Welcome to Gaia! ::

He wandered from the beach over to the towns, at peace with the dilapidation. He wasn't quite sure, yet, about all this skin and flesh and unexposed bones. Clothes were itchy and uncomfortable, but after a brief stint of taking them off, he found he got cold without them.

Being cold was weird.

There was a building all put together and neat not far ahead, and he struggled to get his arm back into the hole of his jacket, tongue sticking out from the effort of it all--

And then ran straight into the door.

Being a people was hard.

Oh! He knew this face. It had been very unkind to him, but he wasn't Lurks Beneath now, he was someone-else.

"Hello again," the totally normal and perfectly acceptable human said, waving brightly at Rep, and tried to wriggle past him to get into the bar. "I want to explore," he explained, clearly with the expectation that Rep should let him in.

He looked up at Rep with wide, owlish eyes, nodding along a bit like a bobble-headed doll.

"A <******** bar!" he exclaimed, ecstatic at the name. "I won't ******** break anything, do not worry." He pat Rep's cheek with a squishy, fleshy hand, giggling in an absent-minded sort of way, craning his neck to try and get a good look at the interior. "I just want to see! No need to kick and fight. I promise! On my brother's bones."

To demonstrate, he held up his two pointer fingers, crossed into an X.

Lurks began humming nonsense under his breath, truly enchanted by all of the human gadgets and trinkets, staring openly at the bottles of liquor and all their shiny, glassy glory.

"It is a nice set of shinies," he said, appraising, tapping his fingers on the bar erratically. It sounded all wrong; soft and dulled, no sharpness in it at all. In any of him, really. Not a single exposed rib! What a pain!

"Is this all for you? That would be greedy, but I would keep it allll for myself, too."

Lurks looked about as excited as a five year old in a candy shop, so Rep's treatment wasn't all that out of line.

He looked at Rep with a funny look in his eye, bafflement mixed with childish frustration. "No," he said, "you do not have to do anything. Humans don't have to do anything at all except breathe and eat and drink and I learned that the hard way." He hopped up onto the counter, ignoring the seats.

"Why?"

He looked so baffled by the idea of selling. "Why can't you just take what you want?" he asked, curious. "That is what I do."

Although the more Rep explained, the more he was sort of starting to understand.

"Scorpio!" he crowed, too entertained by his own name. "I like your <********> bar," Scorpio continued, patting whatever was within reach fondly.

"Oh," Scorpio said, the concept finally starting to dawn on him. "That makes sense. I'm sorry you are weak." That must be tough.

The hunter beamed, watching Rep head towards the metal box. "They were not," he said, quite firmly, "but that is okay too. They are dead, and I am better anyway."

When sound came out of the box, Scorpio reacted so harshly that he fell clean off the counter, scrambling back with a suspicious face. He looked at Rep with deep betrayal, pointing a finger at it.

"What is that!"

Scorpio looked well and truly baffled by the notion of being okay with being weak. Humans continued to surprise him at every turn. He'd known the red ones weren't to be trusted.

The explanation didn't really clarify the sound. On his hands and knees still, he crept closer to press his ear to the jukebox's speaker itself, apparently unbothered by the volume, even at such a close proximity.

"This," he said with grave certainty, "is not any good."