"There are very few monsters within the Inner Circle, which is why civilization has thrived here." Meshua tucked the map away in her coat and tilted her head back to gaze up at the moons. "Honestly, I'd rather have to deal with monsters. People are worse."
"Worse?" Elwend said in astonishment. "How are people than monsters?"
"Because monsters you can kill and be done with," Rivveld murmured as she dissembled and cleaned out her blunderbuss. "People...you kill them, and more of them come after you. Sometimes with bigger weapons than before." She finished reassembling her gun, then held it up and sighted down the barrel. "People are complicated."
"And Palelanders are incredibly simple," Therin sniped as he returned with his pouch full of herbs. "What does that tell you?"
"That you're a petty siisha with a superiority complex?" Rivveld replied.
"Why you--" Therin's eyes flashed and he reached for his scimitar.
"Ah-ah-ahh," Meshua said, lighting her pipe. "Play nice, you two. Take it down a few notches."
Therin settled for glaring at Rivveld and Rivveld settled for ignoring him.
"'Siisha'?" Elwend murmured quietly to Meshua. The felid smiled.
"Not a pretty meaning, boy, and one you're better off not knowing. Now get some sleep. Long day ahead of us."
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Sythe
Forsythe Lambert is your typical mythology geek. She's into roleplay games, mmos, and buys at least a dozen comicbooks for every paycheck. She's spent most of her life wishing she lived in another world.
Forsythe's parents are very nice, very loving people. But they're also very normal, so Forsythe's withdrawal from society in her final year of highschool is a bit of a last straw. Not to mention her eccentricities and dislike for hanging out with other girls. So, to fix it, they've offered to pay for her entire college education--if she spends the first year at an all-girl's college and make some friends. How hard could it be, right?
Riiiiiight.
Meanwhile, down in Haydis--supernatural prison for supernatural baddies--Medusa has gotten loose. Again. And Roben is going after her.
Roben is half-not-quite-human, half-cerberus. The offspring of a damned union between Lilith, the wife of Haydin, and Cerberus, the guardian of the gate of Haydis, he is only one of many--Lilith is the type to lay eggs, and Roben's brethren number in the dozens. However, he is one of the few who are actually a benefit to society. Roben has taken up vigilante hunting.
When denizens of Haydis escape, it's up to people like Roben to track them down, and either end them or bring them back. Now, he's got to bring Medusa back. Preferably before she regains her power in the world above and begins creating new followers.
Though Roben has some difficulties moving in the world above, one of them being that half of his face is a canine skull.
So some preparations are in order.
Forsythe wasn't expecting much out of her year at girl college, and she got a lot more than she bargained for. For starters, she ended up joining a sort of cult that's more serious than she thought it was. Forsythe just thought she and some fellow myth geeks were going to sit around talking legends. But it's turned into some sort of Medusa-worshi, and Forsythe is starting to get genuinely scared--especially when snakes start behaving strangely around her. Her own pet snake Formaldehyde is getting weird--performing something like a dance in his tank at night when he thinks she's asleep.
Then things take a turn for the downright wrong. Because Medusa herself shows up, and then everything just goes to hell. A few of the girls more caught up in the cult sacrifice themselves to her, and the rest hole up in the gym with Forsythe and as many weapons they can muster. Medusa retreats into the worship chamber to digest her meals and leaves some sort of mutated serpent creatures patrolling the school grounds. Things seem to be looking up when the attractive new janitor busts in with guns ablaze and turns out to be some sort of paranormal investigator, but something's changed--for one, his face isn't human anymore.*
He gets flung into the gym during his battle with one of the serpents. It dies before it can hurt anyone, but their saviour is currently unconscious, and no one wants to help him. So Forsythe steps up to the plate to do what she can.
When Roben comes too, he's looking up into the face of a plain young woman with a very scared, yet determined look on her face. And she isn't screaming. Which is such a nice change.
Together they manage to kill Medusa and save the school, but Forsythe gets bitten in the process. When she comes to, she's waking up in an infirmiry in Haydis--in the middle of turning into a gorgon.
Roben: technically a Lilim. Offspring of Lilith and Cerberus, the guardian of the gate of Haydis. He's not ugly, per se. He just doesn't have the sort of face women are attracted to. Great body. Half dog-skull face. He possesses minor abilities in the arts, the most prominent of which is throwing fire. He's trying to get better at shapeshifting so he can possess a more humanish face. He's ruthless when it comes to hunting down escapees, and he's pretty good at it. He's developing a crush on Sythe, despite his best efforts.
(For)Sythe: once-human, now turning into a gorgon. She's actually taking it pretty well, and she's the first woman Roben's ever met(well, first person in general) who didn't totally freak out or become awkward when she saw his face. That may be because at the time she'd just seen Medusa swallow three classmates whole and then had giant snake monsters trying to kill her and everyone else. But at any rate, she continues to seem unfazed by it, which endears her to him. She's actually pretty blunt and no-nonsense, and has no problem stepping up to take charge in violent situations when no one else is around--sometimes even when Roben is around. Which totally gets him kind of hot. Sythe is sarcastic, a little bitter, and is actually easily cheered by little things--dry clothes after getting out of the rain, new comic books, Twix candybars, and Formaldehyde, who continues to dance for her in his tank at night. It doesn't creep her out as much as it used to.
Locif: An incubus, the offspring of an angel and a demon. Locif is strikingly beautiful, in a dazzling, mind-numbing kind of way that hits most people speechless when they meet him. He tends a bar in downtown Haydis, and is the closest thing Roben's had to a friend (before Sythe.) He of course catches Sythe's eye, and jealousy begins to brew in Roben. Locif, on first-impression, is a "nice guy", but can turn into a real bitch if you rub him wrong. The cheerful kind. You know, the ones that spit insults at you with genuine smiles on their faces and laugh when you flick them off. And yet, he's also involved in a deep internal struggle between his demon and angel sides. A sort of ultimate evil vs. ultimate good sort of thing.
He has nipple piercings, and he loves them.
*he's warned by his techgeek that engaging in strenuous activity will activate his baser animal instincts, which will dissolve his human glamour elixir. Activities like fighting.
Activities like getting ambushed by a horny college girl who starts making out with him and then runs away screaming when his face shifts back into half dog-skull.
Roben leads a charmed life.
Forsythe's parents are very nice, very loving people. But they're also very normal, so Forsythe's withdrawal from society in her final year of highschool is a bit of a last straw. Not to mention her eccentricities and dislike for hanging out with other girls. So, to fix it, they've offered to pay for her entire college education--if she spends the first year at an all-girl's college and make some friends. How hard could it be, right?
Riiiiiight.
Meanwhile, down in Haydis--supernatural prison for supernatural baddies--Medusa has gotten loose. Again. And Roben is going after her.
Roben is half-not-quite-human, half-cerberus. The offspring of a damned union between Lilith, the wife of Haydin, and Cerberus, the guardian of the gate of Haydis, he is only one of many--Lilith is the type to lay eggs, and Roben's brethren number in the dozens. However, he is one of the few who are actually a benefit to society. Roben has taken up vigilante hunting.
When denizens of Haydis escape, it's up to people like Roben to track them down, and either end them or bring them back. Now, he's got to bring Medusa back. Preferably before she regains her power in the world above and begins creating new followers.
Though Roben has some difficulties moving in the world above, one of them being that half of his face is a canine skull.
So some preparations are in order.
Forsythe wasn't expecting much out of her year at girl college, and she got a lot more than she bargained for. For starters, she ended up joining a sort of cult that's more serious than she thought it was. Forsythe just thought she and some fellow myth geeks were going to sit around talking legends. But it's turned into some sort of Medusa-worshi, and Forsythe is starting to get genuinely scared--especially when snakes start behaving strangely around her. Her own pet snake Formaldehyde is getting weird--performing something like a dance in his tank at night when he thinks she's asleep.
Then things take a turn for the downright wrong. Because Medusa herself shows up, and then everything just goes to hell. A few of the girls more caught up in the cult sacrifice themselves to her, and the rest hole up in the gym with Forsythe and as many weapons they can muster. Medusa retreats into the worship chamber to digest her meals and leaves some sort of mutated serpent creatures patrolling the school grounds. Things seem to be looking up when the attractive new janitor busts in with guns ablaze and turns out to be some sort of paranormal investigator, but something's changed--for one, his face isn't human anymore.*
He gets flung into the gym during his battle with one of the serpents. It dies before it can hurt anyone, but their saviour is currently unconscious, and no one wants to help him. So Forsythe steps up to the plate to do what she can.
When Roben comes too, he's looking up into the face of a plain young woman with a very scared, yet determined look on her face. And she isn't screaming. Which is such a nice change.
Together they manage to kill Medusa and save the school, but Forsythe gets bitten in the process. When she comes to, she's waking up in an infirmiry in Haydis--in the middle of turning into a gorgon.
Roben: technically a Lilim. Offspring of Lilith and Cerberus, the guardian of the gate of Haydis. He's not ugly, per se. He just doesn't have the sort of face women are attracted to. Great body. Half dog-skull face. He possesses minor abilities in the arts, the most prominent of which is throwing fire. He's trying to get better at shapeshifting so he can possess a more humanish face. He's ruthless when it comes to hunting down escapees, and he's pretty good at it. He's developing a crush on Sythe, despite his best efforts.
(For)Sythe: once-human, now turning into a gorgon. She's actually taking it pretty well, and she's the first woman Roben's ever met(well, first person in general) who didn't totally freak out or become awkward when she saw his face. That may be because at the time she'd just seen Medusa swallow three classmates whole and then had giant snake monsters trying to kill her and everyone else. But at any rate, she continues to seem unfazed by it, which endears her to him. She's actually pretty blunt and no-nonsense, and has no problem stepping up to take charge in violent situations when no one else is around--sometimes even when Roben is around. Which totally gets him kind of hot. Sythe is sarcastic, a little bitter, and is actually easily cheered by little things--dry clothes after getting out of the rain, new comic books, Twix candybars, and Formaldehyde, who continues to dance for her in his tank at night. It doesn't creep her out as much as it used to.
Locif: An incubus, the offspring of an angel and a demon. Locif is strikingly beautiful, in a dazzling, mind-numbing kind of way that hits most people speechless when they meet him. He tends a bar in downtown Haydis, and is the closest thing Roben's had to a friend (before Sythe.) He of course catches Sythe's eye, and jealousy begins to brew in Roben. Locif, on first-impression, is a "nice guy", but can turn into a real bitch if you rub him wrong. The cheerful kind. You know, the ones that spit insults at you with genuine smiles on their faces and laugh when you flick them off. And yet, he's also involved in a deep internal struggle between his demon and angel sides. A sort of ultimate evil vs. ultimate good sort of thing.
He has nipple piercings, and he loves them.
*he's warned by his techgeek that engaging in strenuous activity will activate his baser animal instincts, which will dissolve his human glamour elixir. Activities like fighting.
Activities like getting ambushed by a horny college girl who starts making out with him and then runs away screaming when his face shifts back into half dog-skull.
Roben leads a charmed life.
The window book
Title is AWFUL I KNOW shut up, k
When Abby was little, she had trouble making friends. Her grandfather felt sorry for her, so he gave her the next best(possibly better) thing: a book. But not just any book. A magical book.
This is not like other magical books. It does not transport you to other worlds, or let you cast spells, it isn't a guide to fairytale creatures that secretly exist in the shadows of your reality. It doesn't even read itself aloud.
What it does is it let you look.
So Abby looked. And what she saw through the page was a little boy, much like herself in that he was alone in his room, sitting on his bed, looking unhappily out a very large window. After she noticed the fact that he was alone and looked lonely, Abby began to notice other things. The boy had long, dark hair, and very vividly purple eyes. This did not strike her as odd because Abby was not yet at the age where you start noticing the difference between what is considered odd or normal. She did think of it as mystical. Abby didn't actually know the word "mystical" yet, but she was very aware of the meaning, and the feeling of that word sent a thrilling little chill down her spine.
His clothes were the sort Abby had seen in some of her grandfather's paintings--dark, long, billowing clothes, layers of them, with cruelly curved, pointy, decorative bits of metal attached to the shoulders and around the neckline. The colours of the clothes were very rich and diverse, but also subdued so that you didn't really notice.
The paintings that the boy reminded Abby of were ones that her grandfather had painted himself, and were so real and so lifelike that when you at first looked at them you thought you were looking at a person through a window. Now that she thought of it, Abby realized that the little boy's face, even, was very like the people in those paintings--they had long, narrow, angular faces, very elegant and graceful, but at the same time you knew from looking at them that they could turn viciously cruel in a heartbeat. They'd always sort of unnerved her, but now looking at the little boy Abby didn't feel anything but pity, because despite his hauntingly beautiful features and the ring of twisting, wicked looking metal that sat on his head, he was undoubtedly, undeniably crying.
Abby Solomon befriends the boy, and as they grow older, they grow closer. They tell each other about their different worlds, help each other through hard times, and forge a deep connection across two different universes. Tharalan is a prince of Nelfeld, the land of dark magic--considered by many to be "evil" in his world, though Abby can't see any evil in him.
As the years pass, Abby loses her special book, and loses touch with the prince. She's a young woman now, working as a night janitor in the local library--a very special library. The only reason she really has the job is because her grandfather was friends with the curator. Abby's never managed to amount to anything in life--she's too wrapped up in comics, books, movie, and video games to be bothered with real life. Ever since she lost the magic book, she's been obsessed with finding some sort of replacement. But she never has.
Her life changes radically one night though when the curator of the museum gives her a special key to the upstairs--somewhere she's never been allowed before--and asks her to fill in for the usual night librarian. Abby doesn't ask why a library needs a night librarian, and she doesn't ask about the stairwell that didn't used to be there. She just takes the job, and the bonus pay, and smiles, and nods.
But that night, something goes horribly wrong. As Abby's putting books away, she spies someone stealing a book off the shelf and running off with it. Abby gives chase and follows them through a door that wasn't there before and falls into a place called Limbo--a place between worlds. It's then that she discovers the page in her uniform's pocket--a page from the magic book. It sprouts a thread of light that Abby follows into Tharalan's world, tumbling out of his mirror and into his bedroom.
At first taken to the palace dungeons, Abby is visited soon after by Tharalan himself--now king, after he assassinated his father(who'd killed his mother some months before) and ruler of this land of dark magic. Abby soon remembers her duty to the library's curator and requests Tharalan help her get the book back--to which he refuses, because he wants Abby to remain in his world with him. Forever.
Locking Abby in her guest rooms isn't good enough though. She soon befriends a gargoyle that roosts on her balcony and convinces it to fly her away from the palace, deep into the city surounding it. There, she meets an older manwhore who's out of his prime and being fired from the brothel he's worked at all his life, and a rough-tough drunkard mercenary that frequents it. With their help, and the help of the gargoyle, Abby begins to work her way into the seedy underbelly of the already all-around seedy city in search of the book and the thief--with King Tharalan searching every shadow for her all the while.
When Abby was little, she had trouble making friends. Her grandfather felt sorry for her, so he gave her the next best(possibly better) thing: a book. But not just any book. A magical book.
This is not like other magical books. It does not transport you to other worlds, or let you cast spells, it isn't a guide to fairytale creatures that secretly exist in the shadows of your reality. It doesn't even read itself aloud.
What it does is it let you look.
So Abby looked. And what she saw through the page was a little boy, much like herself in that he was alone in his room, sitting on his bed, looking unhappily out a very large window. After she noticed the fact that he was alone and looked lonely, Abby began to notice other things. The boy had long, dark hair, and very vividly purple eyes. This did not strike her as odd because Abby was not yet at the age where you start noticing the difference between what is considered odd or normal. She did think of it as mystical. Abby didn't actually know the word "mystical" yet, but she was very aware of the meaning, and the feeling of that word sent a thrilling little chill down her spine.
His clothes were the sort Abby had seen in some of her grandfather's paintings--dark, long, billowing clothes, layers of them, with cruelly curved, pointy, decorative bits of metal attached to the shoulders and around the neckline. The colours of the clothes were very rich and diverse, but also subdued so that you didn't really notice.
The paintings that the boy reminded Abby of were ones that her grandfather had painted himself, and were so real and so lifelike that when you at first looked at them you thought you were looking at a person through a window. Now that she thought of it, Abby realized that the little boy's face, even, was very like the people in those paintings--they had long, narrow, angular faces, very elegant and graceful, but at the same time you knew from looking at them that they could turn viciously cruel in a heartbeat. They'd always sort of unnerved her, but now looking at the little boy Abby didn't feel anything but pity, because despite his hauntingly beautiful features and the ring of twisting, wicked looking metal that sat on his head, he was undoubtedly, undeniably crying.
Abby Solomon befriends the boy, and as they grow older, they grow closer. They tell each other about their different worlds, help each other through hard times, and forge a deep connection across two different universes. Tharalan is a prince of Nelfeld, the land of dark magic--considered by many to be "evil" in his world, though Abby can't see any evil in him.
As the years pass, Abby loses her special book, and loses touch with the prince. She's a young woman now, working as a night janitor in the local library--a very special library. The only reason she really has the job is because her grandfather was friends with the curator. Abby's never managed to amount to anything in life--she's too wrapped up in comics, books, movie, and video games to be bothered with real life. Ever since she lost the magic book, she's been obsessed with finding some sort of replacement. But she never has.
Her life changes radically one night though when the curator of the museum gives her a special key to the upstairs--somewhere she's never been allowed before--and asks her to fill in for the usual night librarian. Abby doesn't ask why a library needs a night librarian, and she doesn't ask about the stairwell that didn't used to be there. She just takes the job, and the bonus pay, and smiles, and nods.
But that night, something goes horribly wrong. As Abby's putting books away, she spies someone stealing a book off the shelf and running off with it. Abby gives chase and follows them through a door that wasn't there before and falls into a place called Limbo--a place between worlds. It's then that she discovers the page in her uniform's pocket--a page from the magic book. It sprouts a thread of light that Abby follows into Tharalan's world, tumbling out of his mirror and into his bedroom.
At first taken to the palace dungeons, Abby is visited soon after by Tharalan himself--now king, after he assassinated his father(who'd killed his mother some months before) and ruler of this land of dark magic. Abby soon remembers her duty to the library's curator and requests Tharalan help her get the book back--to which he refuses, because he wants Abby to remain in his world with him. Forever.
Locking Abby in her guest rooms isn't good enough though. She soon befriends a gargoyle that roosts on her balcony and convinces it to fly her away from the palace, deep into the city surounding it. There, she meets an older manwhore who's out of his prime and being fired from the brothel he's worked at all his life, and a rough-tough drunkard mercenary that frequents it. With their help, and the help of the gargoyle, Abby begins to work her way into the seedy underbelly of the already all-around seedy city in search of the book and the thief--with King Tharalan searching every shadow for her all the while.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Scandal of the Century?
That's the title I'm sort of settling on until someone suggests another. I suppose my brain is less like a dead pigeon today.
Also, this line from "Animal" by Keisha goes well with these two:
"I am in love with what we are, not what we should be
Sybil Wright had never been much of a lady. She played only with her brothers and the other boys, as she tended to be too rough with other girls if they even wanted to play any games she enjoyed in the first place. Any dolls that were given her were placed on the shelf above with great care and left to collect dust. Dresses were soon tattered, mud spattered, and her mother gave up the venture for the duration of Sybil's younger years. No one bothered to braid her hair; most of the time it was tangled up enough to keep to itself, and every year or so when summer came around, either Sybil or her brothers managed to get their hands on a pair of scissors and lop the whole mess off. In the years just before Sybil crested womanhood, she began nicking her brothers' clothes and, to everyone's surprise, it actually had a calming effect on her personality. When confined to a little girl's petticoats and fine buckle-up shoes, Sybil was wild as a stray pig. Once she donned a boy's trousers, vest, and shirt, though, she became a perfect little gentleman.
Something changed, though, in the years of tumultous puberty. Her father put his foot down. He threatened to marry her to callous old Horace, the mill man who lived the next township over, if she did not tame her boyish ways. Sybil was furious when he did so--she did not throw a tantrum like a proper girl, screaming and crying and stamping her foot. Instead she went out to the barn, saddled a horse, and went off into the moor.
She rode about for a day and a night, and though her father sent out friends to search no one found her. Sybil knew the moors by heart after her childhood of running about them with her brothers, and she knew just as well how to live out on one at night in the summer when she had a horse to keep her warm enough.
When Sybil came back, she acted like a different woman. She said little to anyone and did as she was told. She wore her dresses, sang the high notes in church, and day in to day out she tended the sheets of the governor's household.
That is to say, absolutely nothing about Sybil herself changed. She just didn't get up to her boyish antics in public anymore.
"No, no, turn it round this way. ...Sah," Sybil added as she corrected John Griffith's attempt at repositioning the bloomers. He'd had them on backwards originally, and it was all Sybil could do not to snicker. Even more laughable was his expression, as if he really just could not believe this was actually happening.
He'd tried to make her leave again, but Sybil had prevailed. It wasn't difficult, really--she knew from the moment she'd entered the room and seen what she'd seen that he was just like her. And Sybil had a theory. If she was a woman who somehow possessed the personality of a man, why shouldn't he likewise possess the personality of a woman? And if he did, he ought to be submissive like one, shouldn't he?
And he was. After a little more protesting he relented to her insistence on assisting him, and stood tamely as she pointed out the flaws in his attempts at ladywear. He obediently did as he was told, all the way up to the point where Sybil was pulling the corset back out of the trunk for him.
"Hold on a moment, now," John said. "You don't mean to say you'll help me put it all on, do you?"
"And why not?" Sybil asked, turning back to him with the corset in her hands. "If you can't even get bloomers right I hardly expect you to get it all on right yourself. ...Sah."
"But...why?" he asked. "You...you shouldn't even...I've been caught at it once before, you know, and the woman--she's supervisor of the maids now or something--she almost had a fit. She screamed, she did. And then she went and had to have a lie, and then the doctor even had to come see her and give her a tonic--you are taking this all awfully well."
Sybil smiled. Then she lifted up her skirts.
"Wait, what are you--" John's voice dissolved into a yelp of astonishment. "Those--those are men's trousers!" he exclaimed aloud, pointing at them.
"Shhh," Sybil hissed, frowning. "Not so loud, or you'll bring the whole house running! Sah."
"Those are men's trousers," John whispered loudly, his eyes round and wide like a doe's.
"Those are lady's bloomers," Sybil pointed out, letting her skirts fall back. John flushed bright red again. "...Sah," Sybil added.
"Well, yes, but--"
"Yes, sah?"
"But...they're..." John's voice trailed off as he realized he had no grounds for argument. And he flushed a third time.
Sybil couldn't help but feel sympathetic towards him. He was clearly ashamed of his "problem" while she had never felt so about hers. But for the life of her, she really couldn't think of a thing to say to him. In the way men rarely know what to say to emotionally distressed woman, Sybil had no idea what to offer in the way of comfort to the governor's son.
"We really ought to hurry this along, if you do want to finish dressing. I've other chores to get on to, and I'll be missed. ...Sah."
"You can stop saying it like that now, you know," he said with a sharp look, the flush fading beneath his irritation. "I get what you mean."
"What d'you mean, what I mean?" Sybil asked, blinking.
"What you mean by saying it like that. Like I'm not...not really a sah."
There was a moment of silence in which the lady's bloomers on John Griffith's body stood out in both their minds. Sybil tried not to smirk.
"That's not at all it," she said. "I don't mean anything by it, it's just that...well, sah, I can't help but think of us as the same, now, even if you are my...my better."
"Oh." Another moment of silence passed as John considered this. "Well...in that case, you might just not say it at all. I don't mind if you don't, not really. You can just call me John. If you like."
"Can I?" Sybil asked, a bit of suspicion in her voice.
"Yes," John said. He smiled timidly. After a moment of contemplation, Sybil suddenly returned a broad grin.
"I would like that," she said. "And I'm--I'm Sybil. Sybil Wright." She offered her hand to shake, a formal, manly greeting.
"It's nice to meet you," John began, taking the hand, but yelped again as Sybil made a mock bow and tried to bring his hand up to her mouth for a kiss, like a proper gentleman acquainting himself with a lady. John yanked his hand away as if he'd been burned.
"What're you doing?!" he exclaimed.
"I was just playing along," Sybil said defensively. "No need for you to shout like that."
"Well--you startled me," he said.
"I thought you might have liked it," Sybil said. "I wouldn't have done so otherwise. Here now, I'm sorry. I shan't do it again."
"It's alright," John conceded, hesitantly. Yet again, awkward silence squatted between them. "Were...were you really going to help me get the rest of this on?" He gestured to the dress hanging out of the trunk and the corset in Sybil's hands. Sybil grinned again.
"Certainly. But like I said, we ought to hurry. Mistress Wood's like to notice if I don't get my chores done by dinner bell."
Still wary of being made a fool of at any moment, John reluctantly surrendered himself to the confident young woman's hands.
Also, this line from "Animal" by Keisha goes well with these two:
"I am in love with what we are, not what we should be
Sybil Wright had never been much of a lady. She played only with her brothers and the other boys, as she tended to be too rough with other girls if they even wanted to play any games she enjoyed in the first place. Any dolls that were given her were placed on the shelf above with great care and left to collect dust. Dresses were soon tattered, mud spattered, and her mother gave up the venture for the duration of Sybil's younger years. No one bothered to braid her hair; most of the time it was tangled up enough to keep to itself, and every year or so when summer came around, either Sybil or her brothers managed to get their hands on a pair of scissors and lop the whole mess off. In the years just before Sybil crested womanhood, she began nicking her brothers' clothes and, to everyone's surprise, it actually had a calming effect on her personality. When confined to a little girl's petticoats and fine buckle-up shoes, Sybil was wild as a stray pig. Once she donned a boy's trousers, vest, and shirt, though, she became a perfect little gentleman.
Something changed, though, in the years of tumultous puberty. Her father put his foot down. He threatened to marry her to callous old Horace, the mill man who lived the next township over, if she did not tame her boyish ways. Sybil was furious when he did so--she did not throw a tantrum like a proper girl, screaming and crying and stamping her foot. Instead she went out to the barn, saddled a horse, and went off into the moor.
She rode about for a day and a night, and though her father sent out friends to search no one found her. Sybil knew the moors by heart after her childhood of running about them with her brothers, and she knew just as well how to live out on one at night in the summer when she had a horse to keep her warm enough.
When Sybil came back, she acted like a different woman. She said little to anyone and did as she was told. She wore her dresses, sang the high notes in church, and day in to day out she tended the sheets of the governor's household.
That is to say, absolutely nothing about Sybil herself changed. She just didn't get up to her boyish antics in public anymore.
"No, no, turn it round this way. ...Sah," Sybil added as she corrected John Griffith's attempt at repositioning the bloomers. He'd had them on backwards originally, and it was all Sybil could do not to snicker. Even more laughable was his expression, as if he really just could not believe this was actually happening.
He'd tried to make her leave again, but Sybil had prevailed. It wasn't difficult, really--she knew from the moment she'd entered the room and seen what she'd seen that he was just like her. And Sybil had a theory. If she was a woman who somehow possessed the personality of a man, why shouldn't he likewise possess the personality of a woman? And if he did, he ought to be submissive like one, shouldn't he?
And he was. After a little more protesting he relented to her insistence on assisting him, and stood tamely as she pointed out the flaws in his attempts at ladywear. He obediently did as he was told, all the way up to the point where Sybil was pulling the corset back out of the trunk for him.
"Hold on a moment, now," John said. "You don't mean to say you'll help me put it all on, do you?"
"And why not?" Sybil asked, turning back to him with the corset in her hands. "If you can't even get bloomers right I hardly expect you to get it all on right yourself. ...Sah."
"But...why?" he asked. "You...you shouldn't even...I've been caught at it once before, you know, and the woman--she's supervisor of the maids now or something--she almost had a fit. She screamed, she did. And then she went and had to have a lie, and then the doctor even had to come see her and give her a tonic--you are taking this all awfully well."
Sybil smiled. Then she lifted up her skirts.
"Wait, what are you--" John's voice dissolved into a yelp of astonishment. "Those--those are men's trousers!" he exclaimed aloud, pointing at them.
"Shhh," Sybil hissed, frowning. "Not so loud, or you'll bring the whole house running! Sah."
"Those are men's trousers," John whispered loudly, his eyes round and wide like a doe's.
"Those are lady's bloomers," Sybil pointed out, letting her skirts fall back. John flushed bright red again. "...Sah," Sybil added.
"Well, yes, but--"
"Yes, sah?"
"But...they're..." John's voice trailed off as he realized he had no grounds for argument. And he flushed a third time.
Sybil couldn't help but feel sympathetic towards him. He was clearly ashamed of his "problem" while she had never felt so about hers. But for the life of her, she really couldn't think of a thing to say to him. In the way men rarely know what to say to emotionally distressed woman, Sybil had no idea what to offer in the way of comfort to the governor's son.
"We really ought to hurry this along, if you do want to finish dressing. I've other chores to get on to, and I'll be missed. ...Sah."
"You can stop saying it like that now, you know," he said with a sharp look, the flush fading beneath his irritation. "I get what you mean."
"What d'you mean, what I mean?" Sybil asked, blinking.
"What you mean by saying it like that. Like I'm not...not really a sah."
There was a moment of silence in which the lady's bloomers on John Griffith's body stood out in both their minds. Sybil tried not to smirk.
"That's not at all it," she said. "I don't mean anything by it, it's just that...well, sah, I can't help but think of us as the same, now, even if you are my...my better."
"Oh." Another moment of silence passed as John considered this. "Well...in that case, you might just not say it at all. I don't mind if you don't, not really. You can just call me John. If you like."
"Can I?" Sybil asked, a bit of suspicion in her voice.
"Yes," John said. He smiled timidly. After a moment of contemplation, Sybil suddenly returned a broad grin.
"I would like that," she said. "And I'm--I'm Sybil. Sybil Wright." She offered her hand to shake, a formal, manly greeting.
"It's nice to meet you," John began, taking the hand, but yelped again as Sybil made a mock bow and tried to bring his hand up to her mouth for a kiss, like a proper gentleman acquainting himself with a lady. John yanked his hand away as if he'd been burned.
"What're you doing?!" he exclaimed.
"I was just playing along," Sybil said defensively. "No need for you to shout like that."
"Well--you startled me," he said.
"I thought you might have liked it," Sybil said. "I wouldn't have done so otherwise. Here now, I'm sorry. I shan't do it again."
"It's alright," John conceded, hesitantly. Yet again, awkward silence squatted between them. "Were...were you really going to help me get the rest of this on?" He gestured to the dress hanging out of the trunk and the corset in Sybil's hands. Sybil grinned again.
"Certainly. But like I said, we ought to hurry. Mistress Wood's like to notice if I don't get my chores done by dinner bell."
Still wary of being made a fool of at any moment, John reluctantly surrendered himself to the confident young woman's hands.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
my brain making like a dead pigeon and me not having a title...
2 posts
1 day
Sybil Wright found her master's son climbing into a corset two weeks after her twentieth birthday.
She was coming in to change the sheets on the young master's bed. That was her job, for the most part--Governor Griffith had a large house, with a large family. If Sybil wasn't washing, drying, or folding sheets, she was putting them on someone's bed. She hated it. It was tedious, repetitive, and on the best days she had difficulty resisting the urge to throw the blasted cloths all in the fire and walk out of there for good.
Today, however, things had suddenly gotten much more interesting.
John Griffith stared at her with an expression of first astonishment, then mounting horror. He'd frozen in the middle of dressing himself, one leg bare, the other lifted halfway out of the corset. A modest dress with only one or two layers of petticoats had been slung casually over the end of his bedframe, a pair of silk gloves huddled in a pile next to one of the sleeves. The young man was wearing lady's bloomers beneath the corset.
"Wh...what are you doing in here?" he asked. It sounded like someone had punched him in the stomach. His eyes darted from Sybil to the dress on the bed and back.
"Sheets, sah," she replied, blinking at him, her mind buzzing with astonishment. "I...I didn't mean to--"
"Get out," he said shakily. He tried to straighten up to deliver a more authoritative order, but his heel caught on the edge of the corset as he did so. Young Griffith stumbled, barely caught his balance, and steadied himself with his face aflame. "Out!"
"Certainly, sah," Sybil said, obediently walking right back out as if in a daze, closing the door behind her.
Sybil stood outside for a moment, and then a grin slowly spread across her face.
"Sah?" she said, popping her bed back into the room. John was hastily stuffing the dress and corset into a trunk in his closet, but he was still wearing the bloomers. His head shot up and smacked loudly on the lid of the trunk as her voice startled him.
He looked round at her in disbelief.
"You have that on wrong."
1 day
Sybil Wright found her master's son climbing into a corset two weeks after her twentieth birthday.
She was coming in to change the sheets on the young master's bed. That was her job, for the most part--Governor Griffith had a large house, with a large family. If Sybil wasn't washing, drying, or folding sheets, she was putting them on someone's bed. She hated it. It was tedious, repetitive, and on the best days she had difficulty resisting the urge to throw the blasted cloths all in the fire and walk out of there for good.
Today, however, things had suddenly gotten much more interesting.
John Griffith stared at her with an expression of first astonishment, then mounting horror. He'd frozen in the middle of dressing himself, one leg bare, the other lifted halfway out of the corset. A modest dress with only one or two layers of petticoats had been slung casually over the end of his bedframe, a pair of silk gloves huddled in a pile next to one of the sleeves. The young man was wearing lady's bloomers beneath the corset.
"Wh...what are you doing in here?" he asked. It sounded like someone had punched him in the stomach. His eyes darted from Sybil to the dress on the bed and back.
"Sheets, sah," she replied, blinking at him, her mind buzzing with astonishment. "I...I didn't mean to--"
"Get out," he said shakily. He tried to straighten up to deliver a more authoritative order, but his heel caught on the edge of the corset as he did so. Young Griffith stumbled, barely caught his balance, and steadied himself with his face aflame. "Out!"
"Certainly, sah," Sybil said, obediently walking right back out as if in a daze, closing the door behind her.
Sybil stood outside for a moment, and then a grin slowly spread across her face.
"Sah?" she said, popping her bed back into the room. John was hastily stuffing the dress and corset into a trunk in his closet, but he was still wearing the bloomers. His head shot up and smacked loudly on the lid of the trunk as her voice startled him.
He looked round at her in disbelief.
"You have that on wrong."
Chapter 1, thus far
Breathe in, flex throat. Push the tension out with sound. Vowels rattle my vocal chords. Hum once, up, hum again, back down. Rinse, lather, repeat.
"Put this on."
I opened my eyes to see my wardrobe manager thrusting a tight black top at me, the curves sewn into it to flatter my body as much as possible.
"She'd never let me get away with that."
"She isn't here. Connel! Where's the black nailpolish I asked for?"
I barked a laugh, stripping off my plain loose T and slipping into the black thing. It fit me like a second skin, snug and sexy. I loved it.
"She'll vacking murder me if I go out there with shit on my nails."
"Sweetie, it's what your fanbase wants. Polls were screaming for it after you did that vampire thing in that music video. Eternal Fapping."
"Eternal Passion," I corrected with a smirk. I liked this one. The last drobey had no sense of humour.
"Connel! Vack it, Connel's fired. You! Yes, you, with the hair. Get me black nail polish in the next minute and you'll have a promotion."
"What's next, lipstick?"
"I thought it best to ease into things, dear, but if you really want--"
"Forget it, I'm dead as it is." I closed my eyes to shut out the pre-concert chaos around me and went back to vocal warmups.
Step onto stage, listen to the roar. The only ocean any of us here tonight have ever known. It washes over me, and as I step up to the mic, parting my lips, I feel beautiful.
I take a breath.
You are so pretty...like a little doll.
Fingers brush the back of my neck.
My throat squeezes and convulses shut, mouth dry as the empty world outside the biodome, airless and bitterly, deathly cold.
So pretty. I could touch you all day long.
It's like my bones are rattling inside me while everything between them and my skin has turned to water. Bile surges in my throat, and I feel a mounting sensation of...of horrible, all over, inside and out. I actually want to pass out.
Shh, don't scream, don't want to ruin your pretty little voice--
"Forest!" the drummer hissed at me. "The vack, man?"
I signalled the band behind me and they immediately began playing. I could feel the whisper bubbling back to the surface of my mind. I fought it desperately.
Come on, come on, get to my entrance--
The intro was over and I practically flung the words out of my mouth at the microphone, assaulting it with my voice. The first few notes stuttered off-key, but I didn't care. I wasn't singing for them, at the moment, I was singing for myself. I needed this. It was the one thing he hadn't touched and destroyed and ripped away from me stop thinking about it stop thinking about it stop thinking about it and vacking sing.
So I sang.
It wasn't a big concert. I was the highest name there, and that's saying something. At the time I was maybe in the bottom thirty-thousands of drop rank, my name getting dropped throughout the entire city about ten times an hour. I'd gotten a recent flux in popularity to get it this high, but we were holding our breathe in case it was just a fad-spike. No point putting stake in numbers if I was only the latest trend of one of the many microsocieties that made up the New California Biodome's sprawling, diverse cultures.
A good gig in the end, though. It didn't matter how many of my fans were there. What mattered was how many people were there in general. Because by the end of the night, all of them would know my name. And they'd be talking about me. Not a huge spike in the drop rank, but every little bit helped.
"You're a vacking whore." The words oozed out from perfect white teeth, accompanied by a sinuous trail of smoke. My friend Tris smiled at me like a crocodile and fell into step beside me as I made a beeline for my room backstage.
"Piss off, bitch," I shot back, smirking. He laughed aloud and hooked his arm through mine.
"Not here," I muttered. I shifted slightly so that I slid free. Tris rolled his eyes and bounced ahead of me to the dressing room, the door sliding open when it recognized his genetic fingerprint.
"She isn't here, Julian," he said, pirouetting in front of the row of mirrors that covered the wall. The smoke from his cigarette formed a ghostly spiral about his head as he spun.
"Cams are, Tris."
"My God, Julian, you're like, vacking paranoid lately. What has crawled up and nested in your ass?"
"Nothing," I mumbled defensively. I finished changing and scrubbed off the black nailpolish. "I'm just...being careful."
"You're being paranoid."
"Tris--" I bit my lip and took a breath. "...What is it going to take you get you off my back about this?"
"Put this on."
I opened my eyes to see my wardrobe manager thrusting a tight black top at me, the curves sewn into it to flatter my body as much as possible.
"She'd never let me get away with that."
"She isn't here. Connel! Where's the black nailpolish I asked for?"
I barked a laugh, stripping off my plain loose T and slipping into the black thing. It fit me like a second skin, snug and sexy. I loved it.
"She'll vacking murder me if I go out there with shit on my nails."
"Sweetie, it's what your fanbase wants. Polls were screaming for it after you did that vampire thing in that music video. Eternal Fapping."
"Eternal Passion," I corrected with a smirk. I liked this one. The last drobey had no sense of humour.
"Connel! Vack it, Connel's fired. You! Yes, you, with the hair. Get me black nail polish in the next minute and you'll have a promotion."
"What's next, lipstick?"
"I thought it best to ease into things, dear, but if you really want--"
"Forget it, I'm dead as it is." I closed my eyes to shut out the pre-concert chaos around me and went back to vocal warmups.
Step onto stage, listen to the roar. The only ocean any of us here tonight have ever known. It washes over me, and as I step up to the mic, parting my lips, I feel beautiful.
I take a breath.
You are so pretty...like a little doll.
Fingers brush the back of my neck.
My throat squeezes and convulses shut, mouth dry as the empty world outside the biodome, airless and bitterly, deathly cold.
So pretty. I could touch you all day long.
It's like my bones are rattling inside me while everything between them and my skin has turned to water. Bile surges in my throat, and I feel a mounting sensation of...of horrible, all over, inside and out. I actually want to pass out.
Shh, don't scream, don't want to ruin your pretty little voice--
"Forest!" the drummer hissed at me. "The vack, man?"
I signalled the band behind me and they immediately began playing. I could feel the whisper bubbling back to the surface of my mind. I fought it desperately.
Come on, come on, get to my entrance--
The intro was over and I practically flung the words out of my mouth at the microphone, assaulting it with my voice. The first few notes stuttered off-key, but I didn't care. I wasn't singing for them, at the moment, I was singing for myself. I needed this. It was the one thing he hadn't touched and destroyed and ripped away from me stop thinking about it stop thinking about it stop thinking about it and vacking sing.
So I sang.
It wasn't a big concert. I was the highest name there, and that's saying something. At the time I was maybe in the bottom thirty-thousands of drop rank, my name getting dropped throughout the entire city about ten times an hour. I'd gotten a recent flux in popularity to get it this high, but we were holding our breathe in case it was just a fad-spike. No point putting stake in numbers if I was only the latest trend of one of the many microsocieties that made up the New California Biodome's sprawling, diverse cultures.
A good gig in the end, though. It didn't matter how many of my fans were there. What mattered was how many people were there in general. Because by the end of the night, all of them would know my name. And they'd be talking about me. Not a huge spike in the drop rank, but every little bit helped.
"You're a vacking whore." The words oozed out from perfect white teeth, accompanied by a sinuous trail of smoke. My friend Tris smiled at me like a crocodile and fell into step beside me as I made a beeline for my room backstage.
"Piss off, bitch," I shot back, smirking. He laughed aloud and hooked his arm through mine.
"Not here," I muttered. I shifted slightly so that I slid free. Tris rolled his eyes and bounced ahead of me to the dressing room, the door sliding open when it recognized his genetic fingerprint.
"She isn't here, Julian," he said, pirouetting in front of the row of mirrors that covered the wall. The smoke from his cigarette formed a ghostly spiral about his head as he spun.
"Cams are, Tris."
"My God, Julian, you're like, vacking paranoid lately. What has crawled up and nested in your ass?"
"Nothing," I mumbled defensively. I finished changing and scrubbed off the black nailpolish. "I'm just...being careful."
"You're being paranoid."
"Tris--" I bit my lip and took a breath. "...What is it going to take you get you off my back about this?"
Friday, December 3, 2010
Sketches
From The Place. I'm still debating whether or not to give it an actual name; I'm not sure. Anyway.
Top left, Garth, in full troll-form. She's leaping off the clocktower of Lower Place. Compasses don't work in Place, and there are no stars, so the clocktower is the only real way to tell where you are. Garth has a very long, heavy tail that is crucial in maintaining her orientation in the air when she's freefalling like this. The clocktower is also the main eyrie in town for gargoyles.
Right below Garth is Theo, the weerraptor that is in constant raptor form. Theo is wearing a mini tophat that's kept on her head by some elastic. She'd rather wear a normal tophat, but they can't stay on her raptor head, and elasticky strings on normal size hats just look silly.
Next to Theo is her ex, a unicorn nymph. Unicorns in the Place play a curious part no one is quite certain of at this point. All that's known is that when they show up, bad things are going to happen. Unicorns alter the solidity of reality around them. In ye olde days, this just made them impossible to find on Earth. In the Place, where reality is already unstable, it really screws things up. People have been known to be trapped between the fabrics of reality after getting too close to unicorns. Unicorns are also suspected to possess some sort of malignant intent towards humans especially. Maybe it has something to do with being hunted for centuries on many worlds for their horns, which are said to give the possessor immortality. In the early stages of their life, when their horns are stubby little things and they're not powerful enough to protect themselves via altering reality to escape, they take different forms to sort of disguise themselves. Horse with a horn? Obviously a unicorn. Person with a horn and a tail and hooves and funky ears? Not to mention weird skin and hair? Wtf, burn it. BURN IT.
So yes, unicorn boy has had some issues with being accused of witchcraft in some of the more primitive worlds. Which is why he prefers the Place, where everyone's too disoriented to care. He doesn't have a name yet. He's also a prostitute. And he's pissed at Theo for being a dinosaur all the time. He misses her. It doesn't help that he's one of her best sources when she wants to dig up dirt on the darker sorts to make this week's column more interesting. So occasionally they sort of HAVE to run into each other.
The floof above them is Azerith cuddling with his baby Giant Salamander. I dunno its name, but he loves the ugly little thing. He finds it adorable. I kept his stripes on his body this time around because I felt like it, and his tail may or may not be actually attached to him at the moment. Those are his eyes looking down at the salamander, and his mouth below those.
He keeps his nose on his face because a disembodied nose just isn't that sexy.
Aaaaand the big black thing is the gargoyle landing on a rooftop somewheres. Her hood and dorsal are currently inflated, and that's her mantle stretching out on either side of her. When deflated, her hood turns into a literal hood, and her mantle folds around her like a cloak. If you didn't see her face at night, she'd look like a cloaked figure and nothing more.
Above her is Ivan, looking like the sorry little wet blanket he is. Cheer up, Ivan. Why so serious?
Oh yeah. You OD'd on a magical faultline, which is why your sorry ass ended up here in the first place, left most of your memories behind you aside from a few choice emotional scars, and now you're suck in a who-knows-what working in an Inn serving tables and trying not to piss yourself from terror when the gargoyle appears on your balcony every night.
And crying out loud, stop complaining to the manager about her. It's her roost, you moron. She was there first.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
The Place
The Place is called the Place because no one's ever dared to presume to call it any different. As for what it IS, well, people have dared to at least /postulate./
The existentialists in particular tend to be particularly pleased about it when they get there, mostly because they think the fact that the Place exists proves them right in a sense. They favour the idea that the Place is a place between realities, and you get there by slipping out of the reality you're usually fixed in.
They're almost right.
It's the most popular theory in general, really. Others have suggested that the Place was once part of a world and got separated from it the way many of its inhabitants were accidentally separated from their own. Or that it was a universe that ended, and the Place is a fragment of it, or a memory of a fragment.
They're almost right too.
The Place is all of those things. It is between realities. It is separated. It is a memory, and a fragment, and a regret, and a shadow, and a tomb, and a tombstone. It is all of these things and more. It is nearly the same thing for quite a lot of people, but when you get down to the details, it's different in little ways for each person. To some people, it's heaven.
To others, it's hell.
To most, it's purgatory, even if they don't know what that means, even if they don't believe in a heaven or hell.
For Ivan, it's a mixup. A mistake. A little bit of confusion that'll be sorted out eventually by the Right People, whoever they are, and then he'll be merrily on his way back to his own life in his own world. For now, he's just trying to get on, trying to pretend none of this is happening, and trying to pretend that he really will wake up before anything /serious/ happens. He's a waiter at the local tavern. The Local Tavern. There's only the one. The Place* isn't big enough for two. Literally.
For the gargoyle, it's home. The only one she's ever known. And she knows it's her home, because gargoyles have always been there, were probably born there, and intend to stay there. You don't see them in Higher Place that often anymore. Too much light and noise at night. If the gargoyle has a name, she hasn't shared it with anyone. Not even Ivan, and he's the only one who's dared talk to her. Though that conversation mostly included "Um, I, um, was just--the trash--I didn't mean to--are you busy? I don't mean to--I'll come back later." She didn't really mean to scare him like that. Gargoyles don't often intentionally scare people, it just happens. It also makes life more convenient, they've found, so they don't really discourage it. Most people aren't aware they're intelligent, and as a by product, are capable of speech. Some of the really stubbornly realistic humans won't even acknowledge they're possible. It's amazing the things you overhear when people are in denial about the fact that you really aren't a statue. It's downright shocking the things they'll /do/ in front of you.**
For Garth, it's just another place she's living in until she ends up in under place to live in until she ends up in another...well, you get it. So on. So forth. For creatures like Garth, peculiar places aren't that peculiar. After she spent a year in a dimension referred to by the inhabitants simply as "Gukk" where the sky was purple, the liquids were carnivorous, the dominant language consisted mostly of wiggling your fingers(or in the natives' case, thirty-six different sets of antennae) and scratching your nose in the wrong context could be taken as an insult deserving of death, nothing much fazes her anymore. Garth's odd penchant for dimension-jumping had nothing to do with her race(weergarlsh, which meant her body fluctuated between human and a type of furred troll with the waxing and waning of the moon)it's just that sometimes there are people that have a knack for slipping between the fabrics of reality***. Garth prefers Lower Place to Higher Place, as in Higher Place the people are more Civilized, and Civilization doesn't take kindly to individuals who fluctuate from being furry and having circular tusks as long as the diameter of the average tire rim to being a normal human being for only one day every month. Lower Place also has most buildings made out of brick, and brick has better pocks for sinking claws into.
For Azerith, it's one of many playgrounds. Like Garth, he's able to travel between realities--unlike Garth, he has total control over this. Azerith has total control over a lot of things. This is because his mother is a Chaeshr. You know how light cast shadows? Well, realities cast /un/realities. And those unrealities are Chaeshrs. Since they're unreality, they can do very much what they like, so even though if you had a map for all the realities, and you pointed to where an unreality was technically cast by a reality, and said "That's Nadime****, right there," it very well is. That doesn't necessarily mean Nadime is there, though. Well, she probably is. But she might also be wandering around Earth in the form of a little black cat. Or whispering over a magician's shoulder in Yrth as he attempts to summon something dastardly. Or sunbathing inside a star. Or, very rarely, providing parental guidance to one of her very many children.(1) Azerith is what's called an imp. There's a lot of Chaeshr-spawned imps running around. Unlike most of the Chaeshrs' children, they actually have a consistent appearance. They do have gender, though it's hard to tell, and their eyes and mouths are detached, enlarged, stylized things that float around and scare the shat out of people. Their Chaeshr stripes aren't very stable, and if an imp moes too quickly their stripes can be left a way behind. The same goes for their tails. An imp may choose to utilize tail or stripes as clothing, if the company prefers it, and the imp cares about what the company prefers. This is actually the most natural sort of form for them to have. It is possible to keep everything /stable/ and in its proper place, and it's not particularly difficult. It just takes thinking about, and imps are generally too absentminded to be bothered with it. Azerith is, like many of his brethren, a mercilessly carefree individual. He also tends to be very blatantly sexual, because it amuses him when people blush. Spluttering is a bonus. Garth, as previously mentioned, isn't fazed, and the gargoyle is practically downright boring. Nonetheless, he enjoys hanging around Garth, and occasionally the gargoyle. He has little to no interest in Ivan, who's too wrapped up in pretending none of it is real to be any fun.
For Theo, Higher Place is all she can remember. Her older sister Brass claims to remember another place, and her younger sister Gus is too busy partying to care. Theo doesn't much care either. She's a weerraptor. Unlike Garth, though, Theo has chosen, through a variety of meditation and mental exercises, to keep her body locked in a constantly transformed state. As a velociraptor.
In Higher Place, it is by no means convenient to be an animal 24/7. But for Theo, it's the only way she can cope with the world. A city full of confused, addled people milling around until they can get kicked back to their own reality. If they're lucky. To them, the Place is a train station. A stop. Practically tourists, in Theo's mind. She hates tourists.
Despite her dislike for these strangers in her world, though, Theo writes about them. Every week she finds an average joe that's lost their way and interviews them, then writes about them, and submits that blog to the Higher Place newspaper. It doesn't bring in much, but it's steady work, and it keeps the meat on her plate.
Higher Place is a place to live, and it's the place she happens to live. It has its good days, it has mostly bad days, but in the end, what choice do you have?
For Brass, it's what she's stuck with. She remembers another place, from before. She vaguely remembers parents. She's under the impression they were separated from them when they arrived at the Place, and that it's a miracle she managed to keep track of her sisters, and keep them safe, and keep them together. Brass has managed to settle down, make a living. She owns a bar, and not a bad one, either. Like Theo, she's also trained herself to control her transformations. Unlike Theo, Brass perfers being mostly human. Mostly. Claws are always convenient things to hang onto, no matter what species you are.
It's also not where she intends to stay. Unbeknownst to her sisters, Brass has hired a P.I. to find out about their parents. If Brass can find them...well. It'll make things better. And then they can figure out together what to do about getting home. Brass doesn't want to live here. She doesn't want to find love here. She doesn't want to stay any longer than she has to. But she can be patient. She's managed it for this long.
For Gus...well, it's life. It's the moment. It's the party, the food, the drink, the friends. She has a hazy awareness of an undercurrent of desperation at each party she attends, in each person she meets, in each drop of alcohol she swallows. Gus, however, somehow manages to remain entirely unaffected by it. The Place is the Place, what do you want from it? Take what you can get. If you can get good, good for you. If you can't, well, you're doing something wrong, and there's always room for improvement. For Gus, it's all about being content with what you have, to the extent you ignore the idea of there being anything else. To everyone else, it's called laziness.
After the shooting, though, things change for Gus. They change for everyone.
The Place has been around for a long time. A very long time. People have come and gone. People have murdered. People have raped. People have stolen. People have, in general, been people.
But this...this is different. For one thing, it's always been provoked. Someone needed something. Someone had a grudge. Someone was really just fucked up in the head. For another, the Place doesn't like guns. If people arrive with them, they usually lose them, quickly. Or they get broken. Or they just plain don't work. And bad things have, in the past, always been done privately. Thieves wait till nightfall, when everyone's asleep. Murderers corner their victims where no one can hear them, or find the body. Rapists have done the same. Bad things have happened, but in the hesitant, shuffling, dreamy-like waiting-around of the Place, nothing has ever been so blatantly /public./
This is different. It changes everything. Everything anyone ever thought they knew about the Place--even the gargoyles' ancient memories have been challenged. People are scared, and not in the disoriented-denial sort of way they are when they arrive, or refuse to accept what's happened. They're scared in the get-indoors-before-dark, stay-away-from-alleys, never-let-them-get-behind-you sort of scared.
The Place isn't meant to withstand this level of intensity of one emotion, one mind, one thought.
The Place is about /waiting./ But it's become filled with Fear. It's become filled with the tautness of a hivemind. And the hivemind is focusing on one thing:
/Getting out./
People are afraid of the Place in a way they never were before. Before it was being stuck in the mud; now it's being stuck in the tar with predators circling in, waiting until you fall asleep to pounce. And they're going to start pushing. They're going to start clawing. They're going to start tearing at the very boundaries of the Place itself.
Things are going to start happening that were never meant to happen.
*In this context, I am speaking of Lower Place, which is where the fog lingers and the beer is a bit warm, and the sky is always cloudy, and machines run on steam if they run at all, and everyone tosses and turns at night whether they're in beds or not. Unless they're dead, or drugged.
**We tend to assume it shocks the gargoyle who's witnessing it, though they tend to stay straightfaced for most things. It's not that they're emotionless. It's just they've been around for a long time. Been there, done that, if you've seen it once, you've seen it a thousand times--that sort of thing. It takes a lot to genuinely shock, amuse, or upset a gargoyle to the point they'll show it.
***these are the same people that have an uncanny knack for finding gratuitous amounts of change between couch cushions and under car seats, can always find the remote, and never lose socks in the washing machine. And if they do, they know exactly where to go to get them back.
****Mother of Azerith, and many, many others
(1) It's not hard for Chaeshrs to have children. Not painful, really, if they just make them. Or they can try going about it the reality way, in which case it may or may not be more difficult for them.
The existentialists in particular tend to be particularly pleased about it when they get there, mostly because they think the fact that the Place exists proves them right in a sense. They favour the idea that the Place is a place between realities, and you get there by slipping out of the reality you're usually fixed in.
They're almost right.
It's the most popular theory in general, really. Others have suggested that the Place was once part of a world and got separated from it the way many of its inhabitants were accidentally separated from their own. Or that it was a universe that ended, and the Place is a fragment of it, or a memory of a fragment.
They're almost right too.
The Place is all of those things. It is between realities. It is separated. It is a memory, and a fragment, and a regret, and a shadow, and a tomb, and a tombstone. It is all of these things and more. It is nearly the same thing for quite a lot of people, but when you get down to the details, it's different in little ways for each person. To some people, it's heaven.
To others, it's hell.
To most, it's purgatory, even if they don't know what that means, even if they don't believe in a heaven or hell.
For Ivan, it's a mixup. A mistake. A little bit of confusion that'll be sorted out eventually by the Right People, whoever they are, and then he'll be merrily on his way back to his own life in his own world. For now, he's just trying to get on, trying to pretend none of this is happening, and trying to pretend that he really will wake up before anything /serious/ happens. He's a waiter at the local tavern. The Local Tavern. There's only the one. The Place* isn't big enough for two. Literally.
For the gargoyle, it's home. The only one she's ever known. And she knows it's her home, because gargoyles have always been there, were probably born there, and intend to stay there. You don't see them in Higher Place that often anymore. Too much light and noise at night. If the gargoyle has a name, she hasn't shared it with anyone. Not even Ivan, and he's the only one who's dared talk to her. Though that conversation mostly included "Um, I, um, was just--the trash--I didn't mean to--are you busy? I don't mean to--I'll come back later." She didn't really mean to scare him like that. Gargoyles don't often intentionally scare people, it just happens. It also makes life more convenient, they've found, so they don't really discourage it. Most people aren't aware they're intelligent, and as a by product, are capable of speech. Some of the really stubbornly realistic humans won't even acknowledge they're possible. It's amazing the things you overhear when people are in denial about the fact that you really aren't a statue. It's downright shocking the things they'll /do/ in front of you.**
For Garth, it's just another place she's living in until she ends up in under place to live in until she ends up in another...well, you get it. So on. So forth. For creatures like Garth, peculiar places aren't that peculiar. After she spent a year in a dimension referred to by the inhabitants simply as "Gukk" where the sky was purple, the liquids were carnivorous, the dominant language consisted mostly of wiggling your fingers(or in the natives' case, thirty-six different sets of antennae) and scratching your nose in the wrong context could be taken as an insult deserving of death, nothing much fazes her anymore. Garth's odd penchant for dimension-jumping had nothing to do with her race(weergarlsh, which meant her body fluctuated between human and a type of furred troll with the waxing and waning of the moon)it's just that sometimes there are people that have a knack for slipping between the fabrics of reality***. Garth prefers Lower Place to Higher Place, as in Higher Place the people are more Civilized, and Civilization doesn't take kindly to individuals who fluctuate from being furry and having circular tusks as long as the diameter of the average tire rim to being a normal human being for only one day every month. Lower Place also has most buildings made out of brick, and brick has better pocks for sinking claws into.
For Azerith, it's one of many playgrounds. Like Garth, he's able to travel between realities--unlike Garth, he has total control over this. Azerith has total control over a lot of things. This is because his mother is a Chaeshr. You know how light cast shadows? Well, realities cast /un/realities. And those unrealities are Chaeshrs. Since they're unreality, they can do very much what they like, so even though if you had a map for all the realities, and you pointed to where an unreality was technically cast by a reality, and said "That's Nadime****, right there," it very well is. That doesn't necessarily mean Nadime is there, though. Well, she probably is. But she might also be wandering around Earth in the form of a little black cat. Or whispering over a magician's shoulder in Yrth as he attempts to summon something dastardly. Or sunbathing inside a star. Or, very rarely, providing parental guidance to one of her very many children.(1) Azerith is what's called an imp. There's a lot of Chaeshr-spawned imps running around. Unlike most of the Chaeshrs' children, they actually have a consistent appearance. They do have gender, though it's hard to tell, and their eyes and mouths are detached, enlarged, stylized things that float around and scare the shat out of people. Their Chaeshr stripes aren't very stable, and if an imp moes too quickly their stripes can be left a way behind. The same goes for their tails. An imp may choose to utilize tail or stripes as clothing, if the company prefers it, and the imp cares about what the company prefers. This is actually the most natural sort of form for them to have. It is possible to keep everything /stable/ and in its proper place, and it's not particularly difficult. It just takes thinking about, and imps are generally too absentminded to be bothered with it. Azerith is, like many of his brethren, a mercilessly carefree individual. He also tends to be very blatantly sexual, because it amuses him when people blush. Spluttering is a bonus. Garth, as previously mentioned, isn't fazed, and the gargoyle is practically downright boring. Nonetheless, he enjoys hanging around Garth, and occasionally the gargoyle. He has little to no interest in Ivan, who's too wrapped up in pretending none of it is real to be any fun.
For Theo, Higher Place is all she can remember. Her older sister Brass claims to remember another place, and her younger sister Gus is too busy partying to care. Theo doesn't much care either. She's a weerraptor. Unlike Garth, though, Theo has chosen, through a variety of meditation and mental exercises, to keep her body locked in a constantly transformed state. As a velociraptor.
In Higher Place, it is by no means convenient to be an animal 24/7. But for Theo, it's the only way she can cope with the world. A city full of confused, addled people milling around until they can get kicked back to their own reality. If they're lucky. To them, the Place is a train station. A stop. Practically tourists, in Theo's mind. She hates tourists.
Despite her dislike for these strangers in her world, though, Theo writes about them. Every week she finds an average joe that's lost their way and interviews them, then writes about them, and submits that blog to the Higher Place newspaper. It doesn't bring in much, but it's steady work, and it keeps the meat on her plate.
Higher Place is a place to live, and it's the place she happens to live. It has its good days, it has mostly bad days, but in the end, what choice do you have?
For Brass, it's what she's stuck with. She remembers another place, from before. She vaguely remembers parents. She's under the impression they were separated from them when they arrived at the Place, and that it's a miracle she managed to keep track of her sisters, and keep them safe, and keep them together. Brass has managed to settle down, make a living. She owns a bar, and not a bad one, either. Like Theo, she's also trained herself to control her transformations. Unlike Theo, Brass perfers being mostly human. Mostly. Claws are always convenient things to hang onto, no matter what species you are.
It's also not where she intends to stay. Unbeknownst to her sisters, Brass has hired a P.I. to find out about their parents. If Brass can find them...well. It'll make things better. And then they can figure out together what to do about getting home. Brass doesn't want to live here. She doesn't want to find love here. She doesn't want to stay any longer than she has to. But she can be patient. She's managed it for this long.
For Gus...well, it's life. It's the moment. It's the party, the food, the drink, the friends. She has a hazy awareness of an undercurrent of desperation at each party she attends, in each person she meets, in each drop of alcohol she swallows. Gus, however, somehow manages to remain entirely unaffected by it. The Place is the Place, what do you want from it? Take what you can get. If you can get good, good for you. If you can't, well, you're doing something wrong, and there's always room for improvement. For Gus, it's all about being content with what you have, to the extent you ignore the idea of there being anything else. To everyone else, it's called laziness.
After the shooting, though, things change for Gus. They change for everyone.
The Place has been around for a long time. A very long time. People have come and gone. People have murdered. People have raped. People have stolen. People have, in general, been people.
But this...this is different. For one thing, it's always been provoked. Someone needed something. Someone had a grudge. Someone was really just fucked up in the head. For another, the Place doesn't like guns. If people arrive with them, they usually lose them, quickly. Or they get broken. Or they just plain don't work. And bad things have, in the past, always been done privately. Thieves wait till nightfall, when everyone's asleep. Murderers corner their victims where no one can hear them, or find the body. Rapists have done the same. Bad things have happened, but in the hesitant, shuffling, dreamy-like waiting-around of the Place, nothing has ever been so blatantly /public./
This is different. It changes everything. Everything anyone ever thought they knew about the Place--even the gargoyles' ancient memories have been challenged. People are scared, and not in the disoriented-denial sort of way they are when they arrive, or refuse to accept what's happened. They're scared in the get-indoors-before-dark, stay-away-from-alleys, never-let-them-get-behind-you sort of scared.
The Place isn't meant to withstand this level of intensity of one emotion, one mind, one thought.
The Place is about /waiting./ But it's become filled with Fear. It's become filled with the tautness of a hivemind. And the hivemind is focusing on one thing:
/Getting out./
People are afraid of the Place in a way they never were before. Before it was being stuck in the mud; now it's being stuck in the tar with predators circling in, waiting until you fall asleep to pounce. And they're going to start pushing. They're going to start clawing. They're going to start tearing at the very boundaries of the Place itself.
Things are going to start happening that were never meant to happen.
*In this context, I am speaking of Lower Place, which is where the fog lingers and the beer is a bit warm, and the sky is always cloudy, and machines run on steam if they run at all, and everyone tosses and turns at night whether they're in beds or not. Unless they're dead, or drugged.
**We tend to assume it shocks the gargoyle who's witnessing it, though they tend to stay straightfaced for most things. It's not that they're emotionless. It's just they've been around for a long time. Been there, done that, if you've seen it once, you've seen it a thousand times--that sort of thing. It takes a lot to genuinely shock, amuse, or upset a gargoyle to the point they'll show it.
***these are the same people that have an uncanny knack for finding gratuitous amounts of change between couch cushions and under car seats, can always find the remote, and never lose socks in the washing machine. And if they do, they know exactly where to go to get them back.
****Mother of Azerith, and many, many others
(1) It's not hard for Chaeshrs to have children. Not painful, really, if they just make them. Or they can try going about it the reality way, in which case it may or may not be more difficult for them.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
blah blah blah I wrote some of this alre--no I didn't. I just did it in my head. Okay. So what happens after this.
Okay, for now I'm cutting off the date, putting it in storage until I can figure it out or not. Probably not.
Dammit, where is my sexual tension? It was everywhere in the first drafts, and so far, Julian is afraid of Lyre and angry at her. I need to turn that around. Get him
So here's what happens. At some point Julian's mom really beats on him. Not after the photoshoot, later. I'll worry about it later.
Julian is feeling especially pressured by being blackmailed by a wilder, his mom for hanging with Tris, who has just forbidden him to do so any longer, and Tris gets pissed by Julian's lack of balls when he goes along with it, by getting a panic attack at a party when someone toxxes him with a semi-paral tox and dump him in a closet and close the door on him as a prank(he sobs and pisses himself) which results in a violent flashback, and in the end he stumbles in Masquerade for reasons he can't understand and Lyre finds him at the bar.
She asks him what he's doing there, saying she's done her research and knows his mom is against the whole fem/masc thing.
"Yeah. Whatever. /Vack/ her," I mumbled, reaching for my beer.
"I think you've had quite enough," she said, cutting me off and pulling it away. I grabbed her arm, glaring murderously at her.
"T'night, of /aall nnightss/, isssnot tha night t get b'tween me and /mmy vackingg beer/," I snarled. Sweet oblivion. Simple, mindless drunken stupor. That was all I asked. Too much? Apparently.
"Am I going to have to ask you to leave?" she asked, her voice cold, the black, furry lips peeling back over the wicked sharp teeth. I wasn't drunk enough yet to forget serious shit, but for a moment, I had actually forgotten she was a bouncer.
"No," I mumbled. "Juss...please, juss let me have the beer..." I could feel my face beginning to crumble as everything built up in my throat, rising rapidly and smashing into the walls of sullen, angry indifference I'd been building all evening.
Not now. Not now not now not now not now...
"Just leave me alone," I said, my voice quavering as I weakly tugged at my glass, encased in her grip. "Pllease jus go away an leave me alooone..."
Fat, glimmering tears were pooling in the corners of my eyes and beginning to spill over. I let my head slump down on the bar, hoping she hadn't seen.
She had. I knew it because I felt her let go of the beer. I dragged it back over to me and waited for her presence to fade so I could take another swig and let the liquid fire blast down my throat and numb it enough to stop me from crying.
Please just go please just go please just leave me alone and above all please don't /ask.../
"Are...you alright?" she asked quietly.
"Ye--no. Yess. Fsine. I'm onlyy vackinngg /vacked/ in thha vackingg /ass/ in liikke a b'jillion differen' ways. Vack off."
"...I see."
The tears were still flowing. Had to make it stop. Go away and let me drink my beer.
"...Mr. Forest. Would you...like a more private atmosphere in which to drink?"
It was so cordial and polite and not on-your-knees-bitch-I-have-blackmail of her I actually thought that for one, it was someone talking, and for two, despite the name, they were talking to someone else entirely.
Okay, for now I'm cutting off the date, putting it in storage until I can figure it out or not. Probably not.
Dammit, where is my sexual tension? It was everywhere in the first drafts, and so far, Julian is afraid of Lyre and angry at her. I need to turn that around. Get him
So here's what happens. At some point Julian's mom really beats on him. Not after the photoshoot, later. I'll worry about it later.
Julian is feeling especially pressured by being blackmailed by a wilder, his mom for hanging with Tris, who has just forbidden him to do so any longer, and Tris gets pissed by Julian's lack of balls when he goes along with it, by getting a panic attack at a party when someone toxxes him with a semi-paral tox and dump him in a closet and close the door on him as a prank(he sobs and pisses himself) which results in a violent flashback, and in the end he stumbles in Masquerade for reasons he can't understand and Lyre finds him at the bar.
She asks him what he's doing there, saying she's done her research and knows his mom is against the whole fem/masc thing.
"Yeah. Whatever. /Vack/ her," I mumbled, reaching for my beer.
"I think you've had quite enough," she said, cutting me off and pulling it away. I grabbed her arm, glaring murderously at her.
"T'night, of /aall nnightss/, isssnot tha night t get b'tween me and /mmy vackingg beer/," I snarled. Sweet oblivion. Simple, mindless drunken stupor. That was all I asked. Too much? Apparently.
"Am I going to have to ask you to leave?" she asked, her voice cold, the black, furry lips peeling back over the wicked sharp teeth. I wasn't drunk enough yet to forget serious shit, but for a moment, I had actually forgotten she was a bouncer.
"No," I mumbled. "Juss...please, juss let me have the beer..." I could feel my face beginning to crumble as everything built up in my throat, rising rapidly and smashing into the walls of sullen, angry indifference I'd been building all evening.
Not now. Not now not now not now not now...
"Just leave me alone," I said, my voice quavering as I weakly tugged at my glass, encased in her grip. "Pllease jus go away an leave me alooone..."
Fat, glimmering tears were pooling in the corners of my eyes and beginning to spill over. I let my head slump down on the bar, hoping she hadn't seen.
She had. I knew it because I felt her let go of the beer. I dragged it back over to me and waited for her presence to fade so I could take another swig and let the liquid fire blast down my throat and numb it enough to stop me from crying.
Please just go please just go please just leave me alone and above all please don't /ask.../
"Are...you alright?" she asked quietly.
"Ye--no. Yess. Fsine. I'm onlyy vackinngg /vacked/ in thha vackingg /ass/ in liikke a b'jillion differen' ways. Vack off."
"...I see."
The tears were still flowing. Had to make it stop. Go away and let me drink my beer.
"...Mr. Forest. Would you...like a more private atmosphere in which to drink?"
It was so cordial and polite and not on-your-knees-bitch-I-have-blackmail of her I actually thought that for one, it was someone talking, and for two, despite the name, they were talking to someone else entirely.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Zhatica worldbuilding: Pain
The storm outside weighs heavily on my mind, and I am not right for making tonight.
But make I will, or I will at least try.
Tonight I make something new for Zhatica. Or rather it has been being made for some time now, and I have now chosen to write it down.
I do not yet have a name for it. I would rather not call it a god, as that is a bit presumptuous, and anyways, they are not gods. They have worshippers, and they have powers, and to an extent, they have immortality.
But they are not gods.
And when have gods ever truly been gods? More that the gods that have existed have all been manifestations of ideas, of mass concepts. War. Love. Darkness. Wisdom. Dreams. Cats. Storms.
I think I will make a thing of cats, and he will be beautiful. He will have long dark hair that shimmers and reflects the colours of jewels when the light strikes it right. His skin will be a golden bronze, his body slim and powerful and delicate.
But I am not writing about him tonight. He has been made, he will be further developed.
Tonight I am forging Pain.
It is Pain that throbs in my right temple, that tucks itself up under the tip of my right shoulder blade and gnaws at my muscles(which is an aching) that crawls into the spaces between the bones of my spine and stiffens and bemoans my back. It is Pain that visits me every day in some form or another. It is with Pain I am very familiar. In others I have known as well as me.
Pain is also male. He is white, all over, though not naturally. He has an almost human colour(though there are no humans in Zhatica, for they are dull) but it is never really seen except maybe in his cheeks from the screaming he can't utter. Pain also has white hair, though, though I am not sure why. Perhaps simply because he does, and that is how it is.
Pain in the first days of Zhatica lay in a place you couldn't see but you could hear sometimes and maybe touch it(like madness), on a slab of something like stone, and bound him with things you couldn't see so that he lay utterly still, not even able to breathe. Not that he needed to, but it was yet another form of discomfort.
In those days there was no Pain in the world, because it was all in him on his slab. His slab kept it inside him. It is not known who put him there, or who he was before(if he was anything, or anyone) or how. The Great Spirit did not mean him to be, or he would not have been able to leave.
Pain felt everything of Pain, everything from finger pricks from sewing needles to heart attacks to fingernails getting ripped off(accidentally or on purpose) to a hookjaw's bite to rape to murder to everything. And the people did not feel it. Instead of pain they felt something like tingling, though rape was still a terrible thing, for it is not the physical pain that scars. Perhaps Pain should have only been called Physical Pain, because that was all he was. People got sad and twisted up with hate often enough despite him.
Perhaps Pain was a Wall of some kind. A person that became a barrier, though he couldn't tell you how. I'm sure whoever did it meant all well and good.
Pain would lay on his slab, feeling everything everyone did not have to feel. You'd think that after a time it would all build up into one terrible mass and he'd be able to shut it out somehow. But no. Every fragment of every second was Pain, and he felt it, and thought it, and knew it, and it was all he could feel or think or know. And he could not thrash or scream or wail or vomit or sleep. The stone he lay on forbade it.
He could cry though. He did. For long periods of time, and frequently. Wouldn't you?
There were so many tears, the flow so regular, that as they dried they left behind enough salt to sew his eyes shut, and trickled down his face and began to build little stalactites and stalagmites connecting his head to the stone. He was not aware of this.
And it was in these days that Masochism and Sadism were sired, and I will tell you of them, though not at the moment.
It was at a point much beyond this, after Pain left his slab and was released into the world once again, that a young woman named for a hat, with Sadism coiled inside her(not around her heart, for Sadism is not a thing of the heart, but of the gut and lungs and blood and hands) came from a time much later on, by means that will not be explained, and took him off the slab. Pain himself was incapable of moving, but she bore in her his own power that had been passed on without his knowledge, and with that power twisted in the way it was, and being a new power in its own right that the old magic did not know, it did not break the seals on Pain, but slid through their crevices and slithered round their locks, and so he was taken off his slab, his imprisonment.
Later she would tell it all as a matter of business, for if it had never been done, people would have gone on without pain, and in her business the pain of others was a necessity.
But in truth, as she stood there, and looked on him, and saw that he was beautiful, and tangled and broken and devoured by Pain, in a way that she, carrying Sadism, found beautifully terrible, she felt something like a hunger, and so when she took him off his binding, there was more than business in her heart and mind.
She bit the salt from his eyes herself, her mouth wetting it enough to dissolve(for it was only salt, and if there had been stone as there is in the water that makes true cave-teeth, her teeth would have broken instead) and put her cloak around his shoulders, for he wore only a thin, frail garment of white that was like a dress, and it was crumbling into bits like spider-silk even as she lifted him. She gave him water to drink, which he could not remember, though he fought it--he fought her--at first, afraid of something, though he didn't know what. And finally his lips were wetted, and he drank, and finally slept. He would forever love sleep afterwards, for it was the first taste of it he could remember, and sleep is a wonderful thing to know for the first time ever when you can properly know it, and cherish it. People that have been able to sleep all their lives could never appreciate it the way he did.
When he woke, she held him, as she had held him during all the time he slept, though neither could tell you how long it had been. She gave him food to eat, food from a strange tree from a strange place very long ago, a tree that called itself the Swampfather(though that in itself is another tale.) It was only then that he realized that his muscles had done something called atrophy, where they had withered so that he was a collection of bones and skin and the memories of internal organs, and little else.
When he had eaten he slept again, for his body was hard at work taking the strangeness of the fruit and making it into new organs, and muscles, and energy. And when he woke again, he began to understand at last what had been done for him, and now that he knew it, something more than joy and delight and gratefulness all together overflooded him, so that he laughed and cried and wanted to dance, but didn't know how, so he instead kissed the woman on the mouth, and contentedly nestled himself again in her arms that night as he slept again.
She never did sleep. She had been told of the consequences of a mere like her sleeping in such a place, and had traded one of her eyes for the eye of a cat. Cats do not shut their eyes unless they want to sleep, and they do not sleep unless they want to. She knew tiredness many times over, but she did not sleep.
When he woke again for the third time, she told him it was time to leave.
He was not Pain during this time, nor after. That name was no longer his, for once he had been removed from the slab, the conditions of the bindings had dissolved, and the world knew Pain--not in a sense that it knew it once again, but that it had always known it, for one of the conditions had been that during his binding, the world should /never/ know Pain in any sense. Not in the current, not in the past, not in ancient memory. And now it did, and it always had.
As he was leaving, she told him what he was not anymore, and that he ought to take a new name. He asked her what the name ought be, for he did not know. He didn't really know anything. All he had ever known was Pain, and that was gone from him now.
She told him he should go find it for himself. He asked her for her name, though we will never know whether or not she told him. He did know it later, though, when they met again. There are those that believe they became lovers for a time, but there is no evidence of this--and at any rate, she was not the type to take a lover that did not enjoy her indulgences in the infliction of pain on others as much as she did. And especially to him, such a thing would have been cruel.
His whiteness left him as he left that place, and she left some other way. The Pain had kept him white in agony for all this time, and now he began to have colour again. His hair remained white, however, and his eyes were so pale a blue they might as well have been also. He went out into a world that did not remember him as he had been. He went among mere people, and they knew him as something more than themselves, for whatever he was, he was not mere--he could not have been, to have been what he was. As time passed, people knew him better, and he did eventually tell him who and what he was, and what he had been, though he never told of them of how things had been before. There was never any need.
Some still called him Pain, then, once they knew, though he winced at this. The name he took was Chime, because the first thing he saw when he came out of the place he had been was a forest full of little silver bells tied on tree branches by little red ribbons, and they made a wonderful noise. He asked a flower what the name of the sound was(and he didn't know yet that not everyone could talk to flowers and trees and animals and things) and when it told him, he decided the name was as beautiful as the sound. And so he called himself Chime.
Chime gained power as people came to know him as he was, and became something more than he had been as Pain--for as Pain, he'd had no real power, and had been little more than a dam to a reservoir--so that as time passed, and times passed, he became able to do what he had done before, by choice. When asked, and when he felt he had been asked through the proper ceremonies performed by those with the proper sentiments(though he was a gentle spirit, and good-natured, he did turn out to be a bit of an arrogant creature, as many of those like him often do) he would once again take on the Pain of another, and very rarely more than one person at a time. On some occasions, when the need of those who cried out was great, he would take the pain immediately, without ceremony, without tribute. It is said he even did this for rape, and when such a time occurred, he would lie in the temple built for him, swathed in sheets, and weep blood once more.
He had lovers, for he was beautiful, and beautiful in a way that feminine or masculine women were entranced by him. But his seed was infertile, and he did not give his women children, and Chime did not disapprove of this.
But Pain had had children in his day, which Chime did eventually discover.
But make I will, or I will at least try.
Tonight I make something new for Zhatica. Or rather it has been being made for some time now, and I have now chosen to write it down.
I do not yet have a name for it. I would rather not call it a god, as that is a bit presumptuous, and anyways, they are not gods. They have worshippers, and they have powers, and to an extent, they have immortality.
But they are not gods.
And when have gods ever truly been gods? More that the gods that have existed have all been manifestations of ideas, of mass concepts. War. Love. Darkness. Wisdom. Dreams. Cats. Storms.
I think I will make a thing of cats, and he will be beautiful. He will have long dark hair that shimmers and reflects the colours of jewels when the light strikes it right. His skin will be a golden bronze, his body slim and powerful and delicate.
But I am not writing about him tonight. He has been made, he will be further developed.
Tonight I am forging Pain.
It is Pain that throbs in my right temple, that tucks itself up under the tip of my right shoulder blade and gnaws at my muscles(which is an aching) that crawls into the spaces between the bones of my spine and stiffens and bemoans my back. It is Pain that visits me every day in some form or another. It is with Pain I am very familiar. In others I have known as well as me.
Pain is also male. He is white, all over, though not naturally. He has an almost human colour(though there are no humans in Zhatica, for they are dull) but it is never really seen except maybe in his cheeks from the screaming he can't utter. Pain also has white hair, though, though I am not sure why. Perhaps simply because he does, and that is how it is.
Pain in the first days of Zhatica lay in a place you couldn't see but you could hear sometimes and maybe touch it(like madness), on a slab of something like stone, and bound him with things you couldn't see so that he lay utterly still, not even able to breathe. Not that he needed to, but it was yet another form of discomfort.
In those days there was no Pain in the world, because it was all in him on his slab. His slab kept it inside him. It is not known who put him there, or who he was before(if he was anything, or anyone) or how. The Great Spirit did not mean him to be, or he would not have been able to leave.
Pain felt everything of Pain, everything from finger pricks from sewing needles to heart attacks to fingernails getting ripped off(accidentally or on purpose) to a hookjaw's bite to rape to murder to everything. And the people did not feel it. Instead of pain they felt something like tingling, though rape was still a terrible thing, for it is not the physical pain that scars. Perhaps Pain should have only been called Physical Pain, because that was all he was. People got sad and twisted up with hate often enough despite him.
Perhaps Pain was a Wall of some kind. A person that became a barrier, though he couldn't tell you how. I'm sure whoever did it meant all well and good.
Pain would lay on his slab, feeling everything everyone did not have to feel. You'd think that after a time it would all build up into one terrible mass and he'd be able to shut it out somehow. But no. Every fragment of every second was Pain, and he felt it, and thought it, and knew it, and it was all he could feel or think or know. And he could not thrash or scream or wail or vomit or sleep. The stone he lay on forbade it.
He could cry though. He did. For long periods of time, and frequently. Wouldn't you?
There were so many tears, the flow so regular, that as they dried they left behind enough salt to sew his eyes shut, and trickled down his face and began to build little stalactites and stalagmites connecting his head to the stone. He was not aware of this.
And it was in these days that Masochism and Sadism were sired, and I will tell you of them, though not at the moment.
It was at a point much beyond this, after Pain left his slab and was released into the world once again, that a young woman named for a hat, with Sadism coiled inside her(not around her heart, for Sadism is not a thing of the heart, but of the gut and lungs and blood and hands) came from a time much later on, by means that will not be explained, and took him off the slab. Pain himself was incapable of moving, but she bore in her his own power that had been passed on without his knowledge, and with that power twisted in the way it was, and being a new power in its own right that the old magic did not know, it did not break the seals on Pain, but slid through their crevices and slithered round their locks, and so he was taken off his slab, his imprisonment.
Later she would tell it all as a matter of business, for if it had never been done, people would have gone on without pain, and in her business the pain of others was a necessity.
But in truth, as she stood there, and looked on him, and saw that he was beautiful, and tangled and broken and devoured by Pain, in a way that she, carrying Sadism, found beautifully terrible, she felt something like a hunger, and so when she took him off his binding, there was more than business in her heart and mind.
She bit the salt from his eyes herself, her mouth wetting it enough to dissolve(for it was only salt, and if there had been stone as there is in the water that makes true cave-teeth, her teeth would have broken instead) and put her cloak around his shoulders, for he wore only a thin, frail garment of white that was like a dress, and it was crumbling into bits like spider-silk even as she lifted him. She gave him water to drink, which he could not remember, though he fought it--he fought her--at first, afraid of something, though he didn't know what. And finally his lips were wetted, and he drank, and finally slept. He would forever love sleep afterwards, for it was the first taste of it he could remember, and sleep is a wonderful thing to know for the first time ever when you can properly know it, and cherish it. People that have been able to sleep all their lives could never appreciate it the way he did.
When he woke, she held him, as she had held him during all the time he slept, though neither could tell you how long it had been. She gave him food to eat, food from a strange tree from a strange place very long ago, a tree that called itself the Swampfather(though that in itself is another tale.) It was only then that he realized that his muscles had done something called atrophy, where they had withered so that he was a collection of bones and skin and the memories of internal organs, and little else.
When he had eaten he slept again, for his body was hard at work taking the strangeness of the fruit and making it into new organs, and muscles, and energy. And when he woke again, he began to understand at last what had been done for him, and now that he knew it, something more than joy and delight and gratefulness all together overflooded him, so that he laughed and cried and wanted to dance, but didn't know how, so he instead kissed the woman on the mouth, and contentedly nestled himself again in her arms that night as he slept again.
She never did sleep. She had been told of the consequences of a mere like her sleeping in such a place, and had traded one of her eyes for the eye of a cat. Cats do not shut their eyes unless they want to sleep, and they do not sleep unless they want to. She knew tiredness many times over, but she did not sleep.
When he woke again for the third time, she told him it was time to leave.
He was not Pain during this time, nor after. That name was no longer his, for once he had been removed from the slab, the conditions of the bindings had dissolved, and the world knew Pain--not in a sense that it knew it once again, but that it had always known it, for one of the conditions had been that during his binding, the world should /never/ know Pain in any sense. Not in the current, not in the past, not in ancient memory. And now it did, and it always had.
As he was leaving, she told him what he was not anymore, and that he ought to take a new name. He asked her what the name ought be, for he did not know. He didn't really know anything. All he had ever known was Pain, and that was gone from him now.
She told him he should go find it for himself. He asked her for her name, though we will never know whether or not she told him. He did know it later, though, when they met again. There are those that believe they became lovers for a time, but there is no evidence of this--and at any rate, she was not the type to take a lover that did not enjoy her indulgences in the infliction of pain on others as much as she did. And especially to him, such a thing would have been cruel.
His whiteness left him as he left that place, and she left some other way. The Pain had kept him white in agony for all this time, and now he began to have colour again. His hair remained white, however, and his eyes were so pale a blue they might as well have been also. He went out into a world that did not remember him as he had been. He went among mere people, and they knew him as something more than themselves, for whatever he was, he was not mere--he could not have been, to have been what he was. As time passed, people knew him better, and he did eventually tell him who and what he was, and what he had been, though he never told of them of how things had been before. There was never any need.
Some still called him Pain, then, once they knew, though he winced at this. The name he took was Chime, because the first thing he saw when he came out of the place he had been was a forest full of little silver bells tied on tree branches by little red ribbons, and they made a wonderful noise. He asked a flower what the name of the sound was(and he didn't know yet that not everyone could talk to flowers and trees and animals and things) and when it told him, he decided the name was as beautiful as the sound. And so he called himself Chime.
Chime gained power as people came to know him as he was, and became something more than he had been as Pain--for as Pain, he'd had no real power, and had been little more than a dam to a reservoir--so that as time passed, and times passed, he became able to do what he had done before, by choice. When asked, and when he felt he had been asked through the proper ceremonies performed by those with the proper sentiments(though he was a gentle spirit, and good-natured, he did turn out to be a bit of an arrogant creature, as many of those like him often do) he would once again take on the Pain of another, and very rarely more than one person at a time. On some occasions, when the need of those who cried out was great, he would take the pain immediately, without ceremony, without tribute. It is said he even did this for rape, and when such a time occurred, he would lie in the temple built for him, swathed in sheets, and weep blood once more.
He had lovers, for he was beautiful, and beautiful in a way that feminine or masculine women were entranced by him. But his seed was infertile, and he did not give his women children, and Chime did not disapprove of this.
But Pain had had children in his day, which Chime did eventually discover.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Goldilocks
It's a blurp of an idea that popped into my head after being up late last night reading Transmet and this morning when we visited a used bookstore in Manassas where I happened upon a book titled "Red Raptor." Even if it was the story of a prehistoric female Utahraptor, the method they told her story was not quite my cup of tea. I'd recommend Mek checking it out though. I don't know if it's his cup of tea either, but I figure it's worth mentioning. It's an old book though, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to find.
"Goldilocks" is the public's nickname for Specs, because she and her sisters are yellow raptors. I'm under the impression that it's popular for velociraptors to be portrayed with red colouring, so I wanted to do something different.
Goldilocks also comes to mind because of this morning's report on the planet that scientists have recently decided may be capable of supporting life. The man on the news described it as the "goldilocks" because its location to the sun in its system provides it with the "just-right" combination of temperature, etc.
I say ten bucks they end up calling the planet Goldilocks. I'm sure it'll come into some official name later like New Earth or Second Earth or something fantastically unimaginative like that. But I bet for the honeymoon period they call it Goldilocks.
My mom just opened a package from the vet's office. It had two cards and a little slab of blue clay. The clay had Boots's pawprint, as did one of the card.
We'll never forget you, buddy. You were a good cat.
Moving on before I cry little a little girl.
I'm a Utahraptor living in New York City.
That in itself should be enough to keep you reading.
Sitting in an apartment in the dark at o'dark thirty tapping away on my typewriter--the keys are easier to hit with claws, and sturdier, too--was not my idea of how this day would begin. I much rather had intended to sleep in after a long night of binge-drinking with the drawns tightly blinded--does that make any sense? Or am I still a little drunk? Oh well, you know what I mean--to keep the garish light of day out until I felt damn well ready to get up and greet it on my own terms. That is, sometime around the crack of noon.
Yet the people of the city that never sleeps are bitter bastards, and seem to have adopted a policy of, "if we can't sleep, no one can."
That is why I was dragged by the tail out of a delicious dream involving a pair of overweight triceratops bogged down in tarpits and screaming their little throats out at this despicable time of the morning by the sound of jackhammers pounding the city's heartbeat into the sidewalk at the foot of my apartment complex. A negligent rhino stumbled down it a week ago in a drug-induced stupor and when he decided it was time to pass out, his horn gouged a three-foot long wound into the already fragmented cement. It bled dirt and the guts of a massive fungi network that have been marinating in the wet darkness under that slab of sidewalk for what looked like years, if not decades. The fungus was white, bulbous, and gleaming. It looked like a baluga whale's corpse infested with tumours.
But I digress, and excessively. You get to do that when you're drunk.
Where was I?
Being a Utahraptor in New York City. No, I covered that.
Being up at this hour. Yes. No, that was the baluga. And tumours. So it's not a matter of where was I, it's a matter of where I was going.
Gus's whimpering from the corner has just reminded me.
She came home with a bullet graze on her thigh fifteen minutes ago. I was awake for it, thanks to the city's obnoxious, cigarette-smoke stained heartbeat. Gus is my sister, and she narrowly avoided being shot this morning in a hate crime committed in a downtown rave club reserved for us dino freaks. I won't deign to go into detail about it. That would involve interrogating my little sister, which I'd rather not due, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of fiction about it to appease your mundane curiosity on this morning's eight o'clock news.
Where I'm going with this, I suppose, is why? Why was my little sister almost shot in the crotch, which was probably meant to be her stomach, or even her lung? I'll tell you.
It's because you all suck.
Not just you humans that hate us primitive weers. It's our own damn kind, dammit, the flesh and blood of our own that betrays us. And I'll go ahead and tell you this, too--see how nice I am, to do your thinking for you?
Because in dino-reserved establishments, no humans are allowed to be involved in the club's staff. At all. Humans are only allowed in as guests with no less than two accompanying dinos to vouch for them. And this guy that almost killed my sister was human. He stank of it. He was filthy with the sweat of his racist nerves and racist adrenaline that kicked in before he was about to Kill A Dino and resurged after he had Killed A Dino, which made him a Man To Be Feared. He was cocky after he'd done it, do you realize that? So he tried to do it again. The fucker tried to kill my sister. Because one innocent wasn't enough.
And it was a dino bouncer who let the fucker in.
Why? There's a lot of these "whys" hanging about my apartment lately, and they're starting to get under claw. It's fucking irritating. They shit in my bed, they shed on my furniture, they scratch up my curtains and scream at me whenever I try to sleep.
You fuckers put them here. I want them out.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a half-empty bottle of Bourbon to pour out the window on some construction worker's head and a bullet wound to mend.
Specs shoved away from her desk, the chair's wheels squeaky-squeaking over the floor. She considered the Bourbon, and took one last sip before she stood, went over to her window, and poured the rest out over the street. Some of it hit someone, if not all. Specs didn't care enough to make sure it was aimed at a construction worker. Either way, it was still satisfying.
"Asshole," Gus grunted from her corner. She was slumped against a wall and looking a lot happier than she had when she'd come in. The empty bottle of whiskey in her half-claw-half-hand probably had everything to do with that.
The medical market had yet to develop a set of antibiotics that worked on all weers in general as well as any that worked on Utahraptors specifically. The coding for each species of weer's magic gene was different, and even though shamans and witches could formulate poultices that were universal, they didn't last. So unless you lived next door to one, or even on the same block, they didn't do a weer much good. Specs knew some healers, but none close enough at the time for the pain Gus had been in. So Specs gave her sister alcohol.
Alcohol, Specs thought tiredly. The gift that...well, there was probably a clever way to finish that thought, but she couldn't formulate it right now. Still a bit drunk. So very tired.
"Ready for antibiotics?" Specs asked. Both she and Gus smirked at the old slang.
"Lay it on me," Gus rumbled. Her voice got gravelly when she got exhausted. Most dinos' did. Voice was one of the first things to revert when the body got too tired to maintain an entirely human front.
Specs got the pure alcohol out of her bathroom cabinet along with the bandages.
"Fuck movies," Gus muttered as Specs laid out an old tattered towel under her sister's leg to catch the alcohol. "You seen the latest werewolves movie? Fuck wolves. Why they so damn popular?"
"They're fluffy," Specs said, untwisting the cap from the bottle. "Humans love fluffy shit."
"Fuck fluffy. Scaley's badass, everyone knows it."
"Prepare for touchdown," Specs grunted, and poured a handful of alcohol over the graze on Gus's leg.
Her sister snarled and her upper body writhed as she struggled to keep her leg still. Small patches of transformation rippled across her, the primitive gene fighting to lash out at the pain.
"Fuck," Gus growled, her voice having dropped an octave. She blinked and winced, and her jugular area contorted as she readjusted her larynx. "Fuck," she repeated, and the word snapped with a much more satisfying clarity in the quiet of the apartment.
"Werewolves?" Specs reminded her sister.
"Yeah. Fuckin' movies. Got us in real life but they still try to pull that instant regeneration shit. And vampires, man. Fuckin' vampires. Still tryin' that shit, like they still think they gotta be real as wolves and we're just hidin' 'em somewhere."
"Humans are stupid," Specs said with a shrug, gathering up the dampened towel and using it to mop up what had soaked through. "Bandages?"
"Do it myself," Gus muttered, sitting up further.
"You're drunk off your ass," Specs said dryly.
"So're you."
"I was. Writing's sobered me some."
"Heh. Does it now? We gotta get you REAL drunk someday, see what you'd write then." Gus snickered. "I bet porno."
"It's not porn when it's literature, little sister," Specs corrected as she wrangled a cigarette out of the box with her snout and foreclaw, lighting it on a candle kept burning for exactly that purpose. "When it's written, it's erotica."
"Whatever," Gus snorted. "I bet you'd write it if you got drunk enough."
"Who's to say I need to be drunk?"
Gus raised an eyebrow.
A pounding on the door startled them both. Specs flicked her tail at her sister, a command to stay. Gus nodded and got back to fumbling drunkenly with her bandaging. They both knew who it was.
Specs waded through a carpeting of crumpled papers, the remains of past blog entries, essays, short stories, and one book she'd been working on for two years. None of it was ever thrown away. It'd been accumulating since she'd moved in three months ago.
"You need a maid," Brass growled as Specs opened the door. She muscled her way in past her younger sister. "Where's Gus?"
"Back he-e-re," Gus snorted in a sing-song voice. "I just had the gr-hic-reatest fuckin' idea ever."
"You gave her beer?" Brass snapped at Specs.
"Had to put the antibiotic on her," Spec said with a smirk and a shrug.
"She's only eighteen."
"Alcohol on fresh wounds fuckin' hurts, Brass."
"I know. I also run a bar, you dick. You know how many underaged pricks I shut down--"
"A day. I know. You tell me over and over. Just this once, B. You know she gets it at parties anyway."
"Not in our own damn house--"
"Who's house?"
Brass remembered they were adults now and where she was.
"She was in pain," Specs muttered as they entered her writing room, where Gus was slumped in the corner. "Scared shitless. I did her a kindness."
"Don't do it again. Shit, Gus." Brass crouched down next to her youngest sister and snagged the bandages from her hands, which were having difficulty staying hands. You could always tell when a weerdino was drunk, even from a distance. They couldn't stick to anyone form. "You drink the whole damn bottle?"
"Brass, listen," Gus slurred, struggling to sit up. "We gonna make a million. Here's what we do, 'kay? You listening?"
"I'm listening."
"Ow. Not so tight. Hokay, so, what we do is, is we get Specs drunk, kay, and we make her write porno--"
"Erotica."
"Whatfuckever, she writes sex, okay, and then we sell it on the black market. Everyone loves her fucking blog, everyone'll buy it. I'm a fuckin' genius, right?"
"We wouldn't have to sell it on the black market," Specs remarked as she pulled her blog entry out of her typewriter and folded it into its envelope. "Erotica is its own genre of literature. We could get it published properly."
"Fuck it," Gus said. "We'd get shit from publishers on royalties. They'd get half the profits or some shit."
Specs looked at her sister sideways as she sealed the envelope with her tongue and stamped her friend's address on it. Specs didn't mess with computers--she was a full-time scaley, someone who preferred to live entirely in beast form 24/7, and computers were hard to manage when you only had three fingers on each hand that weren't very flexible and ended in massive, viciously sharp claws.
"Do you even know what you're talking about?" Specs asked with a mild curiosity. Brass shot her a glare over her shoulder as she finished tying off Gus's leg.
"She's an airheaded raver that's just been a witness to a traumatizing hate crime, almost been shot herself, ran all the way back here alone through New York City at night in the rain, and downed a whole bottle of whiskey, and you're asking her if she knows what she's talking about?"
"We call it Goldilocks!" Gus suddenly exclaimed. "The Goldilocks collection. Of porno."
"Erotica."
"Whathefuckever it's called!"
"I've gotta get this mailed to Rube," Specs said, waving the envelope about. "I'll hit up Lace for a poultice on the way back. Make sure Gus doesn't chew on my armchair again."
"You're going out?" Brass said, an actual tinge of disbelief in her voice. "Your sister was almost shot a half hour ago and you're going out to mail your fucking blog entry?"
"It's a blog entry about my sister almost getting shot, if that helps at all," Specs replied as she donned her hat and fished a plastic bag out from under the sink in her kitchen to keep the envelope safe from the weather. The storm hadn't hit her part of the city, but she wasn't taking chances. "And I said I'd get a poultice."
"Whatever," Brass muttered, trying to help Gus off the floor. "Fuck off and die."
"Love you too," Specs said dryly on her way out.
Brass was about to make a retort when she heard a loud flapping noise, and as the door shut behind Specs, a wyvern the size of a raven landed on the fire escape outside Specs's open window. It was wearing a polic bonnet around the base of its neck. As Brass stared at it, it cocked its head, examining her with one beady little eye, and squawked.
"What the..."
"It's the Lawman!" Gus mumbled as her head began to slump. "He helped me 'shcape the coppers..."
"What?" Brass looked down at her sister as the younger weerraptor's eyes slid shut. "Why'd you have to escape the cops?"
Gus was already out cold.
Brass felt an uneasy feeling blossoming in her gut as she dragged her sister over to the couch and dumped her on it.
This doesn't deserve to be posted as an actual deviation, so my blog gets to endure the fodder, but if anyone cares I have a sequel bit to this floating around in my head and I could put it down if you want. I don't see it continuing beyond that.
I did enjoy writing this, though.
"Goldilocks" is the public's nickname for Specs, because she and her sisters are yellow raptors. I'm under the impression that it's popular for velociraptors to be portrayed with red colouring, so I wanted to do something different.
Goldilocks also comes to mind because of this morning's report on the planet that scientists have recently decided may be capable of supporting life. The man on the news described it as the "goldilocks" because its location to the sun in its system provides it with the "just-right" combination of temperature, etc.
I say ten bucks they end up calling the planet Goldilocks. I'm sure it'll come into some official name later like New Earth or Second Earth or something fantastically unimaginative like that. But I bet for the honeymoon period they call it Goldilocks.
My mom just opened a package from the vet's office. It had two cards and a little slab of blue clay. The clay had Boots's pawprint, as did one of the card.
We'll never forget you, buddy. You were a good cat.
Moving on before I cry little a little girl.
I'm a Utahraptor living in New York City.
That in itself should be enough to keep you reading.
Sitting in an apartment in the dark at o'dark thirty tapping away on my typewriter--the keys are easier to hit with claws, and sturdier, too--was not my idea of how this day would begin. I much rather had intended to sleep in after a long night of binge-drinking with the drawns tightly blinded--does that make any sense? Or am I still a little drunk? Oh well, you know what I mean--to keep the garish light of day out until I felt damn well ready to get up and greet it on my own terms. That is, sometime around the crack of noon.
Yet the people of the city that never sleeps are bitter bastards, and seem to have adopted a policy of, "if we can't sleep, no one can."
That is why I was dragged by the tail out of a delicious dream involving a pair of overweight triceratops bogged down in tarpits and screaming their little throats out at this despicable time of the morning by the sound of jackhammers pounding the city's heartbeat into the sidewalk at the foot of my apartment complex. A negligent rhino stumbled down it a week ago in a drug-induced stupor and when he decided it was time to pass out, his horn gouged a three-foot long wound into the already fragmented cement. It bled dirt and the guts of a massive fungi network that have been marinating in the wet darkness under that slab of sidewalk for what looked like years, if not decades. The fungus was white, bulbous, and gleaming. It looked like a baluga whale's corpse infested with tumours.
But I digress, and excessively. You get to do that when you're drunk.
Where was I?
Being a Utahraptor in New York City. No, I covered that.
Being up at this hour. Yes. No, that was the baluga. And tumours. So it's not a matter of where was I, it's a matter of where I was going.
Gus's whimpering from the corner has just reminded me.
She came home with a bullet graze on her thigh fifteen minutes ago. I was awake for it, thanks to the city's obnoxious, cigarette-smoke stained heartbeat. Gus is my sister, and she narrowly avoided being shot this morning in a hate crime committed in a downtown rave club reserved for us dino freaks. I won't deign to go into detail about it. That would involve interrogating my little sister, which I'd rather not due, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of fiction about it to appease your mundane curiosity on this morning's eight o'clock news.
Where I'm going with this, I suppose, is why? Why was my little sister almost shot in the crotch, which was probably meant to be her stomach, or even her lung? I'll tell you.
It's because you all suck.
Not just you humans that hate us primitive weers. It's our own damn kind, dammit, the flesh and blood of our own that betrays us. And I'll go ahead and tell you this, too--see how nice I am, to do your thinking for you?
Because in dino-reserved establishments, no humans are allowed to be involved in the club's staff. At all. Humans are only allowed in as guests with no less than two accompanying dinos to vouch for them. And this guy that almost killed my sister was human. He stank of it. He was filthy with the sweat of his racist nerves and racist adrenaline that kicked in before he was about to Kill A Dino and resurged after he had Killed A Dino, which made him a Man To Be Feared. He was cocky after he'd done it, do you realize that? So he tried to do it again. The fucker tried to kill my sister. Because one innocent wasn't enough.
And it was a dino bouncer who let the fucker in.
Why? There's a lot of these "whys" hanging about my apartment lately, and they're starting to get under claw. It's fucking irritating. They shit in my bed, they shed on my furniture, they scratch up my curtains and scream at me whenever I try to sleep.
You fuckers put them here. I want them out.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a half-empty bottle of Bourbon to pour out the window on some construction worker's head and a bullet wound to mend.
Specs shoved away from her desk, the chair's wheels squeaky-squeaking over the floor. She considered the Bourbon, and took one last sip before she stood, went over to her window, and poured the rest out over the street. Some of it hit someone, if not all. Specs didn't care enough to make sure it was aimed at a construction worker. Either way, it was still satisfying.
"Asshole," Gus grunted from her corner. She was slumped against a wall and looking a lot happier than she had when she'd come in. The empty bottle of whiskey in her half-claw-half-hand probably had everything to do with that.
The medical market had yet to develop a set of antibiotics that worked on all weers in general as well as any that worked on Utahraptors specifically. The coding for each species of weer's magic gene was different, and even though shamans and witches could formulate poultices that were universal, they didn't last. So unless you lived next door to one, or even on the same block, they didn't do a weer much good. Specs knew some healers, but none close enough at the time for the pain Gus had been in. So Specs gave her sister alcohol.
Alcohol, Specs thought tiredly. The gift that...well, there was probably a clever way to finish that thought, but she couldn't formulate it right now. Still a bit drunk. So very tired.
"Ready for antibiotics?" Specs asked. Both she and Gus smirked at the old slang.
"Lay it on me," Gus rumbled. Her voice got gravelly when she got exhausted. Most dinos' did. Voice was one of the first things to revert when the body got too tired to maintain an entirely human front.
Specs got the pure alcohol out of her bathroom cabinet along with the bandages.
"Fuck movies," Gus muttered as Specs laid out an old tattered towel under her sister's leg to catch the alcohol. "You seen the latest werewolves movie? Fuck wolves. Why they so damn popular?"
"They're fluffy," Specs said, untwisting the cap from the bottle. "Humans love fluffy shit."
"Fuck fluffy. Scaley's badass, everyone knows it."
"Prepare for touchdown," Specs grunted, and poured a handful of alcohol over the graze on Gus's leg.
Her sister snarled and her upper body writhed as she struggled to keep her leg still. Small patches of transformation rippled across her, the primitive gene fighting to lash out at the pain.
"Fuck," Gus growled, her voice having dropped an octave. She blinked and winced, and her jugular area contorted as she readjusted her larynx. "Fuck," she repeated, and the word snapped with a much more satisfying clarity in the quiet of the apartment.
"Werewolves?" Specs reminded her sister.
"Yeah. Fuckin' movies. Got us in real life but they still try to pull that instant regeneration shit. And vampires, man. Fuckin' vampires. Still tryin' that shit, like they still think they gotta be real as wolves and we're just hidin' 'em somewhere."
"Humans are stupid," Specs said with a shrug, gathering up the dampened towel and using it to mop up what had soaked through. "Bandages?"
"Do it myself," Gus muttered, sitting up further.
"You're drunk off your ass," Specs said dryly.
"So're you."
"I was. Writing's sobered me some."
"Heh. Does it now? We gotta get you REAL drunk someday, see what you'd write then." Gus snickered. "I bet porno."
"It's not porn when it's literature, little sister," Specs corrected as she wrangled a cigarette out of the box with her snout and foreclaw, lighting it on a candle kept burning for exactly that purpose. "When it's written, it's erotica."
"Whatever," Gus snorted. "I bet you'd write it if you got drunk enough."
"Who's to say I need to be drunk?"
Gus raised an eyebrow.
A pounding on the door startled them both. Specs flicked her tail at her sister, a command to stay. Gus nodded and got back to fumbling drunkenly with her bandaging. They both knew who it was.
Specs waded through a carpeting of crumpled papers, the remains of past blog entries, essays, short stories, and one book she'd been working on for two years. None of it was ever thrown away. It'd been accumulating since she'd moved in three months ago.
"You need a maid," Brass growled as Specs opened the door. She muscled her way in past her younger sister. "Where's Gus?"
"Back he-e-re," Gus snorted in a sing-song voice. "I just had the gr-hic-reatest fuckin' idea ever."
"You gave her beer?" Brass snapped at Specs.
"Had to put the antibiotic on her," Spec said with a smirk and a shrug.
"She's only eighteen."
"Alcohol on fresh wounds fuckin' hurts, Brass."
"I know. I also run a bar, you dick. You know how many underaged pricks I shut down--"
"A day. I know. You tell me over and over. Just this once, B. You know she gets it at parties anyway."
"Not in our own damn house--"
"Who's house?"
Brass remembered they were adults now and where she was.
"She was in pain," Specs muttered as they entered her writing room, where Gus was slumped in the corner. "Scared shitless. I did her a kindness."
"Don't do it again. Shit, Gus." Brass crouched down next to her youngest sister and snagged the bandages from her hands, which were having difficulty staying hands. You could always tell when a weerdino was drunk, even from a distance. They couldn't stick to anyone form. "You drink the whole damn bottle?"
"Brass, listen," Gus slurred, struggling to sit up. "We gonna make a million. Here's what we do, 'kay? You listening?"
"I'm listening."
"Ow. Not so tight. Hokay, so, what we do is, is we get Specs drunk, kay, and we make her write porno--"
"Erotica."
"Whatfuckever, she writes sex, okay, and then we sell it on the black market. Everyone loves her fucking blog, everyone'll buy it. I'm a fuckin' genius, right?"
"We wouldn't have to sell it on the black market," Specs remarked as she pulled her blog entry out of her typewriter and folded it into its envelope. "Erotica is its own genre of literature. We could get it published properly."
"Fuck it," Gus said. "We'd get shit from publishers on royalties. They'd get half the profits or some shit."
Specs looked at her sister sideways as she sealed the envelope with her tongue and stamped her friend's address on it. Specs didn't mess with computers--she was a full-time scaley, someone who preferred to live entirely in beast form 24/7, and computers were hard to manage when you only had three fingers on each hand that weren't very flexible and ended in massive, viciously sharp claws.
"Do you even know what you're talking about?" Specs asked with a mild curiosity. Brass shot her a glare over her shoulder as she finished tying off Gus's leg.
"She's an airheaded raver that's just been a witness to a traumatizing hate crime, almost been shot herself, ran all the way back here alone through New York City at night in the rain, and downed a whole bottle of whiskey, and you're asking her if she knows what she's talking about?"
"We call it Goldilocks!" Gus suddenly exclaimed. "The Goldilocks collection. Of porno."
"Erotica."
"Whathefuckever it's called!"
"I've gotta get this mailed to Rube," Specs said, waving the envelope about. "I'll hit up Lace for a poultice on the way back. Make sure Gus doesn't chew on my armchair again."
"You're going out?" Brass said, an actual tinge of disbelief in her voice. "Your sister was almost shot a half hour ago and you're going out to mail your fucking blog entry?"
"It's a blog entry about my sister almost getting shot, if that helps at all," Specs replied as she donned her hat and fished a plastic bag out from under the sink in her kitchen to keep the envelope safe from the weather. The storm hadn't hit her part of the city, but she wasn't taking chances. "And I said I'd get a poultice."
"Whatever," Brass muttered, trying to help Gus off the floor. "Fuck off and die."
"Love you too," Specs said dryly on her way out.
Brass was about to make a retort when she heard a loud flapping noise, and as the door shut behind Specs, a wyvern the size of a raven landed on the fire escape outside Specs's open window. It was wearing a polic bonnet around the base of its neck. As Brass stared at it, it cocked its head, examining her with one beady little eye, and squawked.
"What the..."
"It's the Lawman!" Gus mumbled as her head began to slump. "He helped me 'shcape the coppers..."
"What?" Brass looked down at her sister as the younger weerraptor's eyes slid shut. "Why'd you have to escape the cops?"
Gus was already out cold.
Brass felt an uneasy feeling blossoming in her gut as she dragged her sister over to the couch and dumped her on it.
This doesn't deserve to be posted as an actual deviation, so my blog gets to endure the fodder, but if anyone cares I have a sequel bit to this floating around in my head and I could put it down if you want. I don't see it continuing beyond that.
I did enjoy writing this, though.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Today's blather: A bogeyman named Boo
Stfu, it counts as a ramble.
Boo actually belongs to a verse I actually created a while ago, but I haven't told anyone about it
colinmk2 11:51 pm
Oh yes?
Thaddeus Grey 11:51 pm
yez
Thaddeus Grey 11:52 pm
the original story centered around a girl named Shaz. She had long orange hair and was imbued with something called Chaos--which was an actual visible, physical force in her world
this made her a "medium" of Chaos, so she and those like her were called mediums
is much backstory I'd rather not get into at the moment, though maybe later if you'd like me to
anyways, I was...what's the word
wavering back and forth between how Chaos got into her world--originally I had decided people mined too deep and basically disturbed it from some sort of sleep
colinmk2 11:53 pm
Huh
Thaddeus Grey 11:54 pm
I didn't want it to be an already established force in her world because government organizations hunting people and strange creatures down are something I get off on
Thaddeus Grey 11:54 pm
anyways
I have also lately been toying with the idea that it was floating around in space and then fell to Erth like some kind of meteor, etc
however, in Boo's time, a significant amount of time has passed since a large disaster involving Chaos, and during Erth's recovery, mediums have taken a more dominant standing, as has the creations of Chaos, known as "spawn"
they prefer to be called "spun", however, as in "spun from Chaos" rather than "spawned"
colinmk2 11:55 pm
Neat
Thaddeus Grey 11:57 pm
mediums, once hunkered down in small groups or as loners, have spread out more evenly, often travelling about, cause they can, or inhabiting the recovering cities out in the open, as the government is too busy dealing with the basic necessities to bother hunting them--and, frankly, the government needs them to deal with the basic necessities
mediums have also become more diverse in types
one type of medium is an Artisan--they do not possess "familiars" like most mediums
what makes Artisans special is that Chaos will actually spin things right out of their heads
colinmk2 11:58 pm
ooo
Thaddeus Grey 11:58 pm
Boo is one such spun
see, the thing about Chaos
it's not like magic, and it's not just a force of nature
it's pretty well established Chaos has some sort of sentience. It's not male or female, it's not a god, it's not a demon, it's not good, and it's not evil.
Thaddeus Grey 11:59 pm
It exists without morality and integrity
the only thing Chaos is, indefinitely, is curious
Everything it does is based on the question "What if?"
it is by no means innocent--it would wipe out a continent of life if it thought the consequences would be interesting
It has favourites among mediums and Artisans. People it finds more interesting than others. People can not master Chaos like people in fantasy master magic. They earn its favour, gaining more power through that.
And they don't gain its power by worship or praying or some such nonsense.
They earn it by being themselves. They earn it if Chaos thinks they will do interesting things with it.
Thaddeus Grey 12:01 am
Thus, there is no gaurantee that a particularly powerful medium is good or evil or anything. Chaos does not take sides, it throws shit at the fan and watches what happens next.
Into this world is spun Boo. The irony is, he is spun completely by accident.
colinmk2 12:02 am
Mhm
Thaddeus Grey 12:02 am
At least, he is considered an accident by his creator.
His creator is a weak Artisan who was never able to spin anything prior to him, not even her own muse--actually, she doesn't even have a muse. Having a muse doesn't really make Artisans in general stronger or weaker, but it does help them focus their energy better.
Like some other Artisans, she travels frequently with caravans of people--there are not enough resources left in one place for people to be able to set down roots, for the most part
Thaddeus Grey 12:04 am
she is paid to protect them with her power as an Artisan from the various dangers on a road, and I doubt I need to go into detail. Bandits, slavers, etc
Vulturous wyverns that may get hungry enough to not bother waiting for something to die of natural cause.
On one caravan run, she meets a little girl who refuses to go to sleep. She likes the girl and her mother, and with nothing better to do, she starts telling the girl that if she doesn't sleep, the bogeyman will come and get her.
colinmk2 12:05 am
Because kids sleep so much better when frightened
Thaddeus Grey 12:06 am
(The idea is to entertain her sufficiently so that she feels the adults have earned their peace. I'll explain it more later.)
colinmk2 12:06 am
I need to draw to get this character solidified
I'm still here
Thaddeus Grey 12:06 am
The girl starts asking questions, and the Artisan starts answering. Over the next few nights, the bogeyman builds up a description of things little girls are afraid of--he has bat wings for ears, snake tails that rattle for hair, a pair of spider mandibles on his face, long, spindly fingers with long needlelike claws
It's sort of like a story time for the girl. The Artisan doesn't really want to scare her, but each night she tells the girl she'll only tell her more about the bogeyman tomorrow if she's a good little girl and goes to sleep.
But then the description starts getting more into the depth of the character of the bogeyman, and gettings scary
Thaddeus Grey 12:08 am
one night when the Artisan is feeling especially morbid, she tells the little girl that the bogeyman was the soul of a child that died of fright, with its face split open from screaming, and now the bogeyman has stitches on his face to hold it together
she only later realizes that was a really fucking stupid thing to do.
So then she starts softening the description--the bogeyman isn't really mean. He steals children because he's lonely and wants friends. He can't make friends because he thinks he's so ugly/scary looking he never can talk to people.
Even that doesn't help, so she tries a he's-more-scared-of-you-than-you-are-of-him
she tells the girl the bogeyman does want friends, but he's terrified of people in the daylight--he only approaches them at night, when they're sleeping
Thaddeus Grey 12:10 am
the bogeyman can't sleep unless he takes people's dreams and sews them into blankets for himself with his needle-claws
he really is a nice, sweet person deep down, he's just afraid of everything, even his own reflection/shadow
so as the bogeyman builds and builds, Chaos, present inside the Artisan, thinks this is actually pretty interesting, and starts wondering
colinmk2 12:11 am
heh
Thaddeus Grey 12:13 am
What would happen if this bogeyman were a real person? What it would be like for him, struggling to survive this reality? What if he met his creator? Would he be angry at her for giving him such a fucked up psyche? Would he beg her to fix him? Would he see her as his only hope for friendship and love and cling to her like a little puppy?
These are enough questions for Chaos to spin the bogeyman--Boo, the name given him off-handedly one night by his Artisan--out of a lake of Chaos sitting around a few miles away.
most spun are created in the presence of their Artisan, but Chaos is curious about what will happen if Boo meets up with another caravan who's path crosses between him and his Artisan's before he meets her
Thaddeus Grey 12:15 am
So, Boo is created, and the only past he really has is the vague notion his Artisan spouted off one night about being the soul of a child that died in terror.
which Chaos also finds interesting.
Thaddeus Grey 12:17 am
so, things happen. he does meet up with that other caravan, though by then he's seen his reflection and is terrified of himself. He also has access to his "common knowledge"--not memories per se, but a store of simple knowing that many spun are born with. It's not really information about his past as an individual, but a very distinct set of instincts that tell him how the world and the people in it see him, how he is expected to behave or what he needs to do to survive--things like whether or not he is of a "kind", say, and that he needs to hide himself, things like that.
So, for instance, Boo knows he is a bogeyman. He knows people are afraid of him. He knows he can live among them if he's careful. So he's careful. He passes through some ruins, ganks some rags, covers his more conspicuous traits.
Even though Boo is terrified of people, he manages to get taken in by them. Though he mostly lives by absorbing dream energy--which he also knows--he does need to eat and hydrate.
Also, all Boo really wants is to be friends. With everyone. Anyone.
Thaddeus Grey 12:20 am
He tries to make friends in the caravan, and he does--but then shit happens. They're attacked by bandits, and Boo uses his claws to protect a friend. He's stripped of his rags, and they see him.
Boo is also vaguely aware--though he has yet to consciously acknowledge--that he is a creation of Chaos. That he is not a common occurrence. That people will not know what in fuck he is.
They end up thinking he's dangerous, even though when they come at him with ropes and point guns at him he dissolves into a puddle of whimpering tears--a lot of terror, a lot of betrayal. All he wanted was to protect his friends. He didn't want to scare anybody.
colinmk2 12:22 am
Aww
I drew a thing
Thaddeus Grey 12:22 am
I wanna see
They keep him wrapped up in the back of a covered truck. When they pull through a rest stop, coinciding with Boo's Artisan's caravan, the little girl is running around, exploring, and comes running, telling the Artisan they caught a bogeyman just like she told her about.
colinmk2 12:22 am
I don't know if you'll be able to see all of it
Thaddeus Grey 12:22 am
why not :/
colinmk2 12:23 am
Because the smoke is very faint and the light is all the way over there
Thaddeus Grey 12:23 am
Hrmf/
So, long story short, Boo's Artisan takes him off the caravan's hands. Chaos has never spun anything for her before, so she tries to be positive about it, be excited--but really, she's disappointed
colinmk2 12:24 am
Sent
Thaddeus Grey 12:24 am
She feels she had lots of other great ideas in her head--hell, she probably did. Chaos doen't make its decisions based on originality or creativity or how good an idea is, sadly
it makes decisions based on how interesting the outcome will be--or, if it really likes you, it will do it just because you want it, and it likes you being happy
sweet
is this Sor?
colinmk2 12:25 am
Nope, new char
I can blather about her when you're done, if you want
Thaddeus Grey 12:25 am
absolutely
almost done, I think
colinmk2 12:25 am
Alrightie
It's all very innerestin so far
Thaddeus Grey 12:25 am
wrappin up I think
Honestly, Boo is happy because she's his creator, which is just like having a mom, and moms are supposed to love you, right?
Thaddeus Grey 12:26 am
So he follows her around like a sappy little puppy.
colinmk2 12:26 am
hehe
Thaddeus Grey 12:26 am
But gradually as time passes Boo gets over being an oblivious little twit, and even though he sort of grows on her
he comes to realize she really is disappointed he wasn't one of her better ideas that she liked more
colinmk2 12:27 am
Aww
Thaddeus Grey 12:27 am
ideas that she's always drawing or talking about, when she never really acknowledges him as anything more than just another average joe
instead of an amazing miracle of nature/whatever Chaos is that got plucked out of her mind and made real.
Thaddeus Grey 12:29 am
Boo worships her, he can't help himself--that's just who he is. But it's always a deeply emotional blow to him whenever she's talking about him to someone else and mentions he was never supposed to be spun, yes, she knows he's not the most original idea, but she didn't pick him
Thaddeus Grey 12:32 am
"And why did I have to be some kind of--some kind of nightmare freak?" he asked, his lip trembling. His Artisan threw her hands into the air in frustration.
"I don't know!" she exclaimed. "You weren't supposed to happen!"
He looked crushed when she said that. She hurriedly tried to backpedal.
"That's not what I--look, it's just, I didn't mean for you to happen. And I'm sorry you did. Believe me, I would have rather you were one of my truly original ideas, not some ancient folk tale..." She wanted to smack herself. She was just making things worse.
He looked like he was about to cry.
"I...I'm not even an original idea?" he whispered.
"...No," she said quietly. "Bogeymen--the idea--it's been around for decades. Maybe even centuries."
"But lots of Artisans do that," he said, offering a wavering smile. "Lots of Artisans just rework an old concept, right? Make it creative?"
"...Well, yeah, but you weren't even that," she said, faltering. Well, she wasn't going to lie to him. "You...you were just a mishmash of cliches. You know, what little girls are afraid of. The bat wings, the spider legs, the snake tails--that sort of thing."
Boo looked like he really was going to cry.
That image has been sticking with me for a couple days now.
colinmk2 12:33 am
Aww!
Thaddeus Grey 12:33 am
I really like his story and I'm hoping to work it into the 'verse with some success.
colinmk2 12:34 am
It sounds pretty dang nifty
Thaddeus Grey 12:34 am
Gall I am such a dick to my characters
colinmk2 12:34 am
Who isn't
Thaddeus Grey 12:34 am
But I think what I like about him so much is that he represents everything I want to do with that world eventually
colinmk2 12:35 am
"Harry, come over here, I want to throw a speeding eighteen wheeler at you."
Thaddeus Grey 12:35 am
XD
colinmk2 12:35 am
"When it crashes I want the cars it was toting to fall on your head."
"Ready, set... GO!"
Thaddeus Grey 12:35 am
I will have to read that in context someday.
colinmk2 12:35 am
heh
Thaddeus Grey 12:35 am
So, I mean, eventually
colinmk2 12:35 am
It's what I just wrote today
Thaddeus Grey 12:36 am
I want this place, Erth, to have humans having to coexist with a population of spun as many as they are
Thaddeus Grey 12:36 am
and Artisans having to deal with their characters popping into reality at random--and then their characters' issues become real, with whatever powers/strange things about them etc they have in their heads
but once in reality, it becomes vastly disenchanted
Boo, classified as "being afraid of his own reflection, even his own shadow"
has to deal with paranoia, tons of ridiculous phobias, and a sharply contradicting personality trait that demands he loves people, even though they hate/fear him
Thaddeus Grey 12:39 am
it's adorable in a story, but in the real life he spends with his Artisan, he's more than a character. He is a person, and he has to deal with these issues, and she has to watch him deal with them. As he changes and matures, he questions the integrity of Artisans and humans in general, and how they could be so cruel to torture made up people like him--after all, what sort of ethics are brought into question in a society where a schizophrenic serial killer dragon with a Napoleon complex could pop into existence in the middle of time square?
colinmk2 12:40 am
heh
Thaddeus Grey 12:40 am
as he is removed from any story that might have held him in his Artisan's head, Boo is removed from the acceptance a character has--this is the way they are, right? They can't do anything about it--they are not aware that it is not their fault.
Thaddeus Grey 12:42 am
But Boo is aware that it's not his fault. It literally isn't. Thus he is cursed with a sort of awareness of himself, something else he constantly struggles with. And there's the question, of course--does he really love gouda? Or did his Artisan decide he does? Is he really terrified of kitchen sinks? Or is that another afterthought his Artisan slapped onto his ref sheet the other day?
He's always questioning his free will and sense of self, and that fucks with his head.
Boo actually belongs to a verse I actually created a while ago, but I haven't told anyone about it
colinmk2 11:51 pm
Oh yes?
Thaddeus Grey 11:51 pm
yez
Thaddeus Grey 11:52 pm
the original story centered around a girl named Shaz. She had long orange hair and was imbued with something called Chaos--which was an actual visible, physical force in her world
this made her a "medium" of Chaos, so she and those like her were called mediums
is much backstory I'd rather not get into at the moment, though maybe later if you'd like me to
anyways, I was...what's the word
wavering back and forth between how Chaos got into her world--originally I had decided people mined too deep and basically disturbed it from some sort of sleep
colinmk2 11:53 pm
Huh
Thaddeus Grey 11:54 pm
I didn't want it to be an already established force in her world because government organizations hunting people and strange creatures down are something I get off on
Thaddeus Grey 11:54 pm
anyways
I have also lately been toying with the idea that it was floating around in space and then fell to Erth like some kind of meteor, etc
however, in Boo's time, a significant amount of time has passed since a large disaster involving Chaos, and during Erth's recovery, mediums have taken a more dominant standing, as has the creations of Chaos, known as "spawn"
they prefer to be called "spun", however, as in "spun from Chaos" rather than "spawned"
colinmk2 11:55 pm
Neat
Thaddeus Grey 11:57 pm
mediums, once hunkered down in small groups or as loners, have spread out more evenly, often travelling about, cause they can, or inhabiting the recovering cities out in the open, as the government is too busy dealing with the basic necessities to bother hunting them--and, frankly, the government needs them to deal with the basic necessities
mediums have also become more diverse in types
one type of medium is an Artisan--they do not possess "familiars" like most mediums
what makes Artisans special is that Chaos will actually spin things right out of their heads
colinmk2 11:58 pm
ooo
Thaddeus Grey 11:58 pm
Boo is one such spun
see, the thing about Chaos
it's not like magic, and it's not just a force of nature
it's pretty well established Chaos has some sort of sentience. It's not male or female, it's not a god, it's not a demon, it's not good, and it's not evil.
Thaddeus Grey 11:59 pm
It exists without morality and integrity
the only thing Chaos is, indefinitely, is curious
Everything it does is based on the question "What if?"
it is by no means innocent--it would wipe out a continent of life if it thought the consequences would be interesting
It has favourites among mediums and Artisans. People it finds more interesting than others. People can not master Chaos like people in fantasy master magic. They earn its favour, gaining more power through that.
And they don't gain its power by worship or praying or some such nonsense.
They earn it by being themselves. They earn it if Chaos thinks they will do interesting things with it.
Thaddeus Grey 12:01 am
Thus, there is no gaurantee that a particularly powerful medium is good or evil or anything. Chaos does not take sides, it throws shit at the fan and watches what happens next.
Into this world is spun Boo. The irony is, he is spun completely by accident.
colinmk2 12:02 am
Mhm
Thaddeus Grey 12:02 am
At least, he is considered an accident by his creator.
His creator is a weak Artisan who was never able to spin anything prior to him, not even her own muse--actually, she doesn't even have a muse. Having a muse doesn't really make Artisans in general stronger or weaker, but it does help them focus their energy better.
Like some other Artisans, she travels frequently with caravans of people--there are not enough resources left in one place for people to be able to set down roots, for the most part
Thaddeus Grey 12:04 am
she is paid to protect them with her power as an Artisan from the various dangers on a road, and I doubt I need to go into detail. Bandits, slavers, etc
Vulturous wyverns that may get hungry enough to not bother waiting for something to die of natural cause.
On one caravan run, she meets a little girl who refuses to go to sleep. She likes the girl and her mother, and with nothing better to do, she starts telling the girl that if she doesn't sleep, the bogeyman will come and get her.
colinmk2 12:05 am
Because kids sleep so much better when frightened
Thaddeus Grey 12:06 am
(The idea is to entertain her sufficiently so that she feels the adults have earned their peace. I'll explain it more later.)
colinmk2 12:06 am
I need to draw to get this character solidified
I'm still here
Thaddeus Grey 12:06 am
The girl starts asking questions, and the Artisan starts answering. Over the next few nights, the bogeyman builds up a description of things little girls are afraid of--he has bat wings for ears, snake tails that rattle for hair, a pair of spider mandibles on his face, long, spindly fingers with long needlelike claws
It's sort of like a story time for the girl. The Artisan doesn't really want to scare her, but each night she tells the girl she'll only tell her more about the bogeyman tomorrow if she's a good little girl and goes to sleep.
But then the description starts getting more into the depth of the character of the bogeyman, and gettings scary
Thaddeus Grey 12:08 am
one night when the Artisan is feeling especially morbid, she tells the little girl that the bogeyman was the soul of a child that died of fright, with its face split open from screaming, and now the bogeyman has stitches on his face to hold it together
she only later realizes that was a really fucking stupid thing to do.
So then she starts softening the description--the bogeyman isn't really mean. He steals children because he's lonely and wants friends. He can't make friends because he thinks he's so ugly/scary looking he never can talk to people.
Even that doesn't help, so she tries a he's-more-scared-of-you-than-you-are-of-him
she tells the girl the bogeyman does want friends, but he's terrified of people in the daylight--he only approaches them at night, when they're sleeping
Thaddeus Grey 12:10 am
the bogeyman can't sleep unless he takes people's dreams and sews them into blankets for himself with his needle-claws
he really is a nice, sweet person deep down, he's just afraid of everything, even his own reflection/shadow
so as the bogeyman builds and builds, Chaos, present inside the Artisan, thinks this is actually pretty interesting, and starts wondering
colinmk2 12:11 am
heh
Thaddeus Grey 12:13 am
What would happen if this bogeyman were a real person? What it would be like for him, struggling to survive this reality? What if he met his creator? Would he be angry at her for giving him such a fucked up psyche? Would he beg her to fix him? Would he see her as his only hope for friendship and love and cling to her like a little puppy?
These are enough questions for Chaos to spin the bogeyman--Boo, the name given him off-handedly one night by his Artisan--out of a lake of Chaos sitting around a few miles away.
most spun are created in the presence of their Artisan, but Chaos is curious about what will happen if Boo meets up with another caravan who's path crosses between him and his Artisan's before he meets her
Thaddeus Grey 12:15 am
So, Boo is created, and the only past he really has is the vague notion his Artisan spouted off one night about being the soul of a child that died in terror.
which Chaos also finds interesting.
Thaddeus Grey 12:17 am
so, things happen. he does meet up with that other caravan, though by then he's seen his reflection and is terrified of himself. He also has access to his "common knowledge"--not memories per se, but a store of simple knowing that many spun are born with. It's not really information about his past as an individual, but a very distinct set of instincts that tell him how the world and the people in it see him, how he is expected to behave or what he needs to do to survive--things like whether or not he is of a "kind", say, and that he needs to hide himself, things like that.
So, for instance, Boo knows he is a bogeyman. He knows people are afraid of him. He knows he can live among them if he's careful. So he's careful. He passes through some ruins, ganks some rags, covers his more conspicuous traits.
Even though Boo is terrified of people, he manages to get taken in by them. Though he mostly lives by absorbing dream energy--which he also knows--he does need to eat and hydrate.
Also, all Boo really wants is to be friends. With everyone. Anyone.
Thaddeus Grey 12:20 am
He tries to make friends in the caravan, and he does--but then shit happens. They're attacked by bandits, and Boo uses his claws to protect a friend. He's stripped of his rags, and they see him.
Boo is also vaguely aware--though he has yet to consciously acknowledge--that he is a creation of Chaos. That he is not a common occurrence. That people will not know what in fuck he is.
They end up thinking he's dangerous, even though when they come at him with ropes and point guns at him he dissolves into a puddle of whimpering tears--a lot of terror, a lot of betrayal. All he wanted was to protect his friends. He didn't want to scare anybody.
colinmk2 12:22 am
Aww
I drew a thing
Thaddeus Grey 12:22 am
I wanna see
They keep him wrapped up in the back of a covered truck. When they pull through a rest stop, coinciding with Boo's Artisan's caravan, the little girl is running around, exploring, and comes running, telling the Artisan they caught a bogeyman just like she told her about.
colinmk2 12:22 am
I don't know if you'll be able to see all of it
Thaddeus Grey 12:22 am
why not :/
colinmk2 12:23 am
Because the smoke is very faint and the light is all the way over there
Thaddeus Grey 12:23 am
Hrmf/
So, long story short, Boo's Artisan takes him off the caravan's hands. Chaos has never spun anything for her before, so she tries to be positive about it, be excited--but really, she's disappointed
colinmk2 12:24 am
Sent
Thaddeus Grey 12:24 am
She feels she had lots of other great ideas in her head--hell, she probably did. Chaos doen't make its decisions based on originality or creativity or how good an idea is, sadly
it makes decisions based on how interesting the outcome will be--or, if it really likes you, it will do it just because you want it, and it likes you being happy
sweet
is this Sor?
colinmk2 12:25 am
Nope, new char
I can blather about her when you're done, if you want
Thaddeus Grey 12:25 am
absolutely
almost done, I think
colinmk2 12:25 am
Alrightie
It's all very innerestin so far
Thaddeus Grey 12:25 am
wrappin up I think
Honestly, Boo is happy because she's his creator, which is just like having a mom, and moms are supposed to love you, right?
Thaddeus Grey 12:26 am
So he follows her around like a sappy little puppy.
colinmk2 12:26 am
hehe
Thaddeus Grey 12:26 am
But gradually as time passes Boo gets over being an oblivious little twit, and even though he sort of grows on her
he comes to realize she really is disappointed he wasn't one of her better ideas that she liked more
colinmk2 12:27 am
Aww
Thaddeus Grey 12:27 am
ideas that she's always drawing or talking about, when she never really acknowledges him as anything more than just another average joe
instead of an amazing miracle of nature/whatever Chaos is that got plucked out of her mind and made real.
Thaddeus Grey 12:29 am
Boo worships her, he can't help himself--that's just who he is. But it's always a deeply emotional blow to him whenever she's talking about him to someone else and mentions he was never supposed to be spun, yes, she knows he's not the most original idea, but she didn't pick him
Thaddeus Grey 12:32 am
"And why did I have to be some kind of--some kind of nightmare freak?" he asked, his lip trembling. His Artisan threw her hands into the air in frustration.
"I don't know!" she exclaimed. "You weren't supposed to happen!"
He looked crushed when she said that. She hurriedly tried to backpedal.
"That's not what I--look, it's just, I didn't mean for you to happen. And I'm sorry you did. Believe me, I would have rather you were one of my truly original ideas, not some ancient folk tale..." She wanted to smack herself. She was just making things worse.
He looked like he was about to cry.
"I...I'm not even an original idea?" he whispered.
"...No," she said quietly. "Bogeymen--the idea--it's been around for decades. Maybe even centuries."
"But lots of Artisans do that," he said, offering a wavering smile. "Lots of Artisans just rework an old concept, right? Make it creative?"
"...Well, yeah, but you weren't even that," she said, faltering. Well, she wasn't going to lie to him. "You...you were just a mishmash of cliches. You know, what little girls are afraid of. The bat wings, the spider legs, the snake tails--that sort of thing."
Boo looked like he really was going to cry.
That image has been sticking with me for a couple days now.
colinmk2 12:33 am
Aww!
Thaddeus Grey 12:33 am
I really like his story and I'm hoping to work it into the 'verse with some success.
colinmk2 12:34 am
It sounds pretty dang nifty
Thaddeus Grey 12:34 am
Gall I am such a dick to my characters
colinmk2 12:34 am
Who isn't
Thaddeus Grey 12:34 am
But I think what I like about him so much is that he represents everything I want to do with that world eventually
colinmk2 12:35 am
"Harry, come over here, I want to throw a speeding eighteen wheeler at you."
Thaddeus Grey 12:35 am
XD
colinmk2 12:35 am
"When it crashes I want the cars it was toting to fall on your head."
"Ready, set... GO!"
Thaddeus Grey 12:35 am
I will have to read that in context someday.
colinmk2 12:35 am
heh
Thaddeus Grey 12:35 am
So, I mean, eventually
colinmk2 12:35 am
It's what I just wrote today
Thaddeus Grey 12:36 am
I want this place, Erth, to have humans having to coexist with a population of spun as many as they are
Thaddeus Grey 12:36 am
and Artisans having to deal with their characters popping into reality at random--and then their characters' issues become real, with whatever powers/strange things about them etc they have in their heads
but once in reality, it becomes vastly disenchanted
Boo, classified as "being afraid of his own reflection, even his own shadow"
has to deal with paranoia, tons of ridiculous phobias, and a sharply contradicting personality trait that demands he loves people, even though they hate/fear him
Thaddeus Grey 12:39 am
it's adorable in a story, but in the real life he spends with his Artisan, he's more than a character. He is a person, and he has to deal with these issues, and she has to watch him deal with them. As he changes and matures, he questions the integrity of Artisans and humans in general, and how they could be so cruel to torture made up people like him--after all, what sort of ethics are brought into question in a society where a schizophrenic serial killer dragon with a Napoleon complex could pop into existence in the middle of time square?
colinmk2 12:40 am
heh
Thaddeus Grey 12:40 am
as he is removed from any story that might have held him in his Artisan's head, Boo is removed from the acceptance a character has--this is the way they are, right? They can't do anything about it--they are not aware that it is not their fault.
Thaddeus Grey 12:42 am
But Boo is aware that it's not his fault. It literally isn't. Thus he is cursed with a sort of awareness of himself, something else he constantly struggles with. And there's the question, of course--does he really love gouda? Or did his Artisan decide he does? Is he really terrified of kitchen sinks? Or is that another afterthought his Artisan slapped onto his ref sheet the other day?
He's always questioning his free will and sense of self, and that fucks with his head.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Musings of a Hairy, Bitter Cynic
The power on my laptop is dying which means after I get this posted I will have to get up and go all the way over theeeeere as Mek would say, to get the chord.
Oh, mine is a tortured soul, suffering for its art.
Tagging this for spoiler warnings. Not really sure why, because everyone who's reading this will have already read the first ever draft of Dollface. Which reminds me. I still need to remember where we keep our matches now. Mom moved them from the pasta cupboard for reasons I still haven't fathomed.
And before I post my little tirade/musing, I am going to post some stuff from Mek, from a conversation we had the other night. Because it's damn feature-worthy and I may very well put it in the end of Dollface if it ever gets published, if Mek allows, of course.
Do you?
(Slightly edited into a suitable format for reading. All I did was put some punctuation in, really. Hope s'okay.
Honestly?
The TV said life would be fair. Every bit of fiction out there said life would be fair. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, and everyone gets what they deserve in the end. The television taught us that we would grow up to be rock stars or famous authors or celebrities or doctors. That our dreams would come true if only we tried hard enough and believed hard enough.
So we become adults and spend our lives in a daze because most of us didn't become rock stars and what did we do wrong? We believed what we were taught, that's what we did wrong.
I remember I was a senior in high school. And everyone, everyone up until then had told me that life was short, enjoy what you got. And then this guy comes in.
"Attention students, life is really damn long. You need to work hard now so you don't hate the last sixty or seventy years of your life."
...
WHY THE FUCK WAS HE TELLING THE SENIORS
TELL THE FRESHMEN!
THEY'RE THE ONES THAT NEED TO KNOW!
Attention, kids, students, politicians, and people in general.
Mek knows shit.
Listen to him.
The TV lied.
And now for something completely unrelated--I just put that up because I thought he put that shit pretty damn well for spewing it off the top of his head over an AIM conversation.
Let's be honest.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
Right now, I am wasting time writing some stupid pointless ramble about how pointless my attempts at writing are. I also realize some people think I'm good at writing, and that as they've gotten to know me and endured my talking-down of myself in general more and more, they think I'm fishing for compliments/sympathy/attention. Or at least, I probably come off like that half the time.
So let's be honest.
I don't always feel like my writing is shit. Sometimes I even feel like I write good characters, if not plot. Because I like to feel like my characters are something new. Something no one has done before. There are butch women and there are feminine boys, but name one of them you've met personally that isn't gay or at least bi.
Which brings me to the point where I am supposed to say I have nothing against gay or bi characters. But I do. I can't stop people making them and I can't stop actual people being gay or bi, but I can damn well say I don't like it because I think there's a fuckton enough of people out there saying it's okay to be yourself and express your opinions.
And anyone who doesn't like it can't bitch at me about it because they're the ones saying I can't bitch at them for supporting homosexuality.
I made my characters the way they are because my world says that this is the way it is: transgenders are okay, homosexuals are okay, but there's nothing the fuck wrong with a private school inscribing in their rules that I must wear a skirt on chapel days because I am a girl.
And I am sick of this hypocrisy. I am sick of people saying boys can be girls and girls can be boys but I can't be masculine because I got lady parts. Fuck you. They aren't lady anything. They're the equipment I was born with, and I accept it and have no problem with it. I have a problem with people assigning characteristics and mannerisms to them.
I don't know what the fuck I'm doing.
I don't write because I think I'm good at it. I write because I know I suck at it and because I want to get better and because I feel like shoving my foot up anyone's ass that says boys can't wear dresses. That any man who has ever put on a dress and liked it isn't a real man. That I need to shave my legs and rip hair off my face with hot wax and show off my milk-producing infant-feeding glands to be considered "hot" and thus suitable for a mate.
I don't shave my legs. I stopped because no one was seeing them anyway--I go for days, weeks even, without leaving the house. But school's starting again and it won't be cool enough to wear pants again for a bit yet.
And you know what? I'm still not going to shave them. Because they aren't there for you. They aren't there for the sole purpose of being aesthetically pleasing according to the preferences set down by a society I didn't ask to be born into. Because for a moment, I'm going to wax scientifically sexist and point out that as a woman, I've been technically born already more attractive than the opposing gender, which is what I'm supposedly supposed to go to all this trouble for in the first place, and I don't see why I have to put so much additional effort into pleasing their eyes when I'm already a lot more apathetic about my appearance than most women.
Because my legs exist for the purpose of getting me places. That's all. My eyebrows exist for the purpose of keeping sweat and crap out of my eyes. My breasts are there to feed children I don't intend to ever have. I'm not sure what the hair on my chin and upper lip is there for. Probably because I get a fuckton of hair from my dad's side and my body just has nowhere else to put it.
And let's get vulgar for a minute. Let's talk about crotch hair. It's there because humans were created without clothes for a reason--they don't need them to survive. It's there to protect my piss-exit and reproduction site, and it's there to clot the blood when I shit uterus once a month so I'm not leaving blood trails all over the savanna that some rabid lioness could pick up on and follow me and hunt me down. It actually has a purpose and a function. I am not going to cut it off or rip it off with hot wax when that's already a damn sensitive area and because I don't need to.
Hair isn't ugly. It's not unhygenic. It's just as fucking natural as it is on a man's body and I refuse to be ashamed of my body's natural defense system.
Fuck knows what I'm doing.
I'm not a good writer. But I think I write good characters. And I think the stories--their stories--that they're telling you are interesting. They're different. You've read scifi and future and sex and romance and mutated monsters before. Hell, you can get all of that if you just pick up an issue of X-Men.
But you've never read a boy who wants to wear dresses and makeup who was sexually violated in a closet as a child and is now a rising electropop star and a woman that's probably slightly insane--no, I'm serious, she probably is--wants to pin down a cyborg with freckles that glow in the dark and make him squeal, and may very well be as manly as Rambo. And if you've had, send me the title, because I want to read it.
Am I hoping it will get published someday? Fuck yeah. Do I think it's likely? I try not to think about it.
Do I want it to start a revolution?
My expectations are low, but it would be pretty damn nice.
I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I am trying to tell a story that as far as I know has never been told before.
Does the world need to hear it?
I'm sure it can survive without it.
But I think if it does, there will be some interesting consequences.
I'm Thaddeus Grey. I am thoroughly convinced I can't write worth a damn.
But I do think I'm relatively good at making up crazy shit to throw at the fan just to see what happens.
And I think you're all here because you're interested, too.
Oh, mine is a tortured soul, suffering for its art.
Tagging this for spoiler warnings. Not really sure why, because everyone who's reading this will have already read the first ever draft of Dollface. Which reminds me. I still need to remember where we keep our matches now. Mom moved them from the pasta cupboard for reasons I still haven't fathomed.
And before I post my little tirade/musing, I am going to post some stuff from Mek, from a conversation we had the other night. Because it's damn feature-worthy and I may very well put it in the end of Dollface if it ever gets published, if Mek allows, of course.
Do you?
(Slightly edited into a suitable format for reading. All I did was put some punctuation in, really. Hope s'okay.
Honestly?
The TV said life would be fair. Every bit of fiction out there said life would be fair. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, and everyone gets what they deserve in the end. The television taught us that we would grow up to be rock stars or famous authors or celebrities or doctors. That our dreams would come true if only we tried hard enough and believed hard enough.
So we become adults and spend our lives in a daze because most of us didn't become rock stars and what did we do wrong? We believed what we were taught, that's what we did wrong.
I remember I was a senior in high school. And everyone, everyone up until then had told me that life was short, enjoy what you got. And then this guy comes in.
"Attention students, life is really damn long. You need to work hard now so you don't hate the last sixty or seventy years of your life."
...
WHY THE FUCK WAS HE TELLING THE SENIORS
TELL THE FRESHMEN!
THEY'RE THE ONES THAT NEED TO KNOW!
Attention, kids, students, politicians, and people in general.
Mek knows shit.
Listen to him.
The TV lied.
And now for something completely unrelated--I just put that up because I thought he put that shit pretty damn well for spewing it off the top of his head over an AIM conversation.
Let's be honest.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
Right now, I am wasting time writing some stupid pointless ramble about how pointless my attempts at writing are. I also realize some people think I'm good at writing, and that as they've gotten to know me and endured my talking-down of myself in general more and more, they think I'm fishing for compliments/sympathy/attention. Or at least, I probably come off like that half the time.
So let's be honest.
I don't always feel like my writing is shit. Sometimes I even feel like I write good characters, if not plot. Because I like to feel like my characters are something new. Something no one has done before. There are butch women and there are feminine boys, but name one of them you've met personally that isn't gay or at least bi.
Which brings me to the point where I am supposed to say I have nothing against gay or bi characters. But I do. I can't stop people making them and I can't stop actual people being gay or bi, but I can damn well say I don't like it because I think there's a fuckton enough of people out there saying it's okay to be yourself and express your opinions.
And anyone who doesn't like it can't bitch at me about it because they're the ones saying I can't bitch at them for supporting homosexuality.
I made my characters the way they are because my world says that this is the way it is: transgenders are okay, homosexuals are okay, but there's nothing the fuck wrong with a private school inscribing in their rules that I must wear a skirt on chapel days because I am a girl.
And I am sick of this hypocrisy. I am sick of people saying boys can be girls and girls can be boys but I can't be masculine because I got lady parts. Fuck you. They aren't lady anything. They're the equipment I was born with, and I accept it and have no problem with it. I have a problem with people assigning characteristics and mannerisms to them.
I don't know what the fuck I'm doing.
I don't write because I think I'm good at it. I write because I know I suck at it and because I want to get better and because I feel like shoving my foot up anyone's ass that says boys can't wear dresses. That any man who has ever put on a dress and liked it isn't a real man. That I need to shave my legs and rip hair off my face with hot wax and show off my milk-producing infant-feeding glands to be considered "hot" and thus suitable for a mate.
I don't shave my legs. I stopped because no one was seeing them anyway--I go for days, weeks even, without leaving the house. But school's starting again and it won't be cool enough to wear pants again for a bit yet.
And you know what? I'm still not going to shave them. Because they aren't there for you. They aren't there for the sole purpose of being aesthetically pleasing according to the preferences set down by a society I didn't ask to be born into. Because for a moment, I'm going to wax scientifically sexist and point out that as a woman, I've been technically born already more attractive than the opposing gender, which is what I'm supposedly supposed to go to all this trouble for in the first place, and I don't see why I have to put so much additional effort into pleasing their eyes when I'm already a lot more apathetic about my appearance than most women.
Because my legs exist for the purpose of getting me places. That's all. My eyebrows exist for the purpose of keeping sweat and crap out of my eyes. My breasts are there to feed children I don't intend to ever have. I'm not sure what the hair on my chin and upper lip is there for. Probably because I get a fuckton of hair from my dad's side and my body just has nowhere else to put it.
And let's get vulgar for a minute. Let's talk about crotch hair. It's there because humans were created without clothes for a reason--they don't need them to survive. It's there to protect my piss-exit and reproduction site, and it's there to clot the blood when I shit uterus once a month so I'm not leaving blood trails all over the savanna that some rabid lioness could pick up on and follow me and hunt me down. It actually has a purpose and a function. I am not going to cut it off or rip it off with hot wax when that's already a damn sensitive area and because I don't need to.
Hair isn't ugly. It's not unhygenic. It's just as fucking natural as it is on a man's body and I refuse to be ashamed of my body's natural defense system.
Fuck knows what I'm doing.
I'm not a good writer. But I think I write good characters. And I think the stories--their stories--that they're telling you are interesting. They're different. You've read scifi and future and sex and romance and mutated monsters before. Hell, you can get all of that if you just pick up an issue of X-Men.
But you've never read a boy who wants to wear dresses and makeup who was sexually violated in a closet as a child and is now a rising electropop star and a woman that's probably slightly insane--no, I'm serious, she probably is--wants to pin down a cyborg with freckles that glow in the dark and make him squeal, and may very well be as manly as Rambo. And if you've had, send me the title, because I want to read it.
Am I hoping it will get published someday? Fuck yeah. Do I think it's likely? I try not to think about it.
Do I want it to start a revolution?
My expectations are low, but it would be pretty damn nice.
I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I am trying to tell a story that as far as I know has never been told before.
Does the world need to hear it?
I'm sure it can survive without it.
But I think if it does, there will be some interesting consequences.
I'm Thaddeus Grey. I am thoroughly convinced I can't write worth a damn.
But I do think I'm relatively good at making up crazy shit to throw at the fan just to see what happens.
And I think you're all here because you're interested, too.
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