I peed on Alaine yesterday. ^_^

Ykesha of Lynn · 01-03-2011, 04:39 AM

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Word count 1113 - 10 points

I’ve had a dream for three nights now. A child sits drawing in the dirt with his hands. In his lap lies a small pile of human fingers, bent and gray like chickens’ feet. He is humming an unrecognizable tune, but the rhythm and pace suggest he’s engineered the rhyme himself. He hasn’t noticed me, and for several minutes, I watch him while hidden amongst the insects and shadows. His eyes are wide with the wonder he creates upon the mud and his cheerful humming is broken regularly by the high hiss of laughter. Eventually, I approach him, and he looks up at me with the fixed curiosity of childhood. He smiles. His teeth are yellowed and uneven. With a sort of ticking akin to a wind-up toy his head turns unnaturally to the side and pauses once perpendicular to the ground. The grin which had adorned his face in mirth now splits wide and cuts his head into two equal halves. As I recoil and clutch my breast to still the thrashing of an unnerved organ, his tongue laps out, hanging to his throat. I now notice that his cheeks have been slit from ear to ear, although he feels no pain nor seems bothered by this deformity. He slowly rises to stand on legs which quake from dis-attention and are thin and shriveled like an apple turned sour. The fingers spill from his lap, rolling to the ground where they seem nothing but a sea of gray-studded worms. My breath falls quick within my chest and with both hands I clutch myself, jaw falling open in a voiceless cry. On uneasy, newborn steps, he limps towards me.

“Come, come, Lass of Lynn…Tell me, tell me, where you’ve been…”

When I finally wake, I feel unpleasant.

The air had turned so bitter in the last weeks. When the pack breathed, faces turned towards the sky as though to curse it for this sudden chill, columns of vapor rose from their mouths like spirits lazily leaving their bodies. Inferni seemed to be laden in a thick fog, each coyote’s nostrils expelling two bullets of white per breath. The appearance was murderous; the luperci were specters looming about the sea of vapor which covered their bodies from the neck down. An ocean of floating heads, each one apathetic and distant. The red eyes of the Lykoi and the black fur of jackals stood out heavily against the white mass caused by the pack’s condensed breath. Yet Ykesha’s weary-white faded into the dense fog as a name does within the library of a man’s memory. The woman was hardly aware of this, nor did she care. Her body was still too weary to pay heed to the difference between her and the others. They danced amongst the winter fog with ambition and lithe, while she crawled through it clutching calloused lungs. Inferni was a blessing she’d received when nearly dead. Only, she still didn’t feel particularly alive.

This was trickery on their part. Prestidigitation. She, a lone clown ambling across the broad stomach of a theatrical stage had fallen prey to the act ahead of her. Curse the magician! Curse the opera singer and the production actor! The silly bounce and jingle of a courtly jester had long ago entertained the kings of man, yet today this voluntary fool found no applause for his work. Had Ykesha the energy to shake her head, the fae would have. Alas, the cold held her like an aggressive lover, pressuring her ribs and chest with forceful and unyielding arms. Lethargy became her. And boredom. As she looked about her packmates swimming within the pools of fog she felt thin and ugly, much like a stray cat caught looting garbage. The white woman sat near a bare tree, its lifeless silver arms reaching towards the grey heavens with clawed and calloused fingers as though trying to tear through the clouds and release the sun upon an oppressed world. Ykesha looked up and blinked at the bleakness which greater her. The tree seemed so naked. Its limbs were almost rude. She frowned lightly. I should like to dress them up a bit, she mused. Something bright. Ykesha sat in silence while the chill picked through her fur with a chimpanzee’s thoroughness. Her skin rippled in gooseflesh.

A weak wind came, lifting the dense white that covered her packmates and tentatively touching the outstretched tree’s boughs as a man does his wife’s thigh. The luperci blinked her hueless eyes, lips peeling apart to reveal a mouth agape with thought. Her raspberry tongue rolled across the ribs of the roof of her mouth, absentmindedly fingering the intricacy found there. Ykesha then stood, face still open to the sky as if waiting for rain to fall. What purpose was hers; so large a world had produced such a tiny girl.

The fae straightened her back, tiger-like brindles quivering across her spine akin to quaking birds taking flight from a pond. She seemed to glow against the greyness of Inferni, yet her heart felt blacker than the majority of her kin’s pelts. With a heaviness unlike her, Ykesha’s shoulders fell, eyes tilling the earth as a plow does to fields lying fallow. Ykesha’s weary palm found the tree she’d previously leaned upon, pink pads feeling the dull ache of cold emitted by the silver bark. The lass didn’t remove her hand though it stung with chill; her nails, brittle from the dry and constant winds, clutched the tree’s skin and penetrated it with a sudden and violent force. Her teeth ground tightly as frustration drove each claw deeper into the plant’s flesh. Ykesha’s eyes narrowed, her face twisted into an aggressive display. From within the woman’s white chest a growl frothed, turning like stew over simmering coals despite a shrill of her diseased lungs. They barked up at her, angry that in her frustration she had caused them further disquiet. Had the lass not been weakened from her year of fighting the disease she might have vocally lashed out, snarling and spitting vixen-like to the tree she’d wounded in her suppressed passion. What was she doing here? What the hell was she doing here?! For a brief moment the hybrids eyes flashed a menacing glow of contagious violence. She longed to hit something, to chew the ear off of the nearest luperci. The woman licked her chapped lips as her eyes darted around the bodies she had no blood ties with but called family. Her lips peeled back in a snarl.

What. The. Hell.

The hackles along the female’s neck rose as a choir does in their uniform robes.

What in the bloody hell.

Saraqael · 01-03-2011, 03:16 PM

OOC: YAY! Thank you. <3 Word Count: 1030.

IC:
Saraqael dreamed, too. In her sleep-drunken mind, she was in love with a woman who she wanted desperately to have sex with, to feel the warm press of their bodies and the wetness of mouths on mouths, mouths on flesh. She was pretty, thin in frame, but her color kept changing, shifting through the entire spectrum of shadows as well as the rainbow, giving the suggestion that she was also indecisive. Such a small fact mattered very little. She was the object, and so Saraqael hunted. Her job was to complete a quest. If done so successfully, the petite lady was hers to do with as she pleased. Just as her quest commenced, she woke. Disappointment broke inside of her in consistent waves, each one coming to lap the shore of her contentment, persistently disrupting it until she sighed longingly, wishing for the imaginary woman to return. She did not, and Saraqael rolled out of bed.

Wood flooring prompted the claws of her toes to click and scrape, another distraction, another annoyance. Crossing the mirror to reach for something in her pack, Saraqael noticed obelisks of seafoam, cornflower, and pale chartreuse jutting haphazardly, shooting like colored crystals grew, in all directions and pigments and for no apparent reason other than because they felt like it. The hues were kindred at base but she had been sure to separate them, crush their colors from a variety of different plants into exactly what she wanted: three distinct hues. Three baths over the course of a month had ruined them, unleashed a stopper on the power of her white mane, and now it was returning to cursed, undramatic, boring paleness. Originally she had gone to her pack to consider beginning a project to draw attention her from loneliness and sexual frustration but now she was imbued with the desire to finish a new quest, a true one with attainable means and a foreseeable end.

Jars clanked a chipper chorus at her as she rummaged through them, searching for the right ones. Green came to her first, then orange which she replaced hastily, thinking that it was completely unsuitable for her hair. After a moment she retrieved blue and teal then fled back to the mirror. Because it was the least distinguishable of the three colors, being a mixture of both, Saraqael started with teal. The lid on the jar was faux gold and rambled with metallic hollowness as it came off, the dark pads of her hands gripping and rotating it forcefully. A perfume wafted out immediately, clearly having waited this long to escape into the fresh air. It was not unpleasant – just the scent of crushed plant matter and the peculiarly sour odor of pulped berries. Dipping a finger into the pasty pigment, the process began. Her eyes sought all the portions that she could see that looked as though they had been teal once and covered them up with the dark dye. Each tentacle of hair she made flopped over after that, wet and heavy. For the bang, she just piled each sopping piece of hair on top of itself and was careful not to tilt her head forward so as to make them slip and stain her face. She worried not for the appearance of her fingers – they were black, jet as a starless, moonless night, and at most would show a tint in the brightest sun. Luckily for her, before the sun ever returned with such intensity, those pigments would wash away in some stream or rub off on the ground, trees, her backpack, or anything else she deigned to touch.

Months of practice had made her technique virtually flawless, yet no matter how attentive she was, flecks of color spattered her ears gently. The ridiculous white cones were always casualties in the process, but her hair was such a mess that it was difficult to notice once she had it spiked. As she moved on to touching up the remaining two colors, it began to appear as though her ears were naturally shades of blue and green and had been dipped or bleached from the tips down to appear alabaster. It was an interesting illusion, but the mirror tired her and her arms were stiff from the odd angles she held them at to complete the dying process. They had been combing and painting for twenty minutes straight and their frailness could no longer support their own weight. Finished, the toothpick girl allowed her arms to fall, mindful not to let them touch herself until she had washed them.

Springing back to her pack to pluck a spare cushioning cloth, she exited her room, using the rag to open and close the doors behind her until she had made her way outside. Saraqael was familiar with many of the streams and river tributaries that made their way through Inferni by now. While she had absolutely no skill for fishing, water soothed her addled mind and was her favorite outlet for taking comfort in nature. Its fluid sureness set her straight, but today she needed it to perform a service. Both her hands and her hair needed to be rinsed and since she had not sought to discover whether the mansion had running water, the natural way would have to do.

She passed out of the courtyard briskly and headed into the trees, the ragged piece of fabric balled messily in her tiny hand. She wore nothing with the exception of her glass star necklace, a trinket that she never removed. So intent on reaching running water was the girl that she almost passed the phantom lady haunting the trees. Saraqael's head snapped towards her in a double-take of surprise. The two were equally pale, the other perhaps more so for lacking any bits of coal. Stripes, too frequent and precise to have been painted, rippled across her body in soft lavendery-gray. Her eyes were dead white, and Saraqael wondered immediately if she were blind. Perhaps the dyed coyote had not been seen staring, then, but she was frozen anyway, unsure of what to say or do, whether to greet her or flee, continuing on her journey.

Ykesha of Lynn · 01-08-2011, 05:16 PM

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I'm so sorry about the wait! Been working so much lately then when I get home I just want to curl up with a beer and go to sleep. -_-; Word count 1224 - 10 points

Ykesha’s thoughts limped through her mind on spoiled legs. Their toil was obvious; these ideas were heavily burdened by frustration and lethargy. The woman’s mind had become so congested and bothered that the concepts which filtered beneath her eyes no longer held meaning. They were simply metaphor. Despite this, the woman’s pupiless eyes grew large and intense from the vivid displays her thoughts presented to her. Her conscience was labored by a large steamship embedded on a sandbar. In her head, the fae saw this ship with the clarity of one seeing his own hands. She did not doubt its existence, nor did the strangeness of the sharp metal structure amongst an urban setting disturb her. Ykesha wasn’t aware of the incongruity of a sea vessel’s presence on the streets of a city - say, Halifax? - but so firm was her belief that she’d witnessed such an occurrence that the oddity of the matter was not questioned. Within her mind, there was a large ship parked upon the sand, surrounded by a city dripping with decay. Outwardly, the woman smiled, her teeth showing like barren bones stripped pure white by years beneath a desert wind. She didn’t laugh, although her tongue rolled jealously across her teeth. What entertainment these images were! The hybrid became unaware of the disguises her thoughts wore, her attention instead solely focused on the obscure imagery she had encountered. Her internal grin widened.

Each thought and concept became a masked soldier tasked with dragging this vessel through the city streets, scraping large tracks in the pavement as the boat’s keel carved out its mark on the asphalt. The sound was horrible. Unnaturally high scrapings of unnerve echoed past the she-coyote’s mind. The men assigned to pull this burden were overwhelmed. There was no other word for their effort. Their backs were carved entirely of muscle, though not in an attractive way--they seemed to sweat toil. Each lad looked as though he was made of clay. Their unnatural shambles were made more erotic by the occasional moan that drove a sign of weariness from open mouths. Ykesha didn’t pity them. Their struggles were her own--the boat harbored within her own mind, after all. It was with emotionless boredom, then, that the lass watched the men charged with dragging a ship through unmanageable lands. She half grinned at them, half winced. In response, a well practiced chant met the fae’s brindled ears.

Come in my boat.

Each lad tugged vengefully on the rope which tied him to his plow. He, the ox, dug his heels into the soil to upturn the fallow earth. How stiff the ground had become in just one winter!

Come in my boat. I’m desperate for a crew.

Ykesha blinked in awkward surprise as the keel of the ship inched further into the urban maze it had been set within. The groan of the metal bending under the weight of the stern and the tork of the men pulling it sounded distant and horrible, much like a foghorn on an otherwise still night. Ykesha’s large ears flicked back in concern, her eyes completely entranced by the scene before her. How strange a field of vision her mind had procured for her. As the boat continued to slide like a hammer over a concrete wall the woman recoiled slightly, clutching her hands to her chest as her jaw tightened. The groan of distorted metal called out an unbalanced cry, and the lady’s heart thudded with unnerve inside her breast. She’d never expected these slaves of her subconscious to gain such footing. Ykesha had the mind to turn from their plight and flee further into the city, abandoning them as Olympus had Atlas. Her mind still unmade, the fae stood tense, watching the heavy boat inch closer as the masked soldiers tugged with fervor on the ends of their ropes.

Come in my boat.

The best seaman,

Was I.

Ykesha’s teeth clenched at the sight of their impending progress, her bright eyes becoming slits at the fearlessness of these tired men. The fae took a step back, her hands still cupping her ribs as a mother does an infant. As the boat continued to crawl forward at an unnoticeable pace, Ykesha felt her thoughts morphing into violence. Inwardly, she seethed, although she no longer remembered what had caused this original rage. Outwardly, the woman’s hand upon the tree trunk was tense and biting. Her nails had already plunged into the tree’s flesh and now they tightened. Her teeth were clamped together, eyes lost within her inward vision. It was in this confused and riled state that the smaller luperci approached, her obvious haste caused by the iron and berry smells emitted from her hair. It took force for Ykesha to pull herself from her mind and she blinked with startle upon seeing the world again, not her vision. For a brief moment the fae stared at the one whose movement had wakened her from her thoughts, her eyes combing over the white fur, the obsidian patches, and the dyed locks. Ykesha was taken aback by how small the girl was--she was even more delicate than herself--and the bright alabaster of her coat was a joy amongst so much grey and red, the signature of the rest of Inferni. Still, the white lass was unnerved at this sudden interruption to her brooding, and her face wrinkled in frustration. In this state of flux, Ykesha was unsure of whether to lash out at the female who’d come across her or to compose herself for a formal greeting. Fortunately, she didn’t have to decide.

The bacteria constantly breeding within Ykesha’s lungs churned and the fae’s eyes grew wide with sudden pain as a result. The hand which had embedded itself within the tree flew to her breast, clutching a handful of the white fur which guarded her bosom. Her mouth opened, tongue pressed firmly against her lower jaw as if to omit a cry which wouldn’t surface. Her chest wheezed, the fluid churning within it clearly audible through the stillness of the winter day. As Ykesha’s mind whirled in confused ache the woman’s white eyes darted to the luperci who’d just approached her. All disapproval had fled her expression. Her face pleaded now. The woman’s mouth was still open, allowing the rasp which rolled within her lungs to announce its presence as an opera singer does with a baritone chord. The fae’s body began to convulse slightly, her hand tightening open her chest as it did so. She was repressing the urge to cough--this was clear. And all the while her eyes never left the skinny woman who’d passed her by only wishing to rinse free her hair.

Please, her face pleaded.

And with that the white luperci collapsed to her knees beside the dying oak, one hand still firmly collecting her ribs while the other covered her mouth as the cough she’d tried to stifle rippled through her body. The sound was violent. Ykesha’s eyes squeezed closed with the exertion her lungs were producing. As the fits became more aggressive, blood squeezed between the fae’s fingers and rolled down her white arm to drip silently from her elbow.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, a clay-like man tugged sharply on the end of a rope.

The best seaman,

Was I.

Saraqael · 01-09-2011, 12:50 AM

OOC: Word Count: 1020. No worries! I completely understand. Smile

IC:
She had banked on the phantom lady being blind. Both orbs were a solid pearl, leaving her unable to decipher iris from the eye whites, leading her to believe that somehow there were none to be distinguished. A genetic defect was what she chalked it up to. How could one see without pupils? The lenses into the brain were crucial to sight. Hopefully the rest of her senses were not too keen and the ghost girl had not been heard. The coyote approached stealthily anyway, secrecy being the only language in which her body knew how to move. Staring out the corners of her orbs at the statuesque hybrid, she took her first tentative step forward and away. Freedom lay ahead, tantalizing her with a breath of the crisp breeze of the forest. Ruffling the fur on her chest and head, it called to everything that was wild in her, demanding a response from her feral side. Riding the wave of the wind were many smells including rot, water (likely from the snow constantly melting and falling), the musty perfume of tree bark, and the warm musk of prey. Her nose was deadened to the odors of her pack mates as a collective. She could only sniff them out in singular now.

The very idea of food sent rabbits running circles in her head, brown and fluffy, tender and delicious. Her mouth watered quite literally, the inside walls suddenly awash with saliva. Saraqael swallowed, not wishing to drool like an idiot – she had better control over herself than that. Stomach gurgling, she looked down at it, intrigued and frustrated. Her organ was purposefully defiant. It was as though it had tried to cry out for help, begging the young brindled lass, or anyone who would listen, to feed it blood and meat. It acted like she was torturing it, when really, it was accustomed to such harsh treatment. Winter was a hard season and she had never eaten for pleasure.

Observing further, the only motion from the stranger was her death grip on the bark of the tree. It looked to the dark masked female as though her pack mate were attempting to clutch the life out of it and suck it into herself. She realized, then, that the otherwise pretty, fragile thing needed some sort of energy or replenishing sustenance. Black lips, which should have been like smooth leather, perhaps shined with spit, were crusted and cracked. A twinge of fear struck Saraqael in the base of her spine and shot like electricity into her gut. Hunger vanished in the wake of the urge for self-preservation. If sickness was what she had to look forward to as a result from their interaction, she wanted even less to do with the creature. As her own bones, which were dangerously near the surface of her skin, could attest, she was too thin. Any disease, no matter what its original nature, would likely manifest itself in a wasting sickness in her.

New fear set her apprehension about social awkwardness to null and void. They canceled each other out, thankfully, finally freeing her guilty conscience from the awfulness that came from the thought of running away from a blind person. She took her second step, and out of the corner of her eye, the slim fae fell. Saraqael's head whipped back in that direction. The forest was a small thought in her head now, holding only a foggy sense of familiarity like the lost image of a dream. In spite of her natural and quite reasonable sense of distress about the potential for sickness, she reacted on instinct. Instinct was what drove her to flow towards the woman in three bounds. Instinct prodded her to slip behind her and pull the long, silvery hair out of the way of her oral excretions. Thankfully, instinct also reminded her to steer clear of the blood that flowed freely down her pretty white arm as though lacerations were blooming there in the shape and color of veins. It dripped into the cold snow, burning holes there. Saraqael's jaw hung open in mute terror. The last thing she needed was a pack member to die in her arms of an unknown ailment that she had probably already contracted by reason of sheer proximity. She felt dumb, so dumb, for endangering her health. But it was too late – whatever was done was likely irreversible. What had made her act so rashly? The expression on the young lass's face. It was still vivid on the screen of her memory - a desperate, primal request for aid, communicated through the eyes she still thought were unseeing. Wondering briefly what had happened to all her useful skittishness, for she would have been better off if she had run sooner, she looked down at her weak, sputtering charge.

“Doctor” or “medic” were not on her list of talents. She knew nothing about the body of a Luperci in any of its forms, or even if there were differences on the inside. The girl, in her single year of life, also had limited experience with unhealthiness. She could not remember a single instance of poor health in her family or during her travels. Her only executable skill was to soothe and to question, then to seek help if it was asked of her. “Just breathe,” she coached, and made to stroke the pathetic lady's hair if she was allowed. “Do you know what ails you? Does it have a name?” Temptation, curiosity, and concern for herself begged her to inquire about contraction. It would have eased her to know that there were no signs of contagiousness, and frightened her to hear that the hybrid had received the disease from someone else. In that case, the physician she sought would have been for both of them and possibly the rest of the pack. She had heard of stranger things than illness slaying a group of creatures, but all of that would have to wait. For now, she looked to the nameless female, hoping she yet clung to life.

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