[html]  8O Yay, Kirin! -tackleglomphug-
Hazel eyes surveyed the wasteland before him. Why was he here again? Of all the places to revisit, he goes to where he was threatened by a crazy she-‘yote. For heaven’s sake, she had suggested eating him (if he translated what she said correctly). The very idea made him want to gag; why would someone want to eat other people? For some reason, all these new wolves thought that coyotes and wolves should be enemies because they were slightly different. ’We look the same when we are born, our blood is red, why must there be a difference?’ He sighed.
Red wasn’t near any trees. He couldn’t have both trees and the territory border. The crazy coyotes didn’t seem to like trees or something and had made their territory in a scrub-land. All you could catch here was snakes and rabbits, why live in a place that food was hard to find? Of course, Sol wasn’t really complaining. The coyotes could take all the useless desert regions if they wanted, just so long as he didn’t have murderous individuals running amongst his forest. All they seemed to want was to schadenfreude and hurt people. ’Now, not all coyotes are bad. I’m sure of that, there must be some good. Sometimes one is only doing as his alpha asks him to; not really your fault, is it?’
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Finch was exploring. He’d always been rather found of exploration. He usually got more out of it than others; he discovered, not just the tangible new places that others stumbled upon, but the much less physical worlds around them as well. Some coyotes passed a meadow and hardly gave it a second glance, but Finch would see a whole new and fascinating kingdom in that meadow. There might even be dragons.
Of course, he’d been called crazy before.
The pack coyote he’d met earlier, Faolin, had suggested he head towards the center of the territory and choose a den. But Finch had never been particularly interested in dens, suggestions, or even centers. He preferred edges to centers: you could find out more on the outskirts of something than you could in the center. More objectivity, less troublesome detail, just plain simpler and clearer. Finch was much more interested by outlines than by what was actually inside them.
Take, for example, the Inferni lands. Inside, there were rocks, shrubs, dens, and maybe some pack coyotes. Outsider there were, apparently, skulls, marauding wolves… and strange blue-haired coyotes.
Finch was beginning to feel rather lonely, the only normally colored creature in a rainbow world. To be fair, he conceded, the strange coyote wasn’t really blue, not in the same way Faolin had been red. And perhaps it wasn’t blue at all, but a strange and misleading shade of grey? Finch considered the lone coyote’s pelt gravely from his perch just the Inferni side of the border, atop a rough grey (nice, simple, steel grey, not puzzling grey-blue) boulder. His whole posture, from his slightly-cocked head to his neatly-placed paws, radiated mild curiosity: he had the air about him of a scientist observing a strange new breed of animal for the first time. The strange coyote was heading in his direction, but Finch did not appear at all concerned.
The thought had, very briefly, crossed Finch’s mind that there might be something that he was obligated to do about a lone coyote at the border, now that he was a member of a pack; however, at the moment he was too busy puzzling out the best way to describe the color of the loner’s mane to dwell on any other, less important questions. Finch had priorities.
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Red’s ears perked up as he spotted a lone coyote sitting atop a boulder a little ways off. He couldn’t believe that this other was just sitting there and not coming to attack him. ’Good coyote?’ He felt a faint flutter of hope in his chest but he also heard the little voice of doubt whispering in his ear. Maybe this coyote was just waiting for him to get close enough, or maybe even thought that he might join the Inferni. It was possible that they weren’t a bad bunch, just had a few nasty females. The again, she had been injured and had come across a strange male in her territory. In any case, Sol wandered up to the boulder and coyote sitting on it.
Red stopped a little way off from the other and looked him over. He had an odd patch on his eye, but other than that was rather boring in the fur colors. Absent-mindedly he reached for his own thick mane with one hand and ran his claws through it. Because of his wolf heritage, he did have contrasting blue and red tones in his pelt. Of course, he was mostly tan in color like a coyote might be, but other than that, his slightly narrow muzzle, and his large ears he didn’t look very coyote apparently.
So, the hybrid stared at the other. He didn’t really know what to now. He hadn’t planned on coming across anyone; and if he did he expected them to attack him. Red frowned slightly. ”¿So, tú no comes yo? No attack? Tú gusta view from that rock?” The young male cocked his head slightly to one side and twitched his ears. Just to be safe, he moved a hand onto his leg near his pouch. Just in case.
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OoC: Thanks! I'd almost forgotten how much I loved making tables^^ And shouldn’t Red say, "So, no me comes tú? No attack? Te gusta view from that rock"? Or does he just have atrocious grammar in both languages? ^_^
IC:
With the strange coyote’s approach, Finch was beginning to realize the blue mane wasn’t the only strange thing about this coyote. Finch tilted his tawny head to the left, peering at Red out of one yellow eye. The dark spot surrounding the eye made it appear even brighter than it already was as it blinked down at the oddity that was now addressing it. Finch didn’t even notice that the stranger’s heritage wasn’t pure coyote: he had seen very few wolves in his time, and almost exclusively from a safe distance. He simply assumed that Red was just a funny looking coyote. Perhaps a mutant of some sort. There was undoubtedly an unlikely and thrilling story behind this coyote’s strange appearance!
Anticipating the chance to hear an exciting new story, Finch bestowed a cheerful smile upon the stranger– a smile that didn’t falter even when Red spoke in what Finch could only assume was gibberish. Apparently whatever fascinating circumstance had altered the coyote’s appearance had also disrupted his ability to speak properly. Or he could be speaking another language, but that solution wasn’t nearly as appealing to Finch’s imagination.
From the strange coyote’s words, Finch managed to pick out a few words in his own language. Finch’s ears twitched forwards in interest, standing straight up. Oh boy, a puzzle! It was like a code, but even trickier, since it was spoken aloud! Finch tried to analyze what he’d heard a moment before. The word ‘tú’, obviously not the same as ‘to’ since that would make no sense, was repeated twice, in two of the questions: it could be a question, like ‘what’ or ‘which’, but it seemed to be used as a noun of some sort, and it sounded almost like ‘you’. “So, you no…? No attack? You… view from that rock?” Disappointed, Finch realized he was going to need more clues to figure out the code. He’d just have to hope that the wizard who had cursed this poor coyote had left his ability to comprehend normal speech intact.
“Well, ‘hey’ to you to!” he told the strange coyote cheerfully. His tail gave a quick wag, brushing away the patina of sandy dust which clung to the boulder. “Are we going to play charades now? Are you going to attempt to tell me how the evil sorcerer stole your verbs, mutilated your nouns, and left you with only an inadequate handful of punctuation and prepositions, cursing you to remain that way until you find and kiss your true love? Or perhaps until you want to say something so badly, so deeply, like a tender, desperate ‘I love you’, that the words can just burst the curse and escape? Is this going to be a really long game of charades?”
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[html] I don't know, his grammar is conflicting, so there! Go to WotP, Arri is back and I talked with her, she might be joining souls. Go to the topic on WotP, there is sme new stuff going on!
Red looked at the coyote distrustfully. There was no way that this coyote was actually smiling at him! I mean, honestly. The masked ‘yote was smiling and wagging his tail and everything. This was not the norm. Or maybe it was? Red decided right then that the rest of Inferni wasn’t bad, it had just been that wounded female. All the rest were just people like himself or Skoll or Cercelee. The hybrid nodded and observed the other, who appeared to be thinking very hard about what Red had said. One of these days Sol was going to have to learn plain old English.
Right about then the coyote before him blabbered on. Red raised both eyebrows and politely waited for the other to stop talking. He had never met anyone who had just talked and talked and talked. He was like the Energizer Bunny. (if Red knew who and what that was) Red coughed softly at the end. The other seemed to want an explanation for his strange way of talking as far as he could get. He didn’t know what ‘charades’ were. ”Hablo Español. I talk con English también. I try to talk English. I Red Sol.”
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Finch wasn’t fazed by Red’s slightly bemused reaction, or the fact that absolutely none of his questions had been answered. He usually asked questions for their own sakes, anyway, not for the answers he might receive. His ears did droop slightly, however, with the disappointing realization that there was no dramatic and riveting explanation for the other coyote’s nearly nonexistent ability to communicate. This disappointment seemed to suggest that Red Sol was also only funny looking through a cruel twist of fate. Nature could just be heartless like that. But Finch wasn’t going to give up on fantasy just yet.
“So you talk a mix of two languages?” Finch inquired curiously. He stood up, balancing rather precariously on the top of his boulder. He cocked his head again, this time to the other side. “How did that happen? Were you bilingual, and then your evil second-cousin dropped a rock on your head, causing all the words to fall out off their neat little shelves and get jumbled up on the floor of your brain?” The image of the already funny-looking Red Sol staggering around with crossed eyes and a long red tongue drooping out of one side of his mouth rose unbidden to Finch’s mind. The tawny coyote’s grin widened until it seemed to stretch from one alert ear to the other. Finch imagined words, glowing and golden, dribbling out of the real Red’s ears as he looked at the strange coyote, and he couldn’t quite contain a quiet chuckle.
It must be rather unfortunate to speak a language that’s a mixture of two others, Finch thought. People who speak either one can’t understand you. Wait, though. He reconsidered. Maybe it was actually more practical. As foreign languages went, at least Red’s wasn’t completely alien. Finch could still understand some words, more then he might have been able to if Red had spoken pure Spanish. And a Spanish wolf would have been able to understand about as much. It was still rather funny, though– everyone could decipher a little, but nobody could decipher the whole thing. Another chuckle bubbled out of Finch. Wow, he was doing a stupendous job of looking sane today, wasn’t he? Not that he much minded; he’d already been accepted into a pack, his current goals had been met. And anyway, it wasn’t as if Mr. Messy Brain could tell anyone.
With a small grunt, Finch leapt down from his boulder. He landed with a muffled thump in the dirt a yard or so from Red. In his favored Lupus form, he was now looking up at Red Sol. Unlike most pack wolves, Finch had no ego to speak of: the lower position did not bother him at all. In fact, his tail gave another cheerful wave. “The name’s Kirin Kasarian, but you can call me Finch. You wouldn’t happen to know, would you, if there are any generally-accepted pack rules concerning loners? And what you would call the color that’s slightly bluer than slate blue? I was thinking robin's egg blue, but I always pictured that having a hint of green in it.”
Finch settled back down into a sitting position with his usual unconcerned ease, grinning happily up at the stranger. “How do you know what color your soul is, anyway? Or was it just a guess?”
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[html] Oooohh, language confusion 8D
He nodded at the strange coyote’s first question. He shrugged at the second one. Red looked off at the horizon. It wasn’t like he knew exactly why. Maybe he had been taught that way, with two languages. In any case, he might never know. I no tengo family. Wash up on shore, no remember before.” Red bit his lip, trying not to think about his lack of family. He had spent many cold, lonely nights when he was seven months crying himself to sleep.
Red glanced sideways at the coyote. It seemed to be finding something very amusing, as it would chuckle every couple of seconds. ’Probably laughing at his own jokes.’ As the coyote jumped down from the boulder, Red moved away from it a few steps. He didn’t trust this coyote very much, even though he seemed friendly enough. It spoke its name, Kirin, and was for some reason in Lupus form. The hybrid frowned. Everyone he had ever met had been in Optime form.
By now, Red figured that most of what came out of Kirin’s mouth was blabber. ”Storm blue. I’ve never been en pack.” Strangely, his words seemed to change between English and Spanish almost on a whim. Red had never really thought about it, but maybe his words had been mixed up and lost; just like his memories had been.
Red was caught off guard by the next question of the coyote. He turned his head sharply to Finch, who was now sitting on the ground. He didn’t understand the question all the way, and didn’t get that it had to do with his name. ”Soul es en los ojos.” Red pointed at his eye with one finger. He had been taught that a person’s eyes were the window to the soul. ’Taught? By whom?’ Red bit his lip. He often found that he knew things and didn’t know where they had come from.
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Finch had a bad habit of not actually thinking of other coyotes as other people. He had no empathy at all: he was a the only sentient being in a world of scarecrows and dolls. Or, perhaps more fitting, he was a storyteller stranded in a world of his own creation, where everyone he met, no matter how real they appeared, were simply constructs formed of words and imagination. This might have been why Finch had such a skewed view of life. It was, for him, more like listening to a story unfold than actually experiencing life. Everything was distant from him; he was an observer, not a participant, even in those scenes which directly involved him.
So little hints like, for instance, his newest best friend backing away when he came slightly closer just didn’t register with Finch. Of course Red wasn’t afraid of him or something! The fact that Red’s family was a sore subject also didn’t register with Finch. The tawny coyote just didn’t read body language: it was almost as foreign to him as Red’s exotic speech was.
Finch’s right ear twitched sideways so that it stuck out almost level with the top of his head, almost forming a right angle with his other ear. His smile hadn’t changed or faded at all. “No family? You’re not missing out on much, my fine forgetful friend!” Finch considered elaborating on that particular alliteration with something along the lines of, “from families fly fairly flawed feelings” or “families fail frequently”, but he managed to hold both phrases back since they made very little sense even in his own head. Finch had never be particularly attached to his own family: they were just a few coyotes he’d lived with for a year or so. In fact, one of them had tried to kill him– not that Finch had minded much. He didn’t really understand why everyone else seemed to value family so much, but then, there were a lot of things Finch didn’t understand. He’d just learned to accept them as the great mysteries of the world, filing them with such weighty problems as etiquette and why he couldn’t make himself stop breathing through force of will.
The wayward ear snapped back up into its vertical position even before Finch had finished saying the word ‘friend’. “And I don’t believe storm blue fits. It gives too dark of an impression. Something lighter. If your soul is in los ojos, shouldn’t you be Funky-Blue Soul or something?” Finch frowned, an expression which did not appear at home on his perennially cheerful face. “Does that mean my soul is yellow? I’ve never especially liked the color yellow. Do you suppose it’s possible to change the color of your soul if you’re not happy with it? Can I exchange my soul for a plaid one?”
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Red felt the fur along hid hackles rising up as the coyote seemed to take family lightly. Maybe it was just because Red was sensitive, or because he didn’t have a family or did have one and couldn’t remember. In any case, he didn’t like this coyote’s way of just brushing everything off and taking it so lightly. The hybrid had lost any childhood he might have had when he washed up on the coast. It was either learn quick or die.
What the coyote said next made a small snarl escape his lips. ”Lo es me llamo!” Red ignored the next statement by Kirin entirely. The sudden burst of minatory emotion had startled him slightly, but this coyote had deserved it. He considered just walking away right there and then. Kirin wasn’t malicious, just annoying to hell. Red looked out across the scrubland, one ear toward Kirin, the other pressed against his head.
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As socially inept and unobservant of others as Finch may have been, even he realized that maybe, just maybe, his new best friend wasn’t entirely pleased with him. The fact that he had just made such a brilliant observation, however, pleased Finch; maybe he was actually getting better at this whole interaction thing! It was the raised hackles and the snarl that gave him away, Finch thought smugly, I’d recognize those as anger anywhere. Finch’s mother had been very fond of raised hackles, snarls, and anger (or insanity, Finch had never really been able to tell which).
Anger, Finch decided, watching Red’s furious outburst with an expression of mild-mannered, polite interest, is quite fascinating. I wonder why I never get angry? He considered that question. The only answer, he decided happily, is that I don’t actually care. Or maybe everyone else just cares too much– and has no sense of humor.
Finch knew, though, that certain things were expected of you when you upset someone else. He made a spirited attempt to provide them. “I’m sorry,” he said. It didn’t sound particularly sympathetic: sympathy usually required more empathy than Finch could muster. But it was, at least, an effort. “I don’t know what 'Lo es me llamo' means, but did I say something wrong?” he inquired earnestly. His sincerity could have been interpreted as kindness and worry over upsetting another coyote; really, though, it was just curiosity. Finch wanted to know what he had done this time that was so offensive. He found it extremely amusing and fascinating to watch his own bumbling attempts at social interaction. | [/html]
[html] not even trying... except to close my threads...
Red stared at the other creature. Was Finch really this stupid, or was he just putting on a clever front? With the coyote’s non-sympathetic sympathetic reply, Red decided that it was the former. The hybrid huffed at Kirin once, turned heel, and walked off in the other direction, the direction out of the Inferni’s land. He had had enough of this crap.
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