[html] For Shakadyn, in China Town. __________________________________________
They say that you imitate the one you love, mirror their mannerisms in such accurate exaggerations that theyl earn to adore you as totally as the looking-glass. Luz Cresceno had never known the emotion on large scales. To her, the urge to suddenly wrap herself in her former inamorata’s idiosyncrasies pinched few nerves and knocked about no alarum bells, and plucked nothing more than heart-strings. So it was that she emerged from some building’s belly dressed in decidedly cabinboy attire.
The opal necklace that adorned her more and more frequently was at it’s accustomed territory: the valley-place between breasts that had fascinated human men so, yet did nothing for your sidewalk-stranger werewolf male. A vest, in blue-green paisley, covered that particular anatomy-stretch admirably, but did nothing for anything further south. For trousers, a canvas-cloth pair of pants (smacking of high-seas pirate, complete with the slightly above-knee patch) had been fetched from the coffers of a costume store, where Luz had ample opportunity to marvel at less appealing wonders, like fairy wings and tinsel crowns. In order that that they not slide completely off her hips with her first step, she’d bound them with twine at lower hip, right and left knee, so that the pants puffed slightly.
The result? Entirely unnecessary foolishness.
Yet if her life had not been invested in folly and feckless activity, and so many other f-words, Luz Cresceno would not have found herself making footsteps in Chinatown. She’d managed to arrive at the precise time of day where evening collides with afternoon, making for spectacular red sky-play. Lately, she’d risen at other hours than dusk; it gave her unusual appreciation for what little sunset she could snatch from the cracks between gutted buildings. How different she felt, with fabric against her skin! She had never known she was nude before; somehow her selection of silk and canvas-cloth in lieu of figleaves made her feel strides better about being dressed at all.
However, had she anticipated any great joy at mimicking another’s habit, Luz was gravely mistaken. She found her memories alive like birds, and like birds, they fluttered and made noise at the slightest things. The clothing also entirely confused her gender. Before, there had always been the slightest slant towards female, an unmistakable cut to breast and thigh. Now such areas had been doused in the mysteries only fabric affords. It pleased her, a very little, as she stood on the rim of the manmade koi-pond, where the gurgles of their stone brothers (plus one or two wind-chime sounds, their lack in volume more than compensated by their foreboding factor) made an excellent sound-track to night’s onset. There too, amid ichthyofauna, she found her reflection. She rarely caught it; her interest in it was transient and secondary. It tempted her to move her hands against her own cartography, as if to assure herself that this was no trickery, not divine-designed insult, not sorcery. After that, her interest waned. This particular second? No exception from that pattern, although she did assume a posture and hand-arrangement that mocked pensive thought. | |
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[html] and who's to blame; i could assume
Ridiculous.
the loneliness of my white room
Woe be to humanity (so to speak). Shakadyn had found a skateboard.
Somehow, he was (self-)conscious enough to be almost perpetually light on his feet, and even more miraculously made quite a fetching belly dancer. (Not that he'd ever do that in front of anyone else.) However, when he wasn't paying attention, it was an easy thing to spot — natural balance had not been a trait that he had inherited from every other wolf on the planet. Forget having a tail, no matter how many had once claimed and still did claim that its only purposes were stability and looking pretty. For one thing, he always looked pretty, and would have looked pretty even if he had been born tailless or had had it wrested from his derriere in some comely tussle. Secondly, as has been established, he'd had one all his life, and, well, a fat lot of good that had done, hadn't it? As it was, at least he would have looked less preposterous carrying it along if he had opted for two legs — he could have carried it under his arm or over his shoulder — but no. He had continued to travel on four and had been much too amused by the device to pass it by, but not amused enough to accommodate it properly.
So it was that he alternated between skating the board along with a paw (hind or fore, it didn't matter when you were being silly), and right out climbing atop it and kicking himself along until he rolled with much frivolity down a hill or along a sidewalk. It was a point of much awe and consternation from that which he called his third-person self that he had only teetered precariously the first few times, and had only fallen once. After that, he had managed to affect a position that allowed his pawpads to grip the slightly sandy surface and his tail to wave like a banner behind him, and, with a bit of cautious leaning downwards with the aforementioned derriere in the air, he rolled along with ease. He might even have allowed his tongue to loll now and again when he wasn't willing himself not to tumble sideways.
At one point he gained such momentum that he practically flew — right past a faux-pensive wolf of admirably indeterminate sex and/or gender (much as he was, most of the time). It was a scene that would have made a surrealist painter flush with pleasure and flurry off to do questionable things with his paintbrushes. Something about her looked familiar, and he deliberated momentarily between stopping his journey by sticking a paw firmly on the ground and stopping his journey by leaping from the skateboard like an action hero from a bomb. He chose the first option right before making a crash landing into a telephone pole, and somewhere a god shook his fist at his long-laid and newly-foiled comedic plans. Shakadyn very pointedly pretended that he hadn't been making an ass of himself, and called out cheerfully. "Hi!" |
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[html] Nay, fantastic. Or both! __________________________________________
Introspection had so robbed her of proper sense that she ignored noise, disregarded those predator instincts that she’d bartered away long ago in favor of civilized treats, arts of thumb and forefinger, a red-cape sense of invincibility. (She’d borrow them back when she happened on a rabbit, say, or when songbirds were too slow.) These sensations let her turn her head, lazily, with a distinct expression of “And what folly is this?” paired with the come-what-may lavender currently headlining her irises. Indeed, it was a spectacle, one that the astronomer’s daughter (who too introduced herself as a member of that trade) observed with a new travesty of expression: amusement. Especially when the skateboarder foiled certain plans for divine (and impartial observer) comedy. That surprised a bray of laughter and applause, the she-wolf’s mouth now decidedly tipped to the left side in unbalanced pleasure.
Poker with David Bowie, soundtracks topped by with Traffic’s one-hit-wonder, some other third thing. The life in gender-mystery land seemed to please her enough to instill a desire to keep herself there, yet her chuckles might have already exposed her secrets. Little matter. Abandoning the pond and the reflection so unsuitably nestled there against orange koi backsides, she sauntered towards him, a two-fingered wave serving as greeting. Two kooks in china-town. At sundown. Lordy lordy.
Yet the greeting was compromised by a flash of the out-of-character: a quick tumble courtesy a cement-crack, complete with complimentary shock-face. In an attempt to save herself before she fell, she twisted, and by some acrobatic movement landed on her back. Luz Cresceno sighed at the turn circumstance, now sprawled before him and with an inkling of iron-tang taste in her mouth, a sure sign that she’d bitten her tongue. (First time for everything?) Some twist of the angles tweaked at her sense of deja vu, cancelling out all but the most persistent aches. Perhaps now might be the best time to throw sex-enigma to the winds! “Do I know you?” she asked him, casting off any doubts to identity with that lull mezzo, resisting the urge for motion. Her limbs lay as they were: a loose-bound collection of Euclidean lines, none of the angles quite right. | |
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[html] and who's to blame; i could assume
Because I always fill in the OOC note after the IC one: the end of this post rode in unexpectedly, even to me. What a fruit.
the loneliness of my white room
He was flattered that his play had been received so warmly. Was it an exposeé, her laughter and carriage? Had he been asked his opinion (and probably even if he hadn't), he would have said "I think not". Anatomy was not destiny. Sir Darkening Fur of the Errant Trousers was proof enough of that, perhaps not in the same way, but certainly in a related one! Indeed, he had spent the first few years of his life a sprightly white, but as the past few seasons had spun by, he had begun to shed darker and darker. And now, though his underside was still white, his face and back and neck and tail were brushed silver and shot black, as if someone had taken a match to him. It did look quite fetching, but as vaguely noted did not contrast so sharply with his favorite black clothing, which was an effect he had liked. Still, set against the resplendent hues of new mirrors and old pistols, black found a certain elegance... but it was still very different, and thus the lanky she-wolf's question was an unfounded one. Oh, certainly they might have run into each other here before — he had been in and out of the place for several years — but this was the first time he had come here with his new pelt, and beyond that she did not look particularly familiar. He found himself thinking, however, that he might like her to; not in a romantic sense, but in a friendly one. Something about her not-quite-feminine angles was inviting.
He tossed his head so that his long fringe would rest over one eye and not the other (the scarred one, incidentally). If human existence, as a whole, in all its horror and splendor and superficiality, had made it to this very year, it might have been jarringly hilarious to see even a wolf succumbing to the long-fringes-and-skateboards look. (Un)Fortunately, this was not the case, and so he just looked Startlingly Handsome As Usual. Humoring himself, he wagged his tail in greeting, trotting over to inspect the fallen warrioress in all her glory. If anything, the clothing did fit what little of her personality he had seen so far. Less was more, in this case, as she already stood out in his mind... and he was not often given to such sudden invasive marriages to memory. Curiouser and curiouser this rabbit hole grew as the days passed. (For those of you just tuning in: he was sidling provocatively towards that edge that people always talk about, the one that you can fall off of accidentally or deliberately take a flying leap off of, but it is so far untold whether or not such a thing will transpire in either manner. We'll see.) "I could ask the same of you." Shrewdly, he added, "Perhaps you should introduce yourself so that such an eternally unanswered question becomes answered and birthed anew, to greet the sunrise with vigor once again." Sheer poetry! |
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[html] Private observations sprung up at his theft – from history, from a time when skater boys roamed the earth and said ‘gnarly’ unto thee – yet not a one dealt with shock at a facial scar, with the mystery that erupts from a single covered eye, or even Queen Victoria’s underpinnings. Her thoughts made small geometries, springing and colliding and waving fists, around a comeliness he possessed that did not touch her but passed slowly by as stunted scrutiny. (Luz Cresceno blamed it all on the acutely throbbing temples.) Such were her daily dalliances with male features; they amused and puzzled by turns, and sometimes shocked with their allusions to female wares, since so much masculine allure had been tempered with angled cheek bones, big eyes, the romance of unkempt curls. Too often now she found that she could even get a quick heart-race from a he-wolf in bad lighting. Did these things deal with Shakadyn? Yes and no. Her thoughts scuttled, as thoughts are wont to do, and fled beetle-like from logic’s pruning.
A second laugh, a rare sound from the astronomer when spurred by mere words. Folly earned folly. Some were shocked when Luz leaped from slight banter to full-frontal silliness, but she couldn’t resist caprice when it was dressed so temptingly, so deliciously, so foppishly in fringe and monochrome. His poetry inspired a coy tilt of the head, a curling of hands beside her head, as if only droll thoughts lived there instead of the thunderous beginnings to a mighty headache. “My druthers are to leave such questions wandering, preferably ever and anon. But for manner’s sake, call me Hodge-Podge, and I’ll call you Buster.”
A few movements of ape-ish dexterity found her risen from her sidewalk disgrace, and though she examined the dirt-splotches along vest and trousers, she didn’t do a thing about them. They actually earned more pleasure than attention. “So quick to help a lady up, Buster,” she commented mid-examination, glancing at him eye-corner style (and quite comforted by the camouflage long eyelashes afforded in these situations), “it makes one blush.” The truth below the sarcasm? Luz would have refuted such a hand, not even wasting a slap on wrist or knuckle, and risen all on her own any ways. But she did so love a good barb. | |
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[html] and who's to blame; i could assume
the loneliness of my white room
Her drawers? No, druthers. Oh, so she could match him with a javelin spun of words — no, best him. Impressive! — but ultimately fruitless, as no matter how witty the repertoire or attractive the curves, no one got away with calling him something so undignified as Buster. He would have folded his arms right now if he could, and even so he got away with the mock-pout. "Do you know," he said, sulkiness dripping from every syllable, "my real name is not nearly so ludicrous." As a matter of fact, that was a lie: it was far more ludicrous than ever one could dream. At times he regretted naming himself so hastily. He could have done with something less convoluted, ironic — Kismet, for example. On the other hand, or rather paw, he just wouldn't be him without the name he had conjured up from the recesses of his mind all those years ago. And at least he had had the freedom to name himself... he didn't even want to contemplate existence with whatever drab common name his parents would have saddled him with.
His inner child stirred as he watched the other wolf with an appraising eye, her own eyes acting as the duster for the misbegotten grime now settled comfortably on her clothing. It was an inner child that he had never indulged much, even when he'd been that child, and that was probably why it now peeked so curiously out of the darkest doldrums of his heart. This she-wolf — or Hodge-Podge, rather — for all of her elegant looks did not act very elegantly, as a matter of fact she seemed tomboyish so far. This little pup (there was a reason he disliked them) poked and prodded at the edges of his consciousness like a sperm unto an impertinent egg (if such vulgar analogies can be forgiven), alerting him to the fact that never once had it or he gone adventuring. That was bullshit if ever he'd heard it, as he certainly hadn't learnt all of his skills by living in a place like this for all of his life. This place was not so bad, but it WAS... old-fashioned. No, Shakadyn could cook and pierce and dye and dance and so many other things, and he could even magick electricity back into working order and puppeteer that mysterious thing that humans had called a computer. Unadventurous his arse.
Again the child pleaded with him to shut up and listen. That was not the sort of adventuring it had been referring to. No, its idea of adventuring included a lot more daydreaming, and it did have a point, because he was not entirely sure that he could fly up and beyond the sky AND involve himself with a revolutionary pirate fight in the same day with his current methods. Hodge-Podge was eye-candy to the little wolf not for her looks but for her looks, her aura, and with less alarm than he found tasteful, he discovered that he liked it too. Well, whatever. Maybe he'd go with it. Abruptly he came to his senses and he lifted a brow at her words (he was doing that often lately)... looking down at himself perched sturdily upon four things that looked suspiciously like legs, he pointed out, "Well, I'm a perfect lady, and considering my current vantage point it seems that I have little interest in helping them up in general. It's nothing personal." That barb had been about as effective as tossing a dish sponge at a brick wall, and redirected in a way that only one such as he could redirect it. |
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