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rainbowfic2014-07-16 12:11 am
greenling) wrote in rainbowfic2014-07-16 12:11 am
Famous #1, Daffodil #12, Barbados Blue #4
Name: Greenling
Story: All Great Things
Colors: Famous #1 (A dizzy twister dance, can't find my drink or man), Daffodil #12 (build a fort), Barbados Blue #4 (Beach)
Supplies and Styles: Novelty Beads (Image), Sculpture (from Firefight), Modeling Clay (Today's Writing Prompt: Reality. What makes something real? It's harder to define than you'd think!)
Word Count: 2,271
Rating: PGish, mostly for Dmitry talking.
Warnings: Nothing specific.
Summary: Peace visits a strange place, Lance gets a message, Dmitry wakes up (probably).
I'm not sure how so little managed to happen in so many words. And weeks. Comments, criticism, and questions are all appreciated.
At first it felt like nothing, floating over the pale and cracked world; buildings loomed like tiny blank monoliths, rotted and crumbling out to a fuzzy fractal border. Things like gravity and distance had no meaning until he noticed they were gone. Then he fell.
His hair whipped 'round his face, his stomach dropped, a thousand feet below the ground loomed, spun, inverted- and Peace fell laughing into the sky. His feet got under him, and he began to run, too fast, not fast enough, sliding then, careening around corners and ducking under stoplight-lines at the speed of thought. The air flickered around him, real/unreal, solid gray concrete and crumbling black ash, impressions of sound and smell. He rose again.
*
Step by step, Lance double-checked the inventory in his trunk: food, water, ammo, salt, other basic materials, and just as important, news. The shiny black Range Rover parked next to his car did not go unnoticed. He considered asking if he could use it, just for the increased reliability, but the werewolves looked like they were asleep on the grass. Some days- hell, all right, most days- he envied how much of their job seemed to involve sleeping. He sighed and got into the car.
When he'd first driven down with Diana to survey the situation, the streets had been packed with cars. Even earlier that morning, they had been packed with people. Now the streets were empty; even the feral dogs and the birds had fled the area, sensing something in the air.
Thankfully, Lance wasn't doing above 35 when the falcon landed on his roof. It nearly gave him a heart attack, scratching and screeching until he hit the brakes and rolled down the passenger-side window. It hit the seat as an expanding ball of bloody feathers, stretching like taffy into something else.
"Uurgh." Lance winced. "Can you not do that outside the car?"
"Giant floating undead fish at the beach," chattered the nearly-person-shaped taffy. "Pleaseplease go now."
"Shit." He grimaced and hit the gas. "Okay, tell me exactly where we're going and what you know, in that order."
"Uh... you know the place where there's the big slope and a bunch of houses and then the little stupid beach houses that used to be rich people?"
"...Can you give me directions?"
"Left." The vampire pointed, calmly putting his seatbelt on, which was up there for one of the more surreal sights Lance had seen that day. The guy- whose name was Bird or Sunny or something else punnish, Lance recalled- was short and athletic, with gel-spiked black hair. "I haven't actually seen them but they're really, really big. My sister's with them and she said the water just started boiling and then, uhm, she sent me images- you're gonna want to take that fork."
"Did you see anything else weird around the same time? Any surges, mutated demons, anyone else in trouble?"
"No. No, everything's normal, except the giant floating fish, and this whole situation."
"Okay, then once we get there I want you to go check on the other teams. Uh-" he glanced into the backseat- "can you carry some letters with you?"
"Sure, if you have something I can put them in."
"Yeah, there should be some grocery bags back there." Lance's voice was calm, only the tenseness in his eyes and his grip on the wheel showing the adrenaline running through him. "If there's only the one crisis right now, we're going to trim some teams to clear out a hotel for the night. Optimal scenario, most of the civilians have been evacuated and we can keep going 'til we find the source of this, but if it gets worse we need a place to hunker down in that doesn't mean sleeping on desks or in the drunk tank. They're all labeled, then go see Diana and do whatever she says, all right?"
"All right." Sunny-or-whatever pulled down the visor to check his hair in the mirror. "Are- do you think you can help them by yourself?"
"I can try. If Diana doesn't give you something more urgent to do, come find me. And what do you mean by "really, really big"?"
"Uh..." He paused, then gestured vaguely wide. "Big."
Lance frowned. "Yes, but how-"
At that moment, the car crested the aforementioned slope. Maybe half a dozen colorful, spiky, decaying, hot-air-balloon-sized fish swam through the air, bumping into buildings and swarming vaguely around three tiny people-figures at the edge of the high, rough tide.
"That big," the vampire said unhelpfully.
*
Kevin was taller in this place, when he wasn't a snake. It was subtle, especially when he was floating, but he was definitely two or three inches taller. Peace could understand that. He could also understand the scattered gold-and-black scales and the bright yellow eyes, though they were eerie in a vaguely sexy kind of way. Hell, the wolfskin cape-jacket-thing made some sense, in a Founding of Rome kind of way. The dandelions, though. And the tunic thing. He didn't know if he should ask what those were about.
Peace himself looked normal, outside of being shirtless. That was also something he largely understood and had come to terms with.
"Scared me for a second there. Said you hadn't been here awake?" Kevin spoke without opening his mouth.
"Not on purpose..." Peace looked around at the soft, wavery gray-and-red world. The police station loomed under them, defying its own size, surrounded by shining loops of magic; other buildings crumbled or sat squat, roads were cramped or blood-stained, and the whole city that he could see had an air of oppression that grew heavy and strange closer to the shatter. Rough geography matched up fairly closely, less so where the little red lights of demons had swarmed. "What is this place?"
"Extension of dreams. Collective unconscious, astral, something; it's useful for finding things that don't belong."
Peace felt restless. He got the gist of it- he was used to dreams- but there was too much information to take in, too many things that didn't make sense, or made sense in a way that didn't make sense. It all just made his brain itch. "How do you tell... what's real?"
He was really hoping for a nice, straight answer, or at least some kind of pithy enlightening metaphor. He was still trying to sort out what to even ask about first, and was beginning to wonder when and if that stage would end. Instead, Kevin inclined his head slightly, looked around the landscape for about half a minute, and shrugged. "Practice?"
Peace felt ears he didn't have go back a bit. He supposed technically it was a useful answer.
His mind wandered over the next most obvious thing: the shining loops. They looked quite nice, and vaguely like Celtic knotwork. "Do you know what those things are?" He pointed.
"Wards. What I was doing when I noticed you." Kevin grinned.
Peace made a thoughtful noise. He'd seen the flash of the pentacle he'd made earlier, but it had disappeared almost immediately, even if he felt it working. (Come to think of it, he could still feel it in the back of his mind, wavering but present.) "So you can see magic here. Can you see other kinds? Like, not werewolf?"
"See for yourself." Kevin gestured around. "Look for people."
He was lost as to where to start for a moment; but then Peace noticed a car driving away from the station below. That gave him an idea. He floated downward to take a closer look, his hair softly bobbing around him as if in an invisible dramatic breeze.
*
Dmitry opened his eyes-
"Finally. Fuck."
He stared blankly at the... person... sitting on his legs. His first thought had been that it was his brother, somehow, but he'd never seen Rudeth with a grimace like that, and his hair was shorter. Plus there were the slightly glowing, bright purplish-white eyes.
"Okay, look," continued whatever the fuck was going on, "you don't like me right now. I don't care. I think you're a whiny little shit. We'll fix that later. Right now, you need to get your ass up, go find that thing, and raze the fucking earth of it, understand?"
Dmitry continued to stare blankly, noting the fury and the literally-flashing eyes with the calm of a man who had given up all expectation of reason. "The..." He tried to find the words to express what he was feeling at the moment and came up short. "No."
The apparition rolled his eyes. "Small words: find bad guy. Take sword, stick in bad guy. Repeat until abomination is cleansed," he snarled. "I don't expect you to understand that last part, but it needs to be done."
"Are you that thing whatshername was talking about?" Dmitry narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out if he was dreaming. "Some kind of deal with the devil thing?"
He glared back at Dmitry. "Fuck you. I'm not even going to dignify that with a response. Get your ass up now and-"
Dmitry opened his eyes.
He stared blankly at the tiny shoeless Asian boy perched on the far arm of the couch, seemingly frozen in the action of poking him in the stomach with a rolled-up newspaper.
For a moment, neither of them moved. Then Dmitry tossed the blanket (apparently someone had given him a blanket) off one arm to rub his eyes, and the kid yawped like a pack of rabid wolves were after him. He leapt off the couch, landed on a floor lamp, whirled backwards among cords and falling objects, and crashed into the door with an echoing BANG. The door attempted to rebound, but with a slow, ripping crack, it fell off its hinges, managing not to hit the kid who by this time was a a semi-collected heap in the hallway.
Dmitry sat up on one arm and stared, trying to figure out if this was a dream.
"The heck is that thing?!" At the least, he didn't sound like the thing in Dmitry's... the other thing that had just happened.
"Who the hell are you? What's going on?" Dmitry looked around for the rest of his can of lemonade, hoping it hadn't gotten spilled.
"Ech..." With a bit of struggle, the kid disentangled himself from the lamp and began putting things back neatly upright, starting with the door. He kept one eye on the sword the whole time, clearly trying to regain his composure. "I'm, uh... are you with them? The head policewoman, or whatever she is, she asked me to take you to the hotel to help out, or sleep there, I'm not sure. S-seriously- what is that thing?"
"This thing?" Dmitry held up the sword, glaring at the carpet; the kid took a step back, hiding halfway behind the doorframe. Yay. They probably had Peace off doing something useful, and now he had to deal with whatever this was. And his lemonade was gone. "Hell if I know. I'm not gonna hurt you with it, if that's what you're worried about."
"It looks like death."
That caught Dmitry's attention. He looked up at the kid- who was going to go without a name if he didn't give one soon- and stared at him for a moment.
"What do you mean, looks like death?"
"Uh... I... guess it just does?" The kid just stood there with a wide, wary, off-looking grimace on his face. Off-looking like he had too many teeth. "It's more of an... I, I'm not really good at the analyze-y, woo-woo stuff. Name's Bird, by the way. I didn't get yours?"
"Dmitry." He stood up, trying not to be too irritated at the sudden, aborted possibility of useful answers. At least he felt a little better. It wasn't sleep he'd needed, maybe, but it had helped.
"Ah, well- nice to meet you, Dmitry." Bird stood up a little straighter and started walking down the hallway towards the door, half-backwards, still not taking his eyes off the sword as Dmitry followed. "Sorry for the direct question, but, if you don't know what that is... uh, what are you?"
"No fucking clue. Woke up this morning, went outside, found a magic sword. You?"
"Ah- me?" Bird grimaced again, looking a little uncomfortable. "Well... I'm a vampire."
Dmitry stopped in his tracks, staring down at Bird. The statement didn't exactly surprise him at that point, but... "No shit?"
Bird's discomfort visibly lessened. "Nope! Actual vampire."
"Tch. I guess if werewolves exist, vampires are next." He wasn't sure how that logic could follow in real life, but at least the chances of him being crazy or having a brain tumor seemed significantly less likely as time went on. "Is-" a little voice in his head told him this would be a total dick question if the answer was no, but he ignored it- "is that what's going on with your mouth?"
"Oh! Yeah! See?" Bird grinned wide; it wasn't too many teeth, now that Dmitry was really paying attention, but what was in there looked a little bigger and sharper than it should be. Then he grinned a little wider, and his teeth became a jagged maw. They looked a little like a cat's, but with more than one set of canines, and the rest of them weren't as small in comparison. "Totally sweet, right?"
Dmitry's train of thought derailed. He went back to staring.
Bird's expression immediately faded from excitement to awkward nonchalance, and the fangs disappeared. "I mean-"
"-Fuck yeah."
Dmitry smirked at him and started up walking again. Bird caught up soon enough.
Story: All Great Things
Colors: Famous #1 (A dizzy twister dance, can't find my drink or man), Daffodil #12 (build a fort), Barbados Blue #4 (Beach)
Supplies and Styles: Novelty Beads (Image), Sculpture (from Firefight), Modeling Clay (Today's Writing Prompt: Reality. What makes something real? It's harder to define than you'd think!)
Word Count: 2,271
Rating: PGish, mostly for Dmitry talking.
Warnings: Nothing specific.
Summary: Peace visits a strange place, Lance gets a message, Dmitry wakes up (probably).
I'm not sure how so little managed to happen in so many words. And weeks. Comments, criticism, and questions are all appreciated.
At first it felt like nothing, floating over the pale and cracked world; buildings loomed like tiny blank monoliths, rotted and crumbling out to a fuzzy fractal border. Things like gravity and distance had no meaning until he noticed they were gone. Then he fell.
His hair whipped 'round his face, his stomach dropped, a thousand feet below the ground loomed, spun, inverted- and Peace fell laughing into the sky. His feet got under him, and he began to run, too fast, not fast enough, sliding then, careening around corners and ducking under stoplight-lines at the speed of thought. The air flickered around him, real/unreal, solid gray concrete and crumbling black ash, impressions of sound and smell. He rose again.
*
Step by step, Lance double-checked the inventory in his trunk: food, water, ammo, salt, other basic materials, and just as important, news. The shiny black Range Rover parked next to his car did not go unnoticed. He considered asking if he could use it, just for the increased reliability, but the werewolves looked like they were asleep on the grass. Some days- hell, all right, most days- he envied how much of their job seemed to involve sleeping. He sighed and got into the car.
When he'd first driven down with Diana to survey the situation, the streets had been packed with cars. Even earlier that morning, they had been packed with people. Now the streets were empty; even the feral dogs and the birds had fled the area, sensing something in the air.
Thankfully, Lance wasn't doing above 35 when the falcon landed on his roof. It nearly gave him a heart attack, scratching and screeching until he hit the brakes and rolled down the passenger-side window. It hit the seat as an expanding ball of bloody feathers, stretching like taffy into something else.
"Uurgh." Lance winced. "Can you not do that outside the car?"
"Giant floating undead fish at the beach," chattered the nearly-person-shaped taffy. "Pleaseplease go now."
"Shit." He grimaced and hit the gas. "Okay, tell me exactly where we're going and what you know, in that order."
"Uh... you know the place where there's the big slope and a bunch of houses and then the little stupid beach houses that used to be rich people?"
"...Can you give me directions?"
"Left." The vampire pointed, calmly putting his seatbelt on, which was up there for one of the more surreal sights Lance had seen that day. The guy- whose name was Bird or Sunny or something else punnish, Lance recalled- was short and athletic, with gel-spiked black hair. "I haven't actually seen them but they're really, really big. My sister's with them and she said the water just started boiling and then, uhm, she sent me images- you're gonna want to take that fork."
"Did you see anything else weird around the same time? Any surges, mutated demons, anyone else in trouble?"
"No. No, everything's normal, except the giant floating fish, and this whole situation."
"Okay, then once we get there I want you to go check on the other teams. Uh-" he glanced into the backseat- "can you carry some letters with you?"
"Sure, if you have something I can put them in."
"Yeah, there should be some grocery bags back there." Lance's voice was calm, only the tenseness in his eyes and his grip on the wheel showing the adrenaline running through him. "If there's only the one crisis right now, we're going to trim some teams to clear out a hotel for the night. Optimal scenario, most of the civilians have been evacuated and we can keep going 'til we find the source of this, but if it gets worse we need a place to hunker down in that doesn't mean sleeping on desks or in the drunk tank. They're all labeled, then go see Diana and do whatever she says, all right?"
"All right." Sunny-or-whatever pulled down the visor to check his hair in the mirror. "Are- do you think you can help them by yourself?"
"I can try. If Diana doesn't give you something more urgent to do, come find me. And what do you mean by "really, really big"?"
"Uh..." He paused, then gestured vaguely wide. "Big."
Lance frowned. "Yes, but how-"
At that moment, the car crested the aforementioned slope. Maybe half a dozen colorful, spiky, decaying, hot-air-balloon-sized fish swam through the air, bumping into buildings and swarming vaguely around three tiny people-figures at the edge of the high, rough tide.
"That big," the vampire said unhelpfully.
*
Kevin was taller in this place, when he wasn't a snake. It was subtle, especially when he was floating, but he was definitely two or three inches taller. Peace could understand that. He could also understand the scattered gold-and-black scales and the bright yellow eyes, though they were eerie in a vaguely sexy kind of way. Hell, the wolfskin cape-jacket-thing made some sense, in a Founding of Rome kind of way. The dandelions, though. And the tunic thing. He didn't know if he should ask what those were about.
Peace himself looked normal, outside of being shirtless. That was also something he largely understood and had come to terms with.
"Scared me for a second there. Said you hadn't been here awake?" Kevin spoke without opening his mouth.
"Not on purpose..." Peace looked around at the soft, wavery gray-and-red world. The police station loomed under them, defying its own size, surrounded by shining loops of magic; other buildings crumbled or sat squat, roads were cramped or blood-stained, and the whole city that he could see had an air of oppression that grew heavy and strange closer to the shatter. Rough geography matched up fairly closely, less so where the little red lights of demons had swarmed. "What is this place?"
"Extension of dreams. Collective unconscious, astral, something; it's useful for finding things that don't belong."
Peace felt restless. He got the gist of it- he was used to dreams- but there was too much information to take in, too many things that didn't make sense, or made sense in a way that didn't make sense. It all just made his brain itch. "How do you tell... what's real?"
He was really hoping for a nice, straight answer, or at least some kind of pithy enlightening metaphor. He was still trying to sort out what to even ask about first, and was beginning to wonder when and if that stage would end. Instead, Kevin inclined his head slightly, looked around the landscape for about half a minute, and shrugged. "Practice?"
Peace felt ears he didn't have go back a bit. He supposed technically it was a useful answer.
His mind wandered over the next most obvious thing: the shining loops. They looked quite nice, and vaguely like Celtic knotwork. "Do you know what those things are?" He pointed.
"Wards. What I was doing when I noticed you." Kevin grinned.
Peace made a thoughtful noise. He'd seen the flash of the pentacle he'd made earlier, but it had disappeared almost immediately, even if he felt it working. (Come to think of it, he could still feel it in the back of his mind, wavering but present.) "So you can see magic here. Can you see other kinds? Like, not werewolf?"
"See for yourself." Kevin gestured around. "Look for people."
He was lost as to where to start for a moment; but then Peace noticed a car driving away from the station below. That gave him an idea. He floated downward to take a closer look, his hair softly bobbing around him as if in an invisible dramatic breeze.
*
Dmitry opened his eyes-
"Finally. Fuck."
He stared blankly at the... person... sitting on his legs. His first thought had been that it was his brother, somehow, but he'd never seen Rudeth with a grimace like that, and his hair was shorter. Plus there were the slightly glowing, bright purplish-white eyes.
"Okay, look," continued whatever the fuck was going on, "you don't like me right now. I don't care. I think you're a whiny little shit. We'll fix that later. Right now, you need to get your ass up, go find that thing, and raze the fucking earth of it, understand?"
Dmitry continued to stare blankly, noting the fury and the literally-flashing eyes with the calm of a man who had given up all expectation of reason. "The..." He tried to find the words to express what he was feeling at the moment and came up short. "No."
The apparition rolled his eyes. "Small words: find bad guy. Take sword, stick in bad guy. Repeat until abomination is cleansed," he snarled. "I don't expect you to understand that last part, but it needs to be done."
"Are you that thing whatshername was talking about?" Dmitry narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out if he was dreaming. "Some kind of deal with the devil thing?"
He glared back at Dmitry. "Fuck you. I'm not even going to dignify that with a response. Get your ass up now and-"
Dmitry opened his eyes.
He stared blankly at the tiny shoeless Asian boy perched on the far arm of the couch, seemingly frozen in the action of poking him in the stomach with a rolled-up newspaper.
For a moment, neither of them moved. Then Dmitry tossed the blanket (apparently someone had given him a blanket) off one arm to rub his eyes, and the kid yawped like a pack of rabid wolves were after him. He leapt off the couch, landed on a floor lamp, whirled backwards among cords and falling objects, and crashed into the door with an echoing BANG. The door attempted to rebound, but with a slow, ripping crack, it fell off its hinges, managing not to hit the kid who by this time was a a semi-collected heap in the hallway.
Dmitry sat up on one arm and stared, trying to figure out if this was a dream.
"The heck is that thing?!" At the least, he didn't sound like the thing in Dmitry's... the other thing that had just happened.
"Who the hell are you? What's going on?" Dmitry looked around for the rest of his can of lemonade, hoping it hadn't gotten spilled.
"Ech..." With a bit of struggle, the kid disentangled himself from the lamp and began putting things back neatly upright, starting with the door. He kept one eye on the sword the whole time, clearly trying to regain his composure. "I'm, uh... are you with them? The head policewoman, or whatever she is, she asked me to take you to the hotel to help out, or sleep there, I'm not sure. S-seriously- what is that thing?"
"This thing?" Dmitry held up the sword, glaring at the carpet; the kid took a step back, hiding halfway behind the doorframe. Yay. They probably had Peace off doing something useful, and now he had to deal with whatever this was. And his lemonade was gone. "Hell if I know. I'm not gonna hurt you with it, if that's what you're worried about."
"It looks like death."
That caught Dmitry's attention. He looked up at the kid- who was going to go without a name if he didn't give one soon- and stared at him for a moment.
"What do you mean, looks like death?"
"Uh... I... guess it just does?" The kid just stood there with a wide, wary, off-looking grimace on his face. Off-looking like he had too many teeth. "It's more of an... I, I'm not really good at the analyze-y, woo-woo stuff. Name's Bird, by the way. I didn't get yours?"
"Dmitry." He stood up, trying not to be too irritated at the sudden, aborted possibility of useful answers. At least he felt a little better. It wasn't sleep he'd needed, maybe, but it had helped.
"Ah, well- nice to meet you, Dmitry." Bird stood up a little straighter and started walking down the hallway towards the door, half-backwards, still not taking his eyes off the sword as Dmitry followed. "Sorry for the direct question, but, if you don't know what that is... uh, what are you?"
"No fucking clue. Woke up this morning, went outside, found a magic sword. You?"
"Ah- me?" Bird grimaced again, looking a little uncomfortable. "Well... I'm a vampire."
Dmitry stopped in his tracks, staring down at Bird. The statement didn't exactly surprise him at that point, but... "No shit?"
Bird's discomfort visibly lessened. "Nope! Actual vampire."
"Tch. I guess if werewolves exist, vampires are next." He wasn't sure how that logic could follow in real life, but at least the chances of him being crazy or having a brain tumor seemed significantly less likely as time went on. "Is-" a little voice in his head told him this would be a total dick question if the answer was no, but he ignored it- "is that what's going on with your mouth?"
"Oh! Yeah! See?" Bird grinned wide; it wasn't too many teeth, now that Dmitry was really paying attention, but what was in there looked a little bigger and sharper than it should be. Then he grinned a little wider, and his teeth became a jagged maw. They looked a little like a cat's, but with more than one set of canines, and the rest of them weren't as small in comparison. "Totally sweet, right?"
Dmitry's train of thought derailed. He went back to staring.
Bird's expression immediately faded from excitement to awkward nonchalance, and the fangs disappeared. "I mean-"
"-Fuck yeah."
Dmitry smirked at him and started up walking again. Bird caught up soon enough.