Quincunx

Crap, I knew I was forgetting something this week. When I was younger, Valentine's Day irritated me, but not much more than the simple existence of lovebirds did. The one year I didn't go to school on the day, which should have been the easiest, turned out to be the worst. I found the carnation in my locker the next day before first-period and jammed it at the nose of the defiler after third-period class. (Didn't quite achieve 'up' the nose.) I moved after that year and didn't trouble myself with the day since then.

(Rydia wiggles her ears, partway to amusement, partway to commiseration.) Ayshela, there is just no one-upping you on real life crises, is there? . . . Come and join us in the backwaters. . .it's a difficult first few years without the turbines chugging, but in the end it's just so. . .quiet. . . (Tzimfemme, flailing at the ground: "I'll DIG my way back!") . . .mostly. \o_o|

(Tzimfemme slinks through the doorway, trying not to touch the door. It tends to become animate at the most inconvenient times. . .) D answered the unspoken questions in the topic subtitle. Hypersensitive? Maybe, but last month I deleted one of my works-in-progress and also destroyed the commentary--Wyvern's actually. The mistake is fresh in my mind and I wanted to prevent it happening again. Z refers to this entire point-by-point type of conversation.

(A beam of light, the color of mashed peas, descends from the ceiling, deposits the naked mage in the center of the light, and retracts. She drops to the ground the instant the light lets go.) Oof! Teach me not to put my shields back up when I leave here. . . I smell rules, and I'm here on retainer. A: Any work written originally for the Pen site (no reposting) is accepted. (A PG-13 work would have to be moved to the appropriate room, which isn't visible to non-members usually, but we have made arrangements for such works in the past. Don't think any of those people are still around, though.) B: Don't think it's been done before, but why not? Some application pieces have been re-written two or three times, even during the application process. I would ask that you put the succeeding drafts in new posts instead of editing the old, just so we can watch the revision at work. C: The re-application record is four or five times. I can't recall who it is, but someone shows up once every year, keeps forgetting he-or-she's a member already, and re-applies. Wyvern, being what he is, collects a new application fee each time, and someone has to 'convince' him to give it back each time. D: If you have an attack of ill-conscience, you have the power to delete your own posts, even as Honored Guest. If you delete the first post in a thread, the entire thread gets deleted, so please just empty the text block of those posts instead. Z: Power down your shields. They're not necessary here. (Tzimfemme looks around then, realizes what room this is, and leaves in double-time before Melba ((the Almost Secretary)) decides to share some more hen night stories. . .)

Isn't character creation on both of these servers disabled for the moment? [EDIT: Bad info. Only on Icecrown.]

Tzimfemme stepped up to the board, looked both ways, and brought out of a portal an ostentatious, fluffy red quill. It was a duplicate of Minta's, but less travel-worn and more effective. 1. ultramarine 2. one 3. Calvin 4. unlikely 5. equivocated 6. mathematician 7. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! The naked mage pondered why the purple pants of Antonio Vivaldi were exclamation-worthy. 8. riveted 9. a dime (heads) She slapped herself on the back of her non-writing hand. 10. navels 11. liquidity 12. speculated With that, she went back to speculating for ten more minutes. 13. play(ing) pinochle 14. pigment 15. quibbled 16. Susie 17. figment 18. a few 19. glossy 20. seldom

Tzimfemme's skin prickled from the cold wind, and she gulped an extra mouthful of hot chocolate (made from a melted-down Iuz figurine, tonight, dark and probably hazardous to long-term health) to relax herself. However, the longer she watched the aftermath of that wind, and the increasing number of people charging along after an imperceptible goal, the chills came back. She leaned over to the next table. "You don't in any way, shape, or form see a Nimball ™ near the front of that crowd, do you?" "No. . ." Sweetcherrie said, after weighting down the stacks with her hand and looking around. The naked mage slumped a little as her muscles untensed. "Phew," she commented, while Sweetcherrie let go of the papers and they sprang back up to wall her in. The race was circling in tighter turns now as people pursued commitments that pursued them, whipping in and out of Pen reality--the sort of breach which, combined with something as destabilizing as a Nimball ™ game, could have blown more than just the 'net to wriggling smithereens. Well, there were other destabilizing choices at hand, and Tzimfemme had been out of the anarchy business far too long. She lofted the mug of hot chocolate and strutted in the wake of the chase, shouting "KENA!" and slopping chocolate over nearby people, and dipping her free hand in and out of the tiny, weak cracks in Pen reality that followed this circle. . . Tumble dryers were blamed for most of the later clothing loss.

At this rate, may as well change "(tentative)" to "Working off our Weenie Awards". Weenies were applied to people who didn't post in the annual roll call back in August or so, and while some wear their Weenies with pride*, one posting with Weenie or Working off the Weenie Award or similar in the title is sufficient to make the weenie disappear. *DoctorEvil proudly sports a Triple Weenie with Oak-Leaf Cluster, I think. **Finding the special symbols on a U.S. keyboard set up to Swedish keyboard layout is difficult.

\o_O/ shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiny. . . --Rydia, sneaking online before this computer is disassembled and packed also

Tzimfemme used the board sparingly, never blocking blows that would shatter the weakened wood and dodging instead; she roved over more ground than most participants while swiping at the oncoming troll's knees and elbows. Once, when the troll had over-extended his arm, she held the counterattack and looked around while he recovered. Not far away, two trolls were flanking Gyrfalcon but he held them off easily, and closer than that were a pair fighting each other when they could have surrounded Tzimfemme. She frowned. "Inconsistent," she muttered, then vaulted onto a table as the pursuing troll swept his clawed foot at her and brought the board down from overhead, two-handed, to bite into the flesh just above his kneecap. The troll roared and closed his hands on the board as Tzimfemme let go; he bellowed again as it shattered and stuck splinters into his palms, she gathered the quincunx power into a soft silver ball and thrust it at his head at close range before scrambling away. Unarmed, she sprinted and side-stepped through the melee until she found a troll-free circle surrounding a better fighter. Tzimfemme ducked and rolled into it gratefully, then stood up at the fighter's back. "Yo," she began, "mind if I stand here for a bit and get some spells ready? My weapon's broken." "Sure," Knight replied, as he twisted the approach of a charging troll and sent it stumbling into another. "Watch out for the slippery spots, the trolls spilled some beer when we arrived." The naked mage struggled to recall a useful blue spell. "I found something. . .inconsistent with these trolls." "Yeah?" "I tried to trace whose they are, since most if not all of these surroundings have been people's purgatories," she continued, and began to cast a spell off to the side of the pair, "but it traced back to Guild Leader of the AVV. Not a name. Why?" One troll menacing Knight and another from a nearby battle broke away and swung at the area Tzimfemme's spell had landed. While their limbs ripped through the Hallucination, Knight struck at the near troll's unprotected back. "What's the AVV stand for, this area?" he asked, stepping back to counterattack another troll. "It does, something like your Black Rose division. I don't know who's running the place now--" "Sweetcherrie and Gryphon sent out the call for help," Knight added. "--right," the naked mage amended, "I remembered that. . .Anyway, this place is now being run along Marxist lines. Work is Struggle, Struggle is Work, or nothing for free in other words. Some of us had to fight our inner demons and now it looks like everyone gets to fight these anonymous demons." She squinted into the distance and lobbed another spell up and over the crowd. "Thoughts?" Knight paused to catch his breath. "We're not winning this fight. I see the dead trolls aren't regenerating like they should," and they both looked at the bodies lying under the illusion of Knight , "but there's always the same number of trolls attacking us." One of the more distant trolls noticed the gap in the ring surrounding Knight and Tzimfemme, and charged forward into the path of Tzimfemme's descending Paralyze. "I don't see either Gryphon or Sweetcherrie setting up a fight we can't win." "Point," Tzimfemme murmured, "but they haven't really got control of the trolls either. . .Oh, it can't be that simple." She set her shoulders. "Knight, if you run into anyone else in the battle, pass this on: These trolls belong to Gryphon and Sweetcherrie, but they aren't aware of it, their guildleader power is running wild and provoking a story but they have to resolve it, and pass all that on until it gets to either of them." The naked mage scanned the tavern again. "I can't see either of them from here, can you?" Knight didn't reply for a moment, as he braced himself and his extended arm, and let a she-troll run onto his fist and knock the breath out of herself. "All I can see are trolls." "I'll run off and try to find them, then," she concluded, flicking a Double Time spell at her feet. "Good luck, tho' you don't need it, there won't be any fatalities." Tzimfemme burst forth from the circle of attackers just before the trolls' feet swung upwards and entangled with each other, pulling both trolls off balance. "'Sfunny this never happened with elder powers, it's the same degree of control," she mused, skipping sideways around a troll trying to bearhug and crush her, "and speak of the devil, there's Gyrfalcon--YO! GYRFALCON! News!"

(Author's note: More of an outline than a story, but I will be offline for an indeterminate time after tonight, and rushed to get this posted.) "We are NOT here to play GOD! We are here as WOMEN! Every man and woman a MOTHER! Every child WANTED!" For two years I'd been living with Raina, but she still surprised me. Last month, she'd been lecturing international women's lobbyists about the evils of bride kidnapping; now we were in downtown Jalalabad, defending the Kyrgyz government. They had looked the other way while oil money built a cloning clinic. Raina switched to Russian and repeated the chants, beating time with the fist that did not hold the bullhorn. The crowd was mostly foreign: Raina and her New Suffragette supporters, clutches of missionaries quoting Genesis, gap year students, bored sons, hungry refugees yelling slogans for whoever fed them. She turned away from the horn, laughing, and her lips moved. I heard nothing, however; the crowd muttered and shouted and drowned her out. Raina reached for my coat and started to pull me down, but then shoved the cloth away from her. "You. . .Janna. . ." she shouted up at me, "you made another one!" I reached into the inner pocket and pulled out what she'd found--a Rubix cube with one broken corner--and spoke carefully, "This is not America; the police might come. All it will do is make smoke, Raina. You remember." Raina forgot she was holding the bullhorn; she just shrieked and swung her fist at me. I put my hands up to shield my face and the cone of the bullhorn cut my wrist to the bone. I lost my grip on the toy when she jerked the horn free and threw it away. She wanted to hit me again. ***** Last time, Raina forgot to duck. I had to clasp my hands on top of her head, wrestle her behind the berm, and duck myself; it wasn't easy while she was swearing like that. She pushed one hand up to give me two fingers and got splinters in the back of her hand. So did I, holding her down. I hadn't heard the explosion. My hands ached when they flexed, but I had to get my earplugs out. "--ing pig chauvinist gun range, but I took you there anyway. But that was a BOMB! What are you, a terrorist?--" I pointed at my ears and picked plastic out of the back of my left hand. She kept ranting while she yanked her earplugs out and threw them on the ground. "--you do to it?--" "I pried off one of the corners and filled it with firecrackers." "Janna! You idiot! We could be arrested, you stupid nihilist!" What was a nihilist? "I don't think so. You've been watching too many crime drama reruns." She flung out more words I didn't know. "God's bouncing bazongas! My fingerprints were all over that! You know I spent all weekend fooling with that thing, trying to get at least get one side the same color, and you LET me! Could you maybe be a little MORE imprudent???" ***** I had needed to change planes twice, ride one bus to the end of its line, and walk over two miles before I had found her bookstore. The house had been built just over a century ago, white clapboard with wooden trim painted pink, and she had liked to call it "historic". After I had entered, I had taken out one picture from the envelope in my purse and climbed to the second floor: Religions, Foreign Languages, Earth Sciences, History. She had rested her shoulderblades on a bookshelf while paging through a Cyrillic text; the pages had been laid out like poetry, and her lips had moved as she read a few lines. I had laid my finger on her shoulder. She had looked at my finger first, then followed it back to my face. Her face was flat behind one thick bullring in her nose, but her eyes were still full of poems. Then I had slipped the photograph over the text she had been reading; it dragged her back to the present. "Hello, Raina." "JANNA!" Bookstore cats and bookstore mice darted under the shelves. She squeezed the breath out of me, hugging low on my ribs. I looked around; the other patrons gawked, the cashier stared with his jaw half-open. When Raina let me go, she looked around too, then bellowed, "She's my penpal and we never met before, so quit damn staring!" They scurried away also, and Raina looked up at me. I hadn't realized she was so short. "So. . . .Welcome to America. Let's get out of this mausoleum and go do something American, maybe pick up some hamburgers and Pepsi on the way." ***** Police blame the twenty-nine people still in Kyrgyz jails, their families blame the police; both are wrong. Once the flashbomb exploded, people near us tried to flee from the splinters and smoke. While I could wrap my arm around a lamp pole, Raina was already off-balance from punching me and ducking afterwards. Panicky people pushed her further from me; I saw her leg rise into the air before the crowd carried her away. The Kyrgyz government returned Raina's body to her family, just as they found it. I had an undertaker mend her body and buried her in my family's gravesite. Also, I sold the bookstore to her uncle for very little money, just enough to travel with, and to buy some supplies. I will not forgive Raina for dying. Nor will I forgive the foreigners who killed her.

Mynx is "supposedly" out of the country at this time. . .an alibi she took time to prepare in advance. . .mm-hm.

first base is a kiss on the lips. . . I have no idea what he's talking about but I'm having a great time speculating about it. Hm, on second thought (and looking back at the poem also), I might be right--but in that case, you'll need to run down someone who knows both baseball and teenage makeout patterns.

Tzimfemme squatted, elbows on knees, chin on fists, and studied the clean space from where Mynx had vanished. Slowly the corners of her mouth slid out into a smile. "She broke free," marveled the naked mage, unfolding her legs and sitting down properly. "Perhaps now the others will--" She broke off and looked to her right as sycamore leaves fell from that direction, darkening from yellow to red even as the wind gained speed. Goosebumps stippled her skin and the air clotted with crumpling, browning leaves; Tzimfemme squinted her eyes against the stinging particles of dried leaves and barely saw Stephen wink into existence and out again, dragging Tanuchan with him. Immediately, the wind died, but Tanuchan's forest remained except for that circle where Mynx had been. "She did not escape her purgatory," murmured Tzimfemme, and went back to contemplating the clean space. Some time later, the mist crept up from all sides and swallowed Tzimfemme and Vincent Silver, but halted at the edge of the circle. ***** Tzimfemme looked up at the troll, insulated. "And whose purgatory are you," she asked, almost politely, while shifting her weight and picking up the poker chip. The troll reared back, threw down his cards--an eighty-seven of skulls, a pair of ducks, and two card-backs, tilting on the breeze--and brought his arm down fast. Tzimfemme heard herself speaking a spell, with some surprise, but not as much surprised as the troll was when his palm slid off of the perfected forehead. "Ha!" yelped the naked mage. "Invulnerability!" for only eighteen seconds, she added to herself, and turned her back to the troll while climbing onto the table. He shot out his hands and grabbed hold of the mana-formed ribs spraying backwards from the naked mage's spine, but when he pulled, his fists slipped off of them and slammed into his own chest. Meanwhile, Tzimfemme perched on the far edge of the table, looked over her shoulder, and pulled her face into a grotesque expression while trailing a maroon-marked foot over the table. The troll took the bait and swung at her foot, and as she whipped it away and vaulted off the edge of the table, boards shattered. She braced herself and punched upwards at the table's underside; one loose and splintering board popped free from the table, and she had just enough time to grasp it nails-outwards before the god's visage and its invulnerability drained away.

I do disagree, Katzaniel. My friends and I wrote many letters from 1994 through 1997, which would be the period when many of us started to use the Internet, and those abbreviations and acronyms were not used. We had our own cryptic doodle-based shorthand, but nothing that someone outside our circle would have used, and not imitated from an outside source. How do you read abbreviations? How do you hear them in your head? I either fill in the phrase, if it's an acronym, or think "gibberish" if it's an abbreviation; if I have to hear the acronym, it spells itself out. Starlight makes a sound out of the letters already present, which leads to occasional misunderstandings when we're playing Everquest and trying to speak to one another. The EQ community has even begun self-correcting on this one by making acronyms out of one letter for (example) a buff type and one number for the level of buff--much harder to misinterpret. Perhaps this system was taken from another game, but it has no relation to the names and acronyms already present in the game.

I wanted to preserve that in case you came to your senses and deleted it. (Tzimfemme grins evilly.) To cycle back towards the thread topic, the last time spelling changed, we were celebrating our supposed stupidity with songs like "Yankee Doodle Dandy", which leads me to the worrisome parallel that, 200 years in the future, people will still know why "All your base are belong to us" is funny.

Odd to say it on a writing site, but the lack of words on the minimalist badge* gives the image a stronger impact. If a member wanted to display particular ranks or other arcana, then a signature block like reverie's suggestion could supply the information. *Only options 1, 2, and 7 would work on a minimalist badge.

I own characters who are in search of a plot. Send me the details, if you please.

Earlier that day. . . Vlad felt. . .sticky. Sweetened. Generally wrong. The lich glared at doors and they opened for him, suppressing any squeaks from their hinges until he had turned around the next corner. He descended through the Pen Keep and paused before one of the few doors he couldn't glare open. Something scurried behind the door and swung it inward. Vlad tasted the air. It was a lesser undead--zombie--trying to keep out of sight. He smiled through the door, and the zombie cowered against the far wall. "Zombie, shut that door! You're gonna ruin the surprise!" Minta sat cross-legged with her back to the door and didn't bother looking up as she addressed her pet. The zombie slid along the walls until it could barely touch the door hinges and nudged the door shut. Vlad approached the little gnomie and watched her elbows weave backward and forward as she worked with the object in her lap. She would work diligently for a minute, maybe a minute and a half, before stopping and bringing the instrument up to her face. After some licking and lip-smacking, she bent her head over her project and went back to work. The lich moved, step by step, to Minta's blind side, and almost put his foot into a small saucepan filled with buttery, vividly pink frosting. She was frosting his phylactery. Vlad wasn't sure what he said then. Maybe it hadn't even been words, just strangled noises. In either case, Minta jumped, squeaked, and threw her cloak over the phylactery while spinning to face him. "Vlad go 'way!" she shouted, pointing at the door. "Upupup to the Cabaret Room! You're gonna ruin the surprise!" He looked over her shoulder and saw patches of wet begin to seep through the cloak and turn pink. The gnomie stamped her foot and squealed, "Hurry! Zombie, open the door!" She windmilled her arms at him, he stepped backwards to avoid being hit, and found himself on the other side of the doorway. Minta herself swung the door shut, leaving the lich glaring through the wood at the zombie, who shook its head helplessly and retreated.

This topic has slowed down in frequency and only recurs about once every eighteen months (which the Doctor would know if he came here more often *rimshot*, it's simply not in this forum). Maybe we should sticky our dissent, flaunt it the way you flaunt your Scarlet Snack of Courage. . .the only way I see a Weenie becoming a Letter would be chopping it up and mixing it with tomato-based alphabet soup for a bizarre type of Beanie Weenies. (Tzimfemme pauses to eat the underside of a piece of chocolate cake, leaving three crumby pillars holding up the sheet of frosting, and then returns the cake to its intended plate.) Trivia: Beanie Weenies are nicknamed "Dead Man's Fingers" here in Sweden, at least among the poor reservists who have to eat them. Off Weenies, onto Roll Calls--the open-ended format meant to reassure poets and lecturers instead resulted in a headache of non sequiturs, marvelously written, but so densely packed as to give headaches. Lecturers, we've never kept them; all I can say is that they were, except in the Pen's infancy, outnumbered by the poets of gentle demeanor and fragile soul, or fragile demeanor and gentle soul, and the Pen bleeds at the persona-less pain of an ill opinion, even and especially the ones which began this post. Someone toss a gnome up there to keep the poster amused while I collect my wandering thoughts. Damn, no use. [EDIT: Excess spaces. Sticky keyboard.]

. . .the cabaret singer on stage stooped and took a folded card from the front row of the audience. "Helllllooho tonight," she crooned, unfolding the note, "and please give a warm welcome to the Knight of Lilliput. . .'your time has come'. . .Oh bother." The cabaret singer polymorphed back into a pint-sized dragon (elsewhere, Wyvern experienced a gusher nosebleed, soaking and ruining a pile of free documents and one travel agent portalfolio) as the patrons dove for cover. A few brave penguins fell back behind an overturned table and hastily assembled a(n). . .

"Oh, of course, it's an elderly duty. I'll instruct Gryphon how not to disturb you, in the instant after I learn how to manipulate time so I can go into the past, in the instant after I learn advanced planar communications, in the instant after I've finished this conversation." Tzimfemme spoke calmly, and took care not to tick off the points on her fingers as she spoke; even so, she braced herself (as solidly as Henrika) for the reactions to a perceived impertinence. This was old ground. Nonetheless, when the backlash came, the naked mage didn't comprehend a single word. The connection between herself and the Dreamer turned storm-purple, and Tzimfemme at first set her feet and let that riptide pour around her. Her exclusion tilted on one toe and became his inclusion, spun around in the riptide, paradox dancing. . . With clinical detachment, he watched her body elongate and lighten before she tumbled into the portal wall. ***** Sweetcherrie awoke with a start to a white world. The whiteness peeled away from her face, and her hair flew into the gap. Gryphon shouted to be heard over the whistling wind, "Sweetcherrie! Are you all right?" He spread one wing along her right side, and her hair fell back down in the sheltered air. Gryphon dipped his beak and delicately picked the strands of hair away from her face. From close range, she wondered what had caused the parallel, diagonal scratches on the long curve of his beak, and the chipped edges where the scratches ended. Inbi-paper whipped around in the wind until she felt herself be wrapped around a stalactite. It stung, and she whimpered as the cloak scratched against her tenderized skin. "Hello?" she heard, echoed faintly through the limestone. "Is anyone out there?" said the voice, too faint for ears to hear, if they were not pressed to the stone. The screams might have been the sound of the storm itself, whistling through the tunnels, but the storm did not echo in the stone. "Why. . ." asked the stalactite, so soft that Inbi-paper could barely hear it, "why now?" The cave trembled. Shards of stalactites, needle-pointed, rained down from the ceiling. Gryphon arced both wings over Sweetcherrie and ducked his head sideways in that safe space. ***** Jechum floats in... I'm not here. "Yes, you are. I'm looking right at you." I haven't appeared in this story arc yet. Therefore whatever you are seeing cannot be me. Jechum floats out... Mira turned to the others for confirmation. "Who was that?" "It sounded like Jechum, from what you were saying," Gyrfalcon replied, without taking his eyes off of the monitors. Knight, absorbed in plotting the vessel's trajectory on a notepad, had appeared not to notice the conversation. "Didn't you recognize the other voice?" pleaded Mira. "What other voice?" Daryl hid a grin behind the tip of his tail. ***** Cyril watched the silvery beast, only visible when a lightning flash reflected its hide, gallop along the tops of the lower cloud bank. It cast a steady, long-winged, wrong-shaped shadow upwards to the base of the higher clouds when it leaped from the clouds and crashed into the earth. The ground quivered from the impact. ***** The Dreamer's gust was self-contained, and Tzimfemme could not celebrate for long. She tripped and thudded forehead-first into a pile of old, orange pine needles. "Ouch," remarked the naked mage, pushing herself to her feet and feeling the welts on her forehead. Bits of fallen bark fell out of her braids as she looked around and the compulsion to race returned. "Oh, this place. . ." She breathed deeply, trying to smell the sea, but only caught the dusty scent of mouldering pine needles, desiccated bodies, and a trace of artificial bubble-gum flavor; she squinted through the haze of trunks, little more than upright twigs, looking for a gap wide enough to pass through. A branch bowed downward far overhead, then recoiled, showering down light green needles and a sprinkling of powdered sugar. ***** Vlad awoke on his back, dizzy, trying to remember why he was there and why the world was thick and monochrome. Far overhead, some disturbance showed itself in the empty air: a tiny figure, moving like a squirrel but not proportioned like one, and too purple to be a squirrel also. It bounced onto a thicker strand of colorlessness and hopped in place, shouting down to him unintelligibly and pointing towards the ground, some distance away. He groaned, lost consciousness again, and faded away moments before Tzimfemme's left foot struck through where his body had been. ***** Patham heard distant footsteps in the fog, but as soon as he turned towards them, he had to leap out of Tzimfemme's path. As she ran past, the fog thinned and revealed the pines, but no one else. "Wait!" he yelled after the naked mage, and she halted, but didn't acknowledge him. Instead, she tipped back her head--bits of foam flew away as she gasped for breath--and blasted out an undulating, hungry howl. He stopped cold when he heard the answering yowl of a territorial cat. "Hah!" she remarked, "I knew there'd be another one on this hunt," whipped around a cluster of older trees, and loped further into the forest. Patham looked back over his shoulder at the approaching fog, then looked forward, swallowed, and followed Tzimfemme over the springy ground. Between one footfall and the next, the ground changed. The slender pine trunks coalesced into a few fat, twisted trunks isolated from one another, surrounded by strips of their own light gray bark and heaps of leaves, and sounds from a dozen animals broke into the clearing. He stepped on a prickled, round seed pod and fell flat on his hands in the broad leaves; fortunately, Tzimfemme stopped also and tilted an ear towards the sky. While he scrambled to his feet and massaged his forearms, the animals' sounds almost became voices, but the naked mage howled again and they fell silent. She looked back at him and he recoiled from her glazed eyes. "Shapeshifters, hunting," burst out from her lips, along with more foam. "I hunt here. They will not," she struggled to say, and her foot pawed at the leaves and stunted grass. "Come!" She sprinted now, and Patham's lungs were tight in his chest. These trees released some pollen into the air which his body did not like. He could no longer keep her in sight, but followed the path of churned leaves and disturbed, fine soil. ***** "Ha!" shouted the naked mage, pulling Mynx up and out of her cloak by the scruff of her neck. Tanuchan ran forward to intervene, but stopped and gagged at the scent of day-old blood and gut-wounds spilling from the area. Mynx's paws were soaked and the fur stood up in stiff cowlicks. Not too far away, Vincent sank back down to his knees with the point of his longsword in the soil, and looked around blankly before resting his forehead against the hilt and beginning a melancholy prayer. "What's his name, what's his name!" Tzimfemme chanted at Mynx's face. "Let me go!" Mynx snarled, "I don't know what you're talking about!" "Ha! Out on the wild hunt and you don't know what I'm talking about!" she echoed. "I'm out here because I ran a man to his death because I wanted to keep that sin off of a sinful man! There's my great, stinking secret! Now cough up yours!" Tzimfemme's last sentence came out in gasps as Mynx fought with all her limbs to break free. Tanuchan sniffed to clear her nostrils, a wolf's instinct in a human form, and paced around the outside of the wrestling match. ::What happened? The thread nearly broke!:: ::Mynx cried out, then someone else found us. They're fighting!:: Leaves shot in all directions as one or the other of them lost her footing and they both fell. Tanuchan's nightmare wavered, and the pine forest flickered around the scene for a few moments, then the sycamores returned as Mynx growled, "I don't have any secrets!" and cuffed Tzimfemme on the side of her head with the last word. The naked mage fell away and leered at Mynx while rolling to all fours, the lines of her body shifting almost all the way back to the human-faced pooka. Tzimfemme howled; Mynx fought with her face, lost, and yowled. The silver color and the inhuman features drained away from Tzimfemme and wriggled into the soil, where they slipped into the line of mindspeech and solidified it. The naked mage squatted on her hams and looked around at the other three people, still with that leering smile. "Well," she sniffed, "welcome to purgatory. Question becomes, why in blazes did Gryphon and Sweetcherrie decide to build one?"

(Extended from PM with Knight) Tzimfemme approached the booth with a block of fresh chocolate in her hands. Patham had reverted to owl form and perched on the sign, swiveling his head in all directions to spy possible customers. Knight had taken Wyvern's seat, cautiously, and wore a light scarf wrapped around his neck like a WWI flying ace. She couldn't see Wyvern some distance away, towing a smoking pie tin over to the Kissy-Wissy Snookums Pie booth, despite frantic earsignals from Rydia. The naked mage set the block onto the table, laid a fingertip atop it, and spoke to Knight. "I won't say this properly the first time. Ask questions if you have to," she began. "The AARKaSL is more than an object. When you give it away, you're giving away a part of yourself--like Brute, a bit diminished without his Decanter." Knight leaned forward and watched the chocolate melt away from under Tzimfemme's roving fingertip. "He's still Brute," he disagreed. "He lost something once Wyvern took his identifying object. . .this would be so much easier to explain if you hadn't been on the AoD side of things, by the way. . ." Tzimfemme drilled too deeply into the rough figure and patched the chocolate by kneading it with her thumbs. "You'll need something new to add depth to your persona. Stories. Legends. Worship." "Worship?" Knight echoed. "Sweet Jesus. . ." The naked mage muttered a curse. "Metaphors! I'm sorry, Knight, I've become a cleric, I talk that way--" She lifted her eyes away from the blurry sculpture and fixed them on Knight. He, in turn, had stopped watching her and was now studying the featureless replica of himself. "No metaphors, now. You frighten me, Knight, not because you have done anything frightening, but because you have no persona. You picked yourself out of--there--and implanted yourself into our world. . ." "I don't see any reason why I should have a persona," replied Knight evenly. Tzimfemme's skin turned pale all over and her hands froze. "You people, even the ones of you who do distort things about yourself, are some of the very few friends I have. I feel it almost necessary to be who I am. Considering I also like who I am. . .why should I hide it?" Tzimfemme's fingers convulsed around the chocolate as she listened to his stories, adding details. The muscles of the figurine's back, strong but not defined, shifted position to carry absent wings. One arm crooked and held a large bottle, suggested by cutting out the curves which would have rested against his body, and a minuscule dark chocolate dreadnought rested in the hollow. Patches on the exposed skin grew smooth, like scars, except for two cuts under the eyes which directed the chocolate miniature's gaze out towards the world. When all that had been done, the surface of the chocolate steamed like oven-fresh bread, and turned shiny. Tzimfemme tapped her fingernail on the figurine's close-cropped hair without denting it. "It's solid," she murmured, "you're solid. What's more, this is something that can be shown around to other people here, it's proof, it's a witnessing. . . .Is it enough for the AARKaSL?" ". . .Wyvern bought it already," Knight said slowly. "HE DID WHAT?" "He's going over to that booth," continued Knight, pointing at the Kissy-Wissy Snookums Pie sign. Tzimfemme swiveled her head to follow the pointing, and croaked with dismay. "Dear gods. . .he didn't. . .he can't. . .Knight, forgive me but I have to leave, right now," gasped the naked mage, with the last bit shouted over her shoulder as she sprinted over to the incipient disaster.

Tzimfemme, supporting an unpolished chocolate figurine of Knight, reads the placards for procrastination's sake. She reads Falcon's form letter, then Katzaniel's form reply, shifts her eyes to look at Falcon, swivels them the other way to study Katzaniel. Then the naked mage walks a discreet distance away, sits down on an empty pedestal, and laughs until her nipples shake.

Check the "Sent Items" folder of your private messages, if you click that button when you send messages.