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Imperfection (Xala)

Started by Cobalt, June 06, 2015, 02:44:20 AM

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Cobalt

Just curious. What was curiosity without the pursuit of anything in particular? Xala were giving her a line, Zea was fairly sure, but that was all right. When Xala were ready to admit to themselves that they wanted her help, then they'd come and present her with this fascinating problem and she could pick around at the seams of their souls.

That would be a good day.

"I'm glad! It's good for waking up and staying alert, though it's not quite as intense as coffee or coca."

She was still watching Xala carefully, watching for signs that they were at all in conflict over what to say or how to move. If they felt separate but could cooperatively run the body... that must mean that the borders between them were at least a little blurred. Zea had never been able to share her body with anything, not without some degree of resentment or a little bit of a power struggle. Not since she was a kid anyway, but then she'd just been a kid. Zea had been easier to push around then, for a spirit sufficiently motivated.

Perhaps Xala had an arrangement that was more harmonious. Fascinating. Zea couldn't imagine ever trusting another soul so much, enough that becoming one entity would be anything short of a nightmare. How very odd.

Draconian

A smile and she finished off her second cup, "We mostly drink water. We're rarely with civilization. You'd be surprise at how many interesting creatures live in remote locations." The tone of voice implied that Zea, in fact, would not be surprised. The lack of questions still surprised her but she kept quiet and gave a shiver when she felt Tonguebird ruffle it's feathers at her neck.

"On our next outing, is there anything you'd like us to find in particular?" A smile on her face and she kept her hands on her lap and her back straight. It would be bad to be rude now, of all times.

Cobalt

Tonguebird was getting comfortable. What a horrible little thing, getting all over Xala's skin. Zea liked such creatures better when they were dead. What if it defecated? Birds did that, just... all the time. Live birds did, anyway. Dead ones just occasionally flaked or oozed, which Zea found far more manageable.

"Just the usual. Tough hides, sturdy jaws, spines, poison, blah blah blah."

The usual. Zea's usual.

"We have tanners here but their workspace smells bad even by my standards, so I'd much rather just get the stuff fresh and have an entropy specialist stop it from decaying."

Xala looked... they looked fine. How were they so damned comfortable?

Draconian

The usual. 

Xala nodded and tilted her head. Yeah, those were words. "Magic is beyond us," She gave a wave of her hand and smiled. "Though, being able to control fire would be very useful." She folded her arms over her chest and glared off at nothing, "We can just blow it out. How useful is that?" Not interested in Zea she leaned in. "What's it called?" She indicated to the critter in her shirt, "what you made him with."

Cobalt

Blowing fire was actually quite useful, outside of Thanatos. In places where they didn't care about what impact they had on their local environment, Xala could be a smith, or a glassblower, or a baker, or run a crematorium. Probably some other stuff as well. A chef?

"The base is a sunbird. The legs are from a tree lizard. The tongues are just from tree frogs. They're all pretty common and mundane taken individually." Zea overstated a grimace for comedic effect, miming embarrassment. "I just... kind of got into my cups the other night and realized they were all similar sizes... one thing led to another..."

Things happened. Tonguebird happened.

Draconian

Xala listened with interest and just smiled, giving a soft chuckle. "We meant the magic. It was magic, right?" She made an attempt to look over her shoulder at Tonguebird but she couldn't quite turn her head that far.  "Tonguebird is perfect. It's like you made him for us without knowing it!" A grin and while Zea wasn't seemingly too pleased with the spider eating monster, Xala was quite content with it.

Cobalt

The priestess nodded her confirmation that she'd used magic to make the grafts. It was typically easier and cleaner to just pinch everything together than to bother with sutures and cauterization and probable gangrene and eventual death. Just squish things together and move on, done. Usually she didn't have anybody get this excited about it, though...

Zea stared dubiously at Tonguebird, looking between it and Xala. She didn't see it. But whatever. Most people didn't get what she was into either, so maybe it was just one of those things that nobody could understand about anybody else.

"Glad you're happy. I don't know how long its base organisms tend to live or how that'll impact its lifespan, but if you get really attached you could probably find someone to reanimate its remains."

Draconian

"Re..." Xala paused, frowning for a moment, trying to process this information. Oh. She shook her head, "It's... All good. If Tonguebird passes away we'll send it on it's way." The idea of having a little reanimated corpse bird lizard was a little too weird for even her.  As if on cue, Tonguebird meandered over her shoulder, clinging to her coat and giving Zea the look only a beady eyed bird lizard could.

"May we ask how you became interested in..." She looked at Tonguebird, trying to find a good word for what it was, "Creating creatures?"

Cobalt

So that was a definite no on the reanimation. To each their own, Zea supposed. Seemed like a waste, but Tonguebird belonged to Xala now so whatever.

"I don't know, I guess..."

This wasn't the angle people usually took when inquiring about Zea's work. Nobody really cared why her interests and values were what they were; they just wanted to make the minimum amount of polite conversation before fleeing at the earliest opportunity to talk to someone who had never watched a human heart beating. Now that she was a priestess it'd be rude to do elsewise, but hell. Here was Xala. What did they know about rude?

"...I just see ways things could be better, and then I can't really unsee them. My intention is to build a better body for mortal souls to inhabit, since these ones--" Zea laid her hand on her chest below her throat. "--are great, but have a lot of room for improvement. They fall apart just from having been alive too long."

Draconian

"We're not human," she motioned to the scales on her face. To her eyes. The strange tattoos on her face that weren't even actually tattoos. Xala licked her lips, pondering for a moment before she leaned forward on the table, looking Zea over. "Do you intend to become immortal?" Xala looked her over, finding the revelation of someone wanting to not be human interesting.

There was a while in her life when the twins had wanted to be human. There wouldn't have been such a tragic mess if they had been. "You know, an elf would be good for something like that. Those things live for ages."

Cobalt

Zea grinned, and then chuckled, at the notion of just pulling on an elf body like a new sock or glove or sleeve. What the elf was supposed to do then, she supposed Xala was not really intending to help decide.

"They do. It's not really a large scale solution, though." Zea leaned back on her hands again and tilted her head so that her cheek was resting on her shoulder. It left her looking at Xala from a sort of frozen shrug. "At that rate I might as well just kill every human except myself and then forcibly colonize those regions with elves, since all those human bodies would die off anyway." It was the most direct path, right? "I want to fix us. You know? I don't mean being entirely impervious to anything the world might throw at us, but we've been dying of old age and infected hangnails and falling off of tall things for so long, and it's time to grow up and take a little responsibility for ourselves. So I guess that's what I'm trying to do."

Draconian

While Zea was leaned back, Xala was leaned forward with Tonguebird crawling up and down her arm while she spoke. "All species have their fall backs." Xala started, "We're young, maybe younger than you?" She shrugged, "We're from a very small tribe in the Thunderblacks. Eventually, they turn into a sort of... Dragon. We eventually learn to mimic this form, simply because there are so many humans," Xala pursed her lips. "We're not human. In anything more than appearance, but you're so numerous we learn to look like you as a safety measure." Her eyebrows went up and she smiled, "We would say that's a good trait. There are many of you, simply because you pass away so easily. There aren't many of us."

Xala pondered for a moment, "We would like to be human." She smiled, "Far easier that way."

Cobalt

Rare draconic species. Zea was talking to a representative of a rare draconic species that could potentially merge multiple individuals into a single one. They could definitely camouflage themselves as humans and eventually would go--sort of--full dragon.

What an interesting specimen.

"Yeah, blending in can be useful. Also being able to use ladders and chairs. I don't know how many limbs you normally have or how big, but human architecture doesn't leave much room for other body types."

Zea hadn't expected to be anybody's ideal form, except perhaps for a few forms of undead or people laboring under other troublesome curses. There simply were too many design flaws. Then again, there had to be a reason Zea had been given these insights and not everybody else. Zea was the one who was supposed to do something about them. Xala... Xala doubtless had some other purpose.

"And we get everywhere, so I suspect human architecture is kind of ubiquitous."

Zea tried to picture a centaur living in a traditional Thanati elevated house. No part of it made sense.

Draconian

There was a kind smile and she listened, tilting her head. Zea was ... Different. Very educated. Very... Well, Xala could barely read, so she was even sort of amazed they were having a decent conversation after the purchase of Tonguebird. "We're as big as we're going to get." Xala chuckled, "We're the odd one out of the tribe, we won't be changing." And she'd accepted that. Sort of. Not really at all. There was no fixing it now though, and she'd grow to accept it. Someday. Maaaybe.

She shrugged, "You worry about things no one else does, don't you?"

Cobalt

So Xala weren't just rare. They were unique. As interesting as that was for Zea, it lent some context to Xala's assertion that being human might make for an easier life. Being interesting to Zea was not the same thing as having anybody to relate to, anybody whose life might take a similar path. Being interesting to Zea was frequently somewhat cold comfort for everybody else in the world.

"Ha!" Zea tilted her head back to grin briefly at the ceiling. "Sure does seem that way sometimes."

Thunderblacks, though. Too bad Zea's mother was some kind of incurious and savage beast in rut; it might have been nice to ask someone from the plains what Xala's tribe was really like. "Is the double-person thing common for your tribe? I've never heard of it outside of possession, but you're also the first person I've met from the Thunderblacks. Or, y'know." Zea winced. "Pair of people. Sorry."

Draconian

"Well, someone has to worry about things no one else does." Xala nodded, trying to provide some small comfort. Clasping her hands together on the table she watched Zea and blinked at the question. She frowned for a moment, trying to think of how to explain it. "It's not common." She started, looking up at the ceiling before down at the table.

"We're not really... A pair." Xala pursed her lips, trying to think of how to explain it. "It's... What was a soul torn in two but... In us it's... Just one." Which was the super weird part. "We remember two of everything until we were merged." she tried to smile, but mostly came out as a confused smirk, "We were a pair of people. Now we're... One person... But... We don't really like it. So..." Xala tapped at the table, "We haven't gotten used to it yet."

Cobalt

Zea let the air out of her lungs through loose lips in resignation. This was a shitty fate on a level that she couldn't quite get her head around. Certainly she was used to a certain amount of noise, but any cohabitation of her body had been temporary. She wouldn't have enjoyed being stuck that way, but then again...

...she hadn't liked that spirit very much.

Maybe Xala liked theirs--hers? each other?--a little better.

"How'd you get along before? I've had..." Zea swallowed, unused to mentioning this even euphemistically. "...some uninvited sharing happen myself, but I suspect yours is different."

Draconian

How did they get along before?

Badly. Xala remembered herself when she was the two girls. The twins. The fights they'd get into. The anger. "We didn't." She chuckled, tilting her head. "We weren't whole as two people. It made us angry. We were twins, we were mirrors." She looked down at her hands, giving them a flex like she was still not used to seeing just one pair.

"It's just... One now." Which was odd to admit, "But we were two people for so long..." Her voice went soft, "It feels like I'm throwing my twin sister away when we don't talk... Like we do." Xala paused and tilted her head, "Ours is much different. We were one soul with two bodies and now we're one with one body but two sets of memories." Yeah, Xala frowned looking Zea over.

"Uninvited guests? That's unfortunate. We've never had to deal with t--- Wait." She sat up straight, staring at Zea, "Ghosts? Of people?" She frowned, not liking the idea of those. "We don't like things when we can't simply... Beat them up."

Cobalt

This all sounded really really fucked up. Inima's clit, Zea'd never heard of such a fucking thing. What a hideous situation. Being properly one wouldn't solve all that, but neither would splitting back to two. It was just probably going to be horribly shitty to be Xala forever.

She blinked away this brief moment of perspective and gave a single shocked bark of laughter.

"They cause more trouble outside Thanatos than here. Here we tend to take care of them well enough that they don't fall apart and get too deranged. The only ones here I've had trouble with are the ones that came with us when we moved, but they don't tend to mess with me anymore. You get any ghost problems, write me, yeah?"

Was Zea seriously offering this? She really was. And what was even more bizarre, she meant it. Weird.

"They don't know what the hell to do about ghosts on the mainland. Like ignoring them will just make them go away. Like dead people have anywhere to go anyway, right?"

Draconian

Xala made a face and nodded, "We'll write you." Or she'd try. Really hard. Maybe manage a few words before just scribbling the words ghost and how she thought she spelled her name. There was some sort of repeating letter in there, she was sure. Maybe she'd just sing a song to a bird and send it to Zea, that was more common for her. Except not, Xala couldn't remember the last time she'd sent a message that way.

"Sure they have somewhere to go," Xala smiled and then dead panned, "Away from me. We don't like ghosts. Too..." She wiggled her fingers as Tonguebird crawled onto the back of her hand to stare at Zea with it's beady little eyes, "Spooky." Xala didn't do spooky. Give her an impossible challenge or some strangely large thing to climb.

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