A Not So Sober Truth (Ophelia)

[Lion]

Ginzu took his time striding down the path of the forest.  It had been months since he ventured out into the woods in the afternoon because, frankly, he liked the atmosphere offered by the city.  The best place of all was the bar of course.  There you could get a drink and have a chat with strangers and learn the beat of city, the goings-on and such.  It was also there were one could get a hot meal and place to sleep in addition to the company and drink.  Now, there ought to be no misunderstanding here.  True he loved the talkative atmosphere bars had to offer but sometimes he needed the peace and quiet only nature could provide.  And that was when the was thankful the forest was so near.

He had been walked for little more than an hour or so into the woods, bringing little with him save for a few bites of food and his calabash of course.  He'd die before he'd ever forget that.  There wasn't exactly any telling what he was looking for; mostly likely it was just that he wanted to go for a walk.  And thus he dragged his hunched, ape-like form into the woods to feel the atmosphere of the forest around him.  To the surprise of many others, getting around was far easier than they would have assumed.  Ginzu could travel and move like a sighted man despite that fact that he was blind as a bat (maybe blinder).

It was a strange sight to see a hunched-back man trudging through the woods in the blaze of the late afternoon.  But after a moment, Ginzu decided to have a try at walking straight-backed if his body could muster it.  Though the majority of his muscles had atrophied long ago, he was still capable of moving in the most surprising manners.  But walking erect was one of the few tasks he found exceedingly difficult to perform.  That, however, did nothing to deter his efforts.  He paused for a moment, placing a hand against the trunk of a nearby tree for support, and proceeded to stand up straight.  A few cracklings of his spine later and a groan caused by stinging pain, Ginzu eventually stood upright, to his full length of five foot ten.

"Gah!" he said to no one in particular. "I can't wait to finally be rid of this body.  Eh...maybe someone passing through will have a rope I can hang myself with..."  And with that he let go of the support of his legs and slumped to the ground like a bag of bones.  Pulling the drinking gourd from around his neck and shoulder, he uncorked the top and tossed the liquor that sloshed within into his mouth.  If he couldn't die right now, he might as well get drunk.

[Anonymous]

Nasrin's ears pricked, her eyes rolling from the leaves above her to the branches below her until they settled upon the ground. She sat with legs dangling idly upon a high bow of an old dying oak and listened as a foreign touch shivered up its trunk and a crackling noise arose from below. The sound brought images of chafing sticks and of creaking doors muffled under a great wool blanket to her mind.

The ghostly girl-thing raised her brow and lifted herself up onto her palms as she leaned forward for a better look at the source of the relative commotion, hovering less than an inch above the bark of the tree that nipped at the pale fabric wrapped about her. She slipped off the branch and onto its lower counterpart as if she were gliding atop an invisible layer of ice, curling around the new perch until she hung upside-down no more than five feet upwind of the stranger with nothing much to announce her but a mild, windy waft through the hollow of the tree. As she dangled like a rag doll, her hair floated shyly about her face rather than follow suit with her spindly limbs.

'Gah!'

Rin twitched at the exclamation, her fingernails finding her mouth. A smile crept across her lips as her eyes trailed over the stranger, amused maybe too easily by the quirk of the angle and the novel peculiarity of what she'd found. An extraordinarily lanky figure with bandaged eyes, wiry and scarred like the branches of her sickly tree.

'I can't wait to finally be rid of this body. Eh...maybe someone passing through will have a rope I can hang myself with...'

The manner in which he moved and stretched his bony form reminded her of a clock, so old that it had grown a machine's soul, always readjusting its cogs and painstakingly pivoting its own pendulum despite itself.

"Hang yourself?" She questioned brightly and suddenly over the sloshing of the man's drink. The nymph's face lit up at the mention of hanging. 'How coincidental!' she thought delightedly as she peered down at him, feeling as if she had been invited into a private joke.

[Lion]

The wine within the calabash poured into Ginzu's mouth like a serene waterfall, one clear-cut flow of liquor.  It wasn't overtly strong like the other stuff he was used to ingesting but what he brought with him was sufficient for his short time in the forest.  He didn't hear anything approach from above, only what he thought to be the rustling of the leaves from the wind.  Instead, all his mind focused on was enjoying the taste of the wine that stung down his throat.  It was a nice differentiation and slowly a numbing dispersed through out the rest of his body.  Now this was bliss!

Crossing his legs in front of him in an X formation, he relaxed against the tree and nearly jumped when the voice of someone nearby.  Immediately, what would have been a continuous stream of wine pouring into his mouth became a slobbering mess along his neck and shoulders.  What the! he thought with brows furrowed in sudden irritation.  He found it strange that the voice was coming from right above his head.

As if he could see, his head turned in the direction of the voice he figured to be female and exclaimed, "Who the—!" before pivoting on his hips and scurrying a few feet away as if to have a better vantage point.  "Eh, so you were spying on me eh?  Can't a man have a drink in peace?"

These were rhetorical questions of course and he didn't expect her to answer them, though he would be rather surprised if she did.  He corked the calabash and put the rope back around his neck.  His haunches fell to the ground and he sat cross-legged once more, using his hearing to accurately pin his face in her direction. "Who are you and why is 'hanging' thing such a coincidence?"