20 Thunderbird Lane, MHC #6, Monday Morning

[arboreal_priestess]

"Priestess." The mouse's voice was very soft and right in her ear. "Priestess."

"Mmmwha--?" Verity mumbled, barely conscious. She was exhausted after a weekend of running around with a child's seemingly inexhaustible fount of energy, followed by an evening of sugar and cartoons and--

Something about that scenario nagged at her, but she wasn't quite up to figuring out what it was. And, honestly, she didn't really want to. Because if she figured it out, she'd have to deal with it and these sheets were so nice and soft.

"PRIESTESS!" the mouse shouted, just as Verity drifted off again.

"What?" Verity snapped, cranky and aggravated. "Oh god, is it a holiday I need to be involved in?" And there was no Antimony to foist this off on, either. "Can't it wait until later?" She was whining, she knew. She wasn't proud of that.

"You are not needed," the mouse said calmly, tucking her arms back into her voluminous sleeves. "But the Parade Route goes through your bedroom."

"So?" Verity did not see why this required her to be awake. "Just try to be quiet when you go through."

"Then you do not wish to invoke the rite of Food For Privacy?" the mouse asked. "Very well. I just wished to ascertain that before we began."

"No," Verity said, her brain trying harder to pinpoint that thing that she was forgetting. "Why would I care about that now?"

Cartoons. Candy. And laughing with her new friend--

"We were not certain if your new friend should know of our existence or not." The mouse pointed to the other side of the bed, where another person still lay sleeping.

"Right," Verity said. "Fuck."

[For the one currently there and so much SP!]

Comments

[firstofitskind]

"You know, I really did?" Liam admitted with a grin. "It wasn't something I ever thought I would get to experience, so it was... fun. Especially since I had someone willing to show me the ropes, as it were."

[arboreal_priestess]

"Well, those weren't really the normal ropes," Verity said with a self-conscious laugh. "Most kids don't play hide and seek with pit traps, for examples. Or capture the flag with live steel. Our upbringing was--different."

[firstofitskind]

"Makes sense, considering the family business," Liam nodded. "I remember you asking me if I was armed when we first met," he recalled.

[arboreal_priestess]

"Just with dart guns," Verity said. "We weren't allowed to use live ammo until we were older."

Knives, sure. But guns were more dangerous and their parents felt they needed to be older and have more training before using those regularly.

[firstofitskind]

"Sensible," Liam agreed. "But despite all that, you still knew all the important stuff- like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And cartoons."

[arboreal_priestess]

"If we'd been kids any longer, I would have given you the rundown about other important childhood things," Verity said, amuse, "like how the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus were probably some kind of cryptids and every single clapping game and jump rope song I knew."

[firstofitskind]

"I mean, they could be," Liam mused. "Aren't they supposed to be able to visit millions of children in one night? That'd be hard to pull off even if they somehow had access to ID space..."

[arboreal_priestess]

"ID space?" Verity asked, finishing her coffee. "Also, you want a refill?"

[firstofitskind]

"Please," Liam said, handing over his now-empty cup. "ID space- Interdimensional. Similar to Portalocity, here, I guess. Except it's not used to travel between realities. Just to get from point A to point B very quickly."

[arboreal_priestess]

"Like a tesseract," Verity said, adding the last of the coffee from the pot to his cup. "At least in the children's series that--that you probably never read."

Right.

"Basically, the tesseract let them fold spacetime to you could take a step and fold all the distance between two points."

[firstofitskind]

"Like that," Liam agreed. "There's a Portal network on the ground, but there are also shuttles equipped with ID drives." One of which was currently sitting in the junkyard, because the Taelons were all dead, what did they need it for? "But even with a shuttle, that'd be a lot of stopping and starting for one being to manage in a single night," he said with a grin. And then, because now he was curious; "There's a book series with something like that?" Because Verity was, of course, correct in her assumption that he'd never read it.

[arboreal_priestess]

"Well, in the first book of that series," Verity said. "A Crease in Space. My copy's still sitting at my parent's place back West, read to shreds." She handed his coffee back over and gave him an easy smile. "I wasn't much of a reader growing up, not like my brother Alex, but I did like that series. Mostly, though, I preferred to spend my free time dancing."

[firstofitskind]

"I may have to check it out," Liam mused. Especially now that he had time for things like hobbies. "What sort of dancing?"

[arboreal_priestess]

"Well, when I was a kid, it was anytime I could move to music," Verity said with a grin. "Now that I'm older--well, it's still that, but I specialize in the Argentinian tango."

Enough to possibly make a living at it. Which was why she was here.

[firstofitskind]

"And in my experience, you don't 'specialize' in something unless you're pretty damn good at it, am I right?" Liam guessed.

[arboreal_priestess]

"I am." Verity saw no reason to shy away from it; it was fact. "I'm here to figure out whether it's what I want to do with the resto of my life: dance or cryptozoology."

[firstofitskind]

"And what better place to decide that than an island with its own unique brand of weird shit," Liam said with a grin.

[arboreal_priestess]

"I don't think my folks knew all about this weird shit," Verity said with a snorting laugh. "If my dad knew I was going to turn into a dude one weekend and didn't tell me, we're going to have words."

Her siblings, she could see doing this, absolutely. But her parents? Nahhhh.

...Probably.

"But there are weird cryptids on this island that have never been recorded anywhere. If cryptozoology were a real, like, college degree, I could get tenure on what I'm observing."

[firstofitskind]

"... I don't know how I'd feel about waking up as a different gender," Liam mused. "Though I suppose I'll probably find out eventually."

"Are you reporting back to... your parents, then? Or someone else? About things like the blue deer and whatnot?" he asked, curious.

[arboreal_priestess]

"Oh you will," Verity said with a wry smile. "A kid, a girl, and who knows what else."

Verity hadn't been here a full year yet, so even she couldn't say what the island could pull when it felt like it.

"I'm not really reporting, I guess?" she said. "More like sending home notes every so often. About the teal deer, the alots, even the gremlins." Not that Verity had gotten too close to those, mind. "My dad keeps a field guide that the family has been updating for years. My notes go in there."

[firstofitskind]

"Hopefully you included lots of warnings in any entries you've written about the gremlins," Liam noted dryly. He hadn't gotten too close to any of them either, but he'd seen their effects a few times.

[arboreal_priestess]

"First thing I wrote down," Verity assured him. "I keep putting off trying to find out more about them because it involves actually getting near them and that sounds like a terrible idea."