[open] if you could only see the beast you've made of me

[Fazia]

FAZIA

For a change, Fazia has found herself in the meadow - the lack of water within her eyesight makes her skin crawl but since it is only a mild discomfort she is able to put it into the back of her mind. Discomfort is unimportant when there are other things to focus on - and she is certain now that the seeds of some of her mother’s powers have been left in her and she is eager to test this theory. An experiment is in order - and the meadow is the perfect setting for it.

She initially arrives in the afternoon but the warm sunshine causes a little more than discomfort so she takes refuge in the cool shade of the trees. Typically shunning standing still, Fazia only looks as though she is sedentary. Her mind is racing as her eyes watch the movements of whoever she can see.

Beqanna is home to her and most of the time she does not feel apart from the horses that have lived on this terrestrial plane for generations. Even now, fresh from a trip to the mountain, there is a hazy sense of kinship with them. She does not watch them now to learn of their ways. She is calculating what she is to do next, how she might discover what that seed of power might grow into. It requires a volunteer, certainly. She had already tried all she could to discover the secret on her own or on vegetation, water, earth, and air.

Now to discover what other options there are. She wonders about the type of attention she could most easily attract - and an idea slithers its way into her mind.

She moves from the shelter of the autumn-painted tree when night falls, when she’s relatively certain there are no faces around that had been in the same area when she arrived earlier that day. The gentle pink glow of her body illuminates the autumn-brown of the grass around her as she walks. It is not with her usual smooth gait but with a noticeable limp. A tragic, invisible injury - a trick she had seen performed by a bird, faking weakness to draw a predator away from her nest.

It is a similar trap that Fazia lays out tonight. She wonders whether she will also attract a predator, like the bird, or whether it will be a kinder soul looking to help. Either way she would consider it a success as she grimaces (believing the expression will be exaggerated by her ghoul-like appearance) but otherwise stoicly continues her faltering pace.

open to any!

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife

It crawls, it crawls, it crawls.
Around him, like pressure – like he has sunk underground, deep into some ancient seabed – but especially inside him. Whatever it - it - is that has changed in him, rewritten him. He has been rewritten so many times before, erased and inscribed, but this is stronger. This sinks into his marrow, his veins, his damn molars.

Time doesn’t matter. It has long ceased to matter, Sleaze encapsulated in his own particular immortality. Days crawl and then speed past, he with little awareness of them. He sleeps, when he can. He dreams of many different worlds. He does not know which ones are real and which aren’t.
One of the worlds is a beach. Two children, playing, and then death, coming swift – a foolish accident – and their parents, their kinfolk, demanding answers. Sleaze had given them himself – given them a monster – and then he wakes.
He remembers how one of the children had had strange eyes, strange scales. A thing that belong in the ocean as well as it had in it, though of course this hadn’t saved it, in the end.

He is awake, now, in this world, this meadow. It is real – he thinks. His skin itches with whatever writhes inside him.
He sees her, the limping gait catching his eye as something discordant among the smooth strides of the rest.
She looks, he thinks, like that child. The same strange eyes.
Did he make her? Did she walk out of his dream?
But she is not that child. She doesn’t look like anyone in the mob, either. She has an eerie quality to her, mist shaped into being.
Or, a dream shaped into being.

“Are you real?” he asks.
He isn’t quite sure how he wants her to answer.

Sleaze

@Fazia

[Fazia]

FAZIA

There’s an undeniable flush of satisfaction when Fazia’s trap produces a result. It doesn’t matter if someone would have come over to her anyway - she happily rejoices in the boost that her pride receives at a successful venture. Finally something to break the monotony. She’s working on schooling her features into a sad, pained smile rather than the self-satisfied smirk that desperately wants to be shown when he speaks.

And then Fazia is so surprised by his question that she forgets that she was feigning an injury at all. She straightens herself up, tilting her skull and the hints of face around it, as though another angle might give her a better read on this purple stranger.

A handful of answers flash through her mind - most of them sarcastic, not a small amount are just flat out rude.

She settles on something a little less blunt and feels uncomfortable with the idea of how maybe the tables have turned and now she is the one biting at a piece of bait.

“How would I know?”

@sleaze