this isn't mischief
The meadow has been his ‘home’ (although he doesn’t call anywhere home; although the only place he might consider home to be the Valley; although it’s really just the place he spends his days for the time being) since coming back to Beqanna. With the bustle of conversation and constant melody of sound (birds chirping, wind moving, trees shaking, friends talking), there is a constant undertone of vivid, immortal life. It gives him much to do and many things to think about, but it also lulls him to sleep. He finds himself in the gentle embrace of the place between asleep and awake (where the world exists and doesn’t, where time is a fickle thing, where sound and movement and touch and taste and smell are both a reality and an illusion).
At first, the sway of the meadow is his bedtime lullaby. But quickly, the sounds of life are drowned by the impossibly obvious sound of nothing. The red of his eyelids outlined by the sun fades into the deep black of darkness. The sound of a voice startles him away from the faint line between sleep and wake (he spins away dramatically, sharply gasping as he does so). But he finds, instead of the meadow (with its ocean of voices, rainbow of colors and light, and abundance of different vague smells) he finds the inside of an enclosed space (with the sound of a voice echoing off the walls, the inky black of shadows mingling with the light from some sort of miniature sun above his head, and the faint but sure scents of dust and mold and age).
The voice speaks of playing and his crooked lips curl into a sneer (playing means games and games are his favorite past-time). It says the word ‘mansion’ and he glances around. Bruised eyes (blue and black, blue and white) gaze around. He is in a box, with tall walls rising around his body and something dark covering the sky. Aside from the two doors facing him, there are no exits or entrances. His brow furrows together, wondering briefly how he got here, before the voice continues.
A creeping feeling skitters across his skin. It starts at his legs and tingles all the way up to the very tips of his ears and end of his tail. The feeling writhes against his body (and his innards give a dramatic twist, already conforming to the programming of his new body), causing him to groan. His bones snap (but the feeling is surprisingly euphoric, rather than painful) and his eyesight vanishes (only to be replaced with a different sort of sight, one that causes him to blink the stars away until it is resumed comfortably).
When the crawling feeling vanishes, he finds himself standing in an awkwardly different position. The trickster tries to call upon his tricks, but no dark, lingering fingers rush to move beneath his power (nor do the sandstorms begin to curl around his two feet). His mind swims, suddenly, swamped with the sudden sabotage of words that flood into it. Mansion, walls, ceiling, light, door, floor, spider-web, hands, fingers, feet, jeans – foreign, dangerous-sounding words. The trickster glances down, once, to check over his body. A frame surprisingly close to the one he designed for the pink queen (although decorated with a pair of black jeans, a black t-shirt, a dark green zip-up hoodie, and sneakers).
The voice speaks about the doors and his eyes (eyes which remain the same eerie combination of blue and black in the right, blue and white in the left) dance toward them. The first is a red door (and he takes notice of the liquid dripping from its seams, as if there might be something wet and cold – or warm – on the other side). The second door is black (faint light glows from behind it, hinting to something that might be possibly angelic). He considers his choices carefully but quickly. He’s had his fair share of faeries messing with his mind and he knows the urgency of these scenes. Pick quickly and deal with the consequences later.
The black door’s handle creaks as he turns it and the light behind it blinds him for a moment. The trickster steps through the door blindly, but soon after the momentary blindness disappears. When he turns (he hadn’t heard the door click shut, nor the feeling of it swishing closed behind him) he sees nothing but the emptiness of a cracked, eroding road. A throat is cleared, causing the trickster to shift his gaze behind him again. The sight of a woman startles him (her blonde hair is pulled back into a braid streaked with dirt, her outfit consists of a baggy disarray of clothing, and her eyes are a startling color of fierce liquid gold) and he takes a step back.
“Here, Lokii. You’re going to need something after going through a change like that.” She grabs his hand (her hand is rough but warm, while his are ice cold and silky soft) and places something smooth and halved in his hand. When he looks down, he doesn’t know what he’s looking at but the word comes immediately to him. Deviled egg. His stomach suddenly gives a loud cry for substance and the woman’s head jerks around, scanning the decrypted world around them (almost as if she were watching for something; almost as if she were looking to see if someone – or something – had heard). Although the deviled egg is small, it provides just enough energy to calm his seething belly.
The trickster raises his head, looking toward the woman. “Where are we?” he asks (and his voice comes out surprisingly the same, although perhaps less throaty than before). The woman grabs his hand again, gold eyes glancing around sharply and pointedly. “Never mind that. You can call me Pip. We need to hurry. We have a safe – for the time” – at this she rolls her eyes dramatically and a weary smile ghosts her lips – “location to get you, but it won’t last long. Follow me.”
Faster than he thought possible, the blonde drags him toward a decaying building just off the potholed road. A car (low to the ground, one wheel popped and sinking, and all the doors wide open as if people had fled) sits depressingly not far off from the entrance to the building. Rather than using the front door, like the trickster would have expected, the woman crawls through a side window and drags him in after her. Unbalanced, the trickster lands in a heap on the ground. A loud, belly laugh sounds nearby and he looks up quickly.
“This is the little squirt Missy sent us to fetch and put our lives in danger for?” The belly laugh belongs to another girl, only this one is younger. However, the determination and years-beyond her wisdom is seen in her light yellow eyes (eyes that reflect the other woman’s golden ones). “He’s kinda cute, though, Pip. Wouldn’t you say? Those high, sharp cheekbones…” A dreamy sound takes over the girl’s voice as the trickster rises to his feet. The golden-eyed beauty punches the other abruptly in the arm with a, “Shut up.”
The trickster smirks at the sound of being called cute and glances between the two. “Who are you and where am I?” he repeats. Aside from a chair in the corner and one backpack, the room is dustily unoccupied. The girl giggles, and then glances outside. The trickster watches as her face dramatically sobers. “Pip, they’re here.” A groan escapes the blonde’s mouth before she hands the younger girl the backpack and then shoves the door down with a kick of her leg. Bruised eyes glance out the window to find a horde of ash-faced humans racing (sprinting, shoving, knocking others down, running almost at the speed he’s run with four legs) toward their building.
It’s a given that those things are bad and he doesn’t want to be caught by them.
Turning, the trickster runs after the two girls. The pace of running is awkward and clumsy with his new legs, but his body works instinctually to recover. “Hurry! Run faster, Lokii!” The little girl is keeping pace with him, the backpack thumping against her thin shoulders. Her mahogany hair pushes against her rosy ears and cheeks (it’s a startling little detail he notices, but a detail nonetheless) as she runs, moving at a quicker rate than even he. “I’m trying!” he growls, and the sound of glass smashing behind him only encourages his feet to move faster.
“The door is just up these stairs,” the blonde hisses, holding open a door to let the trickster through. The girl struggles after him, but the long run down the hallway seems to have slowed her down and caused the backpack to grow heavier. Even the clumsy, gangly trickster had passed her and she’d ended up only three fourths of the way to the door. The swarms of creatures appear out of the door they escaped from and his heart jumps in his chest. They speed forward and the blonde woman gives an unearthly scream as they reach her at a startling pace.
They can’t rescue her, however. Only about twenty of the creatures are slowed down by the body of living flesh, while the rest come pounding after the open door. Making a quick decision (while the blonde stands frozen and stares at her sister being engulfed by the teeth and tongue and mouth of many hungry creatures), the trickster grabs the woman and pulls her out of the way while slamming the door shut. Using sinewy muscles (and oh, gosh, he’s saving a damsel in distress, even though she’s supposed to be saving him), he heaves her onto his shoulder and races up the stairs faster than he believed possible.
The screech of metal against metal emits from the stairwell as he climbs (his shoulders ache with pain, his chest is tight from lack of air, his legs scream from running). The blonde regains her composure and struggles away, moving to climb the stairs alongside him. “Almost… there,” she pants and the trickster only nods heavily. At the top of the three flights of stairs, a heavy wooden door stairs them down. The pounding of hundreds of feet against the concrete stairs cause the trickster’s fingers to shake. The blonde pulls out a skeleton key from her pocket and inserts it into the door.
Before she can push it open, the trickster shoves it open quickly with his shoulder and drags her in before to closing it behind him, just before the door shakes with the weight of bodies pressing against it.
lokii
this is mayhem
