(2016-12-02) Room With View
Room With View
Summary: Taká has a new roomie, who is a bit of a snake.
Date: 2016-12-02
Related: none
NPCs: none
Scene Runner: NA
Players:
taka..seth..

12-02-2016 11:55:52 PM

Room M13 — METIS DORM — CORAL SPRINGS HIGH

The room is a standard dorm room, though perhaps larger than one would find in a regular college; there is a door in the center of a wall, a window along another above a built-in "ledge", with two desks, one on either side, placed such that the owners would be back-to-back working. A pair of floor-to-ceiling cabinets on either side of the door provide a short "hallway" into the room, opening towards each other.

The window is different from most dorm windows, in that the vista it reveals is not trees, garden, lawn, air. It's a seascape, murky green and lit day and night by some sort of lamp not visible from normal angles that keeps the window from turning into a one-way mirror when the students turn on their room lights. The seascape is itself fairly drab: murky rocks, occasional fish, moderately colorless mud and silt, the filtering down of whatever lives above. The light flickers in the day when the sun is up, but not enough to make it cheerful nor especially visible; the waters of the New England coast are never that transparent. Naturally the window is not made to open.

The room is barely furnished, Spartan. Both beds have been moved together on one side, making a single larger bed. There is no art on the walls, no decorations, only books and some school supplies neatly on one desk. The desk lights and a single overhead light provide the room's illumination.

-=-=-

It's a sprawl worthy of a feline.

Taká is stretched across both beds, wings laid out flat, laboriously copying out the same character over and over. Looks like a lower case 'a' in some spidery script. Above are markings in horizontal and vertical lines; below is more blank paper to practice on.

He sets his stylus down, and reaches over for his mug of tea. A nice quiet evening with his pen, his ink, some paper, and a hot drink. Not a bad way to spend it at all. He takes a thoughtful sip at his mug, and sets it aside again, closely studying the book to his right.

Seth has been informed that since he is now formally a member of Training Team Metis, he has a dorm room selected for him and he has to vacate his current abode in the "unassigned dregs" section. Yay. He is secretly hoping that it's a single; no such luck. He is secretly hoping alternatively that it won't be with one of the many, many uber-dramatic little kids here. Because going to ordinary highschool was bad enough. Supers With Drama … it upsets him.

"Hello?" he says, tapping on the door. Surely someone has informed his possible roomie that he's coming. Right?

Well, if they haven't. He starts to unlock the door with his key. (For anyone watching — he's wearing not-permitted non-uniform clothes. Something a skateboarder might wear1. He's followed by seven very short very squat shadow-goblins, that is, made-of-shadows goblins, each carrying what might be a Rubbermaid crate. And he's carrying a skateboard.)

Well, Taká knew that getting a roommate was a possibility, but he thought he might get some warning — it can only be a new roommate, he reasons, since no one else would have reason to come wandering in with luggage-bearing ghostly minions. Much less have a key.

And that's as far as reason can take him. He says the first reasonably intelligent thing that comes to mind, which is a gasped, "c'Rhys'yw!" Reasonable, maybe, but not of much particular conversational value. So he shakes his head clear and tries again, in strangely accented English: "I… uh… you… who…?" No, not a whole lot more clear, as he struggles to a more or less seated position on the end of the beds, with his wings hanging over the side. And for what it's worth, his current outfit is no more regulation than the intruder's2.

"Hey. I'm Seth Gebsen. Apparently I'm going to be your new roomie," Seth says, tilting his head.

Aaand, this room is NOT big enough. Well, fortunately, that can be fixed. That window though… no. That's a nope.

"Huh. I really hate the view out," he says.

He has the goblins carry the boxes over to a corner by the hopefully unused desk, and stack them there, then he sends them away. By speaking to them in a hissing voice that sounds like someone took a recording of a guy talking Croatian and a white-noise filter and subtracted them from each other. (They vanish into the shadows behind the boxes. That's not concerning at all.)

Seth smiles, not showing fangs, and offers a hand to shake. "New roomie?"

Taká stares stupidly at the offered hand a moment, then shakes his head clear and offers his.

"Apology. I forget that is how you greet. Taká." The accent is clearly on the second syllable. "Taká t'Káeh. And I agree about the view," he says, almost looking over his shoulder but stopping at the last second and then looking away forcefully.

He glances at the beds.

"Ai. I think one of those is yours. Apology. I was not sure I would be… assigned someone."

Seth looks at the beds and at Taka.

"Pleased to meet you, taKA t'Kaeh. And I'm not gonna ask for half of your bed. No way. I don't like to sleep in human form, never know where the legs are supposed to go. So I don't like sleeping on beds. I have a bowl I sleep around. Anyway, I can keep most of my stuff out of your way, if you prefer. But do you need it to always be dark in here?"

Also, though he doesn't ask, he wonders if a bird-related person who speaks English as a second language, is afraid of snakes. Because that would be a bad beginning.

Taká half-smiles.

"One of the two is yours, by right, but if you do not wish it, I will not object to using both. And I have very little… no. Very few possessions, you will not need to stay out of my way. Is that a fair trade?"

Then he looks around, in a little confusion. "Is it dark?" he asks, quite innocently. It may or may not be noticed that he has a very faint red eyeshine, like an owl's.

"No, that's not what I meant. I'm a shadow-mage. If you can sleep OK with a light source in the room, I can make a shadow that I can use to store some of my stuff in, and give us a bit more privacy," Seth says.

His eyes, unlike those of most other animals, do not show any sign of light being reflected at all. He opens one of the containers and begins to take out a complex mess of metal that he assembles into something resembling parts of a tree, and fastens it somehow to the wall that "his" desk is on. It sticks out a foot or so near the bottom, and a yard or so at the top, with various branches and structures that might be good for cats.

"I hope I can get us a wide-screen television. That window is just begging for a giant octopus to come clamp onto it."

Out of another box, he pulls what looks like a Grecian water-jug without handles, about two feet tall, and sets it on his desk. He plugs it into a wall outlet. And the last thing: Inside the jug, a stick-like light that he sets so it hangs from one of the branches, upside-down. It projects a slowly moving yin/yang image on the wall below the "tree".

"Will that be too distracting for you? I can make it go super tiny, or keep it behind my jar…"

"I… uh…" Well, that was well outside of Taká's realm of experience. "No, I think some light won't bother me. It will distract me from the window, at least." Which room fixture he eyes very briefly, but venomously.

He observes the whole process with the box and the jug and the trees and branches with fascination, but not much comprehension. "If I were to ask you what you were doing, it would only confuse me, yes?"

"I hope it would not. What do you think I'm doing?" Seth is doing that thing again where he tries to get other people thinking about things, and it's probably going to be annoying if he doesn't quit it. But it's why the teachers told him he belonged in Metis. And other students. Because it seems to be part of the Metis Thing.

All the "tree" stuff assembled on the wall and ceiling, and a shadow-edge clearly marked, Seth begins picking up boxes and stacking them in the … shadow space? marked out by the moving pattern of light and dark. There aren't that many, after all.

When he's done he reaches across the moving spiral of light and dark and grabs a piece of the shadow and pulls it out from the moving spiral, and stretches it out and covers the window with it. Just a patch of darkness. The window might still be visible behind it if you really look hard.

"Is that better?"

Taká stares uncomprehendingly. "I don't know," he says quite honestly. "I am still trying to understand the normal part of this planet. I have no idea what your rha'thar'yw… apology, your special gifts are since I do not know what is normal yet." He smiles sidelong very slightly. "Although normal seems to be not very normal, based on who I have met so far."

He watches the shadow spread over the window… and then he winces and looks away, shuddering, his feathers bristling. "I… apology, no. It is a wall. It makes the room feel smaller. The underwater view is strange, but it is at least a sense of space."

"Ah, yeah, I was just thinking that myself," Seth says, and pulls the shadow away from the glass, restoring the (ugh) view.

He leans on his desk, and the shadow sheet flows up and over his body then fades in the room light. What it leaves behind is a serpentine creature, four arms, and no legs, and only four feet long. It looks3 like a scaled-down, half-snake Seth with scales on it (pun intended.)

"I shrink so I can hang around without tearing down the walls," he says, in a voice that's only slightly higher pitched.

He reaches, coiling up to grab part of the tree and pulling himself along so he's lying/hanging in it. He moves around a bit, shoving two pieces together which should be together and locked until they click together, and coils around one tree, looking at Taka.

"My gifts are that I'm two-thirds human and three-quarters elemental shadow-serpent. Everything else comes from that."

The view is appalling, but Taká's feathers smooth out. The sense of space is infinitely preferable.

And let's be honest. Taká stares. Jaw hanging open and everything. No fear, just raw surprise. He thought he was ready for about everything this place could throw at him, but he wasn't.

"That… adds to more than one," he says lamely after adding the fractions in his head.

"Yeah, it does, doesn't it?" Seth says, grinning. The fangs are showing now, but as a tinier version of himself, they're cute and not nearly as threatening as when he gets larger.

"It's like when the angles of a triangle add up to more than 180 degrees," he says. That geometry being one of the few "math" things he can express with any coherency.

"I was kidnapped when I was children. Seth of Earth, Sseth of Sombralan. We were taken to a midway dimension and fused into a single new being. It was really mean. It was supposed to cause a war and I was supposed to be an evil jerk. Didn't work that way. Also you're the only one I've told this here, because we're roomies and you deserve to know why I'm not typical Earth Human."

That's an awful lot to absorb, and had Taká ever read 'The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy', he would describe his current state as 'Arthur Dent Mode': blankly letting it all wash over him. Alas, he has yet to crack that particular example of Earth literature, so he's reduced to just blankly letting it wash over him without having a snappy way to refer to it.

Ultimately, what he says is, "I am happy that you are not an evil… tcherk? Whatever that is. I am happy that you are not evil, regardless. If you wish it, I will not tell anyone else. Your secrets are not mine to reveal."

He smiles a little more broadly, and adds, "You are not a typical Earth human, but neither is anyone else here. I am not human at all. I hope this will not trouble you. There is much about this world I still do not know or understand. I hope this will not be awkward for you."

"Jerk. Vocalize the 'tsh' sound. And I'm glad I managed the not-evil part. The other thing, jury is out on how well that worked. Anyway. There's a lot about this world I don't understand either. I couldn't turn to my fully human form until three earth-years ago so I wasn't ever out among people. And I spent time out-of-synch, so I'm actually older than my legal age here."

Seth can't really fix that, but he does sometimes find it frustrating to be treated by adults who don't pay attention, as if he were a "slow learner" or a child.

Nobody here is a typical Earth human. Well, yeah, that's true. Perhaps they should import some of those.

"So where are you from, anyway?"

"My world is called Kyshán, the first colony world," Taká explains. At least this, he knows what he's talking about. "There was an… accident, I think. I was going from Kyshán to the homeworld, to Akiár, and when the ship transitioned to tachyon drive I… ended up here. There seems to have been a mismatch between my rha'thar… apology, my abilities and our interstellar drive and I bounced, I think."

He actually looks at the window, although he seems to be looking past the water. "I do not know where Kyshán or Akiár are from here."

And then his eyes are back in the present, and he looks away from the window and back at his serpentine companion. "Ai. I should warn you. I have been told that people of your world are used to having their thoughts to themselves. I am a telepath. But I cannot reach your mind unless we touch. So I cannot… nnh. It is the wrong word, but I cannot 'hear' your thoughts right now. I will not touch your mind without your permission. I am told most of your people value this privacy."

"First colony world. Star-drives. Huh. Bounced. Do you know if you're in the same universe?"

Seth doesn't actively notice the warning, but he catches it in a bit. The telepathy thing … one of his semi-willing childhood tutors had been a telepath, and a bit unhinged by it. But what Taka said suggest that everyone had it, so he's probably not unhinged. Well. No telepathy today anyway. Too soon.

Taká's eyes go wide. "I… no. I had not thought about that. I do not know if I am in the same universe." He contemplates that a moment. "Does that make me even more lost than I thought he was? I think that's more confusing than just being lost…"

Again, he shakes his head clear. "c'Rhys'yw. Well, if nothing else, I understand what you mean about being older than one seems. At home, I am an adult with my own estate. Here I am a ward of your state, and a pre-university student again. All because I gave my age in our counting and then foolishly corrected it to yours."

"Hm. This might be better, you're getting a more appropriate and focused exposure to earth culture. And they have to take care of you. Hm. Maybe except for the 'in loco parentis' thing . That means 'acting in place of crazy parents', according to one of my snarky tutors when I was growing up… But yeah, I won't be treating you like a child."

Seth slides over the tree and drops down to drape around the urn on his desk, which unsurprisingly seems to be designed for snakes to coil around.

"Why do you sleep on a bed like that? What would you do on your homeworld?"

"There is that," Taká sighs. "Which is not too different from what the t'Káeh did for me at home. If you ever think you are willing to experience the mental contact, I can… ai. Still not the right word. 'Show' you my home on Kyshán."

Taká reflects a moment, then adds, "There are two other things you should know. First, the only wingless people I have ever known have been children. I will try very hard to not talk to you as a child. Please correct me if I do. The second is that it is very unusual to share living space with someone who is not family by blood, or family by choice. Please let me know if I do anything you think is… I was going to say strange, but that is probably too broad. Anything you find uncomfortable."

"I will. And if it helps," and at this, Seth pulls a shadow out of the inside of the urn, shakes it into shape, and lays it on his shoulders, holding it down with the second pair of arms reaching back and up… when he finishes, the semi-solid shadow looks like a pair of wings. Now he has THREE limbs per side.

"This is something I've been working on because flying is awesome and eventually I'm going to figure out how to do it. Also it's a great blanket."

He pauses and looks over at Taka.

"You miss being in contact? I would. That's gotta be very lonely. I'm not comfortable with the idea yet, but I can tell that I will be. Meanwhile, we're family by dictum. And I'm wondering. I took an astronomy class at my last school - they had a planetarium - and one of the things the prof taught us was about they find things in space. Cepheid Variables. They're a special kind of star that have unique traits. Do you know about them?"

"In a very weird way that would probably get me sent to one of the mental redactors," Taká says with a genuine grin, "That does help a lot. It is at least one thing that is familiar. If you have not flown yet, I will be pleased to help you. It has helped keep my mind whole since arriving here, taking the odd flight as high as I can go. Though I think," he adds with something of a connoisseur's air, "your gravity is a little higher than home."

Then he admits, "I do miss mental contact. Not the intense and self-losing sharing of a religious rite, but the simple mind-touches every day. Even the contact with the kirát… apology. With the computer that runs the house, and that is only just enough to qualify as mental contact."

He racks his brain, thinking hard.

"I am sorry. I probably know the star type you are talking about, but not by that name."

"Well, I'm not sure I remember everything clearly," Seth says, "but I have my old texts and if that doesn't work, I can look it up online. But maybe tomorrow when I've got more used to the idea, I can try to remember it better. Or, y'know, when I get my computer I can look it up. Still waiting on that. Maybe I should ask for a giant screen so we can show pictures of forests and things instead of murky underwater blurry fish."

He makes a shadow-whip that he snaps around the dangling shadow-caster, and clicks it twice before drawing the whip back. The light dims to a point where it's not vivid, and might be pleasant in a room where someone was falling asleep.

"I hate to move in and fall asleep so soon but I'm really tired. Don't worry about keeping me awake, but I'm about to fall aslee…" and the voice drifts off. Perhaps if Seth hadn't been being flashy with all the shadow manipulation he'd still have energy. Or maybe not.

"Dream well," Taká says softly. Then he goes back to his neglected writing work, until he dozes off himself.

He can be found in the morning with his stylus still in his hand, and a large blot of ink on the paper, slowly spreading from the tip of the pen.

-=-=-
Room M13 — METIS DORM — CORAL SPRINGS HIGH

The room is a standard dorm room, though perhaps larger than one would find in a regular college; there is a door in the center of a wall, a window along another above a built-in "ledge", with two desks, one on either side, placed such that the owners would be back-to-back working. A pair of floor-to-ceiling cabinets on either side of the door provide a short "hallway" into the room, opening towards each other.

The window is different from most dorm windows, in that the vista it reveals is not trees, garden, lawn, air. It's a seascape, murky green and lit day and night by some sort of lamp not visible from normal angles that keeps the window from turning into a one-way mirror when the students turn on their room lights. The seascape is itself fairly drab: murky rocks, occasional fish, moderately colorless mud and silt, the filtering down of whatever lives above. The light flickers in the day when the sun is up, but not enough to make it cheerful nor especially visible; the waters of the New England coast are never that transparent. Naturally the window is not made to open.

The room is sparely furnished. A metal "tree" made of various branches and leaf-like structures is suspended along the edges and ceiling of the room, providing a vague sense of 'forest' without actually impeding most people. There is a slowly turning "yin-yang" image projected on one wall by a pen-light device hanging from a branch of the tree, a ring of light around the shadow-part making it distinct from its surroundings.

Both beds have been moved together on one side, making a single larger bed. Books and some school supplies neatly on one desk. The other desk has a greek-styled urn about two feet tall sitting on it, but normally that's all. The desk lights and a single overhead light, along with the turning mandala, provide the room's illumination.

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