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 Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 7:21 am
..___..: razz art 1 {alma}
Alma was in the workshop that had once been the airy family room, tinkering with a mechanical hornet. She soldered delicate parts with exacting precision, patiently bent over the tiny thing for hours. She had studied the hornet nest she'd found hanging like a dour paper lantern on the precipice with utter fascination for weeks, taking detailed notes and dissecting specimens before she'd knocked the nest down and sent the insects into the water to drown. After all, hornets were dangerous things. And she'd gotten all she'd needed from them.
The little clockwork hornet would be a fine addition to her collection of mechanized creatures. Alma didn't care over-much for real animals, at least in her vicinity. She admired their natural adaptations and evolutions, but preferred they keep themselves at a distance from her.
She placed a chip of crystal into the heart of the hornet, carefully sealing the tiny thorax cavity. The glass eyes of the creature glowed with a dead light, and it flexed its tiny jointed legs in mechanical reflex. It had no real mind, which Alma preferred. She didn't want to deal with anything that needed taking care of. She had herself to worry about, with Mother dead and Father gone off with his accursed soldiering, leaving her behind.
The hornet buzzed and ticked like a clock, its finely-made glass wings vibrating as though eager for flight. Alma ignored it and switched the hornet off, silencing it. She reopened the thorax cavity with care and inserted a tiny glass vial filled with an ugly green liquid into the gold-alloy mesh venom sac. The collapsible syringe she'd installed in the thing sucked the liquid in, ready and armed. It was not a fatal poison, this venom Alma had created, but it was dangerous. She had accidentally burned herself with it and the back of her hand was still raw and blistered two weeks later. While painful, it had been an exemplary test of how it would affect biological matter.
Though she had to admit, the sizzling that had accompanied the burn had been greatly disconcerting to hear.
Satisfied with her night's work, Alma slid off the high stool and turned off the lights. Over the mostly-unused fireplace the portraits of her mother and father looked down at her, as though in grim approval. Alma looked up at them and sighed, going into her bedroom and tucking herself in.
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Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 8:18 pm
..___..: razz art 2 {era}
"Play it again!"
Era grimaced, setting her bow to the aged violin's strings and striking up the song for the fourth time in a row. She'd jumped at the opportunity for some spare change when the rowdy young party of Mench aristocrats had wandered out from the tavern, but now it was just getting annoying. Her carefully hidden tail lashed under her long coat and her ears lay flat against her skull under her hood.
"Master," she called to the leader of the slobbering, slavering pack. "Won't you spare a poor fiddler a bit of your great wealth, that I might buy a night's rest for my weary bones?"
"I'll pay you once you've done your playing," the Mench boy said with a drunkenly merry laugh. "Play on, play on!"
Grinding her teeth, Era set the tempo much faster and watched with more annoyance than amusement as the drunken lordlings whirled and danced and laughed. Ingrates, all of them. Spoiled brats out for a night on the town, trying to be daring and slipping into the seedier parts of the city. Stupid, stupid children.
Era was so busy playing and inwardly insulting her audience that she didn't even notice the young man who sneaked up beside her, thinking to steal a kiss. When he grabbed hold of her mask and tore it away, all she could do was curse him as her bow skidded across the violin's strings with an awful shriek.
"Koshka!"
The word fell like a stone in the suddenly silent street, and Era took off at a dead run. The party of nobles set off after her, shouting and jeering. Clutching her violin with her bow clenched between her teeth, Era sped into a trash-choked alleyway and climbed up the rotted-iron fire escape, swinging with unnatural agility up onto the roof. She hid, panting, as the drunken boys crashed through the alleyway calling for her to come out. Pulling her hood lower over her face, Era cursed them all again. Now she'd have to find a new mask, damn them all.
Sighing, Era cradled her scratched old violin and made herself as comfortable as she could in a shadowed, neglected corner of the roof, fearful to leave her hiding place. She'd catch a few hours sleep, she thought to herself, and then sneak back to her hovel of a home in the early morning, before any more Mench gave her trouble.
"Miserable arseholes," she muttered moodily to herself, curling into a tight ball and falling asleep to the sound of drunken jeering.
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Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 3:34 pm
..___..: razz art 3 {ivy}
"Please, let me go...."
Ivy looked up from her workbench in pure irritation, shushing the trussed up young man in the corner of her greenhouse. He wriggled weakly in the ropes binding him, looking very frightened.
"If you didn't want to stay here, you shouldn't have come at all," Ivy snapped at him, returning to the loving, gentle trimming she was giving a small orchid. "I don't like visitors."
"Please, I didn't mean to disturb you. I swear, I won't t-tell anyone y-you're here..."
"Shut up," Ivy said, brushing an errant thatch of curly hair out of her face. "Save your breath, because once you're dragged into the flower you're going to be drowning in nectar. Slowly, I can only hope."
The man gave a sob and struggled harder. What had appeared to be ropes tightened around him reflexively, vines slowly and inevitably dragging him towards the gaping maw of a huge, lurid and nectar-dripping flower. Ivy yawned and went about her work patiently as the man begged, cursed and screamed at her. It was some hours later before the plant had finally dragged its prey into its belly and begun the long process of digestion. Ivy was glad her darling plant had gotten a good meal, though she did wish it would be less noisy. The plant's nectar was a sedating necrotic, and would kill the unfortunate inside it after almost humanely putting him to sleep.
"Such a kindly baby you are," Ivy said tenderly, giving the plant a motherly kiss on a flowerbud before heading off to bed. The plant, or rather the occupant inside it, gave an acknowledging twitch, and a quiet night fell on the greenhouse.
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Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 5:04 pm
..___..: razz art 4 {rook}
Rook always knew he wasn't on the best of terms with his crew, but this was skirting on ridiculous.
"I swear, if you LEAVE me down here I'm going to shoot each and every one of you!" he shouted as he ran after his small ship as it slowly, but quite surely, flew up and away from him. He could hear his first mate jeering in a highly unladylike manner, giving him a rude salute. Rook tried to jump for the rope that was dangling from the belly of his crude little ship, missing by mere inches until the inches became feet, and then yards, and then Rook found he had suddenly run out of rooftop to sprint on.
"GAH!"
Splut.
Rook had fallen face first into a convenient pile of cow s**t, in the middle of a rough farmer's market. Pushing himself up, shuddering with cold horror at the taste in his mouth, Rook pushed his father's aviator goggles up back on his forehead and walked through the silent marketplace as though he had had every intention of falling three stories into dung.
"What're YOU looking at?" he snarled at an elderly Koshka, who slapped Rook upside the head for his insolence. Ears flat against his skull and tail a puffy bottlebrush, Rook looked skyward for his hijacked ship and growled as he watched it soaring merrily into the distance.
"Ingrates," he said under his breath, trying to brush off the cow dung but only succeeding in smearing it. He had, at least, gotten something of a last laugh. He untied the heavy pouch at his belt, looking at its sparkling contents with something like satisfaction. Rubies and sapphires were easy enough to fake with glass, but switching them for the real thing was tricky. Feeling heartened at his successful heist, even IF he no longer had any place to call home, Rook went on his way to find an inn. He only hoped they could offer him some way to clean the dung off his best coat.
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Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 6:08 am
..___..:: Part 5 {Rook & Deik}
Rook was not a happy camper.
He'd managed, in the past 48 hours, to have a mutiny on his ship, fall into a pile of cow crap, get mugged, get beaten upside the head with a cane when he tried to lift an old lady's purse, and been pursued by the old lady's angry and very tall grandson for fifteen minutes.
Out of breath, covered in cow dung, and wishing very much that lightning would come from the cheerful sunny blue sky and strike him dead, Rook sat on a street corner and brooded.
"... hello?"
There was the sound of moving fabric and metallic footsteps behind Rook, and then someone was sitting down beside him on the curb. A young man with flaming red hair, his hand holding a corner of his scarf up to his nose against the odour Rook was emitting, gave him a vague smile.
"Are ... you lost? Need directions to a hotel? Or ... a hose?"
Rook jolted and jumped a good foot of the ground, tail a bottlebrush.
"Don't DO THAT," he said, holding one hand to his heart and the other to his forehead. "Ye gods, man, do you want to kill me?!"
After his moment of melodrama had passed, Rook sighed and assumed his position of Pathetic Street-Dweller and All-Around Loser, staring at a crack in the pavement.
"But now that you ask, yes, I'm in need of somewhere to stay," he said flatly.
The boy looked a bit surprised behind the edge of his scarf at the outburst, which he had raised higher in a desperate attempt to keep his nose from melting off his face.
"Well uh ... I knows a place where you could get cleaned up, then point you to any amount of boarding houses, hostels, inns and etcetera. Sir."
He gave another vague, good natured and slightly awkward smile at the man, and seemed in some odd way to be waiting for something.
"Yes yes, very good," Rook said absently with a wave of his hand. Then he gave the new man a look, suddenly suspicious. "You're not a hooker, are you?"
"........what?!"
Dropping his scarf, the boy waived his hands frantically in the air, shaking his head back and forth vigorously. As he did so, the hair hiding the left side of his face swung away, revealing a bronze sphere where his left eye should be.
"Oh, no no no no I'm n - a - do I looks like a girl?"
stopping his mad head shaking, he quickly looked down at his chest as if worried that breasts might have sprouted since he last checked.
"There can be male hookers," Rook said stubbornly, glad his accusation had triggered such a quick denial. "And besides, I'm broke. Couldn't afford your services if you were."
Giving the false eye a mildly interested look, wondering how much it would be worth if sold in a back alley in the small hours of the morning, Rook stood and brushed a few dried flakes of dung off his coat.
"Well then. Carry on. I wouldn't mind something with a decent bath and a bed, really..."
(ongoing)
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Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 8:14 am
..__..: razz art 6 {cecilia}
Cecilia was working.
This was hardly unusual for her, really. She loved nothing more than to go home in the early evening, grade a few papers with a nice cup of tea in hand, and then get to work on one of her many writing projects. Currently, her play 'The Oceans of Melancholy' had hit a bit of a rut in the eight act, but she hardly let that perturb her. Cecilia was of the opinion that ideas were capricious things - they came forth bit by bit, slowly, not all in one rush. And anyway, she'd already written ninety two pages of the play. She was sure the rest would be along in good order.
Adjusting her half-moon reading glasses, Cecilia sighed as she read a book report she'd assigned one of her less than stellar students. The girl, rather than reading the book and writing a summary and opinion as Cecilia had quite nicely requested, had instead written about...well, Cessi wasn't quite sure.
"Dear, dear," Cessi said, tapping her quill to her lip out of habit. "Oh Serena, I can't read your handwriting at all."
Deciding that the paper could wait until she could try to decipher the illegible text, Cecilia got up from her desk and stretched. It was late in te evening already and she hadn't even had dinner yet. Navigating through the towers and mountains of well-tended and well-loved books and scrolls, she went into her tiny kitchen and grabbed an apple. Cessi smiled as she polished it on her frock. Her students were always so very thoughtful, giving her apples and blank journals for her to write in.
"Such darlings," she said fondly, biting into the apple and leaning against the large window in the kitchen, looking out at the vast sprawling city below.
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