Lost and Broken

[Thief of Words]

After some deliberation, I've decided to post up what portions of the story I have running elsewhere that are able to be posted here. Where sections areally unable to be posted here, I'll make note of such and provide a SFW summary of said portion for those who do not wish to check into it later.

 

[Thief of Words]

Part I: Grief
Stage I: Denial
Chapter I
or
I:I:I​

Letting a billowing breath out into the freezing night air, my back against the brick wall of the storefront, I pondered on just how many things had had to go wrong just to land me where I was. Specifically, that was sitting, freezing my ass off, fairly certain that I had managed to land myself on my asshole manager's shit list, and contemplating having to drive my car back over half-frozen roads at night in a blizzard across a probably-iced-over bridge just to get home, collapse in bed, and toss and turn my way through another bout of despairing, hope-rending nightmares just to get back up and face the same thing again in the morning. Possibly. Probably.

Unless it was so snowed over that my manager couldn't open the store. Which condition hadn't precluded him from opening despite the winter storm blowing in today. We were apparently not required to attend work today...not that he'd made that clear to anyone who didn't directly ask. And, of course, nobody had fucking bothered to tell me about that fact until about fifteen minutes ago when I overheard one of the full-timers complaining about the ass-covering move the manager pulled by claiming today's hours were 'optional' in a tone which made it clear they in no way were. Add to that the usual mixture of ungrateful jerks and the kind of mouth-breathing scum-suckers who could look a person in the eye right as they cheated them out of money they rightly deserved, or as they were otherwise known, non-tippers, and it'd been a hellish night.

Those who haven't had to live off tips don't get it, but ask anyone who has had to rely on tips to supplement wages: if you don't tip? You're an asshole. If you cannot afford a tip? You can't afford the meal. If you purchase the meal anyway, then you are a liar and deserve spittle or worse in your food. There is no discussion here; this is a simple fact. You actively cheat the driver out of money they depend upon if you do this. If you do, then you are a thief, a cheat, and an all-around cad. It differs for sit-downs, where 18-20% is the rule. For pizza delivery? If you tip less than $2? You're an asshole; fuck you.

$2.50 to $3 is generally the minimum to prove you aren't a glaring shit stain on the surface of society. $3 is...average. It's an okay tip. You won't make anyone's night, but neither will we hope you choke on the fucking pie like anyone tipping less than two bucks. $4.50 to $5 is the minimum to be generous. Tip $10 and you'll be one of the delivery driver's favorite customers. Yes, we're mercenary that way. Our appreciation of you correlates directly to tip generosity and inversely to how much of a dick you are, but--fun fact--not tipping lands you squarely in the dick zone. I don't care how duplicitously nice you act to my face, if you use the opportunity that creates to cheat me? You're a bastard, and I will personally hope you never order from our store again, because delivering to your doorstep is literally a waste of my time, to the point that it nearly costs me more to make the damn delivery than I make catering to your stingy ass.

Anyway, aside from a procession of people nominated to my particular version of the 'special hell' to which child molesters and people who talk in the theater go, a winter storm so ugly that I had to hunch over my steering wheel to see through it, and the usual passive-aggressive and active-aggressive bullshit from the GM, I also managed to dig myself into even worse of a place, and unlike the rest of it, there wasn't a convenient or accurate scapegoat for this sector of my misery. I could only blame myself for this. See, I fucked up. I still have no fucking clue how I managed it, and my fuck-up was compounded by those of others, but I could not deny that I was at fault on this.

I lost a couple of orders. And the bag they were in at the time. I have literally zero recollection of how I managed it but somehow? I did. Admittedly I'm at least partly used to losing things, it remains one of the sad 'perks' of my ADD that small objects regularly tend to go on walkabout around me; just today three of my nicest pens had disappeared, presumably retained by customers. With my luck, by the same stingy assholes that had decided to make tonight far less profitable for me than it could've been. That thought brought hot tears to my eyes. Here I was, risking my life driving in weather I shouldn't be out in, all for the money to let me keep my apartment. Not that the money had been enough the last couple months. I'd had to, humiliatingly, borrow money from family just to survive. I hated doing that. Every time he sent money to help me with rent, my father chose to remind me it was a temporary arrangement, no doubt because of the insistence of my stepmother it be so.

She was a proponent of the bullshit philosophy of 'tough love,' which is to say: abandonment as a loving act. Never you mind that Dad could've told her that the 'light a fire under her ass' methodology had not only failed to produce positive results the times he'd tried it; it had been the driving issue behind some of the most miserable years of our shared lives. Well, beyond my Dad's inability to keep his cock in his Goddamned pants.

See, back when I was still a kid, still eldest daughter of two in my then-nuclear-family, I'd realized with a painful certainty that healthy families didn't behave as ours did. More than that: I'd realized that healthy relationships didn't involve one of the two partners seeking sexual release outside the partnership without their significant other's approval. I had no idea when my father fell out of love, which he'd supposedly been in with my mother. She...she took far longer to do so. For love of him, and--after she realized he didn't care enough to meet her even close to halfway--for love of my sister and I, she strove to salvage their marriage. I'd later learn she did much of that for my sister's sake and mine. She made a sacrifice of her pride and her dignity in the face of Dad's charisma and ability to convince others he was an upstanding man, and she didn't seek to ruin him or bankrupt him.



Some days, more days than not, I wish she had. Those days? Those days, I wish she'd been less morally upstanding. That she'd dared to use her bitterness as a weapon. She didn't. In all things, she strove to be the better, the bigger, person. The truth is? She suffered for that decision. Repeatedly, for most of a decade now, she'd suffered for her decision to be a better person than my father is.

And there was always a tinge of guilt to that knowledge. See, my mother has, for as long as I've been aware of her expectations of me, expected that God has some great thing He wanted me to accomplish. Personally? I...frankly? I have a hard time countenancing that. I'm a fuck-up of the first degree. One of the smartest people I've ever known, I remain one the people I've known least capable of making substantive use of their intelligence. I've never managed to live up to what was expected of me. Fuck, I've never even managed to live up to what I expected of myself. And I probably had the lowest expectations of myself of anyone I've ever met that wasn't my boss in some retail or fast-food job. God choosing me to do some great thing? Honestly? I've never had the faintest clue as to how it would even be possible to do so using me. Omnipotence and omniscience aside, why bother choosing the least fucking suitable tool for the task? Unless...well, unless He planned on showing off, maybe? For that matter, all that's not even accounting for the fact that I'm a female-preferring bisexual, or as my kid sister unwittingly dubbed me when speaking about an ex of mine she thought was just a friend: "half-a-lesbian."

Still, I digress, and quite far afield, if I'm any judge of such. As I'd been saying earlier: I'd fucked up. It'd only been a few weeks, two or maybe three, since I'd started this job. Well, I got a couple of deliveries that sent me out the ass-end of our delivery area. I'd never been this far out from the store, if I was honest. Plus, well, honestly it made me nervous. The street I was on had a profusion of two-to-five-room houses, each set upon a narrow or steeply-set postage stamp of a yard. Slipping out of the warmth of my car and into the night which was filled with...it wasn't quite sleet. I think the weather reporting typically called it a 'winter mix.' Sleet fell cheek-by-jowl with rain and the sort of fat, oversized snowflakes that hit my windshield with a puff of scattering powder, as the oversized snow globs spread. The click of bits of ice too large for me to think of as sleet but too small to be hail and too solid to be snow filled my ears as I carefully picked my way up beside a driveway and, hopping from my car, hurried into the blessed shelter of a porch.

Stepping to the door, I hit the doorbell, then waited. In the calm clatter of the wintry precipitation, I could hear the murmur of the resident or residents' television babbling away in the den which opened onto their front door. Minutes passed. There was no response. I tried knocking. Again, nothing but the murmur of voices from their television. Sighing, I tried knocking once more. This time, when they didn't respond, I walked back to my car, opening the door to set the bag containing both pizzas I was delivering on this run onto my passenger seat. Closing the car, I leaned against the slight dampness of my car as I called the number the first customer had left. As it turned out, the address printed on my run slip was wrong, at least, it was according to the customer. She claimed she'd told the person taking her order that her address was on the other side of town, minus the directional variant which had led me to this place. Fighting a surge of irritation, I told her that I'd be headed her way before long and started to make my way through the snow and frigid roadway to the next destination, an apartment complex I'd rarely delivered to or visited before.

Chewing on my lower lip as I maneuvered past the complex's gates to try and find my way to the right unit, I remembered the last time I'd been there with a shudder. An individual I'd mentally dubbed 'Jimbo the Jumbo Jackass Jarhead,' a near 300-lb. (presumably ex-) marine with a more than sizable paunch who'd not only shorted me on tips, but spent the entire time I was passing him his pizzas staring at the outline of my bra through the thin polyester blend of my work shirt. I mean, I got it. Yes--surprise, surprise--I have tits. I come from a fairly long line of poorly endowed men and generously endowed women. I...in the matter of curves, I was well ahead of the curve, much as I was in terms of intelligence. On certain levels, I was still not sure how that worked, the stacked gals to small guys part, save that most of the women in the family had only been with a single man,. But still. From the way Old Jimbo had stared, I got the impression he'd never seen a gal with my particular sizes. I mean, it sure as hell wasn't that he found me attractive for my own sake. I had long been aware that my kid sister was the pretty one between the two of us. Between the number of folks who'd called bullshit on my pointing out we were related and the fact that she was the, oddly, popular one, well. It'd been quite well-engraved. She was the cheerleader, the sorority sister, the pretty counterpart to my brainy nerditude. I was the one that was a gamer, not a gamer grl or...or whatever god-awful mangling of the language those girls who used video games to draw guys in to stare at their tits made use of.

But, digression aside: I let my car glide through the complex, double-checking that the address wasn't Jimbo's. To my relief and gratification, it wasn't. Still, it was one I hadn't been to before, so I had to drive slowly, checking the various signs that management had put up against the numbers on each lintel to see if I was on the right track in the vaguely organized labyrinth that was the apartment complex. Some fifteen minutes later, I pulled up to the correct address and turned to grab their pizza. I paused, brain having hit a clear error message: ERROR 404: PIE NOT FOUND. The pizza wasn't there. Neither of the pizzas was there. Nor was the bag I'd placed both orders into. I might've screamed a bit. And punched out my steering wheel.

Cursing, I retraced my drive halfway back to the store despite the snow and black ice littering the path. No bag, no dice. I returned back to where I'd just been, slowly hunting with my hi-beams on for the bag or a likeable enough lump in the snowy landscape that might've been it. Still no dice whatsoever. Letting out an explosive "FUCK!" as I collapsed back against the place atop my seat where the horribly uncomfortable headrests had been before I removed them, I glared up at the roof my car, mind desperately racing to figure out where I might've left the order.

Putting my car in gear, I turned around and drove back to the house with the porch and the tv murmur. I knocked again, rather insistently, until finally someone answered as I'd given up and made my way to my car. She was a middle-aged black lady who asked "Who deyah?" in tones much alike the lady who spoke on television about the hail back in Dallas. Apparently, while I'd been knocking earlier, she'd asked much the same question, one I'd not heard for the murmur of her television. Apologizing and asking her if she, a...rather unfortunate vision in a stark white moo-moo, had seen a pizza bag on her porch or in her yard, I told her sorry for disturbing her and then left after learning she'd seen no such thing. So I called the manager. I told him about what happened, explained I'd retraced my path three times by that point, and accepted his instruction to head back to the store. He...hadn't seemed especially pissed off at the time, but his near-resignation that I'd heard in the sigh he gave off tripped all kinds of warning klaxons in my mind. I'd heard that 'well, it's you and you're incompetent so not a fucking lot I can do about it' sighs, as I mentally categorized them, plenty of times before. When I got back, I found out he'd sent my friend, Yvonne, who'd been the one to recommend me for the job in the first place, out to deliver the remade pizza to the first customer. He gave me the remake for the second customer, and I delivered it with a gratifying lack of incident (if an unfortunate lack of a tip) to the second customer. Sliding and dodging my way around cars stalled out on the hill that led back from the complex in question, I managed to get back to the store safely, only to be sent back to work, practically up to my tits in suds, on the dishes for the day.

Several hours and one pizza purchased on my discount later, I had made my way outside after clocking out, setting my dinner in the passenger seat as I leaned against the brick of our storefront and tried not to cry. I sure as shitting hadn't gone back to school to get a Master's degree in order to deliver pizzas. Yet that'd been the only work that had managed to come my way in...what, eight months by this fucking point?

Something like that. Digging my fingernails into my palms until they left welts, I made myself go back to my car, pulling my winter coat tighter about me. It...my sister still made fun of me for that jacket. She claimed it was my purse...which admittedly wasn't that far from true. When I'd still been a student, I'd just worn my backpack. I'd never taken to purses much, not after getting guilted for losing most of an even dozen of them when I was younger. My ADD plus the easy ability to set them down did not make a healthy combination for my purses' survival rate, so eventually my mom had given up on buying them for me and just humored my preference for backpacks and pants or coats with pockets.

Eventually, blinking away angry tears, I pulled out of the store's parking lot and began to carefully meander my way back home. I kept my car moving between 15 and 25 miles per hour, as the road was girt by snowdrifts and whole sections of it were glazed with black ice, virtually indistinguishable from the asphalt beneath it, given how wet everything around was damp or slicked over by rain. Things largely went well, as it was late enough that most of the students, who I couldn't help but think fell into the category of 'Instant Psychopath, just add Automobile,' had either not arrived in town yet or had settled into their dorms for the evening.

It continued well enough right up until I started to cross the bridge between towns. Tires losing purchase on a patch of black ice, my car started to fishtail back and forth. I tried to pull myself out of it, but ended up over-correcting, sending my little Honda coupe into a 180 degree spin that fetched my driver's side door against the guardrail which kept my car from plummeting off the bridge and down some fifty-plus feet to the river below. Recovering from being spun about, I took a moment to catch my breath and then fasten my seatbelt. Clearly that should've been accomplished before I left the store. Grimacing against the expected noise of metal on concrete of my door scraping and being scratched against the concrete railing, it took me several seconds too long to see the pickup truck which came bearing down upon me. I have no idea if the driver was that arrogant or if he just didn't give a fuck, but the asshole was coming onward in a big Ford pickup blazing away at better than seventy miles an hour despite the frigid roads. It was a horrid, frozen moment that saw me realize that there was no way he'd miss me, right as he'd hit the patch of black ice which had cast me against the railing and left me facing the wrong way. Unable to stop for the skid of his tires, his truck started into a spin at the black ice, one which careened the oversized vehicle into the side panel of my own little Honda and, momentum sent over, flipped my car up, onto the railing, and then down into the blackened depths of the rushing, flooding river.

The last thing I remember of it was the stomach-in-throat feeling of falling fast suddenly being interrupted by a jarring, bruising impact. After that, darkness reigned.

 

[Thief of Words]

Part I: Grief
Stage I: Denial
Chapter: II
or
I:I:II​

I came awake with all the grace and speed of a one-legged giraffe, which was to say that my consciousness flailed around awkwardly in a purported attempt at getting somewhere for quite a while. Still, eventually wakefulness managed to impose itself upon me. I immediately wished it hadn't. Coughing, I managed to catch my breath, probing at the soft palate at the back of my mouth tentatively, gingerly. Yep. Definitely forgot my CPAP last night.

Groaning, I reached to pull my comforter back over me. I tried, at least; the existing haze over my thoughts gained a new layer of confusion as I discovered that I was sleeping on my hands, which had gone numb and asleep in the process. Grimacing at the pins-and-needles sensation, I tried to squirm my way around to where I could sit up without using the nerve-pinched digits. My skull throbbed as I made the effort, and I was aware that I was hot, swelteringly so. I could feel a flop-sweat soaking my shirt to my stomach and my bra to my chest.

Ung. Sweaty polyester. Why the fuck wouldn't I have taken off my work shirt before I slept? And why the hell was it so hot and so...wait a minute. Muggy?! My eyes shot open, and I strangled a whimper at the twinned pain of brilliant light stabbing into my sight and the sensation of eyelids which felt as though their inside surfaces had been coated by a layer of ground glass. My eyes adjusted to the hateful afternoon brilliance...eventually. Slowly, carefully, I worked my eyes shut, then back open again a few times until the eyeball-scouring sensation of lacerated corneas ebbed.

Ugh. My eyes feel swollen. Looking blearily about, I was greeted by the usual impressionistic blur of hues I found each morning only...it was as though I was staring out at an entirely different painting. The still life of my eggshell-toned apartment with the scattered blurs of color that were my books and the rich, warm browns of my furniture simply wasn't there. All of the usual sights had been replaced with the green of grass around me. There were dark brown patches in places that might be dirt, and I was surrounded by scattered brown pillars that were almost certainly trees. Admittedly, that certainty mostly came from my ability to hear the wind soughing through the boughs above me; I couldn't see clearly far enough to make the treetops out in any detail.

Leaning up into a seated position, I whimpered at the throbbing pain putting my temples into a vice. Slowly working my fingers to ease life back into them, I kept my ears open for anything that might clue me in to where I was. Aside from the murmur of the wind in the trees and a rushing-water sound of what was probably a river somewhere nearby, the most telling thing was what I couldn't hear, rather than what I could. Shucking my jacket off, I reflected on the fact that I couldn't make out any of the sounds of modernity. No cars, no airplanes, not even so much as a train could be heard. It was simultaneously rather nice...and exceptionally unnerving. The noise had always been something I hated about the necessity of living in cities. I vastly preferred peace and quiet, or at least the decent facsimile I could crop together on the inside of my apartment: I was surrounded only by the noises I chose to have there...a large part of my preference for headphones over speakers. I could drown the uncontrollable noises of my surroundings with the sounds, music, movies, things of my own choosing. It was a part, perhaps a third or so, of why I'd chosen to live alone despite it costing more than having roommates.

I let out a wry snort, not quite a laugh, as the thought "Be careful what you wish for," dragged itself drily across my mind. Then I winced, as the motion had set a spike of pain through my temples just as the throbbing ache had started to recede. Hissing at the pain, I continued on more carefully, moving slowly as I pulled my coat over to me. Working the last tingles and numbness from my fingers, I fished around in first one, then another of my jacket pockets until I managed to locate and extricate my phone from the pocket's contents. Thumbing the power button, I stared at it, brow furrowed as I tried to reconcile what it told me with what my eyes showed around me. According to my phone, it was very nearly 4 AM of the morning after...SHIT! That crash. The..., my mind recoiled from just how much didn't make sense right now. The heat was one part of it. It felt like it was at least 100 degrees out here, but it had been about 24 degrees last night. Which meant...what? That I was either at some equatorial clime or I was somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere? And the Eastern Hemisphere, apparently, if the fact that the sun was shining where it hung, sinking, just above the horizon at what'd be 4 AM back home.

I admit, I had a sudden wish that I'd paid more attention to time zones, to know which was roughly 12-hours off from my own. At a guess, I thought it was probably somewhere in Southeast Asia or Oceania, but I couldn't say for certain. And I couldn't just message someone to find out what happened or pull up the info online. My phone had zero bars of service, and I'd not been able to afford a data plan for most of a year now. And, of course, there sure as hell wasn't wifi available. And all of that wasn't even beginning to account for the fact that in order to end up on the other side of the planet in, what, six hours? Someone would've had to have loaded my unconscious ass into some kind of supersonic aircraft and hauled ass away from the States just to...what? To dump me in the middle of nowhere? What the fuck would that accomplish for them? I mean, I was nobody special. It didn't make any sense. I wasn't worth the effort that sort of thing would've involved. And it was certainly far too much money to invest into something so stupid as a common prank.

Setting aside the nonsensical nature of my current circumstances, I couldn't help but remember the way my former English professor had termed my luck: 'the most Byzantine concatenation of circumstances' that he'd ever encountered. That was to say, my luck was not only bad, but it tended to be bad, not in runs, not in streaks of bad luck, but in inordinately convoluted tangles of misfortune, like a great and thorny bramble of bad luck. I had to admit that, right now, this seemed like the worst of the lot. Which, considering everything over the years, was damned well saying something. Still, dwelling morosely on how much things sucked had never done me a lick of good, and besides, for all that my luck usually sucked, it almost always had a back-swing to it. Things went awfully for quite some time, but my luck let up just enough that I always survived it. It just usually came by the barest of measures. By this point I'd probably lived a solid half of my life by the seat of my pants and the skin of my teeth. And, hopefully, for all its weirdness, this set of circumstances would prove true to type: miserable yet manageable.

Moving to a kneeling position and letting out a long and shuddering breath, I tried to think of other things than how much this sucked. Of course, my first two thoughts after I started trying were immediate failures. The first, being on how much I hated feeling so sweat-sticky and gross, certainly didn't count. The second, noting how much of a disarrayed and tangled mess my hair had gotten to be, was no better. The third was just shaping up to be more of the same when I pounced upon the sense of abjection and contorted it into something useful: yes, it sucked not being able to see worth a damn right now, so I should clearly hunt for my glasses rather than continuing to sit around, moping about not having them. So resolved, I began to crawl about on hands and knees, fingers sifting through the grass as I hoped to catch a glint of sunlight on glass or feel my fingers brush against the black wireframe my lenses were set into. I must have worked my way twice through a widening spiral of the ground that covered a good fifty or sixty feet before I finally gave up and admitted that wherever I was, my glasses clearly hadn't managed to make the trip with me.

Determined to still stave off the onset of despair, I made my way back over to my coat and began rifling through my pockets to take stock of what I currently had in the way of tools and possessions. The first couple of pockets presented my billfold and my tip money from most of the past week, just shy of a couple hundred dollars. Shifting to my next pocket I found where my lighter and one of my knives had been. Those were nestled cheek-by-jowl with my iPod. I didn't smoke, hated cigarettes with passion, as a matter of fact, but I did have a Zippo lighter I'd picked up years ago at a concert as a souvenir. The knife was an old Christmas present from my Dad: every year he got my sister, my step-sisters, my step-brothers-in-law, and I a nice knife from a particular retailer for such. This one, if I remembered right, had a pair of small blades and a nice wooden finish to the handle. Moving on, I found two other of my knives, one with a single larger blade and a handle of polished rosewood, and the other a single small blade of damascened steel set into a handle of polished stag's horn. Moving further into the largest pockets, which tended to rest over my hips when I was wearing the jacket, I found my old pair of headphones alongside the concessions I'd made to my family's concerns over the safety of my doing pizza delivery.

You see, out of my entire extended family, I was, to my knowledge, with the possible exception of my aunt who ran an art gallery and my other aunt who was married to a minister, the only person in the whole family who didn't own a gun. Even my younger sister had a little purse pistol she carried around with her, and our mom kept a little handgun in the glove compartment in her car. Meanwhile I, having read somewhere something that stuck with me: never draw a firearm on someone you aren't prepared to kill. I knew full well that the kind of trick shots you saw in the movies to disarm or disable bad guys were just that: tricks. The hand was an inordinately small and mobile target on the human body. Shooting them in the shoulder ran the risk of hitting major blood vessels in the area, and anyone thinking to spare someone by shooting them in the leg was clearly unaware that one of the surer ways to kill someone was to perforate the femoral artery. Thing is, I...I wasn't prepared to kill anyone. Not even in defense of my life. I kind of took that whole "Thou shalt not kill," business quite seriously. I hated so much as seeing people hurt. I on no account wished myself responsible for them being injured or maimed, and the idea of someone dying because of my actions was something I still had nightmares over to this day, thanks to an ex from years ago whom I'd had to personally talk down from attempting suicide.

Ah, but that tangent aside, I'd made two concessions to my family's concerns over my safety. The first was, I shit you not, a decent-sized canister of honest-to-God fucking bear mace. Well, no. Technically, most companies had moved away from the chemical formulation used in Mace years ago. It just had become a bit of a brand name as byword situation such as calling adhesive bandages Band-Aids. Still, rather than letting me buy a canister of everyday pepper spray, my father had instead ordered some self-defense items for me off the internet. The first of which was the fucking bear repellant spray. To my mind, it was a clear case of overkill, like college students wanting to get drunk making hunch punch with Everclear instead of vodka: it was substituting something which wasn't formulated for use on humans for something which was. That was the first part of his gift for my self-defense. The second part? The second part was this combination taser-flashlight which looked like nothing so much as a maglite as designed by the damned Dark fucking Eldar. Seriously, the whole thing was done up in black and red, and the rim of the lens for the light was surrounded by the prongs for the stun gun portion. Add to that the brilliant halogen glare of the light and the fact that it had a fucking strobe function, and you can understand why I felt like the whole setup was more than a little bit overkill.

Add to that the fact that the closest I'd ever come to needing the freaking things had been when I'd been accosted by a crackhead or meth addict, I had no idea which, while making a pizza delivery to one of the local trap houses, a confrontation which was swiftly resolved by the drug dealer/customer, who mollified the old guy who'd come by for his fix by insisting she finish paying me for her pizza before they did business. A side note, but drug dealers? Surprisingly good customers to deliver pizza to. Perhaps it was the lucrative nature of their particular form of illegal commerce, but of the two or three I'd had occasion to deliver to, only one of them was a bad tipper, and the other two were actually up there with the church that ordered twenty-odd pizzas every single Sunday for the best tippers we delivered to. Still, I digress.

As far as the self-defense kit my dad had gotten me went, I'd honestly kind of come to the conclusion that the only real purpose the things served was to act as a security blanket for my father's fears. I mean, I live in a college town with a population skewed toward the feminine, with about 3 women to every two men. Not only that, but the place was blessed or cursed (depending on your perspective) with a higher concentration of conventionally attractive coeds than just about any place in the nearest two to three states. Meanwhile I, well, I wasn't really anyone's type, if I were to put it bluntly. Those inclined to perve on the women around them had more attractive, both figuratively and literally, subjects upon which to perve. And I was a-okay with that. Well, sort of. I wasn't okay with the idea of folks doing that to others, but I was perfectly content not to be the subject of someone's creepy, fetishistic obsession.

Repositioning my possessions inside my coat, I picked it up and managed to wobble my way to my feet. Fortunately for me, I'd come to within earshot of moving water, so of all my present problems there at least was one, perhaps two, which I could fix in the short term. And the presence of a river meant that one of my greater problems--specifically that I was stuck in the middle of fucking nowhere in the wilderness of only God knew where--was probably going to be resolved sooner than later, as moving water was one of the surest guarantors of human settlement in all of human history. So it was that I trudged my way over through the woods until I managed to find a break in the tree line and could finally make out the blur of what had to be a rather significant river. I admit, I was more than a little let down that it was so big, in part because a smaller waterway would've at least given me the chance to take a fucking bath. By this point I was practically drowning in my own sweat, and, as mentioned before, I felt utterly fucking disgusting with my sweat-slick clothing clinging to me in all the worst ways. Still, at least some water would help me with the severe case of cotton mouth I had going on. Setting down my jacket, I shimmied over to the bank, grateful that the river was running fairly high, as it meant I didn't have to perch hanging precariously over the bank and risk falling in. Instead I could just reach out and cup handfuls of the running water to sip at my leisure. I didn't take as much as I wanted to, just what seemed like enough to remedy my dehydration and replenish what I'd lost to sweating. I stopped before my stomach got to that over-full sloshy sensation that drinking too much of any fluid filled you with.

Determined to make the best of circumstances, I also leant my head down under the current, letting it rinse my hair. So I had to deal with sweat pooling between my breasts, slicking my shirt to belly and back, I was at least going to get to wash my damn hair. Dark brown and...if not precisely what I thought of as curly, as that involved more ringlets and curls other places than the tips... it had a wave to it, then curled up at the ends. Back in high school, my friends had been jealous that I was able to wear it in something approximating the feathered style of cut which had been popular then without any extra effort beyond cutting it short, but that was just how my hair did. It curled up at the ends, and when around shoulder length, it just turned up into a splay of not-quite curls that approximated a feathered cut. Not that my hair was that short right now. I'd not wanted to spend the money to get it cut for quite some time, so it was down past my shoulders, a bit shy of mid-back. It...it could be a real pain in the ass to put it up well enough that it could fit under my work hat enough not to be a problem, since it counted as too long evwn in a ponytail, but I made do. Usually I wound it up a bit, and then tied up the excess in a bun through the little opening in the back of my hat, where a ponytail would usually slip through.



Shaking the excess water from my hair, and then gathering it up to wring a bit more out before I settled it back over my shoulders, I picked up my jacket and began what promised to be a long damn walk. The sun hung low ahead of me and slightly to left of my heading. I followed the river and wended its way west-northwest. All around me, the landscape was cast in hues of orange and red by the sunset, the river reflecting the burning, dying sun as though the whole course of the thing had been set alight at once. I walked on for over an hour before I finally paused to fish out my flashlight, planning to have it to hand so that I could keep on walking after the sun had set. Having only recently woken, I had no doubts that sleep would prove impossible for the immediate future. It turned out to be something of good luck that I did, as while I was working the kinks out of my back, I heard a sharp snap behind me of a limb being broken. Pulling free the flashlight and managing to fumble the bear mace out of the pocket alongside it, I whirled, dropping my jacket as I turned. What saw left me torn between terror and laughter. I couldn't decide whether to laugh my ass off at the irony of my earlier thoughts about my father's overkill, or to be terrified by the fact that not thirty yards behind me was the huge, hunched figure of what could only be a black bear.



Immediately dropping to my knees to pick up the canister of bear repellent, still on the edge of hysterical laughter at actually needing the damned thing for its original intended purpose, my mind still found the time to bring to my attention the fact that the beast before me wasn't native to any of the regions I'd speculated I was in. As far as I could tell, I was facing down an American Black Bear...and they weren't even native to either of the fucking hemispheres I'd been certain, up until this exact moment, I'd been in. Still, I didn't have time to try and work it out, because the moment the creature realized it'd been spotted, the bear...more accurately described as a tank with fur on, set off in that uneven loping stride they have, nonetheless making good time as it set to charge me with a roar. Shaking hands fumbling with the cap of the spray, I finally managed to arm the damn thing and let out a stream of highly concentrated capsaicinoids right into the bear's eyes and nose as it got halfway to my position. Rising to my full height as the bear skidded to a stop and snuffled and grunted in disgruntlement, I let out a loud shout and sprayed the bemused beast again.



Roaring and rearing up on its hind legs, the bear took one last spray to convince it that I was neither an easy nor a worthwhile meal, and it made an about face and went loping off away from me, at an odd angle. As I watched it go, I caught a hint of something over the ever-present scent of the river and grass and sharp tang of still dwindling pepper spray. I caught a hint of something almost...metallic in the air. A metallic tang that put me in mind of the way copper or pig iron tasted. That...that worried me. Picking up my coat as I clicked on my flashlight and clipped my bear spray to my belt-loop, I picked my way over to where the bear had stopped and reared, searching the ground in front of me. A gleam of reflected halogen light confirmed my concern.



Something had wounded that bear, and pretty badly, if the rate at which it'd been bleeding was any indicator. I couldn't help but feel a stab of pity for the beast, its intention to eat me aside. That pity was tempered, however, by an undercurrent of worry. The things that could reliably wound a bear that badly were relatively rare, and that was including other bears. Rising from my crouch by the bear's blood, I swallowed with a mouth gone suddenly dry and used my flashlight to cast about in the lengthening shadows of the copse of trees fronting the riverside.



I wasn't entirely sure if it counted or not, but again I got...well, I got my luck: simultaneously terrible and sort of good. The good was that I managed to blindside a creeping predator with the brilliance of my flashlight. The bad was that I no longer had any doubt as to what had injured the bear. The bizarre was that I suddenly realized that I had no goddamned idea where I was or how what I was looking at was here. Because I recognized the creature that responded to the blinding beam of my stun gun-cum-flashlight. Oh, did I ever.



You see, growing up, I'd been fascinated by antiquity. I'd adored learning about the beasts of the primordial past of Earth. Megalodons, Giant Sloths, Cave Bears, and axe-beaks, I learned about them all. But far more than the distant fish and mammalians, I had been utterly fascinated as a little girl by older creatures yet. I had been fascinated completely and utterly, by dinosaurs. And, surreal as it felt to be doing so, that was what I was staring down, as its long tail lashed in agitation and it gave another leathery, crocodilian hiss. For my part, I slowly pulled free my bear spray again, mind whirling as I tried to come to terms with what I was seeing. You see, it was one of the most popular dinosaurs around, and had been since Jurassic Park had come out. But, unlike the Tyrannosaurus Rex, no one ever got the name of this pack hunting beast right. Apparently the filmmakers, or perhaps it'd been Michael Creighton in the original book, but either way; someone had decided in the long process of Jurassic Park's release first as a book and later as a film, that velociraptor sounded far snappier than the actual name of the six-foot stalking dromeosaur the movie so prominently featured. And so they attached the name of a little hunter barely larger than a turkey, to the six-foot-tall monsters they wished to terrify audiences. But I knew what it was really called. It'd always been my favorite dinosaur as a little girl.



I had no fucking clue how or why but somehow I was being stared down by an angry Deinonychus.

 

[Thief of Words]

Part I: Grief
Stage I: Denial
Chapter: III
or
I:I:III​

So. I was currently living out the stuff of my prepubescent dreams. And it seemed exceedingly likely that I was going to die because of that. Well, assuming I wasn't already dead. The thought had occurred to me earlier, but I was pretty sure it wasn't the case. I sure hoped so. If I was dead then that meant that all the asshole materialists I so loathed in life actually had the fucking right of things, and that was just far, far too terrible a notion to countenance. But, like I said, dinosaur. A deinonychus or, to be specific (pun somewhat intended) a Deinonychus antirrhopus, was currently hunching itself into a threat posture before me, its knees bent and its mouth open wide to hiss at me again with that leathery, alligator-like noise it'd made before. I fumbled with the belt clip for my bear spray, trying to undo it without losing my stun-gun or my coat, but it wasn't being terribly cooperative, and I was well aware that those blade-like teeth were quite capable of tearing chunks out of my flesh, presuming it didn't get in close enough to gut me with the immense, flesh-carving, sickle-shaped dewclaw it bore on each foot. Something about it was off, but, well, I didn't have time to dwell on that, as the beast launched itself at me, closing the space in half a breath.

Screaming, I threw the billowy weight of my winter coat over the beast's head before charging in, like a fucking lunatic, and tackling the thing roughly behind its hips, and then rolling atop it, setting my full, not inconsiderable weight right over it and using it to keep the beast's many exceedingly lethal natural weapons from making their presence felt in my flesh.

Flicking the switch for my stun gun to on, I jammed the electrodes into the dinosaur's flank, the rattling noise of the high voltage self-defense tool's operation joined by the outraged shriek of the beast beneath me. Of course, it was at that point that the creature's long tail whipped about to smash me in the face. Feeling like my already aching eyes were now bruised and my nose had been broken, I gave the creature what I felt to be a rather well-deserved second jab with my stun gun, this time holding it to the monster's side and letting the ornery beast thrash in place for several seconds. Unclipping my bear spray while I used the back of my stun gun holding hand to gingerly prod at my nose to see if the wetness I could feel oozing on my top lip was blood or mucus, I stepped forward to pull free my much savaged coat from the creature's head, changing my mind as its clawed foot slashed up to hook the thing. Aiming my bear spray at the dinosaur's head, I began to spray it quite thoroughly. I knew it was unwise, but if I remembered my dinosaur facts rightly, the Deinonychus had stereoscopic vision and actually did use its sight to hunt, as opposed to many beasts that used scent alone.

I panted, staring down at the blood on the back of my hand and trying my best to breathe through my mouth even once the blood was running into it, making me grimace at the taste of old pennies and iron. Shutting my eyes and trying to catch my breath, I winced as a deep breath sent a dagger sharp pain through my side, by my ribs. Blinking my bruised-feeling eyes, I reached up with my as-of-yet unbloodied hand to check my shirt on that side...only to hiss out pain and spittle and blood as my fingertips brushed against raw, flensed flesh of my side. Pulling it back from there, I looked at the blood liberally coating my hand. Fuck. FUCK! "God FUCKING Dammit!" I screamed into the twilight, tears welling fat and heavy in my eyes as I coughed, spraying the blood that was even now running down my lips and chin.

I sobbed, torn between that or laughter. Sitting down, I wept, smearing my mouth clear of blood as I looked upwards, hoping my nose would stop bleeding. For years, I'd berated myself for being a fucking coward. And now, for once in my goddamned life, I actually did something that was remotely fucking brave. I'd spent my whole life being careful and cautious. Always missing things because I was too afraid of the consequences. And now? Now I was going to bleed to death or die of some godawful infection all because I took a fucking risk for once. Worse? Worse was the fact that nobody would ever know what the fuck happened to me. It'd be anywhere between a few days to a week before anyone would even think to call me. It'd probably be half a week more before anyone, probably my mom, got worried enough to call the cops.

Oh, no, no, no. I close my eyes, a moment of cold panic sending ice through my veins. Mom was going to be so fucking disappointed when she sorted through my effects. I snorted, the blood in my nose burbling in an ugly, splattering bubble. Then I laughed, cutting off with a pained wheeze as I realized that I was sitting here, probably doomed to die, and I was freaking out because my mother was going to see my browser history. It...it was so damned absurd that I was sitting here worrying about that. But then, that particular long-held and neurotic habit was pretty damned well ingrained by this point.

Reminded of the wound in my side, I did my best to gingerly pull off my work polo and use it as a makeshift bandage of sorts. Not that sweat-dampened polyester was worth a damn as far as absorbency or sterility went, but beggars and choosers, after all. Pulling it on tight, I tied it up at my side, well aware of the way the tightly tied shirt was making the pudge on my side more obvious by dimpling it put into my love handles. Taking shallow breaths, I got up and made my way over to the beat that was sitting there, breathing heavily and exhaustedly as it snarled and repeatedly blinked its eyes, trying to clear them of the burning pain of the bear spray.

Briefly forgetting to breathe through my mouth, I had a fit of coughing, spraying my blood over the creature's scarred flank. When I had finally managed to catch my breath again, I stepped at a careful distance from the creature to retrieve my jacket, keeping my stun gun hand free, read to zap the damned thing if necessary. Or maybe even if not. I'm not proud to admit it, but the thought that this ill-tempered monster had probably killed me had left me feeling more than a little bit vindictive towards it. Retrieving my coat with my left hand, I managed to get around to run my fingers through the proper pocket to retrieve the largest of my three knives.

A part of me, the angry and spiteful part of myself that I'd worked hard to quash for over a decade by this point, wanted to stab the damned thing. After all, it'd killed me. It'd be fair to return the favor, right? Wrong. And, truth be told, I knew that was a morally bankrupt position to hold. I was just angry. Scared. Yet despite that, I was still more than a little entranced by the sight before me. The pebbled skin and powerfully corded muscles on display, as this creature I'd dreamt of seeing for long, long years lay there before me. Still, my brows furrowed as I squinted down at the Deinonychus. I'd noted before things got crazy that it seemed off somehow, aside from the fact that it was more than a hundred million years out of place, given its presence alongside what had appeared to be a modern black bear.

Deinonychus antirrhopus and, as far as I was aware, the rest of the dromesauridae were part of a category of saurian theropod dinosaurs whose proper terminology I always managed to forget but who were united by the distinguishing feature of having had feathers. Jurassic Park, both movie and book, had come out a bit before the discovery of feathered v. mongoliensis skin impressions, and so the movie had them clad in the pebbled skin then presumed to be common amongst most dinosaurs. The beast that had tried to cut a flank steak off of me was much the same, utterly unfeathered, not so much as a tuft of down or a single pinion upon it.

I was still standing there, agonizing over whether I should finish off the majestic monster, spray it again with my bear spray, or just taze it again and run like the hounds of hell were after me--hah, me, running; yeah that'd fucking happen when I was hurt and winded. And maybe I'd grow fucking wings and soar away while I was imagining the impossible. Still, it was probably in my best interests to make sure the beast was too thoroughly dazed to chase me, so I scooted carefully foreward, then shocked it again, holding my stun gun to its writhing flesh as it screamed its pain to the skies above. I had stepped back and was just about to turn around to go, jacket up over my shoulder, when voices up ahead of me jarred me from the mixture of gallows humor and dull wonder at what'd just happened.

Squinting in the face of the sunset, I managed to make out three human or humanish shapes, one short and rotund where the other two were huge and beefy.

The little fat...man? I think it was a man, from what I could make out of his voice beyond the fact that he spoke in a language of agony and pain...and I mean that literally. Have you ever heard a conversation in a distant room, just beyond the point of comprehension, yet which tantalized with the barest hints of comprehension? Or, perhaps, heard a conversation in a language which was a close relative to one you did understand, such as hearing French while you understood Spanish or Italian? It was like both of those things, but also neither of them. It also was absolute agony to hear.

Every single syllable sent a sliver of raw, unadulterated torment sizzling into my brain and threatening to boil my mind. As I doubled over and hissed out an expression of agony, I wondered if this was what the cluster headaches my friend Trish got every so often felt like. I wanted to curl up in a ball, vomit, and then die. Anything to make the hurting stop.

And then suddenly, it did. Rising to my feet I managed to croak out a rasping, "Quiet!" at the trio. When they clearly didn't get the picture, the pudgy fellow opening his broad mouth like a bullfrog ready to croak again, I let out a sharp, sibilant "SHHH!" I figured that the nearly universal command to shush would get it across where English wouldn't. I was right. It did. Flicking my flashlight on, I borrowed a nasty trick for taking away someone's poise that I learned from the police and shone the brilliant beam right into the faces of each of the approaching individuals in turn. I had no idea what sort of figure I must have cut, half-naked and an obvious wound bandaged with a scarlet run of cloth, my nose broken and blood running down past my lips and neck to drool, quite irritatingly I might add, into my cleavage, but apparently it was actually an intimidating one, as both Beef Hardfist and Big McLargeHuge leveled spears of similar stature to their own at me. I couldn't help it, I giggled. It was just so fucking absurd! Me, overweight, boring, me--the single least threatening person I'd ever met--had these two WWE-huge motherfuckers edgy and jumping. Shaking my head, I blew another spray of blood off my lips, before favoring them with a smile that was only slightly stained by blood, or at least I hoped that was the case. Realizing that gestures and expressions might speak more clearly than words here, I raised my left eyebrow interrogatively at them, looking from one to the next to the next. Somehow, they got the point. Then again, I have very expressive eyebrows.

Tubbs McFancyPants spoke up this time and, wonder piling atop wonder, I actually understood him this time.

"I was hoping to, ah, convince you to, um, refrain from killing my claw strider there. It is worth quite a sizeable sum of money to the right buyer, you see, and it has been ever so much effort tracking it this past half-day." He gave me an unctuous smile, tinged with wariness and fragile hope. "There is a, erm, a modest reward I would happily provide you with for assisting in its recovery. And if nothing else, a lady of your, ahem, obvious education and sagacity should clearly not be forced to travel the wilderness alone in this fashion. If you will assent to travel with us, you could ride in relative comfort aboard our caravan all the way back to proper civilization." He stopped here, eyes searching my face.

I have no earthly idea what he might've seen there. At that particular moment, I was utterly fucking poleaxed by the first sentence he'd said. I knew of only one context past present, real or imagined, that used the phrase claw strider to refer to d. antirrhopus. I couldn't help but wonder bitterly, What? Was Worm or one of the Warhammer settings unavailable? You see, I had finally figured out where I was. Well, assuming I'd heard him correctly.

I opened my mouth, spitting more of the last of the now-drying blood from my lips before rasping hoarsely in the tongue he'd addressed me with, "Sorry. I didn't quite catch part of that. Your what?"

"My...um...that is, my claw strider. That, right there." He pointed a fat finger at the source of my current injuries, as if his context might've been uncertain.

"Fuck," I muttered in English. Switching back to the other language, I nodded to him, saying, "That sounds quite admirable. I don't suppose you'll have bandages or something to disinfect my side? The thing got a good hit there before I managed to bring it down. Well, there and my nose." I smiled sheepishly.

He blinked owlishly at me before nodding and gesturing for either Beef or Big to secure the creature, I couldn't tell which with my eyesight being what it was. "So!" he said in probably fake cheer, "Come with me Lady, er...apologies. I don't believe I caught your name, madam."

I rolled my eyes, nodding at him. "You can call me Anna."

"Very well, come, Lady Anna. We shall get you bandaged and cleaned and in clothing befitting a savant of your obvious skill! And then, you may regale me with tales of your exploits as we take the road all the way to Great Forks, most artful of cities!"

Yep, I mused in resignation, I am so goddamned fucked. I am in Creation.

 

[Thief of Words]

Part I: Grief
Stage I: Denial
Chapter: IV
or
I:I:IV​

I would love to say the conversation that followed my introduction went well. I'd love to be able to say that I handled myself with verve and aplomb. I really would. Sadly, I can't. To start with, that conversation didn't happen. Apparently, since my side was sliced open, I'd been moving on sheer willpower. I tried to take that first step, and I went over like a house of cards. Didn't really manage to say much more than a pained whimper when I hit the ground. I heard voices around me, but they seemed to come from a distance, and I found I couldn't keep my eyes open. I let out another, probably piteous, noise when I felt strong hands grasping me and lifting me up. I was bounced, jounced, and shaken around at a quick pace, but things had grown hazy, distant. I drifted away to the sense of motion and the sound of running.

What happened next is, well...I have no fucking clue what exactly happened after that. Things got hazy for a while after that. I can remember impressions of things, a sense of motion, people prodding and poking at me, asking me to do things I didn't want to do. I was tired. Really tired. I mostly just wanted to go to sleep. I remember feeling like I was floating, just drifting along underwater, entirely at the mercy of the gentle rocking of the tides. It reminded me of scuba-diving in a way, which was nice. I'm fairly sure I slept. A lot. I mean, whole days of vague and dreamlike...stuff? Stuff fits well enough, I suppose. Days, maybe weeks', worth of stuff happened. People came, people left. Sometimes they made me eat certain things or drink other things. Many of those tasted awful. Some I tried to spit out. Some tasted nice. Those I ate happily, drank happily. Sometimes either or both of those actions made them mad. It was confusing. Sometimes they tried to speak with me. I usually didn't understand why. I tried to move some, but it hurt to do so. I couldn't always remember why. Everything was confusing. Where I was, what was going on, all of it.

Eventually the haze started to lighten. I started to be able to remember things somewhat better. The questions, it turned out, were repetitions. A check-up. One that had been administered several times by this point. The first time I really remember more than indistinct fragments of it, were on a day that started poorly and only grew more mortifying as it went on. I woke up to the feeling of rattling shudders running through the stiff frame of the bed beneath me. I felt stiff myself, so I probably shouldn't have given the bed, well...it was more of a wooden cot with an overstuffed mattress atop it, really, but I probably didn't have the right to give it guff for that anyway. My muscles, such as they were, ached from long sleep in a bad position. I tried to stretch to work the ache out of my sides and back, only to stop with a pained whimper as my left side screamed when I lifted that shoulder to stretch that side of my back.

I had been staring at a scene elaborately detailed onto the wooden cart's inner roof. It had been pleasant, the way the intricately painted ceiling's designs subtly twisted and danced while I watched them. Which...really should've been a clue that I was on something. It reminded me of times I'd taken an Ambien and then gotten distracted before I could head to bed. Well, back when I'd taken that particular sleep-aid. Still, the stretch had brought tears welling to my eyes, and my vision of the beautifully rendered designs on the roof grew blurred. I quickly blinked away the tears, trying not to groan further as I felt at my side, sending another awful pulse of pain through it. My fingertips were met with the feeling of soft, soft linen, tightly wound. Bandages. I was injured. I...how was...? I paused, trying to think of what would've hurt me. Well, most of me did. A not insignificant faction in my mind just wanted me to go back to sleep. Or just to sit here, staring at the roof. It was pretty, and as long as I didn't move, I actually felt good. Really good. But sleepy. Which...ought to be worrying. That meant some sort of soporific narcotic. Sleepy euphoria made it seem like either they had me on an opiate or a benzo-, er. A benzodie...um. Benzo-thingy.

Ugh. My thoughts felt slippery and heavy, like lead weights sheathed in plastic and drowned in vaseline. I really, really wanted to just set them down. But I knew that would be tremendously irresponsible, even for me. Just as I resolved to hang onto the train of thought about why I was injured and drugged to the gills, I was startled into losing my grip on the idea by the wagon's door opening to let in a gust of hot, humid air, the stink of large herbivores, and a narrow-faced woman with hair the lurid purple-pink and cream white of a bright-hued orchid bloom. The shock of that floral-toned head of hair and the faint greenish tinge of her skin jarred me from my previous concerns as the fact of where I was jarred me out of my attempt to puzzle out the reason I was hurt and high. I...was in Creation. The obvious something-blooded joining me in the cart was a sure sign of that. Sitting up in order not to be lying down when I had company, I noticed something else my narcotics-dulled senses had neglected to let me notice: Beside the linen bandages running under my breasts and around my ribs, I was bare-assed naked.

Face burning as the luxurious white silk of the sheets tried to slip down and off my breasts and leave me entirely bare to my visitor's eyes, I flushed and clutched at them in a panic. The woman blinked, clearly surprised by the gesture. I continued to turn beet-red and fumbled about for something to say that wouldn't make me sound like an idiot. Unfortunately, I didn't do so well. "Um. I...sorry? I seem to have, um, misplaced? Misplaced my clothing." I shifted the silk sheet to cover me a bit better before shrugging and asking, "You wouldn't happen to know what happened to them, would you? I'd, well, rather get dressed so I don't, y'know, die of embarrassment." My voice was slow, even compared to my usual sedate speaking pace--which was itself an artifact of both a Southern upbringing and a painstaking, pensive disposition--the tones slurring and stilted.

Her expression didn't so much as twitch, her eyes giving me a once over before she stepped to the table. "I doubt that's likely, considering your...suggestions earlier in the week. You were adamantly against 'chaining the calamity that is my mammaries' as you so eloquently phrased yourself when we attempted to provide you with clothing before."

"I," my face, neck, cleavage, and ears all turned a lurid red, a sharp contrast from my normally pasty and freckled skin as I slurred out a panicked, "I did what?!"

I couldn't tell if she had no sense of humor or simply a supremely dry one. Her mouth didn't so much as curl up at the corners. "Quite. You insisted you were 'too much woman for mere mortal clothing to handle' and entirely refused to put on so much as a single stitch." She snorted. "You then claimed you were allergic to cotton. And to wool. You attempted to claim a silk allergy, despite having rested on silk sheets from the moment you were admitted to my infirmary."

I gave a weak grimace, face still burning as I listened, horrified but enrapt. You see, there's a fact about myself I don't exactly tell many people. Apparently, once I pass a certain degree of intoxication, I undergo something of a metamorphosis. From an awkward, quiet wallflower who couldn't lie with a straight face to save her frigging life, I become a blithe and incorrigible liar. I had, at one point, gotten so intoxicated that when questioned by police, I'd provided them with an entirely fictional personal history and description of events. And then promptly forgot about the entire incident until told about it by a friend who'd witnessed the whole, gloriously stupid situation. I was mortified by the idea of what I'd done.

You see, there's a pretty big disconnect from my apparent manner and my mind. I'm...I'm not really an up-front kind of gal. Not really. Not in person. Over the years, growing up, I gradually accumulated what amounts to a fucking ironclad personal filter. My unvarnished stream of consciousness is something to which I, and I alone am privy, barring nigh-blackout drunkenness or usage of narcotics. Ambien would do the trick. Among alcohols, Everclear did likewise. Beyond that? I spent too long observing my grandmother, whose personal filter had always been spotty at best, to be willing to be as unabashedly up-front as she was. Even if sometimes I envied her confidence, to tell any-and-everyone exactly what she thought at all times, I'd been subjected to ridicule for it far too often when I was still enough of a precocious child for it to come across as cute, something I'd resented the hell out of. Before puberty hit me like a Mack truck and circumstances broke me into little depressed pieces, I'd been an inordinately serious-minded child. I had loathed that people thought I was cute.

I blinked again at the idea, chewing on my lower lip before asking a question that had been pressing on my mind since she'd gotten here. "Blood?"

"Hm? Pardon?"

"Your blood," I slurred, smiling. "Demon, fae, god, elemental, dragon? No....no. Demon's not likely. Only know of two floral demons. One is...probably a sunflower? The animating intelligence of a living Malfean floral manse...and might not have grown yet. Um. Th'other's not possible. Benenenezet. Um. Benne...Bennie? Zet! Beniezet! Um. Benezet. Right. Orchids're a typified plant, not somethin' unique, and Bezenet's nature is to make thin's that're unique. Or make things unique. So...yeah." I chewed my lower lip. "Dunno about any wood elemental speciesh that'd be...that're orchidy. Um. Don't know enough about fae to guess if it could be that. So....um. Yer not creepifying enough f'r a child of the creepy stillbirth goddess of An Teng. Her kids're bamboo tree walkers, I...think? Mmm...and, of course, that leaves maybe fae, maybe god, maybe dragonblooded." Shrugging, I tilt my head. "So...yeah. That. Guessing that you have exaltation of and/or by the Dragons, depending upon whom it is you ask. But better to ask, so...yeah. Which?"

Her eyes narrowed in what might've been amusement. Maybe? Not entirely sure there. She was too subtle for me to read for certain. "Hm. Not an...inept analysis. I am a Wood Aspect Dragonblooded." She gave me a slight inclination of her head in recognition. "Had you not been in recovery as long as you have, I would have been tempted to ask if you yourself were an Earth Aspect, given your stature and the pallor of your skin. Given that you are clearly mortal, I should ask: are you perhaps a Patrician of some stripe, Anna?"

I blinked owlishly, trying to figure out how she'd gotten my name. "U-um, what?"

She repeated herself. "Are you a Patrician of some sort? Or perhaps an unexalted member of a Dynastic family?"

I blinked. "When did I tell you my name?"

"Pardon?" She seemed put off by the sudden non-sequitur.

"My name. You...you know my name. How come?"

"You provided it. Before you initially lost consciousness."

"I did? Um. Huh. That...oh. Okay?"

"Now that your question is answered, perhaps you'd care to answer mine?"



I took a moment to work my way back through the last bit of the conversation to remember what she'd said. When I remembered, I couldn't help it. I laughed. Not some short burst of laughter, but an undignified, tear-welling, gut-busting series of high pitched giggling that only stopped when I tried to bend over and the laughter turned into a pained and breathless wheeze at the molten agony in my side. "O-owww. D-don't make me laugh like 'at. 's...s'not nice."



Her pinkish-purple brows lifted momentarily, before she offered a toneless, "My apologies, then."

"Is...is alright. I mean," I gave her a smile that probably had too many teeth showing. "You're why I'm not dead of in...in...um. Blood poisoning an' stuff. So...eh." I tried to blink my way through lids that felt like they weighed 20 lbs each. "Oof. Whatever you've got me on...it...hoo. Hoo boy, it's doin' a number on me. No nausea...so nothing so crude as laudanaudan...um. Not laudanum. It makes ya nauseated. Is the no scope thingy. Um. Nosca...noscapine. So...is it morpher...morph...um. More fine? No. Um. Morphine! That's it. I'm on morphine, right?"



Again she seemed...I don't know. Maybe amused, maybe not. I couldn't...I couldn't tell.

"Dun judge me," I sulked. I realized how I sounded and added, "Don't judge me. Is the drugs talkin'. Well, messin' up my talkin'."

Her lips twitched at the corners. "Mm. If I were going to start judging you, I probably would have started after the fifth time you attempted to convince me to help you 'break in' the cot."

I squeaked and buried my face in my hands, letting out a groan of mortification. "Please tell me you're fuckin' with me."

Another snort. I'd started to suspect she just had a very, very dry sense of humor. I mean, we're talking a British man left to pickle in a 100 gallons of gin in the middle of Death Valley dry. I...I'd be lying if that hadn't made me want to kiss her. "No, Lady Anna. What I'm saying is that I refused to fuck you." Again her lips twitched upward slightly at the corners. Alongside her emerald lips' sheen, the dancing of her orchid-colored eyes, those hints of humor made her entirely enthralling. Plus there was the willowy grace of her carriage. The obvious intelligence in that measuring gaze.

No, no. Unsexy thoughts. She could poison me at a whim if we kissed. Her anima would manage that faster than I could escape. Mmmhmmm. Just like Poison Ivy. I grimaced. I said unsexy thoughts, dammit! I felt a sudden thought pressing unwelcome against the back of my mind. Waitaminute...that was in the past tense. Does that mean she still might? I pulled my arms over my face to try and hide my horrid, lurid blush. I could feel my face burning at this point. Stupid, dirty mind. Hate you, brain. I felt the stagnant, beast-of-burden scented air stir over my chest. Oh, shit! I'm still naked! Squawking, I dropped my arms down to cover as much of my chest as I could manage. I...wanted to ask her if that meant she might consider it. But that seemed...well, at best I figured it'd get me laughed at, and that kind of mockery would sting.

"So," I attempted to change the topic of conversation, "about those clothes? I...um. I'd really like some about now. If...if there are any that'll work with the whole," I made to gesture at the bandages over my ribs, then stopped when I realized that'd have me flashing her again, "um...bandaged up and braless thingy that I've got going on."

"Braless?" She quirked on eyebrow up ever so slightly.

"W-well. Did you see what they brought me in wearing? The blue bits that covered my breasts? That's a brassiere. Provides support for a gal's bouncy bits. It's kind of a godsend for folks with big breasts."

She considered a moment, then shrugged. "You'd have to check in with someone else to see if any of your clothing was salvageable. You were...well, you bled quite profusely until someone did what I'm loathe to accord more than a hack job on bandaging your injury. Still, whoever did that saved your life by staunching the bleeding."

"Um. That...that'd have been me. I...I didn't want to bleed to death, so...um, insufficient bandaging seemed less a problem than none."

"Unusual to encounter those of your apparent profession who have more than passing knowledge of medical practice."

I struggled to piece her implications together through a head that refused to feel anything other than monumentally heavy. I frown, my brows beetling down. "A-are you calling me a whore?"

She blinked owlishly at me, her train of thought having been viciously derailed. "How is that your inference from what I said?"

"W-well, you said I kept perp...porp, per...ugh!" I ground my teeth, aggravated at my words not obeying my thoughts. "Perposi....solicited you for sex a bunch, and hooker...er...um. Prossitutes do that."

"You showed up wielding strange and novel artifacts and singlehandedly apprehended a claw strider. The only presumption was that you were of the class of active archaeologist or savant that investigates tombs and lost cities and such nonsense."

I offered her an eloquently empty expression as I tried to puzzle out what she was getting at. My mind felt like it was being slow-dipped into cold molasses, and it fucking sucked. "U-um. O-okay. I...can," I let out a cavernous yawn, eyes prickling with tears and jaw stretching to the point it probably would've felt sore had I not been doped up on painkillers. "Can I go back to sleep now? An'...and can we gimme off of the morphine? It...hate my mind going all goopy and sticky, hate my thoughts getting stuck."

She gave a short nod. "That can be arranged, though you may not be glad it was, afterwards."

I didn't even have the energy to muster a retort to that. I just shrugged, slipping back onto the cushioned cot, rolling over and wrapping my arms around and under the pillow, hugging it to me as I strove for sleep.

It didn't take me long to drift off after that.

 

[Baran3]

Huh...

Watching for now.

Not enough to form an opinion.

 

[Thief of Words]

Huh. Not a single like or reaction past that. Unsure if that means those inclined to read it did so elsewhere or...or what. XD

 

[giodan]

Love it! At frist i was thinking she don't konw exalted but it was great how she realizated it!

 

[the DragonBard]

Very interesting.
Hope to see more.

 

[Thief of Words]

Part I: Grief
Stage I: Denial
Chapter: V
or
I: I: V​

Strange, vivid dreams and nightmares haunted my sleep that night. I couldn't remember what they consisted of by the time I finished reluctantly clawing myself to wakefulness, their misty substance billowing away to nothing under the daylight which slowly flowed in and filled up the inside of the wagon. As before, my thoughts felt slow, though this was a different slowness than the morphine had brought on. It was less like trying to wade through neck-deep jello, gently impeded by a calming, gripping reverberation, something which gives way periodically. This...this was the slowness of a badly maintained car's engine. Stop-and-start, engine complaining before it finally rumbles to life. As my mind puttered gradually to operation, I tried to open up my eyes and look around. As it turned out, that was something of a mistake.

As it turned out, I had one hell of a black eye going on. My luck being the utter shit-show it always was, it was my right, my good...well, no, that's a lie. I don't have a good eye. I have a worse eye and a better eye. But better, it must always be remembered, is a comparative measure. After all, just because it's a better terrible sandwich than another more terrible sandwich doesn't change that they're both terrible sandwiches. That's how my eyes are. My right eye is somewhat better than my left. Neither actually lets me see clearly out past about five or eight feet, but the right eye's view tends to be slightly clearer at that range.

After I managed, with what I am proud to hope was a minimum of whimpering, to recover from the pain of trying to open then trying to close my right eye, I gingerly opened my left eye and stare blearily about the medical wagon around me through a pounding head. On the...well, not quite bright side, clearly Doc Orchid had taken my request to just apply morphine enough to insure I slept seriously. Despite my inclination to regret that at that particular moment, I knew that was a good thing. Addictive personalities ran deep in my` family tree, on both sides. And I sure as hell inherited one. Steeling myself, I breathed in, then out, then in again, and levered myself upright. I even only sounded like someone was breaking my fingers when I discovered how badly my side hurt. I think. Hopefully. Maybe.

When I got myself upright, I made the mistake of trying to blink with both eyes, drawing tears and another groan of pain as my own muscles made my right eye feel punched. Once the throbbing in my head finally receded, I started looking around properly. Doc O wasn't in at the moment, something I considered simultaneously advantageous and unfortunate. On the one hand, I was still fucking naked, and the fewer times people managed to see me starkers, stretch-marks and all, the better. On the other hand, I was still fucking naked, and I really wanted a chance to get some clothes on. And see if any of my stuff or my coat had survived my near-disembowelment. I still owed that Deinonychus a follow-up tazing. Well, no. No, bad brain. Don't go all vindictive on me. No doubt it was just following instincts when it decided I'd have been an easier target than the fucking bear. Not that that worked out for it. Then again, if it expected to survive long in Creation, it was probably a useful fucking lesson for the thing, specifically: beware the sheep that runs off wolves. As many innocuous seeming things here that managed to be utterly and terrifyingly lethal, those were words to damn well live by.

Pulling the silk sheets around me, I took a few moments to pull them into a tentative toga around me, feeling gratified that I still remembered how to do so, seeing as last time I had cause to do it was just over a decade ago during Senior year of high school. Which just reminded me that I hadn't been invited to my reunion. Not that I'd have actually gone. My high school days were...we'll go with an interesting time--albeit in the Chinese curse sense--but really, you could mostly put that unwillingness down to the fact that despite having been considered the uncontested smartest person in my class, I was about as far from 'most likely to succeed' as could be, and I'd lived down to that, given I was almost thirty, hadn't had a date in a decade, and I was delivering pizza part time to pay my rent.

So, on the one hand, I'd feel jealous both of the pretty but not so smart girls I'd known who'd settled down with a high school sweetheart and popped out some kids and of the overachievers club members my grades should have put me in the midst of...if it weren't for the fact that by the time I got to my second high school I was essentially running on fucking autopilot to the point that it had been commented to me by my classmates that they couldn't believe the way I could apparently nap during Calculus class, get called on, look up for about four seconds, answer the question perfectly, then put my head back on my desk. Never mind that my dyscalculia meant that I always wavered between a high B and low A in math. And had to get extra time for test-taking. Though, honestly, when it came to my 'nap then answer' trick, the key was that 1) I was a hell of a lot lighter back then, so I didn't snore anywhere near as badly as I do now, 2) when it came to classes, I was usually at least 2-4 days ahead, and 3) that ever since I was a little girl, I'd always been good at pretending to be asleep when I wasn't. It was how I managed to sneak 2-3 extra hours' reading into a night despite Mom's tendency to check in on me.

Then again, by the point of Junior and Senior year of high school, the last time I'd been actually challenged intellectually by schoolwork was back when I'd spent Freshman and Sophomore year of high school going to a high-tier boarding school on a scholarship. At the time, I was met by the simultaneous issues of 1) having been too immature to handle living away from family on my own, and 2) of having been in the process of entirely failing to cope with my family's disintegration which had been going on for a good three or so years. I learned a great deal there, mind you. For one, I learned I was stronger than I thought, having managed to do shot put as a sport. I was also first introduced to R-rated movies, the effects of drugs on people I knew, and anime. It was also the last place I'd met someone who I would have unequivocally and without a doubt called more intelligent than I was. I'd met plenty of folks after that more educated than I was. But more learned is different from being outright brighter. To be fair to me and to her, though, she was studying Milton and quantum physics in high school for fun, and she ended up going to Harvard with a free ride. Also, she ran my first-ever game of D&D, so I will always owe her a debt of gratitude for introducing me to something which kept me sane through the way my entire life subsequently unraveled.

My makeshift toga covering everything from about mid-cleavage down, I staggered over to the other side of the medical wagon from where my overstuffed cot sat resting against one of the wagon walls. Ignoring the throbbing pain in my face and side to the best of my ability, I stumbled across the huge vehicle to squint myopically at the racks of glass bottles of various solutions and fluids and packets of odd powders stored in a gorgeously-wrought set of shelving-cum-cabinet against the opposite wall. The bottles were marked by what looked like labels, though I'd had to draw close to be sure. As I tried to make out the contents of one, hoping against hope that it said something useful for the situation like "willow-bark extract" or the like, I had to fight a sense of vertigo as the calligraphy writhed under my gaze like an ill-tempered octopus. Concentrating, I tried to make more than an inky, contorting scrawl out of it, only for a sudden sense of pressure to set in behind my eyes, building in a rush before bludgeoning me down to a heap on the floor. Cracking my head against the boards beneath me, I could barely manage to croak out a whimper as my vision receded and my thoughts blanked before the pain.

When I found I could bear to move again, I made my way upright at a glacial pace and untangling and then fixing my sheet wrap, my wounds and bruises still throbbing. A vague sense of panic making itself heard over my general discontent, I patted at my side, letting out a slow sigh of relief as my hands came back dry. It was good to know I hadn't opened any stitches, even if it didn't actually make sense that I hadn't. Still, that concern took a backburner to the realization that I could read the damned labels, which I hadn't been able to do before my little fainting spell.

The fuck? How do I even...I mean, the actual fuck?! Shaking my head, I continued my perusal of the supplies. Eventually I gave up, letting out an irritated little snort. Of course there isn't any damned aspirin.

Sighing, I looked around, trying to see if there were any scrolls or books I could try reading. I was bored. Really, really bored, and the last thing I wanted was to be left alone with my own thoughts. Last thing I'd ever wanted was to be left alone with my own thoughts. Kneeling carefully, I opened up first one, then another drawer. I reclosed the one which held nothing but a surprisingly tidily sorted grouping of silver immediately. Even if I had pockets or a place to hide stolen money I was depending on these people for clothing, food, continued medical care, and transportation to somewhere less likely to be bandit ridden than one of the major trade routes in the Threshold. I wouldn't say I was comfortable with any of that, mostly because I absolutely wasn't. Still, I had sense enough not to sink any chance of at least getting my feet somewhere in the direction of under me, rather than ending up six feet under.

Looking into the next drawer, I looked over a surprisingly sterile-looking set of surgical tools. Good to know they don't just rely on magic to do the job for them.

Closing that drawer as well, I was in the process of pulling open and pawing through a third, much harder to reach drawer in hopes of finding either a cloth to wipe off the sweat I was currently drowning under or something to frigging do until I got the chance to ask for clothes and whatnot when one of the paired bay doors at the back of the immense coveyance slammed itself shut with a resounding bang. Yelping, I reflexively threw what I'd been shifting at the person there without thinking. As the figure's arm swept up and caught the pair of wire-wrapped handles, I took the chance to scurry back and away from the Dragonblooded physician, tears starting to streak my cheeks as terror began to strangle me. I didn't...I really didn't want to know why a physician would want a fucking garotte squirreled away in a corner of their clinic. Unfortunately, I had a very strong suspicion as to why.

"P-please," I managed to sob out as the pink-haired healer stared at me, entirely unamused, "please tell me th-that isn't not what I think it isn't. Please? I-it's just...just a loop of, of...of cheesewire, right?"

​

 

[giodan]

wow!!!!! never a time to realx eh?

 

[Thief of Words]

I : I : VI Musical Preview

​

 

[Thief of Words]

I : I: VI







Her expression shifted not a whit. No gleam of wry humor came to my rescue. Maybe I was reading too much into her comment before, and she really did have the sense of humor of a stump. Maybe it just wasn't a joking matter. Maybe she only enjoyed irreverence to a point, one we had clearly passed. She took a step towards me from the distant end of the immense clinical cart. I couldn't help but feel like the huge space was far, far too small for my liking.



"Well," she intoned with all the welcome warmth of an unexpected speculum, "that is singularly unfortunate." As she spoke, she strode forward, slowly uncoiling the wire from about the twinned wooden handles of the garrote. I couldn't help but be transfixed by the sight. It was like a cotton-mouth, all shiny coiled catastrophe unwinding and ready to render me dead for my trespass. My mind raced, tearing in two directions at once. On the one hand, I wanted to scream, to run, to break down and cry. On the other, I wanted to laugh my damn head off. It was just my fucking luck. And again with the doctors.



My dad's indiscretions had sundered my family beyond any hope of salvaging. My last boss' lies had left me unemployed and in the lurch for most of a year, and, a solid year along still riding the bleeding edge of homelessness. And now? Now this Dragonblooded doctor-bitch was going to kill me simply because she hid her murder-weapon about as well as my dad had hidden his liquor bottles or his handgun when I was a teenager. I'd...rather not go into why I know that, to be honest. Plus, at the time, I had far more important things to deal with than memories of...not better times but also not worse, not really.



With an effort of will, I tore my eyes from the garrote in her hands and watched her as she stalked forward, tense and wary, in a most unwelcome way. There was a tension to her posture as she came forward. One that tore from me a desperate, babbling, blubbering attempt to get her to stop.



"I don't, there's... stay back! Don't come...don't come closer! I'm...you don't have to. Have to...look, you," I desperately cast around. "You don't have to kill me to keep this a secret, I mean. So what if you're an assassin? So what if-if, so what if you kill people in addition to fixing them? I," I gritted my teeth, hating how fucking pathetic I sounded. You'd think I'd have tried to at least die with some fucking dignity. Some goddamned class. But no, you see, tackled dinosaur aside, I'm a consummate coward.



She slowed. I decided to try and capitalize on the maybe-opportunity. I couldn't afford to die now. I wouldn't. I couldn't die now, not without having managed to actually do anything worth justifying my life. I...damn it all, for the first time in my life, I'm somewhere my knowledge actually gives me power to fucking help people, and I'm going to die because someone's shitty at subterfuge! Someone, please! I just want to "I won't tell, won't tell anyone. I swear it. Hell, I'll swear it on any authority you want. By the constancy of Nysela, Goddess of Heavenly Duty. On the honor of the Seventh Legion, by the munificence of the Scarlet Empress, by the-the...by the brilliant mind of Brem Marst, for fucks sake! By the eternal mandate of the Order of the Manacle and Coin, by all these things and more do I swear myself to silence. You're a child of Sextes Jylis! Have some fucking compassion, damn you!"



She stopped, mere steps away from me by now. The tension bled from her motions, and she stood calm and relaxed. Apparently what I'd said was convincing. Or she accepted one of those oaths. I wasn't sure which. Except...something about it seemed wrong. Seemed too easy.



I narrowed my eyes, frantically trying to figure out what was setting me off. She was just walking toward me. Her expression was placid, her arms down by her sides, the garotte held casually in...shit. that's what it was. She was still holding the fucking weapon ready to use, despite that her posture and stance practically screamed, "everything is normal; nothing to see here!"



I blinked owlishly, a coin dropping.



An eyebrow clambered up my forehead, disbelieving, as I burst into tears and laughter. She was still going to kill me. And I even knew why.



Her lips twitching in quickly suppressed irritation, she slowed a moment. "I'm afraid I fail to see what the humor is, here."



I blinked, clearing my eyes. "I...heh, I do. I just," I trailed off into another attack of giggles. "It's just that I...I can't help but remember the whole speech that goes with," I gestured with a wave at her posture and stance, "that style. Was certainly memorable. Never even got the chance to give the thing."



The look she gave me in response was as dry and unimpressed as the Sahara.



"No, really!" I laughed again, wiping to clear my eyes and sniffling to clear my runny nose. "Just...give me a second to catch my breath."



Holding up a forestalling hand, I gulped down air and forced my heart rate to slowly return to something vaguely close to normal. Working my way up the wall, to stand leaning against it, I closed my eyes, mouthed the first few words to refresh them in my head, and launched headfirst into the spiel.



"There is no White Veil Society. It is not cunningly concealed among the apparently carefree Dragon-Blooded socialites of the Realm, its satrapies and Lookshy. No one would suggest that its members have a political agenda within and beyond the Scarlet Empire. Nor would anyone believe, should it be whispered, that the White Veil Society collects vast sums of money and favors in order to further the goals that it doesn't have. Moreover, an organization that does not exist certainly cannot have the influence or talent pool to develop its own subtle, social martial arts style.

White Veil Style does not combine common, everyday movements with potent manipulations of chakras and Essence lines in a devastating and nearly invisible manner. It isn't one of the White Veil Society's many sources of secret power. It never sees use at the recitals, dinners and orgies of the Dynasts. People do not die from it, occasionally silently and occasionally screaming, days or weeks after not encountering it.

Students who are not learning this elementally neutral style do not believe in secrecy and the universal application of stealth. They do not train by walking on the unbroken eggshell of the dove, by holding complete conversational debates while making high-precision strikes or by meditating on the meaning of the poisons and diseases that they wield."



I breathed in, eyes still closed, a small and satisfied, if crooked, grim tilting up the right corner of my mouth. I was tempted to say to cross that off my bucket list, given how long I'd hoped to get to deliver a version of it. A choked off, dry imitation of a laugh snuck its way out of me. Bucket list might've been a bit close to accurate, under the circumstances. Ah well. Fuck it. If she really wanted me dead, I already was. White Veil was some delayed-action Fist of the North Star level bullshit. I'd find out in hours or days when I died in agony or peacefully in my sleep. Almost laughing again, I shook my head and opened my eyes.



I will cherish the memory of the look on her face as she struggled to come to some kind of decision for years to come, assuming I manage to survive that long, that is.



I did laugh, albeit briefly at that. She was...less than amused.



"You could've saved a great deal of time by simply telling me you were White Veil," she settled on irritation.



"N-nope," I managed to catch my breath, if not kill the sort-of-smirk on my lips. "Certainly couldn't."



She gave me a blank stare. "You know of the White Veil. As a mortal. And still live. Clearly, you're a member."



"Totally couldn't. I'm not one. I mean, how could I be?" I couldn't help the smile as I pointed out, quite calmly, "There is no White Veil society. Certainly I couldn't be a member of a society that doesn't exist."



Her lips puckered in in disapproval as she muttered some mind-shredding syllables under her breath. "Wincing, I fell back onto my butt from where I'd been trying to at least stand. "Oof. Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you already tagged me, can you just fix that? Or...you know, do the whole medical charm thing? I'd rather not become acquainted with the ways the Dragon Dies from personal experience, thanks."



She snorted, rewinding the cord around her garotte with a complicated flick of her wrist, the un-held handle whirling artfully about and somehow managing to miss conking her right in the nose, though I'd no idea how. "I swear," she muttered in a language I was certain I shouldn't have understood but did, "you're worse than my elder sister gets."



Raising a brow and getting to my feet, I let out a sigh. "Ri-iight. So, any chance on getting those clothes?" I sniffed the air, "and maybe some water to draw a bath? Or some proper food? Pretty sure I smell like gym shorts in a sweat marinade and I don't think I've eaten for...um, a while." Reaching down, I picked up the sheet I'd dropped in my earlier panic, rewinding it about me. "Um...let me know the verdict on those when I get back?" Something had brought itself to my urgent attention, now that I wasn't in any (I hoped) immediate mortal peril. "Because I need to go pee."



Retying my makeshift toga, I made my way past her and out the back of the stopped cart, heading out and away from it for a ways, until I was inside a stand of tall grass sufficient to hide me from view. Popping a squat, I finally relieved that pressure, feeling for the first time in what was probably months that I could just catch my breath and relax. Sure, my whole future was a giant fucking unknown. Sure, I was in a hostile world where the established players would no doubt have a vested interest in making sure I couldn't find my way. None of that was anything fucking new. At least here my nerdish obsessions might prove useful for once in my life. Finishing up, I savored the sound of wind rustling the grass and distant rain drawing closer.



I suppose that in that respect, this came as close to an All's Well result as I could've hoped for. Slowly making my way back through the thick, tall grass, I could hear the rain come ever closer. It was...well, it was oddly peaceful. The sort of thing that made sites like Rainy Mood such a success back home. Calmed, I took my time on the walk back, listening to the rain come closer and closer until it stopped just shy of me, mere feet behind me, with an odd accompaniment that'd grown as it neared me. Why was it followed by the sound of...wait, what? Windchimes? Tinkling crystal? Bits of glass? A paranoia-provided coin dropping, I whirled on my heel.



That was the first time I came face to blurry face with a demon of the third circle.