sheep_game | btwn us and the weeds we make one entire incineroar

[seems about right, tbh.]

Is there anything else you'd like to say about that, or shall we move on?

[despite the brusqueness, he might be able to feel that she means this kindly, as an opportunity to remove the fingers from this tender bruise, and to not linger on this so much that it becomes an unpleasantly Big Deal.]

"Better to have loved, and lost,
Than never to have loved, at all?"

Ah, sweet sorrow! In my own words, I would always choose to have felt true power's thrall.

Ere a demon is ever a core piece to take,
To reduce me to a past, most wicked state...

That's the one, I think, an equal found never,
Drunk of that wine, I was changed, forever.

_{[ the coin rises up from the water on its own, and he plucks it back up.

mimes like he'd toasting her with it, before making it dance over the backs of his fingers to vanish, again. tonhe added to his carefully marked collection. ]}

Edited 2024-04-27 21:59 (UTC)

But even if the feelings stay the same, the situations change, don't they. Then, before you know it, all the joy is lost from global annihilation and you have to find something else to match that high.

True ecstasy... truly is fleeting...

[ rattles chain experimentally. Yyyyup. they're still cuffed. ]

At least you're around to work my frustrations out upon, miss dragonling~.

Mmhmmhmm...

Am I trapped here with you, or are you trapped here with me?

Edited 2024-04-27 22:25 (UTC)

_{[ carefully wrangles his flutter of _"danger!!!" like he's putting out the lit corner of a newspaper. leaves the flicker of "danger~" untouched.

shifts the way his legs are crossed as pretty, slightly eerie will-o-wisps appear around the hot spring. ]}

It appears to me, THAT is a matter of opinion...
In which we both take interest, engaging its ebb and churn.

Yet, if you do want to escape the demon's dominion,
Grant to the depths, your memory, your turn~.
Unless, of course, you have a different suggestion...?
What suits, you find? Whither, you yearn?

Edited 2024-04-27 22:51 (UTC)

[It's hard to tell if she's feeling his "danger~!" or her own tbh. Sometimes two people handcuffed together can be nigh-lethal dangers to each other and be cognizant of it while still being outwardly calm and put together even if they're both vibrating internally. That's just life!]

Nah, this is fine. Might as well see what this is all about.

[She tosses it into the water. Plunk!]

cw: violence, sexual assault

The specimen room looks a lot like a library, except instead of books, the racks are floor-to-ceiling cabinets filled with drawers, where bits of natural history of all kinds are filed away for research purposes. There are clusters of tables here and there where people can work, and it’s here where Azdaja sits with books, tools, and a pile of bones spread out in front of her.

As an apprentice, most of her duties are important but thoroughly tedious jobs. Lately she has been processing a whole lot of skeletons. These specimens here are fresh from the dermestid tank, and she just finished arranging them into the shape of the creature it came from -- which appears to be some kind of four-winged bird with a long, bony tail. Now she will label each and every tiny bone, take their measurements, record everything on a tablet, and then put the bones away in the appropriate cabinet. It’s slow, meticulous work.

An Azdaja lookalike peeks into the room. She doesn’t have a name (neither of them do, at this point in their lives) but our Azdaja thinks of her as Wasp Lips, because of that one time she got stung on the face and her lips were swollen like sausages for days.

“Yo. I need the calipers,” she says.

“I’m using them,” says Azdaja, barely looking up.

“I don’t care. These ones are rusty and I can’t deal with it any more. Give me yours.”

“Fuck off.”

Wasp strides confidently into the room and reaches for the calipers, then abruptly yanks her hand back again as Azdaja slaps at the table, claws already out, guarding her calipers like a food-aggressive dog. Azdaja’s staring directly into Wasp’s eyes. Slender horns peek through her hair, and a thin black tail is now trailing out the back of her chair.

“I said, fuck off. I have a lot of work to do and I’m not getting behind because of you.”

“Well, you’re going to have to figure something out, because I’m taking these,” says Wasp, starting to walk around to Azdaja’s side of the table. “And you can either give them to me nicely, or I’m going to ruin your day.”

Azdaja rises from her chair as Wasp approaches, bristling, still maintaining eye contact. “Big words as always, you cun—”

Wasp snags Azdaja by the horn and slams her face-first into the table with astonishing speed and force, sending bones clattering across the floor. Azdaja twists herself sideways to wrench her horn free of Wasp’s grip, blood from her nose splattering across the table, and slashes at Wasp’s face with her claws, aiming for her eyes. Wasp catches her by the wrist, bangs it down to the table hard enough to yank Azdaja off balance, grabs a knife from the tray of implements, and stabs it down straight through her palm and into the wood behind it.

She screams, trying to jerk her hand back, but the knife’s lodged in the table, and all she gets for her effort is the feeling of the blade rubbing against her bones and tendons. Her scream is cut short by hands tight against her throat as Wasp throws her whole body weight onto her windpipe, cracking her head back against the table hard enough to make her teeth rattle.

She thrashes, trying to push Wasp off with her one free hand. Laying back over the table like this, with Wasp’s entire weight holding her down, Azdaja’s feet can’t get purchase on the linoleum floor. She swipes her claws at Wasp’s face but she dodges it neatly, then chomps hard on Azdaja’s forearm.

Azdaja’s eyes go wide, pupils dilating like saucers as she struggles. Her sleeve has protected her from the worst of the venom, but she has no defense against the hands around her throat. She jerks and writhes, unable to free either of her hands, unable to kick Wasp off with her in between her legs like this.

Seconds tick by like hours as she succumbs to the lack of air and blood flow. Her eyes unfocus. Her limbs grow heavy. Her vision starts going dark, and all sounds fade to a distant, steady hiss.

Wasp spits her arm out and it thuds onto the table. She seems satisfied with this, gives Azdaja one final, punishing squeeze, then lets go. Azdaja doesn’t react, even to draw breath. Her consciousness is already teetering on the edge of the void and her body is flirting with the idea of following when Wasp slaps her so hard her head snaps to the side, blood spattering across the table.

It’s enough. Azdaja coughs, sucking down deep, rasping breaths. She tries to roll over, but her limbs won’t work properly. She squirms on the table, feeble and helpless, as Wasp starts undoing her pants, and then roughly tears down Azdaja’s.

“Stop... Stop it...”

Azdaja’s voice is soft and hoarse, and her one free arm is weak as she tries to push Wasp back by her face, even as Wasp mounts her. Wasp is staring, rapt and hungry, into her eyes as she does it, reveling in her struggles as Azdaja’s claws slide harmlessly off her cheek, lacking the strength to even break skin. The squirming and gasping as it happens just seems to encourage Wasp, who takes her pleasure viciously at Azdaja's expense, until she eventually leans forward and sinks her teeth into her neck as deep as they’ll go.

This time the venom takes hold completely, and Azdaja’s body goes slack even as Wasp’s efforts get rougher. Eventually she finishes with great, shivering satisfaction. She surveys her work, licks the blood from her fingers, helps herself to the calipers, and casually leaves the room. Azdaja, meanwhile, is still on the table, half undressed, cheeks painted red from her own bloody nose, and a knife through her upturned palm.

It’s hard to tell how much time passes. She’s vaguely aware of other people passing through the room, hears the occasional giggle or tch of disgust. All she knows is that by the time she can move her body again, she hurts absolutely everywhere. Her head is spinning. Bones and tools are strewn all over the floor.

She groggily unpins her hand from the table, to tired to muster more than a hiss of pain..She stumbles to the nearest sink, over in the nearby maceration room, to to wash her face and gingerly check her nose for breaks. She blots the blood from both sides of her hand.

That’ll have to do for now. She has so much work to do, and now she’s running behind. So she goes back to her work table, gathers up the scattered bones, and starts again.

Edited 2024-04-27 23:15 (UTC)

...Heh. Oh yeah. I forgot about that.

[the bracelet reveals that, throughout this memory, Azdaja felt... nothing much at all.]

[ > azdaja feels nothing much about it

great news for her relative mental peace and quiet! somebody else feels a rich and vivid tapestry of different emotions about it ]

[ at first he's just quietly interested in getting to see more of her life and history. curbing himself from getting too invested or enthusiastic, because right now, in close proximity and alone woth her, it's more important to ration his slim remaining slivers of mana more than ever.

all his imaginings of "what does a desk-job dragon do in her regular work day?" gives way to banal reality. tedium, meticulous focus, a quiet absorption in task over environment that isn't terribly dissimilar to many scenes out of his own life, combing the world for hints of Alexander's long shadow. a deeply rose resistance to having her flow interrupted for some other schmuck's ease of convenience. ]

[ the scene turns for the outright violent, as a simmering anticipation in his gut had expected from one of her memories of home. his regard of it is studious; a third party point of view on what she looks, sounds, acts like when this, this, or that happens is a rare treat, and they don't even have to think about cleanup after. the perfect, no strings attached theatre of her misery. ]

Edited 2024-04-27 23:55 (UTC)

[ "oh yeah, i forgot about that," she'd said. speaking of nostalgia, when's the last time Azdaja remembers wishing Wasp Lips over there was stone fucking dead? it's about when her body is in that moment of free-fall hangtime after the strangulation, strongly considering departing for the close clutches of death--

Angel Devil is completely, nearly aconsciously absorbed in the proceedings, and the spring is visibly boiling in front of them.

He barely breathes, doesn't even twitch,
save for an odd, minute quiver in his newly woolly tail.

If you had to use one word for what he's feeling as the scene proceeds, that's easy;

one crisp, clear, deeply possessive thought of--
"kill." ]

[ "that's mine. take your filthy hands off. i'll split you into pieces. i'll boil your bones and crack them open until the last dregs of you can be scraped out like cleaning away the grout." ]

[ the world turns around her, a gallery of scoffing vegetables wearing her familiar face;

they're like Genomes, wandering around heedless to what's in front of them, but worse, they have their own little derisive opinions about it. and all at once angel devil has decided he understands the true, dire necessity of Azdaja must have felt, to make a return to that world.

If she's barred from it forever by one single moment of death, then she can't go back there and rend out her own piece of importance from its thick hide. She can't write broad her name, unignorable, in the eyes of any of those pitiless doppelgangers. Can never crack down to grit, the gnashing teeth of each successive humiliation.

Like swallowing down suffering for years and years with no goddamn payoff in the end, however fleeting. ]

_{[ damn. and all over some scissors or whatever. now he gets why she makes a point of appreciating how personal he makes shit.

if he'd been forced to so completely embrace the vast pointlessness of his existence to live instead of having the steak of imperfection, and thus the idea of perfection as something plausible and achievable, dangled forever over his head, he would probably be, like, burning people alive for the fuck of it a la Patches instead of out there making weird little meat atrocities in the back yard of the lab for the net benefit of their small society. ]}

Edited 2024-04-28 00:21 (UTC)

_{[ quietly. in a completely atonal voice wrung out with the tension he'd mirrored in himself from the memory. ugh ugh he feels skittery electric sensations that are 50/50 on being actual electricity running loose over his skin VS just phantom brain imaginings ]}

Truly . . . I am but an apprentice.
In the art of. Radical acceptance.

Edited 2024-04-28 00:24 (UTC)

[Not having any big feelings about this gave her space to appreciate his. His curiosity she understood, because that's how she feels watching his memories, too. But the possessiveness took her by surprise. It was a little bewildering, a lot amusing, and deep down, she's honestly kind of ... touched? Yeah. She's touched. His sense of empathy is apparently working better than hers. She can barely muster any for the version of herself in the memory, let alone other people. How funny that an artificial being can feel some things even better than she can. That's neat.]

[It's neat to think he cares enough about this to have any feelings about it at all, when she, herself, has lost track of how many times in her life this has even happened to her, or how many times she's done this same thing to other people.]

[When he finally says something, she does a spit-take and busts out laughing, full of amusement and delight]

Edited 2024-04-28 00:58 (UTC)

[ the hot spring eases off to a steaming simmer, as the tension bleeds off. ]

I'm just saying. You'd even forgot.
Infringed, I remember to the moment I've gotten them got.

[ click.
...the cuffs unlatch. ]

Edited 2024-04-28 01:10 (UTC)

[she rubs her wrist in relief, then bends down to pick up the cuffs.]

I would, but she's been dead for ages. She got herself got.

Never left a name behind, either. It's probably thanks to this coin that anyone's thought about her at all in years.

Edited 2024-04-28 01:34 (UTC)

[brb.]

[...She hurls the handcuffs out into the rose bushes as far as she can, with what is a frankly unnecessary amount of violence, in a belated flash of quiet but world-scorching rage.]

Edited 2024-04-28 01:33 (UTC)

That's more like it. Here's your free stage.
Show us some fire. I know you have rage.

[the rage simmers down just as quick as it appeared, mellowing into some kind of low-key resignation and futility. The flower on her head has at no point stopped being dead throughout all of this.]

[She wanders over to the water's edge and holds her hand over it, testing the heat. Is this too hot to go in now? damn.]

Eh. What's the point? "There but for the grace of the Emperor go I," right? We weren't that different.

[

now he wants to make her mad on purpose but he doesn't have any immediately good ideas for how to do so. which is the whole point, he's pretty sure. damn. what a tough chestnut. grudging respect. ]

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