InsaneJournal

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Entry tags:	creative commons, fantasy, feathered lizard, fiction, sci-fi, vai

Random story bit. Isn't it cute..

This is not the assignment I was supposed to be working on. I sort of lucked out, I guess, because I was doing this on the laptop, which is a win98 machine, and I now have a blue screen of DEATH.

I may write more about Vai and co. They seem quite insistent. And I like the feathered lizard, which I don't think I described properly. And I don't like the name for Marla, so don't get attached to it. Eh, it dumped my italics, too.. I'll fix it later.

BTW, if you want to play with this bit of weirdness, contact me. (I think the E-mail is working right.)

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This
work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.


"How the Hel should I know where she keeps them?" Thomas was furious. Vai was the sort to just hand her notes over to anyone who was interested, and explain anything they had questions on. But of course, that wasn't as much fun. He was so angry that he had a brief stab of regret that he couldn't just give this woman up and find one who wasn't such a mind mauling bitch.
</p>
"You were supposed to seduce her! Idiot!" Marla's perfect features were twisted artistically into a veil of anger and contempt. She never held an expression that hadn't been practiced for at least a week. Thomas was always fooled. They all were. Except Vai. This was, of course, the problem.

"Look, I can't help her weird virginal..." Thomas was right at the end of his rope with his Sworn. She was just being cruel, and he knew it. And Vai's baseless..

"Don't be stupid. She's mooned over you for a year." Marla spun around, displacing her vest, and revealing something that Thomas had desperately tried to keep from accepting for months. He didn't respond for several seconds.

Finally, "Well, she seems to be convinced that you're sleeping with Marcus, and that when that crashes and burns again, you'll come take me back." Marla's expression suddenly had a reality to it that Thomas had never seen, but was in no mindset to enjoy. "She doesn't want the baggage. She also said that if she wanted a sample of the communal venereal diseases, she'd come and ask you for a blood sample, not have herself added to it."

She grabbed him by the lapels and hissed. "You. How. Dare..."

No longer willing to endure her bullying, he seized Marla her by the shoulders and spun her around to look in a mirror. "I wouldn't have bothered with such obvious slander, but I didn't leave that mark on your chest, now did I, My Sworn?"

Click.

"Ohhh." Mortal terror. What a lovely expression.

"Under here!"

**--**

She moves slowly into the room. Quiet and sad. Brilliant, if her reported experiments were to be believed, but uninterested in the politicking of her peers. Vai Peters wept as she gathered her belongings, trying not to sob outright. Her few friends were drifting away, convinced of Vai's complicity in her own hurt. The man she feels the closest connection to had never even bothered to consider her for a companion until his real obsession became enamored of someone else. All she feels she has left is her work and the feathered lizard, Gull, whose cage is hidden behind her headboard.

And now there is no more time.

All her papers and diagrams are summarily stacked and shoved into a soft leather case, which slides into a bag along with various instruments that are carefully packed in clothes. As soon as the delicate items are put away, she walks to the bed to release her pet.

Gull is tall. Taller than Vai by at least two feet, and fully capable of carrying her about during processions. "Hello. How are you this fine evening?" He responds by nibbling on her finger. "I don't think we should stay here, anymore, friend. I don't feel inclined to do the requisite study of geriatric penises attached to scary men from the Bluebeard story."

Her father had ordered Gull destroyed after an incident with some over-friendly widower who made the mistake of scaring Vai at some otherwise forgettable procession. Vai, however, had managed to make a last minute substitution.

All hail the clone queen, Daughter of the Silver Prince, fourth in line to the King of Glass. Uncourted, undesired, apparently unbearable. Soon to be a refugee.

"I don't know what I do to drive everyone away. I.... I really don't. All the boys treat me like their mother or sister, except the old men, and they're just disturbing. And the girls think I'm being really mean to them if I don't always take their side against the boys, or if I point out that some other girl is doing the same things they complain about the boys doing to them. And then there's this strange idea that I should be just fine with sharing any boy who'll have me. Honestly. It's squicky when someone borrows my hairbrush."

She lets Gull poke about the room while she finishes packing and starts changing into a palace guards' clothes. Said guard was odd, she thought. He had bemoaned the damage to his work wear but almost didn't seem willing to take her offered money for them. He had looked especially shocked when she had requested him not to mention her generosity. The couple hidden under the wash stand stare in horror as she cuts her hair to men's length and straps down her chest. After this, she puts on the shirt, with its' various Gull-gifted slashes lovingly mended.

"I mean if you're going to complain that the boys would be renting, if they were girls, then why look the other way when the actual girls do the same things? It makes no sense. Why can't these people make up their minds? But when I put it in those terms, it's like... Like they all just want me to shut up and go away..."

Thomas is staring openmouthed at the young woman whose adoration he has reviled for over a year. There are tears as her untouched blue-black hair settles on the floor.

"Come on, Darling. Let's go for a run." High up, just below the ceiling is an old alcove. It was the reason that she had requested this room as a child. It was mysterious and it made a good place for a young girl to hide from her older sisters and brother. "Can you find the mouse?" This is Gull's favorite game. In it he gets to dash around and around the room on progressively higher pieces of furniture until he reaches the alcove and dives through the hole that Vai made in the fill that used to seal the door. Vai hauls herself up via the bed curtains behind him.

Three staircases and a tunnel, with an exit into the woods. Then through the village, peel off the main road and onto an old hunting trail. With luck, no one would notice that the dutiful, accepting little Princess was gone before dawn, at least.

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