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dark_slippy_thingIt was nighttime. Of course it was dark. And despite the knowledge that the shadows were gone, and this was how night was supposed to look, Valentine still found himself searching the skies now and again, just to be sure.
He had met up with his buddies, Bing and Eric, shortly after his friends had headed back to Fandom. One last practice, he had decided, and he'd head back to the island in time for his workshop. Maybe he'd get his pals to tag along. The next term was coming up, after all, and it was so very difficult to find a good juggler... well... anywhere, really. So Valentine figured that he could just bring one or both of his partners back with him, they could sign up for classes, and they'd be all set. What could possibly go wrong?
Eric's fiddling was the only sound that filled the night air alongside Valentine's own directions as he discussed their routine with Bing, who stood by the wall and juggled intently.
Ah, juggling.
Actually, the late-night rehearsal was going rather well until a strange girl approached the fiddler from the shadows along the nearby building and spoke his name.
"Eric?"
"Quiet, please," Valentine insisted, leaning toward her from the faint haze cast by their lanterns. He didn't know the girl, and he had no idea where his fiddler companion had picked her up from, but now wasn't the time for distractions. "We must have perfect silence while we rehearse."
And then he turned his attention back to Bing, who was still juggling intently.
"Eric, is that you?" The girl continued to pester his Violinist, earning her another stern look from the lantern haze.
"Can we also not distract our accompanist, if you don't mind? Some of us are rehearsing here."
"Eric, what are you doing here?"
Stupid girl. Annoying girl. Disrespectful girl.
Valentine did his best to ignore her.
"And we catch the last ball, and we stop. And we turn, and we bow." The two jugglers bowed in unison. "And we say, 'can we have a brave volunteer,' blah blah blah..." Damn. No brave volunteers in sight. Eric's silly little girlfriend would have to do. "Hey! You!" He pointed, and she looked at him. "You can be the brave volunteer."
"What?"
"What's your name?" Might as well get acquainted to the rude girl who didn't have the wit to respect when performers were rehearsing, anyhow.
"... Helena."
Valentine leaned in for a closer look.
"What's wrong with your face...?" Everyone who didn't have a mask had gone back to Fandom without him. This girl... What in the world was she doing here? She didn't look or sound or act much like anyone from the school. Not that he could tell just by looking. But he would have known if someone else had followed them here, wouldn't he?
"My face?" She put her hands to her cheeks, as though trying to find something out of the ordinary.
She had no idea how out of place she was, here. Valentine was almost amused at the thought. It was very nearly a welcome turnaround from the 'mask boy' comments he almost constantly got at Fandom, even if it was nice to stand out in a crowd. He fit in just fine here, after all, and she was the odd one out.
"Whatever." He looked back to Eric, eager to finish their rehearsal so that he could get back to Fandom in time for class. "And it's music, Maestro, please."
"I know lots of songs, but.. they all sound a bit the same."
Idiot. Half-dazed, absent minded musician. Stupid musicians, anyhow. All the same. All of them. Every last one.
"Okay, come on," Valentine urged. It was like speaking to a child, really. Valentine was thankful that such was not the case. "We need some sort of, 'ooo creepy,' dangerousy kind of music. Okay? Go!"
Eric didn't give any music at all, still off in his own little world as he studied the creepy girl who had no real face.
"I know you... or somebody like you..."
Valentine could hardly take this, anymore.
"Oh, come on, Maestro, this is our big finish!"
At long last, Eric shrugged his shoulders, put the bow to the fiddle...
And the very last sound he ever made was a dissonant screech of the bow against the strings before Eric the fiddler was dead.
The shadow that had crept up behind him, turning him instantly into a mass of blackened stone, loomed ominously against the wall as though eying them all up for dessert.
And the stupid girl reached for him? What was the matter with her?!
"Nononono, don't touch him!" Valentine dropped the three orange juggling balls that were in his hands and waved his arms about as what was left of their accompanist began to crumble to the concrete. At least the girl had taken the hint and was backing away. Bonus.
"The door, the door," Valentine hissed at Bing, who had run forward to grab the girl and then proceeded to pass her over to Valentine. Perfect. Just wonderful. She'd only serve to slow him down. They were all as good as dead.
Valentine dragged her to the door and wrestled with the doorknob while Bing threw his juggling balls at the shadows in an attempt to keep them at bay. One small explosion of light made them pause for a moment, but they were so thick, now, thicker than they had ever been, and they swept over Bing effortlessly.
The doorknob was stuck. The girl was yelling something in his ear that Valentine wasn't even horribly worried about making sense of at this point. The shadows were on all sides. They were going to die. Bing and Eric already had. He wasn't going to make it back to Fandom. He wouldn't be able to keep his promise to Naminé...
And then, the door opened. Like a miracle. And the two of them fell into the old junk room and slammed the door shut behind them, staring down at the small sludgy wave of shadow that crept under the door, tried to stretch toward them, shuddered, and then died.
Good riddance.
Immediately, Valentine started to scour the room for a way out. They certainly couldn't go back out the way they had come in, and he had no intention of sticking around long enough to see if shadows knew how to open doors.
"What was that... that thing?" Stupid girl. Just standing there by the doorway.
"One of the many things to avoid in life," there was perhaps a sombre note in Valentine's voice, "like losing a comrade and a companion and a lifelong soul mate, while attempting to res-cue lit-tle girls." He made a point to annunciate every last little syllable as he turned around to face the kid that his partners had died over. And then he paused, cringed, and pointed downward. "What the hell have you got on your feet?"
"...What?" The girl looked down at the well-worn rabbit slippers, confused.
"Is that some sort of sick joke? Treading on little rabbity-type animals with every step?" Ew. Ew. Ew. "That's just.. NASTY."
"They're not real," she said defensively as the juggler resumed searching for a means of escape. He had better things to do than worry about the sadist footwear of a girl who seemed totally out of her gourd. She just stood there. Useless. Stupid and useless and she had gotten his partners killed. Damn it. "I'm sorry about your friends," she continued, and Valentine kept searching the walls and the floor. He did not want to hear this. Not from anyone, not right now. Even if that was the first 'sorry' he had heard in months that he figured was actually deserved. "I thought the violinist was Eric. He's a friend of mine..." She shook her head. "But it wasn't."
She started pacing around the room. Oh, so helpful, that girl. So bloody helpful. Did she have any idea where they were?!
"I don't really know where I am," she stated. Go figure.
"Well, you're in one of the other things to avoid in life," Valentine paused long enough in his search to snap at her.
"What, the junk room?"
"No, trouble!" Valentine looked up sharply as a growl and a snarl cut into the darkness. "There!"
Out of the shadows stalked a small creature, feline in appearance, its face a sharp-toothed mess of something that looked like an unmasked human face, messily sheared off and stuck onto the cat's head. Its bony legs terminated in stumps, and there were two paper-thin rainbow wings along its hairless, emaciated back. A sphinx.
And this idiot girl was shining some sort of light right into its face, serving only to make it snarl more.
"Don't irritate it!"
At least she had the brainpower to shut the light-thing off after being told. The little creature relaxed, and then started to pace the room.
"What is it?"
"Just a sphinx," Valentine whispered. "Throw it a book!"
"What?"
"Throw it a book, it likes books!" For crying out loud!
"Oh." The girl turned to the bookshelf and started reading the titles. What in the world was wrong with her brain? "Fingers Keepers by Joe Grey; The Complete History of the Future Fruit by Douglas Prawnhead; Smoke and Mirrors, by..."
"Anything, anything! It's not going to read it!" Valentine flailed his arms about and pointed at the sphinx and watched as she finally caught a hint, grabbed a book from the shelf, and threw it at the creature, who pounced upon it and set about to hungrily devouring its pages. Excellent. This left him free to ease his way to the other door in the wall, try the knob and--
"Aaaah!" Open it to reveal that he was now flailing his arms to keep from falling out the doorway into a chasm that must have gone down at least thirty feet to terminate in the concrete of the streets below. That was not a drop that Valentine was willing to take over a little sphinx and two carbonized buddies. He pulled himself back inside and tapped his fingers to his face and pulled the door halfway shut and started to sweat. "Right. Not a disaster. Not a disaster. Okay. Think! Think!" He had been in Fandom too long. Fandom, where there were no sphinxes aside from the cabin names and fish preferred to swim and books didn't fly and-- "OKAY! Grab a couple of really big books!" To his relief, she actually did as she was told and scurried over to him with them. He took one and left her with the other. "Okay, throw it on the floor."
"Why? I like books."
"Please, please, come on!"
She bent over and halfheartedly let the book drop to the floor.
This was seriously starting to lose its novelty.
"Awwwhh! No, no no no USELESS! It's really got to feel like it's being rejected..." He turned his own book around in his hands and gave it a sour look as the girl bent over to retrieve her own. He had a good deal of practice at this rejection thing. "Grrrrh, horrible, offensive, badly constructed book!" He hoisted it into the air and flung it down at the floor as hard at he could.
But the book didn't hit the floor. It swung open at the last possible inch and hovered there, then started to drift out the door-leading-nowhere. Valentine jumped onto it, hitching a ride and looking over his shoulder to see if the faceless Miss Stupid could figure it out.
"Um... Nasty, poorly paced book with a soppy ending that I didn't believe for one minute!"
There, now she was catching on.
Finally.
Somewhat.
"How does this work?"
"So long as they think you don't like them, they migrate back to the city library," Valentine explained coolly, thankful to be alive even if he was balancing on the cover of a rejected hardcover several stories above the city street. "And we get a free ride out of this hole."
It looked as though he wasn't going to be making it back to Fandom for his "Dealing With Stupid People" workshop, anyhow. Shame, really. He liked that class.
He wasn't entirely certain if it was fortunate or not that he'd likely be getting in a great deal of practice in that particular department with this girl tagging along anyhow.
(OOC: Not for broadcast due to being in a different world. Not for interaction due to the same. MIRRORMASK SPOILERS, because I've taken all of the actions and dialog straight from the movie, and only the narrative and the fandomy subtext is mine. The rest belongs to Gaiman and McKean. Who I adore. Greatly. And I can only hope I am doing this any justice. Seriously.)
He had met up with his buddies, Bing and Eric, shortly after his friends had headed back to Fandom. One last practice, he had decided, and he'd head back to the island in time for his workshop. Maybe he'd get his pals to tag along. The next term was coming up, after all, and it was so very difficult to find a good juggler... well... anywhere, really. So Valentine figured that he could just bring one or both of his partners back with him, they could sign up for classes, and they'd be all set. What could possibly go wrong?
Eric's fiddling was the only sound that filled the night air alongside Valentine's own directions as he discussed their routine with Bing, who stood by the wall and juggled intently.
Ah, juggling.
Actually, the late-night rehearsal was going rather well until a strange girl approached the fiddler from the shadows along the nearby building and spoke his name.
"Eric?"
"Quiet, please," Valentine insisted, leaning toward her from the faint haze cast by their lanterns. He didn't know the girl, and he had no idea where his fiddler companion had picked her up from, but now wasn't the time for distractions. "We must have perfect silence while we rehearse."
And then he turned his attention back to Bing, who was still juggling intently.
"Eric, is that you?" The girl continued to pester his Violinist, earning her another stern look from the lantern haze.
"Can we also not distract our accompanist, if you don't mind? Some of us are rehearsing here."
"Eric, what are you doing here?"
Stupid girl. Annoying girl. Disrespectful girl.
Valentine did his best to ignore her.
"And we catch the last ball, and we stop. And we turn, and we bow." The two jugglers bowed in unison. "And we say, 'can we have a brave volunteer,' blah blah blah..." Damn. No brave volunteers in sight. Eric's silly little girlfriend would have to do. "Hey! You!" He pointed, and she looked at him. "You can be the brave volunteer."
"What?"
"What's your name?" Might as well get acquainted to the rude girl who didn't have the wit to respect when performers were rehearsing, anyhow.
"... Helena."
Valentine leaned in for a closer look.
"What's wrong with your face...?" Everyone who didn't have a mask had gone back to Fandom without him. This girl... What in the world was she doing here? She didn't look or sound or act much like anyone from the school. Not that he could tell just by looking. But he would have known if someone else had followed them here, wouldn't he?
"My face?" She put her hands to her cheeks, as though trying to find something out of the ordinary.
She had no idea how out of place she was, here. Valentine was almost amused at the thought. It was very nearly a welcome turnaround from the 'mask boy' comments he almost constantly got at Fandom, even if it was nice to stand out in a crowd. He fit in just fine here, after all, and she was the odd one out.
"Whatever." He looked back to Eric, eager to finish their rehearsal so that he could get back to Fandom in time for class. "And it's music, Maestro, please."
"I know lots of songs, but.. they all sound a bit the same."
Idiot. Half-dazed, absent minded musician. Stupid musicians, anyhow. All the same. All of them. Every last one.
"Okay, come on," Valentine urged. It was like speaking to a child, really. Valentine was thankful that such was not the case. "We need some sort of, 'ooo creepy,' dangerousy kind of music. Okay? Go!"
Eric didn't give any music at all, still off in his own little world as he studied the creepy girl who had no real face.
"I know you... or somebody like you..."
Valentine could hardly take this, anymore.
"Oh, come on, Maestro, this is our big finish!"
At long last, Eric shrugged his shoulders, put the bow to the fiddle...
And the very last sound he ever made was a dissonant screech of the bow against the strings before Eric the fiddler was dead.
The shadow that had crept up behind him, turning him instantly into a mass of blackened stone, loomed ominously against the wall as though eying them all up for dessert.
And the stupid girl reached for him? What was the matter with her?!
"Nononono, don't touch him!" Valentine dropped the three orange juggling balls that were in his hands and waved his arms about as what was left of their accompanist began to crumble to the concrete. At least the girl had taken the hint and was backing away. Bonus.
"The door, the door," Valentine hissed at Bing, who had run forward to grab the girl and then proceeded to pass her over to Valentine. Perfect. Just wonderful. She'd only serve to slow him down. They were all as good as dead.
Valentine dragged her to the door and wrestled with the doorknob while Bing threw his juggling balls at the shadows in an attempt to keep them at bay. One small explosion of light made them pause for a moment, but they were so thick, now, thicker than they had ever been, and they swept over Bing effortlessly.
The doorknob was stuck. The girl was yelling something in his ear that Valentine wasn't even horribly worried about making sense of at this point. The shadows were on all sides. They were going to die. Bing and Eric already had. He wasn't going to make it back to Fandom. He wouldn't be able to keep his promise to Naminé...
And then, the door opened. Like a miracle. And the two of them fell into the old junk room and slammed the door shut behind them, staring down at the small sludgy wave of shadow that crept under the door, tried to stretch toward them, shuddered, and then died.
Good riddance.
Immediately, Valentine started to scour the room for a way out. They certainly couldn't go back out the way they had come in, and he had no intention of sticking around long enough to see if shadows knew how to open doors.
"What was that... that thing?" Stupid girl. Just standing there by the doorway.
"One of the many things to avoid in life," there was perhaps a sombre note in Valentine's voice, "like losing a comrade and a companion and a lifelong soul mate, while attempting to res-cue lit-tle girls." He made a point to annunciate every last little syllable as he turned around to face the kid that his partners had died over. And then he paused, cringed, and pointed downward. "What the hell have you got on your feet?"
"...What?" The girl looked down at the well-worn rabbit slippers, confused.
"Is that some sort of sick joke? Treading on little rabbity-type animals with every step?" Ew. Ew. Ew. "That's just.. NASTY."
"They're not real," she said defensively as the juggler resumed searching for a means of escape. He had better things to do than worry about the sadist footwear of a girl who seemed totally out of her gourd. She just stood there. Useless. Stupid and useless and she had gotten his partners killed. Damn it. "I'm sorry about your friends," she continued, and Valentine kept searching the walls and the floor. He did not want to hear this. Not from anyone, not right now. Even if that was the first 'sorry' he had heard in months that he figured was actually deserved. "I thought the violinist was Eric. He's a friend of mine..." She shook her head. "But it wasn't."
She started pacing around the room. Oh, so helpful, that girl. So bloody helpful. Did she have any idea where they were?!
"I don't really know where I am," she stated. Go figure.
"Well, you're in one of the other things to avoid in life," Valentine paused long enough in his search to snap at her.
"What, the junk room?"
"No, trouble!" Valentine looked up sharply as a growl and a snarl cut into the darkness. "There!"
Out of the shadows stalked a small creature, feline in appearance, its face a sharp-toothed mess of something that looked like an unmasked human face, messily sheared off and stuck onto the cat's head. Its bony legs terminated in stumps, and there were two paper-thin rainbow wings along its hairless, emaciated back. A sphinx.
And this idiot girl was shining some sort of light right into its face, serving only to make it snarl more.
"Don't irritate it!"
At least she had the brainpower to shut the light-thing off after being told. The little creature relaxed, and then started to pace the room.
"What is it?"
"Just a sphinx," Valentine whispered. "Throw it a book!"
"What?"
"Throw it a book, it likes books!" For crying out loud!
"Oh." The girl turned to the bookshelf and started reading the titles. What in the world was wrong with her brain? "Fingers Keepers by Joe Grey; The Complete History of the Future Fruit by Douglas Prawnhead; Smoke and Mirrors, by..."
"Anything, anything! It's not going to read it!" Valentine flailed his arms about and pointed at the sphinx and watched as she finally caught a hint, grabbed a book from the shelf, and threw it at the creature, who pounced upon it and set about to hungrily devouring its pages. Excellent. This left him free to ease his way to the other door in the wall, try the knob and--
"Aaaah!" Open it to reveal that he was now flailing his arms to keep from falling out the doorway into a chasm that must have gone down at least thirty feet to terminate in the concrete of the streets below. That was not a drop that Valentine was willing to take over a little sphinx and two carbonized buddies. He pulled himself back inside and tapped his fingers to his face and pulled the door halfway shut and started to sweat. "Right. Not a disaster. Not a disaster. Okay. Think! Think!" He had been in Fandom too long. Fandom, where there were no sphinxes aside from the cabin names and fish preferred to swim and books didn't fly and-- "OKAY! Grab a couple of really big books!" To his relief, she actually did as she was told and scurried over to him with them. He took one and left her with the other. "Okay, throw it on the floor."
"Why? I like books."
"Please, please, come on!"
She bent over and halfheartedly let the book drop to the floor.
This was seriously starting to lose its novelty.
"Awwwhh! No, no no no USELESS! It's really got to feel like it's being rejected..." He turned his own book around in his hands and gave it a sour look as the girl bent over to retrieve her own. He had a good deal of practice at this rejection thing. "Grrrrh, horrible, offensive, badly constructed book!" He hoisted it into the air and flung it down at the floor as hard at he could.
But the book didn't hit the floor. It swung open at the last possible inch and hovered there, then started to drift out the door-leading-nowhere. Valentine jumped onto it, hitching a ride and looking over his shoulder to see if the faceless Miss Stupid could figure it out.
"Um... Nasty, poorly paced book with a soppy ending that I didn't believe for one minute!"
There, now she was catching on.
Finally.
Somewhat.
"How does this work?"
"So long as they think you don't like them, they migrate back to the city library," Valentine explained coolly, thankful to be alive even if he was balancing on the cover of a rejected hardcover several stories above the city street. "And we get a free ride out of this hole."
It looked as though he wasn't going to be making it back to Fandom for his "Dealing With Stupid People" workshop, anyhow. Shame, really. He liked that class.
He wasn't entirely certain if it was fortunate or not that he'd likely be getting in a great deal of practice in that particular department with this girl tagging along anyhow.
(OOC: Not for broadcast due to being in a different world. Not for interaction due to the same. MIRRORMASK SPOILERS, because I've taken all of the actions and dialog straight from the movie, and only the narrative and the fandomy subtext is mine. The rest belongs to Gaiman and McKean. Who I adore. Greatly. And I can only hope I am doing this any justice. Seriously.)
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Date: 2007-06-19 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-20 08:55 am (UTC)