Re: The Glorious Championship! [S3G5] [Round Two: The Kestalvian Rainforest]
08-23-2011, 12:26 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Elli failed to catch up to Bethany as quickly as she ought to, considering herself to be much more athletic and agile than some egghead grad student. This was because Elli had failed to taken account the slick moss growing on the branches above her.
Understanding the need to get away from humans and typewriters following a hurried, mutually unsatisfying consummation with Restless-She, Bethany had immediately seen the potential of the moss as a medium of quick transportation. In the future, it would seem, Disney’s “Tarzan” reboot had been conflated with the true animated classics, despite being average at best. Accordingly, the whole surfing-on-mossy-branches thing, despite originally being a ridiculous grab for the 5-12 male audience of the late nineties, was by then a fully-formed trope and a staple of the noble-savage genre.
So it was that, despite not having paused for some casual homobestiality along the way, Elli arrived in chimpanzee territory a full twenty minutes behind Bethany. This was apparently enough time for the Convolution to do its job pretty thoroughly.
For one thing, the apes had discovered music. There were about five of them in a drum circle, led by a larger chimp with a tuft of silver on his back, banging out some impressively complex percussion as a unit. It took her a bit longer to realize that the quite-under-control bonfire in the middle of the circle was also definitively not supposed to be an animal thing.
Most of the apes were up in the trees, the branches of which had been knitted together to form intricate tree house patterns. They were having wrestling matches, public sex, eating what they found and generally living life to an extent that Elli rarely saw, even in the city. One of the trees seemed to either be growing right over a natural spring or else was a natural spring, and water cascaded out of dozens of hollows and trickled off the edge of branches. Little baby chimpanzees were playing in the water, darting in and out and pushing each other in and pulling each other out with abandon, which Elli tried to pretend wasn’t the most adorable thing she’d seen in her life because she was on a mission. She had to find Betha—oh.
The reason she hadn’t seen Bethany right away was because she’d been searching for the xeniobiologist’s sweaty blue tanktop, rather than her sweaty flesh-colored nothing. She had further expected Bethany to be tied up in a tree screaming for help, rather than picking bugs out of a contented-looking chimp’s hair with one hand and writing something down in a leather-bound notebook with the other. The scientist's decision to go nude would have been somewhat more understandable if that had been the fashion among the chimpanzees, but her friend in the purple was still fully-clad and having an argument with an imposing male up in the trees, and the chimp on the receiving end of Bethany's grooming was wearing her underwear.
Elli’s cat nuzzled up against her ankle and hissed in the general direction of the apes. “Go hide,” Elli told her pet in a low voice, giving it the behind-the-ear treatment. “They probably aren’t big on cats here in the rainforest.”
The cat obediently scampered up a tree and crouched in a branch. Elli suddenly felt very alone. Well, no use turning back now. “Bethany!” she called, stepping out from the trees.
Most of the activity in the camp stopped. The chimps consider me a stranger, and they don’t like strangers, but the Convolution knows me, and it doesn’t like me. It was an unsettling thought.
Bethany opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, made a sort of croaking sound, cleared her throat, and managed to speak. ”It’s you,” she rasped dreamily. ”I didn’t think you’d come. What year is it?”
Elimine figured someone had probably mentioned a year at some point, but couldn’t remember what it was. She decided not to beat around the bush. “It’s only been about a half hour since you left.”
”So long,” said Bethany, indifferently. The purple-clad chimp and the enormous, muscular male she’d been talking to began to walk over. The male had a regal-looking stripe of purple running down his back and was carrying the corpse of a tigress over one shoulder, absentmindedly gnawing at one of her arms as he listened to the humans talking. The tigress looked like she’d been beaten to death. ”Time was all I used to care about,” expounded Bethany. ”Growing time, bottling time, civilizing time. A very human sort of project. But now, over the years, I see the rightness of the way of the jungle. The Family simply coexists with Time, they let it wash over them like rain until they erode away into the soil. And then! Time gives them a great blessing and grows roots in that soil, that their soil may support the trees. In my time with the apes I have seen the beauty and the rightness of this cycle, in both its joys and its sweet, sweet melancholies.” Bethany’s hair looked terrible.
Elli didn’t know how to react except to repeat, “It’s been a half hour.”
Bethany pulled a bright green insect out of the half-dressed chimp’s hair and held it on her tongue pensively, while it buzzed out an SOS in morse code. Then she popped it into her mouth. After swallowing, she continued her monologue. ”In the before-time, I used to collect insects and pin them to corkboard. I would sort them by the chronophilic and the chronophobic, the chronostatic and the chronodynamic, the chronovoltaic, the chronosolvent, the chronochronic, the chronopolistic and the chronomarxist, the analog and the digital, homochronic and heterochronic, the Chrono-Saxons and the post-time Ageless Age Chronopunk movement, Team Edward and Team Jacob (that one was more of a personal hobby), chronophenomenal and chrononoumenal, genus and species, the chronoholics, chronopportunists, Chronobama and Chron Paul, and I had a separate board for spiders.” She scribbled something down in her notebook. ”Now I just have a notebook where I describe what the bugs taste like.”
”A half-hour.”
”It was long enough for me to record the tastes of over seven hundred species.” She held up a page for Elli’s perusal. It was in an indecipherable shorthand, but with meticulous penmanship. ”There are recipes in here, too. I’m learning so much more with my tongue than I ever did with my brain. Of course there have been contributions from… other tongues, as well.”
Elli, cognizant of the way the chimps were looking at her, was about ready to give this up. “Look, Bethany, I understand you think you’re happy here,” she said, slowly backing up towards the treeline. “I can’t make you leave if you don’t want to. But it’s dangerous out here. And you’re definitely being influenced by a—“
Elli was cut off by the purpleback male initiating some sort of sign-language conversation with Bethany, inasmuch as a verbal conversation can be cut off by a nonverbal one. Bethany responded in kind, deftly making a series of complex hand movements that she presumably learned during her half hour’s stay among the chimps. Elli allowed this to go on for precisely the length of one chorus of “When the Saints” and then asked, “What’s he saying?”
Bethany turned back towards Elli. “He says he allowed me to stay with the family only under the condition that this was a one-time event, that no other outsiders would follow me. That peace has been broken now. He says, scornfully, that we can have each other, and he is considering banishing us both.” She looked Elli up and down. We could… have each other. It’s been so long since I’ve been with… someone like me.”
Elli couldn’t think of a response to that last bit that would prove constructive to this conversation. ”Tell him I’m just passing through. I don’t mean to infringe on… things… here.”
A lengthy exchange of handsigns. The purpleback chomped into its tiger’s haunch.
”Alpha-He-Declines-the-Nipple, so-called (he wishes me to add) for his refusal to dine on anything but meat or drink anything but blood since his infancy, claims that you have already ‘infringed’ by forcing him to look upon your hideous face. His words, not mine. He notes your presence, and that of your family, has been foretold to disrupt the cycle of growth and decay by He-She-Has-Two-Mouths-Three-Eyes-and-Both-Sets-of-Genitals, whose prophecies have never mislead him. He wishes for you to leave, but would sooner keep an eye on you. Thus, he is forbidding you to run off into the trees to rejoin your panther, as is obviously your intent, until he has deliberated and decided what to do with you.”
By the time Bethany had gotten to the pertinent bits of that speech, Elimine could already feel the presence of the two chimps that had materialized between her and the treeline. Elli, unsure both of the ethics of killing chimpanzees and whether she could take them in a fight, decided to submit. “Alright, tell him I’ll come along,” she said. “For now. Tell him that.” Bethany signaled to the Alpha, who seemed satisfied and launched himself up into the branches and vanishing out of sight.
The chimp wearing what used to be Gabe’s jacket (or more to the point, used to be the Convolution’s badge) led Elli and Bethany across the forest floor to a hollow where the xenobiologist seemed to have carved out a living (in a half hour). There were scattered notebooks, a sleeping bag, several sets of clothes looking sad and unused in a corner, and some potted plants. It looked disturbingly lived-in.
The purple-clad chimpanzee signed to Bethany. ”You will remain here until a decision comes down,” Bethany translated. ”It is likely that you will simply be set free, or else banished. I—me, Bethany, not her—I might be sent out with you. Hopefully it won’t come to that.” Elli nodded and tried to scope out her surroundings. Navigating the rainforest was a very complex three-dimensional affair, and she couldn’t gauge a proper escape route.
Bethany and the chimp began signaling furiously. Another ape, the old one who had been leading the drum circle earlier, joined in. Several other chimps began to approach curiously. “Bethany?” Elli demanded, clutching her trombone. “What’s going on?”
Bethany pointed at the trombone. ”Restless-She wanted to know what that was. I told her it was for making music. She said it looked like an awfully inefficient drum, so I tried to explain to her… it got into some pretty tedious translation issues. Then she said she would like to hear you play. The others are interested as well.”
Elimine looked around. The chimps didn’t look to be in a patient mood. ”The making of music is new to the Family,” Bethany cautioned. ”It is considered a valued and pioneering art. If you’re any good at that thing, it might change some of their opinion of you, decrease the odds that they decide to do something... drastic.”
Elli reached in the back of her brain and searched for evidence that she was being Convoluted. How would you be able to tell? She said “I—“ and Restless-She, as though sensing her hesitation, bared her teeth and hissed.
That was one thing that Elli didn’t need translated. Wondering where her cat had gotten off to, she put the horn to her lips.
Elli failed to catch up to Bethany as quickly as she ought to, considering herself to be much more athletic and agile than some egghead grad student. This was because Elli had failed to taken account the slick moss growing on the branches above her.
Understanding the need to get away from humans and typewriters following a hurried, mutually unsatisfying consummation with Restless-She, Bethany had immediately seen the potential of the moss as a medium of quick transportation. In the future, it would seem, Disney’s “Tarzan” reboot had been conflated with the true animated classics, despite being average at best. Accordingly, the whole surfing-on-mossy-branches thing, despite originally being a ridiculous grab for the 5-12 male audience of the late nineties, was by then a fully-formed trope and a staple of the noble-savage genre.
So it was that, despite not having paused for some casual homobestiality along the way, Elli arrived in chimpanzee territory a full twenty minutes behind Bethany. This was apparently enough time for the Convolution to do its job pretty thoroughly.
For one thing, the apes had discovered music. There were about five of them in a drum circle, led by a larger chimp with a tuft of silver on his back, banging out some impressively complex percussion as a unit. It took her a bit longer to realize that the quite-under-control bonfire in the middle of the circle was also definitively not supposed to be an animal thing.
Most of the apes were up in the trees, the branches of which had been knitted together to form intricate tree house patterns. They were having wrestling matches, public sex, eating what they found and generally living life to an extent that Elli rarely saw, even in the city. One of the trees seemed to either be growing right over a natural spring or else was a natural spring, and water cascaded out of dozens of hollows and trickled off the edge of branches. Little baby chimpanzees were playing in the water, darting in and out and pushing each other in and pulling each other out with abandon, which Elli tried to pretend wasn’t the most adorable thing she’d seen in her life because she was on a mission. She had to find Betha—oh.
The reason she hadn’t seen Bethany right away was because she’d been searching for the xeniobiologist’s sweaty blue tanktop, rather than her sweaty flesh-colored nothing. She had further expected Bethany to be tied up in a tree screaming for help, rather than picking bugs out of a contented-looking chimp’s hair with one hand and writing something down in a leather-bound notebook with the other. The scientist's decision to go nude would have been somewhat more understandable if that had been the fashion among the chimpanzees, but her friend in the purple was still fully-clad and having an argument with an imposing male up in the trees, and the chimp on the receiving end of Bethany's grooming was wearing her underwear.
Elli’s cat nuzzled up against her ankle and hissed in the general direction of the apes. “Go hide,” Elli told her pet in a low voice, giving it the behind-the-ear treatment. “They probably aren’t big on cats here in the rainforest.”
The cat obediently scampered up a tree and crouched in a branch. Elli suddenly felt very alone. Well, no use turning back now. “Bethany!” she called, stepping out from the trees.
Most of the activity in the camp stopped. The chimps consider me a stranger, and they don’t like strangers, but the Convolution knows me, and it doesn’t like me. It was an unsettling thought.
Bethany opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, made a sort of croaking sound, cleared her throat, and managed to speak. ”It’s you,” she rasped dreamily. ”I didn’t think you’d come. What year is it?”
Elimine figured someone had probably mentioned a year at some point, but couldn’t remember what it was. She decided not to beat around the bush. “It’s only been about a half hour since you left.”
”So long,” said Bethany, indifferently. The purple-clad chimp and the enormous, muscular male she’d been talking to began to walk over. The male had a regal-looking stripe of purple running down his back and was carrying the corpse of a tigress over one shoulder, absentmindedly gnawing at one of her arms as he listened to the humans talking. The tigress looked like she’d been beaten to death. ”Time was all I used to care about,” expounded Bethany. ”Growing time, bottling time, civilizing time. A very human sort of project. But now, over the years, I see the rightness of the way of the jungle. The Family simply coexists with Time, they let it wash over them like rain until they erode away into the soil. And then! Time gives them a great blessing and grows roots in that soil, that their soil may support the trees. In my time with the apes I have seen the beauty and the rightness of this cycle, in both its joys and its sweet, sweet melancholies.” Bethany’s hair looked terrible.
Elli didn’t know how to react except to repeat, “It’s been a half hour.”
Bethany pulled a bright green insect out of the half-dressed chimp’s hair and held it on her tongue pensively, while it buzzed out an SOS in morse code. Then she popped it into her mouth. After swallowing, she continued her monologue. ”In the before-time, I used to collect insects and pin them to corkboard. I would sort them by the chronophilic and the chronophobic, the chronostatic and the chronodynamic, the chronovoltaic, the chronosolvent, the chronochronic, the chronopolistic and the chronomarxist, the analog and the digital, homochronic and heterochronic, the Chrono-Saxons and the post-time Ageless Age Chronopunk movement, Team Edward and Team Jacob (that one was more of a personal hobby), chronophenomenal and chrononoumenal, genus and species, the chronoholics, chronopportunists, Chronobama and Chron Paul, and I had a separate board for spiders.” She scribbled something down in her notebook. ”Now I just have a notebook where I describe what the bugs taste like.”
”A half-hour.”
”It was long enough for me to record the tastes of over seven hundred species.” She held up a page for Elli’s perusal. It was in an indecipherable shorthand, but with meticulous penmanship. ”There are recipes in here, too. I’m learning so much more with my tongue than I ever did with my brain. Of course there have been contributions from… other tongues, as well.”
Elli, cognizant of the way the chimps were looking at her, was about ready to give this up. “Look, Bethany, I understand you think you’re happy here,” she said, slowly backing up towards the treeline. “I can’t make you leave if you don’t want to. But it’s dangerous out here. And you’re definitely being influenced by a—“
Elli was cut off by the purpleback male initiating some sort of sign-language conversation with Bethany, inasmuch as a verbal conversation can be cut off by a nonverbal one. Bethany responded in kind, deftly making a series of complex hand movements that she presumably learned during her half hour’s stay among the chimps. Elli allowed this to go on for precisely the length of one chorus of “When the Saints” and then asked, “What’s he saying?”
Bethany turned back towards Elli. “He says he allowed me to stay with the family only under the condition that this was a one-time event, that no other outsiders would follow me. That peace has been broken now. He says, scornfully, that we can have each other, and he is considering banishing us both.” She looked Elli up and down. We could… have each other. It’s been so long since I’ve been with… someone like me.”
Elli couldn’t think of a response to that last bit that would prove constructive to this conversation. ”Tell him I’m just passing through. I don’t mean to infringe on… things… here.”
A lengthy exchange of handsigns. The purpleback chomped into its tiger’s haunch.
”Alpha-He-Declines-the-Nipple, so-called (he wishes me to add) for his refusal to dine on anything but meat or drink anything but blood since his infancy, claims that you have already ‘infringed’ by forcing him to look upon your hideous face. His words, not mine. He notes your presence, and that of your family, has been foretold to disrupt the cycle of growth and decay by He-She-Has-Two-Mouths-Three-Eyes-and-Both-Sets-of-Genitals, whose prophecies have never mislead him. He wishes for you to leave, but would sooner keep an eye on you. Thus, he is forbidding you to run off into the trees to rejoin your panther, as is obviously your intent, until he has deliberated and decided what to do with you.”
By the time Bethany had gotten to the pertinent bits of that speech, Elimine could already feel the presence of the two chimps that had materialized between her and the treeline. Elli, unsure both of the ethics of killing chimpanzees and whether she could take them in a fight, decided to submit. “Alright, tell him I’ll come along,” she said. “For now. Tell him that.” Bethany signaled to the Alpha, who seemed satisfied and launched himself up into the branches and vanishing out of sight.
The chimp wearing what used to be Gabe’s jacket (or more to the point, used to be the Convolution’s badge) led Elli and Bethany across the forest floor to a hollow where the xenobiologist seemed to have carved out a living (in a half hour). There were scattered notebooks, a sleeping bag, several sets of clothes looking sad and unused in a corner, and some potted plants. It looked disturbingly lived-in.
The purple-clad chimpanzee signed to Bethany. ”You will remain here until a decision comes down,” Bethany translated. ”It is likely that you will simply be set free, or else banished. I—me, Bethany, not her—I might be sent out with you. Hopefully it won’t come to that.” Elli nodded and tried to scope out her surroundings. Navigating the rainforest was a very complex three-dimensional affair, and she couldn’t gauge a proper escape route.
Bethany and the chimp began signaling furiously. Another ape, the old one who had been leading the drum circle earlier, joined in. Several other chimps began to approach curiously. “Bethany?” Elli demanded, clutching her trombone. “What’s going on?”
Bethany pointed at the trombone. ”Restless-She wanted to know what that was. I told her it was for making music. She said it looked like an awfully inefficient drum, so I tried to explain to her… it got into some pretty tedious translation issues. Then she said she would like to hear you play. The others are interested as well.”
Elimine looked around. The chimps didn’t look to be in a patient mood. ”The making of music is new to the Family,” Bethany cautioned. ”It is considered a valued and pioneering art. If you’re any good at that thing, it might change some of their opinion of you, decrease the odds that they decide to do something... drastic.”
Elli reached in the back of her brain and searched for evidence that she was being Convoluted. How would you be able to tell? She said “I—“ and Restless-She, as though sensing her hesitation, bared her teeth and hissed.
That was one thing that Elli didn’t need translated. Wondering where her cat had gotten off to, she put the horn to her lips.