Re: The Gradual Massacre (GBS2G4) [Round 4: Misty Swamp]
10-19-2011, 07:38 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Wojjan.
Acacia followed the narrow winding road, fog covering her every side. She looked back, but Kalevi's voice died in the mist. She wasn't sure if he cared enough to call her name. No one ever was, she was extinct, left to battle in vain on this rotten earth. She looked up at the thunderous white sun, but it was covered in purple clouds. She looked around her. In every direction, the swamp's darkness. She heard something.
“Who's there?”
Acacia heard the hollow wail of death all around her, and the rustling wind carried her head in its direction. The scream of a man who lost his lungs, his voice, his mind. The thin silhouettes skirting the mist, flesh and bones no more than strings hanging from their spoiled hull, were unmistakeable. Those were the menace, the illness she had been battling against. The plags were here.
Though the winding boardwalk gravely limited her movement, she found a way to dash off at the very sight of the first. She ran, the road unfurling in the mist like a tunnel, but at every side more plags emerged, somehow standing straight in the marsh's muck. Slowly, almost like a straight line, like the narrow confines of crushing walls, they closed in on her, until she could smell their corpses. From up ahead, one of them had found a way onto the boardwalk, and with a shriek Acacia pivoted around, almost instinctively. But on the other side too, more diseased, more mist, and the utter dread of dying.
She now stood straight in front of a large group of them, neither of them moving, numb in fear or sheer weakness of will. Their eyes stared her over, looking straight into the mist, into the sun, and like wax they burned away. From the crowd, one of them pressed their way forward. So maliciously malformed, scars and scrapes all over their face, still Acacia recognised him.
Kalevi revealed a gun and held it to his own head. “Last round left, Aic,” he mouthed, with a delirious grin plastered over his face.
“No!”
Acacia's eyes flipped open, but it still took her a long while to actually climb out of bed. She rubbed her eyes, then the back of her head, her neck and her hair (what little she had) as if to find an entrance into her mind and rub out the terrible nightmare at the source.
She looked around the room where she had spent the last few weeks, as if to check if she had truly woken up. Yes, she was in the reassuringly familiar hotel room, where she had fallen asleep every night since her arrival in Hearth. The bed she was in was posh, but her tossing and turning in the night had piled the bedsheets and pillows up into a gaudy mess of velvet.
“Kal?”
“In here.”
“Kalevi?”
He turned around the corner to face Acacia. Kalevi had almost forgotten, due to the conversations he and Acacia were able to have, that she was technically deaf. “I'm in the kitchen if you need me." He pointed, although that was probably giving her deafness too much mind.
Though the room was technically just the one, the wall to Acacia's left separated the bedroom from the kitchen, and served little to no use other than creating the illusion of a larger room. Acacia found herself out of bed, miraculously, and she trailed the wall beside her to lead towards Kalevi. To her right was a double door, and to her left (past the wall) she knew was another.
“I was up early, couldn't really fall asleep again. Figured I might's well start breakfast.”
Acacia definitely wasn't used to Hearth yet. The city had been very welcoming, and to be fair she was definitely in her element in the town, but ever since she lost her way in the mist (though she was sure she was out for only seconds, and the Hearth guards found her almost immediately) it felt as if a bit of the purple mist had lodged itself inside her, eating her dreams like a ghost. Those nightmares were the hardest part of her new life, to such an extent that she volunteered for every shift in every troop she could apply for (only to be denied for her handicap) and tired herself out working the day around juggling her job as a herbalist (which she sort of gave up on, being far outclassed by a magical treant and company) and odd jobs she took from villagers overnight. But what humorously took her the longest to get used to was the sight of Kalevi wearing an apron in front of the kitchen stove, always awake first to cook breakfast.
“I made salad, I hope I'm not stepping on any toes with that?” A sly smile found itself on Kalevi's face, but much more endearing than the time she had first met him.
“You tease! I'm no tree-hugger, you know.” Acacia leaned forward, almost hanging in Kalevi's face, barely touching.
She quickly leaned back again, flipping her short hair around. She tried as best she could to speak as nonchalantly as possible. “Salad is fine, really.”
Breakfast was usually silent, and if it wasn't they hardly spoke about anything interesting. Plans for the future or recollection of the past, even the very notion of the Gradual Massacre was swiftly ignored. With as much idle conversation as at the table the pair got dressed and headed outside.
The double doors swung open, and they found themselves inside the annex of Hearth itself. The hollow tree it was in essence had no visible entrance, so only those contestants with unconventional means of transport (or comrades with such) were able to enter. This of course meant two things. The city and its inhabitants were as of first a very close-knit group, and someone else or several elses arriving was as welcoming as marriage. Or mass marriage. Antisocial fellows weren't uncommon, but they left as fast and unceremoniously as they had entered. Due to the city being only available to those with powers that made relativity more of a guideline than a universal constant, there was an almost limitless space available to accept more people.
Second, life in Hearth was a lot more peaceful and laid-back than in cities like Fernwood. The more common dangers like plants, zombies, eldritch abominations, murderers, fire, mist, right hands of a thoroughly wicked grandmaster, or an all-devouring swarm of bugs, couldn't thrive as well in Hearth as in other cities. Hearth was very well known for its bustling nightlife (or it would have been if anyone who knew about it didn't already live in it) and being, everyone's past experiences considered, a fine change towards entertainment. Some even came with the idea of starting a night club, serving cocktails made from the giant tree's fruit. Discovering if your alien body could cope with ethanol was, according to the regulars, “part of the fun.”
Once both Acacia and Kalevi had left their room, they turned to the door. Pressing a handle at the top made it blip out like a TV screen, leaving but a tiny square as evidence of it ever existing. This handywork, a hotel room with two different exits that can lead from any defined place to another, was the special power of a man who arrived in Hearth as a god, but in his world had the lowly job of a bellboy. His power was regarded normal where he came from, but it was a rare sight in Hearth, most useful to receive the steadily growing population. Felipe Cortez was not used to the attention his power begot in this city, so whenever Acacia met the man, he gave off a finnicky, nervous vibe though she was pretty sure he had to have been sociable to get the job. In a past life, maybe, or on a full moon.
Kalevi pocketed the door, and bid his farewells with a fleeting streak along Acacia's shoulder. She knew him, and how cold he'd been to her (and everyone else for that matter) and that made it almost a kiss to Acacia. They parted their ways, which left Acacia with sadly little to do. Hearth was a monument of life, so one would expect her skills in botany to prove quite useful, but what use is a green thumb when you're surrounded by aliens and spirits with green bodies and superpowers that could make a plant grow on your finger if they fancied? Hearth was in full expansion (even hotel doors took up space) but every job in the process was already spoken for. Acacia wasn't strong, so she could hardly help digging out the bottom. She was skilled enough to help the tree grow further, but others were much better, and her skill couldn't compare with their magic.
With all the time in the world on her hands, she still found some part of her to annoy itself at being interrupted.
Like a crescent, a perfectly black line seemed to get cut out of reality. A thin, young hand covered in soot grabbed at the line, and tore the space in front of her open like a shred of paper. Another hand followed to grab at the other end of the space that just had cut itself open in Hearth, and soon the lady responsible showed her face, arms crossed on the edge of reality as if the blackness in the unnatural hole was a bath, and floating in perfect stillness in a pose that could not feel natural in the slightest. She turned around, where Acacia could make out a few other people shuffling about in the void. She called out to her presumable allies.
“We did it, we're out!”
Acacia circled the gap once or twice, probably to find out where it lead, but she soon realised it made about as much sense as any method of transportation in Hearth, and let the subject be. A lot of people tried to explain complex movement to her, and they'd failed time after time.
Maybe they did it just to spite her, but almost purposefully they saved the most ferocious of the cast for last. By the time some skeletal warrior wielding his own arm stumbled out into the city, Acacia felt that uncanny feeling that meant as much as “I really wish I was carrying my chainsaw right now.” Gapgirl asked Acacia where she was right now, but she could only gasp for air. An 'uh' would be pretty appropriate right now, if only her thought-to-speech could deal with mannerisms. She motioned for the merry crew to follow her, and soon the odd parade found itself cautiously treading along a path of branches and wooden boards, circling the periphery of the hollow tree.
The girl introduced herself as Calabiese, and as she extended her hand towards Acacia it gave her a chance to fully size her up. She was a perfectly typical young lady, freckles and red hair tied together in droopy pigtails with soggy ribbons to them, and apart from incredibly baggy clothing nothing seemed off at first sight. She carried an odd backpack, one of those explorer's hip satchels she saw in a movie once, and she presumed it lead to a different dimension like the portal she exited from, because when she fossicked around for a hairbrush she seemed to find all sorts of things like balls of yarn and a bottle of water, none of which seemed to fit in the bag on their own, let alone all together.
Calabiese was a thorough airhead, but she definitely wasn't flat-out dumb, so it didn't take long for her to pick up Acacia's quizzical gaze. She quickly turned to explain the specifics of her powers, all the while doing her hair. “Y'sees, dear, I control me limits. Any of 'em. C'pacity of my bag, distance or time from point A t'point B, or what's else ye's can think of. As long as't's got a limit someplace to 't, I's got it under m'mark. T'is one catch, but. If I's to fancy raising me one, I's gonna best find another to lower 'swell.” Her hair was now a braid she laid across her shoulder. “So, wanna meet me pals? Man, t'tell ya, the'ncredible affray, some deal't was!”
The walk was short, and Acacia figured a formal introduction could wait until their destination. Calabiese didn't. She told Acacia every single detail about Eye-Ay, as if she was the first welcoming being she'd seen in her entire life – which, judging from her merry crew, would've been an astute conclusion – and thought nothing of lengthening the time it took to get to wherever Acacia was taking her to tell her all about the battle she'd been through, and how horrible it was, and how you totally get used to skeleton marksmen after three rounds.
Acacia had politely nodded at every other sentence, and had politely stopped nodding once Calabiese felt she could take the story on her own, regardless of anyone listening to her from some point on. It seemed to distract her from slowing down the course of time around her, though, and she left Acacia with just about enough time to notice that Calabiese didn't move her feet to walk around, but instead opted to shorten the distance between her and whatever point she fancied by growing out her hair.
Acacia knocked on the door she'd arrived at, with the entire cast of The 'Ncredible Affray in tow. And old woman opened the door, someone Acacia hadn't seen for a long time, or at least since she herself had arrived in the village. Mahogany was the alma mater of Hearth, having used her skills in botany to make the tree habitable in the first place, and furthering her shabby stronghold into the village Hearth is today. Acacia decided now was about as good a time to seek her out. Maybe plan a village council or something.
Whenever something remarkably interesting happened in Hearth, first all the villagers would be invited to some sort of meeting or council, or whatever you'd call it, and from then on everyone would complain about it. Hearth was a pretty small village (and the acoustics carried quite the while, given its shape) so there wasn't much difference between complaining on the boardwalk or in the meeting, other than everyone else not feeling as embarrassed about hearing you rant about something aloud. Often the meetings would devolve to a bunch of conflicts between one person and another, strung together to form some kind of tacky court drama, with everyone else sitting put until it's their time to call someone out over something. With such a foresight of the meeting's course in mind, nobody was exactly happy to hear another had been scheduled (unless of course they had something to complain about) but nobody really dared not showing up either, in fear of being accused of not caring about the village at the next meeting. Shock and surprise all around, then, when the meeting didn't start off with someone kicking their chair from under their ass, but with a darling little southern gal “boy glad fancyin' you types all!”
“Well, Calabiese,” Mahogany huffed, “you definitely seem the most talkative of your group. Would you mind doing us the favor of introducing all of you?”
“I can introduce myself just fine!”
Toronto pressed his way through the crowd of far more imposing figured (even though he didn't even need the room to squeeze his lanky shape through) and straightened his spectacles in a way that made you suspect he forgot they weren't sunglasses, and smoothed his suit so his tie would stand perfectly aligned with his trimmed goatee. “Name's Toronto.” He lit a cigarillo on a special vintage designer cigarillo-lighter. “And this...”
He shook his cellphone a bit, until a small orange bubble flew out. It hissed, kind of like when you'd break a mirror, and flew through and around itself to check for anything of interest. “...This is Wish. Wish is a spirit that can fulfill, uh, last wishes. Wills, mostly, because he knows that someone else speaking for a dead guy isn't always what that dead guy wanted. He prefers black-and-white testaments. As for myself, I used to arrange funerals, but then I took a turn for accounting.”
Calabiese decided to interrupt him, clearly unsatisfied being demoted from her position as spokesperson for NA. “What's he trynna say's he's a forger. Makes him wills 'mself! Exploitin' poor Wish'ms like's nothin'.”
The crowd immediately geared up as Calabiese raised her voice, expecting at least a little bit of bloodshed this meeting. Some already started cracking their knuckles, ready to spring straight and shout at someone else and fall into the usual pattern.
“Shh! I told you not to say that in front of Wish!”
“Ye's said he ain'ts got any hearin', so what's t'deal?”
“Shut up! I mean... I dunno. I just don't want to upset him.”
“Aw, s'sweet o'yours t'admit't.” Calabiese made it as clear as in a middle school play that endearment wasn't something Toronto wore on a daily basis, and the way the man tugged on his collar and shuffled around in silence afterward demonstrated that he couldn't accessorise well with it either.
Calabiese strutted towards the next contestant with the flair and refined bossiness of a grandmaster, but severely lacking in their blase disinterest. “Thisn's, uhh, Shiro. He's a tengu, if I's remember, so's that why he's got'm lookin' like a bird. I, uh, don't't'behonest ever think've heard'm speak. There's't. Watch't beak though! 'S got's m'sharp one.” Shiro took a polite bow, and sat down on his knees by the table, without a word.
“And'ms here's Rossem.” With a gruesome ginding noise, the skeleton's bones clacked, his spine snapping into a wicked curve and almost detaching entirely from his skull. Fear gripped the council of Hearth, and Rossem's dead glare held it in a vice for long. “He's not's all bad, ye'see. But thing's he used t'bein' a hunter'r sum'n, so's got all t'intimidatin' air 'round'm.” Calabiese smiled at Rossem as if he were a human, something the citizens of Hearth right now didn't consider possible.
“...Saved m'life once, even.”
Oh, so that explains. Hearth was a saving grace to a lot of people, considering its location right in the middle of the purple mist, with nothing to scare the clouds away around it. Many of the inhabitants were simply dragged in by patrolmen (like Acacia and Kelavi) so the villagers were all very familiar with the gratefulness that grew from rescue, on either end of the bargain.
As if someone just recited a poem, Mahogany started clapping, but immediately stopped to rub her hands once she noticed no one followed her example. “So that's that, hm. I trust that you'll all find your place in the village soon enough. You've already made one friend, I see!” She waved in Acacia's general direction. Acacia mumbled something, or considered mumbling but didn't quite make it past the speech recognition barrier. “Well, that concludes my topics at least, so unless anyone has anything else to say...”
Several people rose up even before Mahogany had ended the meeting, and now that she had formally concluded it (asking for anything else to say was in essence a conclusion and propagation at the same time) already people were flinging complaints at one another. Acacia sighed, and wished she had the nerve so simply walk out from this part on. But she also knew that, were she to do so, at the very least someone would have to start complaining about it at the next meeting.
Acacia followed the narrow winding road, fog covering her every side. She looked back, but Kalevi's voice died in the mist. She wasn't sure if he cared enough to call her name. No one ever was, she was extinct, left to battle in vain on this rotten earth. She looked up at the thunderous white sun, but it was covered in purple clouds. She looked around her. In every direction, the swamp's darkness. She heard something.
“Who's there?”
Acacia heard the hollow wail of death all around her, and the rustling wind carried her head in its direction. The scream of a man who lost his lungs, his voice, his mind. The thin silhouettes skirting the mist, flesh and bones no more than strings hanging from their spoiled hull, were unmistakeable. Those were the menace, the illness she had been battling against. The plags were here.
Though the winding boardwalk gravely limited her movement, she found a way to dash off at the very sight of the first. She ran, the road unfurling in the mist like a tunnel, but at every side more plags emerged, somehow standing straight in the marsh's muck. Slowly, almost like a straight line, like the narrow confines of crushing walls, they closed in on her, until she could smell their corpses. From up ahead, one of them had found a way onto the boardwalk, and with a shriek Acacia pivoted around, almost instinctively. But on the other side too, more diseased, more mist, and the utter dread of dying.
She now stood straight in front of a large group of them, neither of them moving, numb in fear or sheer weakness of will. Their eyes stared her over, looking straight into the mist, into the sun, and like wax they burned away. From the crowd, one of them pressed their way forward. So maliciously malformed, scars and scrapes all over their face, still Acacia recognised him.
Kalevi revealed a gun and held it to his own head. “Last round left, Aic,” he mouthed, with a delirious grin plastered over his face.
“No!”
Acacia's eyes flipped open, but it still took her a long while to actually climb out of bed. She rubbed her eyes, then the back of her head, her neck and her hair (what little she had) as if to find an entrance into her mind and rub out the terrible nightmare at the source.
She looked around the room where she had spent the last few weeks, as if to check if she had truly woken up. Yes, she was in the reassuringly familiar hotel room, where she had fallen asleep every night since her arrival in Hearth. The bed she was in was posh, but her tossing and turning in the night had piled the bedsheets and pillows up into a gaudy mess of velvet.
“Kal?”
“In here.”
“Kalevi?”
He turned around the corner to face Acacia. Kalevi had almost forgotten, due to the conversations he and Acacia were able to have, that she was technically deaf. “I'm in the kitchen if you need me." He pointed, although that was probably giving her deafness too much mind.
Though the room was technically just the one, the wall to Acacia's left separated the bedroom from the kitchen, and served little to no use other than creating the illusion of a larger room. Acacia found herself out of bed, miraculously, and she trailed the wall beside her to lead towards Kalevi. To her right was a double door, and to her left (past the wall) she knew was another.
“I was up early, couldn't really fall asleep again. Figured I might's well start breakfast.”
Acacia definitely wasn't used to Hearth yet. The city had been very welcoming, and to be fair she was definitely in her element in the town, but ever since she lost her way in the mist (though she was sure she was out for only seconds, and the Hearth guards found her almost immediately) it felt as if a bit of the purple mist had lodged itself inside her, eating her dreams like a ghost. Those nightmares were the hardest part of her new life, to such an extent that she volunteered for every shift in every troop she could apply for (only to be denied for her handicap) and tired herself out working the day around juggling her job as a herbalist (which she sort of gave up on, being far outclassed by a magical treant and company) and odd jobs she took from villagers overnight. But what humorously took her the longest to get used to was the sight of Kalevi wearing an apron in front of the kitchen stove, always awake first to cook breakfast.
“I made salad, I hope I'm not stepping on any toes with that?” A sly smile found itself on Kalevi's face, but much more endearing than the time she had first met him.
“You tease! I'm no tree-hugger, you know.” Acacia leaned forward, almost hanging in Kalevi's face, barely touching.
She quickly leaned back again, flipping her short hair around. She tried as best she could to speak as nonchalantly as possible. “Salad is fine, really.”
Breakfast was usually silent, and if it wasn't they hardly spoke about anything interesting. Plans for the future or recollection of the past, even the very notion of the Gradual Massacre was swiftly ignored. With as much idle conversation as at the table the pair got dressed and headed outside.
The double doors swung open, and they found themselves inside the annex of Hearth itself. The hollow tree it was in essence had no visible entrance, so only those contestants with unconventional means of transport (or comrades with such) were able to enter. This of course meant two things. The city and its inhabitants were as of first a very close-knit group, and someone else or several elses arriving was as welcoming as marriage. Or mass marriage. Antisocial fellows weren't uncommon, but they left as fast and unceremoniously as they had entered. Due to the city being only available to those with powers that made relativity more of a guideline than a universal constant, there was an almost limitless space available to accept more people.
Second, life in Hearth was a lot more peaceful and laid-back than in cities like Fernwood. The more common dangers like plants, zombies, eldritch abominations, murderers, fire, mist, right hands of a thoroughly wicked grandmaster, or an all-devouring swarm of bugs, couldn't thrive as well in Hearth as in other cities. Hearth was very well known for its bustling nightlife (or it would have been if anyone who knew about it didn't already live in it) and being, everyone's past experiences considered, a fine change towards entertainment. Some even came with the idea of starting a night club, serving cocktails made from the giant tree's fruit. Discovering if your alien body could cope with ethanol was, according to the regulars, “part of the fun.”
Once both Acacia and Kalevi had left their room, they turned to the door. Pressing a handle at the top made it blip out like a TV screen, leaving but a tiny square as evidence of it ever existing. This handywork, a hotel room with two different exits that can lead from any defined place to another, was the special power of a man who arrived in Hearth as a god, but in his world had the lowly job of a bellboy. His power was regarded normal where he came from, but it was a rare sight in Hearth, most useful to receive the steadily growing population. Felipe Cortez was not used to the attention his power begot in this city, so whenever Acacia met the man, he gave off a finnicky, nervous vibe though she was pretty sure he had to have been sociable to get the job. In a past life, maybe, or on a full moon.
Kalevi pocketed the door, and bid his farewells with a fleeting streak along Acacia's shoulder. She knew him, and how cold he'd been to her (and everyone else for that matter) and that made it almost a kiss to Acacia. They parted their ways, which left Acacia with sadly little to do. Hearth was a monument of life, so one would expect her skills in botany to prove quite useful, but what use is a green thumb when you're surrounded by aliens and spirits with green bodies and superpowers that could make a plant grow on your finger if they fancied? Hearth was in full expansion (even hotel doors took up space) but every job in the process was already spoken for. Acacia wasn't strong, so she could hardly help digging out the bottom. She was skilled enough to help the tree grow further, but others were much better, and her skill couldn't compare with their magic.
With all the time in the world on her hands, she still found some part of her to annoy itself at being interrupted.
Like a crescent, a perfectly black line seemed to get cut out of reality. A thin, young hand covered in soot grabbed at the line, and tore the space in front of her open like a shred of paper. Another hand followed to grab at the other end of the space that just had cut itself open in Hearth, and soon the lady responsible showed her face, arms crossed on the edge of reality as if the blackness in the unnatural hole was a bath, and floating in perfect stillness in a pose that could not feel natural in the slightest. She turned around, where Acacia could make out a few other people shuffling about in the void. She called out to her presumable allies.
“We did it, we're out!”
Acacia circled the gap once or twice, probably to find out where it lead, but she soon realised it made about as much sense as any method of transportation in Hearth, and let the subject be. A lot of people tried to explain complex movement to her, and they'd failed time after time.
Maybe they did it just to spite her, but almost purposefully they saved the most ferocious of the cast for last. By the time some skeletal warrior wielding his own arm stumbled out into the city, Acacia felt that uncanny feeling that meant as much as “I really wish I was carrying my chainsaw right now.” Gapgirl asked Acacia where she was right now, but she could only gasp for air. An 'uh' would be pretty appropriate right now, if only her thought-to-speech could deal with mannerisms. She motioned for the merry crew to follow her, and soon the odd parade found itself cautiously treading along a path of branches and wooden boards, circling the periphery of the hollow tree.
The girl introduced herself as Calabiese, and as she extended her hand towards Acacia it gave her a chance to fully size her up. She was a perfectly typical young lady, freckles and red hair tied together in droopy pigtails with soggy ribbons to them, and apart from incredibly baggy clothing nothing seemed off at first sight. She carried an odd backpack, one of those explorer's hip satchels she saw in a movie once, and she presumed it lead to a different dimension like the portal she exited from, because when she fossicked around for a hairbrush she seemed to find all sorts of things like balls of yarn and a bottle of water, none of which seemed to fit in the bag on their own, let alone all together.
Calabiese was a thorough airhead, but she definitely wasn't flat-out dumb, so it didn't take long for her to pick up Acacia's quizzical gaze. She quickly turned to explain the specifics of her powers, all the while doing her hair. “Y'sees, dear, I control me limits. Any of 'em. C'pacity of my bag, distance or time from point A t'point B, or what's else ye's can think of. As long as't's got a limit someplace to 't, I's got it under m'mark. T'is one catch, but. If I's to fancy raising me one, I's gonna best find another to lower 'swell.” Her hair was now a braid she laid across her shoulder. “So, wanna meet me pals? Man, t'tell ya, the'ncredible affray, some deal't was!”
The walk was short, and Acacia figured a formal introduction could wait until their destination. Calabiese didn't. She told Acacia every single detail about Eye-Ay, as if she was the first welcoming being she'd seen in her entire life – which, judging from her merry crew, would've been an astute conclusion – and thought nothing of lengthening the time it took to get to wherever Acacia was taking her to tell her all about the battle she'd been through, and how horrible it was, and how you totally get used to skeleton marksmen after three rounds.
Acacia had politely nodded at every other sentence, and had politely stopped nodding once Calabiese felt she could take the story on her own, regardless of anyone listening to her from some point on. It seemed to distract her from slowing down the course of time around her, though, and she left Acacia with just about enough time to notice that Calabiese didn't move her feet to walk around, but instead opted to shorten the distance between her and whatever point she fancied by growing out her hair.
Acacia knocked on the door she'd arrived at, with the entire cast of The 'Ncredible Affray in tow. And old woman opened the door, someone Acacia hadn't seen for a long time, or at least since she herself had arrived in the village. Mahogany was the alma mater of Hearth, having used her skills in botany to make the tree habitable in the first place, and furthering her shabby stronghold into the village Hearth is today. Acacia decided now was about as good a time to seek her out. Maybe plan a village council or something.
Whenever something remarkably interesting happened in Hearth, first all the villagers would be invited to some sort of meeting or council, or whatever you'd call it, and from then on everyone would complain about it. Hearth was a pretty small village (and the acoustics carried quite the while, given its shape) so there wasn't much difference between complaining on the boardwalk or in the meeting, other than everyone else not feeling as embarrassed about hearing you rant about something aloud. Often the meetings would devolve to a bunch of conflicts between one person and another, strung together to form some kind of tacky court drama, with everyone else sitting put until it's their time to call someone out over something. With such a foresight of the meeting's course in mind, nobody was exactly happy to hear another had been scheduled (unless of course they had something to complain about) but nobody really dared not showing up either, in fear of being accused of not caring about the village at the next meeting. Shock and surprise all around, then, when the meeting didn't start off with someone kicking their chair from under their ass, but with a darling little southern gal “boy glad fancyin' you types all!”
“Well, Calabiese,” Mahogany huffed, “you definitely seem the most talkative of your group. Would you mind doing us the favor of introducing all of you?”
“I can introduce myself just fine!”
Toronto pressed his way through the crowd of far more imposing figured (even though he didn't even need the room to squeeze his lanky shape through) and straightened his spectacles in a way that made you suspect he forgot they weren't sunglasses, and smoothed his suit so his tie would stand perfectly aligned with his trimmed goatee. “Name's Toronto.” He lit a cigarillo on a special vintage designer cigarillo-lighter. “And this...”
He shook his cellphone a bit, until a small orange bubble flew out. It hissed, kind of like when you'd break a mirror, and flew through and around itself to check for anything of interest. “...This is Wish. Wish is a spirit that can fulfill, uh, last wishes. Wills, mostly, because he knows that someone else speaking for a dead guy isn't always what that dead guy wanted. He prefers black-and-white testaments. As for myself, I used to arrange funerals, but then I took a turn for accounting.”
Calabiese decided to interrupt him, clearly unsatisfied being demoted from her position as spokesperson for NA. “What's he trynna say's he's a forger. Makes him wills 'mself! Exploitin' poor Wish'ms like's nothin'.”
The crowd immediately geared up as Calabiese raised her voice, expecting at least a little bit of bloodshed this meeting. Some already started cracking their knuckles, ready to spring straight and shout at someone else and fall into the usual pattern.
“Shh! I told you not to say that in front of Wish!”
“Ye's said he ain'ts got any hearin', so what's t'deal?”
“Shut up! I mean... I dunno. I just don't want to upset him.”
“Aw, s'sweet o'yours t'admit't.” Calabiese made it as clear as in a middle school play that endearment wasn't something Toronto wore on a daily basis, and the way the man tugged on his collar and shuffled around in silence afterward demonstrated that he couldn't accessorise well with it either.
Calabiese strutted towards the next contestant with the flair and refined bossiness of a grandmaster, but severely lacking in their blase disinterest. “Thisn's, uhh, Shiro. He's a tengu, if I's remember, so's that why he's got'm lookin' like a bird. I, uh, don't't'behonest ever think've heard'm speak. There's't. Watch't beak though! 'S got's m'sharp one.” Shiro took a polite bow, and sat down on his knees by the table, without a word.
“And'ms here's Rossem.” With a gruesome ginding noise, the skeleton's bones clacked, his spine snapping into a wicked curve and almost detaching entirely from his skull. Fear gripped the council of Hearth, and Rossem's dead glare held it in a vice for long. “He's not's all bad, ye'see. But thing's he used t'bein' a hunter'r sum'n, so's got all t'intimidatin' air 'round'm.” Calabiese smiled at Rossem as if he were a human, something the citizens of Hearth right now didn't consider possible.
“...Saved m'life once, even.”
Oh, so that explains. Hearth was a saving grace to a lot of people, considering its location right in the middle of the purple mist, with nothing to scare the clouds away around it. Many of the inhabitants were simply dragged in by patrolmen (like Acacia and Kelavi) so the villagers were all very familiar with the gratefulness that grew from rescue, on either end of the bargain.
As if someone just recited a poem, Mahogany started clapping, but immediately stopped to rub her hands once she noticed no one followed her example. “So that's that, hm. I trust that you'll all find your place in the village soon enough. You've already made one friend, I see!” She waved in Acacia's general direction. Acacia mumbled something, or considered mumbling but didn't quite make it past the speech recognition barrier. “Well, that concludes my topics at least, so unless anyone has anything else to say...”
Several people rose up even before Mahogany had ended the meeting, and now that she had formally concluded it (asking for anything else to say was in essence a conclusion and propagation at the same time) already people were flinging complaints at one another. Acacia sighed, and wished she had the nerve so simply walk out from this part on. But she also knew that, were she to do so, at the very least someone would have to start complaining about it at the next meeting.
quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur.