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Post by ABYSSINIAN on May 31, 2016 4:32:11 GMT
 By his standards, he's not that far from the scene of the crime. On the other end of Kingsport, there are four businessmen dead behind locked doors. K'shiel should've gone straight back to the Spectre handlers, but he could do that later. Briefly, he stopped at a bakery, and he carried an entire cake across town. He wonders if it'll still taste the same after surviving an aetherial trip. He's in some sort of hide out. There were mafia here. They're dead now, sliced and diced apart like dinner. K'shiel finds a knife on one of the bodies. It's very clean, so he uses it to slice himself a piece of cake. It's a rich, velvety chocolate cake with sweet raspberry mousse between its layers. jack |
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May 31, 2016 13:04:22 GMT
Post by jack on May 31, 2016 13:04:22 GMT
Spending too much time queueing up at a café instead of catching up on his gaming backlog was not Jack's idea of fun, but a group of mafia members wanted coffee, and had told him that he could keep the change. These people really needed to like, get their stuff in order, Jack thought to himself as he stood impatiently in line to buy too many cups of coffee. The girl at the counter stared at him funny when he placed his orders; Jack stared back without a single word. Carrying six cups of coffee and a box of donuts in hand, he returned to the blue house between two white houses a block away from the café. Gingerly, he shifted the cups of coffee onto the box of donuts. They stood, precariously. Jack threw open the door, yelling, "Back with the coffee and -- oh." Sitting in the middle of the room with some cake was a strange, pink thing, and Jack just stared at it for a while before shutting the door. He muttered something to himself, placed the coffee and donuts on a coffee table in the living room, and returned to the room. God, the dead people. People he once knew. He willed himself not to look at them. He also had to somehow stop himself from looking the dainty pink gay furball in the eye, because for some reason he felt like growling at him. "Um," said Jack, not knowing if the cat-eared person was friend or foe or just someone who had came to rid the mafia of incompetent people, "Hi?" ABYSSINIAN |
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May 31, 2016 16:14:40 GMT
Post by ABYSSINIAN on May 31, 2016 16:14:40 GMT
K'shiel took another bite of the cake, regarding the newcomer's coffee and donuts with interest. He realized his own cake was a bit much for one person, and he cuts another slice out of it before vanishing to the coffee table. "Hi," he responded, as if this were an ordinary encounter. He took a donut and replaced its empty spot in the box with the slab of cake. It didn't fit, and instead the cake slice sprawled over the donuts next to it. He took one of the cups of coffee too before vanishing again to reappear among the bodies. "Traded you."The cake was better than the donut, he decided, but it was a close contest. He sipped the coffee and made a face. To his credit, K'shiel didn't spit it out. If anything, he savored the awful, bitter taste as it ran over his tongue and down his throat. K'shiel poured the cup out next to one of the bodies, perhaps as a tribute to the fallen. Maybe the dead guy will like it more. jack |
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Post by jack on Jun 4, 2016 4:46:59 GMT
No-one would ever know if the dead guy actually liked the coffee. Jack watched K'shiel pour the coffee all over the ground, and decided that he was going to nope out of there as soon as possible so he didn't have to do extra cleaning.
"Thanks for the cake?" Jack mumbled in response, because really, what did one say in a situation like this? He walked over to the coffee table, noted that the cake really was there (huh), and took a donut for himself.
He returned, and K'shiel was still there.
Deciding that an introduction was better than none at all, Jack said, "I'm Jack. Who're you?"
ABYSSINIAN
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Post by ABYSSINIAN on Jun 4, 2016 6:16:37 GMT
K'shiel heard the question but ignored it as he enjoyed the donut. More accurately, he delayed answering it. He didn't normally have conversations with people outside of Spectre, so he wasn't too sure how this was supposed to go. (He didn't normally have conversations with people inside Spectre either. They asked him questions. He tried to kill them when he thought he could get away with it. There wasn't much of a back-and-forth.) He didn't know how to answer anyway. Was he still Abyssinian at this point? The mission was done. People were dead. He was AWOL now, and that meant he wasn't Abyssinian anymore, because there was no one to call him Abyssinian--or maybe that's not how names worked. Maybe he's always Abyssinian, even when there's no one around to call him that. "Why are you Jack?" he asked. "How do you know?"jack |
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Post by jack on Jun 4, 2016 6:29:38 GMT
Good question. Jack stared back at him for a moment, pondering it. For some reason, he reached out and started absently scratching the catperson's ears while he was at it.
"I just am? And ... I just kinda do," he said, frowning. "It's like I woke up one day and I knew my name was Jack ..."
That was really strange, wasn't it? People had names and stuff, and it was handy to help indicate that they were the person in particular one was talking to, but still. Oh, maybe learning one's own name was like learning addition, or something. The more he thought about it, the more his head hurt.
"It's like how you know that the dog you got for your birthday is a Magnus, or an Ace. And then some parents look at their kid and go, 'Oh, she looks like a Karen, let's name her that.' I guess no one actually told me that, either. I'm just ..."
He stopped himself. The more he explained, the more it sounded like he was going around in circles.
ABYSSINIAN
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Post by ABYSSINIAN on Jun 4, 2016 7:07:10 GMT
K'shiel tilted his head, because the scratching wasn't quite hitting the part of his ear that he wanted. "One day I was born, and my name was K'shiel," he said. He knew humans were different, but K'shiel knew his name from the start. No one used it though. They called him Subject Seven instead. Maybe Spectre had seen him, and like a dog--he hated dogs--they called him what they wanted to call him. It wasn't that they called him Subject Seven that made him Subject Seven though. It couldn't be that. It would've been the experiments, the surgery, the pain, the endless training, the attempts at brainwashing, the frustrated scientists that wanted him to be more by being so much less. "Do you look like a Jack?" He didn't know what a Jack was supposed to look like. "What if you don't look like a Jack one day? Are you still Jack?"jack |
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Post by jack on Jun 4, 2016 7:18:50 GMT
Jack adjusted his hand to scratch the appropriate location that needed scratching. He was surprised that K'shiel was enjoying it, but then again cat-people were pretty much like a cat in some ways.
"K'shiel, huh?" said Jack, humming lightly. That was a pretty unique name if he'd ever heard one. Most of his friends had been Alexes or Thomases or Calebs. They weren't anything special like that -- and Jack used to be pretty common way back in time, apparently. Now it was just short for Jackson or something, but no-one really named their kids that kind of names nowadays.
Jack continued, "I guess you look like a K'shiel. I mean, from what you look like, K'shiel is a name that's pretty you, if you get what I'm saying?"
He didn't know what to say about himself being a Jack, though. Going by that logic, he probably wasn't 'Jack' anymore if he looked different and acted different, right? Was that why superpowered people who did stuff went by all those fancy aliases? That had to be a pretty far cry from their usual lives, right?
"Right now, probably," mused Jack, in a tone that was quite unlike his usual one, "One day ... maybe you won't see me like this. I'll turn into something different. Maybe a guy that can shatter walls with his scream. That sounds like a person named Raja, I don't know."
ABYSSINIAN
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Post by ABYSSINIAN on Jun 4, 2016 20:52:09 GMT
K'shiel did not really get what Jack was saying. "I don't know another K'shiel. I could look for another, maybe. Maybe they all look like me."He popped back into the living room to grab a second donut. (He maintained the cake was better but there was nothing about the glaze on the donut that he wanted more of.) "Then... if Raja lives, is Jack dead?" He wondered if that was like Aegis. Aegis was Aegis, when he was Aegis. Other times, he was someone Spectre didn't like. K'shiel liked the one that Spectre didn't like. "Can Jack come back?"jack |
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Post by jack on Jun 5, 2016 2:40:15 GMT
"Yeah. If I don't look or act like Raja anymore, then Raja's gone, too. Maybe Jack could come back after Raja's gone. I kinda want to say that if Raja doesn't let Jack come back, he can't, but I can't say for sure. Maybe Raja doesn't like dying.
"If K'shiel became Raja one day, maybe you could tell me if he'd let Jack come back," Jack finished, and stopped scratching when he looked at K'shiel for a bit.
He laughed, quietly.
"... nah. Just stay K'shiel, I'll become Raja and tell you what I think then."
ABYSSINIAN
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Jun 5, 2016 5:13:36 GMT
jack likes this
Post by ABYSSINIAN on Jun 5, 2016 5:13:36 GMT
"Okay," he says. K'shiel ducks his head. He's enjoyed the ear scratching, but it's getting close to dinnertime. Ordric might be home soon. "I don't know if I'll stay K'shiel though. People like giving me names. It's weird."He gives Jack a quiet look of consideration. "If you become Raja, I hope it's because you wanted to become Raja."With that, he fades into the aether. jack / end? |
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