trans_9 | In My Life [open]

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In My Life [open]

Roxie has been doing a lot of work here and there on her little ex-vet's-office. It's a small building, barely big enough for a reception area and a few offices and storage areas. She's taken down the alien lettering of the sign out front of the building, leaving it a freestanding blank, and an odd pile of removed shelving and cabinetry sits off to the side of the lot.

She's decided to leave the building to air out, today: there's the faint stink of drying paint coming from somewhere in there, wafting out through the open windows (in all room but one, the windows of which seem to have been painted over with black from the inside) and doors.

And Roxie herself, well, she's sitting in a rolling office chair that's been dragged out onto the sidewalk out front, and her head is leaning back with her eyes closed.

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Sherry, for one, was glad that things were getting into a routine. Well, glad for everything except having to visit medbay more often than any healthy girl should. Even if said otherwise healthy girl had an extra guest 'nestled' in her intestines.

She saw Roxie's hideaway/house thing as she and Bandit walked along the quiet road. She had tried to run with him, but it was no use - the dog was too fast and she was too out of shape to keep up. In fact, Sherry rued the day that would be coming soon enough when she and the other kidlets had to be physically trained. "Come on, Bandit," Sherry patted her thigh. "Roxie's house is over here."

Bandit had enjoyed the running, but it had been clear even to him that Sherry was in no state to keep up. So he had fallen back and was walking calmly in the heel position.

OKAY, Bandit replied, nudging Sherry gently with his nose. His tail was held high behind him in a show of confidence, and he trotted lightly alongside his little mistress. He sniffed the air, smelling the paint. As they approached, he jogged forward, coming up to the girl in the office chair and sniffing her knee.

ROXIE?

Roxie's head slides forward in a languid, limp way that hints that she may have been in the midst of a nap a moment ago, but when her eyes open they are sharp and focused. There's something off about the way she smells—there's the paint, sure (and this close up one can see the occasional dabs of it dried black against her hands and the sleeves of her jacket), but there's a subtler undercurrent of chemicals and dried death below that, far too dim for a normal human to really notice.

"... hello," she says, looking between Bandit and where Sherry is lagging along behind.

Sherry hesitated at the door, and wrinkled her nose at the smell of drying paint. "That's Bandit," she nodded to the big dog. "Cute, isn't he?"

The smell of paint makes her a little dizzy, and she was glad Roxie, at least, wasn't inside the building. Bleh. But she doesn't care - she's with her friend and her ~~daddy's~~ dog, and she isn't anywhere near medical. "Why black?"

Bandit easily sniffed out these traces, and the dried death especially made him pin his ears. He growled huffily and went back to Sherry's side. His body language is slumped, ears pinned but tail still high in an aggressive fashion. He doesn't like this girl.

BAD. SMELL BAD. GO? He proposed, nudging Sherry's hip.

Through the architecture of a hundred alien worlds, small girl looks for her friends. She is dizzied by street signs in writing styles seemingly built for compound eyes, ultraviolet sensors, streets whose names are scents and tastes. Too many unknowns waiting to leap and grab her. She only felt safe bringing Borg.

Eventually Borg tastes fresh paint in the fetid air and she quickens her step to them. What kind of escape they can make here is dubious, but one of the keys to childhood is secret spaces. Some (Borg tastes more scents, scents more tastes, and is reminded of the emotion-sounds of a Yellow Knife somehow, though he cannot place why) are more secret than others.

At the door are her friends and a newcomer...A dog? "Hi Sherry-chan, Roxie-chan!"

"Why are you scared, boy?" She bends forward to let him sniff her hand.

Roxie frowns a little--but there's a practiced edge to it that takes some of the emotion out. She's used to animals disliking her, by now. That prickly, half-subtle offensiveness is a trait that every acolyte of her order has shared for years beyond counting... it was different, once, but that's so far at the edge of the instinctual dream-memories she can peel open that she just accepts it.

As she glances over at Yuri her expression flattens, though. The difference is enough for her that on anyone else it would have probably turned into a smile.

"No, we'll stay, Bandit." Sherry knelt down beside him and scratched behind his ears. "It's okay." Sure, the dog was unsettled, but she would do her best to soothe him. It wouldn't do either of them any good if he was to get upset.

Vega's the last one to arrive. Totally not because he got lost, noooo waaaay. He just... got a little turned around. That's all! And not distracted by weird alien buildings either.

Now that he's really been down here some, Vega's honestly itching to go exploring. Nobody's here to say he can't. He's not used to that.

"Hi guys!" He grins when he sees them, jogging over and relieved to have found the place. He was starting to worry about being lost.

"Whoah, whose dog?"

BAD SMELL. BAD. DEATH. BAD. He asserts, but delicately sniffs the offered hand anyways. WHO R U? Sherry's petting isn't so much calming as annoying, but he's far too polite to let that show. He gently moves away from her hand instead, because he knows what 'stay' means and knows with equal certainty that he doesn't really have a say in the matter. What the boss-lady says goes.

Luckily Bandit soon starts to forget about the bad smell because there are tons of other things to focus on. New people! Stuff! Awesome! His tail is wagging again as he moves to the newest arrival. He presses his nose up close to Vega's pants and sniffs heartily. HELLO.

Yuri isn't as clever as Sherry, tough as Roxie or brave as Vega. In the great balance of the meativerse, however, she's been gifted with a quiet sensitivity. Well, quiet when she's not scared. Or sad. Or otherwise crying.

The point is, she instantly notices Bandit's concern, and from her crouch, finds the doggy sweet spot and scratches it. "I'm Yuri Otani. That's Vega-kun and I can see you already met my good friends Sherry-chan and Roxie-chan."

Roxie shuffles gently to her feet, staying a respectful distance away from Bandit. "... it's nice to meet up again," she comments, reaching up to adjust her glasses. "Is there anything one of you wanted to do this time?"

The last time Sherry checked, death and decay didn't smell like drying paint. She would know, really, after being trapped in a precinct with a lot of rotting people. The little girl repressed the shiver that ran down her spine as she thought, for a second, about that.

"I'm up for anything so long as it keeps me far, far away from the medbay," Sherry replied with a shudder. In fact, the less she thought about medical, or people cutting her open, the better. "What about you two," she asked and raised her eyebrows at Yuri, Yuri's Tentahat, and Vega. "Anything specific?" The street was fairly empty, with lots of abandoned buildings. "Hide and seek?" That was something she was good at -- the hiding, not the seeking.

Vega laughs, taking a step back from bandit but patting him on the head, though avoiding the strange plug-looking thing.

"Cool, you talk?"

"And what's wrong with the medbay, huh?" Vega asks Sherry, furrowing his brow. He hasn't heard anything weird about that. He's curious!

Bandit likes gentle sensitivity! In fact, it's probably one of the qualities he appreciates most in a human. HELLO. NICE 2 MEET U 'YURI-O-TANI'. The honorifics go over his head, though.

He lets Vega pet him on the head, but eventually ducks away from the hand; not out of annoyance, just dislike. He lifts his head, presenting his chest and chin for scritches. YES. MAKE HUMAN NOISE. NOW 'VEGA' SCRATCH?

"Alright, hide and seek!" Yuri enthusiastically agrees with this plan. Borg, however, lids his eyes and speaks up. He refuses to move when she starts pulling him off, suctioned in place.

"Yurrri, you can't run around this place alone.

"I guess you're right...but no cheating and sniffing people out."

The tentahat muttered something about how it wasn't cheating if those were the senses you were spawned with, but eventually lapped into a silent acquiescence.

"... okay," Roxie says, looking between the other kids. "But don't go in my house. You might get paint on you."

She's making just a little, little bit of a smile. Hide and seek is one of those games she's actually good at.

"... but who's seeking?"

Sherry half-smiled at Vega. "Specifically, I don't like going there because they scan me, poke me, or attempt to draw my blood. Besides, it's technically a hospital, isn't it? I hate hospitals."

And doctors, nurses, surgeons, and workaholics, but that's beside the point.

"So, how shall we do this? Keep it in a certain radius, or does the seeker have to count to fifty? Oh, and - one, two, three not it!"

"Oh, you mean tests." Vega makes a face. He hates those. Drawing blood hasn't really been a part of it, but he's been hooked up to so many machines figuring out his baseline functions and monitoring him before and after battles that it's not even funny. "I don't like those either."

He scratches Bandit's chin and chest some, as asked. He likes this dog. As he does, he says "Maybe wherever you are you have to be able to see a landmark so we all don't get lost? And then if you're out you have to go there."

Vega hasn't played hide and seek in at least a couple years.

Yuri points up and away at a crazily branching alien skyscraper. Extensions seem to fade in and out from its personal corona of mist.

"That one!"

"One, two, three, not it." Borg adds heavily, out of a wish to not be stuck here for hours while Yuri seeks her friends out. Hiding, after all is something she's actually good at.

"... I guess that leaves me," Roxie says, though her tone of voice isn't flat enough to suggest actually being upset. "I'll count to sixty?"

Scratch scratch scratch. Kick kick kick. Happy dog is happy. One ear up, one ear down, he leans heavily into the scratches and makes a happy little whining noise.

HIDE-SEEK! BANDIT GOOD HIDE-SEEK! he declares with a heartfelt wag of his tail.

"Then it's settled. Roxie's 'It' first, and we have a minute to hide as well as a landmark." For the first time in a long time, Sherry smiles a little more honestly.

"Okay, let's start."

Roxie turns around and closes her eyes. No peeking at all, even.

"One, two, three..."

Yuri is off like a rocket, through an alleyway (strewn with wishbones and empty exoskeletons falling from trashbags, she tries not to notice) and remembers something she read: people seldom look up. She backed up against the wall (something like a trilobite but fried crunched underfoot) she let Borg's drilltacles bury into the brick. Kathunk kathunk, she was carried up until she blended with the tangle of telephone and power lines at the alley's peak. It wasn't so much a hiding place as camoflauge: there was a spindly structure up there where lines converged. Borg's drilltacles there made her a stick insect among sticks.

Vega likes Bandit, he's never met a dog before. Much less one that could talk. Deprived Backdraft child is deprived.

"Alright, Roxie's it!"

He bolts off in another direction, trying to think of places to go. Vega's not used to thinking on his own small scale, he's used to Zoids. And they're massive and can be difficult to hide, because anything big enough to shelter a hundred and twenty ton mech is usually obvious.

He keeps an eye to the skyscraper they've picked but throws in plenty of jinks and twists to try to break the path he's taken before he finds some kind of vehicle garage. He ducks in the wide, open doors and finds a workbench against one wall with some kind of tool chest under it. He ducks down into the remaining space and presses himself up flat against the wall, heart thumping and a grin on his face. It's not the greatest hiding place in the world, but it'll do.

Sherry picked yet a third direction to run in, and made sure the path she took was plenty difficult for Roxie to get a good straight line in. She patted her leg for Bandit to follow her out of habit more than planning and finds a small window for two for them to squeeze into, just in case the dog followed her.

After that, Sherry started to breathe slowly, deep breaths in and out to control her heart rate. What if Roxie had super hearing? She pulled a carapace in front of the small window as cover and waits.

Bandit bolted after Sherry, moving quickly and silently, shadowing her. At the last second he veered off the path, running this time; he made himself loud. Going in the opposite direction from Sherry's hideaway, he wound through the sinewy alleyways until he found an appropriate dead end, then let out a powerful bark. Moving quietly from the on out, he crouched low and slowly wound his way back towards Sherry's location: he was faster than a human, but he'd been out of time by several seconds already. Lucky for him, he found a half-open dumpster along the way--or what looked like a dumpster, anyway--to crawl into. He scuttled as far away as he could from the opening, keeping himself out of sight, and ceased to move.

"... fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty ..."

Roxie slowly turns and looks down the now-empty street. Where would they go—

—and then she hears Bandit's bark. Hah. She starts into a half-shuffling jog down the direction it came from. Not full speed—she doesn't want to hurt somebody if she runs into them—but certainly faster than one would expect from the way she normally moves.

Sherry laid on her belly and watched the floor of the alleyway. She could hear someone coming closer and kept very, very still. Even though it was just a fun game, and her little hole was dark enough to hide her moving around, she wasn't going to take the chance of being caught.

Roxie's feet passed by her hiding place and Sherry slowly drew back, away the tiny square of light that shone into her hole.

Yuri saw Sherry scrambling into her space from her suspension. Beneath her hand, at a join, a rusty bolt was loosed by small fingers. With it gone, she considered. She could throw it to Sherry's hiding place, exposing her.

But that would be a small scratch against what she thought was right.

So instead she launched it so it landed outside of the alley, at the building's entrance, behind Roxie. This would hopefully make her think someone was hiding inside.

Roxie skids to a stop, turning, glancing down the way the bolt landed.

...and then she turns again, scanning down the other direction. She's been tricked by that kind of thing, up-close, too many times...

Oh, that wasn't fair! The noise made Sherry peek out slowly, looking around the carapace as best she could while still trying to stay inside her hole. Roxie was still nearby, and all the waiting was making Sherry nervous.

Couldn't she just go down a sidestreet now?

Go away, go away, go away.

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In My Life [open]

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