Grim Omens [OPEN]

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

Sharp Tongue is hunched over a patch of paving in the city, painting the ground with a brownish paste using her hand claws. Her eyes are bloodshot and her movements jerky. Symbols, shapes, things that may or may not have meaning. Something that could be a serpent, a man, a raptor, all figures delineated in messy smears. Swirls and slashes and spots and shapes, more indistinct figures.

The shaman works quickly and intensely, occasionally making snuffing noises to herself as she goes. She has to get this down. Now. Before the memory fades.

Next to Sharp Tongue, there is a circle scratched onto the cement, her bag, and several emptied containers not including the one she got what she's painting with from. The remains of some ritual, perhaps?

Comments

[raptorwithagun.livejournal.com]

Red Snout approaches, claws clattering faintly on the pavement as comes up to his tribemate, eying the strange shapes she's marking out. Strange, very strange indeed.

"What are you doing?"

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

"I have spoken," she says, without even looking up or slowing in her furious painting, "with the spirits."

"I must mark it before I forget it."
"I do not yet know what it means."

[visserbasher.livejournal.com]

Upon seeing two raptors, a sane person would perhaps quickly run in the other direction.

"What in- are you painting?"

Loren was, apparently, not a very sane person.

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

Sharp Tongue again does not look up.

"Yes," she says curtly, almost snappishly, "I am."

Almost done almost done almost dooonnnee...

[visserbasher.livejournal.com]

This is definitely not something you see every day.

"What is it?"

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

"I communed with the spirits and they showed me things that are not yet," she says shortly. Almost there almost there... the pictures are blurring in her memory....

A few fierce slaps of brown on the ground and "Hah!"

Sharp Tongue gives a fierce, triumphant hiss.

[visserbasher.livejournal.com]

Loren turned to Red Snout. "Does this happen often?"

[raptorwithagun.livejournal.com]

Red Snout looked at Loren as if she had asked if the sky was blue. Or perhaps if water was wet.

"She is a shaman." He replied, as if this explained everything.

[visserbasher.livejournal.com]

"...Oookay... So that's a yes."

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

Sharp Tongue stands up suddenly and jumps back away from her scrawlings, growling.

"I'm done. Yessss..."

She stares fiercely at the paintings. Shapes, really.

"Now I must decide what it means." She's kind of worn out already. Sharp Tongue's mixtures have left her dehydrated and in need of sleep, but she has to figure this out.

[raptorwithagun.livejournal.com]

Red Snout peered at the strange symbols. They are beyond him, even more than the human letters. It's a shaman thing, and he is not a shaman. Shamans scare him a bit, to be honest.

"I am certain you will, Sharp Tongue." He offered reassuringly.

[visserbasher.livejournal.com]

Loren craned her head, looking closely at the... whatever it was, then at the raptors, then back at the paint scribble.

She thought about saying something but really, she had no idea what.

Why was her life so weird?

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

"It is not good."

Sharp Tongue paces up and down her line of paint smearings.

"This," she taps a bunch of indistinct, lumpy lines. "Dead. Lots of dead. Many humans."

"Serpent."

She taps one, then extends a handclaw to hit another mass of them. "Many serpents."

"Water, fire," she mutters, now focusing on some blurry scrawlings around more raptors and people.

"It is very confused. Something comes. Something bad."

She shakes her head.

[visserbasher.livejournal.com]

"Many humans? You can tell what species, not dinosaurs like you?" She wasn't being critical, simply curious.

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

"The difference between a raptor and a man is very clear, is it not?" says Sharp Tongue, looking up from her paint smears.

She regards all the humanoids on the ship, for the most part, as funny-looking humans.

[visserbasher.livejournal.com]

"Ah, if you say so. I'll take your word for it."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana is constantly coming and going from the worm pen, so it is no surprise when she finds her erstwhile acolyte staring intently at a patch of city street. She seems to wobble like one who has taken an overly large dose of Spice.

She squats on her heels in front of her, looking for signs of a too deep trance. She smells no flinty cinnamon, but remembers the compounds and tools of the 'raptor sayyadina's apprentice.

Instead she waits, saying nothing, merely checking to see if Sharp Tongue is responsive to her.

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

"Do you need something or do you distract me for no reason?" hisses the raptor, not looking up at Sheeana.

She's working!

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana grins. She's used to this pricklyness by now. It's part of Sharp Tongue's nature.

"I was curious...And I wanted to be sure you hadn't entered a too deep trance."

The figures aren't familiar to her but the ritual content is obvious.

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

"I spoke to the spirits. I need to remember what they said."

Scrabble scrabble scrabble.

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"Then use the Memory Trance." Sheeana found herself analyzing the figures on the pavement. Freeform shapes, that was ghafla that could be sifted through. But the hybrid figures...

Amphibian...Literally "one who lives on both sides" in Latin. I am sorrounded by such monsters. Arha, both Bene Gesserit and Jed-eye now. Leto, man and Worm. Myself and Sharp Tongue, fremen, 'raptor and Bene Gesserit. These are interesting things. Is this the beginning of 'raptor Other Memory?

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

"I am doing as the Shaman does," replies the raptor somewhat testily. Another human shape. Then a raptor one. A...snake... no not snake it has these things. Many snakes? She can't even begin to guess and just smacks down a couple of writhing, twined squiggles.

"Future sight," she says. "Ask the spirits what will be and they will tell you. If you can understand."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

Sheeana is suddenly very interested. "Like what the Spice can do." She feels herself walking on shifting sands. Delicate.

"They look like worms." Could she have already guessed her plan with the two worms in their pen? How quickly they would breed under the right circumstances?

[snarky-raptor.livejournal.com]

The raptor shakes her head and makes a sneezing noise, scowling down at the figures on the stone.

"I do not know what they are. I made the shapes I saw but I do not recognize."

She traces the tip of a claw along one of the narrow, serpentine lines.

"I think it is a viper," she says. "Not one. Many vipers."

[worm-dancer.livejournal.com]

"You are in the liminal place where you can pull things from the unformed universe." Watching this activates her Atreides heritage, that danger sense Darwi had used to protect the sisterhood. She dared not go too deep into it, fearing the effects it could have. But it hovered there at the edge of her consciousness. "A nest of them. It's danger. I feel it too."