trans_9 | Tools of the Trade

Sharp Tongue has everything she owns spread out in a corner of the Obs Deck, where she's hovering over it jealously and arranging it with loving care as she makes sure it's all in order. The entire contents of her shaman's bag, and the bag itself, are here. Strange pastes and dried herbs and oddly shaped bits of stone, bone, and occasionally metal. Tools. All the mixtures and some dry ingredients are contained in various ways. Glass bottles are frequent, most of these in still-usable pieces with the few that are whole and stoppered containing some kind of mysterious liquid. Also common are things that at least appear to be the round bowls formed by the insides of broken skulls. Something whitish and about the consistency of cold butter is held in a sizable sea shell.

The bag itself is designed to hang across Sharp Tongue's back and against her left side, it's made of thick brown triceratops hide. Strange sigils have been apparently branded into it, usually in three claw slash motif. There are smears of paint in similar markings across it, in yellow and white and red. Hanging from the edges of the bag are teeth, feathers, and some claws. The biggest of these are two velociraptor hunting talons near the front.

It's a grisly assortment of things and doesn't smell all that great, but they all clearly seem to have a meaning to Sharp Tongue.

She's muttering to herself indistinctly as she goes over them, occasionally growling or hissing. She appears to have restored her body paint, having drawn long white and red slashed up and down her sides and legs, and a few across the muzzle for good measure. They're not sacred paint and they weren't done by Narrow Face, but they will have to do.

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"Only if you think you can handle it." Her mouth parts slightly into a wry grin. "If you are a weak shaman, it can drive you insane." It's true. This dose is mixed a little with dried water of life, taken by singing her own worm with water.

Already her eyes are growing glassy, far away. She's having trouble staying in the present, holding on to it. The stars call in their glassy voices...

"I am no weak shaman." And with a small flare of raptor pride, Sharp Tongue accepts. It'll have to be put into her open mouth mouth, raptor hands cannot hold powder very well.

If she still felt any concern for her tongue and lips, Sheeana would smirk with satisfaction. Perfect...

As it was it took a lot to empty the other dose into the raptor's waiting mouth, heedless of the teeth like little knives. It smells of cinnamon but tastes...like whatever you like to eat the most.

Sharp Tongue closes her jaws around the spice, careful not to bite this other's hand. A human shaman, she's decided, or something similar anyway.

She savors the flavor of it, inhaling instinctively to bring in scent. It tastes like... some manner of seasoning, which is a human thing. Or a ritual thing. It's unfamiliar. Sweet. Spicey. And somehow, the flavor of raw hadrosaur. A young one, tender meat hot and fresh and bloody.

She growls softly at the strange sensation.

Sheeana feels herself slip away into the flux of the trance. She sees flashes of possibilities.

A picturesque wooden village dominated by a wind driven mill. A grey wind sweeps through and the smiling peasants scream as they are fleshily dissolved...

A crysknife, gleaming and bone white in the night...

A boy with a wry smirk and old eyes (blue within blue as her own) rounding a corridor. Something is brown, patchy, leathery on his skin, dry as Sharp Tongue's. He smiles at her and calls her his valued descendant...

Then her perception shifts to the past, to the memory-lives that vie for her attention. A woman's voice rings to her, husky and panting as if she'd just been running from something. Sheeana, listen to me! I gave you your name, you owe me that much!

"I don't owe you anything! You ended up the slave to his Golden Path just like all the others..."

He's not what you think! He-

"Be quiet!"

And so Siona is. Sheeana is unsure if she has said her part of her conversation with her ancestor aloud. Her eyes are focused on far away things, her pulse either quickened or vastly slow. She barely notices that anyone's with her.

Sharp Tongue has never felt this. She wonders in the most subconscious, vague manner if this is what the thin, flat mushroom called the Great Scale does to the mind. She's never tasted it.

But then it's gone in a rush, like the stars past the obs deck windows streaming through the raptor's mind with fire light dancing across them, whispering and hissing to her in tiny shimmering voices.

"Little daughter. Come. What you have heard, see."

A warrior, some forgotten grandsire of generations past, looms into her thoughts. No tribal markings cross his scarred hide, and his claws glitter strangely bright. Her consciousness bleeds into his. Snake Neck Silver Claw. A warrior for the... Confederate Army. Traitor! Traitor! Exile and traitor to his kind! Snake Neck stands defiant and easy under the scorn, and blurs.

Sharp Tongue as Snake Neck walks. Claws replaced with metal ones by some human trick rasp on paving stone. Their city looms tall around the one raptor, and humans pass him and give him a wide berth. Great dinosaurs are here. Triceratops. Allosaurs. Iguanodons. All of them massive and none aggressive, placidly bearing human riders or pulling loads. Humans everywhere, more than she could have ever imagined even from the tales she has heard. Seeing is different from hearing. Sharp Tongue tries to protest and scream at the wrongness of it, but Snake Neck does not.

"Heh, lookit! Rebel raptor!"

Snake Neck turns to face the taunt from a group of men loitering on a corner. He draws his right foot claws against the stone of the street, throwing sparks and snarling.

"Would you like to make something of it, pinkskin?"

The human city fades, leaving Sharp Tongue tumbling in the star void again with Snake Neck beside her. "Guard your tribe, little daughter. Guard your tribe." And the warrior vanishes like smoke on the wind.

Sheeana is pushed up from the depths of the trance as the Spice leaves her system. She breathes heavily. If she were anything but Fremen and Bene Gesserit she would be sweating heavily.

The room slowly comes into focus. Time stops screaming at crazy angles, resumes its slow and straight march.

She grins at her Raptor companion. It is a conspiratorial grin. It would imply everything needed to say to a human, but for Sharp Tongue's benefit she says: "I won't ask you what you saw. But I can tell it was something signifigant."

Tools of the Trade

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