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Ane bolts the door securely behind her before setting the heavy lead-lined box on the floor with the creature’s cage atop it. Ane sits cross-legged on the floor in front of it, elbows on her knees and chin in her hands. She makes a point to hum at the creature’s stomach area, if it can even be said to have a proper stomach area — it just seems to be a sort of fluffy, scaly puff of skoosh with a chubby-cheeked, large-eyed bit at one end.
It shuffles its bottom, lacking feet, and almost tumbles over. The concentration of Ane’s hum seems to tickle the creature, making it twitch and wriggle, though it doesn’t make more noise than usual.
“Alright,” she says sternly, as if a firm tone alone can cut through the creature’s ridiculousness, “I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, but I want to know a few things.”
“Fueep fep,” the creature jabbers, tilting forward. It seems to be some kind of gesture, until it topples forward and bumps its little head on the latch of the cage. Oh, that looks quite unpleasant… It must have hurt, given the way it squints its trio of eyes. And that lock really is big and dangerous for such a little thing, isn’t it?
Ane tucks her hands firmly beneath her.
“Yes, you’re very cute, and it is very unfortunate that you bumped your tiny…” Head? “Self, but I’m not going to let you out here. Not yet. If you aren’t an animal — can you talk? Do you have a name?”
The creature seems to subtly narrow its eyes. Either that, or a mote of dust just floated into the top one. It’s rather hard to tell.
“Fueep… fep,” it exhales, a tad pitiful. Then, for some inscrutable reason, it extends one of its fluff-tube-arms and makes a squeaking puff out of its end.
“I… I don’t know what that means. Are you hungry? Do you need food?” Ane mutters to herself, “Void, what would you even eat?”
The creature seems to be profoundly clueless, just soundlessly flapping its little triangle of a mouth. If there were a competition for the most ridiculous creature in S’varga, this one would be a smash hit. That being said, something about it’s mouth movement looks very sassy… It gives the distinct impression that the creature would look both hilarious and oddly fitting in makeup. Perhaps some lipstick, some jewelry… That would look quite silly, wouldn’t it? Though it’s strange one would even think of this. Maybe it’s because there’s jewelry and lipstick so conveniently nearby, with which to dress up the strange little character…
“No,” Ane says firmly. She feels a bit ridiculous talking to the creature this way, but, if nothing else, she’s at least used to trying to commune with things that don’t speak. Even the slipshell statue was more communicative than this, though. “Do you want food? Or water?”
It flicks its ears dumbly, fluffing the tuft of fur in between them. There’s a silly little rise to its upper-head, like the top of an egg. The slipshell would probably fit right on there, like an odd little stone hat. Maybe the creature would hatch? Who knows. It seems like it’d be an amusing sight, though…
“I’m not putting it on your head,” Ane replies obstinately. “If you don’t want any food, then I won’t give you any yet — I don’t want it to rot while you have ideas about makeup and stone hats.”
The creature’s ears droop low, and its trio of eyes turn watery. Its entire body seems to droop, as if laden with a sudden sorrow. Its odd little arm-tubes even flump out of its sides, laying limply beside it. The creature utters a soft, “Fuep… Fuep,” seeming disconsolate. Its fur even droops slightly, flattening against its body.
Oh shit. I made it sad.
Maybe it isn’t the only one of its kind. Maybe it has little ones to feed, that it was stealing for — what it would’ve been stealing from a shop of eldritch curiosities, Ane has no idea. Still, maybe there’s a nest of these little things somewhere, cold and hungry…
She sighs softly as she reaches for the lock of the cage.
It seems like such a simple, sensible idea. A creature needs room to thrive. Perhaps this is true here, as well.
But really, what does this creature need to thrive? There’s no telling how long it’s been in that cage, neglected and forlorn. And here it seems so oddly drab, so sad and morose. Maybe what it really needs is a good cheering up.
It needs a tiny dress-up party.
The fluffy little whimsy-balloon puffs its way out of the cage, and damn, it’s hard not to follow along…
Soon after, the lipstick comes out, and then it has a little smudge of crimson across its little flap of a mouth. Then, there’s the earrings haphazardly hung over its big, fluffy ears… The necklace follows naturally, crafted by Ane’s own hands, now adorning this adorable little abomination. Its eyes shine with glee as it gets dressed up, a service provided so naturally that it seems to be an afterthought.
Then, shortly thereafter, the slipshell figure… it looks so relaxed, so calm. It wouldn’t mind, would it?
Onto the head it goes.
The slipshell seems comfortable there, at least, and smiles in its usual placid way. It’s probably seen some weirder shit in all its years. Sitting as a hat for something without limbs doesn’t even rank on the slipshell’s “Strange Weekend” list. It just seems content to ride out the tide, and await more incense to be burned for its favor.
The fluffy creature, however, is elated. It bounces around wildly with its new hat, somehow never upsetting the stone statue. It looks really avante-garde, flapping its tube-arms with stylish flare. Yes. Yes. Yes. It is really working that hat. Slipshell is really in this seaso-
It’s around then that Ane realizes she was complicit in all of this. As soon as she catered to one whim, another followed, then another… For all its worth, the creature seems happy, perhaps even brighter, for all the trouble… Though the process to get there was downright insidious.
“This,” Ane breathlessly concludes as she gently smudges away an errant trace of lip paint from the creature’s cheek, “Is easily the most asinine thing I’ve ever done.”
“Fueeep, fwippa fwip!” The creature agrees, carrying through the rest of its strut. It seems oddly grateful to have its makeup corrected. It soon begins to slow down, settling into a pudgy puddle of sorts in the middle of the vanity. It lets out a puff of air, like a relaxed sigh of sorts.
Fortunately, the slipshell doesn’t judge. It just seems content to sit upon its temporary perch. Nonetheless, Ane cautiously removes it and replaces it atop the vanity.
“Be careful, don’t break that. It’s important… I think.”
She’s content to let the creature do whatever its tiny heart desires for the moment, while she sets about putting away makeup, jewelry — how did her bottle of amber perfume get here? It hadn’t asked for perfume too, had it? — and various other tiny-creature-dress-up accoutrements. As she hums at a brush, bristles shiny with the remains of lip paint, she cynically concludes that she was incorrect about the tiny creature having a nest of little ones to tend to.
If this thing is a parent, is not a responsible one.
Now that it’s had its fun, the thing toddles around in aimless circles on the vanity. Soon it stops, stares down, and then clambers its way onto half a seashell that was being used to hold jewelry. It settles down again, and just slowly melts into a pile of fluff and flub. Like a sort of pudding, it fits the container it’s in. The creature’s eyes drift slowly closed, and its ears gently lower.
Now there is peace once more.
Also, there are small whistling snores.
Ane gently ruffles the ridiculous fluff atop its head with a fingertip. If it’s going to sleep there, she’s going to have to find better accommodations for it — ones that don’t involve bits of jewelry wire and the edges of gemstones. Maybe something softer, like a folded handkerchief in a box…
With the little fweep-fweep creature dozing with its ludicrous outfit and tiny smudge of lip paint, Ane turns her curiosity to the bear. She opens the lead-lined box as if she were pulling the cork from some volatile alchemical reaction. Even though she’d already handled the thing in the shop, that seems worlds away from actually having it in her home.
Cautiously, she turns it over in her hands. It seems in good repair now — the shopkeeper (or was it his hat?) had warned her not to let it become damaged. Though she’ll have to devise a way to see what they meant, for now, her attention is purely wrapped up in it’s pain relieving properties.
Ane is uninjured, so the bear does little.
She can change that.
Kneeling on the vulre-skin rug, Ane places the bear on her lap. Her little silver penknife is within easy reach, tucked into one of the cupboards beneath her bed. It probably wouldn’t take much to register as an injury to the bear, and she certainly knows her way around her own biology. She’s had to use enough blood to know exactly which cuts to make to elicit pain with little damage, and which yield blood with little pain. Deft hands guide the tip of the knife to its mark.
And so the slice occurs. Ane sees the cut, the small seam of blood, a single shining drop coursing down across her outer forearm. It was a cut that probably went a fraction deeper than anticipated, though it’s nothing serious regardless. The sensation of the cut, though… It’s most strange. If a description had to be put to it, one might say it feels like being gently ripped, as if the flesh were made of unfeeling fabric. It’s unmistakable. There’s no pain, no recoiling, no seizing up — just the rather abstract sense of damage.
Naturally, this means that without sight, Ane can’t tell how much damage there is, only its location. And, even after the fact, there’s still another vague feeling: almost like being opened up, like a cracked book, or a torn pocket of stuffing. Still, no pain.
The bear, for its part, is completely unremarkable. It’s sitting there with its stitched little triangle smile, its button eyes, its fluffy tentacles and its jaunty hat. That’s all. It doesn’t glow, it doesn’t move, it doesn’t do anything.
It’s just a stuffed bear. In a way, so is Ane.
She can feel the uncomfortable psychosomatic sensation of cotton wadding in her mouth, squeaking between her teeth and drying her tongue. Void, she can almost feel it filling her stomach, with its insidiously coiling, twisting fibers…
She sets the knife down and presses her finger to the wound, putting pressure on it to slow the bleeding while she looks for a clean bit of cloth to bandage it with.
At least the sensation itself seems to stop at the wound, and anything else normally considered “pain.” But the imagination can do some strange things, especially when the body is behaving well outside the bounds of normalcy. That being said, the bear sure doesn’t do anything to stop bleeding… Though even that feels abstract, like a breeze against uncovered fluff.
Either way, it looks like this won’t do exactly what she’d hoped. Even without the warnings from the merchant (or his hat), she’s hesitant to hand over a magical object like this to Thelorn. He’s not likely to trust it, for one, and it feels so deeply wrong and strange. It protects against pain, but not in any way that she could reasonably call “pleasant.” Honestly, it doesn’t even seem to prevent or guard against it as much as just substitute a different kind of discomfort. Would the bear even recognize Thelorn as injured?
Maybe it’ll do in an emergency, for pain that isn’t long-lasting. For now, she reaches to set it on a shelf in one of the costume cupboards.
As the bear leaves Ane’s grasp, a sort of warm, fuzziness recedes from her person… It’s a subtle feeling, but there was some layer of comfort that it provided that is far more noticeable in its absence. Little pains return from the woodworks, whether its joints, the back, or just aching feet from a long walk. It’s easy to see why someone might be reluctant to give the bear up. It’s enough to make Ane hesitate to put the bear away from her — but, if it’s able to cause that after only a few minutes, she’s even more reluctant to see what it can do if she gives it more time.
With her brief experiment with the bear finished for now, she turns her attention back to the snoozing fweep-fweep creature. She lightly wiggles a fingertip against its oddly soft, oddly scaly belly, lightly tickling it as it dozes amid her jewelry.
“Hey. I’ve no idea what you usually nest in, but you probably don’t want to stay there,” she cautions it.
“Fwepfwepfwep,” the creature half-protests, half-snores, nearly toppled by her wiggling finger. The touch seems to make it puff out inexplicably fragrant air. It’s a rather calming scent, the sort one would use for incense before sleeping. True enough, the creature still seems very asleep, with all three of its eyes closed, fit snugly into the shell
“Come on,” Ane murmurs, in a musical coo. She gently tips the shell, attempting to dislodge the creature onto her palm. It doesn’t seem to have any teeth that she can see — what would it use them for? If it eats like a fuhajen, it wouldn’t use its mouth. If it’s truly some kind of odd, fae thing, it probably doesn’t properly eat at all. The odds of her getting bitten seem, at most, very low. “Wakey wakey.”
Like a pile of pudding or a heap of putty, the creature half-falls-half-pours out of the shell. When it plops into Ane’s hand, it makes a small, “fwemp,” and otherwise remains unperturbed. It’s not even properly upright or laying, but rather at a diagonal, though it doesn’t seem to mind.
It actually feels rather light in Ane’s palm, far more so than its size suggests… It’s like holding a waterskin filled with air, albeit one covered in fluff and scales. When she hefts it gently, it even bounces a little.
Ane sighs.
“Alright, let’s find you somewhere to sleep that’s less,” she pauses, “ridiculous.”
She sits at the chair in front of her vanity, the better to rummage through its drawers. There’s an empty bottle of liniment, a bit of ribbon, a few corks with ends stained with use. It takes her some time before she finds a cotton handkerchief, edges adorned with faded embroidery, to fold into a makeshift bed. Ane tucks it into the bottom of the wire cage, and gently rolls the sleeping fweep-fweep inside. This time, she leaves the cage door open. How much damage can it really do without her awake to acquiesce to its tiny, weird demands?
The answer to this question doesn’t occur immediately…
Instead, Ane finds herself pulled into a strange jaunt of consciousness once again.
Uruvalai 