Quincunx

Have you ever smiled at the glitter and health in your food? Have you ever tasted the spoons until finding the correct one? (and, yes, washed them all afterward) Have you ever chased the itching through arteries and veins? Have you ever squeaked your teeth?

". . .Because clearly all necromancers need more plants. . ." *zapping noises from the garden, interspersed with high-pitched squeals of "I got one!" plus one "spectre, cut that out, you're not supposed to help!"*

Uppity-dated! The Many Rooms of the Mighty Pen Keep is several years old, but still valuable.

. . .printed along the inner rim, naturally. However, Paint can't handle text manipulation, and the last time I checked, I no longer have a word-processor with word art capabilites. . .wonder if someone's made such for OpenOffice. . .ponder ponder ponder.

On the borderlands, sound was inaudible. At the moment Tzimfemme began to speak, tiny round mirrors of polished metal left her lips--one for each word--and undulated through the air before the eyes of fossilized Sossity before dropping upon the rubbings taken from the rock. Sossity's statue stood in a depression, knee-deep in the mingled thoughts of Pennites; the naked mage's thoughts pooled around them both and, rising like burnt incense, flowed across the dead sands to tether Minta. Tzimfemme, hunched over the unrolled and cross-hatched parchment, wiggled her toes until the proper coins came to mind. "If you're awake in there, Sossity. . .there's constellations I don't recognize, except the spiral staircase here." The naked mage plucked at the last five mirrors and lay them over the spots of Cassiopeia before the discs turned to ash. "The mark of blue. Triskelions, here--ripped reality, there--Minta here. She must be guarded. It's been three years since she slipped, and I do not fancy crossing again." The strand of Tzimfemme's ideas collapsed upon itself, shortening, spinning the gnome partway towards the statue. "See how she is changing, Sossity--you must be awake--" Minta frowned at the fluid chain sprouting from her skull. Silver smoke flowed over her fingers, and when the first wisp reached the tether, its surface tension broke; thousands of silver motes coalesced in an instant and rolled freely over Minta, who giggled and squirmed until the spheres began clinging together at their poles and threading themselves back onto the tether. She rolled her eyes upwards at the renewed tether, frowned, grabbed hold of it, and leaned backwards on her heels for extra leverage. When the gnome tugged on the chain, the beads pulled slightly apart, then recoiled and jerked Minta several inches off of the ground; she swung and kicked for awhile, but each tug on the chain only lifted it one bead further away from the sand. Eventually she gave up and the tether sank back to earth with a splash--further inside the Pen, two thinkers felt the harbingers of migraine. "--Sossity. Rosemary is dead; Minta is in danger! You are a guardian--start guarding, damn you!" Her hand lashed out, fast enough to scatter thoughts into a thousand droplets, but the naked mage wrenched muscles to halt her flying hand before it struck. She swept her gaze over the surface, dipped concave to avoid her, and dropped smaller, soft-edged coins into it: "Don't do that. I cannot hurt you." The puddle of pysches quivered when the words dissolved, forming chevron-shaped ripples which raced away from Tzimfemme. She bowed her head over the parchment before the arrowhead hit the tether and bounced away, as ripples never do, past the unoccupied end. The naked mage entwined a thin braid around her fingers and tugged on it, hard, in lieu of a surface to hit her head against. "Here, a pair of calipers or compasses--I have seen these before, Rosemary beaded them upon her dress! Two I haven't deciphered, the compasses, a lopsided cross, that triskelion, the staircase!" She poked at the leading symbol, an asymmetric squiggle unlike all the rest, then distracted herself with pain; the unbound thoughts ossified, then sprouted glassy blade-shaped buds. Tzimfemme looked sourly at the construct. "If they bloom into roses, I will hurt someone--Halt, that wasn't free-floating!" Meanwhile, Minta had scooped together a heap of lustreless sand with her feet and frowned when no depression remained; the grains were too fine, and slithered out of the heap as well as into the hole. She gave up on trying to stomp tracks into the land and zoomed instead towards the nearest blazing white flaw in the world, while the psyches' surface lapped higher against Sossity's ankles. The gnome skidded to a halt on the edge of the crack, backlit to the point of invisibility, and peered down. Another little girl, poking at another neato tiny skellie, maybe even the skull of a mouse! Minta mouthed, "Hihihi!" and waved. Tzimfemme watched from the corner of her eye and saw Minta screech in fear, backpedaling, overbalancing. The naked mage snorted half a laugh before turning back to the chart. Three seconds later, her braids flew out as she whipped her head back towards the pair, towards Minta whose feet had tangled in her frayed hem and towards the child in the Reality sprawled out over her diaper. Tzimfemme leapt to her feet and bounded from hillock to dune, the parchment skidding downhill with half a clockwise turn before the psychic waters claimed it; she flung herself in front of the crack, but the little girl moved no faster, stood up with no more ease. The naked mage strained at the image, and finally spied the difference between the nearly-naked child and Minta: the eyes, hostile and blue--and in that instant, she remembered when Rosemary had seen the eyes. Unconsciousness would have been a mercy, and there was none; madness would have been a comfort, again, and there was none. Mirrors showered out from her lips, and what fell was no longer unmarked: duplicates of Rosemary's tiles. They rolled downhill on their edges, ripping open new cracks in the world, and fell along the grasping lines of Tzimfemme's quincunx power--not silver, but white. "No! Minta! She'll rend the world in two again, bloody her arms to the elbows--" Tzimfemme glared at the flaw-child as her hands locked on Minta's shoulders; Minta lunged against the gesture with such violence that the coins sprayed backwards briefly instead of burning away in the light. "You will not have this one--" "Ophidia." Sound! "Th' Hydra." Sossity! She held a coin of her own, marked with the constellation of the hydra and threaded on a pink ribbon, but her lips moved: the golem lived again. One cold marble hand clamped the collar over Tzimfemme's throat and dragged her away from the Reality while the other pried and crushed her fingers. The naked mage set her jaw against the chokehold, glaring and thinking dagger-shards, "I will kill whoever would drag Minta to her hell in the Reality." "Y'can't. You c'n think to kill'm, 'n' I'm here t'stop them bein' hurt." Sossity's tongue was not much more clever, now that it was stone, than it had been when she lived and breathed. Those clumsy words rattled when they disturbed the silence of the borderlands; Minta clapped her hands over her ears, discovered that she was free, and fled. "'m not t'be defeated, ever," added the guardian of the unicorns, as the splinters of Tzimfemme's thoughts shattered against her skin, "y'put me here y'self. 'N' sayin' y'did manage t'kill them, who's t'say death'll stop 'em?" The naked mage sprayed out white-hot shard-names like knives in the belly. "That'n's me, 'n' I live. That'n died in th'Reality twice 'n' still lives. That'n's born 'n' killed more 'n' you here, still lives. That'n y'killed y'self once 'n' lives again. . . .I'm tired, 'n' y'are 'swell. Only got one thought t'move me. Dyin' ain't rest. Now take me back as y'were takin' th'mad one back. Take m'thought back. Do m'job y'rself. Let me rest." Sossity's statue crumbled from the feet upwards, transforming into a wave of snowy powder that doubled back upon its still-solid surfaces and scattered over Tzimfemme's skin; another memory of Rosemary's rose--like shipwreck wood, or a drowned man turning on his face--and that image triggered another as the powder flowed upwards into Tzimfemme's nose and mouth. By the time Sossity's hands dissolved and released the naked mage, she was bound in a coffin of powder, and doubly paralyzed by the tumult in her mind. When powder swirled down her ankles and touched sand, the two mingled as one substance, and Tzimfemme's body sank into the dune in seconds. The borderlands were still and dead once more, but only for one moment, before the first colorless bud oriented itself towards a flaw and began to unfurl.

"Out of respect to the original" indeed! Box my ears for writing the wrong title just after that pomposity! What you saw consciously (and what I think I picked up subconsciously), Appy, were three active verbs. "Watch" may be grammatically an active verb, but the subject of the sentence is passively watching* whatever else occurs in the sentence, instead of the subject looking at what occurs. *that's a passive grammatical construction as well. whee!

The neutron star does not glow: it irradiates. Why else would I grow hot standing next to ice? Invisible bombardment.

"Planning"? What is this "planning" of which you speak?

I see no problems with going back and enjoying your own work, I see no problems with re-reading a lost treasure, but re-writing. . .doesn't strike me as quite as healthy. Not sure why.

The era of charging through books has come to an abrupt halt: Star brought home a handful of novels written in Swedish, and I'm meant to practice.

You've all got the punctuation covered thoroughly. What did you need me for? *grin* reverie: Out of respect to the original "Listen, Look, Feel", I'd leave out the blank line after each key word, although I would use them as you did if the poem was my own work. Curious that these two should be clumped together, though; they're both introductions as Preprise noted. "Listen, Look, Feel" would be bland on its own, but as the actual words spoken by the Storyteller before a tale, becomes interesting. That poem becomes the "show" of the "show, don't tell" advice.

Old National Geographics, dates ranging from 1985 to the present--but as fast as I devour those, it barely counts as reading.

As far as I can tell, both that and its OOC thread have been deleted.

[/roleplay pauses] Scream diverted to its appropriate collection. [roleplay resumes]

The packed courtroom, visitors huddled in the foreground rows, cowering under the burst of justice--off to the side, a court reporter absorbing the justice and glowing with a trace of it as well. Words wink in and out of the verdict, but all that truly matters is the light, and the human stain which delivers it.

Carina Nebula <Rydia> one thousand crowns and wings. . .. <Rydia> or two heart beats <Rydia> and all the surrounding biological noise <lilValdar> \\o_o? <Rydia> the nebula looks like <lilValdar> ohhh <lilValdar> I stopped trying to describe it past shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnny!! \o_o/ <Rydia> the smaller burst of pale for the atria, the larger for the ventricles. . .surrounding them, wisps of capillary noises <Rydia> oxygen transfer as life in the point of every star <Rydia> I don't know what the dark masses at the lower edge represent <lilValdar> liver? \o_o? <Rydia> the dark, secret, deconstructive processes of digestion? but that's just one idea, and I would like more.

Overpressurized food items weren't just a one-time occurrence! Have you ever exploded a can of soda with pencils? Have you ever exploded a can of soda with fire? Have you ever exploded a can of soda with horseshoes?

Minta egged the Pen on, "Do an evil goatee too! An' more horns!"

Tzimfemme tore her eyes away from the glittering bag (twice as compelling as an ordinary object in the well-lit world ought to be) and peered outwards. There had been tapping, scraping noises. . .that way. Wyvern. He wasn't a blur of red at the far edge of vision, but delineated and detailed, with only the distant illusion of being smaller. The naked mage had to squint, however, to make out the door he was scratching at--doorknob maybe, the sounds of resistant wood wouldn't carry so far, though she couldn't be sure at this distance, and approached for a better view. Wyvern heard footsteps while he was picking at a door lock, and went into damage control. "This isn't what it looksss like, honest! I dropped my, er, present for Yui in the keyhole, and I was trying to fisssh it out." By the time his words slowed down to hi-how-ya-doin' speed, he'd covered the door with his body (both hands further concealing the doorknob, behind his back) and further covered everything up with a winning grin. Tzimfemme had seen it before, and crossed her arms. "Do you know what it does look like?" she began. "Hmm," Wyvern mused aloud, and unconsciously tugged at the handbag while turning it over, "it looksss expensive--" Tzimfemme pried it out of his claws. "Not that. It looks like you've been posted here to escort me to the party--" Wyvern cut in, "Yui's a close persssonal friend of mine!" He leapt into the role and pushed open the formerly intractable door. His claws shone against the wood, as the carp scales had done against the null space. If Wyvern had been a modern photograph, the door would have been a century-old sepia-toned picture plate. "Yes. Not the way I would have done it, but it's her house." The naked mage unfolded her arms, and then gave Wyvern a quizzical look. "Why do you have flowers on your head?" ***** "Aren't you going to try some of the cake? It doesn't taste blue, I promise!" The naked mage shook her head, once. "Sorry. Paranoid about ending up like Persephone. . ." That. . .faded? dimmed? monochrome? quality had persisted as the pair, Wyvern and his sensitive nose in the lead, found passages that were gradually more filled with objects and less null space. When they had finally found the double doors behind which the party was being held, the pile of non-shadow-realm gifts on the table burned themselves onto the retina. What had caught Tzimfemme unawares (and mad at herself for not realizing it years earlier) was Yui's and Aegon's adaptation to the shadow realm; what, in the daylight of the Pen Keep, was ethereal flesh blended perfectly with the twilight backgrounds. Tzimfemme and the other guests wandered around the sitting room like mobile neon signs, and the less said about Wyvern's Hawaiian bib and lei, the better.

Aha! It was a haiku with a hiccup! I see now. (I don't pay much attention to the line-and-theme conventions of proper haiku, just judging by syllable count.)

I'm not positive that "Serenity" is a poem. It might be the beginning of a list poem, but I believe that lists have at least three items. "Skyline", on the other hand, I like and not just for the cinquain (?) form I never see, but for the lines slowly lowering my eye from the sky to the ground. "Towered" gives me the impression of a coniferous forest. "Emerald" is beautiful and does not need the "green" to follow it, although the word which follows does need to build upon "emerald" in some way.

"Lots welcome an' not for tryin' to chop him up for parts Wyvern," Minta told the zombie as the stick warped away, slightly candy-sticky. She had half a thought to try an' grab control of zombie, but that would be a dumb idea with neato necro in the sky lookin' down. . ."Weird! Is strings of magic like Rosemary used to see!" she reported, twanging a string, then fishing around inna pocket for a two-handed oversized guitar pick, then giving the string a bigger an' better twanging. "Didya hear anything?" Loki peeked in all the nearby shadows but insubstantial strings of magic don't cast shadows. Minta plopped down in the biggest shadow, the pine-tree-trunk shadow, an' thought about it for a little bit before bouncing back to her feet. "'Scuse me Pen, but couldya trace along from here to here to there to there to here to there," the gnomie's arms fly around as she points every-which-way, "so people can follow the magic trails pleaseplease?"

Rydia's feet shot forward, the present (ooo! shiny holographic carp-scale bag!) dropped as her hands flew apart for balance, but neither elf nor package hit the floor: the hand which had snagged her collar held her up by the neckline and its mate snatched up the bag's handles. She kicked a bit for purchase, boots sinking into the nearer edge of the shadow, before getting one heel back onto solid ground and shifting her weight back under her own control. "Rydia," Tzimfemme grumbled, "I did say something about black holes, and you did listen. Did you understand?" Rydia pointed one ear towards the sign, then tracked downwards, following the arrow. Flecks of special low-light ear cosmetics flicked into the air when she replied, "That's not a hole, silly! That's a portal!" Tzimfemme rolled her eyes. "I'll take the present, Rydia, and attend instead. Your head can be such an empty vessel, but at least the vessel exists, and I'd like to keep it that way. . .Anyway, go. Get to the d-e-r-b-y before you-know-who notices it. I can't handle her." She pivoted to Rydia's left, turning the elf towards the Conservatory, and propelled her forward. The naked mage watched Rydia, and only after she had left the room did Tzimfemme step and sink into the portal. Subtracted much more than just light to get a zero sum. . . Rydia's handicrafts were well-suited to the shadow. Tzimfemme held up a hand and flexed it in front of her face. Only two or three people were thinking about her at the time, but the impressions were divergent enough to make the fingers' length fluctuate--yet the null space threw everything real within it into the sharpest relief. Only a few seconds' observation of the flickering real/unreal fingertips made her feel queasy. The carp-scale handbag, on the other hand, glittered wherever its outline touched the null space. Tzimfemme couldn't help glancing upwards to where spotlights should have been--then all around. "I had expected. . .no, it was only implied. . .that there'd be more directional arrows if they were needed. . ."

Hold on a moment. . .I have to call a minor foul. Zool mentioned a _lack_ of Congress, which makes one anti-con amongst his con, or a pro if we're solving the sentence to exclude negatives. However, what shall we call the stammerers' line-dancing convention? The con-con can-can?

And, should you forget this advice, washing at 60 degrees Celsius (that's the whites cycle, if your washer doesn't specify, not the colorfast cycle) will get rid of the resultant mildewy scent. A few hours of strong sunlight will also. So will, as a last resort, bleach. Other life lessons from the college era I wish I could forget: So you think your personal odor is fine and laden with pheromones? I can't judge that. I can assure you that it only works for fresh personal odor. Wash your laundry and bedsheets! If it still smells, wash it with more detergent and a higher temperature! Cleanse yourself to wash off old personal odor! Bleach on an empty cycle cleans out washers and dishwashers which have been tasked to clean off. . .funk. (Thanks, Wench!) It also kills, disinfects, and dislodges some invertebrates. After the initial dislodging, though, muscle power will suffice to scrub things clean. Sometimes it's better to cut off the dreadlock than spending the hours to untangle it; its hairs will already be so abused that they'll re-tangle with a sneeze.