065 x 650 // video

[dignity_misery]

[ The camera is on the edge of a sink, pointed up towards a mirror which leaves Carla's hands free as she slowly runs a comb through long black hair. She's in the process of getting ready, in simple black underwear. She's... an attractive woman, but a little too thin and her skin bears too much of her self-hate. There are also some very large tattoos. A serpent with its tail at her knee, wound around her leg and its head at her stomach. When she turns away from the mirror, the inked spine up her back shows. There is apparently a new piece however, wrapped in gauze around her other thigh, large judging from the amount. ]

It's my birthday.

[ She states this while pulling on a simple red dress, sleeveless with buttons up the center. The pair of dog tattoos may be obvious as she fiddles the garment closed. She cleans up well. ]

Someone needs to take me to dinner.

[ Stated without a shred of shame. She also doesn't seem particularly... excited about the prospect of a birthday dinner either. Her brown eyes never really lift to try to make eye contact with the camera. And not with herself in the mirror either. ]

Comments

[dignity_misery]

And it's nice to see you.

[She acknowledges the flattery, but it is part of this face he puts on. The grin. She loves it, recognizes the character he plays with a fond remembrance for when she had been alive and powerful. Memories of herself with that same disgusting smile.]

I know a place down there that serves claw viper.

[It's not a very nice place, but she had acquired a taste for the creature when the City had been flooded with sand. It's the kind of restaurant that Carla brings her fellow monsters to.]

[unflagging]

[He is, after all, as some have noted, a hatefully happy man.]

Sounds fun. Don't think I've ever had that before. Shall we?

[Why the hell not? He offers her his arm, if she wants to take it. Let's make a good show of it, let's go for broke.]

[dignity_misery]

[She's a very physical woman. Smothering those she 'loves' and ripping apart with her hands those she didn't. She loops in at his arm, pleased with herself and the attention.

She leads the way confidently down into darkness, through the markets and past the carnivals. The little hut that comprises her restaurant doesn't seat very many people. Most don't come to eat, they come for weapons and talismans made from their magic-infused bodies. Created by sorcerers and finding mysticism in their own right through the worship of dark things, they had many attributes, least of which was the variety of poisons that could be found in their stinging tails.

Carla pulls Rory along with her in the back to show him where the corpses are strung, butterflied, from the ceiling. The serpents come in a number of colors: red, blue, green, silver, gold. Long forked tongues loll out of their heads, eyes filmed over.]

You choose whichever one you like.

[Like fishing a lobster out of tank.]

[unflagging]

[And he's pleased to give that attention, her arm through his arm, his hand on her hand. Quite content as she leads the way down to the underground (hadn't he been a few doors down once? for something or other? probably) and down to the prepared and butchered viper (claw viper, these little lobstrosities) corpses. Which he admires for a moment, of course.]

Very pretty.

Are they different flavors? Or is one color better than another? You are, of course, the connoisseur, so I defer to your expertise.

[Not really. It's chatter.]

[dignity_misery]

They're... magus.

[She comes from a world without magic, so the vocabulary is a bit clumsy for her, but she gets her meaning across.]

Gold and silver are the most powerful, and they taste sweeter.

[Each variety was her favorite, however.]

[unflagging]

[Blandly considering them.]

I like sweet things...

[Magic too, though. Now that was sweet.]

[dignity_misery]

[Carla is enjoying herself, clearly, smiling to herself as she turns to say a few choice phrases to the purveyors in Aranochi, their desert tongue. She could easily use the device to translate all of it, but she has always had a fondness for language. It had seemed like a puzzle to her once upon a time, something that become functional once you put all the pieces in the right place.

They return out to the small tables to wait while their pick is barbecued, there is mint tea and herb salad dressed in lemon juice waiting there. Otherwise the remaining 'waiters' are more busy speaking to customers looking for claws and fangs.

Carla settles back into the flimsy chair comfortably, toying a finger on the lip of the warm teapot.]

Where did you come from?

[She doesn't expect much by way of answer, but she's curious and she's brazen enough to see what she can have.]

[unflagging]

[He leaned across the tiny table--a little too close, a little too eager and smiling.]

When? You have to give me a when to start with. Where did I come from before here? Or where did I come from at the start? Or where have I been? It's a complicated question to ask, dearheart.

Where did you come from?

[dignity_misery]

[His manner thrills her, her brown eyes showing clear with interest. She liked to obsess, but was also many times bitten by her loves and obsessions. It frightens her, and yet it tastes so good.]

Before here. Are you angry they took you from it?

[Carla had been angry.]

I came from one of the Earths with the zombie infestation.

[The lack of constant reminder to be vaccinated and healthy was very noticeable to her. The lack of dead things on the corner, the lack of disdain for them here.]

[unflagging]

[He looks off into the middle distance for a moment, at whatever bustle is going on behind her, nothing important. His eyes still dance with high glee even if the rest of his face is a nice study in pensive consideration.]

Am I angry that they took me from it?

[After a moment, the grin returns. And, with a small sigh:]

I'm fucking furious.

[And a giggle.]

I came from a place that was just dying on the vine, like as not. But, oooh [narrowing eyes] zombies! Tell me more.

[dignity_misery]

How did you know it was dying?

[Some might have said the same about her own world, infested with death, and yet it carried on.]

Reanimates, you're supposed to call them. [But honestly, once you've been a zombie yourself the political correctness just stopped mattering.] They live to hate and to eat. It's been almost a century since the first wave of infections.

[unflagging]

[A dismissive wave.]

You know these things when you live in them. Time fucked off. So did direction. Everything else was shriveling up and drying out. Monsters were breeding. But that was there. I've been in other worlds that ended without dying. There is a difference.

Reanimates, then. I've known a few others who lived to hate and to eat--no, that's not true. They did other things in between. Anyway--infections. And is there no cure? No treatment? Or has the world succumbed?

[dignity_misery]

Magic then. I didn't know there was any in my world, until it found me.

[Much like when referring to the claw vipers as magus... it felt clumsy to talk about magic. Which irritated her.]

There's a vaccine, if you can afford it. Once you're infected there's no going back. The government shoots them, the black market finds uses for them. Only a few of our continents were wiped out.

[Like 'only a few' is an accomplishment.]

[unflagging]

But it found you.

[Magic for him, though, is his flesh and blood and heritage. "Clumsy" is an existence stripped of it.]

I see. Well, there are generally a few survivors of these things, by fortune of one kind or another, or chance, or maybe fate.

[Viva Las Vegas.]

At least it was only a few. And it touched you, of course. Surely, it must have, somehow or other.

[dignity_misery]

[A little shrug, eyes sliding away from him to stare off at nothing.]

I spent a few years infected.

[unflagging]

Oh did you?

[dignity_misery]

I died... nine years ago.

[She had been twenty-four. She is thirty-two now, but it's not age that shows on her face so much as sorrow.]

I made a wish that brought me back, but it's still... under my skin, I guess.

[She knows. Nothing has ever truly removed it, the memories are always there, stirring her. Haunting herself.]

[unflagging]

And how could it not be? These memories, this reality of your existence. To know what you had endured, what you had been, and from what you recovered. No. Of course it would lie under your skin even now, this other you--hateful and hungry. But still you ponder it.

The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe--universes, indeed--is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in the world we know, more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind--no, nor woman's either--can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

So was that wish the way by which what little magic is in your world found you?

[dignity_misery]

[Her smile is sharp and narrow as she listens to him. Whether she agrees with or believes his words is truthfully not the point. She enjoys the theater of it, and the subversion.]

A ladybug landed in the window and offered to grant my wish, in exchange for something.

[She toys with her cup, lowering her eyes.]

But I didn't have anything to give.

[unflagging]

[He doesn't care. Most of what he says is a lie or a series of lies anyway. Especially when he's sitting on a chair and acting respectable and even sophisticated. He's more truthful when he's crouched on the floor or hunkered in the sand by a campfire, destroying things.]

So did you get your wish? Are you indebted to Mrs. Ladybug?

[dignity_misery]

She's smiling, as long as I suffer.

[And make others suffer with her.]

[unflagging]

[He smiled too.]

Well, that's one way to make payments.

[dignity_misery]

[A furious look crosses her face, but she doesn't lash out, just enjoys the emotion for a moment. He is good at being infuriating, and she enjoys that as well. Troll knows troll.]

I don't think I can pay it off.

[unflagging]

Then maybe you'll just keep trying to pay it off forever. That's how it works with loans and debts sometimes. You keep trying to get ahead and the bank keeps asking for more and more and the interest piles up until there's nothing left but the hole the debt makes.

Unless Missus Ladybug is more of a loan shark and plans on breaking your kneecaps sooner or later.

[A moment of consideration... Dry and low:]

Actually, she probably knows you'd enjoy that too much. So she doesn't dare.

[dignity_misery]

[Her fury isn't for him this time, and her smile is tremulous. She'd eat that little bug, make her scream, but the Ladybird has never appeared before her again, even when Carla had begged and cried.]

She's a bitch.