<p>Silence. Out of the quiet of dark came the soft hiss of a spray paint can, the clack of it being shaken vigorously, a soft breath which swirled like creamer in milk before dissipating into the cold night air. Cold enough for snow, at least, but not cold enough for the Yki holding the spray paint to feel a chill. She stood purposefully, wearing only the ragged backpack that was slung carelessly across her shoulder. The long, hook-like nails of her left hand were tap-tap-tapping the can rhythmically as she squinted into the darkness at her art. She had been working for hours, and now, finally, it seemed finished.</p> <p>The position was perfect, and she knew it. To her opportunistic mind, it was as if the architects of Janardan had constructed the cluster of buildings specifically for her purposes. She glanced over the courtyard behind her. It was silent, though not for much longer. Though the sun had not yet breached the horizon, she knew the layout of the area. There was the courtyard, devoid of life but for the leafless trees that had been purposefully placed amongst old wooden benches and dewy grass. There was a three story hall with walls of large, uneven slabs of granite, on the roof of which the Yki was standing, balanced precociously on the steeply set shingles. Most importantly, there was the tower behind her. Its structure included a story of blank rock, windowless and featureless beneath the large clocks on each face of the tower. It was here that Sage had seen a canvas waiting to be painted. She leaned back and took stock of her work.</p> <p>Before her, larger than life, was a firebird. Though it wrapped around all walls of the tower, its head and part of its right wing were aligned to be most visible from the frequently used courtyard. It had eyes as blue as the sky. Its feathers, in some places intricately painted in crimson and gold, and in some places implied using broad, sweeping strokes, curled and twisted along their edges like hungry flames. The dull grey stone it was painted on made the colors pop impressively, so much that it almost looked alive. It was fantastic. Sage curled her lip up. The beak looked a little too long to her, the tail feathers on the wall to her right a little peacockish. But it was too late to worry about that, and she knew it. The sky was starting to lighten, and soon tenacious rays of sunlight would be trickling down the sidewalks and creeping up the buildings. Sage stuffed the spray paint into her rugged pack, and scrambled down the wall of the classroom building like she weighed nothing at all, using window ledges and scars in the rock like ladder rungs.</p> <p>Sage padded to the largest of the trees, one which she had been known to sleep in, and sat cross legged beneath it, closing her eyes. She would have liked to stash her bag of evidence and get some real sleep, but the first classes of the day would be starting in less than thirty minutes. There would be acquaintances to debate with, snobby thills to harass, art classes to get her hands dirty in; all things which Sage hated to miss. The Yki would have to do with a catnap.</p>
<p>Slow and sweet, her honey vision strolled steadily through the dissippating dark, moving with the meandering grace of a panther-cat on the prowl. But Nyymbata herself, why, she was not on prowl. No, quite the contrary. The long-legged she had finished a shift at the <em>Whip and Pony</em>, and was ready to slip back beneath the sheets... and the sooner, the better! Clad in little more thigh-high leather boots and a thick, fur jacket, the Anubi was not enjoying the poetic peace that the thick snowfall had brought. A woman of sand and dunes, she disliked the weather in Swaraj and ambled through the snow usually with a loaded-gun of a look: curled lip, slanted, thickly-lashed dark eyes, and angled brows, all of which suggested that interruptions to her journey were less than appreciated.</p> <p>Anyway, she was harbouring that indiscriminate scowl when she came upon a sight she suspected was rare: that peculiar bird of a thill was on the roof now making delicate art of school's exterior. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened... Janardan had many blind corners. And, well, that thill had more than one eye to spot them. Gruesome, utterly gruesome. Still, Nyym watched Sage for quite some time. Beneath the very tree Sage had come to call occassional home did Nyym take a lean, observant and somewhat entranced. Strokes of red and orange flooded the otherwise bland walls with soft, serpentine hisses. It was the same noise that Nyym made to shoo off slobbery hands that night while on stage. Mind you, she had a whole lexicon of noises down her throat, many much more frightening and revolting than the hiss of spraying paint.</p> <p>She lit up a clove cigarette and smoked slowly. The crackle of burning played sweet melodies against the dead-still backdrop of twilight in snow. She shared a moment with the thill, unbeknownst to all save for the ever leering 'Firebird.' When the cigarette sang its last humming note, smokey and sweet, she flicked the end into ashes with a snap of her fingers. Not a elemental scorcerer, but she learned what she could from class.</p> <p>By then the light of twilight was bleeding into the first shards of light for the day. Sage would be done soon. Nyym, exhausted from a night of dance and flex, had no interest in talking. Words were for lesser beings. Instead, she left her parting gift -- two formidible prints, avian in nature, in the snow alongside the tree where the thill was known to rest. Shapeshifters, eh?</p> <p>OOC: Feel free to describe the rest of the day... Does Sage live in the residences? Nyym's next appearance is private and likely at night.</p>
<p>Sage awoke to noise, and lots of it. The courtyard, which had been empty such a short time ago, was congested with students; classes were starting soon. Sage stretched lazily, looking up her artwork. It looked good in the daylight, long shafts of sun stricking the wall of the tower and reflecting appealingly off of the pheonix's face - <em>Wait.</em> Sage swore under her breath. The tower wall with the pheonix's front was facing west, so why was the sunlight hitting it? Sage shook her head, trying to clear her brain of sleep fog. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" Sage looked around and hit herself on the head. It was already evening. She had missed her upper-level philosophy class, a trigonometry course (which she hardly attended anyway), and probably half of her once-a-week ceramics lab, her favorite class this semester. Sage stood up quickly, brushed the snow from her coat, and sprinted towards the art building, her bag lying abandoned in the snow behind her.</p> <p>---</p> <p>Though her professor had looked quite displeased, the ancient-looking arden grudgingly allowed Sage into the ceramics room, despite her showing up an hour and a half late.</p> <p>"Huq myki uw oua su pbeki at ell qysh ouab dbitimki, Sage. Hudiwallo oua gum's hefi emo dlemt shyt ifimymp, vikeati oua qyll vi hibi necymp napt bipebglitt," He intoned loudly as she entered, and Sage cringed under the words. She had no idea what they meant specifically, but she knew she would be doing extra work to make up for her tardiness, and she grabbed a dozen cubes of soft river clay before settling into her station. "Y izdiks tyz, iekh qysh hemglit, wallo wubnig emg sbynnig, viwubi oua liefi," he continued, and ended his pronouncement by slapping a trimming knife onto Sage's wheel.</p> <p>"Aeh, Professor, we both know I can't speak Ramath--" Sage began.</p> <p>"Mugs. Six. Trim them before you leave." Her professor said monotonously, then gave a shadow of a smile. "I know, I know, you don't have the cryokinesis to dry your work in such a short period... I expect you to trim them tomorrow at the latest."</p> <p>"Right-o, chap," Sage grinned, and her professor rolled his eyes, but left her to her work.</p> <p>Sage brushed her dreads out of her face and bound them up in a black elastic, though there was always one that tumbled out and got in her eyesight. She then wet her hands slightly in a bucket, rubbed them over the wheel, and roughly rounded a cube of clay in her hands before slamming it uncerimoniously into the center of the wheel. She wet her hands once more, and put her foot to the pedal. The soft clay centered easily under he firm grip, and opened it's belly just as quickly. The trouble always came when she was thinning out the walls - she had a tendency to spin the wheel too fast at this point; the walls would thin too quickly, and half of the pottery-to-be would fly off from it's base, smacking her (or some other unaware victim). Even so, Sage zoned into her work and by the time the art building closed for the night, she had made seven tall, narrow mugs, with thin, elegant handles. None of them matched, but hell. Sage was a painter, not a sculptor.</p> <p>---</p> <p>By the time Sage reached "her" tree again, it was dark, and her pack (which she hadn't remembered until she was almost done with her lab) seemed to be... gone. Next to where she had slept earlier was a pair of prints - unusual ones at that. They didn't look entirely fresh - the wind had seen to altering them - but it had snowed while Sage painted the night before, and they were newer than that. The thill stared at the prints as she absently attempted to rid her forearms of dried clay, her imaginative mind weaving threads of an epic daydream where the prints were left specfically for her to see, and where things only got stranger after that.</p>
<p style="text-align:left;">I'm going to assume that, as it is two years after the initial Fronima surges, that magic in Janardan is acceptable so long as it is under supervision. Otherwise, user conducted magic is, overall, highly unacceptable and generally warned against, especially for excessive situations. So Nyymbatta would be breaking a good few rules in doing this and runs the risk of hurting herself. It's hard to really predict what the current year's plot is going to look like, because we've only made it as far as '83. </p> <p style="text-align:left;"><strong>Edit: </strong>I just realized I misremembered something you'd posted. It's a minor edit. (January 29, 3PM)</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p>Things only got stranger after that.</p> <p>Nyymbatta attended only two classes that day: elemental kinesis, where she succeeded in branding not one but two of her classmates with her magma touch ("Damned Fronna!"); and dream-weaving, where she and Espoinya finally made progress on their "quietude" dream, Monet-themed and brimming with pastel riverbanks. With the soft palette of teal, orchre and burnt umber on her mind still, the Anubi finished her school day with a traipse through the luminous courtyard once more--finding both art and prints where she'd left them. <em>Crimson paling sunset. Peacocks.</em> Her feet, classed up now in thigh-high cattle's flesh, would make a generous merry-go-round of the prints, inspecting, before coming to a gliding, unpredictable halt. Those eyes, uneasy amber, faltered... something else came to her attention. Just then, fate poured a full glass of crafty coyote's blood and she obliged the gods with a sup: spindly fingers extended, they plucked the sac like Eve plucked fruit off the tree of knowledge. An act of theft likely seen by all but not really noticed by many, Nyym had the cover of a self-interested student population to conceal her misdoings.</p> <p>Womb-warm and just as dark and sleepy, Nyymbatta slipped into the privacy of her own room for the rest of the day to muse upon the artistic workings of another and, also, did a great deal of reading, mostly of the fantasy genre. <em>Studying. Studying hard. And with a toothsome grin.</em> She shed those layers of clothing for which she had no need--so, all of them--and then sat cross-legged in a plush chair with glasses perched, dainty birds, on the brim of her nose.</p> <p>Hours dissolved like shadows in the night. Only when the first lick of moonlight wet a windowpane did she stir from her fiction-trance with a smile, one that had been sequestering for centuries it seemed. It had been long... 2 years long, she'd counted. In that time she'd missed the dead (as a necromancer might) and the surreal (as a shapeshifter might). She craved the tingle, the scintillation of Fronima. So, she plucked the sac from her bed where it had laid, carefully replaced its contents, and then walked, quite nude, onward to the courtyard... but before arriving, she held steady behind the Ciderpatk building of astrologies and dreamweaving and slid the pack off her shoulder onto the snow. She was reminded of how, in the winter, the cold blankets softened everything: discipline, touch, excitement, noise, moral, even hunger. How long those days of muted-monochrome seemed. Life, life, all she wanted was life.</p> <p><em>Birds. Phoenix. Crimson paling sunset. Great, arching neck. Cranes, herons, swans, geese.</em> Her fictions were fuel, her fictions were truth. <em>Peacocks. Phoenix. Firebird!</em></p> <p style="text-align:left;">Beneath its paint of bile black fur, her flesh began to pimple and then, uncoiling fiddleheads of feather sprouted like a vernal choir on the first days of May. They unfurled at such a speed, you knew it had to be magicked. The rest of her body had become contort: her neck found a peculiar, serpentine arch and overtop a sable smile she’d grown a sharp, long laughing beak. Her arms were draped in plume while her latter limbs found themselves spindly, cool, and smooth. The night air was brisk on her flesh. Last were the eyes--once an eerie and thick amber, they had clouded over with the luster sapphires. Grinning in the way that only birds can, the phoenix chortled in merriment as it hoisted the bag around its neck and then made off toward the tree, shedding ember-riddled feathers as it did. It bared an uncanny resemblance to the clock-wall west of the courtyard.</p> <blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><p style="text-align:left;"><span style="font-size:8px;"> </span></p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
<p>Deep though she was in her daydream, Sage's sharp ears were made to hear the sound of footsteps through snow, and the unique crunch of the hard top layer of snow being crushed caught her attention. Her ears swiveled back as half of her mind demanded she return to the real world; begrudgingly, she did so. She turned lazily, white fur giving her the appearance of an apparition, lit as she was by dancing rays of moonlight. The soft huff of her breath stopped abruptly. <em>Holy shit,</em> she thought, as her sextet of ocean eyes focused confusedly on the figure in front of her. Sage had once had what was called a psychotic episode, and since then, she had learned a trick for detecting her hallucinations - they only encompassed one sense at a time. But she had heard the footstep a split second before she saw the surrealism before her. <em>So, I'm more crazy than I used to be, or... </em>Sage let her thought trail off as she took in the form, awed.</p> <p>The bird looked a lot like her painting. Great blue orbs of eyes above a slinking, curved neck; the long beak holding a bemused expression. But it was the wings the sage was drawn to - glowing, fiery feathers that were at once stunning and dangerous. <em>Holy shit, </em>Sage thought again. She was tempted to look at her painting on the clocktower - a primeval part of her brain, unburdened with logic, insisted that it was the same phoenix she had painted not a day ago, and even as Sage was tempted to look, a part of her didn't want to know. Eventually, a rogue eye flicked up to the tower. Her bird was still there, looking somewhat less impressive in comparison to the real thing; drab, dark, flat, like the painting of someone who had never seen a firebird before. Of course, Sage hadn't.</p> <p>"So what are you?" Sage mused, mostly to herself, but in a loud enough voice for the magnificent bird before her to hear her, if it cared to. She looked it over again, and started as she noticed that a dark area on its chest was actually what looked disconcertingly like her own backpack. Sage's mind reeled. This firebird, this enigma, this wisp of fantasy, had her backpack. Did it know she was the one who had painted the mural? How could it have? She couldn't deny the intelligence in the bird's eyes, but how could such a wonder go unnoticed around campus? Sage took a bare-footed step towards the mysterious, cocking her head slightly. </p>
<p>BAAH, I don't love that post but that's the best I had! Need to read more fictions!</p> <p> </p> <p>There, between her splayed toes, the snow turned to wet and the scent of soil filled the air around her. The smell brought forward an anticipation for spring, evoking olfactory memories so intangible and complex that her other senses were rendered temporarily blind. In a split second watermark memories of tree-climbing, woods-fucking, flower-picking, skinny-dipping, and beer-drinking flooded her mind. <em>Firebird! </em>She awakened a second time to see that the heat of her body had swelled a halo of melted white around her and began to singe the looping arms of the other's satchel. The fabric's original colour was quickly engulfed in the black of ash. Soon, the threads would shudder and snap.</p> <p>Seemingly ignorant to that fact, the bird released hollow noise that sounded like beating wooden chimes then hastily paced a semicircle in the snow to avoid the approaching thill. Her eyes, that unnerving precious-gem blue, were steadfast on Sage. No trust for strangers it would seem. They rustled her feathers, which one-by-one flew in a stream of embers off her fluid frame. One by chance managed to torch a skeleton leaf left hanging on the nearby tree's branches; it ignited, looking like a over-worked Christmas ornament. Nyymbatta paused mid-step to admire the results of her work. Blue stare then reflecting a tangoing red heat. <em>Mmm. </em>The power of her own body impressed her and made the results of her coursework seem insignificant and childlike. Who cared if she could snap a flame from her fingers? This was so much cooler.</p> <p>In her distraction Nyym forgot to keep watch of her company despite how omnipresent her spider eyes made her seem. Didn't seem to matter, though. <em>If you play with fire, you will get burned.</em> Turning her gaze back onto Sage's, the phoenix radiated with the taunt and glory of gloated laughter.</p>
<p>Sage stared unabashedly with all six eyes for quite some time, the flaming feathers of the phoenix flashing in her retinas. Her mind was enraptured by the strange bird. She was tempted, so tempted touch the thing; though she doubted that she could have if it didn't want her to. It didn't even want to be approached, it seemed, leaving Sage in an awkward stitch. She wasn't going to just leave this mythological vision in the courtyard; how could she turn her eyes away? But it backstepped gracefully when she tried to move towards it. What was she supposed to do, what did the thing want?</p> <p>Sage glared at it rebelliously, and dropped down to the ground, crossing her legs and wiping snow off of her boots.</p> <p>"So you're not going to tell me what you are? Well, that's fine. It's pretty obvious. Whether you're a hallucination or not would be nice to know, but at this point I'm not assuming anything." Sage stared the magnificent bird down, pursing her lips slightly. Her bag wasn't going to last much longer, and what did they say about spraypaint cans? Under pressure, highly flammable, do not use near an open flame? They weren't going to last long, not long at all. The bird had made only her wind-chime noise; nothing intelligible. "So, do you not speak common, or are you just one of those snooty, high-brow mythological creatures? This is like meeting a celebrity and finding out their an asshole," Sage added, nonchalantly. Who cared what she said; it was probably a hallucination anyway.</p>
