|
Within the livestock barn of the farm, Olesja relaxes criss cross applesauce on the dusty-clean floor, wearing her coveralls and muck boots. Her old FSB Ushanka is on her head, Kevin is curled up in her lap asleep, and she's tossing a ball for Pupyat. He's good at bounding after the ball and then falling over near it. And sometimes he's even good at jumping on it, and biting it, and every once in a while he's good at bringing it back and that makes the safe smell with the mom eyes happy. So he's thinking about doing that more while continuing to try and tackle the ball with his face.
"Cyka blyat," she complains down at the sleeping Kevin, "There's two of you."
Not to far from the farm itself, at a spot where a stream cascades down ten feet or so to a small pool below, a leyline runs through an otherwise largely untouched span of wilderness, and out of that leyline slips a creature with four wings, two of which it's using to fly and two of which are used to cover the sides of its body tripartite body that aren't the seemingly "active" ones. The visible face is that of an ox, which lets out a snort of air while orienting itself, makes sure the fox in its arms is still secure, and then shoots off directly toward the Tometchko farm.
Last time Mei came by it was in her human form, carrying a puppy. This time it's in her angel form, carrying a fox.
When she arrives outside the barn she sets down and booms out, "BE NOT AFRAID." In Ukrainian. Sort of. It was translated by Google Translate.
Not just a Fox, but a fox, because being a fox is one of the most natural ways for her to be, these days. She curls up contentedly in Angel!Mei's arms like she's part of a Renaissance painting. Angel carrying a Vulpine Princess. She lounges contentedly until she's set down, her tail draped over Mei's arms, and then hops around her in a circle; there's a shimmering of Forces and then she corrects the angel's pronunciation of the Ukrainian phrase.
Her accent isn't native, but it's about as close as someone raised in America can get. After fifteen years, it had better be.
Never surprise a Tear, sometimes they just explode into essence and corpus all of a sudden. Which makes a fair bit of sense, of course. She's at her most defensible when being a diffuse pool of goo on the floor, and that's a fact. But after this startlement, she just looks like a giant blotchy gumdrop filled with web traffic, a horrified mask of war etched on one bulb.
Kevin floats in the middle of her, legs pointing straight out, eyes open, mouth calmly chewing something he shouldn't be. When one of his eyes is making contact with Mei he bleats happily. Hi! I'm floating in food foot milk hands!
And that's when the ball comes bouncing into her corpus, getting lodged like a bullet in ballistic gel.
"I used to be a Councilor."
Baaaaaa-a-a-a-a, Kevin greets Fox from within her spouse and primary address.
"I did."
"BUT THEN YOU GOT BETTER," the angel booms again. There's a short pause for her to drop a spell, and then Mei's voice goes back to normal. "Sorry. I forgot to tune things down to my outdoor voice. But, first things first... are you afraid?"
The eight foot tall angel's wings shift as it turns, and somehow between the two pairs of wings it manages to keep only one of its sides visible at a time, now the lion. Mei's voice changes too, into something more leonine, as she crouches to pet Fox. "I've never seen you quite like this before, Olesja. It's interesting."
She twines herself around the angel's ankles, and then stops, head tilted to the side, when Lesja sort of... splats into essence and corpus. There's a moment where Lesja -- and Kevin -- and Pupyat -- can see her muscles bunch in an Extremely Recognizable Way.
It is probably best for everybody that before Fox can pounce into her spouse the way that she sometimes pounces on mice, Mei leans down and starts petting her back. It makes her spine un-arch, relaxing slowly. Her voice hangs in the air. "I have. It's very sexy." You weirdo.
Myrne rises up into its Kingship, and every spirit in sight starts behaving themselves juuuust that much better. The butler just walked in ten minutes before the tea.
The blob grows taller and then more gaunt, limbs long and terminated in bulbous drops of corporeal goo. She just looks like an emaciated gumby that's lived through Kirsk with nothing but a bolt action and a flag. The eyes are every door post missing their mezzuzot within a dozen miles.
Pupyat of course has no clue what Fox is up to. Looks like a playbow to his ignorant fluffy head. And Kevin is too rock stupid to notice. But now that everything is dislodged from within Myrne, Kevin is free to charge over and start gonking his head into Mei's ankles. Gonk. Gonk. Gonk.
"Oh? Oh. Well. This is... This is Myrne. This is me as Myrne, and since I'm Myrne, this is me. Lesja's in here, too. But. You know. It's a don't tell the kids sort of situation if you get me?" One blobby appendage grows numerous pseudopods that are pointing in about two dozen directions at the various nearby spirits in the area.
"I can stop. Just. Somtimes it's easier not having limbs about stuff. You know?"
Fortunately for Mei, her feet are hooves made out of brass. She just lifts her foot up a little when Kevin starts ramming into her and lets him bash his head against some metal for a bit, like a goat does. "Hi Kevin. One day I hope you knock some sense into yourself," she tells the goat. She straightens up from petting Fox and comes over for a closer look at the blobby cadre mate.
"No need to go back to being Lesja all the way, if you don't want to," she says as she clomps around on her hooves. "I don't think any of us are being particularly human at the moment. At least I decided to model my Legacy on the Cherubim and not something even stranger, like the Ophanim. I'm not just flaming wheels of eyes. This is pretty neat, though. What you can do, I mean."
She laughs. "Fox, you wouldthink it's pretty sexy, since it's a new experience. I can't really disagree."
"It's a new experience, and it's squishy. Like ultimate boobies." Fox. What the fuck, Fox. Why are you like this, Fox? She watches Lesja transform herself, and then she crouches again, her backside twitching once, twice, and then --
-- leap!
Yes, young FSB officer on the riverside. Fifteen years hence, the strange little woman who just connived you into buying her a bag of pelmeni and then wheedled her way into your life is going to attempt to bellyflop into your corpus as a fox. What do you think of that?
When your wife is a fox and leaping at you through the air you have a few choices. Myrne goes with the seldom chosen 'make it weirder'. Rather than dodge, or just take it, Myrne lifts one stubby appendage to its face like it's blowing itself up.
The slender stomach of the thing distends into a neat parabolic curve designed to intercept Fox's trajectory at a perfectly cromulent angle sufficient to slide her fuzzy butt around in a tight spiral down and down and down into Myrne's corpus. Like a quarter circling a donation drain.
She spits out the bottom of Myrne's corpus to slide right along the floor, having suffered nothing but a great time. Pupyat bounds right over barking and pounces on her backside playfully.
Myrne's corpus snaps back to its former composition as he states, "I have a tornado slide at the park, what. She turns into God stuff, I turn into civil architecture." (edited)
Mei lets out a laugh, made strange for coming from a lion's throat, and sits down on the ground. She's still taller sitting down than she is standing up in her human form, but everyone's a bit weird out here, right now. Especially Kevin.
"What an interesting bunch we've become. It's strange that a couple of years ago I was unaware that all of this existed, drinking myself senseless to try to forget what it was like to put myself in the heads of serial murderers. So much has changed ."
Whenever possible, Fox lives her life as an extended exhalation that goes a little bit like this:
wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
And so it is that she goes wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee when her spouse turns herself into a spiral slide. By the time she spits out the bottom, her tongue is hanging out the side of her mouth, and when Pupyat pounces on her, she rolls onto her side and pap pap pap the baby gently. It's both a feline sort of warning and an instigation to play, very much we can play, baby, but we're going to play the way that I like to play.
"We're always changing. That's what I told Zoya the other day. We're always changing. It's only surprising when you see it happening."
|