1 January 2015, Geiseric "Geist" Valk's Domain

Crash Course
Geist's Domain, for all of its changes on his arrival in RhyDin, had whittled itself down to a modest, well-lit dome, peppered with long, elliptical tables of various sizes, glowing, oven-like caverns and small hutches with circular doors. The surrounding accretion of Brink was, as expected, a wild mess, yet his austere little laboratory seemed closer to a room made for a particularly large hobbit with a penchant for Scandinavian minimalism. Two large, black seats with gentle, green-glowing pseudopodia beneath settled across from each other, one full of a Geiseric Valk tinkering with a flat, blue insect-like thing, the other full of a Zofie Kaminsky, picking bits of rock from her arm from beneath the tattered remnants of purple pleather jacket sleeves. Once plucked out, the stones left behind little indents in her skin, bringing up bits of wet blue dew that hissed in the open air.

Zofie scrunched her nose as she winced, twitching as each dent popped back into place before finally releasing her blood to streak down her arm from the minute punctures. "Aa--aao--fft! Aaaaooow****..."

Geist glanced up from his careful prodding of the insectile device, brows furrowing just slightly as he observed her rather vicious form of self-care. "Erh... Miss Kaminsky..." He set the insect aside on a nearby table before slipping down from his seat, taking a kneel next to her and raising his hand to block her continued picking and scratching at her arm. "Please take a moment from your activity. It need not cause you such discomfiture."

Zofie looked up from her picking with her brows down and her lips pressed flat, her fingers stiffening, then slowly, one by one, curling away from her arm. "So... I've been pickin' teeth and bits of shrapnel and **** out of my person for the better part of a year and a half..." She tilted her head to look more squarely at Geist, her incredulous expression all the more exaggerated with her cat glasses. "... and you're tellin' me that I was doin' it wrong?"

"Precisely, Miss Kaminsky." He nodded once, matter-of-factly, before letting his hand slip away from its place above her arm, moving from his kneel to a crouch, with his forearms resting on his knees with his elbows close to his sides. "You erh... weren't instructed in the use of your augmentations, were you?"

"Oh! Yeah, I did!" She popped right up with a wild grin, too wide to be genuine as her head bipped and bopped back and forth. "Y'see, just after I climbed out of that weird monster-pit in Bad Acid Trip-ville, I went to go take a leak behind a tree, y'see, and what do ya know, I got a nice print-out of the manual that came right out of my hoo-hoo!"

Geist's eyelids dropped by half as he smirked, moving one hand around slowly while lurching left and right, before finally succumbing to a silent snicker and a shake of his head. "Fair enough, fair enough. First and foremost, I would like for you to relax, and to feel the density of the shards in the arm. You'll... obviously notice the difference between they and your flesh."

Zofie sighed out of her nose as she sat back in her seat, letting her weight sink into its pliant, black substance. She started to slow her breath, counting down with little bobs of her head between her inhales and exhales. Eventually the bits still stuck in her arm started to wiggle, inspiring one of her eyes to pop open. "Whoa, okay."

"Now..." Geist slid one leg over and shifted his crouch to settle in front of Zofie, still with his arms in and casually resting atop his knees. "... If you might consider that your skin, while protective, also breathes, also absorbs elements from outside. It has become more resilient, yes, but its principles remain the same."

Zofie's fingers and toes spread and scrunched as she puffed up her cheeks and exhaled, working herself back down to a state of relaxation. Her lower lip peeled down as the fragments in her arm quivered, then settled, sinking into her skin slowly. "Yeeeeeehyeeeeeeempffff wh..." Once they had submerged, her skin showed no signs of wounding. As they met her muscle tissue, her arm spasmed, and the coiled tendons pulverized the intruding tissue. She breathed in sharply through her nose as the bits flowed up her arm, tumbling up through her shoulder and finally meeting the wild, weird world of her stomach. Just as soon, the punctures left in her arms sealed up, leaving only the streaks of red from her earlier attempts. She turned over her arm to examine the results, flexing her fingers to feel the pins-and-needles tingle centered where her wounds once were. "Okay... that was cool..." Her tone of voice stayed a bit flat, as if not entirely convinced about the process. "Just checkin', but this doesn't mean that I'm gonna start eatin' my bed, or lose the arm of my chair when I'm wistfully staring at a pot roast with my chin in my hand, does it?"

"Hah! You'll be fine. It's a secondary measure that requires conscious effort. Also, it only functions on objects lodged in your skin." Geist pushed against the ground to stand, turning in a clipped circle to return to his seat and take up the flat, segmented insect-thing once again. "One thing to consider. Your ah... sort of Stranger. What do you know of it?"

"I've heard anything from Brights, to Capes, to... trash-eatin' raver-****s." She looked off to some point in the middle distance, pursing her lips and nodding. "Mostly the last one."

Geist swallowed and sighed, his big, blacklight eyes dimly flickering as his shoulders sunk in disappointment. "That... was not our intent. Much of what has happened in that regard went... terribly wrong." He waved his free hand, dispelling his train of thought before continuing. "We gave the augmentations you've received the designation 'Cavalier.' I'm sure you've noticed that your habits, now that you're not running for your life, have drastically changed, yes?"

Zofie leaned back in her seat and tucked her knees to her chest, scrunching her toes in the soft black seat-bottom as she held onto her legs, her chin resting atop her knees with an exhausted turn of her eyes to Geist. "Yeah... like the massive piles of junk I half-remember gettin'... and wakin' up stuck to the ceiling..." She shrugged her shoulders, parting them through the curtain of her hair to lie bare. "I seem to find some good stuff, though. Got a lot of clothes..." She smirked, raising her brows and looking down toward the floor. "Got even more glasses. I don't mind that, so much."

"You see..." Geist smoothed his fingers over the blue bug-thing, sealing the segments on the living device closed. "... We borrowed a bit of the instinct-drives found in Hobgoblin technology, to share some of the sensory and neurological load. Initially, the technology cleaved too close, and those to whom it adapted had become violent and domineering. Around the nineteenth century, we reworked them to erh... more constructive ventures as we ah..."

"Got your heads out of your ***es?"

Geist snickered and closed his eyes, finally breaking a smile. "Yes. That. At any rate, you will likely learn a great deal by interacting with those instincts as they arise. If you allow them room to unfold, it's likely that you'll have a bit of an easier time going forward."

Zofie could do little more than nod, bringing down one leg, then the other as she offered Geist a sweet, dimpled smile. "Well... thank you very much, Mister Geist. For... a lot of stuff. I think I'm gonna go eat a bunch of junk and pass out for a day." She started her slow, stiff slide toward the steps, sleepily swinging one arm back to send a wave to the giant, undead caveman.

20 Feb 2015, Dockside

Calibration, pt 2
"Peter Parkerin'", as Zofie called it, did not go as planned. She lied on her back on one of the side streets, legs still up in the air, with the remnants of a window box scattered on and around her. She sputtered out a mouthful of potting soil and roots before quirking her lips into a dimpled, sour smirk, rolling onto her side and pushing herself up to sit. Splinters and dirt had caked her sleeveless Spider-Man hoodie, which she attempted to clear off with a handful of snow; it was effective, for the most part, but poor Spidey would forever be stuck with one worn-in spot of pink paint on his right knee and a streak of brown that gave the impression of a rip-roaring Spider-Fart. To her, however, it hardly became apparent until she dropped down to set her fingers on her glasses, dead on-point, and unfolded them to set them square on her face. She raised her eyebrows in surprise, wiggling her fingers before finally looking down to survey the damage to her hoodie. "Awwww ****. Sorry, Pete." She sighed through her nose and attempted one last, useless wipe-off at her chest before continuing her stroll through Dockside, pfuffing a breath that sent the top end of a thick pink curl to waver.

The freezing rain splattered and clumped through her hair as she strolled, taking slow, deep breaths as she adjusted to the awakening of her senses. Vibrations clashed in the shifting densities of ice, water and slush, and each plantigrade section of her step felt like static, like every song on a playlist going through at once to become rendered as dross. She took a deep breath as she waited at a crosswalk, letting the stillness sink in for her to adjust. The first elements that registered, and thoroughly, were the trucks and carriages rolling through the intersection, slow-moving and massive while echoing the numerous splatters of sky-dropped sludge upon them. She relaxed her eyes, 'feeling' their shapes as they rolled, lurched, and moved along the roads, peeling through space-time and wobbling, if ever-minutely, from the decreased friction.

The rhythm pulled from the larger moving objects laid a rhythm. Next, she became aware of the uneven clusters of freezing rain, between its pelting of her person and the world around her. The cold hardly bit through her hide as it saturated her hair, her hoodie and torn, cropped jeans, registering as 'wet' fa more than 'cold.' However, with that added layer of damp, she adjusted to the onslaught of inclement weather, slowly tuning it out like the hiss of a record player and observing just where everything became struck. Soon, the shops, the shapes of people on the street, the quality of the windows along the block and the motions between each opened up for her. As the crosswalk turned its signal, she sauntered across the street, passively keeping track of each of the points laid out around her while letting her poorly-sighted eyes relax.

As she moved, her stomach rumbled, prompting a quick glance down an alley toward one of her recently-raided dumpsters, half-expecting the draw of her hunger to bring her toward it. Nevertheless, she felt quite the opposite. The constant motion from the sleet seemed refreshing, nourishing, almost. With a curious quirk of her brow, she bobbed a nod, flexing her fingers once more before taking herself off toward the Wonderplex, in the hopes of catching a bit of the weird cinema to come from Rhy'Din's colorful array of cultures.

24 March 2015, Shinebox Entertainment Offices

The lights faded back to life as Zofie's reel came to a close, its final image that of a hand made from salvaged metal starting to tear at what looked like humanoid skin before cutting to black. The Committee members present, a cybernetically enhanced human male being in a half-open shirt with thick, dark hair and a three-day beard, a red-haired half-elf in a push-up bra, leather vest and floor-length skirt patterned after the night sky, and a silver-haired halfling in a linen suit and a half-finished cigar perched in his deft, yet thick fingers, each worked on their own expressions as they looked from the blank screen and back to Zofie, taking their time to make her squirm.

"Soooo, that was... uh..." The cyborg's one green-glowing eye flickered as his lips went flat and his finger tapped on the desk, leaving the space open for one of his two cohorts to answer.

Zofie might not have outwardly squirmed, yet her bare toes spread wide before attempting to bury into the huge throw-rug in the office floor, seated in a rolling chair and done up as prim as she could muster. An eggshell-colored set of jacket and crop pants settled around her shoulders and hips respectively, while a sleeveless, mint-green top with a high-ruffled collar hugged her torso tightly beneath; flattering, yet not showy. She opted on gold and blue for her glasses, nose ring, toe rings and nails; the skull-charm anklet was too much of a security blanket for her to leave behind, yet the inquisitive, judgmental stare from the board had her questioning that decision somewhere in the back of her head near the nape of her neck. She brought up a darling purse of her lips and smoothed her hand along her dreadlock bun, slowwwwly blowing out her breath. "Uhm... I'm not plannin' on makin' it too high-concept. Like... I actually want people to watch it and not get bored or overstimulated over nothin'. I just picked out some shots for the reel that show what I can do with what I got."

The halfling raised his hand as he leaned back, settled in some dangling chair composed of rattan and high-tension wire late of Old Temple. The act brought the others' eyes to him and quieted whatever they might have said, at which time he took another drag from his cigar, held the smoke, and spoke through the wisps as they tumbled from his mouth. "Et's obvyuss that I luike yar stuyle, Mess Kamenskee." He gestured in a quick point from his similarly-cut suit to her own, his own furred feet left to dangle casually from his chair, loose as an opium lush halfway to catching the dragon. "Me only question es; wot kuinda time slot are ya plannen' on, an' 'ow many epesodes ya thenk y'can deleffur?"

Zofie drew up her dimpled grin as the halfling gestured between them, a nervy, yet encouraging laugh slipping out before falling quiet once again. She inhaled to speak, yet the clear, whip-crack voice of the half-elf cut her off at the pass.

"You keep telling us what it's not going to be. I don't want to give airtime to what something isn't. I won't tune in to watch 'not-Spartacus' or 'not-Midnight Gardens'. It... looks impressive, whatever it is you're doing, but--" The edge of the half-elf's hand collided with her palm repeatedly to punctuate the point she attempted to make. "--I Need a Clear Idea of What you Want to Do Before I Pay for it. Got it?"

"Yes ma'am." Zofie dipped her chin to nod in deference to the other woman's words, her shoulders sinking, yet still with her pride intact. "I have a treatment typed up on the same thumb-drive. If y'don't have the means to read that, I kin get you a printed copy in an hour, tops. It's mostly goin' for an adventure-noir crowd, and I think that the main cast has a good enough bridge to draw lots o' folks in. I might have undercut on the dragons, though, but--"

The cyborg raised his metallic hand and made a shooing motion off to the size of Zofie, as if brushing away her sentiments. "Hey, hey, whoawhoawhoa. Let us worry about demographics; you just focus on the work. We aren't looking to make one show for everybody, but we'd like to have a show for everybody. There's no perfect soup, but there're perfect soups. We'll get back to you if there's anything that might be a problem. Just don't be an ass, alright?"

"Yessir." Zofie instinctively wiped her palms on the knees of her pants in spite of her lack of sweat, slowwwing her breath down as she listened to the three different types of intimidating business people in front of her, all so dreadfully casual with the power they wielded in this meeting. She glanced from one side of the room to the other. Finally, that squirm started to show itself above her ankles.

"Well--" The cyborg brought his meat-hand down on the desk as he leaned back, his smile wide and actually reaching his eyes, enough to bring Zofie's expression to a paradox of relief and excitement. "-- we'll contact you by the weekend and let you know what we think!"

"Thank you so much, y'all!" Zofie popped up to her feet with her hands clasped together, fingers interlaced, shoulders high but her smile bright. She unfurled one hand and fluttered a point toward the thumb-drive stuck in the tablet on the half-elf's desk. "Y-y'all kin keep that, if y'like. Thank you so much..." She winced briefly as she slid one foot back. "... again."

The halfling let out a low, smoky chortle as he moved his cigar over the ashtray, letting the long, gray spend of it fall free to reveal the bright orange cone of its cherry as he waved. "Bye bye, now."

12 July 2014, Cargo Hold of the Inter-versal Prison Transport Ship Makara, Deep Occult

Fresh Meat
"You ffh--You bastards!" Ensign James Franklin slammed his fist against the sliding metal door to the cargo hold once he noticed the handles and latches on his side had been melted to keep him inside. He scrambled and screamed, stepping back two paces to rocket his heel at the latch, only to send himself further within. The mutineers and escaped prisoners were kind enough to leave him with his emergency light attached to his belt, as well as his uniform. He fumbled at his belt for a moment before finally taking hold of the flashlight, clicking the button on its handle and turning it toward the nigh-palpable darkness of the hold.

What had been a bright, bustling little arrangement of lifts, boxes and workers had, in the four weeks since the uprising, turned the place into an abattoir. Thick, old splatters of pink and gray that used to be crew members stained the walls intermittently. Boxes had been torn open, scattered about like the aftermath of a Christmas morning. A gurgle in his stomach led him to turn the light toward one of the food crates, then another, and another, until finally noting that every single one still present had been emptied, packaging and all. As he stepped forward, a blur of pink shot across the cone of light from his flashlight's head, causing him to stumble right back against the door. "****!!"

"H-Hello?" The voice that drew out from the shadows was high, soft, with just a hint of a scratch to it. "I can't see y'all..." The tremor of long, matted pink hair touched the edge of the light as the figure leaned her head around the corner, expressive lips held open just a bit from under a nose that veered a tad toward aquiline, though still understated in comparison to the rest of her face. Eyes blue enough to resemble contacts stared wide and wild, if blindly, before squinting into the light pointed toward her. "... well... okay, aow, yeah, I kin see that jus' fine..."

"Oh thank God." James breathed a sigh of relief as he doubled over, setting his hand on his knee while tilting the flashlight just a little bit away from the pink-haired girl peeping from behind the crate. He looked back toward her with bright green eyes, grinning as reassuringly as he could manage; he was a young fellow, with chestnut brown hair that had just started to show raggedness from where his crew cut had grown out. He remained low as he extended his hand, fingers flexing to coax her out as if she were a startled animal. "It's okay, little lady. I won't hurt you."

She simply smiled, setting dimples into her olive-skinned cheeks before creeping forward, just a tad, with most of her upper body covered by the tangled curtain of her hair. Bare footfalls landed tentatively along the hold's floor, padding against metal and squishing in substances unknown. Around her ankle, a metal chain with small charms clanked, still indistinct in the low light. Her only clothing seemed to be a ragged pair of pants torn off at the calf and a jacket missing a sleeve, both stained in blood and reminiscent of Franklin's own uniform. Her eyes remained unfocused, yet she followed along the trail made by the flashlight well enough, her gait weak, yet well-balanced, if unnaturally so. Every so often, her shuffle brought a bit of her hair or a bit of jacket to drift back, giving the officer a momentary glimpse of her firm abdomen and well-crafted curvature before slipping back to cover.

"I'm James." He cleared his throat as he scratched at the back of his head, biting hard on his lower lip before peeling it out between his teeth as he watched the girl approach. Turning his eyes away once, toward a horrible splatter on the wall, and finally up to an unsullied upper corner of the room, he started to rise, slowly, as not to startle her. "What's your name?"

"Hey there, James." The arm not bearing a sleeve raised, her fingertips fluttering during her wave. She cleared her throat as she drew in closer, a short hop taking her over the railing and onto stairs that led toward the door, her coat and hair and body all awash with motion and distraction. "I'm Zofie." She rubbed one eye with her wrist as she crossed one leg behind the other, balancing it on the tip of her toe. Something dark, viscous ran down her sole as it kept turned away from him, waiting for a moment to scrape it off on the edge of a step. "Where y'from, James?"

"Oh, me?" James pressed his palm to his chest as he looked around, frowning in concentration until he found a blown-out fuse box onto which he placed his flashlight, pointing it upward to act more as a diffuse lamp for the both of them. His hands went back on his hips as he stood at the top of the steps, looking just past Zofie, yet keeping her in his peripheral vision. "I'm from Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's... on a place called... Earrrth?" He slowwwly let his eyes drift back down to Zofie, lips pursed in query to see if any spark of recognition showed on her.

"Oh ****, you're from Michigan!?" Her bubblegum pink brows tipped up as her posture straightened, heels together and hands slightly tilted out at the sides, betraying a background in either dance or gymnastics. Her smile seemed genuine from her nose down, yet her eyes held something a little sad behind them. "I'm from Columbia, South Carolina, m'self!"

"Really?? Hahaa!!" James popped to life clapping his hands in surprise, causing Zofie to jump, just a hair, from her spot on the steps. "Oh.. uh... sorry. It's... I don't meet many other people from Earth out this way. They're usually from the outer colonies, and... I don't have to tell you how hard it is to deal with the weirdos from the Jovian stations. They have this need to inject tonal shifts in the middle of everything they say, and it--"

"Whoooa, whoooa." Zofie put both of her hands up, her heels turning out as she winced, dimples once again fetchingly settling into her cheeks. "I think we might be from different Earths. The space program on mine has just been privatized and we're still usin' fossil fuels n' ****. It's a fluke that 'm out here, in the first place."

James hissed his inhale through his teeth as he shrugged bashfully, once again rubbing at the back of his head. "Oop. Sorry... just got excited, is all." As he settled, he looked off to the side, into the dimly lit hold. He squinted for a moment as he caught sight of what was left of a ribcage. The holes in it looked uneven, chewed through. However, the prisoners were a scary lot from across the multiverse, likely to have hidden particularly brutal weapons. He turned his eyes back to Zofie with an apologetic half-smile, his eyes drifting to the dip in her throat, then down the bare strip of her torso between the edges of her jacket before snapping back up and away with a hard cough. "So... what has you in here, of all places?"

"Well..." Zofie raised her brows and shuffled in her stance, sliding her hands into her pockets nonchalantly as she took the opportunity to wipe her feet on the stairs. "I stowed away on here a little over a month ago... n' once all hell broke loose, I jus'... wasn't too agreeable to the change in management, so they tossed me in here. It ain't terrible. I mean, they keep me fed, n' all, but it's only enough to remind me how hungry I am." She made an 'o' with her lips and dipped her chin, her shoulders tightening.

James quirked up his lips as he nodded, shrugging up his shoulders, then his hands before going back to his default, practiced Superman pose. "Yeah. They've been strange, that way. Some of the crew they tortured right on the deck in front of everyone, and others, they just... let loose in some other part of the ship. The intercom network's down, and it's not like we really get much of a chance to know every last part of the ship." His head cocked just a tad as he regarded Zofie, still fit, still lovely, but shaking ever-so-slightly from the reminder of her hunger. "... say. I'm gonna see if I can figure out a way out of here. We can hop an escape pod, and rocket off to some nice little rimworld, and I can treat you to a nice dinner. Sound good?"

Zofie kept her eyes away from him as he made his plea, a lock of pink across her cheek hiding their hollowness, the tedium of hearing it, before she turned back to face him. Her eyes crinkled as her smile went broad, close-lipped. If he had any bit of attention paid to it, her expression read as overwhelmingly sad behind it. "Yeah... that sounds real good."

"Great!" James brought up his hand in a victorious fist as he turned, reaching for the flashlight to start the search around the cargo bay. "Don't worry, Zofie. We'll get out of here in no time."

Before he had time to register, to notice, diamond bit about the size of a quarter floated up from Zofie's pocket, spinning in place... before firing forward. James simply felt a sudden thud at the base of his skull before his lights went out, his face still awash with hope and gusto as his body tumbled to the floor.

Zofie sighed as she raised her hand, letting the diamond bit float back into her grasp as she reached down to take James' arms and drag him down the steps. "I'm... sure you would've tried your best, but it wouldn't've been worth nothin'. S'what happened to Warden Bacall on that first day." She pulled him toward one of the hollowed out crates, dipping back into the darkness. "I jus' figured it'd be better for you to go out hopeful instead of sour..." She unzipped his jacket and tossed it aside, raising his arm toward her lips. "Plus... despair shocks the meat."

Once again, as it had for every week of the last six months, the sound of tearing flesh and crunching bone echoed from the cargo hold of the Makara.

3 October 2015 Willard Nursing Care, Charleston, South Carolina

"... Who in blazes are you?" Gaspar's glare toward the pink-haired, barefoot, bespectacled intruder carried a particular mix of scorn's furrowed brows, confusion's tension in the neck, and panic's back-and-forth darting of his eyes. He glanced from the woman to the emergency button next to his bed, standing stone still in the middle of his modest, yet cozy room.

"I'm uh..." Zofie closed her eyes and brought a hand to the back of her neck, her head dropping to a far enough angle that her glasses should have slipped off of her face. A single lock of hair brushed by her cheek as she crossed one ankle behind the other, looking up cordially, but still tensely, toward her grandfather. "I'm just here t'check up on ya, sir." She dipped in a curtsey, all of her teeth showing in a quick, yet tender grin.

Gaspar turned away from the emergency button by an inch, yet he still refused to keep his look toward the stranger as anything but askance and hard around the eyes. He raised a finger, slowly and close to his body, and moved it up and down in indication of her clothing. "You dress like a belly dancing clown who fell into a crayon factory. You look ridiculous."

A snort preceded Zofie's burst into a peal of laughter that she muffled with her palm, the opposite arm crossing over her middle. She caught her breath and nodded, her lips tight in an attempt to restrain her smile, yet her dimples firmly set in her cheeks. "I've heard somethin' to that effect, sure. But, I don't really dress for other people, so..."

"Hmph! You sound like my wife." He tossed his hand in the air dismissively as he puttered toward the door in small steps, reaching for the sturdy metal cane that rested next to it. Gaspar's hair had receded to a curly white peak atop his head, yet the hair that remained was still as wild as ever. Lines cut deeper into his skin, made paler from his indoor lifestyle, yet it still retained its base of rich brown. His eyes and his mouth were what remained the most salient change; the latter seemed slack beneath his bristly mustache, while the former teetered between vacancy and wild, perplexed glances. "I am going to get my lunch. I don't feel like talking to strangers today. Goodbye." He wasted no time in turning the corner and shuffling down the hall, emitting loud hails and rumbling chuckles as he passed staff and fellow residents.

She remained mummified in her own limbs as Gaspar passed, her giddy little smile eventually relaxing while her eyes went half-lidded. Her arms dropped before her legs uncrossed, settling her square enough to support the deep sigh and quiet sob in the back of her throat once he was out of earshot. "Goodbye, Baba." She took the long route out, taking to the quieter hallways on her path toward the nearest exit she could take without causing a stir.