Tag: Pawn and Storm

Chapter Nineteen

The next day, once everything was arranged and it was starting to approach sunset, I went home, for the first time in a while now. It felt…strange, being there again. It was familiar, but at the same time felt somehow alien. It wasn’t just that so much of my stuff had already been moved out; that definitely played a role, but there was also an element that felt more intrinsic. I felt out of place, like I didn’t belong here anymore. I’d lived in this house for fifteen years, but tonight I had the same sort of derealization that I sometimes felt in unfamiliar places, like I was moving through a dream.

You can’t step in the same river twice. The world looks different depending on where you’re standing, and I’d gone a hell of a long way in the past week, though what direction this path led was impossible for me to guess. Regardless, the view from here was different, and my own house now looked like a strange, alien environment.…

Chapter Eighteen

Okay, I see why you hate these things.

I snorted and pulled Raincloud more fully onto my lap. She wasn’t exactly allowed to be there—pets were supposed to be in carriers unless they were service animals—but the bus driver had not been able to resist a puppy who knew very well how to exploit her intrinsic cuteness to get what she wanted. Part of it, at least. There’s a lot to hate.

On some level, I supposed I was being unfair. Public transportation was a vital resource, and from what I’d heard Pittsburgh’s bus system was actually pretty good by American standards. The fact that using it was miserable for me really wasn’t their fault. I got sensory overload easily, didn’t handle crowds well, and was prone to collapse in a convulsing heap if I wasn’t careful with those things. I also had serious emotional issues around the topic. When I was a kid, I really hadn’t been equipped to understand the details and context of my mother’s death. I just knew that she’d gotten sick because of poison on the subway and it was probably part of why she died. Hadn’t left me with great feelings on the topic.…

Chapter Seventeen

Nothing much happened on Christmas.

I was, on the whole, glad for it. In part, this was because it meant no catastrophes happened. But there was no celebration either, and I was glad for that part, too. I didn’t love the holiday; it didn’t haunt me the way it did Pepper, but holidays in general weren’t my favorite thing, and this one in particular I didn’t care for. There were several sets of moods associated with Christmas—rampant materialism and conspicuous consumption, family with the implication of traditional values and structures, and Christian theology with overtones of orthodoxy and martyrdom.

The first of those I just didn’t like much, and I could acknowledge that part of that was my relatively privileged position. It’s easy to disdain materialism when you don’t lack for the material, and I’d been coasting my whole adult life on an inherited trust fund. The second, well, family was not something that had good associations for me. I was hardly going to be calling my relatives to wish them well. And for the last, when a large portion of Christian sects would place me in Hell from birth as a demon, a large portion of the rest would put me in Hell because I slept around and wasn’t picky about gender, and most of the remainder would be convinced by the blood on my hands?

Yeah. Not a fan. I didn’t hate the religion, didn’t go out of my way to antagonize them or anything. But I wasn’t fond of it, either. My usual policy was to leave them the hell alone, and I appreciated the faith most when they returned the favor. I didn’t celebrate their holidays.…

Chapter Sixteen

peppersghostinthemachine: morning. how’s the vixengoth?

I laughed at that nickname. I laughed hard enough that Capinera, who was sitting on the other side of the room reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, was looking over at me curiously. EmeraldKeychain: Okay, vixengoth is pretty good, I’ll have to pass that one along. She’s doing well, and remains insatiable. Also, referencing Pepper’s ghost? Seriously? Also, you’re up early.

I wasn’t. I was up late. Though in my defense, I had caffeine on hand now and was largely nocturnal by preference. Sitting around on a laptop until dawn was pretty standard behavior from me.

peppersghostinthemachine: thank you, thank you, i owe it all to the pernatal toxin exposure. also i haven’t slept.

EmeraldKeychain: Again?

peppersghostinthemachine: yup. i never sleep on christmas eve.…

Chapter Fifteen

“Yes,” I said, eyeing the large man standing behind me warily. “I do mind, but I have a feeling you’re going to do it anyway, so let’s cut to the chase.”

“Great.” His voice sounded distinctly wrong as he said that, an inflection pattern that just didn’t quite work.

He did indeed proceed to sit down, taking the chair Kadir had recently vacated. His movements as he sat were a little off, too, not quite how human bodies moved. Between those and the really unusual size, I would have known he wasn’t human at a glance. I could also feel it, his aura completely lacking the shimmering feeling of humanity and instead consisting of an unpleasantly musky smell and the sound of drunken laughter. But this wasn’t even a convincing enough guise to fool most humans on more than a cursory level.

“So given you’re now sitting down,” I said, as Saori slid her chair over slightly towards me, putting the table between her and the new arrival. “What the fuck do you people want, anyway?”…

Chapter Fourteen

Saori’s car was a disaster.

This was not news. It was, in fact, one of the first things I had noted about her, and it had continued to hold true since. “Saori’s car is a glorious disasterpiece composed of the most bizarre, disturbing, and confusing shit you will have seen today” was just a maxim I had learned about interacting with her. As with most such maxims, it hadn’t taken long for this lesson to sink in.

What I now learned was that this rule applied more extensively than I’d quite realized. She’d had this car less than forty-eight hours, and it was already every bit as strange as the last. She had her usual array, the things that never varied: Emergency gear, medical kit, dice and cards, acetylene cutting torch and sledgehammer, spray paint and rope. Those things were in the car because they were useful, and as a result they stayed there.

But she had also accumulated quite a bit of truly strange shit already. To sit down, I had to move a bag containing about twenty mood rings, a toaster which appeared to be operated by hand-crank, and a plastic box with dozens of restaurant coupons. Being a fool who never seemed to learn, I gave in to curiosity and examined the latter somewhat before putting it in back. All of the coupons were from other cities, I was pretty sure, and it looked at a glance like they were all expired.…