come_sailaway | [OPEN] September catch-all

Who: Nimona and YOU!
What: Recovering and regressing (thanks to the flowers)
When: September
Where: All over the ship
Warnings: Game-typical angst; more warnings will be added if needed

(1) a feather on the air

Nimona doesn't spend much time as a human right after the big tournament. It still makes her itch. So there are a whole lotta pink animals flitting around the ship for a while -- a rat here, a bear there, a lizard sunning itself on a railing, a rabbit gnawing industriously on the nearest piece of wooden furniture. An enormous whale breaching off the starboard bow of the ship. Maybe an octopus sipping a milkshake by the pool, as it reads a library book with one tentacle and draws mustaches all over the pictures with another.

(And a horse probably thirty percent of the time. She's still gonna play that long game, even if she's pretty sure her cover got blown when she freaked out all over Edgar.)

(2) dreams are sweet until they're not

Within a week and a half, though, she's feeling okay enough to shift back to human for a while. She's got heists to commit, after all!

Well. "Heists." Going through the motions of paying for things kinda puts a damper on it. And honestly, her heart's not really into the attempt, anyway, as she sweeps an entire rack of personalized souvenir keychains into a sand bucket and slouches toward the side of the ship.

Threading her legs through the lower bar of the railing, she takes a seat, folds one arm over the top railing, and starts listlessly chucking the keychains into the ocean one by one. This isn't brooding. This is a good old-fashioned proper mope.

But hey, maybe you can get a keychain with your name on it if she doesn't empty the entire bucket first?

(3) i remember fields of flowers

And then the flowers start to sprout.

They're... actually kind of pretty? Not that Nimona would admit it, but seeing them unfold from the decks and the ceiling cheers her up a little. There's something about the tiny blue and purple ones in particular that she really likes -- enough to draw her closer one day while she's wandering around.

A little self-consciously, she leans in for a sniff.

And then, jolting back with a gasp, she vanishes in a rush of pink light that immediately darts out of view.

[Nimona's been hit by forget-me-nots! She's regressed to her earliest days of running wild in the forest, before she met any humans; she's more timid, will appear much younger if you spot her, and does not have a cynical bone in her body. Relevant (spoilery) scene from the movie is here.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Man. That is like a whole dragon's horde worth of cold hard cash dragging the poor girl down.

(It's so shiny.)

Nimona leans on the railing, studying the scene, and pulls her bottom lip between her teeth as she shakes her head. "Yikes," she declares, solemnly. "That's a lotta stuff. Here -- "

She stretches down a hand, waving it back and forth in the direction of the basket. It's cool! She's got you! What else would someone like Nimona do but help out of the sheer, earnest goodness of her heart?

Grace strains mightily, trying to pull herself up into Nimona's reach. ~Please be careful. I cannot drown and I do not like the idea of starving to death at the bottom of the hot dog sea crushed beneath all this weight.~

Oh, hey, weird bubble-voice in her head! Cool.

"It's okay, I gotcha!" Nimona hefts herself a bit farther over the railing, legs kicking up off the ground behind her. "...Though yeah, what's with the hot dogs in the ocean?"

(FOCUS, NIMONA.)

~I am given to understand that the gentleman Max Maximum, High King of All Maxes, Lord of the Limit, had an incident with an improbable number of sausages which are now rudely displayed in public at all times.~

Reach Grace, reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaach -

Nimona may be from a PG canon, but look: there is no way a phrase like an improbable number of sausages rudely displayed at all times WOULDN'T be funny, no matter what the MPAA has to say about it. She snickers, swings her feet a liiiittle higher behind her, streeeeeeeetches down --

Her hand meets Grace's.

"Gotcha!"

For about a quarter of a second, before Nimona topples over the railing.

There's another half a second of freefall, punctuated by a yelp from Nimona, before two giant dragon's wings explode from her back with a FWOOMP. She's way stronger than she looks, but it still takes two hands and a bit of straining to arrest their fall; Grace's legs are just barely skimming the ocean's surface when they stop, Nimona's broad wings flapping above them.

"Gotcha," she wheezes again with a big, fang-y grin.

So there's good news and net neutral news. The net neutral is that Grace is shedding weight as fast as she acquires it now, thanks to having few pockets and being jostled very, very hard.

The good news is she's looking up at Nimona in pure delight.

~You have ways of scale and fang, like the Professor! Amazing!~

The secret bad news is I'm gonna flip a coin after I go to bed tonight to see if Grace assumes that turning into a reptile is a symptom of academia.

"Yeah!" says Nimona, laughing. "Got a lot more than that, too. Hang on -- "

With a grunt, she hauls them both higher, wings flapping madly to keep them aloft. After a few more seconds of straining, she manages to get them level with the deck, then above the railing, before toppling back on solid decking with a crash-thump-jinglejinglejingle.

"Whew, you weren't kidding about the weight," she gasps, still grinning broadly. "You good?"

~I believe most traditions of the living would hold me to be evil.~

Nimona perks up further.

"You too, huh?" she says, as chipper as if she just met someone wearing the same band t-shirt in a crowd of office workers. "Metal. High-five."

She holds up a hand for the requested five.

Grace stares at the hand for a long time, giving it her Full Attention, before slowly, carefully, poking it in the center of the palm with a single finger.

"C'mon, don't leave me hang... ing..."

The poke impacts, and Nimona deflates slightly like a balloon pricked by a needle.

"No high-fives where you're from, huh. Okay! One more time." She keeps her palm upright and wiggles her fingers. "Hold your hand up like this."

Grace obeys with an expression of extreme curiosity. She is willing to be patient.

~You say the living disfavor you as well? Are you their slayer, as I have been?~

Congratulations on your new friend Nimona! She's a slasher villain.

"Sometimes," says Nimona cheerily, as if Grace hasn't said anything more bizarre than I like puppies. "Not too much, though. Mostly they just don't like me 'cause of who I am."

She slaps her open palm against Grace's: hard enough to make a little noise, but gentle enough that it shouldn't sting.

"You do a lot of murder?"

Grace stares at her palm for a moment, then directly at Nimona's hand, with an expression of Extreme Analysis. Despite this, and, for that matter, despite the fountaining wealth that is starting to get dangerously piled around her again, she decides to answer the question: ~I am not certain how much is a lot when it comes to the slaying of the living. But I spent...time...imprisoned alongside them, in a place with an unsettling similarity to this one. Death had no grip; to die was merely to be returned to one's prison, and my role therein was to hunt the living and end them in terror. Here...I am not in that role.~

"Oh."

Murder: much less cool when you're being forced into it. Nimona winces, but rallies, saying, "I guess it's a little better that we're not forced-forced into murdering each other here? Like, nobody's gonna drag you out of your room and not let you go back until you stab somebody! But, uh. Yeah."

She uses her arm to sweep some of the growing gold pile toward herself, giving Grace a little more room. (Totally the only reason she's doing it! Yes.)

Grace follows Nimona's example and uses her harpoon to sweep more of the gold off the side of the ship. This is a much better idea! The reptile woman is wise. ~Do not despair, learned one. There have been chatterers here that have needed to learn respect. I remain quite willing to slay the living, but...I would like to do so as myself, and be seen as myself if it happens, rather than as a rampaging thing. If that...makes any earthly sense? The power of words is new to me.~

"Oh, yeah, that totally makes sense," says Nimona as she casually pockets one of the shinier diamonds in the rapidly-growing pile. "If you're gonna do a murder, it's no fun if it's because someone else told you to do it. Like, no thanks, if I'm gonna stab a guy it'll be because I want to stab him, y'know?"

YOU CAN'T TELL NIMONA WHAT TO DO, SHE'S NOT A PART OF YOUR SYSTEM

~Yes. Yes, precisely! For far too long I have not been considered a person with a person's wants or needs, and instead have been decreed this or that or thusly. That I am a dead thing, a monster like in the fanciful stories of sailors...I do not wish to return to being spoken of as if I act without volition simply because of this.~

Grace blundering face-first into Nimona's issues like -

[OPEN] September catch-all

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Said With Strained Desperation

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Damn Canon Characters And Their One-Liners

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