theresnodoor | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

When you fight for three years, you get used to the aspects of it. The secret keeping. The sudden pounding rush of adrenaline. The constant thrum of fear under your skin. The exhaustion. The rage. The helplessness and the power.

There are different kinds of 'get used to,' though.

There's the kind where, free of those constraints, you can relax. It never leaves entirely, but it ebbs. You don't miss it exactly but you recognize that you could go back to it in a heartbeat, if you needed to - and you tell yourself you don't want to.

There's another kind. Less readily admitted to.

The kind where you relax immediately. And slowly, surely, the thrum under your skin comes back. But the fear has a different flavor this time around, more restless than anything else.

The nice thing is, the solution is obvious.

The bad thing is, it's a solution you can't admit to.

Rachel does a lot of things to channel that thrum. Waking at dawn. Gymnastics routines. Runs around the lake. Training with the punching bag. Reading with Tobias. Talking, talking, talking to people. Morphing for fun.

But they're only channels, and none of them for much purpose.

There's only one thing that's given her true relaxation, release, since Milliways.

An afternoon walk in Milliways' forest and Rachel finds herself standing before a tall rock face, more than a hill but not quite a mountain. An opening several feet taller than she is - a rock cave.

Carved into the stone, a symbol she won't readily forget.

"...Daedalus."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I'm assuming you are," Rachel says, casual.

Not quiet, not to herself. But without something else to focus on, she may have.

Whether or not something is real doesn't matter nearly as much as the question Do I have to deal with it?

Over by the table, there is not much. A very tiny bottle and a very tiny cookie. There are tags on each of them.

"Oh."

Her voice is dark and wary.

"You have got to be kidding me."

"Oh hey," says Mel, "a classic lit reference that even I get."

She scoops the bottle up in her hand and shakes the liquid inside it by her ear, listening to it slosh. Then she grabs the cookie in her other hand.

Rachel just eyes her for a moment.

And then starts looking for a tiny door.

Because if there is a tiny way out of here, Mel is not allowed to eat the keys.

...not all of them.

"Wait wait, there it is," Rachel snaps, pointing to the small round door in the small round room near the small round table - with the small round knob. "Don't eat all of those or I won't be able t-"

"Oh."

"Duh."

"Yeah, go ahead, eat 'em."

Mel eyes the things in her hand, and then eyes the door, and for a few seconds wonders if she really has to, because they would make great souvenirs.

Then, she looks to Rachel, looking lost.

"You remember which one is which?"

"...um."

Rachel frowns. It's been a while, but the movie was a constant favorite for her youngest sister. If only she'd paid better attention to it.

"...I think it's the bottle. But just try a little, to make sure."

"Wasn't planning on snarfing it," Mel informs her.

She puts the cookie in her pocket, and as an after thought, puts the tiny little key that was on the table in there as well.

Then she changes her mind and takes the key out and drops it on the floor. She has no idea what'll happen to her pants.

And she pulls the glass stopper out of the bottle and takes a sip.

"...ew."

There's another nose wrinkle here, if only for the word 'snarf.' Leads to all sorts of grunting, snuffling, pig-like connotations, should she ever see Mel at a meal.

While Mel goes about drinking gross things, Rachel checks the tiny door to see if that's the key is for. Otherwise, they're snagging things they don't really need and carrying them around.

She glances at Mel over her shoulder next. Honestly, she's only pretty sure about the whole liquid-equals-tiny-Mel thing and would really prefer to not be wrong here.

It tastes way too sweet. Like drinking runny cough syrup. Mel wonders if it should be mixed with gin or something.

She licks the sticky off her lips while trying not to think about the weird sensation that feels like her ankles and wrists really want to know what's up with her torso. She loses her balance briefly and stumbles back, now about two feet tall.

And fortunately for everyone watching, her clothes has adjusted accordingly.

"That was the short one," she says.

But she's still too big for the door. One more sip.

"Nice call."

It's the short one 'cause she's not tall, see. Mel is a deductive genius.

Rachel watches this, to be perfectly honest, with some jealousy. This probably isn't all that comfortable for Mel, but it's a lot more attractive than Rachel's smoothest morph.

"How's it feel?"

"Feels like I swallowed a vac and have it stuck on 'suck'," Mel says eloquently. She loses her step again when her feet are pulled up and ends up resting a hand on the floor to steady herself.

"How does your thing feel?"

Rachel started it.

"It doesn't, really."

So there, Mel. Rachel will answer your questions and you can just take it.

She's still watching, too, head tilted curiously. "It just sounds horrible. The only physical part is some serious vertigo on anything that has to shrink first."

"Yeah," Mel says, standing upright again, and eyeing the door to see if she would fit through.

She looks like she might.

And she turns up to look at Giant Rachel, whose ankles are now most of Mel's vision.

"You coming down?"

She's starting to smirk, looking down at her. Small and puny. Even with her scythe and superior skill, Rachel could simply lift her foot and-

Just like-

When it-

She takes a step back.

Or maybe she stumbled.

"Yeah." Small. Almost breathless.

"Yeah, I'm coming."

Small. Small and able to get through the door, preferably able to fight.

Mel sees something happen, and her face softens.

Sort of.

Becomes less hard, anyway. Because she recognised something and... well, Mel would never talk about that stuff out loud.

Instead she turns and tries the door.

Keerrrr-ack

Turns out they didn't need a key.

Go figure.

Small. Not too small. Something pointy, or-

Ooh.

There's some vertigo with this morph. But at least it starts out pretty.

Rachel's hair turns glossy and black, shorter, thicker. Growing in a wave down her back, then spreading over her entire body, over the black clothing she wears. And as she starts to shrink, blue eyes bright, a single white stripe starts at her nose and flows back over her head, down her neck, all the way to her tail.

See, she has a tail now.

And shortly, there is a fat little skunk waddling along behind Mel.

And now she is about the same height as Mel, who looks directly into that fuzzy little face and grins the grin of a city girl who's never heard of a skunk.

"You'll eat me if I try and ride you, won't you?"

<Go for it,> Rachel allows, sounding utterly amused by the question. She waddles a little closer to snuffle at the door. <You're about the size of a grasshopper, but it knows you're not food.>

Mel looks down at herself.

"Kinda giant ass grasshoppers you have in your world?" she asks rhetorically.

But they've got a door in front of them, and Mel has her hand on the now broken handle.

"Alright, let's see what's behind the next one."

Waddling occurs. No one can really waddle gracefully. It's kind of funny.

It's a lot less funny if you tick off this particular creature, though.

Outside the door, there is...

Grass. Cool earth. Tall trees. A sunny day and a warm breeze.

All rather obviously normal-sized.

<...that was pretty anticlimactic.>

Mel stands just outside the door, scratching the back of her neck as she looks up at the relatively giant landscape.

"What a waste of shrinking juice."

Mel already has the thing drawn and in her hand, before she pauses.

"...why?"

<Because I want to be human and I don't think anyone's going to mimic a punching bag long enough for me to hit them.>

She wasn't really expecting a yes to that question anyway.

The demorph is slow, despite the lack of back-up here. She's trying to be cautious, for once, especially if Mel wants to play with being small for a while yet.

Mel shrugs.

"It shrank with me, though," she says, holding it up to show.

But - because Rachel's big and this would be awkward, she takes a cookie bite while the demorphing process is going on.

"Wragh!"

She balloons up in all directions, staggering again with the disorienting feeling of throwing up through her limbs.

When she stops, she looks down at her arms.

"How do I know if this is the same height I started?"

"Augh!"

Jumping back, Rachel's eyes are on that scythe that grew with Mel. "Maybe you should wave a huge knife around! That'll help you figure it out! Jeez, Mel."