RODLOX FILE 3
summary "people say 'saying don't make it so'...but what if it did? and if it ever does, who decides who is real?"
done in the style of The Outer Limits
an answer to all the Challenge items and quotes for this week
anybody who asks may archive it
~~~~~~~~
She'd tracked him all the way out to here, a backwater canyon she'd passed once or twice; one with no place to hide once in it, no water or anything else to eat or drink; in short, utterly worthless. The Queen was ready to re-phrase that to 'utterly worthless to anyone but the Capitan.' What was he doing?
She had been aware, ever since being locked in a cave with him, of certain feelings for Marcus. While not exactly Love, they also hadn't been Hatred or Revulsion. She couldn't find a good way of categorizing them, and thus couldn't just shelve them - and she also couldn't talk to Marta about it either.
It was that curious concern that had brought her here, to learn what he was doing.
What Captain Grisham was doing, and had been doing for the entire time he had been tracked, was to open a passageway. His skin was wearing heavy on him, and he was ready for a vacation, even if there was a report to make.
So intently was his focus that he did not detect the Queen of Swords' approach, though he should have - and normally would have been able to. And it very likely would have been better for all concerned if he had.
To Tessa's eyes, what came out of the space Grisham was reaching into - was that a pocket of something? - was a wave of colours. And even 'wave' failed to describe it, lacking a defined edge, or foam. It was colours without solid lines, no lines at all.
Grisham had vanished.
Moments later, Tessa too was engulfed by the lineless.
~~~
Absorbtion, soaking, bleaching, transferring, drifting. They all worked to describe Grisham's world, the plane he was on now. He was home.
Having dropped the human shell upon re-entering this realm, he could feel his mind expanding back to normal parameters, touching the others of his kind, gentle taps on their peripheries after so long away. The delicate scent of the metaphors, the tangy wiffs of the associatives, the chattering cry of the similies.
Here, in this place, in his native bodyless form, Grisham was blind of visual sights; but he could feel conceptions trudging through the groundless clouds that made up his world. He could likewise feel thoughts, and - speaking of thoughts -
Feeling something on the edge of his mind, a someone who had been pulled in with him, Grisham quickly constructed a simacrum to hold the stowaway for long enough . . .
END
By Rodlox
Babnol@hotmail.com
an all-new fanfic, where Tessa and the Doctor might, I repeat , might become -
INTRANSITIVE -- 1. Of or being a verb that indicates a complete action without being accompanied by a direct object, such as 'sit' or 'lie', and that in English does not form a passive. 2. An intransitive verb.
INTERREGNUM -- 1. An interval of time between the close of a sovereign's reign and the accession of the normal or legitimate successor. 2. Any period during which a state is without a permanent ruler. 3. Any pause or interuption in continuity.
INSISSATE -- To thicken, as by evaporation; make or become worse.
disclaimer: The Queen Of Swords and all series characters belong to CBS and the producers and the
actors who portray them. I only own the original character in here.
feedback: yes, please!
summary: this list doesn't seem to do oceanside fanfics anymore . . . time to change that. [with the
response to Challenge 39's words and quote- see above]
~~~~~~
"Plac'd in this isthmus of a middle state
"A being darkly wise and rudely great"
~~~~~~
The high cry of a baby caught the attention of the Queen of Swords, interupting her midday siesta sunning herself on a wide flat rock. Getting to her feet, she ran towards the sound, towards the high and long, low and sad, wail of an infant in pain. She ran both with a sense of justice and and an instinctive maternal protectiveness.
Over this rock, under that one, around that sharp-edged cluster. The Queen wove her way through the boulder-rocks of varying sizes which littered this portion of the beach.
Run and run, over and around, splashing bootted feet in tidepools and lapping surf.
Coming around a corner, an outcropping of cliff whose base also sloped upwards, the Queen looked down at the source of the wails.
The crier was shaped like a dolphin, though the details were -- wrong. The site of the blowhole didn't match what she remembered from the captive dolphin in Monterrey, the fins seemed more angular, and the tail was twisted the wrong way.
"What -?" she started to ask, but was interupted by another baby cry from it's mouth. Two rows of conical teeth lined those narrow jaws.
She realized what was wrong: the tide was going out, and this not-dolphin was trapped, not even in a tidepool.
Descending as quickly as she safely could, the Queen then went to as close as she thought was safe, considering what to do. The skin of the not-dolphin seemed to be drying out, even cracking in a few places on the upper fins.
Pulling her red sash out of it's place, Tessa went to the sea to soak it. Re-approaching the creature, she told it cautiously -- much as she'd try to soothe a wild horse -- "Shh, sshh, it's okay; I'm going to help you," taking baby steps closer and closer to it; it didn't move against her.
Tessa began scrubbing.
As time went by, and thinking of a good name, Tessa remembered what she'd heard the Anglophones name their dogs: "Dover," she dubbed it.
While rubbing Dover's sides with a damp red sash, Tessa thought to herself. "I wish you could talk," Tessa finally said.
"What would you like to hear?" the not-dolphin inquired. "Any rhyne in particular?"
"You can - you can talk?" Tessa asked, astonished and carefully taking a step back.
"Crickey, you right," Dover replied. "Had the talent all along."
"Then why didn't you call for help before?"
"Hmm, let me think. How many fingers am I holding up?"
Tessa looked at his fins. "None; you don't have any."
"Quite right."
Eyeing her sponge bath patient -- the first sponge bath she'd ever given, to boot -- Tessa/Queen asked, "What were you doing that got you here?"
"I seem to be suffering from an insissation of the water supply," Dover told her. "A shame, really, having any interregnum to my swimming."
"What?"
A sigh through the blowholes. "I was caught when the tide went out, and now a human is assisting me."
~~~~~
much much later:
Tessa Alvarado was sketching something as she waited in the pueblo, waiting for Marta to gather more herbs from Market. Dover, to be precise.
As he was passing by, doctor Helm could not help but see what Tessa was drawing. "Quite a fine Ichthosaur, senorita," he praised her.
"Doctor?" she asked, wondering if he was using some sort of lewd English word . . . even Grisham had not done that. She hoped he wasn't.
"What you were drawing," he clarified. "My cousin's found a number of them out on Dover, by the White Cliffs."
"Really?"
"Quite right. Tell you what," as if this'd only now occurred to him, "why don't I buy you lunch, and I can tell you about them, okay?"
Tessa remembered Dover's final words to her: 'While you are certainly intransitive,' Dover mentioned once he was in water two human bodies deep, 'the real question is are you a goal without a cause, or a cause without a goal?' With that, he dove beneath the waves . . . leaving her all alone.
END
{yes, i know his suggestion violates Spanish decency for the time period...}....