the compass shifted [OPEN]

[allsongs]

Date & Time: 1/24-1/30
Location: wilderness
Characters: Simmaeri the big honkin' dino-thing and you!!
Summary: WELCOME TO MAHOU JURASSIC PARK
Warnings: No clue, just a giant creature atm



Simmaeri took slow and careful turns then. Lumbering, methodical steps from massive, heavy legs made the closest scenery quiver. The feeling of stony, withered ground was slow in processing, much slower in understanding; it was such an unusual addition to the mix of already unusual things bombarding her senses. She could see no open expanses of white or gray, smell no fresh ice or snow, and hear only whispers of wind, gusting more like little gasps, choking on the chemicals mixed into the air itself. It stung her nostrils, made her eyes itch unpleasantly.

This was what her brothers and sisters had sought and embraced? It made no sense. It was as empty as it was unkind to her in that moment, and startled creatures quickly fled before she had chance to turn her head and regard them. Those, at least, would have been exciting; she did not know any creatures other than herself; seeing something new would, perhaps, make up for this startling change.

Either way, she lifted her head back up (not too high; the stinging seemed worse higher up) and let out another long, low sound, rumbling up from her neck and out through a snapping of her jaws. It filled the air and soon passed, and she waited well after the echo for a reply.

Was she really so far away that none could hear her back in the north? The terrain had changed so suddenly...what odd, foreign magic had done this?

Am I lost now? How strange this is.

Comments

[whatsupcroc]

Collette found herself laughing, imagining herself the only human in the world. What a frightening, lonely thought! So improbable too, but telling of what sort of world Simmaeri was from. Humanity was important to humanity. In the grand scheme of things, they were just another part of an endlessly expanding universe.

"I'm a human being, and I'm not the only one. There's millions, billions of us in the world. I'm not sure how many there are here now, but we've got a half million or so in total in the city of Exsilium. A city," she explained, "Is where human beings live together, and work together, and eat and sleep and create together. Can you see those weird looking rocks way off in the distance?"

She pointed back the way she'd come, toward the far off, perhaps impossible to see hints of civilization. She forgets from what heights one must stand to see the hint of anything that once was habitable.

"I'm not sure if you can see them from here."

[allsongs]

Raw magic made those words understood in an instant save for those her magic had yet to know in her time. Humans. City. Exsilium. Million, billion... Foreign, musical in the way they were presented...how would Simmaeri even begin to know how to speak them herself? She could not mimic the sounds the little Collette made – not with simple sound in the air. Not with such a big mouth, big throat, and big, untrained tongue.

It made her envious, excited and envious. She wanted to know how to do that, too. Make those sounds words, give them meaning to herself and the little creature called a human being.

The gesture, too, was a new one, and Simmaeri only understood to look when the words came with it. Hesitant to leave Collette's level, she paused before raising her head high, stretching out and tilting an eye in the direction pointed to. Hazy shapes. An expanse. Flecks of light, perhaps? It was unclear, and the longer Simmaeri stared, the more her eyes began to sting.

I do not see far, she admitted with a low note in her nose. It gave way to a sharp exhale, sending frosty mist into the air to clear her eyes and nose, small flecks of water making their way down to the grown well before her head could return. I do not know those words...those words you use. I cannot make them. What are they? They are new.

...There are more of you? Many?

[whatsupcroc]

Watching Simmaeri is like watching the paleobotanist and Professor Grant stare up at the bracheaosaurus in Jurassic Park. Only that dinosaur had been eating leaves and definitely hadn't been talking.

It made this all the more surreal -- and wonderful.

"Lots more of us," she agreed. "Which words do you mean? You say that a lot," she began, trailing off. How to explain to a giant dinosaur that when she's not a giant dinosaur, she still asks the same thing?

What are they? I do not know those words...

"Do you know the word for song? For singing?"

[allsongs]

The sound alone that escaped her wasn't anywhere near what "song" ought to be, but it wrapped around the rest of her communication, her thoughts and will all sent together in a rumble and a wish.

I know to sing, yes. I have always sung, as have others. But it did raise a curious question, and her head did tilt slightly as she looked at Collette. Your kind do as well?

[whatsupcroc]

"Yeah, all sorts of singing. But what does yours sound like?" Collette tilted her own head in the same direction as her large friend. "Is it like how you talk to me now?" Strange and heavy, in a way the Andalites might have either loved or hated.

[allsongs]

No.

Simmaeri slowly lifted her head high up, nearly stretching her neck to its full length. Another snort sent a small puff of mist into the air, soothing the sudden sting that came with the change of air quality.

When she "sang," it was with a massive bellow that came from her belly, with a tone that seemed to rise and fall the longer it went on. Her neck swayed slowly, faintly altering the volume in places. It went on for a length of time, rumbling across the landscape, calling out for others like her much sweeter than the trumpeting that first drew the eagle to her. Nothing like what she had sung in a human shape – impossible to emulate – but a song all the same.

[whatsupcroc]

Craning her head back to watch Simmaeri's progress, she held her breath. When the sound began, when the singing started, she had to remind herself to exhale.

Collette tried to frame what she heard in words she knew. Nothing felt appropriate: in the end, she decided Simmaeri's song was heavy. Large and long, calling for an echo of something within that was almost bittersweet.

"Beautiful," she breathed more than said, rubbing her arms vigorously with her hands to calm an odd onset of chills. "Totally not what I had in mind, but amazing."

[allsongs]

You do not know it?

Still within the frame of a world where everything knew all she knew, Simmaeri's words took a curious tone once again. Slowly, her head descended to Collette's level, giving a loud sniff and a loud exhale through her nose.

How else can you call your kind from afar?

[whatsupcroc]

"Trust me, we have got a whole bunch of different ways. Radios, telephones, cell phones, tablets, a few people who're psychics, smoke signals back in the old west, letters we can still send now. People used messenger pigeons at one point!"

Her answer started wandering, going for the more abstract and absurd ways of calling people over a distance. "I guess we've got megaphones too, and some musical instruments are meant to have sound carry. If you know what a call is supposed to signal, then it works as a way of calling people to you. Whistles do that too," she added, lifting a hand to give in to her temptation to play at touching Simmaeri's massive head. "Mind if I touch you?"

[allsongs]

You may.

But she wondered if she would even feel it, herself. Collette, so small...with the magic to change shapes so smoothly. What would a hand feel to a hide thick against a frozen north?

Touch mattered to her people, however. Simply asking made Collette less an oddity and more a...distorted familiarity.

[whatsupcroc]

Collette reached out, running her hand over Simmaeri's skin. She's not sure what she expected -- she's not sure how to describe what she feels now. She let her hand still, getting a sense of the immensity of the thinking, feeling person (dinosaur, but person) before her.

Collette broke into another smile, stroking her friend's face. "Can you feel that?" she asks, fascinated if for once, someone was in her place. Not numbness in this case, but a sort of thick enough skin as to make a touch like hers fail to register, but closer than most people not likewise paralyzed or born with an improper connection from pain receptors in their epidermis to their nervous system at large.

[allsongs]

Simmaeri slowed her breath in an attempt to better focus on the anticipation of such a tiny touch, but it bore no result, imagined or otherwise. Disappointing, in a way, though she knew it was only sensible. She wanted to better know the strange magic and nature of Collette, wanted a touch to open those answers to her. She was, in a lot of ways, too ravenous to know the things that drew her interest.

No, I cannot, she said, her massive eyelid drawing down heavily nonetheless. But I see you, and I can tell.

[whatsupcroc]

Collette considers what that says. "I know what that's like," she admits after a moment, expression relaxing into something that contemplates the giant before her. Her thoughts are quiet, then loud again in her own mind.

She wondered, and so she asked.

"Would you be able to feel another someone like you?"

[allsongs]

Yes.

The eye opened up again, pupil dilating to focus once more on small Collette.

To feel the weight of one another is to know we are present, mind and body. When one wonders too long what it is to be, we draw near and remember not to be lost alone.

[whatsupcroc]

"If you wanted," she offered after a moment considering the immensity of one eye, "I could become something like you for a little while. If you need to feel grounded in the present again."

But she's not sure, waiting before offering an explanation. Simmaeri saying no from the start wouldn't necessitate an explanation.

[allsongs]

Change, she said, her throat rumbling a sound. As you had changed before? That tiny, flying thing...

[whatsupcroc]

"Yeah," she admitted. "Like that, except... it'd be to something that smells and looks like you. Only it'd be me, and kind of a version of your body. Which is weird for a lot of people."

Sensibly weird, all things considered.

[allsongs]

There was a lengthy, groaning sound in Simmaeri's throat as she pondered this. Collette's words were strange more in sound than in substance; she knew of the strange powers and debts few of her kind had taken for their own. What had happened to them thereafter remained a mystery.

Show me this magic, she said at last, drawing her head away a bit, as though distance would give her a better view.

[whatsupcroc]

"I'd have to touch you again." It was a rule that wasn't a rule, since it'd been tossed out the window for logistical reasons, but one that feels like its closer to respect these days. "When I concentrate on someone I touch, I learn how to be like them. And then I can turn into them."

Simplified and distilled down from a lesson in genetics Collette barely understood, it made more sense this way. No way was she going to spend time debating if it was magic or if it wasn't. Technology that behaved like magic might as well be magic.

[allsongs]

It was a strange kind of magic, Simmaeri thought. But then, why should she not believe? Wasn't it part of the dreams many of her own kind had spun? To change – to truly change. To be something new. A frightening concept. What would it do to Collette? Would she be Simmaeri?

She wouldn't know by hesitating. Perhaps, she thought quickly, she would be her, and teach her to speak those words. And for that reason, Simmaeri's head drew close again, her breath still filled with a chill.

I would very much like to see this, she said, mixed with a murmuring rumble. This trick, she thought. Show me.

[whatsupcroc]

Collette reached out, this time concentrating on Simmaeri in a way different than before. Six seconds of a lull that would come over her gargantuan friend if the morphing technology worked.

"You'll want to move back," she said after the fact. "I'll be needing room to get up to your full size. I can't really walk on my own," she confessed off hand. Matter of fact and not bothering to slide into a further explanation, she waited for Simmaeri to either move, or have a whole lot of dinosaur in close, immediate, tangled proximity before long.