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

[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.