C'mon now Tess...
What? You're serious about this? No! Forget it! You cant mak-Ow!
I can, and I am. Now I'm not gonna stop tweaking your wing until you do this!
Fine...where should I start...?
Howabout your name...
Fine...My name is Tess...and I'm an alcoholic...
Tess!
What? C'mon it was funny!
No, it wasn't. Now tell people what you look like, please.
Whatever. um.....What do I look like?
Tess...knock it off. The more trouble you give me, the longer this takes.
Fine....I'm around five-foot five and my weight is none of your damn business. My hair is black and my eyes are red...most of the time.
You might want to explain that better...most of the time?
My eye color is a tell for my moods. When I'm calm, they're red. When I'm irritated, or plotting, they brighten to ruby. Anger is crimson, and pure unbridled fury is scarlet. On the odd chance that I'm scared, my eyes are pink, the paler the shade, the more freaked out I am. Rose is reserved for when I'm...um....looking at someone I have feelings for....
Anything else for how you look?
Oh, yeah I have tiny wings, a tail, and horns growing out of my head. No joke, in case you cant already tell, I'm not human, not fully anyway...
That leads nicely into my next question, What's your history?
Well, I was born...
Wait, start with your parents first.
Do I have to?
Kinda, yeah. Your parentage is a huge part of who, and what you are.
Fine. My mother's name is Samantha, and when she was nineteen she left her hometown to be a roadie to this rockstar named Vanto. What she didn't know was that Vanto was really an incubus. Vanto seduced my mother, then when she told him that she was pregnant with me, he dumped her in some po-dunk little town out in the middle of bible country. Samantha was completely stranded there, her family refused to take her back, so she was forced to have me there.
So just to clarify, Vanto is your father, correct?
Yeah, he was alright.
Okay...Now you can pick up on where you were before I interrupted.
Thank you...now where was I? Ah yes...Well, like I said, I was born in the middle of bible country, and believe me, the locals had it out for me from the start.
What do you mean?
Well, if you were an ultra-conservative bible thumper, and some strange hippy woman comes into your town and gives birth to a red-eyed baby out of wedlock wouldn't you want the child doused in holy water and then stoned?
...wow...
yeah, that's what I thought. Anyway, Mom named me 'Tess' after one of the nurses in the hospital
That's sweet...
Eh...not really...She just threw all the names of the nurses into a bedpan and pulled out 'Tess' at random.
Your mother sounds like a really...unique person.
You could say that again, I guess. To me she was just my mom.
So you have fond memories of her?
Yup. She was real smart too. Her folks were rich, so she had all that schooling, but she left it to follow my father.
I see...lets move along. You've covered your parents, and how you were born. DO you remember your first five years?
Not all of it. No one does.
Of course, but I meant what do you remember?
...my first memory was sitting at the counter of our kitchen. We lived in a little...I guess 'cottage' would be the right word. My mom was making pancakes, and I was dipping my fingers in the batter, and Mom was pretending to smack me with the spatula.
How old were you, do you think?
Maybe three.
Alrigh' then. Anything else?
I remember watching the cartoons with all the cats. I cant remember the name of the show now though.Oh, and the whole 'Sunday routine'
'Sunday Routine'?
Yeah. Every Sunday afternoon, after church, the pastor would show up on our doorstep and try and talk my mom into letting me be 'schooled' I'd always hide behind the bathroom door and peek though the crack at him and my mom squabble.
I assume we're not talking about normal school then?
You'd be right. He was trying to talk her into giving me private Sunday school lessons, and my mom told him off every single time that she had the right not to practice his religion, and so did I. Now that I look back at it, she may've been a Wicca...or Neopagan, or whatever they call it nowadays, I don't care.
Alright then, anything else aught of interest, before you started school, I mean?
Not that I can think of, aside from school.
Alright, what do you remember from ages six to ten?
I remember my first day of kindergarten...
And?
I hated it.
Really?
Yeah. I didn't fit in with the other kids. I didn't know how to act, and their mommies an' daddies tol' them to stay away from me, so I had nobody to play with. The teacher was local, and so she knew that I was a b*****d. The fact that my eyes were red were no help.It didn't get any better as I got older
Really?
Really. When I was seven years old, my wings sprouted. I was at school, and my back was hurting like you would never believe. When I went to the nurse, she didn't believe me, an' sent me back to class. They finally fully sprouted when I was at lunch. Tore out the back of my uniform shirt, sprayed blood on my classmates, it was a horror show.Only after that was my mom called, and she could take me home.
How'd she react to you?
She was fine with it. Mom was always....she always accepted me as I was. After I learned how to control them, it was autumn, and she threw me into a pile of leaves from a ladder, trying to teach me how to fly.
Did it work?
No.
Alright, moving on. what was school like after your wings sprouted?
Worse.
Worse how?
Before my wings sprouted, it wasn't obvious that I wasn't fully human. After, it was. Before, teachers who were distant were downright hostile.Students who went out of their way to avoid me were now violent.
That must've been tough...
You've no idea.
How did you deal with that?
At first I tried to hide, and run. But when there's no safe place to go, I started fighting back. I won't lie, I got beat up at first.
How badly?
Nothing serious, I mean, they were kids, and so was I. I think the worse injury I sustained was a broken finger or two.As the years went on, I got better and better, and my antagonists got the idea not to harass me in any fashion on the school grounds.
Wait, back up a second...How did your mom react to all these fights?
She patched me up after I got beaten up, called the teachers and principals and parents, asking for some kind of reprimand for the students.They never did though, unless it was a slap on the wrist, and we never heard of it. After I started dealing out the a**-kicking, the other side of the standard slapped me in the a**.The teachers and principal had me expelled in sixth grade for breaking some kid's nose
What happened then? were you home schooled?
Mom tried to home school me, but it didn't quite work out that way. We'd be more likely to slack off then study.Then mom managed to get me into a school in the next town over.
What was that like?
Nice...really nice. They..didn't know me, and they had a gymnastic program.I was even able to hide my wings...I was like a normal human there
Wait, back up a bit...Gymnastics?
Yeah. I'd always loved watching it on TV, and had always wanted to do it. at that other school, they taught me the basics. In part, that's what got me started in Parkour too.
What basics?
Tumbles, vaults uneven bars, balance, the works...I was at that school for two years, and that was one of my favorite programs there.
You say that like there was more then one favorite. What were the other ones, if you remember.?
Choir. I had music in my genes from both sides of my family. Mom could sing, although it wasn't professionally, and I already covered Vanto being the front for a band...My teacher said she'd never heard anyone quite like me before...
How so?
I've got an uncanny talent for mimicry. I can even sing like a guy if I work at it.
Really?
Yeah, really.
That's impressive, but please don't do it again. This is only being taped, and it may confuse whoever is listening to hear my voice answering questions...
Oh! I'd forgotten that the darn thing was there!
That is kinda the idea...anyway, you attended the school for two years, right?
Yeah.
Then what?
Then it was back to by old district for High School. We were a small area, and both middle schools were in the same high school district.
I can see where this is going...
Yeah. The few friends that I made at the good school met the enemies that I had at the bad school, and well...you can guess, right?
The kids told your pals about your...wings.
Yeah. I reverted back to how I was in elementary and middle school.
Violent and standoffish?
Give the lady a cigar. Only this time, I wasn't fighting as much.
Really?
Yeah. I was putting my gymnastic training to use, in being able to get away from my tormentors.
What about the teachers at the school?
I still didn't like doin' schoolwork. An' they didn't like me not likin' it.That, and I did still get into more scrapes then the average student, although not as bad as when I was younger.
Then what?
...My mother died.
...I know that must've been painful, but could you...
Go into more detail?
Yes, please.
Yeah, I can...I was fifteen. It was fall. Mom wasn't feeling all that well, and I had to leave her to go to school. There...must've been some kind of faulty wiring in the kitchen...That's where the fire started.
Fire?
Y-yeah. The smoke alarms went off, but Mom could hardly get out of bed. She still managed to call nine-one-one and tried to get out. The firefighters were pulling her out of the house when I got home.
Was she...?
No. She was still alive, but had inhaled a lot of smoke. The fact that she was unburnt was like a sick miracle.The ambulance took her 'n' me to the hospital.
Then what?
...The doctor's said that if she hadn't been sick, that she would've survived the smoke inhalation, or that if she hadn't inhaled smoke, she would've recovered from her infection...
But she had both.
She held on for eighteen hours in the hospital. She was even awake for the first part of it...Then, during the night, she slipped into a coma. When I woke up in the morning she was on life support. That was six in the morning. After three hours...I...The doctors told me that she wasn't going to make it...without th' tube down 'er throat, pipin' 'er air t'breathe....
Here. You're sliding into Cant, and not everybody can understand that. Take a deep breath, blow your nose..we don't have to go into all the...
I wanna finish. It's 'er...her memory that I want to keep on this tape too.
...Alright. You okay now?
Yea-yes.
So you told the doctors to take your mother off life support.
Yeah. Sh-she always wanted to have her ashes scattered in the ocean, but I couldn't go that far, so I had to settle for the river that led to it. Mom would've understood.
What then? Your house had been destroyed, your only known family dead, and you were in a town that hated you as much as you hated it. What did you do?
En't it obvious? I left. The house hadn't fully burned to the ground, so I was able to salvage a few things to sell for bus fare I got on the bus in front of the church. Flipped them off out the window for good measure. I went as far as I could on the bus, then I hitchhiked or walked
Did you have and destination in mind?
No. I eventually made it into Seattle on the back of a pickup truck.
Then what?
I was homeless for a while. Celebrated my sixteenth birthday on those streets.
You're birthday's in December, right?
Yeah. Before you ask, yeah, it was cold
Then what?
A little after my birthday, I started working for The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, my boss.
Yeah? How'd you get that job?
Well, it's kind of a funny story...I had already been doing work of that fashion, just without him clearing clients...
Whoa, wait, before we go on any further, what kind of work are we talking about?
Covert deliveries.
Wha?
Lets say that you were blackmailing someone, and you wanted to deliver a message to them, only you didn't want it to be through the postal service, and have an added personal touch. What you'd do is you'd hire a runner, in this case, me. I'd take your message, either written or verbal, and deliver it to your mark, without being detected by anyone in authority. My Parkour skills payed off big time.
Sounds dangerous.
You have no idea. That's actually how I met The Cat. I had been hired by a rival to deliver a message to him. He caught me and turned me over to his foster-father for training.
Ah, that's your friend Walks With Foxes, right?
Yup. For all you folks listening in, Foxes is a shaman, and he trained me in my more magical abilities.
Wait, what?
Um, yeah, did I neglect to mention those?
Yes. yes you did!
Um, okay, I'll try and explain, although it's not easy. The old name for half-demons like me is 'Cambion' Supposedly, Cambion's have a penchant for magical abilities.
I think I remember hearing that Merlin was a Cambion...
Exactly. Anyway, Walks With Foxes taught me the basics of magical theory, and left me to the rest.
Some teacher.
No, it's not like he neglected me or anything, There's a saying 'Ask ten mages how they do magic and you'll get eleven answers' I figured out how to cast spells my way myself, although I wasn't very prolific with it..
Why not?
They remind me of what my father was...same with my abilities in dreams.
Dreams?
Yeah. Another ability I inherited from Vanto is the ability to enter and manipulate dreams. Walks With Foxes was able to tutor me in the basics of this, because he can do the same thing. It's another talent that I don't use.
Because it reminds you of him?
Yeah.
Alright, I can't think of any more serious questions.
Does that mean we're done?
Not quite. Favorite color?
Red.
Food?
Lasagna.
Kink?
I'm not gonna answer that.
Liquor?
I don't drink.
Animal?
Anything that's not going to kill me
Weapons?
A shotgun named Diplomacy and a guitar
Hopes?
To get my butt off this hard chair with my tail still attached
Dreams?
That you'll stop asking me questions.
Fears?
Drowning....and being helpless
Ticklish spot?
So not telling you.
Gemstone?
Ruby.
Well, I think that's that. Thanks for sitting down and talking to me.
It was hardly of my own free will. Can I go now?
Want to leave any parting words?
Not really...
View User's Journal
Character log
 |
