shitposting rave 5: discount rejects from every genre

-sort of... falls into the rave. She's wearing next to nothing and what she is wearing draws more attention instead of providing any actual modesty. She's covered in a visual cacophony of glitter, and can pull-tabs are hanging from her horns in addition to the usual decorations. There is only a faint smear of lipstick on her bottom lip. Somewhere distant a line from a song is heard: "My god is made of balsa wood and porc-e-lain."

She pats the floor of the rave. Good flat surface. Best friend-

 

Guy in a rat mask, not an actual rat. Pretty good DJ, some kind of high end hacker troll... thing... yeah this one's dead. As a doornail. Got something like thirty other fixers killed too, but that happens in this industry when you're shit at your job.

Good music though. Early shit's better.

 

Good guideline to live by. Some people just operate outside the rules. Just be careful to not become the obstacle you once longed to destroy. Not to yourself nor to others.
[His eyes dart to the knife, tho he covers it with a quiet appreciative whistle. He's sure there are more. There are always more knives. No need to let everyone else know though.]

Holiday, birthday or bachelor and/or bachelorette party?

 

Al'rrhissim steps into the rave like a soft breeze. This is immediately counteracted by her plopping down with all the grace of a student who just came home from eight straight hours of field work. Her long desert coverings crumble into sand around her, and she produces a tea can from the dunes.

 

"Hey, kit," Nivalorrha says. "Delivery."

 

"Aunt Nivy!" Al'rrhissim responds. "Do sit down. I haven't seen you in, what? Fifteen years?"
The tea is still steeping on a tripod over a small fire, but she offers some sliced and dried lizard meat.

 

"Don't you start with that as well. It's bad enough your mother does it," she frowns.
The meat is accepted. Nivalorrha eyes it. "Field rations?"

 

Al'rrhissim shudders. "Dear gods. I'm sorry, it's just... everyone's gone, you know? And yes, field rations. Don't tell me you exclusively switched to fish over on Pennarion."

 

Nivalorrha breaks into laughter at that last comment. "It's the real reason I'll never go back to ai-Talas."

 

"There's always Sireni," Al'rrhissim deadpans without missing a beat. "But you said something about a delivery?"

 

This time it's Nivalorrha's turn to say "Dear gods. I'd have to learn how to drive a boat. Or a waterplane. No, thank you."
She finangles a letter out of the messenger bag at her side.
"This one's weird. Don't know who it's from or how I got it, just that it's supposed to go to you. It reeks."
The smell is metaphorical, but the unclear source of the missive has her on edge. It feels like something very, very important. Something she'd defend with her life. And she doesn't even know how much she got paid for it.

 

Al'rrhissim takes the letter, gingerly, and turns it in her hands. From the feel of it, it's filled with multiple sheets of paper. There's one line on the envelope, 'To Al'rrhi', in green cursive, and she has the nagging feeling that she's not supposed to open it yet, that there's still something missing.
So she opens it.

It's empty.
"Uh-oh," she says. "Auntie, where were you before you brought me this?"

 

Nivalorrha rubs the bridge of her nose. Everything is blurry.
"...Parkati," she finally says. "What does that have to do with anything?"

 

"Easy," Al'rrhissim replies. "There's no letter because there is no letter."

 

"What."

 

"Or at least, not yet. It's not been written yet, you see?"
It makes perfect sense -- this is a liminal place, in both time and space. At some point ahead in time, someone wants to reach her, and due to her associating messages with her courier aunt, the delivery was via her. But it went to the her who is not yet where she's supposed to be. The message arrives at a place where it does not exist yet.
There's really only one person who could've sent it, and Al'rrhi hopes that, wherever they are, their sibling Emre is all right.

 

"...I think you lost me somewhere," Nivalorrha concedes.
Fucking scholars, she thinks fondly. At some point they just stop making sense. Be it her two sisters or her niblings, or the sundry she worked with during the revolution. Stark raving bonkers, the lot of them.
"And don't tell me just to accept it as truth either," she adds. "I don't even let Kalla do that."

 

"Then I've got nothing," Al'rrhissim replies, and giggles. "But the important thing is that it arrived. Now it only needs to be written, and then I'll know what's inside. Liminal space stuff. Don't understand it very well myself, beyond that."

 

I actually don't directly know him, but from what one of my friends says he's an ass. It's probably less racism and more uh... I don't know really.

 

Lissa looks back over at Red Hood. "You know, where I came from, everyone's brainwashed. Not just the clones. I still have trouble with it now and again. But they did it by raising me all wrong, and I see similar things all over the place on Earth. Brainwashing isn't all Stockholm syndrome and waterboarding and sleep deprivation; the most insidious kind is the simplest, where you train people not to trust their own senses and feelings and reasoning."

"I know he's not an actual rat," Lissa says, smiling, "but I'm not a house cat either. Except here, when I'm playing with your boyfriend, because it's fun. I remember the music you were playing, it was nice."

"Speciesism with a side order of sexism? Dear gods. I just don't like people who introduce themselves by commenting on my anatomy with weird animal noises instead of walking up to me and saying actual words. Preferably words like 'Hi, I'm Defalt, what's your name?' but I've been known to cheerfully accept things like 'is exhibitionism a part of this scenario' when it's actually a comment on the conversation I was having and therefore a sign that even though I'm being hit on, the person was actually listening to what I was talking about." Lissa shrugs. "At least he didn't make a pussy pun. I will fucking deck people for that, it's a racial slur in my home dimension but also it's a sure sign that my body is being addressed, not my brain."

She's been listening to the conversation in her own language, more than a little nervously. Finally she decides to jump in.

"Parkati? They carpet bombed it during the buyout," says Lissa, wide-eyed. "Are you from the Pennarion with an Imperator Tainell someone else was talking about?"