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White Dream Basket
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>>1037480
Jennifer has seen Spirited Away. Also Princess Mononoke, and from those she's seen evidence that some people believed in spirits. They were in several public libraries on VHS, or she likely wouldn't have seen them. Still, she always approached them as fiction, not as reality. Somehow she never expected spirits to be a thing she would have to deal with. And even if she did, she half-expected whimsy and wonder. Well, the wonder is still there. The whimsy? It reminds her, an old memory bubbling up, of My Neighbor Totoro. It was supposed to be a fun children's movie. No one told her to watch out for a mass of tiny black spirits spilling forth in an unstoppable tide, tiny innumerable eyes opening by the ton as the black mass swarmed forwards. Sure, in the movie it turned out to be just innocent fluffs, but tell that to her nightmares, of being buried under an inky tide.
Okay, so maybe the memory has a reason for being. And on reflection, the tar while ever-present and cloying and death - paradoxically the spirits still, somehow, live. Jennifer wonders, recalling a series of jokes overheard in the cafeteria, if the box spirit can help her hide, lay in ambush. She somehow knows the words to say, words that are not English, nor Spanish, nor Japanese - she doesn't know any language but English, but she's heard enough languages to know that the language she now also knows isn't any that the people of earth as a whole speak. She knows that if she says a certain thing in a certain tone, with the right gestures - the spirit can understand. She leaves it alone, for now. She wonders, if she were to strike down the lightning spirit would it take out power to the block? She doesn't want to find out now, but eventually...
Curiosity alight, she takes to the skies, once more just a bat, in form at least, and from above takes a look at the city as a whole, the landscape and spirit scape glowing together - or, well, negative light is still a glow? Tarry residue still sticks out. And the light of the moon, and the faint laughter of mercurial moon spirits, gives a moment of respite. Maybe the moonspirits are from the now, maybe it's just distant echoes of the past, but Jennifer hears them and in them hears that there's something she can do - if only she could figure it out. And she knows that tonight, or maybe just this afternoon - before she meets up with the group of changed she ended up a member of - she'll be going for a quick flight, see if she can see or hear places where the spirits are strong - or where they are dead. Scope out some interesting locations. But that came later.
That came later after the talk with Dory the Wolfman. Moving back in time a little, before she split off the group to head home to her dorm, before she got distracted by the spirits and ended up filling herself up on moths and insects and taking a nap in a tree for an hour before finally winging her way home collapsing into her bed, she just learned that vampires are in fact real. And that wow, wolfmen - and maybe wolfwomen too? have had a hard time. And that she hates time travel and temporal shenanigans. So so much. Isn't enough for things to happen once and not just in multiple ways at the same time? Gah, so annoying. "But the spiders didn't try to eat you? They mostly just fled in a delicious wave." Being a bat and a human may be warping Jenifer's thoughts. Just a little. "And maybe it won't happen this time?" She really should care more about the thought of killing. She really should. She thinks she would have before last night. Now she just has a sense of - well, not hunger, but she gets the feeling that if something were just a little bit different she would have some hunger. Right now she just thinks of it as an enemy. "Maybe if we show interest in it's beliefs it would be willing to try to convert us? Based on what Theo told us maybe they'd be willing to talk about it's tribe's history. Maybe drop some more information on where more of them can be found, or where enemies are, of either our or theirs?" Currently a human, and rocking a hoody that, to the discrete eye, is twitching back and forth and not doing as good a job hiding a pair of oversized ears as she would like - good thing a lot of people aren't very observant - Jenifer isn't that concerned to the wolf-man's survival. Either of them, really. Turning back to the cooperative one, she gives him a look. One that speaks of annoyance and a ruined vacation. "Where was your tribe before? Any other locations where we can expect to find these guys? Or just locations in general you would avoid?" It's the start of a mini-interrogation to get the lay of the supernatural land.
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