OOC: commentary on Leah/al-Razi alley scene
LJ entry: Degradation
Originally posted: November 27, 2005
Written: January 3, 2006
What Has Come Before: Leah got sucked into the black hole of representing the Friends of Humanity in the media, to protect her family and friends from Tom's threatened retribution, and while she kinda likes it, kinda agrees with it, the job is wearing on her. She explored a death wish with Magneto in Central Park and was saved from fatal consummation by Scott and Hank, yay, X-Men. She had a bad Thanksgiving with her family, resulting in her being banned from her mother's house for the foreseeable future. She's in love with Rossi and doesn't know what the hell to do about that. She doesn't know what the hell to do about a lot of things in her life. She's gone back to the Catholic Church, which has been good for giving her some direction and absolution, but it's not enough. Nothing is enough. This scene certainly illustrates that.
This scene! It happened because xmm_al_razi was this cool new player I didn't know, but my friends had pumped him up as teh awesome, and so I demanded rp. I do that; I will hunt you down and make you scene with me if I think I'm going to enjoy it. Some people collect twinks. I collect good rp'ers. I have you all in a glass menagerie for my pleasure. Tennessee Williams would be proud of me. (Oh, God, I'm making Tennessee Williams jokes two paragraphs in. This isn't going to turn out well at all.)
Leah has taken advantage of the hour (getting towards "late," especially for a Sunday) and the weather (not too cold, especially for late November) by taking over a whole round table to herself in the cafe, not too near the door, but not too far from it, either. Every time it opens, in fact, her face jolts up from brooding study of the coffee cup between her hands, and her eyes jump with hope dashed by another slouching stranger, another hustling student, another canoodling couple. And she looks down again then, each time, and hunches her shoulders under her denim jacket, and stares all the harder into her dark and sullen drink.
You can always tell when I'm uncertain about a scene and a dynamic because I throw tons of words at a setting. (Which, for the record, I love to do. I love setting. I love closing, too. I'm better at closing than setting, but I'll do both in a scene, by gum. It's not a hardship for me; if you want me to do it, just ask, and I will.) I've been focusing more on putting in all the traditional setting information of time, season, locale, and so on; I'm trying to ease back on it a bit because, yo, I'm not writing short stories, I'm rp'ing, and the narrative demands are different. I think. At any rate, I overwrite by default, and when I'm not sure what I'm doing, I go straight to default, and purple prose happens. Sad, really. I wonder if I could change that default, to Hemingway-style spareness. Hm.
Leah is at the White Room, waiting for Scott Summers out of the (to-be-discovered) misguided hope that he'll show up even though she didn't call him for a meeting. They met randomly there, they kept meeting there, it became their place, and she would like to talk with him. About anything. She would like to curl up, figuratively speaking, into his steady, upright, quiet nobility. She needs some of that, lacking any of her own (having, in fact, the opposite, thanks to mean Mr. Tom!).
I don't usually do a setting in the imperfect tense, so to speak: writing about what's been happening for a while, not just right this second as the scene starts. It adds to the sense of Leah's waiting, her repeatedly dashed hopes, her dwindling optimism - captures her life in a nutshell, in other words. Good for me. I totally didn't intend that. Is it possible to be a good writer without trying? Ha.
Non-slouching ex-students, pair divided by silence, Adel and Bahir enter one after the other. Bahir drifts away as Adel heads for the counter, the buttons of his coat loose, hands in pockets holding it close to his body as he angles between chairs. Adel quickly sheds his coat, draping it over his arm. He waits patiently in line, chatting up the girl in front of him up until her boyfriend turns around to wrap a proprietary hand around her waist. Adel smiles brightly and falls silent. Bahir sits, glancing a table over -- Leah -- and then on in evident disinterest.
Gosh, and I was so hoping the twins would come in as another canoodling couple. Disappointed! (Imagine me saying that as Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, when he finds the jewels missing from the safe in the garage. DisapPOINted!) I have drabbled a slash pairing of the twins. It was easy. The twins hate me now for it. Too bad.
And here is where I confess two things about the al-Razi twins: I thought their player was a complete twink for doing this character concept (two semi-independent chars with one PC object! Linked twin telepaths! How speshul snowflake of you, darling!), and I thought that because I was eating my liver with envy that I hadn't thought of it first. Damn you, xmm_al_razi. HATE.
Adel gets cockblocked. Ha, ha. Bahir is my preferred twin, because Adel is cheery and banal and petty EVIL and his brother is a poor abused grarful honey-bunny whom I enjoy slapping around with Shaw. See how my likes and dislikes work? Is Bahir scouting Leah for his brother? Gosh, that didn't occur to me until now, given their link and all. Does Adel make Bahir find girls for him? How evil is that?
--
Al-Razi
Similar overall in face and form, differing slightly in the small details, both men stand just under six feet, slender builds well-muscled and finely proportioned. Their features are mirror copies: symmetrical, attractive, clean-edged but not striking. Eyebrows are dark, thick but well-defined, with clear eyes below. Banded brown and gray, the effect that of watered silk, they are striking in their clarity, not their color. Thick lashes, not especially long, add a dark frame. Their mouths are stubbornly set.
Adel keeps his hair short, bleached and dyed, with golden strands streaking through a russet brown, set in chaotic spikes. Bahir's hair is longer and lushly dark, with a slight wave. At the longest point, it only just brushes his shoulders. Adel is clean-shaven, while Bahir keeps a slightly scruffy short mustache and beard.
--
I include character descs in the first log I do with them, and in subsequent logs where the descs matter (e.g., at a masquerade party). They are pretty boys. Adorable. My characters enjoy telling them that, whether they're there to hear it or not. I'm mean. Bahir is scruffy! How can you not like scruffy? Adel is metro. No wonder he got cockblocked.
Her shoulders still hunched -- raven's grumpy distress -- Leah stares back at Bahir in that interval of glancing, but looks away, too. Down. And then into the backs of her eyelids as she raises her cup for a slow, measured swallow.
Aw, raven. That's Shaw's symbol, not Leah's, but I use it wherever I want to indicate a death-doom-and-gloom Poe-ish mood. This pose says absolutely nothing else except the raven thing. I've switched from default purple to default sparse, after all. Floundering, needing a hook to get into the dynamic, still more wrapped up in my char than in the interaction (which, granted, has hardly started).
It is a few minutes before Adel comes through with two mugs of coffee, one placed before his brother, the other kept in hand. He sits with a smile for all, indiscriminate in his affection, that slowly spins to fix on Leah. As he adds packet after packet of sugar, he grins gamely in her direction. He waves a pinky. Bahir leans back, looking very much as if he'd like to slouch, and scowls over the coffee at Adel.
Leah's cup goes down. Her eyelids go up, just in time to catch -- pinky. Waving. At her. Bemused, she looks at it and then at its owner. "What the hell are you doing?"
Seriously. Adel? You're weird. Okay, it's New York, and New York comes with the weird, but . . . seriously. Pinky waves? You're either twelve or gay. Maybe both. Or possibly high, now that Leah considers that all-beaming smile. Stoned out of your gourd, yes, that could be it. Lacking anything else to do, she'll get out a pointed stick she carries with her at all times (New Yorker!) and poke him with it.
"Saying hello," Adel says, sliding smoothly into conversational opening. "Hullo." The pinky goes down.
Bahir groans quietly, taking a long sip to scald harsh words from his tongue.
Leah studies him now. "Do you always say hello like that? You give gay guys a bad name."
Leah is a tiny bit homophobic, in the sense that she stereotypes that group. She's a bigot, after all; her mind-set encompasses that kind of reductive, black-and-white thinking for most every section of the population. She likes categories and labels. She likes applying them to people she meets. She feels more certain and in control of an uncertain and uncontrollable world.
Bahir's eyes skitter back in a darting look, flashing approval; a smirk curls over the rim of the mug as he lifts it from another prolonged swallow.
"I imagine I do, given as how I sleep with women," Adel says, flustered a bare second before recovering.
Annoyance flattens Leah's mouth. "Well, how nice for them." Her gaze encompasses both of them for a moment. Twins; mirrors. "Double your pleasure, huh?"
I use the mouth-flattening thing a lot. Too much. Way too much. Sigh. Must find new phrases to slot into my repertoire when I'm groping my way through a new dynamic.
Why do I keep using words and ideas in comments that show up in the very next pose? I used encompasses up there, and here is the word in Leah's pose. That bugs me. Maybe I should stop doing stream-of-consciousness commentary and actually draft and edit these things like proper writing. I call myself a writer, do I not? Honestly, what a slacker.
Leah is not unaware of Bahir's approval. She likes the scruffy, too. Adel is too sleek and modern and charming for her. And possibly twelve, gay, and/or stoned.
"How original," Bahir says, deadpan. Approval fades and the smirk turns wry, not so gentle in its mockery. "I've /never/ heard that one before."
Adel meets annoyance with cheer: a terminal failing. "The women seem to like it."
"If you want original entertainment," Leah snaps at Bahir, "try Eighth Avenue. Pimps'll hook you up right. Midgets are fifteen percent off for Thanksgiving, I hear. Natural markdown, y'know." Her glower slides to Adel, over him: hot, slick, pallid brown. "Do they? As much as I'm enjoying it?"
So much for the nascent liking of Bahir. Fuck off, asshole. She can be plenty original; she's just not wasting it on you.
Eighth Avenue in New York City is the traditional stomping grounds for sex-trade workers. Or, well, it was the last time I checked. (Not in person, thank you.) I try to provide local color that my characters would know, by drawing (carefully and in strategically limited fashion) on what I know about the locales in question. Also: midgets are funny. Always. This log occurred before I found out that the twins' player is shorter than I am, and THAT MAKES IT EVEN FUNNIER.
Pricked by Bahir's smirk, Leah turns on him and then on his brother. Rawr! She don't like being mocked, not at all. Inferiority complex, you know, plus she's outnumbered. Stupid twins.
Uncurling a single finger, Bahir points it ever so vaguely in Leah's direction. "Much better," he declares, magnanimous. "And yet, no thank you." Magnanimous /and/ polite.
Adel rubs his jaw line with a mug-warmed hand, smile rueful. "Perhaps in a slightly different manner," he accommodates.
Leah bares her teeth at Bahir, but battle-light lights her eyes with grudging simpatico for a second before she sighs back to the other man. "I was waiting for someone," she tells Adel, backing off somewhat (though her fingers are tight and yellow-knuckled around her cup). "Nothing you did. Sorry."
xmm_al_razi liked my pose well enough to remark on it in his commentary of the scene. I suppose it's all right, but it's really just more of the same: throwing big-ass words into the mix because I don't know what else to do at the moment. Leah was warming to the scene, as she often does when her baser emotions get shook up, but I wasn't. I remember feeling mentally lagged and dumb. The twins had me outnumbered, too!
Leah/Bahir OTP! It has to happen. C'mon.
Bahir smiles, ever so slightly, down into his coffee before attention turns away. "Don't worry about it," Adel says, brushing aside the apology. He continues, not-prying, oh-so-deft: "Waiting for a friend?"
"Apparently," and Leah looks back to the door, which stays stubbornly shut.
Bahir doesn't like anyone, though. Alas. It is not meant to be. Leah will cry into her pillow tonight over the loss, be sure of it.
That's not deft, Adel. Sorry. Leah's response is what a not-so-deft prying deserves: flat nothing, not even positive confirmation of his guess. I love my gruff, wary, shut-up-you-stupid-little-man-and-your-stupid-scruffy-brother character!
Adel follows the line of Leah's glance, a shoulder dropping in a shrug. "Sorry they didn't show," he says, sympathy tendered with a feather touch.
Leah shrugs, too, but swifter, harder. Brusque, as in a dismissal. "My own fault," she mutters, half on a laugh. "Next time, I'll call. Anyway." She has another swallow of coffee, grimaces, puts the cup down, braces it between both hands. "Worse ways to spend a Sunday night, right?"
Of course, Adel has telepathy. Projective empathy. NOT FAIR. Leah gives over a little, under his sympathetic touch, which I took to be psychic, since the pose isn't entirely clear and I was aware the twins' powers and wanted to extend the scene through the grace of deus ex machina manipulation. She braces herself for continuing conversation: maybe it can pass the time until Scott shows up (he might! you don't know! shut up!).
I've been doing the half-laugh and half-snort thing a lot more since meeting xmm_percy. I'm an unabashed thieving sponge.
"Usually more efficient," Adel agrees, humor gentle and smile slight. "There's always something to be said for striking up conversation with perfect strangers. I like doing that." Bahir's sigh speaks volumes -- condensed, Reader's Digest volumes -- of resigned irritation on this matter.
"And your brother -- for surely he must be -- doesn't," Leah divines effortlessly. She smiles. "Or maybe he doesn't like you?"
Yeah, it doesn't take much to make that divination, thanks to Bahir's sigh. I appreciate a player who'll give such easy, helpful hints of body language and expression, to advance the conversation and provide me with something to pose next. It's all about me, as the twins' player has found out. ALL OF IT.
Maybe Bahir doesn't like talking to his brother? Leah doesn't, after all, and Leah likes/liked Bahir. Reasonable inference to draw.
Bahir's attention turns back to Leah, smiled fixed. "A bit of both."
"He doesn't really mind that much," Adel assures, blithe. He smiles over at Bahir, met with a heavily ironic look. "He'd be bored otherwise."
Leah's smile turns upside down. "Bored? So /you're/ his entertainment? Well--" she slouches back, snorts "--better you than me, since I've already struck out once with him. But you keep coming. Tilting at windmills."
Apparently Leah has read a book in her life. Go figure. (Cervantes, yay!) I did deliberately do the smile turning upside down as a reference to the scene I'd had with this player before this scene, where Shaw met the twins at Sweet Basil. Cross-alt in-jokes. I like making other players feel like I remember, appreciate, and enjoy them. You get more rp that way. Ahem.
"Hmm." Adel blows the thought over his coffee, pausing to take a drink. "I wouldn't say I'm his entertainment. I'd say people are, and unless I forced him to go forth among the plebes, he'd hole himself in a room with a stack of nerdy journals and call himself content."
"And I would be content, too," Bahir says, mournful for many lost nights.
Back to Adel, who says, a touch of irony amid all the cheer, "I'm persistent, see."
The twins give the player twice as much rp space as the rest of us. JELUS. And so quick with turning out those multiple poses! I don't type that fast.
"Hoi polloi are the better for it," Leah tells Bahir with dark, mocking gravity. "Speaking for them as I may, since it's my job and all. You're /wasted/ on journals. How can this--" her chin lifts, rotates, includes the coffeeshop and the three of them "--compare to a centerfold illustration of Jupiter's moons or a circuit diagram?" Her voice lowers; the corner of her mouth twitches up. "Or do you go for the hard-core stuff? Firefox source code, oh, God, yeah."
I like that pose. I write to entertain myself, first and foremost, if I'm not playing development midwife or helpful napkin to someone else. I absolutely could not make myself type "the hoi polloi" because hoi means "the" in Greek (declined to match polloi) and my brain refused to let me be redundant, even with an accepted Anglicized phrase. I struggle with that persnickety censor over the few languages I know. Shut up, brain. I suppose it reads okay here, though, because Leah is the type to bite off the articles and other leading words in her sentences, to get right to the meat of things.
I love using chins as pointers. Do it all the time with my characters. Don't remember where I picked it up. Maybe from myself, but I don't think I do it all that much. (I'm not physically demonstrative during speaking. I sit like a lump and talk and stare. Sometimes I'm even staring at the other person, courteous sort that I am.)
Cracked myself up with the Firefox thing. I couldn't think of anything geeky enough, so I covered it with Leah's faux arousal on that line. I'm sneaky! I hide my faults with window dressing! Bahir jerking off to a centerfold of Jupiter's moons also cracks me up. Why? Because - repeat after me, you know it by now - I'M MEAN. The twins hate me so, so much. Especially Bahir.
Bahir's eyes flicker, lashes dropping as he sips. He looks up at Leah, bland. "Mutation and polymorphism spectrum of the GALNS gene in mucopolysaccharidosis IVA, actually."
Biogeekery is hot. I made the player Google that. The player also hates me.
"So, you see, we compare quite favorably," Adel tags.
Leah fans herself languidly. "Hot," she purrs and zaps Adel with fresh irritation. "Do you? 'Cause what he's talking about sounds more interesting than you trying to get into my pants."
Zap! Leah uses short, bristly, sparky words like that. She's a hedgehog. She bristles and sparks. I try to match my writing to my characters when I'm aware enough to do so. Usually I'm not, and intuition and experience have to guide me. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don't. I'm such a lazy roleplayer and writer, you have no freaking idea. I don't think when I write poses, I don't proofread or edit them, I don't plan more than two or three poses ahead in a scene - sad, sad. Pathetic. I'll talk more on this subject later.
Leah's ego's pretty healthy, isn't it? Of course Adel wants to fuck her. Why wouldn't he? She frankly thinks that he could do a lot worse than her. She's at least forthright, experienced, passionate, and so on. He is twelve, gay, stoned, and/or stupid. Poor Adel. Bahir must be his chaperone, keeping him from running out into traffic and drooling on strangers. Leah feels pity for Bahir, stuck with that job.
"Dull, actually," Bahir says, considering a moment. "Genetic grunt work."
In that moment where Bahir considers, Adel regroups, blinking innocent, lamb-like (sheep to the slaughter!), under her irritation. "Just said hello, Miss."
"So you /are/ gay," Leah declares in triumph.
She occasionally zings people. She's not as witty as Shaw, in social settings, but she's about as mean (if not as actively cruel). She's got that bold New York attitude - speak up in a crowded room first before someone else seizes the opportunity from you - and she's got a locker-room mentality that delights in constant one-manupship putdowns. Growing up with all those red-blooded American males around her - she'd have been a great guy, I'm telling you.
Bahir chuffs a soft laugh, eyes narrowed at his twin in malicious humor. Adel spreads his hands along the mug, discomforted. He shifts. "No, really, I'm not."
Leah makes wide, offended eyes. "There isn't something /wrong/ with being gay, is there? My cousin's gay, and he's a cop. Should I tell him that you hate the homos?"
"Hate the homos" is hella hilarious. (How's that for alliteration, xmm_al_razi?) I'm trying to remember which cousin she's talking about. The one who works in the property room in a Staten Island precinct. What's his name? Dammit. I'd have to look through the logs, and I'm not going to do that right now. Anyway, it's an NPC I've referred to before, and lo and behold, for the purposes of making Adel feel bad, I up and made him gay right in this very pose. Thank you, NPCs.
"I don't hate the homos!" Adel insists, repeating her words in a somewhat stilted fashion. Bahir makes little noises of evil amusement -- snickering, snicking, snerking -- as appropriate, and occasionally (by his brother's glare) where inappropriate. "I have gay friends." Adel flashes his queer cred, but loses credit by immediately stressing, "You know, just friends who are gay. I just like women. You know, breasts. Hips."
Leah draws herself up to indignant height. "Women," she tells him with acid contempt, "are more than just breasts and hips and /body parts,/ sir. We are /people./"
How dare Adel suggest women are nothing more than body parts! No, I know he didn't, not consciously, anyway, it's just bad phrasing, and Leah knows that, too; but you bet she'll pretend to assume that for the purposes of, again, making him feel bad and putting him down. It's a pissing contest. She's going to win. By God, she will!
Adel has no queer cred. Please. He has hair gel. That doesn't count.
Bahir lifts a finger to interject with a comment, a slicing look from Adel cutting him off mid-aborning. He finishes his coffee, smiling, as Adel digs. "Of course they are. I like people. I just like female people better."
"Who do you like?" Leah asks Bahir.
"Myself." Bahir sips. "Occasionally, him."
Leah tells Adel now, "I like /him,/" and jerks her thumb at his brother, just in case he needs the help.
This exchange amused me as much as it did xmm_al_razi, and yes, thumbs are underused in rp. Leah's a thumb-using kind of character. She gesticulates!
Lips to fingers and fingers to air, Bahir wafts a soundless kiss to Leah. Adel sighs in defeat. "You know," Adel whines-doesn't-whine, "he thinks everyone on the planet isn't near as smart as he is." Bahir hums agreement. "And that most people are little more than animals." Bahir nods agreement. "And that he's better than everyone." Bahir shrugs agreement. "And that--"
Bahir /smiles/ and reaches across the table, patting Adel's elbow -- cutting him off. "You are so very twelve."
Leah slits her eyes in a slitted smile. "I like him even more. You might be twelve, but you're a good pimp for your brother."
I like the air-kiss. It's cute. It has an Arabic flavor to it: the traditional eyes-lips-heart salute of the deep desert. Adel really is twelve. Leah was right!
"You," Adel accuses, playful tone edged, "have bad taste in men."
Leah leans forward on folded arms, her brows rising politely curious over flat, hard eyes. "Because I like him? Or because I don't like you?"
I need to describe what her voice is doing. Bah. Her eyebrows, her eyes, but not her tone? That's poor writing. Lazy, lazy.
"Both," comes the twinned reply: Bahir's dry, Adel's sly.
And Leah's wry. "So, what -- you come as a set? I didn't think you were Siamese-joined."
That capping - dry, sly, wry - makes me happy. I'm a better writer than I am a roleplayer, and I like doing writerly things: rhyme, alliteration, references, and so on. Tricks o' the trade. I have come to recognize over the past few months (I know, I know, I'm slow) that I play this game more as a writer than a rp'er, and I don't think that's a good thing. It's pushing me towards quitting XMM, actually, in favor of a forum game or two, which I think might better suit my style, preference, and time commitment. We'll see. I'm not saying that as an attention-getting device, either. It was just in my head, and out it came. If I want attention, I'll ask for it, promise. I'm just making connections, finding realizations, and trying to figure out what I want. These commentaries have been very good for such self-reflection.
"At birth," Adel offers up, plate of cheer trimmed with sunny smile and an airy gesture. Bahir grimaces, eyes flashing in mild annoyance toward Adel. "Not Siamese, though."
"Well, good. You know what happened to poor Eng and Cheng, after all." Leah sips at her coffee, delicate and unconcerned.
She's being especially bitchy when she acts the proper lady. (Shaw does the same thing. I don't know if Joelle does. Probably not, for variety's sake.)
I spelled "Chang" wrong. Botheration.
"No, not really," Adel says, gesture smoothly transforming into a silent invitation for Leah to offer up her insight.
A lifted shoulder. "One died. The other didn't. Lay there, connected to his dead brother, feeling the death poisons seeping into him, feeling that empty corpse cooling next to him, waiting for his turn. --I'm Leah, by the way. Nice to meet you."
The recitation of that story, I stole from the X-Files episode "Humbug." Let's see if I can find the quote on the internets-
CURATOR: Welcome to my museum. May I put to rest any questions you may have conjured?
SCULLY: I was just reading about the fascinating life of Chang and Eng and wondering if their death was just as fascinating.
CURATOR: Oh, very much so. On a cold January eve in 1874, Eng awoke to find his brother had passed away during the course of the night. A few hours later, Eng himself departed from this world. Now, these facts themselves may be less than fascinating but imagine... imagine being Eng and lying there.
(He puts his disfigured hand on her shoulder.)
Knowing that essentially half your body was now dead... that the rest must inevitably follow... and being able to do about it absolutely nothing. At the autopsy, it was officially concluded that Chang died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
SCULLY: And what was the official cause of Eng's death?
CURATOR: Fright.
(Source, and here's a Wiki on the Siamese twins.) I ♥ the internets. Everything in my life ends up in my rp sooner or later, you betcha. Leah gets a kick out of passing the story along to these twins. It's hardly even mean of her; she's just sharing information. Interesting information! Isn't it? Yes, it is. Thank you.
How perfectly horrible," Bahir says, precise in his pronunciation.
"How -- horrible," Adel repeats, stilted. "That must have been--"
"Horrible, yes. Nice to meet you, too, Leah," Bahir says, name offered: "Bahir. That's Adel."
"Egyptian?" Leah asks with a touch of professional curiosity. She keeps her arms crossed on the table; her hands stay folded inside the nest, wary, warm, and safe.
I'm sometimes dimly surprised that I remember what my characters' body configurations are throughout a scene, especially when I'm tired and/or distracted. I think it's a kinesthetic sense I have for them, not visual imagery: inside feeling them rather than outside watching them. I can feel what they're doing (and experiencing) throughout a scene, and yes, I have IC/OOC bleed problems from that, why do you ask? I'm working on it. It's better than it used to be.
Leah isn't terribly familiar with what nationality the names "Adel" and "Bahir" might be associated with, but they're obviously Arabs, probably from the Gulf region, so she makes a guess, reporter that she is. (It never really turns off, in her brain. There's always a story out there somewhere!)
"Bahraini," Adel says, wrapping his wits back round the thread of conversation. He favors Leah and Bahir both with a mistrustful look before forging on. Bahir meets his gaze, level, and is careful to not-smile. "Know it?"
Leah shakes her head. "I haven't been to the Middle East. Kinda always wanted to. Cairo, anyway. Maybe the Pyramids. I haven't even left the continent, though."
Adel supplements Leah's geography: "Off the coast of Saudi Arabia." He considers over the last of his coffee, smile rueful. "We've pretty much lived there and here. Never even made it up to Canada. I imagine Egypt is much like Bahrain: dry."
"I know where Bahrain is, thank you," Leah clips off frostily. "I was just saying I'd like to go to Egypt."
My bad on this exchange, although it provides a delightful example of how RL conversations stall briefly in cul-de-sacs of misunderstanding (rp shouldn't be perfect all the time!). Leah understood, as I did, that Adel (I'm assuming it's him speaking in that first quoted pose) means "know it?" in terms of "have you been there?" - which isn't, in fact, what he means, and that leaves Leah open for the geography lesson that she doesn't actually need, thanks. It's good misunderstanding. I squirm a bit because I fear it makes me look bad and no one will ever talk to me again because I have to be perfect for y'all and live up to the compliments I get, or else! (I am also working on that fun psychological kink, for the record.)
"But you--" Adel, though young, is wise enough to shut up on that. "I guess I'd like to go sometime myself," he finishes, rather lackluster.
Leah narrows her eyes. "I what?"
"Why do you want to go to Egypt?" Adel supplants, disingenuous.
PWNED. Or else he cares more about sexing her up than about putting her in her place with a reminder of how she misunderstood him and Said The Wrong Thing. Charming Adel.
"Because I'm an ugly American tourist who likes to gape at old impressive shit and take photos and talk really loud to the natives because then they'd understand English," Leah reels off, glibly bored.
She suspects that at least one of them thinks of Americans that way, so she mocks her people for them. Helpful Leah!
Adel's total contribution to the conversation at that stands at "Uhm."
"Volume doesn't really help," Bahir says, helpful tones sweetened.
Leah rolls sweet right back to him: "Gee, thanks, I had no idea. Does volume help you understand sarcasm? I can shout, if so."
Bahir taps a finger against the side of his mug. "I was being," he says, speaking slow for her benefit, "ironic."
"And I was so hoping you were as stupid as your brother," Leah laments on a gusted sigh. "Shooting fish in a barrel is much more fun."
"He tries," Bahir says, utter certainty in his voice. "He tries very hard."
"Do you?" asks Leah kindly, of Adel.
Leah+Bahir vs. Adel entertains me greatly. So does Leah vs. Bahir, for that matter. They're bitch buddies!
"No!" Adel insists, defensive. He folds his arm over his chest, leaning back in a slouch.
"Note the defensive posture, the sharpness of his tone," Bahir murmurs, aside made sotto voce.
Leah cuts him an annoyed look, then refixes attention on Adel. "So, should I fuck you back in the alley to make you feel better?" Still kind, still soft, so gentle and compassionate and awwwwww. "Would that help, little one?"
Leah thinks that Bahir is being condescending - she can read his body language herself, thank you - and gives him a cut. (I should add switchblade to her meta lexicon, if it isn't there already.) Aaaaaand the proposition just comes out of the blue, doesn't it? Kinda. She's aware that he has been flirting with her, or trying, and she's not against casual sex, and he's not unattractive, and she can use him to get off, and take that, stupid Bahraini boy. That he might possibly be using her doesn't even occur to her until the much-later scene with Percy at the bar. She's in charge here. She's in control. (She has to be. Or else she disintegrates into a mess like the world's a mess, and God, God, what is she doing with her life, and will she survive it - etc.)
Adel considers. Adel considers very hard, leaving Bahir in a mild state of shock, swiftly conquered with sharp irritation: "Don't you--"
"I suppose it would," Adel says, cutting him off. "If you're offering."
"Sure." Leah shrugs back in her chair and then starts climbing to her feet. On her way up, she looks at Bahir, and it's an empty, flat look, hardly glazed with passion. Dull with ... something else. Shadows, or else hatred. "You, too? You can watch if you want. Keep yourself happy." And she mimes jerking off, with a thin smile.
I wasn't giving the twins overmuch telepathic or empathic output to read. I regret that. But I give a little here: her shrug, her dull look, her thin smile. She's not exactly skipping tra-la-la to meet a lover, is she?
I wonder, if she tried, she could have come up with a bigger insult and offense to Bahir right there: suggesting that he come watch her and his brother fuck, and hey, if he wants to wank, too . . . I wasn't aware of Bahir's tricksy relationship with sexuality, thanks to Adel, or I'd apologize for having slipped OOC into IC. As it stands, it's an IC thing for this self-loathing woman to ask of strangers. If she's going to degrade herself, if she's going to use Adel (which adds to the degradation because that's not very Christian of her), she's going to go whole hog. A threesome with the twins would not be out of the question, either, in her mind. Why not? Why the hell not, at this point in her life?
Bahir slams his hands down on the table, childish in his temper. He stands with careful dignity. "Nothing there I'd care to see," he spits, gaze sharp.
Aw, Bahir. How much hate he must have for his brother, sublimated into snark and scruffy sullenness, because he loves his brother, too. Love this relationship.
Adel stands, likewise, with a great deal less temper and rather more fluidity of limbs. "Not his sort of thing, really: sex." He gestures a silent 'after you'.
Leah shrugs again. "Your loss," and more kindness goes to Bahir with the words, like the slow seep of sweet cyanide. She jerks a nod to his brother and goes out without looking back, shoulders hunched again, hands in jacket pockets, but head up. Oh, head definitely up, flagged defiantly against the night.
I wrote my pose in closing fashion, in case xmm_al_razi wanted to stop there. He didn't, and so this pose sticks out like a sore thumb, and I stick my tongue out at it. Bah.
And now I return to the hanging thread from before: my laziness as a writer and rp'er.
I have been doing online roleplaying since November or December 1993. I've taken breaks now and then (a few months, a summer, a year), but by and large, it's been an unbroken twelve years and counting of this hobby. Moreover, I've been a writer since 1985 - twenty years. (It makes me cry a little to think that there might be people reading this who haven't been alive as long as I've been writing. How did I get so old so fast?) I've done just about every kind of play and writing you can think of. I've gotten into ruts, I've jolted myself out of them, and I've fallen back into the same ones or new ones.
I've been in a rut for the past several months, since maybe August or September. Roleplay hasn't been fun for me; in the majority of scenes, it's been mechanical, rote, something I do on autopilot to make other people happy. My writing - ha, I haven't even done non-rp writing in a year. I'm in a creative rut, and I've been trying to climb out of it. I've been trying to grow, to learn, to adapt, to expand. Like Amalthea in The Last Unicorn, I can feel the shell of my creativity dying all around me. Withering, atrophying - vanishing. It scares me. It depresses me.
That's why I write so much in these commentaries lately about growth and such. I'm giving myself positive public feedback to keep going, keep trying, don't give in and lapse into the ruts forever. Don't lie down and die! I do not view online roleplay as pure passive escape: I am doing it to hone my skills as actor, writer, roleplayer, psychologist, person, whatever you've got. It's escapist, yes, but I need to develop through its medium, not rest on my laurels, not soak up the companionship, the friendship, and the praise. (Not go gently into that good night!) I'm a shark. If I don't keep swimming, I'll die.
So, I've been trying new character development and new rp opportunities, one of which this scene represents: the dirty, half-hateful sex in the alley between Leah and Adel. I'm pushing Leah down and down and down, nearly to her breaking point, and I'm expanding my sex-writing (which I also regard as mechanical, rote, and something I do on autopilot to make other people happy) in case I need to use it in actual, non-rp writing. Exploration. Development. Pushing boundaries. Growth or death - of my interest in these silly games if nothing else.
Back to the poses.
"Not really," Bahir grates, buttons refastened. His fingers fumble the third, glare trailing after them. He exits two steps later, yet rather quicker; when they choose a direction, he turns opposite.
Adel spares not a glance for Bahir (poor Bahir!) as he trails after Leah, his hand inches from the small of her back. "Alley, hmm?" he murmurs, leaning toward her, yet not touching her. Slow coils of sensuality unravel, feather light.
For readers of Anne Bishop's Black Jewels Trilogy: Ha, ha, Daemon Sadi. Who needs to shut up and die omg. Adel = Daemon. I like to say that Bahir = Lucivar, to go along with it, but I don't think he really does. Not right now, anyway. Or it's a bad parallel to extend too far. Probably that.
Leah stalks on, around the end of the building and into the alley as promised. As promised. Denim scrapes on brick as she turns against the wall. "Shut up," she tells him, low. "Just shut up and do it."
She doesn't want talk, for God's sake. She wants to feel dirty and low; she wants to feel in control of that feeling because she doesn't have control over it when Tom or her situation induces it in her. She's trying to get a mean little piece of her own back, through Adel and this encounter. She doesn't get it, and a part of her knows she won't and doesn't, but she goes ahead anyway, against the better angels of her nature.
In covering shadow, Adel smiles -- sharp. "Right." Perfectly capable of following simple directions, he takes her hips in a doubled grip, hand to either side. Fingers stroke once, light, before gliding toward fastenings. Clever fingers make for short work, fingers on her skin as he pushes the fabric open.
Crooking a leg up around the back of his, her sneakered heel into the hollow beside his knee, Leah drags him closer and grabs his mouth in a kiss. No passion here, no; no attempt at the softness of love, the play of seduction. Her tongue thrusts against his; it fences, it rams, it insists. Her hands are already dragging at his pants, too, and she's pulling him even closer, harder. Breath, hot and regular on his face. Fingernails, blunt and prickling into his back.
Sex-writing, admittedly, bores me. I do it like color-by-numbers: do this now, and then this, and next that other thing, yadda yadda yadda. Every writing is like that, though, so I'll say what bores me about the sex part is that it's supposed to be sexy and I feel the pressure to make it such. And I'm not much interested in sex in my RL, which naturally doesn't help matters. Yawn-a-rama. I try to make it interesting for me by going more purple and playing around with format and diction: parallel constructions, sentence fragments, and so on.
Kiss hard and hot (sparring, forcing -- obliging), Adel braces his right hand on the wall, his left slipping low, curving between denim and cotton. A ripple of phantom touch ghosts along Leah's back: nails, a memory of a touch -- easily lost in a whirl of sensation as his fingers stroke.
Leah's breath shudders, though -- at his touch, at that touch, at any and at all of it. She hitches her hips unconsciously rough against his, and the hand not gripping his back for support dives to help push jeans and underwear out of the way. Down, down -- down! As her body strives /up/ and she kisses. She kisses him.
Daemon's sexy psychic tendrils, shut up and DIE OMG. (Hee. I love you so much for the references, xmm_al_razi.) She wants to mount him and ride him now, dammit. Time is compressed a bit: I don't think she'd be quite ready that fast, and oh, yes, there's a condom somewhere in here, courtesy of Adel. Safe sex, kids!
Adel licks away each hitch and slip of breath, catching her lower lip light between his teeth. He rocks forward and away, rhythm a thing lost in sway of a lower brain. His hands drift -- one falling, one rising -- to meet at her waist. He cups the underside of her breasts through the fabric, thumbs smoothing up and over her nipples, before touch slides down, slow, along the curves of her body. His fingers grip, holding and pressing, assisting the drive up only to facilitate a slide down.
Teeth sink briefly into his lower lip, and Leah's fingers stiffen over his back. The rhythm rocks her, waves slapping against a sinking boat's hull, and her breath draws ragged down its side, down the alley's chilled and fetid darkness, like breaking fingernails, like broken conversation.
There, penetration. She bites him, and she starts moving. I steal from "Nautical Disaster" by The Tragically Hip (from the album Day for Night, buy it in stores now!):
I had this dream where I relished the fray
and the screaming filled my head all day.
It was as though I'd been spit here, settled
in, into the pocket of a lighthouse on some
rocky socket, off the coast of France, dear.
One afternoon, four thousand men died in
the water here and five hundred more were
thrashing madly, as parasites might in your
blood. Now I was in a lifeboat designed for
ten and ten only, anything that systematic
would get you hated. It's not a deal nor a
test nor a love of something fated. The
selection was quick, the crew picked and
those left in the water got kicked off our
pantleg and we headed for home.
Then the dream ends when the phone rings,
you doing alright he said it's out there most
days and nights, but only a fool would
complain. Anyway Susan, if you like, our
conversation is as faint as a sound in my
memory, as those fingernails scratching on
my hull.
Mmm, the Hip. So much love. (Everything! Ending up in my rp!)
With each stroke, a ghost's caress; with each spark of friction, a phantom echo; sensation doubles between two mirrors, reflected in each new shift -- each press of skin, each slide of lips, each glide of hips. A runner's measured breath, rough in his throat, breaks past Adel's lips. He bends his head, lips grazing her collarbone. In the heat and drive, in the multiplication of arousal between two sources, the race is short.
Leah rises to it, but her voice sinks, drowns in glottal fulfillment: a sound like a punch to the gut as she crests the last wave and coasts home. Race over. Race won. Panting deeply, she leans between wall and man, arm and leg still around him. Rests a moment with her brow pressed onto his shoulder.
For what it's worth, that's one of my favorite climax poses. Glottal fulfillment is lovely, especially coupled with the violence of the punch analogy. I finish off the nautical conceit with that wave mention. I like playing off a theme for in-scene arcs like sex. Think I got into the habit from mating-flight rp on Pern games, of which I've done far, far too much in those twelve years (you want to talk about getting into a rut! Same damn flight, over and over again, same poses, same reactions, and gah - I swore off them years ago).
Sound dies in Adel's throat, unable to shoulder past sudden tension. He rests his head against the wall of the alley, breath smoothing against the skin of her neck. His arms tremble and tighten before he shifts his stance, pulling away. Soft syllables slip past his lips, a tangle of foreign tongues. It ends with a universal sound: a small, sated, "Hmmm."
"Yeah," Leah says, as quietly, and lowers her leg to stand on both feet, a process involving some extrication, some extraction. She pulls in a breath, shakes her head brief and sharp in the shadows.
No post-coital cuddle or chit-chat: once she's got her breath and balance back, she's done with him. She isn't looking at him. Doesn't want to encourage aforementioned cuddle or chit-chat.
I like the "tangle of foreign tongues" thing. Bet that's where I stole my drabble idea from, with the twins. Ha!
Safe sex, kids! Adel resecures and disposes, adding trash to trash in the alley. (Litterbug!) He leans back against the wall, licking his lower lip and regarding her from under dark eyelashes, through glazed eyes. "That was nice," he offers, inane.
Leah breathes a snort. "Yeah," comes again, and not kindly this time, not from her, not for him, not here or now. "You feel better?"
"Nice"? She wasn't doing it for "nice," bucko. She slides right back into needling him: aw, does baby feel better now? Not so grumpy or snarky? Awww! She hates him about as much as she hates herself at this moment. His weakness. Hers. Hate it all!
Adel's hand starts toward hers, but diverts, to edge her hip in a light touch. "Mmm," he says, agreement vague. More pointed, he turns, pushing off the wall to stand tall before her again. "You?"
"Sure," Leah tosses off and pulls up her pants. Head ducked to watch the fumbling rebuttoning, she continues, "Good to hear. Tell your brother good night for me. Missed his chance, huh? Coulda had you both."
"He wouldn't have known what to do." Glib, Adel dismisses Bahir in a gesture, his eyes on her. "I'll send your regrets."
Leah's mouth hooks down as she raises her head again. "I'm a bitch," she says plainly and catches his forearm in her hand's curl. "If you want -- before you go -- to make up for, y'know, all that in there..." Her hand drops to his pants now, and her fingers trail over his groin.
Adel's about two inches taller than Leah, by the way. She just completely ignores him for the first part there, redoing her pants and all, sniping at him some more and at Bahir. Poor asexual, grarful Bahir, who had to live through that because he can't turn their link off. (He bitched at her in a subsequent scene. Called her a slut! OMG!) And then . . . and then she feels bad. Weakness! She used him, she bitched at him - aw, hell. She'll apologize, and degrade herself further, on her knees for him.
Besides, I wanted to riff on transubstantiation for the journal entry (the ceremonial wafer she'd accepted that morning in Mass, the blowjob she gives now in the alley), and scenes will conform themselves to my writer's demands if I can manage it without making a mess of things. (I'm a bad roleplayer.)
"I'll forgive you," Adel whispers, voice echoing of playful sacraments. Young and male he smiles, pressing forward against her touch. "Sure. Don't have to, but--"
"Hush," Leah tells him and pats his cheek gently. Then she kneels, false penitent, and pulls him out -- still gentle, there's that, at least -- and takes him into her mouth. Eyes half-closed. Fingers moving, massaging. And tongue ... and tongue. This race isn't long in the running, either.
Sacraments - penitent. Reference, since I'd mentioned the transubstantiation thing to xmm_al_razi during our play, and more capping. I live for it! It's my happy game. I didn't bother spending much time on the actual fellatio. She sucks him off. You get the point. Yawn (literally, since it was getting late and I was tired).
Adel hushes, last words curling away through the close air. There is the lightest suggestion -- an intimation of a hint -- of shared touch and then it breaks. Stifled sounds echo back soft from the opposite wall as Adel slumps, head rolling to the side. After, he skips words, straight to a pleased hum.
Leah sits back on her heels, swallows, and wipes her mouth along her jacket sleeve. A moment. She stands up, unfolding like a jack-in-the-box. "Good night," she says, a little hoarsely, and turns to go.
Done. She pauses after his orgasm, after she swallows his semen, and maybe reflects on the Mass thing, in a dim way. She feels a crying jag coming on. Possibly accompanied by thrown objects. She's not going to show that to him, though. Physical intimacy is nothing compared to emotional intimacy.
"Yes," Adel agrees, voice soft over the word. He leans, watching her walk off: in no hurry to follow, in less hurry to call after her. Concluding words come, after a pause: "You too."
But Leah's already gone, with her head high as she crosses the street -- glance upstream, glance down- -- another shadow borne ceaselessly back into the shadowed night.
A closing I like because it isn't overwritten and it works off the other person's pose (with the leading conjunction for transition and contradiction both) and it ends with a Great Gatsby reference. Yay! Sometimes I like my writing. The more I push boundaries, the more I try - the better I can get. The twins' player gave me a great scene, and much generosity, in which to work, and I do sincerely appreciate it.
[Commentary for X-Men MUCK. Please see the full list for more.]
Originally posted: November 27, 2005
Written: January 3, 2006
What Has Come Before: Leah got sucked into the black hole of representing the Friends of Humanity in the media, to protect her family and friends from Tom's threatened retribution, and while she kinda likes it, kinda agrees with it, the job is wearing on her. She explored a death wish with Magneto in Central Park and was saved from fatal consummation by Scott and Hank, yay, X-Men. She had a bad Thanksgiving with her family, resulting in her being banned from her mother's house for the foreseeable future. She's in love with Rossi and doesn't know what the hell to do about that. She doesn't know what the hell to do about a lot of things in her life. She's gone back to the Catholic Church, which has been good for giving her some direction and absolution, but it's not enough. Nothing is enough. This scene certainly illustrates that.
This scene! It happened because xmm_al_razi was this cool new player I didn't know, but my friends had pumped him up as teh awesome, and so I demanded rp. I do that; I will hunt you down and make you scene with me if I think I'm going to enjoy it. Some people collect twinks. I collect good rp'ers. I have you all in a glass menagerie for my pleasure. Tennessee Williams would be proud of me. (Oh, God, I'm making Tennessee Williams jokes two paragraphs in. This isn't going to turn out well at all.)
Leah has taken advantage of the hour (getting towards "late," especially for a Sunday) and the weather (not too cold, especially for late November) by taking over a whole round table to herself in the cafe, not too near the door, but not too far from it, either. Every time it opens, in fact, her face jolts up from brooding study of the coffee cup between her hands, and her eyes jump with hope dashed by another slouching stranger, another hustling student, another canoodling couple. And she looks down again then, each time, and hunches her shoulders under her denim jacket, and stares all the harder into her dark and sullen drink.
You can always tell when I'm uncertain about a scene and a dynamic because I throw tons of words at a setting. (Which, for the record, I love to do. I love setting. I love closing, too. I'm better at closing than setting, but I'll do both in a scene, by gum. It's not a hardship for me; if you want me to do it, just ask, and I will.) I've been focusing more on putting in all the traditional setting information of time, season, locale, and so on; I'm trying to ease back on it a bit because, yo, I'm not writing short stories, I'm rp'ing, and the narrative demands are different. I think. At any rate, I overwrite by default, and when I'm not sure what I'm doing, I go straight to default, and purple prose happens. Sad, really. I wonder if I could change that default, to Hemingway-style spareness. Hm.
Leah is at the White Room, waiting for Scott Summers out of the (to-be-discovered) misguided hope that he'll show up even though she didn't call him for a meeting. They met randomly there, they kept meeting there, it became their place, and she would like to talk with him. About anything. She would like to curl up, figuratively speaking, into his steady, upright, quiet nobility. She needs some of that, lacking any of her own (having, in fact, the opposite, thanks to mean Mr. Tom!).
I don't usually do a setting in the imperfect tense, so to speak: writing about what's been happening for a while, not just right this second as the scene starts. It adds to the sense of Leah's waiting, her repeatedly dashed hopes, her dwindling optimism - captures her life in a nutshell, in other words. Good for me. I totally didn't intend that. Is it possible to be a good writer without trying? Ha.
Non-slouching ex-students, pair divided by silence, Adel and Bahir enter one after the other. Bahir drifts away as Adel heads for the counter, the buttons of his coat loose, hands in pockets holding it close to his body as he angles between chairs. Adel quickly sheds his coat, draping it over his arm. He waits patiently in line, chatting up the girl in front of him up until her boyfriend turns around to wrap a proprietary hand around her waist. Adel smiles brightly and falls silent. Bahir sits, glancing a table over -- Leah -- and then on in evident disinterest.
Gosh, and I was so hoping the twins would come in as another canoodling couple. Disappointed! (Imagine me saying that as Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, when he finds the jewels missing from the safe in the garage. DisapPOINted!) I have drabbled a slash pairing of the twins. It was easy. The twins hate me now for it. Too bad.
And here is where I confess two things about the al-Razi twins: I thought their player was a complete twink for doing this character concept (two semi-independent chars with one PC object! Linked twin telepaths! How speshul snowflake of you, darling!), and I thought that because I was eating my liver with envy that I hadn't thought of it first. Damn you, xmm_al_razi. HATE.
Adel gets cockblocked. Ha, ha. Bahir is my preferred twin, because Adel is cheery and banal and petty EVIL and his brother is a poor abused grarful honey-bunny whom I enjoy slapping around with Shaw. See how my likes and dislikes work? Is Bahir scouting Leah for his brother? Gosh, that didn't occur to me until now, given their link and all. Does Adel make Bahir find girls for him? How evil is that?
--
Al-Razi
Similar overall in face and form, differing slightly in the small details, both men stand just under six feet, slender builds well-muscled and finely proportioned. Their features are mirror copies: symmetrical, attractive, clean-edged but not striking. Eyebrows are dark, thick but well-defined, with clear eyes below. Banded brown and gray, the effect that of watered silk, they are striking in their clarity, not their color. Thick lashes, not especially long, add a dark frame. Their mouths are stubbornly set.
Adel keeps his hair short, bleached and dyed, with golden strands streaking through a russet brown, set in chaotic spikes. Bahir's hair is longer and lushly dark, with a slight wave. At the longest point, it only just brushes his shoulders. Adel is clean-shaven, while Bahir keeps a slightly scruffy short mustache and beard.
--
I include character descs in the first log I do with them, and in subsequent logs where the descs matter (e.g., at a masquerade party). They are pretty boys. Adorable. My characters enjoy telling them that, whether they're there to hear it or not. I'm mean. Bahir is scruffy! How can you not like scruffy? Adel is metro. No wonder he got cockblocked.
Her shoulders still hunched -- raven's grumpy distress -- Leah stares back at Bahir in that interval of glancing, but looks away, too. Down. And then into the backs of her eyelids as she raises her cup for a slow, measured swallow.
Aw, raven. That's Shaw's symbol, not Leah's, but I use it wherever I want to indicate a death-doom-and-gloom Poe-ish mood. This pose says absolutely nothing else except the raven thing. I've switched from default purple to default sparse, after all. Floundering, needing a hook to get into the dynamic, still more wrapped up in my char than in the interaction (which, granted, has hardly started).
It is a few minutes before Adel comes through with two mugs of coffee, one placed before his brother, the other kept in hand. He sits with a smile for all, indiscriminate in his affection, that slowly spins to fix on Leah. As he adds packet after packet of sugar, he grins gamely in her direction. He waves a pinky. Bahir leans back, looking very much as if he'd like to slouch, and scowls over the coffee at Adel.
Leah's cup goes down. Her eyelids go up, just in time to catch -- pinky. Waving. At her. Bemused, she looks at it and then at its owner. "What the hell are you doing?"
Seriously. Adel? You're weird. Okay, it's New York, and New York comes with the weird, but . . . seriously. Pinky waves? You're either twelve or gay. Maybe both. Or possibly high, now that Leah considers that all-beaming smile. Stoned out of your gourd, yes, that could be it. Lacking anything else to do, she'll get out a pointed stick she carries with her at all times (New Yorker!) and poke him with it.
"Saying hello," Adel says, sliding smoothly into conversational opening. "Hullo." The pinky goes down.
Bahir groans quietly, taking a long sip to scald harsh words from his tongue.
Leah studies him now. "Do you always say hello like that? You give gay guys a bad name."
Leah is a tiny bit homophobic, in the sense that she stereotypes that group. She's a bigot, after all; her mind-set encompasses that kind of reductive, black-and-white thinking for most every section of the population. She likes categories and labels. She likes applying them to people she meets. She feels more certain and in control of an uncertain and uncontrollable world.
Bahir's eyes skitter back in a darting look, flashing approval; a smirk curls over the rim of the mug as he lifts it from another prolonged swallow.
"I imagine I do, given as how I sleep with women," Adel says, flustered a bare second before recovering.
Annoyance flattens Leah's mouth. "Well, how nice for them." Her gaze encompasses both of them for a moment. Twins; mirrors. "Double your pleasure, huh?"
I use the mouth-flattening thing a lot. Too much. Way too much. Sigh. Must find new phrases to slot into my repertoire when I'm groping my way through a new dynamic.
Why do I keep using words and ideas in comments that show up in the very next pose? I used encompasses up there, and here is the word in Leah's pose. That bugs me. Maybe I should stop doing stream-of-consciousness commentary and actually draft and edit these things like proper writing. I call myself a writer, do I not? Honestly, what a slacker.
Leah is not unaware of Bahir's approval. She likes the scruffy, too. Adel is too sleek and modern and charming for her. And possibly twelve, gay, and/or stoned.
"How original," Bahir says, deadpan. Approval fades and the smirk turns wry, not so gentle in its mockery. "I've /never/ heard that one before."
Adel meets annoyance with cheer: a terminal failing. "The women seem to like it."
"If you want original entertainment," Leah snaps at Bahir, "try Eighth Avenue. Pimps'll hook you up right. Midgets are fifteen percent off for Thanksgiving, I hear. Natural markdown, y'know." Her glower slides to Adel, over him: hot, slick, pallid brown. "Do they? As much as I'm enjoying it?"
So much for the nascent liking of Bahir. Fuck off, asshole. She can be plenty original; she's just not wasting it on you.
Eighth Avenue in New York City is the traditional stomping grounds for sex-trade workers. Or, well, it was the last time I checked. (Not in person, thank you.) I try to provide local color that my characters would know, by drawing (carefully and in strategically limited fashion) on what I know about the locales in question. Also: midgets are funny. Always. This log occurred before I found out that the twins' player is shorter than I am, and THAT MAKES IT EVEN FUNNIER.
Pricked by Bahir's smirk, Leah turns on him and then on his brother. Rawr! She don't like being mocked, not at all. Inferiority complex, you know, plus she's outnumbered. Stupid twins.
Uncurling a single finger, Bahir points it ever so vaguely in Leah's direction. "Much better," he declares, magnanimous. "And yet, no thank you." Magnanimous /and/ polite.
Adel rubs his jaw line with a mug-warmed hand, smile rueful. "Perhaps in a slightly different manner," he accommodates.
Leah bares her teeth at Bahir, but battle-light lights her eyes with grudging simpatico for a second before she sighs back to the other man. "I was waiting for someone," she tells Adel, backing off somewhat (though her fingers are tight and yellow-knuckled around her cup). "Nothing you did. Sorry."
xmm_al_razi liked my pose well enough to remark on it in his commentary of the scene. I suppose it's all right, but it's really just more of the same: throwing big-ass words into the mix because I don't know what else to do at the moment. Leah was warming to the scene, as she often does when her baser emotions get shook up, but I wasn't. I remember feeling mentally lagged and dumb. The twins had me outnumbered, too!
Leah/Bahir OTP! It has to happen. C'mon.
Bahir smiles, ever so slightly, down into his coffee before attention turns away. "Don't worry about it," Adel says, brushing aside the apology. He continues, not-prying, oh-so-deft: "Waiting for a friend?"
"Apparently," and Leah looks back to the door, which stays stubbornly shut.
Bahir doesn't like anyone, though. Alas. It is not meant to be. Leah will cry into her pillow tonight over the loss, be sure of it.
That's not deft, Adel. Sorry. Leah's response is what a not-so-deft prying deserves: flat nothing, not even positive confirmation of his guess. I love my gruff, wary, shut-up-you-stupid-little-man-and-your-stupid-scruffy-brother character!
Adel follows the line of Leah's glance, a shoulder dropping in a shrug. "Sorry they didn't show," he says, sympathy tendered with a feather touch.
Leah shrugs, too, but swifter, harder. Brusque, as in a dismissal. "My own fault," she mutters, half on a laugh. "Next time, I'll call. Anyway." She has another swallow of coffee, grimaces, puts the cup down, braces it between both hands. "Worse ways to spend a Sunday night, right?"
Of course, Adel has telepathy. Projective empathy. NOT FAIR. Leah gives over a little, under his sympathetic touch, which I took to be psychic, since the pose isn't entirely clear and I was aware the twins' powers and wanted to extend the scene through the grace of deus ex machina manipulation. She braces herself for continuing conversation: maybe it can pass the time until Scott shows up (he might! you don't know! shut up!).
I've been doing the half-laugh and half-snort thing a lot more since meeting xmm_percy. I'm an unabashed thieving sponge.
"Usually more efficient," Adel agrees, humor gentle and smile slight. "There's always something to be said for striking up conversation with perfect strangers. I like doing that." Bahir's sigh speaks volumes -- condensed, Reader's Digest volumes -- of resigned irritation on this matter.
"And your brother -- for surely he must be -- doesn't," Leah divines effortlessly. She smiles. "Or maybe he doesn't like you?"
Yeah, it doesn't take much to make that divination, thanks to Bahir's sigh. I appreciate a player who'll give such easy, helpful hints of body language and expression, to advance the conversation and provide me with something to pose next. It's all about me, as the twins' player has found out. ALL OF IT.
Maybe Bahir doesn't like talking to his brother? Leah doesn't, after all, and Leah likes/liked Bahir. Reasonable inference to draw.
Bahir's attention turns back to Leah, smiled fixed. "A bit of both."
"He doesn't really mind that much," Adel assures, blithe. He smiles over at Bahir, met with a heavily ironic look. "He'd be bored otherwise."
Leah's smile turns upside down. "Bored? So /you're/ his entertainment? Well--" she slouches back, snorts "--better you than me, since I've already struck out once with him. But you keep coming. Tilting at windmills."
Apparently Leah has read a book in her life. Go figure. (Cervantes, yay!) I did deliberately do the smile turning upside down as a reference to the scene I'd had with this player before this scene, where Shaw met the twins at Sweet Basil. Cross-alt in-jokes. I like making other players feel like I remember, appreciate, and enjoy them. You get more rp that way. Ahem.
"Hmm." Adel blows the thought over his coffee, pausing to take a drink. "I wouldn't say I'm his entertainment. I'd say people are, and unless I forced him to go forth among the plebes, he'd hole himself in a room with a stack of nerdy journals and call himself content."
"And I would be content, too," Bahir says, mournful for many lost nights.
Back to Adel, who says, a touch of irony amid all the cheer, "I'm persistent, see."
The twins give the player twice as much rp space as the rest of us. JELUS. And so quick with turning out those multiple poses! I don't type that fast.
"Hoi polloi are the better for it," Leah tells Bahir with dark, mocking gravity. "Speaking for them as I may, since it's my job and all. You're /wasted/ on journals. How can this--" her chin lifts, rotates, includes the coffeeshop and the three of them "--compare to a centerfold illustration of Jupiter's moons or a circuit diagram?" Her voice lowers; the corner of her mouth twitches up. "Or do you go for the hard-core stuff? Firefox source code, oh, God, yeah."
I like that pose. I write to entertain myself, first and foremost, if I'm not playing development midwife or helpful napkin to someone else. I absolutely could not make myself type "the hoi polloi" because hoi means "the" in Greek (declined to match polloi) and my brain refused to let me be redundant, even with an accepted Anglicized phrase. I struggle with that persnickety censor over the few languages I know. Shut up, brain. I suppose it reads okay here, though, because Leah is the type to bite off the articles and other leading words in her sentences, to get right to the meat of things.
I love using chins as pointers. Do it all the time with my characters. Don't remember where I picked it up. Maybe from myself, but I don't think I do it all that much. (I'm not physically demonstrative during speaking. I sit like a lump and talk and stare. Sometimes I'm even staring at the other person, courteous sort that I am.)
Cracked myself up with the Firefox thing. I couldn't think of anything geeky enough, so I covered it with Leah's faux arousal on that line. I'm sneaky! I hide my faults with window dressing! Bahir jerking off to a centerfold of Jupiter's moons also cracks me up. Why? Because - repeat after me, you know it by now - I'M MEAN. The twins hate me so, so much. Especially Bahir.
Bahir's eyes flicker, lashes dropping as he sips. He looks up at Leah, bland. "Mutation and polymorphism spectrum of the GALNS gene in mucopolysaccharidosis IVA, actually."
Biogeekery is hot. I made the player Google that. The player also hates me.
"So, you see, we compare quite favorably," Adel tags.
Leah fans herself languidly. "Hot," she purrs and zaps Adel with fresh irritation. "Do you? 'Cause what he's talking about sounds more interesting than you trying to get into my pants."
Zap! Leah uses short, bristly, sparky words like that. She's a hedgehog. She bristles and sparks. I try to match my writing to my characters when I'm aware enough to do so. Usually I'm not, and intuition and experience have to guide me. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don't. I'm such a lazy roleplayer and writer, you have no freaking idea. I don't think when I write poses, I don't proofread or edit them, I don't plan more than two or three poses ahead in a scene - sad, sad. Pathetic. I'll talk more on this subject later.
Leah's ego's pretty healthy, isn't it? Of course Adel wants to fuck her. Why wouldn't he? She frankly thinks that he could do a lot worse than her. She's at least forthright, experienced, passionate, and so on. He is twelve, gay, stoned, and/or stupid. Poor Adel. Bahir must be his chaperone, keeping him from running out into traffic and drooling on strangers. Leah feels pity for Bahir, stuck with that job.
"Dull, actually," Bahir says, considering a moment. "Genetic grunt work."
In that moment where Bahir considers, Adel regroups, blinking innocent, lamb-like (sheep to the slaughter!), under her irritation. "Just said hello, Miss."
"So you /are/ gay," Leah declares in triumph.
She occasionally zings people. She's not as witty as Shaw, in social settings, but she's about as mean (if not as actively cruel). She's got that bold New York attitude - speak up in a crowded room first before someone else seizes the opportunity from you - and she's got a locker-room mentality that delights in constant one-manupship putdowns. Growing up with all those red-blooded American males around her - she'd have been a great guy, I'm telling you.
Bahir chuffs a soft laugh, eyes narrowed at his twin in malicious humor. Adel spreads his hands along the mug, discomforted. He shifts. "No, really, I'm not."
Leah makes wide, offended eyes. "There isn't something /wrong/ with being gay, is there? My cousin's gay, and he's a cop. Should I tell him that you hate the homos?"
"Hate the homos" is hella hilarious. (How's that for alliteration, xmm_al_razi?) I'm trying to remember which cousin she's talking about. The one who works in the property room in a Staten Island precinct. What's his name? Dammit. I'd have to look through the logs, and I'm not going to do that right now. Anyway, it's an NPC I've referred to before, and lo and behold, for the purposes of making Adel feel bad, I up and made him gay right in this very pose. Thank you, NPCs.
"I don't hate the homos!" Adel insists, repeating her words in a somewhat stilted fashion. Bahir makes little noises of evil amusement -- snickering, snicking, snerking -- as appropriate, and occasionally (by his brother's glare) where inappropriate. "I have gay friends." Adel flashes his queer cred, but loses credit by immediately stressing, "You know, just friends who are gay. I just like women. You know, breasts. Hips."
Leah draws herself up to indignant height. "Women," she tells him with acid contempt, "are more than just breasts and hips and /body parts,/ sir. We are /people./"
How dare Adel suggest women are nothing more than body parts! No, I know he didn't, not consciously, anyway, it's just bad phrasing, and Leah knows that, too; but you bet she'll pretend to assume that for the purposes of, again, making him feel bad and putting him down. It's a pissing contest. She's going to win. By God, she will!
Adel has no queer cred. Please. He has hair gel. That doesn't count.
Bahir lifts a finger to interject with a comment, a slicing look from Adel cutting him off mid-aborning. He finishes his coffee, smiling, as Adel digs. "Of course they are. I like people. I just like female people better."
"Who do you like?" Leah asks Bahir.
"Myself." Bahir sips. "Occasionally, him."
Leah tells Adel now, "I like /him,/" and jerks her thumb at his brother, just in case he needs the help.
This exchange amused me as much as it did xmm_al_razi, and yes, thumbs are underused in rp. Leah's a thumb-using kind of character. She gesticulates!
Lips to fingers and fingers to air, Bahir wafts a soundless kiss to Leah. Adel sighs in defeat. "You know," Adel whines-doesn't-whine, "he thinks everyone on the planet isn't near as smart as he is." Bahir hums agreement. "And that most people are little more than animals." Bahir nods agreement. "And that he's better than everyone." Bahir shrugs agreement. "And that--"
Bahir /smiles/ and reaches across the table, patting Adel's elbow -- cutting him off. "You are so very twelve."
Leah slits her eyes in a slitted smile. "I like him even more. You might be twelve, but you're a good pimp for your brother."
I like the air-kiss. It's cute. It has an Arabic flavor to it: the traditional eyes-lips-heart salute of the deep desert. Adel really is twelve. Leah was right!
"You," Adel accuses, playful tone edged, "have bad taste in men."
Leah leans forward on folded arms, her brows rising politely curious over flat, hard eyes. "Because I like him? Or because I don't like you?"
I need to describe what her voice is doing. Bah. Her eyebrows, her eyes, but not her tone? That's poor writing. Lazy, lazy.
"Both," comes the twinned reply: Bahir's dry, Adel's sly.
And Leah's wry. "So, what -- you come as a set? I didn't think you were Siamese-joined."
That capping - dry, sly, wry - makes me happy. I'm a better writer than I am a roleplayer, and I like doing writerly things: rhyme, alliteration, references, and so on. Tricks o' the trade. I have come to recognize over the past few months (I know, I know, I'm slow) that I play this game more as a writer than a rp'er, and I don't think that's a good thing. It's pushing me towards quitting XMM, actually, in favor of a forum game or two, which I think might better suit my style, preference, and time commitment. We'll see. I'm not saying that as an attention-getting device, either. It was just in my head, and out it came. If I want attention, I'll ask for it, promise. I'm just making connections, finding realizations, and trying to figure out what I want. These commentaries have been very good for such self-reflection.
"At birth," Adel offers up, plate of cheer trimmed with sunny smile and an airy gesture. Bahir grimaces, eyes flashing in mild annoyance toward Adel. "Not Siamese, though."
"Well, good. You know what happened to poor Eng and Cheng, after all." Leah sips at her coffee, delicate and unconcerned.
She's being especially bitchy when she acts the proper lady. (Shaw does the same thing. I don't know if Joelle does. Probably not, for variety's sake.)
I spelled "Chang" wrong. Botheration.
"No, not really," Adel says, gesture smoothly transforming into a silent invitation for Leah to offer up her insight.
A lifted shoulder. "One died. The other didn't. Lay there, connected to his dead brother, feeling the death poisons seeping into him, feeling that empty corpse cooling next to him, waiting for his turn. --I'm Leah, by the way. Nice to meet you."
The recitation of that story, I stole from the X-Files episode "Humbug." Let's see if I can find the quote on the internets-
CURATOR: Welcome to my museum. May I put to rest any questions you may have conjured?
SCULLY: I was just reading about the fascinating life of Chang and Eng and wondering if their death was just as fascinating.
CURATOR: Oh, very much so. On a cold January eve in 1874, Eng awoke to find his brother had passed away during the course of the night. A few hours later, Eng himself departed from this world. Now, these facts themselves may be less than fascinating but imagine... imagine being Eng and lying there.
(He puts his disfigured hand on her shoulder.)
Knowing that essentially half your body was now dead... that the rest must inevitably follow... and being able to do about it absolutely nothing. At the autopsy, it was officially concluded that Chang died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
SCULLY: And what was the official cause of Eng's death?
CURATOR: Fright.
(Source, and here's a Wiki on the Siamese twins.) I ♥ the internets. Everything in my life ends up in my rp sooner or later, you betcha. Leah gets a kick out of passing the story along to these twins. It's hardly even mean of her; she's just sharing information. Interesting information! Isn't it? Yes, it is. Thank you.
How perfectly horrible," Bahir says, precise in his pronunciation.
"How -- horrible," Adel repeats, stilted. "That must have been--"
"Horrible, yes. Nice to meet you, too, Leah," Bahir says, name offered: "Bahir. That's Adel."
"Egyptian?" Leah asks with a touch of professional curiosity. She keeps her arms crossed on the table; her hands stay folded inside the nest, wary, warm, and safe.
I'm sometimes dimly surprised that I remember what my characters' body configurations are throughout a scene, especially when I'm tired and/or distracted. I think it's a kinesthetic sense I have for them, not visual imagery: inside feeling them rather than outside watching them. I can feel what they're doing (and experiencing) throughout a scene, and yes, I have IC/OOC bleed problems from that, why do you ask? I'm working on it. It's better than it used to be.
Leah isn't terribly familiar with what nationality the names "Adel" and "Bahir" might be associated with, but they're obviously Arabs, probably from the Gulf region, so she makes a guess, reporter that she is. (It never really turns off, in her brain. There's always a story out there somewhere!)
"Bahraini," Adel says, wrapping his wits back round the thread of conversation. He favors Leah and Bahir both with a mistrustful look before forging on. Bahir meets his gaze, level, and is careful to not-smile. "Know it?"
Leah shakes her head. "I haven't been to the Middle East. Kinda always wanted to. Cairo, anyway. Maybe the Pyramids. I haven't even left the continent, though."
Adel supplements Leah's geography: "Off the coast of Saudi Arabia." He considers over the last of his coffee, smile rueful. "We've pretty much lived there and here. Never even made it up to Canada. I imagine Egypt is much like Bahrain: dry."
"I know where Bahrain is, thank you," Leah clips off frostily. "I was just saying I'd like to go to Egypt."
My bad on this exchange, although it provides a delightful example of how RL conversations stall briefly in cul-de-sacs of misunderstanding (rp shouldn't be perfect all the time!). Leah understood, as I did, that Adel (I'm assuming it's him speaking in that first quoted pose) means "know it?" in terms of "have you been there?" - which isn't, in fact, what he means, and that leaves Leah open for the geography lesson that she doesn't actually need, thanks. It's good misunderstanding. I squirm a bit because I fear it makes me look bad and no one will ever talk to me again because I have to be perfect for y'all and live up to the compliments I get, or else! (I am also working on that fun psychological kink, for the record.)
"But you--" Adel, though young, is wise enough to shut up on that. "I guess I'd like to go sometime myself," he finishes, rather lackluster.
Leah narrows her eyes. "I what?"
"Why do you want to go to Egypt?" Adel supplants, disingenuous.
PWNED. Or else he cares more about sexing her up than about putting her in her place with a reminder of how she misunderstood him and Said The Wrong Thing. Charming Adel.
"Because I'm an ugly American tourist who likes to gape at old impressive shit and take photos and talk really loud to the natives because then they'd understand English," Leah reels off, glibly bored.
She suspects that at least one of them thinks of Americans that way, so she mocks her people for them. Helpful Leah!
Adel's total contribution to the conversation at that stands at "Uhm."
"Volume doesn't really help," Bahir says, helpful tones sweetened.
Leah rolls sweet right back to him: "Gee, thanks, I had no idea. Does volume help you understand sarcasm? I can shout, if so."
Bahir taps a finger against the side of his mug. "I was being," he says, speaking slow for her benefit, "ironic."
"And I was so hoping you were as stupid as your brother," Leah laments on a gusted sigh. "Shooting fish in a barrel is much more fun."
"He tries," Bahir says, utter certainty in his voice. "He tries very hard."
"Do you?" asks Leah kindly, of Adel.
Leah+Bahir vs. Adel entertains me greatly. So does Leah vs. Bahir, for that matter. They're bitch buddies!
"No!" Adel insists, defensive. He folds his arm over his chest, leaning back in a slouch.
"Note the defensive posture, the sharpness of his tone," Bahir murmurs, aside made sotto voce.
Leah cuts him an annoyed look, then refixes attention on Adel. "So, should I fuck you back in the alley to make you feel better?" Still kind, still soft, so gentle and compassionate and awwwwww. "Would that help, little one?"
Leah thinks that Bahir is being condescending - she can read his body language herself, thank you - and gives him a cut. (I should add switchblade to her meta lexicon, if it isn't there already.) Aaaaaand the proposition just comes out of the blue, doesn't it? Kinda. She's aware that he has been flirting with her, or trying, and she's not against casual sex, and he's not unattractive, and she can use him to get off, and take that, stupid Bahraini boy. That he might possibly be using her doesn't even occur to her until the much-later scene with Percy at the bar. She's in charge here. She's in control. (She has to be. Or else she disintegrates into a mess like the world's a mess, and God, God, what is she doing with her life, and will she survive it - etc.)
Adel considers. Adel considers very hard, leaving Bahir in a mild state of shock, swiftly conquered with sharp irritation: "Don't you--"
"I suppose it would," Adel says, cutting him off. "If you're offering."
"Sure." Leah shrugs back in her chair and then starts climbing to her feet. On her way up, she looks at Bahir, and it's an empty, flat look, hardly glazed with passion. Dull with ... something else. Shadows, or else hatred. "You, too? You can watch if you want. Keep yourself happy." And she mimes jerking off, with a thin smile.
I wasn't giving the twins overmuch telepathic or empathic output to read. I regret that. But I give a little here: her shrug, her dull look, her thin smile. She's not exactly skipping tra-la-la to meet a lover, is she?
I wonder, if she tried, she could have come up with a bigger insult and offense to Bahir right there: suggesting that he come watch her and his brother fuck, and hey, if he wants to wank, too . . . I wasn't aware of Bahir's tricksy relationship with sexuality, thanks to Adel, or I'd apologize for having slipped OOC into IC. As it stands, it's an IC thing for this self-loathing woman to ask of strangers. If she's going to degrade herself, if she's going to use Adel (which adds to the degradation because that's not very Christian of her), she's going to go whole hog. A threesome with the twins would not be out of the question, either, in her mind. Why not? Why the hell not, at this point in her life?
Bahir slams his hands down on the table, childish in his temper. He stands with careful dignity. "Nothing there I'd care to see," he spits, gaze sharp.
Aw, Bahir. How much hate he must have for his brother, sublimated into snark and scruffy sullenness, because he loves his brother, too. Love this relationship.
Adel stands, likewise, with a great deal less temper and rather more fluidity of limbs. "Not his sort of thing, really: sex." He gestures a silent 'after you'.
Leah shrugs again. "Your loss," and more kindness goes to Bahir with the words, like the slow seep of sweet cyanide. She jerks a nod to his brother and goes out without looking back, shoulders hunched again, hands in jacket pockets, but head up. Oh, head definitely up, flagged defiantly against the night.
I wrote my pose in closing fashion, in case xmm_al_razi wanted to stop there. He didn't, and so this pose sticks out like a sore thumb, and I stick my tongue out at it. Bah.
And now I return to the hanging thread from before: my laziness as a writer and rp'er.
I have been doing online roleplaying since November or December 1993. I've taken breaks now and then (a few months, a summer, a year), but by and large, it's been an unbroken twelve years and counting of this hobby. Moreover, I've been a writer since 1985 - twenty years. (It makes me cry a little to think that there might be people reading this who haven't been alive as long as I've been writing. How did I get so old so fast?) I've done just about every kind of play and writing you can think of. I've gotten into ruts, I've jolted myself out of them, and I've fallen back into the same ones or new ones.
I've been in a rut for the past several months, since maybe August or September. Roleplay hasn't been fun for me; in the majority of scenes, it's been mechanical, rote, something I do on autopilot to make other people happy. My writing - ha, I haven't even done non-rp writing in a year. I'm in a creative rut, and I've been trying to climb out of it. I've been trying to grow, to learn, to adapt, to expand. Like Amalthea in The Last Unicorn, I can feel the shell of my creativity dying all around me. Withering, atrophying - vanishing. It scares me. It depresses me.
That's why I write so much in these commentaries lately about growth and such. I'm giving myself positive public feedback to keep going, keep trying, don't give in and lapse into the ruts forever. Don't lie down and die! I do not view online roleplay as pure passive escape: I am doing it to hone my skills as actor, writer, roleplayer, psychologist, person, whatever you've got. It's escapist, yes, but I need to develop through its medium, not rest on my laurels, not soak up the companionship, the friendship, and the praise. (Not go gently into that good night!) I'm a shark. If I don't keep swimming, I'll die.
So, I've been trying new character development and new rp opportunities, one of which this scene represents: the dirty, half-hateful sex in the alley between Leah and Adel. I'm pushing Leah down and down and down, nearly to her breaking point, and I'm expanding my sex-writing (which I also regard as mechanical, rote, and something I do on autopilot to make other people happy) in case I need to use it in actual, non-rp writing. Exploration. Development. Pushing boundaries. Growth or death - of my interest in these silly games if nothing else.
Back to the poses.
"Not really," Bahir grates, buttons refastened. His fingers fumble the third, glare trailing after them. He exits two steps later, yet rather quicker; when they choose a direction, he turns opposite.
Adel spares not a glance for Bahir (poor Bahir!) as he trails after Leah, his hand inches from the small of her back. "Alley, hmm?" he murmurs, leaning toward her, yet not touching her. Slow coils of sensuality unravel, feather light.
For readers of Anne Bishop's Black Jewels Trilogy: Ha, ha, Daemon Sadi. Who needs to shut up and die omg. Adel = Daemon. I like to say that Bahir = Lucivar, to go along with it, but I don't think he really does. Not right now, anyway. Or it's a bad parallel to extend too far. Probably that.
Leah stalks on, around the end of the building and into the alley as promised. As promised. Denim scrapes on brick as she turns against the wall. "Shut up," she tells him, low. "Just shut up and do it."
She doesn't want talk, for God's sake. She wants to feel dirty and low; she wants to feel in control of that feeling because she doesn't have control over it when Tom or her situation induces it in her. She's trying to get a mean little piece of her own back, through Adel and this encounter. She doesn't get it, and a part of her knows she won't and doesn't, but she goes ahead anyway, against the better angels of her nature.
In covering shadow, Adel smiles -- sharp. "Right." Perfectly capable of following simple directions, he takes her hips in a doubled grip, hand to either side. Fingers stroke once, light, before gliding toward fastenings. Clever fingers make for short work, fingers on her skin as he pushes the fabric open.
Crooking a leg up around the back of his, her sneakered heel into the hollow beside his knee, Leah drags him closer and grabs his mouth in a kiss. No passion here, no; no attempt at the softness of love, the play of seduction. Her tongue thrusts against his; it fences, it rams, it insists. Her hands are already dragging at his pants, too, and she's pulling him even closer, harder. Breath, hot and regular on his face. Fingernails, blunt and prickling into his back.
Sex-writing, admittedly, bores me. I do it like color-by-numbers: do this now, and then this, and next that other thing, yadda yadda yadda. Every writing is like that, though, so I'll say what bores me about the sex part is that it's supposed to be sexy and I feel the pressure to make it such. And I'm not much interested in sex in my RL, which naturally doesn't help matters. Yawn-a-rama. I try to make it interesting for me by going more purple and playing around with format and diction: parallel constructions, sentence fragments, and so on.
Kiss hard and hot (sparring, forcing -- obliging), Adel braces his right hand on the wall, his left slipping low, curving between denim and cotton. A ripple of phantom touch ghosts along Leah's back: nails, a memory of a touch -- easily lost in a whirl of sensation as his fingers stroke.
Leah's breath shudders, though -- at his touch, at that touch, at any and at all of it. She hitches her hips unconsciously rough against his, and the hand not gripping his back for support dives to help push jeans and underwear out of the way. Down, down -- down! As her body strives /up/ and she kisses. She kisses him.
Daemon's sexy psychic tendrils, shut up and DIE OMG. (Hee. I love you so much for the references, xmm_al_razi.) She wants to mount him and ride him now, dammit. Time is compressed a bit: I don't think she'd be quite ready that fast, and oh, yes, there's a condom somewhere in here, courtesy of Adel. Safe sex, kids!
Adel licks away each hitch and slip of breath, catching her lower lip light between his teeth. He rocks forward and away, rhythm a thing lost in sway of a lower brain. His hands drift -- one falling, one rising -- to meet at her waist. He cups the underside of her breasts through the fabric, thumbs smoothing up and over her nipples, before touch slides down, slow, along the curves of her body. His fingers grip, holding and pressing, assisting the drive up only to facilitate a slide down.
Teeth sink briefly into his lower lip, and Leah's fingers stiffen over his back. The rhythm rocks her, waves slapping against a sinking boat's hull, and her breath draws ragged down its side, down the alley's chilled and fetid darkness, like breaking fingernails, like broken conversation.
There, penetration. She bites him, and she starts moving. I steal from "Nautical Disaster" by The Tragically Hip (from the album Day for Night, buy it in stores now!):
I had this dream where I relished the fray
and the screaming filled my head all day.
It was as though I'd been spit here, settled
in, into the pocket of a lighthouse on some
rocky socket, off the coast of France, dear.
One afternoon, four thousand men died in
the water here and five hundred more were
thrashing madly, as parasites might in your
blood. Now I was in a lifeboat designed for
ten and ten only, anything that systematic
would get you hated. It's not a deal nor a
test nor a love of something fated. The
selection was quick, the crew picked and
those left in the water got kicked off our
pantleg and we headed for home.
Then the dream ends when the phone rings,
you doing alright he said it's out there most
days and nights, but only a fool would
complain. Anyway Susan, if you like, our
conversation is as faint as a sound in my
memory, as those fingernails scratching on
my hull.
Mmm, the Hip. So much love. (Everything! Ending up in my rp!)
With each stroke, a ghost's caress; with each spark of friction, a phantom echo; sensation doubles between two mirrors, reflected in each new shift -- each press of skin, each slide of lips, each glide of hips. A runner's measured breath, rough in his throat, breaks past Adel's lips. He bends his head, lips grazing her collarbone. In the heat and drive, in the multiplication of arousal between two sources, the race is short.
Leah rises to it, but her voice sinks, drowns in glottal fulfillment: a sound like a punch to the gut as she crests the last wave and coasts home. Race over. Race won. Panting deeply, she leans between wall and man, arm and leg still around him. Rests a moment with her brow pressed onto his shoulder.
For what it's worth, that's one of my favorite climax poses. Glottal fulfillment is lovely, especially coupled with the violence of the punch analogy. I finish off the nautical conceit with that wave mention. I like playing off a theme for in-scene arcs like sex. Think I got into the habit from mating-flight rp on Pern games, of which I've done far, far too much in those twelve years (you want to talk about getting into a rut! Same damn flight, over and over again, same poses, same reactions, and gah - I swore off them years ago).
Sound dies in Adel's throat, unable to shoulder past sudden tension. He rests his head against the wall of the alley, breath smoothing against the skin of her neck. His arms tremble and tighten before he shifts his stance, pulling away. Soft syllables slip past his lips, a tangle of foreign tongues. It ends with a universal sound: a small, sated, "Hmmm."
"Yeah," Leah says, as quietly, and lowers her leg to stand on both feet, a process involving some extrication, some extraction. She pulls in a breath, shakes her head brief and sharp in the shadows.
No post-coital cuddle or chit-chat: once she's got her breath and balance back, she's done with him. She isn't looking at him. Doesn't want to encourage aforementioned cuddle or chit-chat.
I like the "tangle of foreign tongues" thing. Bet that's where I stole my drabble idea from, with the twins. Ha!
Safe sex, kids! Adel resecures and disposes, adding trash to trash in the alley. (Litterbug!) He leans back against the wall, licking his lower lip and regarding her from under dark eyelashes, through glazed eyes. "That was nice," he offers, inane.
Leah breathes a snort. "Yeah," comes again, and not kindly this time, not from her, not for him, not here or now. "You feel better?"
"Nice"? She wasn't doing it for "nice," bucko. She slides right back into needling him: aw, does baby feel better now? Not so grumpy or snarky? Awww! She hates him about as much as she hates herself at this moment. His weakness. Hers. Hate it all!
Adel's hand starts toward hers, but diverts, to edge her hip in a light touch. "Mmm," he says, agreement vague. More pointed, he turns, pushing off the wall to stand tall before her again. "You?"
"Sure," Leah tosses off and pulls up her pants. Head ducked to watch the fumbling rebuttoning, she continues, "Good to hear. Tell your brother good night for me. Missed his chance, huh? Coulda had you both."
"He wouldn't have known what to do." Glib, Adel dismisses Bahir in a gesture, his eyes on her. "I'll send your regrets."
Leah's mouth hooks down as she raises her head again. "I'm a bitch," she says plainly and catches his forearm in her hand's curl. "If you want -- before you go -- to make up for, y'know, all that in there..." Her hand drops to his pants now, and her fingers trail over his groin.
Adel's about two inches taller than Leah, by the way. She just completely ignores him for the first part there, redoing her pants and all, sniping at him some more and at Bahir. Poor asexual, grarful Bahir, who had to live through that because he can't turn their link off. (He bitched at her in a subsequent scene. Called her a slut! OMG!) And then . . . and then she feels bad. Weakness! She used him, she bitched at him - aw, hell. She'll apologize, and degrade herself further, on her knees for him.
Besides, I wanted to riff on transubstantiation for the journal entry (the ceremonial wafer she'd accepted that morning in Mass, the blowjob she gives now in the alley), and scenes will conform themselves to my writer's demands if I can manage it without making a mess of things. (I'm a bad roleplayer.)
"I'll forgive you," Adel whispers, voice echoing of playful sacraments. Young and male he smiles, pressing forward against her touch. "Sure. Don't have to, but--"
"Hush," Leah tells him and pats his cheek gently. Then she kneels, false penitent, and pulls him out -- still gentle, there's that, at least -- and takes him into her mouth. Eyes half-closed. Fingers moving, massaging. And tongue ... and tongue. This race isn't long in the running, either.
Sacraments - penitent. Reference, since I'd mentioned the transubstantiation thing to xmm_al_razi during our play, and more capping. I live for it! It's my happy game. I didn't bother spending much time on the actual fellatio. She sucks him off. You get the point. Yawn (literally, since it was getting late and I was tired).
Adel hushes, last words curling away through the close air. There is the lightest suggestion -- an intimation of a hint -- of shared touch and then it breaks. Stifled sounds echo back soft from the opposite wall as Adel slumps, head rolling to the side. After, he skips words, straight to a pleased hum.
Leah sits back on her heels, swallows, and wipes her mouth along her jacket sleeve. A moment. She stands up, unfolding like a jack-in-the-box. "Good night," she says, a little hoarsely, and turns to go.
Done. She pauses after his orgasm, after she swallows his semen, and maybe reflects on the Mass thing, in a dim way. She feels a crying jag coming on. Possibly accompanied by thrown objects. She's not going to show that to him, though. Physical intimacy is nothing compared to emotional intimacy.
"Yes," Adel agrees, voice soft over the word. He leans, watching her walk off: in no hurry to follow, in less hurry to call after her. Concluding words come, after a pause: "You too."
But Leah's already gone, with her head high as she crosses the street -- glance upstream, glance down- -- another shadow borne ceaselessly back into the shadowed night.
A closing I like because it isn't overwritten and it works off the other person's pose (with the leading conjunction for transition and contradiction both) and it ends with a Great Gatsby reference. Yay! Sometimes I like my writing. The more I push boundaries, the more I try - the better I can get. The twins' player gave me a great scene, and much generosity, in which to work, and I do sincerely appreciate it.
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