(Untitled)

[ifnotyouthenwho]

Once upon a time, Johnny Maxwell had been quite good at naming things. That wasn't much really, but Johnny didn't have any other talents to go on. Yo-less was clever, Wobbler got computers, Bigmac could be hotwire a car in twenty seconds, and Kirsty was good at everything. Naming things was really all he could do up against competition like that

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[curiously_cora]

"What are you doing?" Coraline asked, draping herself over Johnny's back as she leaned forward and against him to reach for a piece of paper. Coraline's fingers grazed a piece, tugging slowly before she picked it up. Coraline glanced at Johnny, faint blush appearing on her cheeks as she pressed against him. "Is this me?"

[ifnotyouthenwho]

"Umm... No. Well, not really. Not quite?" Johnny was finding that his ability to coherently think and speak was apparently directly related to whether or not Coraline was draping herself over his back. He reached desperately to try to cover up some of the scattered papers, not because they were embarrassing, just because they were... well, they were embarrassing both in terms of content and artistic ability.

[curiously_cora]

"Was that a yes somewhere in there? I think it was," Coraline said turning her head to grin at him. Coraline stretched over him, reaching for a piece of paper and tugging it towards her whilst he was distracted trying to cover some of the others up. "This is me and that one's you. I like this alien, he looks creepy but he could be a bit weirder. Here, let me."

Coraline bit her lip, still draped over Johnny as she stole a pencil and began to doodle an even more creepy looking alien into the scene.

[ifnotyouthenwho]

"No!" Johnny reached out for the pencil. "She's not supposed to be a creepy alien, she's just a normal alien." He hadn't meant for the Captain to come into the comics, she just sort of had. He wasn't happy with how he ha drawn her though. It was difficult trying to fit all six of her arms in and she still looked a bit like a frog. The real Captain had looked more like a crocodile when she wasn't a newt. "The Captain's a good alien."

[pointzerothree]

It's always been a little weird to Eduardo, the kid who looks like a young Dustin. Not weird enough, though, for him to keep any kind of a distance. That would probably take a hell of a lot more, and besides, he doubts anything will ever be quite as strange as the time their ages were virtually switched. Now, spotting Johnny and a whole bunch of papers, he heads in his direction, not quite instinctively yet, but too curious not to. "Hey," he says, glancing down at the drawings, though trying not to look too closely so as to not be intruding. "What are these?"

[ifnotyouthenwho]

"Nothing. I mean, I just got a bit bored and started trying to make a comic book, I guess." Johnny looked down at his collection of badly drawn pages. He would have been embarrassed if Eduardo had said anything about the quality directly, but until then he was simply going to assume that everyone else was as bad at drawing as he was. "But I think I'm better at making things up then actually making them."

[pointzerothree]

At a closer glance, the drawings really aren't anything exceptional, but Eduardo figures it isn't his place to judge. God knows he probably wouldn't be a whole lot better if anyone put a pen in his hand and told him to draw. As he's said to his girlfriend before, there's a damn good reason he wasn't an art major, and it's that he would have been terrible. "Well, making things up is half the battle," he offers, almost questioningly, one shoulder lifting in a shrug. He wouldn't have been any good at that part, either. "You could always, um, collaborate with someone."

[ifnotyouthenwho]

"I dunno." The mess of papers lay there looking accusingly at Johnny. The more he thought about it the more he was beginning to realize that deciding to pursue the artistic impulse in the open might not have been the best idea. "Well, they're rather private, I guess. Someone else might think they were stupid." Heck, even he thought they were pretty stupid.

[percy_jackson]

I may have melted Riptide, but I still had the sword Elizabeth Norrington had given me, a short sabre. I still felt the need to train, after all. And I was on my way to training when I spotted Johnny working very attentively, and surrounded by drawings. It was an impressive sight and, glancing at the drawings, I could see that some of them were about Coraline.

Johnny and Coraline. Yes. Nice kids, both of them. And it was past time that I introduce myself to Johnny and make sure he was nice enough for Coraline.

"Hey," I said, standing in front of his work, a little off to one side. "Johnny Maxwell, isn't it?" I slung my sheathed sword over my shoulder and held out a hand. "My name's Percy Jackson."

[ifnotyouthenwho]

Johnny looked at the sword. Johnny looked at the boy. Johnny looked back at the sword.

"Umm... Pleased to meet you?" He shook the offered hand, trying valiantly not act as awkward as he felt. Unfortunately, it wasn't really working.

[percy_jackson]

"I'm pleased to meet you," I said, giving his hand a firm shake. "Coraline's told me all about you!" And what she didn't tell me, I learned from other sources. "She mentioned you two had a date when the Island played with our ages." And you were a gentleman, if you knew what was good for you.

[ifnotyouthenwho]

Oh no. He'd been afraid that the age weekend would come back to haunt him, but so far he had been lucky enough to escape most everything except Coraline's continued existence. Sometimes it seemed like everything she did was solely to remind him of what had happened that weekend.

"She did? Umm... It wasn't really a date, not a proper one," Johnny said, wincing a bit from the firmness of the handshake.

[butterflyfactor]

If there was one thing Layla had absolutely no admiration for, it was comic books. Not that that was this kid's fault, but the fact that the lives of pretty much everyone she knew, including herself, had been chronicled in them left a certain sort of distaste for the art form.

"Careful," she said.

"Create enough of those and your characters might start showing up on the island."

[ifnotyouthenwho]

Johnny dropped the pencil as if it had physically burned him. That couldn't happen. It couldn't. He'd been assured that this place was normal. Having people get pulled out of his head and into the real world again did not count as normal. "I thought that didn't happen here. They said it makes everyone normal. I mean, except for that weekend."

He looked at her uncertainly. "Right?"

[butterflyfactor]

"...For a given value of normal," Layla said, observing him with removed interest. Apparently she'd struck a nerve. She loved doing that, but she rarely did so accidentally.

"It certainly makes sure you don't have any powers. Is that something you used to be able to do?" she said, eyebrow lifting.

"Bring drawings to life?"

[ifnotyouthenwho]

"Umm... Not exactly." Johnny looked down at the paper. There was a badly drawn approximation of a super-powered Coraline yelling at an equally badly drawn super-powered Wobbler. She'd blown up his burger, but that was about as far as he'd gotten in terms of plot.

"I sort of... Well, if I thought about things too much they would become real and happen." He shrugged.