maskormenacelogs | Not Quite the Kwoon

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Not Quite the Kwoon

WHO: Mako Mori and Daryl Dixon
WHERE: De Chima - Abandoned warehouse where her makeshift gym is set up
WHEN: Oct 11
WHAT: Sparring
WARNINGS: Zombie...s, dead families, stuff?

Mako's text to Daryl has been quick and relatively simple, an address, and emoticon of a cup of green tea, a picture of two hanbo and her tiny jaeger, along with the words come join me, Daryl-san sent in a text bubble. The tea she had brewed very carefully and there was a faint scent of peach to it, which was very calming. Mako herself was dressed in a tank top and military trousers, as she had been before when she had stepped on the mats at the Kwoon Combat Room in Hong Kong. That had been with Raleigh and seemed so long ago even as it seemed like it was yesterday.

This would be...different, but somehow, it seemed like the right thing to do. She would teach him as he had taught her how to use her wings. It was, she thought, a very good thing.

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"Sure, I'm okay," Mako said and touched his pendant before cocking her head slightly to watch his wings. They looked pretty close and that made her wonder a little, though she didn't say anything.

"You want to fly, test them out?" There was that grin again, that glint in her eye that said she was always in the mood to fly.

Her hand came near and Daryl froze for a heartbeat while he mentally figured out what she was reaching to touch. He didn't relax until her hand dropped but he didn't pull away either. She was just checking out his pendant for some reason. The only thing in it was the oil and the cicada wing.

...which looked a lot like his current wings, actually.

Daryl flexed them again, this time spreading them wide so he could study them before reaching down and looking at the small wing in the vial.

"Guess so," he answered, starting to get curious if they would function differently than the feathered ones had or if they'd be mostly the same. "Wings like these allow for hoverin' easier, don't they?"

"Yes, they should," Mako said. "Hovering could come in handy." Wings in general were good when it came down to evacuating people, surveying, keeping a watch out.

"May I take a look at them?" she asked. "I'll be careful, I promise. If you want, you can take a look at mine. They're pretty odd, but soft at least."

He could already hover to an extent with his other wings, but it was an awkward affair. Daryl continued to look over his shoulder at them, but turned cautiously so they could angle toward Mako.

"Don't touch," he warned, but did hold them out for her to inspect.

"I won't," she murmured, "those aren't the kind of wings you touch." Mako remembered the summers when she'd sit out and listen to the bugs sing, the ones that took years to come up from the earth.

"Those will definitely hover," Mako said, "and really well, too. They're built for it."

He honestly didn't know if touching them would cause them any damage. It could. But considering how they manifested, it might not. Wasn't worth the risk. Or the discomfort of having someone else's fingers on them, either.

"Thought it was the vest," he said after another minute, hand idly twisting his pendent while one finger tapped on it's side.

"You wear the vest," Mako said about as thoughtful as she was curious, "and you wear the pendant. What happens if you remove it and try to manifest wings?" She shrugged a little and peered up at him, a smile touching the corners of her lips.

"Sorry, I'm a scientist. If I don't ask enough questions," Mako pressed her lips together for a moment to suppress a laugh, "new ones come to find me at three in the morning." Sometimes they did, but mostly it was nightmares. Her frown nosedived the laugh a second later and she fell quiet. Her own wings materialized, fluttering a little in response to unchecked emotion as she scrubbed a hand through her hair.

Daryl's fist closed around the pendant and he recalled the wings. They curled down toward his body like they were being rolled inward to a center point, then just sort of... broke up. Into golden dust that faded from the air. Then he pulled the necklace up over his head and went over to his jacket and vest. He set it down and stepped away. About halfway between Mako and the jacket.

"Guess we can find out," he offered, crossing his arms and frowning. He wasn't sure what had made her expression do a one-eighty, but she seemed pretty excited at the thought of discovering more about his wings.

"You uh, you ready?"

"I am," Mako said, nodding as her wings curved around her. "I guess today is all sorts of new things, mm?" She rocked back on her heels for a moment in anticipation.

Her wings only did, well, what they usually did. His were far more fascinating.

When he'd first figured out how to call his wings, he'd thought that was the end of it. That the porter had changed his vest to be a power he could use if he was wearing it. He could still feel the wings, feel connected to them when they were out, but they were tied to his vest. When he'd barreled into Mako, he had mentally 'reached out' for them in the way he was used to and they'd come. Just... differently. And unexpectedly.

But it did mean that if he reached out for them again, there was a possibility they'd still come. He didn't understand why they changed from the vest to what was apparently the necklace, of course, but it gave sound reasoning for them to appear without either now, too. He took a deep breath, arms still crossed and hands tucked under his armpits, fingers curled into his shirt. He shut his eyes. And he focused.

So far every time he'd called for the wings to come to him, his clothes had parted to make room for them and then sealed back up when put away. He figured that would be the same. And it was. The dark blue and black checks of the flannel he was wearing unraveled on his back as a pair of wings, oily and slick, rose out of him. They were similar to bat wings in that they had a claw for the 'tumb', but that was where any similarity ended. There were a dozen sections of skin hanging between long bones that connected them. More like a gargoyle. Or a demon.

He opened his eyes and wrapped them forward to look at them. They looked familiar, but he couldn't quite place why they did.

"Ain't any longer than the others," he said after a second of stretching them as far as they could go. "Guess I got a size limit."

She looked at him for a long, long moment chin in hand. No wing necklace, no wing vest, but they changed into something else, even if there were a size limit.

"It seems to me, Daryl-san," Mako said after a long moment, "that it is something you wear that shapes the wings. Do have," and she her tone softened further as if she were invading his privacy further and apologizing for it, "any tattoo work? I think that fulfills the principles that I have observed. I wonder, though, if it has to be permanent."

The last trailed off as she thought about it. There were many options, many types of wings, too.

He dropped his head, brows knitted in thought. He did have tattoo work, of course, but the wings didn't really match the one on the underside of his right arm. It was a smaller one, harder to see the details of, so he wasn't all that concerned she hadn't caught sight of it. But he let his arms drop so he could lift his arm a little awkwardly and bring it into view. It was a small devil, about half the size of a coaster, with more bat-like wings than the ones he was sporting. But there were some similarity in the lines. He could probably bluff it off as being those for now.

"Maybe I should get a new one." It came out joking, but there was some seriousness to it. It wasn't like he was opposed to tattoos in any way. He dropped his arm before any detailed inspection could happen and lifted his brows as he looked over at her, "What about yours? They the tattooed kind, too?"

Tattoos seemed to work for Daryl, then. That was very interesting. She nodded a little, her expression contemplative.

"I do not have any," Mako said, "but there is definitely something that glows on my back. It was very itchy when I arrived, but not anymore." She turned a little and her wings faded away into black dust-like particles. What was left was a blue, red, gold play of light in cracks that let out light intermittently. It could be seen shining through her tanktop and where her skin was exposed.

"I haven't managed to see where it all is, but I think there is a great deal of it."

"They don't always glow," he said as his eyes moved up and down her back, squinting some as he tried to follow the light where it hid at the bottom of the shirt. Tried to figure out the pattern. It was vaguely wing-like, but not as distinctly so as most designs tended to be. But it was decently symmetrical. In the shapes, anyway. The colors shifted too much.

Daryl nodded and stepped forward like he was going to touch, but pulled his hand back quickly. Instead just nodding at her and folding his arms again, "Yeah, it looks like it goes all the way down. Covers most everything. Kinda like sheet lightning crackling all all over."

Mako made a slight hum of a sound. So much of her back was covered, then.

"Powers are strange," she murmured, shaking her head before she turned to glance up at him. "Tied to us somehow, but not really all that easy to figure out." She paused for a moment. "The Breach is like that, the crackling, shifting. I saw it as we went in."

Edited 2016-10-26 15:04 (UTC)

"Why's it glow?" he asked, folding his wings down and then recalling them. This time they disappeared not by unraveling (as his vest-based ones did) or by curling inward (as the cicada ones had), but by rotting away: chunks both large and small dropping away as the skin shriveled up around the bones and disappearing into nothing before they could hit the ground. The bones then silently cracking and turning to dust.

The way Daryl moved to go back and get his necklace made it pretty obvious he hadn't noticed the difference. Might not even know there was one.

"The Breach, I mean. If it's a hole, shouldn't the light you see be from what's inside it, not the hole itself?"

"Think of it as a matter of physics," Mako said. She'd heard Dr. Gottlieb explain it so many ways, her explanation was immediate. "Two foreign pieces of matter in close proximity interacting will always produce a some sort of reaction. In this case, it's interacting with many different elements - water and particles within it, oxygen, the composition of the earth's crust, the silicon in the sand particles, fish and saltwater flora and fauna. The resulting impact of exo-universe particles, creates, well, a very large light, heat, and matter show as those interact with our universe."

She laughed and made a face.

"It's excited to be here, even if we are not too particularly pleased with it."

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Not Quite the Kwoon

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