tabularasa_rp | (no subject)

Who: Espio the Chameleon and anyone!
What: The Void thinks he’s a dragon and that he should have wings. He disagrees.
Where: Leylines / Mortis Lake Shore / Shibumenosaki Underground Academy
When: After the tremors have stopped
Content Warnings: None in particular

Questions
Ley Lines

Okay, testing mysterious glowy telepathy thing. Anyone hear me? For all I know I could be talking into the void.

[You have to be near it to hear, right? Though given this is a new thing the world has decided to give them, how it really works is probably a mystery to all of them... everything here has something of a mystery to it. There are so many unanswered questions, so much to be made sense of! And right now, Espio’s main question is regarding unexpected transformations...

Not for any particular reason. Nope. He definitely hasn’t suddenly acquired new appendages out of nowhere for no apparent reason, absolutely not. Not that he’s going to be able to hide them...]

Quick question. I’ll keep it brief. Since coming here, has anyone had something change about them? Like new powers, or old powers coming back... or suddenly sprouting horns or a tail out of nowhere... is that normal here? Should we be expecting that to happen?

Clumsy
Mortis Lake Shore

It’s not a good day. The problem? Unwilling transformations. Again.

He didn’t mind when he suddenly gained a golden-coloured horn upon his forehead. A horn is completely fine, because he’s supposed to have a horn, and it makes logical sense to him that an illogical place like this would pick up on that and let him have it back. He’d like it if it would turn him back into a chameleon, instead of keeping him in this human shape, but getting his horn back was a still a nice surprise.

Wings, on the other hand... chameleons don’t have wings. Waking up with a pair of pink and gold dragon wings painfully and tightly bound by his clothing was very much not such a nice surprise, even when he did tear them free. These things had better be temporary!

...okay, maybe some people would be excited to suddenly have wings. Espio does like flying, so surely it would be nice to fly unaided. Right? Too bad he doesn’t know how to actually use them.

Espio has taken himself to a relatively open area by the lake, and is attempting to occupy himself with figuring out how wings work. Most of it is simply exercise - furling and unfurling them, stretching and flapping, adjusting their position, attempting to at least get the damn things under control enough that he doesn’t accidentally smack someone in the face or knock everything over like he’s been doing all day. It’s a pain in the ass.

He can’t quite resist trying to at least get off the ground, however... and he does succeed! It’s just that he only gets a few feet up before swiftly crashing back down into an undignified heap with a loud shout and a lot of swearing. This is not going to work.

Curious
Shibumenosaki Underground Academy
Nurse’s Office -> Gym

The plan was to visit the gym. Sudden wings were no excuse for Espio to skip out on his usual daily fitness regime! He makes a brief stop on the way, however, should anyone be curious enough to follow him. In the vague hope that he might find something to treat the minor scrapes and cuts from his earlier experiments, he slips into the nurse’s office, and while he doesn’t find what he’s looking for he does take notice of the anatomical model and the two empty stands beside it.

“Person... machine... dragon,” he reads out loud. He never took particular notice of these before, but given that he is currently sporting a pair of distinctly draconic wings, he can’t help but be curious. Is ‘dragon’ something this place considers similar to people? “Weird.”

And with that - after hearing anyone else’s input on the matter, should they have followed him - he heads off to take his stress out on a punching bag, where he’s more than happy to talk or even offer a little tuition to someone. He’s not a gym trainer, no, but he is a martial arts instructor, so it might be worth asking!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The answer's a lighter one than Shouyou would've expected, but he supposes that just means Espio's good at rolling with what he's been dealt.

"Mmm, I guess it'd be pretty hard if you had to learn from scratch like this so suddenly," he muses, eyeing the wings. They look cool, there's no doubt about it, even if the reality of flying seems much more complicated than he'd first thought. "If it were me, I'd totally crash into everything at the beginning."

Once the words are out of his mouth, it takes Shouyou a second to connect the dots, comprehension lighting up his eyes. "Oh! That's where you got the bruises from, isn't it? You were testing them out."

He would be partly right in thinking so - Espio is from the Special Zone, and rolling with the punches is just what Special Zone people do! Unfortunately in his specific case, hopping from world to world and dealing with everything that entails, it’s turned more into a case of bottled emotions. Nobody needs to know his problems.

His grin is a little unsteady but he nods in confirmation. “Of course!” he says. “Who wouldn’t? Always did like flying... used to ride a phoenix all the time.”

"You did?!" Congratulations, Espio. You've just become even cooler.

Shouyou loses all hesitation now, getting right up Espio's space as his eyes practically sparkle.

"What was it like? Are there things like phoenixes everywhere where you're from? Can you talk to them?" He hardly draws breath as he fires off question after question. To someone like him, who'd come from a world far more normal, he can't help but be excited over everyone else's brushes with the fantastical.

“He didn’t know how to stop talking!” Espio says, and though he’s not put off by the lad’s excitable response he still takes a step back to preserve his personal space. “His name’s Marco, and he was a giant pain in the ass. He wasn’t from my world, though - my world’s where this one got its sky from.”

He pauses for a moment, something seeming oddly familiar about this boy and his excitement. His appearance, too, come to think of it... huh. “...hey. What’s your name?”

[To be clear, he’s CRAU, but he doesn’t know Shouyou! He’s thinking of an OC that used him as a PB.]

Espio's certainly not the first to require some personal space, so Shouyou just lets him back up and keep some distance between them. For now, anyway. No promises could be made for the future.

He's still interested in hearing more about the (apparently) talkative phoenix, but Espio's question has him straightening up with a grin. "Ah, I'm Hinata Shouyou! What about you?"

“Espio.”

The name is completely unfamiliar, so it can’t possibly be someone he knows. Still, there’s something oddly familiar... who is it he’s thinking of? It can’t be someone he knew well if it’s taking this long to put his finger on it.

This is definitely going to bother him for days, he’s sure.

After a long pause of trying to figure it out, he realises the silence is a bit weird, and goes on to add: “I’m a chameleon from Meridian. We don’t have a lot of humans there, but I’m used to you lot by now.”

There's something oddly familiar with Espio, too, though in Shouyou's case, it's simply a matter of chance that the chameleon resembles a certain teammate of his. Especially the spot of color in his bangs. Shouyou has to bite back a grin when he places the similarity.

Then, Espio's words sink in. His eyes widen. "A chameleon...so this isn't what you actually look like?"

“Right! But I’ve been stuck like this long enough that I don’t see this body as not me. I’m actually about this tall...” He indicates his original height with his hand, and though he’s not exactly tall as a human, his original height barely even reaches his chest. “And you would definitely not mistake me for human! Or any other mammal, for that matter.”