Revan in Xanadu: David's Camera (Interlude)
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This story is a work in progress. |
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Xanadu story universe |
Revan In Xanadu: David's Camera
David blinked. As always, he tried to keep his upper eyes closed, but they opened along with his normal eyes every time. He could keep them closed by touching the wrinkled lids, but not by force of will. Cheryl had suggested typing a strip of cloth around them, but he’d refused flatly. Even providing that it stayed in place, a blindfold wouldn’t make him look any less strange.
Hopefully it was like learning to wink, and he would get the hang of those long-lashed elephant eyes as time passed.
"No, no... I don't want to get the hang of it, I want them gone!" he muttered sullenly, then glanced around, hoping that no one had been around to hear it. Apparently not – there was no one else in this side room that the pointing griffin had indicated, but his big gray ears flapped anyway. His wide-set elephant eyes caught the motion and he winced, twelve-inch trunk curling around and fingering his human lower lip.
At least when it had happened he hadn’t just started trying to pull at them. There’d been that girl with the rabbit ears in the same room whose first impulse had been to take them off – evidently that had hurt a _lot_.
He knelt by a pile of trash and started to shove it about, searching. "Come take me to Xanadu, David." he mocked to himself. "It's reeeally special this year. You had sooo much fun _last_ year. You can wear that funny elephant hat from the Republican rally Daddy went to. The one with the eyes on the forehead. Oh, this will be _great_!"
The worst part was that he knew he had nobody to blame – well, maybe Old Man Winters, but _that_ wasn’t going to change a damned thing. He hadn’t needed much convincing to go – no, he wasn’t a furry or a big fan of anything in particular, but some of the things put up for sale were amazing. Box sets from every television series he could imagine, liberal foreign films that would make his parents go purple in the face, obscure games, model kits, action figures… It was an irresistible lure.
As for changes… He didn’t even have tusks. Aside from the obvious, the only things that had changed were a slight thickening of his fingers and toes, a bit of skin coarsening, and the tiniest nub of a tail, only noticeable if he touched it or wore a tight leotard. Not that that was likely, even without Mom and Dad finding out. Not with this thing on his head, disrupting his balance.
He was lucky, and he knew it, and that didn’t change a thing.
David encountered a puddle of what he hoped was beer and flinched, trunk twisting and scrunching. "Why did she have to wait a year to start Driver’s Ed, anyway? Damn you."
If only he had someone to pin the blame on! His trunk tried to reach the trash and he slapped it away, creeped out by the movement. It almost seemed to have a will of its own, like the arm of that guy from Dr. Strangelove.
“Idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot…” If he repeated it enough, perhaps something would change. The logical part of David told him that that was ridiculous, but he wasn’t feeling particularly logical just now.
"Who are you referring to?" David killed the squeal that threatened to emerge from that trunk and swiveled around.
"You again. Make some _noise_ when you walk, dammit!" he snapped. The Asian-looking woman raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. She was not tall, but her face was stern, and she gave the impression of being so _superior_, always collected and certain. The effect was heightened by the Jedi robes, but she’d probably have looked dignified in a clown suit.
The first time he’d seen her, she’d had the thing that had been his sister in tow. She’d been wearing a costume that totally obscured her face and body, but he’d seen her for a moment in these clothes, long enough for his sister to tell him who this was. He’d kind of come to associate her with a feeling of dread and terror. While it was nice to know that Cheryl was alive and at least as human as David and still remembered him… what in Jesus’s name would he tell Mom and Dad?
He’d told them a little about the convention beforehand. Said that there was security around, that there was plenty of stuff to buy, that his sister could talk to people with similar interests. Hadn’t said anything about furries, cosplayers, or crossdressing, let alone the Adults Only hall. Actually, he’d implied that Xanadu “wasn’t that kind of convention”. They’d trusted him and let them borrow the car and drive the two hours out, just like last year, and just like last year, they’d worn the getup before entering. Last year they’d kept quiet about it when hey got home. This year… there was no way to keep that secret. Not when David was an elephant man, Jim was missing, and Cheryl was a seven-foot-tall albino-looking bald man with a lightsaber and head tattoos.
Mom and Dad were on the conservative side of the political spectrum. He hadn’t finished senior year of high school just yet, and Cheryl had just started as a freshman this fall. As well as making scornful comments about anyone who wasn’t “normal”, their parents had lectured loudly and often about the importance of a good education. They’d be livid. What would he say? God, what _could_ he say?
Nothing. Not until he could think of something. He’d claim later that there had been electromagnetic interference or something, and that was why he hadn’t called.
“I’m… looking for something,” David said, hating that little nasal twang that the trunk lent to his voice. To his relief, it had curled up tightly instead of groping around.
"Very well. What are you looking for?" _How dare she be so *level* all the time!_ He swiped his left hand over his bulbous temple, coming back dampened by something pungent.
"Video camera. Friend had it on." _And cost a bundle,_ he added to himself. The digital kind, a really compact durable model with a battery good for five, maybe six hours. It had been a birthday present and got trotted out any time something interesting loomed on the horizon. Naturally, he’d brought it here.
"Oh? It seems that this was important. All right. I will help you." About to snap that he didn't need help, or some such thing, he stopped himself with the thought that perhaps wading through the overturned trash to look for a palm-sized camera would shake her a little. _And I do need the help._
David was really only doing this to get away from… Cheryl… for a bit. The events of the day were just too much for now, and he didn’t want to just sit around and think about it now that there’d been a lull in the chaos. His… sister… might have been a help, but… he needed to think. Desperately.
He could say that a wizard or a raygun had done it, maybe. Then it wouldn’t be his fault, and maybe Mom and Dad wouldn’t… But they _always_ knew when he was lying outright, not just edging around a subject! What to do, what to do…
Putting that off, he tracked the woman with his big, dark elephant eyes with their big, feminine eyelashes, still slightly put off by the way they elongated his vision. She moved from one clot of trash to the next, focusing on each just long enough to stir it and pull something out, then moving to the next.
She was moving faster than he was. But surely this woman- Hailey, or Revan, he’d been told that she would answer to either - was missing things that he, David, would have found in his methodical search. She was skipping some piles entirely! It was as if she was just making a circuit of the room.
Well, he wasn't having much luck anyway. Food scraps, food wrappers, tattered fabrics and cheap plastic, like last-minute costume trimmings... shredded cloth, hair, clothes whose stitches had dissolved…
Abruptly she- _Revan right now. Have to decide on a name._ - walked back to his position.
"I found your camera."
Startled- that couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes, if that- David blurted, "How do you know it's mine, and not someone else's?"
"I just do. The description reads 'The small camera used by David and his friend', and on the quest log under 'David's Camera' it says 'You have found the camera that David was searching for. He will want it back'. I don't remember seeing either logs or descriptions before, but they work."
"Whaat? Give it to me!" Revan produced the camera and handed it over. It was his, all right, complete with the worn little monkey sticker on the underside. Cheryl had put that on when she was eleven. But it wasn't labeled with a description.
"As a videogame character, I see these things. They are a common element in role-playing." She coughed, then, voice roughening.
"Here," he mumbled, fishing out a bottle of water from the backpack resting at his side. He wasn’t happy – at all – but there was being upset, and there was being a total jerk. Especially after she’d helped him out.
Revan accepted it, and David jerked in surprise as the edges softened and the bottle re-formed into a clear circular package, almost like an IV bag, with a tube extending like a straw. Revan bit that tube and set it in her mouth. The package shrank and warped as the water was sucked out.
She handed it back to him and the soft plasticlike substance reshaped into the familiar form of an unlabeled plastic water bottle, cap opened and screwed on tight, with only about a fourth of the water remaining. Seeing the look on his face, she shrugged.
"Thanks. Apparently it's not just clothing."
David muttered something like "don't mention it", slipped the bottle back into his satchel, and picked up the camera with his slightly-thickened hands. He tilted its tiny screen so that Revan would see it- why not, after all?- rewound to the beginning as the tip of his trunk pointed at the screen, and hit "Play".
The recording started earlier that day, in the car. His friend Jim was riding shotgun with the camera, and Cheryl was in the back chattering. He hit "Ffwd" through that scene, with the comments about how _cool_ the renovated convention center was, through the scene at the hotel with the snobbish registration girl, through the anticipatory banter as they went into the Convention Proper as Malak, Harpy Lady's Brother, and David the Elephant Hat Guy, past where they dropped off Cheryl-as-Malak at the designated "KotOR SIG", and paused as he and Jim parted.
The voices were distorted, but recognizable. David's face, too close with the hat's trunk dividing his face, twiddling the tip with his finger, rolling his eyes as Jim's voice proclaimed that he was going to the Award Ceremony to see if Old Man Winters was going to trip at the podium and break his leg like that guy at Octacon.
The recording cut to the "ceremony", and clearly Jim had a _terrible_ view. His arm, with the blue felt-and-feathers wing and the yellow-stained talon-hand, was draped over a railing and he was bemoaning the presence of a Chinese New Year dragon(surely stolen from a festival) dancing around blocking the view, when the screen jerked crazily around and ended up filming the ceiling.
David rewound that bit again, jabbed at "Pause", then hit "frame-by-frame". Goosebumps raised on the unwinged section of Jim’s arm, then seemed to become bluish acne. The blue at the center of each bump swelled into a pinfeather shaft over the course of two frames as the hand attenuated ever so slightly. Then the camera went out of focus for five whole frames. Giving up, David went back to "play".
The winged hand jumped out of view as its holder dropped the camera, which tumbled down to the floor, was kicked by a clawed yellow birdlike foot, and then hit something dark green and hairy that jumped, and it slid down again, face up. Distorted figures flickered in and out of view against the ceiling, and the camera skittered around, hit what might have been a scaled tail, flipped face down, and skittered around some more, catching nothing but flooring.
The camera's simple programming realized that it was in trouble and it turned off, sending the viewscreen to black.
From there, David knew, it must have been kicked around a lot more. Exactly how it had ended up _here_ he’d probably never know. But he’d bemoaned the camera’s loss out in public, and the griffin had pointed him a direction… he was lucky it wasn’t broken.
"Well, that was interesting, but ultimately completely useless," David muttered as Revan said "Flatscreen. How primitive," under her breath. He caught it anyway with his elephant ears, which flapped hard enough to create a breeze.
She turned a bland expression on him. Then all of a sudden her demeanor changed; she froze in a stiff posture, got to her feet- when had she sat?- in a fluid motion, then ran out of the room.
David watched her go in bemusement, then picked himself up, letting the tip of the trunk rub between his eyes. “What a weirdo.”
| Preceded by: Revan in Xanadu: Big Change (Interlude) |
Revan in Xanadu | Succeeded by: Revan in Xanadu (Part 5) |
