30 Day OTP Challenge (Young Wizards), day 9: Hanging out with friends

Gili Motang is quite a beautiful island. Hot white sun, hot blue sky, warm blue water, beautiful scrub-forested hills over fascinating volcanic terrain: there’s a lot to recommend the place. Most of the beaches there aren’t great—way too rocky and North Shore-ish for the tastes of wizards raised closer to the pale smooth sand of Jones Beach. But there’s more to life than beaches, and Gili Motang has a lot going for it even where the beach is rocky and there’s driftwood and such lying around.

“So the Lone Power, the Michael Power and the Hesper walk into a bar…”

“Wait. No. Why would they even do that?”

“What, go into a bar?”

“No, walk into one.”

“Yeah, they’d just sort of appear, wouldn’t they? — ”

…Also lying around are five or six bored-looking komodo dragons, sprawled in the sun or hunched up in the shade of various boulders and gazing longingly about them at apparently unprotected creatures that they consider might be nice as prey. But the apparent lack of protection (as one or two of the dragons have discovered over the course of the afternoon) is deceptive. Now they sit about looking vaguely cranky at being disrespected, as no one’s paying them any attention any more.

This would be because the dragons have had their chance for the day with the one person here who is really interested in them. This is someone who looks very much like a dinosaur of the low-slung, heavy saurian type, and she’s finally finished having her regularly-scheduled temper tantrum over the stupid, stupid creatures who can’t see the advantages of being moved wholesale to another really lovely planet where all kinds of sentient beings who give a damn are just waiting to dance attendance on them twenty-six hours a day, the dimwitted, infuriating little—

“Ahem. Mamvish?”

“Yeah, Mamvish?”

“Projecting again!”

“Sorry. Sorry…”

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30 Day OTP Challenge (Young Wizards), day 10: With animal ears

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The ears itch, and they don’t seem to fit Kit’s head properly.

Which is peculiar, since they came with it as a set.

“Stop waving them around like flags, for the Tom’s sake,” says the voice from behind him. “It’s only going to make it worse. Hold still and settle.”

Easy for you to say, Kit thinks, bristling….which by itself is weird enough. All around him are incredible screeching and groaning noises, metal on metal. The darkness isn’t anything like as dark as it ought to be. His nose is being assaulted with smells, lots of very serious smells: stale water, rust, and a whole lot of the back-alley kind of smell you get in places where people haven’t felt like using a urinal or a toilet. It seems impossible that a place Kit thinks he knows so well could be so unsettling. When you’re human, the far end of one of the passenger platforms at Grand Central Terminal smells a whole lot different.

“I know,” says the voice behind him. “Sensory overload. There’s always a lot of that in the first few minutes of a change. But it’ll be louder where we’re going, so just hold yourself still and get used to it.”

Kit squeezes his eyes shut, which helps a little. His changed eyes don’t exactly see only in black and white, as too many humans think, but their light-gathering ability in these conditions is amazing, and somehow manages to fake the effect of color vision. It’s the infrared, I guess. And certainly you see a lot more texture with these eyes. But the noise… and the smell…!

What really annoys Kit, though—because he can feel two sets of attention fixed very critically on him—is that Nita seems to be having no trouble with today’s job, none at all. She’s sitting off to one side in the shape of kind of a brunette tabby cat, looking over her shoulder at her tail; and her ears are working just fine. No one’s paying her any attention. It’s all on Kit, who seems to just keep getting things wrong.

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