station72 | [open] ability testing

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[open] ability testing

CHARACTERS: Lakshmi Bai & YOU
WHERE: Hyrypia - Anywhere you feel like.
WHEN: DAY :016 - DAY :0
SUMMARY: Lakshmi is testing out her symbiotic abilities on some suspecting/willing test subjects/unknowing ppl. Also, backdated to hell.
WARNINGS/OTHER: Nothingness. Also Lakshmi's extra everything? Didn't talk to her the first time and still want to join in? No problems. Come get some sweet, sweet extra emotions. If there is a particular emotion you would like to have your character go through, please let me know.

I. I NEED NOISE.

Her testing isn't direct on anyone to begin with - simply she wants to try it without comment. To that she takes anyone who said they might wish to be part of it and see it for themselves, measuring it for herself. She cannot be sure with a host exactly, the way they all bleed through each other's bandages. So she instead looks to mix it between them. Not to engage directly with oh, a group of gossiping staff, a set of seconds drinking and talking about the results of the hunting races, whoever seems a good and unknowing target, as she sets herself near to them with a Host to accompany her, she gets to sit next to her.

Knows that what she'll need in particular is a host to limit any conversation she has with another, when she slips to the deep waters of that cool dark nothingness.

( Ready? )

II. I NEED THE CRACK OF A WHIP.

Once she can be sure of it, sure it's weight, it's flex, how it feels in her own skin to take all that is outside of her and push it out - it's then that she finds another host to know the exactness of how it feels. How it flows, of how it might react on those nearest to her. To peel away those bandages and let it drip, drip, drip.

So in the privacy of a tent, she settles herself in a the set of her skirts and the push back of her veil

"You're quite sure you want to... feel this?"

Last chance, jump from the ship, that way she can be sure she is ever a summer fire racing across empty grass fields, consumptive, she never leaves much else behind her but ash. Even animals knew to flee that.

III. I NEED BLOOD IN THE CUT.

After a few tries, she no longer is half so unsure, she turns it out to what it is, a tool. She steps out, she finds oh, groups of Seconds, whispering servants, drunk off duty guards, she fills herself with easy laughter and like a spiked drink, she finds them to give it to them a laughing word to build a picture of herself of someone, removed, perhaps, not inclined to touch, not liking to discuss herself or her group, but well - she is clever, isn't she? Always likely to make others laugh.

Now she knows her timing, though, now she knows to step herself out of any conversation before it wears off, to put herself back to the confines of the tents. It's there she sits, like this - where she so normally fire, now she sits a empty wine dark sea. Cool, removed, it takes and gives nothing back.

To find her then however, she is not idle, she is only a process of movements. A series of calculations that come without merit. Instead: she has taken out her knives. Lays them out by length, a stair case set of longest to shortest. Of their ceremonial blade, hers - Sir Bors, what remained of her husband's shamsher melded together as one - a shorter woman's knife for cutting thread and snapping away unwanted snags.

It's there, she begins to sharpen them. Because they must be sharp, is the only burgeoning thought of soon to be her own emotion again. But for now: it is only that they must be sharp. Tools have only purpose, after all.

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At first, Elena takes the words as an answer to her question, but it doesn't sit right in her mind. There's more to it, a deeper meaning that seems at once so simple. It matches the oddness she's feeling from her broodmate, a simplicity and complexity all jumbled and tied together in a way she can't yet explain.

But at least the other woman isn't throwing that blade at her yet.

"What happened?" she asks softly, leaning in just slightly, tilting her head just an inch to the side while examining the woman. "Why are you like this?"

She busies the work of her hands - shifting to move them through the motions of cleaning her blades. The slow draw around the hilt of the blade. The way that when it presses it against skin, it is almost, almost painful, but to the depths of this emptiness - it is smothered over like water pouring against a rock. Consumed and gone. "I used my ability."

The whetstone comes to the base of the blade then sweeps across - the soft slithering hiss of stone against metal. "It makes me - much. Then nothing at all."

It makes a little sense, and also none at all, much like the rest of the things Elena's encountered in the past year. From what she knows about the abilities granted to them by the symbiote (whether they want them or not), there are physical types of abilities and mental ones. This, what Lakshmi is describing in as few words possible, must be a mental ability. She can't begin to guess further at what it might be, though.

Glancing down at the mass of scarves in her lap, she's quiet for a moment before beginning to carefully smooth out the material, as though not wanting it to get wrinkled. "I haven't figured out what my ability is yet."

She grunts a little thing - her words are for once not meant cruelly they are contemplative. Looking over Elena. "Are you not a monstrous creature in your other forms? Is that not an ability?"

The image in her mind is without the distortion of her miseries, for once, though if that is better or worse to watch such a face rip a rib cage open without any context or explanation is better. The visceral taste of blood on the inhale, the bile acid of a body on the exhale. Given no form, simply it is.

That image causes her to flinch back both mentally and physically, her eyes going wide as a further sense of painful understanding settles in her chest. That is what Lakshmi has battled for so long, what she judges Elena by. Seeing it herself, even like this... she can't quite blame the other woman for feeling the way she does.

"I don't look like that," she replies softly, her expression torn between sorrow and sympathy. "I change, but... I'm not a monster. Not like that." And even if she'd rather not admit it, there's a plea in there for Lakshmi to look a little deeper at who she is rather than just what she is.

To that, her face lifts, her eyes with the same flat inquiry. "That is what Vampires are." There can be no separation of these two ideas, those who feast on another are this . But like this, she doesn't fight her over it.

Instead she keeps her eyes on her: "Show me what you are."

If it were anyone else, Elena would balk at the request that feels like a command. Maybe that's what it is, her one chance to really show Lakshmi the truth of what she is even if that doesn't include all the other pieces that make up Elena Gilbert. All her broodmate sees is a monster, a vampire, and to at least separate Elena's type of vampire from those in her home -- it's a start.

Calling up that side of her takes a moment, concentration needed to think back to how it felt the few times she's made the change over the past few weeks, but after a few seconds her facial features change. Her canines lengthen, the veins beneath her eyes rise to the surface and darken, and the whites of her eyes redden as if filled with blood. She doesn't move an inch after that, holding so still that it might not even appear as if she's breathing, and Elena feels very much like a prisoner waiting for judgment and execution.

There is silence at first, that black pool that compromises lets the image fall into that inky surface. Then like wet cloth sliding, she moves in depth, the blade set aside, loose from her fingers in a soft thump to the tent floor. If there could be no greater sign for her emptiness, it is the ease that discard of which compromises her so completely. Moving forward on her knees until she can reach Elena herself. Her fingers framing at her temple to jaw and with it she turns her up to face her - tilting her face like a jeweller inspecting a ruby. One way, then the other, her thumb coming across to press against that sharp front canine, and pressing the pad of worn skin until it relinquishes blood a sharp pricking cut.

Then, so utterly profound: "You have less teeth than you should. Are you deficient for your kind?"

There's a fear that rises up in Elena as Lakshmi nears, despite the knowledge that the symbiotes won't allow the other woman to hurt her. Her instincts scream for her to run, to flee to safety, but then beneath that there's the slightest tendril of longing to have it all end, here and now. A readiness and almost desire to die that has danced in the darkest parts of her mind since the night her parents' car went off that bridge, it's there for Lakshmi to see if she looks, flitting to the surface and then back below the ocean of Elena's mind as she's examined like some kind of animal.

She lets Lakshmi move her head, making no other movements as the study continues, even as she begins to feel more like a creature with every passing second. A thing, no longer human and therefore no longer worth anything. That feeling strengthens as the scent of blood surges up from the small cut to the other woman's thumb, but it's not until that question is asked that Elena leans back, face shifting seamlessly back into her normal human visage.

"No, I'm not deficient," she protests, a trace of indignation in her tone. "This is how vampires are in my world."

She takes it all, lets it all fall deep, deep within her. It takes without comment or judgement, her loathing, her longing, settled like lights sinking below the surface. Swallowed up - never to give it back.

"That must be inefficient. How do you feed?"

And that finger, that drip of blood, stays hovering in empty space.

The smell of Lakshmi's blood wraps around her senses and its takes a great deal of willpower for Elena to keep from shifting back into her vampire face. It's only been a day since she fed from Gildor, but she's a young vampire and that hunger is a constant companion. She needs a distraction, something to help keep her mind from wondering how that blood would taste--

So she offers an answer to Lakshmi's question by way of a demonstration. Tugging back her left sleeve, she lifts her arm and shifts her face just long enough for those sharp teeth to sink into the skin above her wrist, puncturing deep enough that blood pools and spills across her skin as she holds her arm out for her broodmate to see. "I manage."

The wound will bleed for a few seconds, the blood dripping down freely, and then the skin will knit back together and leave no sign of having been injured at all save for the blood left behind.

"That is not efficient. Consuming yourself."

Her hands lift in a supremely matter of fact way. The efficiency she prefers to deploy in almost everything she does is more than just a frustration, it is a simple movement. Of the blade coming into her hand from where she'd dropped it.

It slices easily, the softer skin at her elbow. It wells as quick with blood as she curls the limb up, forcing it to pump up. "Here."

Elena's eyes widen and she jumps up from her seat, genuinely shocked at what the other woman had just done. "Lakshmi, what the hell!"

The shock is thankfully enough to distract her from the hunger, the enthralling scent of fresh blood kept at bay as she stumbles backward away from her broodmate. "What are you doing?!"

The answer at least - is easy, as she sits, waiting for Elena to take what has been offered. The blood curling around the dip at her elbow. Pooling in the crevices of skin and drip, drip, dripping. Steady as her heart beat that still hasn't risen - she feels no fear or loathing. Just simple bound duty that is beyond any emotion.

"I serve - that is a Queen's task, I serve my people, and you are being inefficient."

"I am fine," she insists forcefully, keeping that distance between them. "I was showing you--"

The words cut off as the smell hits her and she turns away as her face shifts into vampire mode, as that hunger grows stronger, and it's so tempting to leave right that second, use her speed to flee. But she's out of her costume, and to get the missing pieces would mean going near that blood...

"Let me heal you. Please."

"Heal me? Why would I need you to heal me?"

Whatever she means by that, unmoving, she waits and watches. No more explanation than that - for the moment still even mercifully free of her own impatience for that matter.

"Because you're hurt," Elena practically growls out from between clenched teeth, "and I'm not feeding from you."

How many times does she need to say that, in how many different ways? It's not happening, Lakshmi, time to move on from it and stop torturing your hungry broodmate.

She looks to the wound, and then back again. The blood seemed so mild.

"Child," for once, not vampire, not a creature, more and less than that. "I have both been shot and given birth. This does not constitute hurt."

Granted, she what she feels at the moment clearly isn't anything that matters. But mercifully, finally, she turns her face - and her wound away - reaching for a scarf that she wraps the wound up to hide it away. The movements are like always, efficiently quick.

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[open] ability testing

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