milliways_bar | (no subject)

"So are you actually asleep," Ray asks, "or is this just something that you put on to get away from your adoring public?"

"Shhhhh," goes the Fox. "I'm trying to lull the universe into a false sense of security."

"Okay, fair," says Ray, settling in at one of the other chairs. He can braid the wires together in quiet if he has to, even if they are about eight different colors of metal alone, never mind the insulation.

One eye opens a slit. Then opens completely.

Nope! He's not gonna let curiosity suck him in. Nope. No way in hell. The eye slams shut.

And cracks open again. "Taking up macrame?"

"Working on the sensor sheaths for a full-face multicapability mask I'm building for a werewolf I know," Ray says. "He needs the mask to keep up with a friend of his when they go hunting. I don't suppose the word 'yautja' means anything to you?"

Ray's seen a lot of movies, but he wouldn't know the Predator movies if they bit him on the ass.

"A WHAT?!"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the sound of one Fox freaking. "We've got a Predator in the house?!"

"Oh, is that what the human name for her race is? Spoon says she lets her call him Christine," Ray says absently. "He wanted me to work on a mask for him to make it easier for the two of 'em to go hunting together, ever since he killed that xenomorph with his teeth."

That skull, at least, he recognized.

"Unless we've got some bizzaro coincidence here, that's the movie name for them."

He jumps onto a a chair and slips into human form. "Gorblat's blue balls...well, as long as she doesn't try to take any of the patrons' heads for trophies, we're fine."

A chuckle. "Christine?! Great! Now I've got an image of one of those super-hunters doing Phantom of the Opera."

"I haven't spoken to her yet," Ray admits. "I imagine I'll probably get introduced soon enough, if only because Spoon- that's the werewolf- is probably going to show up with her in tow at some point. And around here you have to be careful about saying things like that. God help us all if this place gets another fit of the musical numbers."

The door drifted open.

"--BEWARE!"

Kzzack!

"OW!"

A frustrated Danny floated in through the door, and turned human again.

"'Danny, clean up the basement, you'll have plenty of time before school,'" he muttered sarcastically to himself. "Yeah, when the Box Ghost doesn't sneak in and try to steal all the plastic bins."

He'd figured he wasn't going to have time for breakfast unless he stepped in where time stopped.

A snicker.

"But that sounds like fun!" he protests. "Well, so you know you've got the right carbon-based lifeform when she does come around."

Foxtrot wraps himself in the illusion he gave Danny during the Foliage Census raid. "This is roughly what they look like."

After a couple of seconds, the hunt gear/armor is replaced with a tux, cape and white half-mask. "And this is what they look like on an Andrew Lloyd Webber kick."

One eye opens.

Then another eye.

Then another...wait. Wrong spirit.

Well, Foxtrot unwraps his tails, yawns and stretches.

"Rough day at the office?" he asks.

Ray gives this some thought. "Okay," he says. "No offense, but anything that looked like the 'grr, argh' sort of hunter you just showed me would probably want me to point out 'what kind of use is half a mask?'. Although admittedly, I have no idea of their sense of aesthetics beyond 'xenomorph skulls make good trophies'."

Would indeed, but the man in the gray suit is just surveying a figure he hasn't seen in a while or two. Fox-shaped, check; four tails, check; radiates in the mana spectrum, check... "Poobah Foxtrot?" he asks somewhat tentatively.

He slips back to human form.

"Good point. But the image of one of them trying to pull off 'Music of the Night' is freaking hilarious!"

The Fox lifts his head and yawns massively.

"Yes, my son? Do you need guidance on the Path of Geekery?"

"Okay, I'll buy that," Ray says. "Not that I've met this one yet, so I wouldn't know if she had anything like the kind of pipes necessary to pull that off. I think there's some kind of a law in science fiction to the effect that every culture and every species has some variety of opera, and every single one considers everybody else's opera to sound completely awful."

"Not at the moment. I just wanted to check something. You're aware, I hope, that the Exalted One's adversary has gotten out of the box they stuck him into?"

"And if you don't even like your own species/culture's version?" he asks.

...

...

Shame on you, Michael. There are gentler ways of waking up a kitsune. Say a sledgehammer to the head?

...

...

"SHHHHHHIIIIIIIT!"

"That would probably be the point at which you start listening to rock and roll. Or possibly complaining that Bob Dylan sounded better in the original Klingon."

Foxtrot grins.

"Heh! Well, that's me to a T."

Sudden thought...then a dramatic facefault.

"Holy crap! Does that mean I'm normal?!"

What an utterly terrifying idea!

"Nobody normal in the history of the Universe has ever used the phrase 'in the original Klingon', Foxtrot," says Ray. "Except for normal Klingons."

Comic sigh of relief.

"Whew! Close one, there. Lead me not into normalicy, but deliver me from mundania."

Foxtrot leans back and props up his feet on the table. "Well, now that we've settled that little crisis, what have you been up to besides making Predator masks, Great Lord Ray?"

"The workday hasn't even started yet. I was doing chores before school and the Box Ghost stole the bins mom put in the lab to organize stuff," Danny grumped, still looking a little groggy, and juggling a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast, a glass of orange juice, and a bowl of cereal over to FX's table.

"You'd think they'd at least have the decency to let me snag some breakfast and officially clock in for the day first before giving me a reason to kick their butts."

Gnarf. Foods.

"Yeah, evil kinda sucks that way," Foxtrot agrees, slipping off the table and into something more humanoid. "Always 'me, me, me and my world domination plots' with no consideration for the average superhero who has to haul himself out of a warm bed at O'dark thirty to kick their butts."

He grins as he leans back in his chair. "Maybe we should offer a seminar. The New Wave of Villiany: How to be a kindler, gentler evil overlord."

Danny laughed. "Vlad's attendance should be mandatory," he said, still snarfing food like eating was going out of style. (Not that he was ever IN style). "But technically, I can't really consider the Box Ghost evil. He steal boxes. That's like...a misdemeanor. A ghostly status offense--somewhere in between causing cold spots and rattling ghostly chains. I can't really ever bring myself to do more than give him a few kicks in the rear and send him back to the Ghost Zone."

"Maybe a companion course for spooks like him, then," Foxtrot suggests. "How To Be A Considerate Annoyance".

Ray makes a face. "Well, there was the incident with the Deep Ones, which I'm not sure if I told you about... I mentioned that, right? The jewelry showing up on Antiques Roadshow?"

"Like you!"

"Hell, yeah!" he laughs. "I'm the most considerate annoyance you'll ever find. My pranks and tricks are calculated to do my victims the most good...or at least get the most amusing reaction."

He tilts his head to the side thoughtfully. "You know, Danno, that offer of mine is still open. Wanna little help over in Spook Central, U.S.A.? I'm not the biggest and baddest, but I got a few tricks that might prove interesting." The grin returns...twice as evil. "It sounds like your local spirits need a few kitsune lessons in how to be cool."

"I think you did," he answers. "Deep Ones? Worshipers of You Know Who? What kind of incident are we talking about? You weren't fighting off something oily, tentacled and gargantuan without your faithful Poobah, were you?"

"Not unless you count the burrito I found in the Seven-Eleven where I met two of them," says Ray. "The words 'Dude was such a racist' came up multiple times in reference to Mr. Lovecraft. I still have to make an appointment to meet with their elders- the two I met were on the North Shore Community College swim team."

Blink-blink.

"Well, a tentacled burrito is pretty damn freaky, too," Foxtrot says. "Hey, sometimes it's damn good to find out that some writer was WAAAAAY off-base. They gonna sue his estate or something?"

Still chowing down, he considered it.

"Can we just, like, hang out, too?" said the boy ever-eager for more friends.

Truth be told, just showing FX around the city for a day with Sam and Tuck would do him good in its own way, even if they never ran across a single ghost.

"The general impression that I got was that they wanted to be left alone, since for the most part they had human relatives as well as Grandma P. down in the ocean," Ray says. "Although I think they're working on some kind of lobbying tactic for better enforcement of the Clean Water Act."

"I should think so!" he says. "There's a bunch of elven conclaves back who are trying to do the same thing about forests. Kinda hard to lobby and keep the non-human status of your clients hush-hush, though. Talk about round-about and sneaky. I hear that Fairhold's lobbyist was thrown out of law school because the professors were actually scared of him."

"Damn right we can hang out!" Foxtrot says. "All work and no play gets you kicked out of the kitsune league. Just say the word and I'm there, Danny-boy!"

"Well, considering that some of these guys could pass for humans if you just assumed they were insanely ugly, I think they've got an advantage," Ray says. "These two were out in public, after all."

Foxtrot shakes his head.

"Ray, Ray, Ray...you gotta get a little more political savy with the stuff you've got going with your government and all. It ain't John Q. Public seeing through your cunning disguise that you have to worry about most of the time. It's the opposing lobbies and politicians looking for dirt to undermine you. Sit back and think a moment what would happen if some investigator working for the Oil Industry and their leaky tankers stumbled across the fact that the people standing in the way of getting safety regs relaxed were truly fish-people? And that's WITHOUT adding in Lovecraft's negative publicity blitz."

"Speaking of government," Ray says. "I, uh... kind of got some news I didn't really want."

Michael doesn't precisely realize what he's done, but he does realize the ambiguity inherent in his news, and how that ambiguity might have contributed to Foxtrot's panic. "It's only Peck, if that counts as an 'only'."