The raven wing of sable hair--it’s really black!--cascaded dynamically back from the triumphant features of the jade-skinned beauty standing atop a wind-whipped precipice. Her gleeful laughter, upthrust arms, laughing mouth, splayed fingers suggested, fairly shouted, sentai-villainess but with an oddly apt dosage of...was there a pedagogic gleam in those dark eyes that both blazed and appraised? A further change happened to the lovely eyes ; the fire doused as if it were never there albeit a fractional grin, almost a smirk, remained, a fractal feature of the face that would never fade. She snapped precisely manicured fingers that were the same shade of jade as the rest of the girl that projected from a black & green leather outfit suggestive somewhat of a gallows-harlequin ; an unseen stagehand shut off the wind-machine.
“Your turn...” She considered a clipboard that lay by her feet atop her papier mâché perch, “...Raven’s Shadow.” The permanent micro-beam curled minutely into the world’s smallest cheshire-cat grin as the eyes attached to the mouth watched the sullen, black-laced teenager drag her almost mine-made-up pout stage-wards. The four other similarly outfitted & pancaked-pretties watched, gloomily, from the well tush-buffed leather seats of the pilot’s briefing auditorium. In the far-back row, an enigmatic grin sketched across a blue face.
***
The green woman sat at a scarred, steel mess table with the less scarred blue man.
“Maybe we don’t want them to ever be that happy, Wandblume.”
“They’ll never be that happy, Van Loan.” She considered her cyan colleague with a dry grin. “You have to squeeze goth oranges extra hard to extract any sunshine at all.”
Van Loan, about to quaff the very liquid of Wandblume’s visually unpleasant analogy, put his glass back, untouched.
“ Ugh!” He waved bye-bye to the Florida Sunshine--it was actually L-5 Sunshine. “ Please, Shego, stop the food metaphors before you put me off bacon!”
Wandblume grinned a true, full-fledged, ripened-banana grin ; quaffed her partner’s abandoned OJ.
“I love it when you call me that, Dr. D : it means I fit the part!” She leant quickly across the dimpled steel tabletop, and planted a quick, citrus smack on slightly startled blue lips. There were sniggers, not very loud as Shego was scary, from the off-duty crew members busily ingesting cubes of red & green--it was Classic Sci-Fi lunch day. Vandblume, the gossipy name for the couple, was the choice shipboard entertainment : they made soap opera couples look downright mundane by comparison.
Van Loan attempted what he thought of as his Patented M. Bison Grin of Manly Charm. As usual it came off as Infectious Goofball Charisma. It made the ‘wavium-altered Wandblume--first name Ramona--always feel the oddest combination of seventy percent infatuation and thirty percent scorn for her endlessly-buoyant-yet-hardly-ever-actually-brilliant-but-usually-very-mad scientist beau. Still, she lost herself in minor-reverie as she considered his two actual brilliant contributions to extra-terrestrial well-being :Flow-Grow, the super high-potency hydroponics nutrient that had made manifold lesser settlements capable of being self-sustaining, and the grey-water reclaimant algae, Blue Goo.
“I know that dreamy expression : Marveling at my brilliance!” Van Loan’s only slightly smug words brought her out of her chin propped in both hands daydream. She reached back across the surface of the table, this time to deliver a cuff. More barely stifled sniggers chuffed about the chamber. “Yeah, I love your pacifistic smart-bomb ; the invisible, lost super-computer, and, let’s not forget the day-glo breakfast cereal!”
“Hey, I’ll have you know Twenty plays a great game of Go ; the Space-Cray isn’t lost, just misplaced ; and I’ll find a buyer for Shining Wheat, or my name isn’t Doctor Drakken!” By the final four syllables he had worked himself up into the index finger raised, happily-driven blue-bundle of energy that she found so damn maddeningly endearing.
Raucous applause broke out from all corners of the room. Van Loan made ostentatious bows to the four cardinal compass points. It was not an uncommon occurrence aboard the station.
Wandblume gave him the requisite exasperated glare. The rest of the room got the equally requisite once over that was faultlessly engineered to engender the continuation of respect & entertainment. Within the green-gorgeousness of her ‘Wavium shell, the once plain-- she had actually been as pretty but without the self-confidence she had come across as a Plain-Jane-- Ramona Wandblume continued to marvel at how cosplay had actually improved her life.
She stole Van Loan’s last bacon strip. “look, someone wants an all-goth-girl sentai-team : someone with enough pull to make that thing I did vanish, poof!” She punctuated her point by making the bacon vanish into the ingress point of her GI tract. “I will be a good girl for people that can make things go ‘Poof!’ “ She gave Van Loan an almost enigmatic look. “You don’t want me to go ‘Poof!’, right?”
“Not the real you.” He looked pointedly at the mess’ black & green festooned Wandblume’s fan-club ‘table’ populated by a happily chattering array of amateur Shego enthusiasts. Fan-girl & boy squeals and waves erupted as they noticed being noticed. Returning the waves, Van Loan thought two thoughts. One he expressed to his lunch partner : “But we do have an annoying surplus of you!” The other he kept firmly within his skull : ‘Where’s my fan-table?’
“Your turn...” She considered a clipboard that lay by her feet atop her papier mâché perch, “...Raven’s Shadow.” The permanent micro-beam curled minutely into the world’s smallest cheshire-cat grin as the eyes attached to the mouth watched the sullen, black-laced teenager drag her almost mine-made-up pout stage-wards. The four other similarly outfitted & pancaked-pretties watched, gloomily, from the well tush-buffed leather seats of the pilot’s briefing auditorium. In the far-back row, an enigmatic grin sketched across a blue face.
***
The green woman sat at a scarred, steel mess table with the less scarred blue man.
“Maybe we don’t want them to ever be that happy, Wandblume.”
“They’ll never be that happy, Van Loan.” She considered her cyan colleague with a dry grin. “You have to squeeze goth oranges extra hard to extract any sunshine at all.”
Van Loan, about to quaff the very liquid of Wandblume’s visually unpleasant analogy, put his glass back, untouched.
“ Ugh!” He waved bye-bye to the Florida Sunshine--it was actually L-5 Sunshine. “ Please, Shego, stop the food metaphors before you put me off bacon!”
Wandblume grinned a true, full-fledged, ripened-banana grin ; quaffed her partner’s abandoned OJ.
“I love it when you call me that, Dr. D : it means I fit the part!” She leant quickly across the dimpled steel tabletop, and planted a quick, citrus smack on slightly startled blue lips. There were sniggers, not very loud as Shego was scary, from the off-duty crew members busily ingesting cubes of red & green--it was Classic Sci-Fi lunch day. Vandblume, the gossipy name for the couple, was the choice shipboard entertainment : they made soap opera couples look downright mundane by comparison.
Van Loan attempted what he thought of as his Patented M. Bison Grin of Manly Charm. As usual it came off as Infectious Goofball Charisma. It made the ‘wavium-altered Wandblume--first name Ramona--always feel the oddest combination of seventy percent infatuation and thirty percent scorn for her endlessly-buoyant-yet-hardly-ever-actually-brilliant-but-usually-very-mad scientist beau. Still, she lost herself in minor-reverie as she considered his two actual brilliant contributions to extra-terrestrial well-being :Flow-Grow, the super high-potency hydroponics nutrient that had made manifold lesser settlements capable of being self-sustaining, and the grey-water reclaimant algae, Blue Goo.
“I know that dreamy expression : Marveling at my brilliance!” Van Loan’s only slightly smug words brought her out of her chin propped in both hands daydream. She reached back across the surface of the table, this time to deliver a cuff. More barely stifled sniggers chuffed about the chamber. “Yeah, I love your pacifistic smart-bomb ; the invisible, lost super-computer, and, let’s not forget the day-glo breakfast cereal!”
“Hey, I’ll have you know Twenty plays a great game of Go ; the Space-Cray isn’t lost, just misplaced ; and I’ll find a buyer for Shining Wheat, or my name isn’t Doctor Drakken!” By the final four syllables he had worked himself up into the index finger raised, happily-driven blue-bundle of energy that she found so damn maddeningly endearing.
Raucous applause broke out from all corners of the room. Van Loan made ostentatious bows to the four cardinal compass points. It was not an uncommon occurrence aboard the station.
Wandblume gave him the requisite exasperated glare. The rest of the room got the equally requisite once over that was faultlessly engineered to engender the continuation of respect & entertainment. Within the green-gorgeousness of her ‘Wavium shell, the once plain-- she had actually been as pretty but without the self-confidence she had come across as a Plain-Jane-- Ramona Wandblume continued to marvel at how cosplay had actually improved her life.
She stole Van Loan’s last bacon strip. “look, someone wants an all-goth-girl sentai-team : someone with enough pull to make that thing I did vanish, poof!” She punctuated her point by making the bacon vanish into the ingress point of her GI tract. “I will be a good girl for people that can make things go ‘Poof!’ “ She gave Van Loan an almost enigmatic look. “You don’t want me to go ‘Poof!’, right?”
“Not the real you.” He looked pointedly at the mess’ black & green festooned Wandblume’s fan-club ‘table’ populated by a happily chattering array of amateur Shego enthusiasts. Fan-girl & boy squeals and waves erupted as they noticed being noticed. Returning the waves, Van Loan thought two thoughts. One he expressed to his lunch partner : “But we do have an annoying surplus of you!” The other he kept firmly within his skull : ‘Where’s my fan-table?’
Very curious to see who these people are and what their schtick is.