Springtime in Cloudcuckooland [Done!]

[Bee]

Thalia wasn't quite sure how the kite ended up in her possession, but then Thalia was never quite sure how much of anything ended up in her possession. Stuff just seemed to naturally gravitate toward her, and if she happened to latch onto it and run with it--well, it was hardly her fault, really.

She was still quite surprised to find that her hair had ensnared a purple butterfly kite; she wondered how long it had been there before she noticed it, and why Iskra hadn't commented on it. She imagined that some little girl was probably very unhappy right now, which made her sad.

But then she saw the kite waving and diving in the air and promptly forgot about it.

"We should go to the fields," she told her companion. "You can kick back in the sun and stuff away from people and I can fly my new kite."

[Dark]

Iskra was rather glad that that child’s mother hadn’t noticed Thalia’s theft--the woman was rather sturdily built and didn’t seem the type to care if Thalia was a Queen and capable of unleashing the powers of chaos on a whim--and the child was too dim to do anything but stare perplexedly at her hands where she’d once held kite strings. The petulant crying had been rather delayed, too, and didn’t start until they were down the street quite a ways. The brat must have been dropped on her head as an infant or something.

She nodded in response to Thalia, “Sure,” and turned down a side street that would eventually split, and if they turned left, would take them out of the city. It was a good day to lay in the sun and let Thalia burn off some excess energy. If Iskra were lucky, the kite would keep Thalia occupied all afternoon, but the kid was just as liable to get distracted by butterflies or various other shiny things off in the distance. Iskra would have to keep an eye on her, just in case.

[Bee]

There was a nice open patch of land some ways past the bandersnatch fields--a perfect, unobstructed place for her to fly a kite and for Iskra to sunbathe relatively unmolested (there were an unnerving amount of people who didn't like admitting Lowlanders into their company; Thalia thought these people were a bunch of jerkfaces.)

She kicked the kite back up into the sky and let her Hair pilot it. Her tentacle unrolled an apple (where had that come from?) and she ate it happily. The other tentacle unrolled strawberries. Bad tentacle. It knew she was allergic. The soft appendage was already lightly tinged with rash just from holding them. Strawberries were tiny red murderers to people of her bloodline. (Well, just her and Iphis, actually, though they did give Mom an awesome scouring of painful-looking hives).

She proffered them to Iskra. "I brought snacks, apparently."

[Dark]

Iskra took the strawberries--normally she would have been leery accepting food items that Thalia had been storing in places unknown, but she’d seen the girl swipe them in the market this morning, and thought they were probably fresh enough that they wouldn’t kill her--and ate them lazily while she watched Thalia fly the butterfly kite. It looked pretty, wandering across the blue sky, and Iskra especially enjoyed watching the streamers attached to the tail of the kite flip-flap-zip after the slow-floating butterfly waaaaaay up high--they had some sort of metallic sheen that caught the light.

She settled deeper down into the grass, finding a comfortable position. It was warm, just like Iskra liked it, and the breeze was just enough to keep the air from getting stale like it tended to do on very hot days; she flicked out her tongue and smelled flowers and soil and green things. She dozed.

[Bee]

She trailed the kite around contentedly for quite some time, tossing it back into the air on the occasions it crashed, apologizing to some little kid when it caught the breeze wrong and dive-bombed his defenseless little head. She thought about affixing herself to a giant kite and gliding through the air, a way to overcome the epic fail that was her natural Diamond flight ability. Then she had a brief day-dream nightmare in which she was flying with Tosiek and he got too close to the sun and melted.

Then she got bored. It was a chronic problem. She reeled the kite back down--she was briefly tempted to turn it into an actual butterfly and let it have five minutes of glorious freedom and find a new owner--but she liked it too much to let it go.

"It's bubble time," she told Iskra. "I'll be back. Guard my kite."

[Dark]

Iskra continued to doze in the grass, waiting for Thalia to return--or not. Time was very relative where Thalia was concerned--it was whatever time she needed it to be--and while the rest of the world moved on without her, Thalia still thought it was 9:00am when in actuality it was 1:15pm. It would be a cute quirk, if they didn’t have things to do. Today, it didn’t matter, and when the sun started to dip below the horizon, Iskra finally decided that Thalia probably wasn’t coming back, and it was time to head home.

Thalia had probably gotten distracted by half a dozen things by now and entirely forgotten she was suppose to meet back up with Iskra, which was fine--Iskra had come to expect it; at this point, Thalia was probably wondering where Iskra had gotten off to.

Tucking the kite carefully under her arm, Iskra started the long trek back to the apartment. Maybe Thalia would have accidentally stolen them dinner.