On the Job (Finished)

[carcinoGeneticist]

There was nothing Seth could say as the floodgates opened but do his best to keep up with the boy's words. Everything he said seemed to make perfect sense but none at the same time. Seizures? Mom looking happy, but a depressed father? Left to die on a mountain, a game they didn't understand?

Part of him wanted to storm back and grab that scrawny cat by the throat, shake him until he spilled whatever it was that he'd been keeping secret from his daughter. She'd said that her other children had died, damn it! How could he be speaking to one of them?

The other part, a more quiet part that usually reminded him that the truth wasn't always pleasant, told him that the little pussy would have never done something that brave without his daughter's backing. Fuck. Now he wanted to strangle them both. But he couldn't do that, not yet anyway. He needed to know why they'd done it. He needed to know what could lead to a child - his child - abandoning his grandchildren. So he would tell the boy what he knew.

"Yeah,[/b]" he said softly, voice sounding hoarse as he stood once more. He gave the teen a small and crooked smile, one that didn't quite seem right. "My name is Seth. And, well.[/b]" He spread his arms slightly and shifted to his human form, shrugging. His body could, in a way, speak for itself.

"Hairy enough for you? Rhiannon... your mother. She's... my daughter.[/b]" The word stuck in his throat like a cherry pit that he'd forgotten to remove.

[The Jenn]

Jak 'oohed' at the change to human form like somebody admiring Christmas lights. He didn't notice the strain in Seth's smile, especially since human faces were so weird anyway, even though he'd worn them on more than one occasion. "So you're Seth, and you're hairy, and yeah! Rhiannon's my mom's name! Dad called her Rhi, but I heard that at least a few times. And she's your... huh?"

He stared for a second, brain taking longer to make the appropriate mental jump from 'stranger' to 'family'. It was a really, really, really huge jump for his mind. "You're... family?" That stare again, so unbelievably intense. Now he took the time to really look Seth up and down, trying to fix his mind around the man. Family mattered. All of it. "Maybe I'll see you when I have seizures, too, now that I know you." Wouldn't that be neat?

"Well, uh. If you're family then I guess I can introduce myself. Since, y'know. You're family." That word obviously meant a huge amount to the young man. His mind was jumping around all over the place. "My name's Jak. I live in a shack around here, but you wouldn't be able to tell it's a shack 'cause we cover it with garbage to keep everybody out. Maybe we'll get a house someday, if I can steal enough money. I'm really good at it. It's easy to steal from somebody when you look like them. I'm a Joker. Mom used to cry when she looked at me, and she never really liked my jokes. Kinda... what's the word? Ironic? Yeah. Kinda ironic. Sure, they sucked, cause I was a kid, but she could've at least pretended to laugh. My sister scared my Dad more than me. She used to hurt him because she hated how he got sad. If he'd laughed more at my jokes, maybe she wouldn't have hurt him. My brother scared both of them. I still don't know why. He was always so nice. He just looks kinda like a jellyfish. I look a lot weirder."

He never got to talk about his family. Amhal hated them all, except for him. He missed talking about them. He thought about them all the time.

His eyes narrowed and he leaned a tiny bit closer, voice dropping to a whisper. "You... you wanna see? It'll scare you. I promise. I'm a freak." He grinned, lips pulling back to show teeth and gums in an unnatural display.

[carcinoGeneticist]

The man nodded at Jak's words, but it was a faint nod. Family. This... this crazy kid was his family. It seemed unreal, like a bad dream, and he couldn't deny that there was a part of him that wanted to just run away. It was almost too much for him to deal with. He suppresed that part of himself. He and Heilyn shared views on family: Children were precious, to be loved and well-cared for. Not abandoned on a mountain to die. Not left to steal money so that they could maybe one day buy a house.

It made him depressed and pissed off all at the same time, but there was nothing he could say just yet.

He could tell that there was a lot this boy had never gotten to talk about, and he was quiet throughout it all, letting the torrent of words wash over him. Some of it was harder to understand than others, but when he began to speak about his other siblings, Seth felt as if his lungs weren't working quite right. A Joker. The boy hadn't been playing before, he was... a Joker. That shattered something in the back of the bat's mind, something that had been true for as long as he'd been able to formulate his own opinions on the world.

And the other children that his daughter had... given up. What could have happened to them to have caused such serious and terrifying mutations? It was a good thing he was in human form, or else his disgust at the thought would have been far too plain to read. A child that hurt her own parents? It didn't seem right or even possible. Sure, Tegan had been a terrible judge of teeth when she'd wrestled her father, but it had never been enough for him to say she'd hurt him. And... a jellyfish? What did that even mean? He couldn't help the shudder that he felt at the thought. Seth didn't like things without bones.

This was too fucking unreal.

"You're my grandson,[/b]" he said after a moment, and gave the boy - Jak - another reassuring smile. It was hard to do, considering the fucking creepy look on the boy's face. There was weight to the promise, but he choked down his fear. "You're family. Of course I want to see what you look like.[/b]"

[The Jenn]

Something in Jak bubbled up happily at those words. Someone besides Amhal, telling him that he was family. He daydreamed about stuff like this. Of course, he'd never really seen it under the light of the moon in an abandoned and condemned building before, but he probably should have. That was just how the world worked.

"Kaaaaaaaaaaay," he agreed, giving the man one last searching look before taking a few steps back. "Don't scream, alright? You might bring people in here or something." And just like that, he changed.

The colors faded and melded into their natural markings, a mix of Highland and Bog. His body changed, becoming misshapen and neither animal nor biped, with tubes growing near his face and on his back. The bone tails descended along with his normal one, clattering on the floor and giving him some measure of balance. He hunched as his eyes disappeared, leaving nothing but empty sockets, and then a floating, flaming eyeball burned itself into life above his head. He wasn't wearing his goggle, so both sockets were plainly visible, and he wasn't wearing his eyeball-scarf. From his forehead, a mechanical feeler sprouted, dangling down and away from his face like an anglerfish, glowing with an eery purple light and illuminating his nightmarish face unnaturally. The missing eyes were even more horrifying in the dim purple glow.

Above his head, the flaming eyeball rotated. He always like it when his vision expanded like this. "Boo," he whispered, and then cackled, the sound echoing up his throat as well as through his breathing tubes, wheezing through the one twisted tube. The sound was terribly ominous and a thing that nightmares could be made of. So much for not making noise.

Hopefully the man would get over his surprise quickly and they could resume with their chat. So long as he didn't make the man unhappy, all would be just fine in his world.

[carcinoGeneticist]

Seth drew his fingers across his lips in the pantomime of a zipper being zipped. He wouldn't scream.

Of course, the boy didn't give him much longer than that to prepare himself for what was to come. It didn't matter, of course. There was no way anyone could prepare for the sight that reached his eyes.

He wasn't sure what horrified him the most. The completely blank chest was so unnatural the man almost swore at it, but then he saw the positioning of the boy's body. Awkward, unthinkably broken, fucking wrong. The last term was multi-purpose, and seemed to describe almost every part of Jak. His grandson. His flesh-and-blood. He had never heard of something so terribly deformed, not even in the darkest of stories. Even in his worst nightmares, the monsters were never anything that seemed even remotely possible.

But here one was, grinning up at him with a far-too-wide mouth, then whispering "boo" like a child while it wheezed and cackled like a fucking banshee. He could feel the sweat beading up on his forehead as he used every bit of energy not to scream.

He'd promised not to, after all.

"Fucking...[/b]" he finally said, feeling his body tense in uncomfortable ways as his subconscious struggled to get away from the horrible creature that stood in front of him. There were a million things he wanted to say, a million questions, a million curses. All he could bring himself to utter, however, was "Fuck, fuck Jak... What the fuck happened to you? Suits, fuck..![/b]" as he stared on in open horror.

[The Jenn]

Hah, yeah! Jak told him he was a freak, and his face was great! 'Boo' never failed. It was, like... a classic or something. He even made the guy sweat! It was visible in the combined glow of his eye and his feeler. Seth was getting really into it. He was thrilled. Whether he was really freaked or just playing along, he was doing a really great job of it. What a good sport!

"I was born with most of it," he said, still laughing. The breathing audibly continued as he spoke. "Well, I was born with regular eyes too, but they melted out of my head when I lit the weird candle I found in the garbage, and that's when the floating one showed up. And I wasn't born with the bone tails. They showed up after I ate that candy I found in the gutter. It had nougat and everything. So worth it. The feeler showed up after I put on a pair of goggles I found. I think they were in somebody's garbage too. All this neat stuff that everyone throws away, or doesn't eat. I don't really have much of a choice. Gotta eat something, right? Still, it's always kind of an adventure. Every bite you wonder what's gonna start sprouting next."

He cackled again, enjoying all of this immensely. "Everything else, though, that's all me from the day I was born. Well, the one tube wasn't bent. My sister did that. But it was still there. All the others were born with their animal forms, except for me. I couldn't stand upright for long until I grew the extra tails, and I fell over a lot more. They make a really cool sound when I drag them around, too."

It was so neat to be able to tell all this stuff to somebody, and it was safe to tell him because he was family! "You know, maybe my brother won't even hate you," he said in a suddenly hopeful tone of voice. "Since you weren't involved with the whole mountain thing, but you're still family, maybe he won't hate you. I haven't been able to go looking for any of the others 'cause I know he doesn't want to see them, even if I do." He had no idea how much of an information overload all of his rambling was having on Seth.

[carcinoGeneticist]

It was too much. Too fucking much. Seth pressed his head against his hand, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to press out the endless flow of words that just kept coming and coming out of the.. the... the monster.

His fucking grandson. What the hell had his daughter done, if he really had been born with that?

It brought up more questions than that, too. Treasa, sweet, naieve, terrified Treasa with her wing-bones. A small mutation. He'd heard that one of them had looked like a jellyfish. The horror that was yammering at him with increasing affection and hope. What about Kieran, who'd always seemed normal? What horror could be under his mask, what was it that his parents were able to hide, saving him from joining his siblings on a mountain to die?

He'd never before understood what could make a parent abandon their child. He still wasn't sure if he would be able to do it himself, but fuck if he couldn't understand what had gone through Rhiannon and the pussy's head. Especially the pussy. He couldn't deal with his own shadow, how would he deal with these monsters?

The man struggled to suppress another wave of nausea when Jak continued to speak. Something about the way that torn-looking mouth flapped was almost too much to take. He tasted bile when he spoke next. "Your.. your brother's alive too?[/b]"

[The Jenn]

Jak was completely unaware of Seth's mental turmoil as he rambled on, taking the gestures as excess drama at his bizarre appearance. Was he laying it on too thick, or was he really just that weird? He hadn't shown anybody but his brother what he looked like in years and years and years, so it really could be the second one. Huh. Neat.

"Yep, my brother's alive. And my sister, but I haven't seen her since the mountain. I just see her when I have seizures. Sometimes she's flying. Sometimes she's doing other stuff. She was born without eyeballs, kinda like I am now, and kinda like Kieran, except he didn't have holes like she did. He didn't have holes anywhere on his face. He just loved me. Said I made everything feel better. I miss him a lot. He loved my jokes. She sorta did. She was also white all over, except it wasn't white like a Highlander, it was white and winey pink-red like something weird. And she had blue hair. And thorns on her head. Really weird thorns. She was a bat. Not a mixed one like Mom, but a full bat like you. She just got angry a lot because neither of our parents could be happy around her and that sent her into rages. All Dad could say whenever she did that was that it reminded him of his parents, and I dunno who they were, but they must have been really nasty to go off like she did. If she was older, she probably would have killed him or something."

Throughout all of this, his tone remained cheerfully excited.

[carcinoGeneticist]

It never stopped.

The boy never stopped talking, but Seth was torn between wanting him to stop and wanting him to get every last drop out. If he wasn't so freaking fascinated by the things the boy was saying, he would do something to quiet him.

But he couldn't.

"Pravus..[/b]" Seth muttered as he ran his hand across the fluff of blue hair that sprang from his head, an action that anyone who knew him would see as a nervous twitch. He'd heard rumors. He'd met Xiven. He knew about the man's rages. It would be hard for a man who'd lived in the Court for as long as the bat had not to have at least heard of them. "And fuck, my first... My first full-bat blood. And she's..[/b]"

It was a thought he couldn't continue. There was a bitterness to it, one that he'd swallowed for almost all of his life. Being the only full bat he'd ever known was frustrating. He'd had high-hopes for Rhiannon's children and he'd finally come to terms with the fact that none of them were even part-bat, only to have this news flung into his lap. A full-bat. A full-bat with thorns coming out of her head and no goddamned eyes. It was a slap to the face. He tried to push that out of his head again, and in return his mind was forced to focus on something else.

"Wait, what did you say about Kieran?[/b]" The boy's words had been lost in the haze of Seth's own mind, and he stared the freakish abomination down. He'd loved his brother, sure, but there was more. Something sinister. His own little freakshow to match the others.

[The Jenn]

This guy was just begging for more words, and Jak couldn't have been happier about obliging! He didn't know what 'Pravus' meant, but the bat comment confused him. "She's what? Blind? Angry? Mean? Weird? Alone? Lost? Dell? Yeah."

He rocked back on his haunches, easier with his legs, and 'sat' staring at the man with eyes that couldn't see and one big, fiery one that could. "Kieran? He loved me. He was a really great brother. Dad always liked him best, and it was really obvious, but I think that was how he ate. Or something. He always said he felt full when he was happy. Like it was warm or something. He was so cuddly, him an' Amhal. Sa wanted to cuddle, but sometimes the bony wings got in the way like my tubes did. She really got the short end of the weird-stick. I think that's why Dad liked her too, cause he didn't feel as responsible whenever he looked at her. Said he did it to all of us cause of his weird cloak-thing and death and whatever, and Mom said she did it all cause of... I dunno, I can't really remember." They'd cried a lot.

"With me, well, weird-weird. Dell, mean-weird. Amhal, jellyfish-weird. Kieran, no face-weird. Sa... pretty wings-weird. Not so bad. Mom said she could pass as a Hisstor mix and nobody would look more than twice at her, and I didn't really know what that meant until I met a Hisstor. They're cool-looking. I can pass as one now 'cause of my butt. And maybe a little Corvie too, cause of my head. And hey, who knows what else? I was the only one to get any purple, at least purple like Mom, so you'd think she would like that, but she didn't like me at all."