First Meeting

Disclaimer: none of the characters belong to me.

Across the multiverse.

…Skye's motor had not broken down – yet.

Well, that is, it was not her motor per se – she was not a cyborg, thank you very much – it was her van's motor…and she should've really found a mechanic to look at it, but lately, or recently, the life of Mary-Sue 'call me Skye!' Poots did not involve mechanics or anyone. She was a free, independent young woman, completely self-sufficient, and she could repair her own van!..

Well, no, she couldn't – her speciality were computers and hacking, not cars and their maintenance, but right now her priorities were more like going to the public laundromat and cleaning her scant supplies of laundry. She was not proud of it – of her scant supplies of laundry, that is, Skye would have liked to have more, but because she was now independent, self-sufficient, etc., she didn't own a lot of things, and most of them, those things, were related to computers; Skye's van was her biggest exception…

Something moved in its' innards, even as Skye reminisced about her current position in life – Skye's one and only, (currently), companion – her daemon. Everyone, every person in the world got assigned one by a higher power from their birth and till their death, a mysterious entity that could take on the form of any animal (and more) at will…until the person in question stopped being a child and became an adult, after which, the daemon's form became settled and simple – just one animal. Period.

Skye's daemon got settled with a form of a snake – some sort of a pit viper, as she discovered via Google. Well, so far so good, though the dramatic irony – that Skye's daemon became a snake permanently after she left St. Agnes' Orphanage for good with no intention of returning to it, or embracing the Catholic church as the adults in the Orphanage had intended for her…no. Not for her, not for Skye. She was done with it and gone from them; she was living in her van…and her daemon, her oldest and best friend was a snake. So what?!

"Where're you going?" the daemon in question enquired.

"I'm going to the laundromat, to wash my other clothes," Skye explained patiently – she could tell that her daemon was sort of missing her former skills of being able to alternate between many, many forms. Skye's daemon fancied herself a jack of all trades; now she had to become a master of one, and was kind of sulking…unlike Skye herself, really, who was just being lonely, a self-sufficient master hacker or not!..

"Aren't you wearing your other clothes?" the daemon asked again.

"No, I'm wearing them, I'm going to was my other-other clothes, I mean my initial clothes…I'm not good with those word games, sorry," Skye muttered, because her daemon actually was – in fact, word games tended to cheer her up. "Want to come with me to the laundromat instead?"

"Sure!" the daemon immediately perked up and crawled up Skye's sleeve into her sweater – she hated the cold, not a real snake or otherwise. "Let's go!"

"I think I've been had…" Skye muttered, grabbed her laundry bag, turned around from her van – and smacked into a muscular torso.

"Watch it!" the speaker snapped, looming over Skye, (who herself was not really petite). "Where're you going?"

"Excuse me?" Skye blinked, as the speaker's – a very manly speaker's, BTW – own daemon looked through the collar…well, over the collar: it was another snake; a rattlesnake, actually.

"Hello!" Skye's daemon stared at the newcomer with a clear, concrete interest. "I haven't met another snake yet! Is it your final form? How are you doing?"

The bigger reptile/daemon blinked and looked at his own owner. "Behave," the latter said, before pausing. "Um, you two want to come inside?"

Skye blinked, feeling oddly shy herself – she had not had too much experience with attractive men back in the Orphanage, because reasons, (mostly connected with Catholicism and its' partial segregation of genders). "Well," she said, trying to regain her footing and some space for maneuvers. "Laundry?"

"The laundromat is nearby, want me to show you?" the man himself sounded off-balance – the similarity of their daemons was the key; few people had matching daemons, and Skye's daemon – a pit viper of some sort – was very similar to her counterpart, which was a rattlesnake, again. This great similarity of their daemons meant…Skye did not know what it meant; she, regrettably, had never studied daemons very intently, (even though they were a part of school education, even in orphanages), so there was that…

"The laundromat," their new companion, (well, one of the two) said brightly, opening the door for Skye and her laundry, and her own daemon. "Come in?"

Skye, realizing that she was dawdling, blushed and got inside. Inside, the air was much warmer and drier than it was in the streets; both of the daemons immediately abandoned their human partners and raced across the floor into a darker, out of the way corner of the laundromat, where they began to…interact, clearly happy to meet another snake-shaped daemon after years of loneliness; Skye was barely able to notice that the second daemon was not only shaped like a rattlesnake, but was also mottled in color, covered in bands of scaled colored black and white and grey – as opposed to her own daemon, which was a monotonous, bright banana yellow color. (And no rattle either).

"So, I'm Skye?" she turned to the man…paused, and got her laundry started. "Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you too. I'm Grant," the man himself looked away, eyeing the two daemons, which were knotting themselves into a knot and blinked. "So, um, are you new in town?"

"Yes!" Skye spoke with an almost desperate brightness. "I and my daemon just drove in. In our van. You don't need a computer specialist, do you?"

"Are you good and experienced?" Grant raised an eyebrow. "…With computers, I mean?"

"Yes! Phrasing! I mean, I am!" Skye turned red. "Do you have a girlfriend?" she added, rather miserably, as she half-sensed and half-realized that the two daemons were clearly engaged in exploring each other…in depth, and she and, ah, Grant, were not. (And they could not – not in public, and they would not – they just met, but still…)

"No," Grant himself was even redder. "I'm single. I'm giving you a test run…," he groaned. "That's not what I meant!"

"I know," Skye patted him on a shoulder. "Phrasing?"

"Phrasing."

Silence fell. It was late during the day, the laundromat was practically empty, and that suited Grant and Skye just fine: their daemons were really busy with each other in public, and that was bad enough.

"…You know," Skye muttered after a pause, feeling somewhat jealous of her daemon. "I think that this is going to be a beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Grant just nodded in agreement.

End of First Meeting