Title: The Week of the Devil and the Problem with Iconic Figures
Sunday.
It was a nightmare. An evil ploy! A plot from a horror film! Things such as these proved that there were forces out there out that sought your personal misfortune. She couldn't even enter her workshop anymore-couldn't summon the courage to look at *those* things. The cruel fate that awaited her every day in her pottery wheel, and the image would torment her every night afterwards...
Vases shaped like cones.
Lined in stands one after the other, covering the spaces on the walls-triangular vases right side up or upside down. Cruel fate, why had it chosen her? She molded carefully, diligently, and she would work days on a row, working the clay with calloused hands trying her hardest to make it come right. But every time it was the same: all her jars, pots, vases - all her clayware was a hyperbola of modern geometric art!
She didn't understand why! She used to make GOOD vases. Vases that didn't look like cones. At ALL! So why did all of her new vases come out like that? Ceephied, give her a sign! Where did she go wrong! It was like her own mind betrayed her. She had to have something wrong with her; her mind had been defiled and perverted. It had reached a point where she did not know if it was her hands or her eyes playing tricks on her. A toy Val left around - a pizza Jillas was eating - her hat!
Cones. Cones! CONES!
Filia sniffed. Things could be easier if she only could go back to the classics she knew so well. None of this Art Nouveau. They were an atrocity, an abomination! (She was only midly aware she had never had problems with cubism or expressionist abstract artistic movements before.)
For how long could she run from them? You see, in her mildly sturbborn insistence to prove she could make pots that were not even slightly conical, she had made about half thousand of those. Now they occupied about an 85% percent of her shop space - and with each try it seemed to get worst! Her hands just seemed to have a mind of their own and she was either caught by a little distraction, some passing thought, and some times it was like that even as she was deep in concentration.
And next thing she knew, it was a FUNNEL!
Everywhere. Everything reminded her of-
- And she would blast them with her lazerbreath or hide them or refuse to come back to the workshop so not to have to face her shame.
She sighed with a little whimp. Maybe she could "call in sick" again today; the guys could take care of the shop for her. Surely Jillas and Gravos wouldn't mind...
Monday.
She walked into the workshop, pointedly ignoring every conelike thing that seemed to wave at her with a big smile and greet her with a "Filia-chan!" She strung her work apron around her and dropped on the chair in front of the wheel, sworn to get it right this time, ridding on the fires of determination.
All the while, the other ceramics seemed to watch and laugh at her. Those things... THOSE *things*! They, she would rather avoid for good was it not because her job depended on going back to the pottery wheel... and because, as she was trying to rest, her sleep was haunted by the impression of a giant spiral. But! She knew it was all part of the same hydra of a conundrum because she had neglected her duties, and her pride being hurt by her behavior the last couple of days.
She would admit she had let herself be intimidated by shapes of clay -with no deep symbolism or taunting meaning whatsoever-, and now it was interferring with her job; no matter how much she ignored them, those little pots would still be there shinning with unheated clay and mocking her, by being purposefully infuriating and *CONIC*.
She had had enough of that! (She rolled her sleeves.) She wouldn't let the cones win!
She submerged her hands on the substance as it was starting to spin like it was second nature. Her hands danced around the shape, caresing the clay expertly as they had done many times before. One thing she could say about clay modeling was that it was her element. (Of course, spiky iron maces were her element too, in a context.) The soft shape would soon take form. It spun fast but gently, smoothly and with the guidance of light touches that were like tease. Yes, though she was a strong dragon practicing a human art, she could be delicate. Rarely if ever she applied too much force (and some times broke the wheel...)
Her dexterity with the tool was hardly ever questioned, unless some external factor made her lose sense of herself. Like right now: she saw the clay take the shape of a cone, and felt obligued to strangle it.
The mud splatted all around the room and herself.
She composedly and calmly cleaned her face, purposely acting like it was nothing that shamed her, as if ignoring the "faces" of the vases that seemed to talk would prevent them from making fun of her. And yet, that did not seem to be working well. She did not take comfort from the notion that she could terminate all of them with a single fireblazer... maybe because she knew she would also destroy the walls of her shop and the stands.
She sighed as she started over from scratch with a new buddle of clay.
Friday.
Filia put her latest work - a cone-shaped urn - over on a stand, sighing mournfully but without the strenght to destroy another of her creations. She stayed like that, glaring daggers at the urn, demanding it to be less cone-looking. This black and yellow conic urn...
Actually, it might use with a bit of purple.
Without thinking much what she was doing or if it was even a matching color, and maybe because she was so emotionally tired, she brought it to her lap and started applying the paint mindlessly. All the while, she kept looking at the thing, transfixed... Then she realized what she was doing and she felt pretty angry at herself.
She put the vase back at the stand. Made to move away. But was drawn to it again. Again, she stared at it. She made to reach for it, but hesistated and left.
She came back and grabbed it, brought it to herself and hugged it.
This turned to be pretty stupid, since the paint was not dry yet, she had forgotten to heat the clay in the kiln and it pretty much got crushed and melted in her arms at her unwittingly strong embrace; thus she ended with a lot of wet mud smeared colorfully on her clothes.
...Her eyebrow twitched.
"It's ENOUGH! Stupid NAMAGOMI!" she cried out to the skies. "Even when he's not here, he's a total BOTHER!"
The thing that really stung, though, was that Gravos had gotten some of those into the kiln and put them on display. To her dismay, before she could finish taking them off the stands, customers saw them with what Filia thought was an uncertain but supportive curiosity. They called them "neoteric, very 'avant-garde'".
The conical vases sold quite well.
Saturday.
Miles away, at Wolf Pack Island, Xellos did something he rarely did but had been doing a lot lately: He sneezed.
He scratched his nose thoughtfully. Unlikely as it was, it seemed someone somewhere out there... really missed him.
"It's just means you have a cold," said Lina irritably, climbing up a very neglected and muddy entrance of an abandoned temple.
"Can mazoku get colds?" asked Gourry, after her. Zelgadis and Amelia exchanged a look, before following behind.
Xellos watched them enter, and shrugged before going in as well, looking amused. He walked back to his current assignment mumbling an improvised tune,
"If you sneeze on Monday, you sneeze for danger;
Sneeze on Tuesday, you kiss a stranger;
Sneeze on Wednesday, you sneeze for a letter;
Sneeze on a Thursday, for something better;
Sneeze on a Friday, you sneeze for sorrow;
Sneeze on a Saturday, your sweetheart tomorrow;
Sneeze on a Sunday, your safety seek,
The devil will have you the whole of the week~"
-*-
(NA: O-Make? Monday Xellos: Wishing it was Tuesday. *cough*
Alternative titles for this fic includes: 'A Trilateral Frame of Mind' . Thoughts?)