/015. Blue.
In the old days, long gone, humans stripped down to their clammy skins and striped themselves with mud and woad before leaping into battle. The race was full of strange past-day rituals, both related to combat and not. Zim reads about the fabled excision of the breast, an Amazon practice designed to exacerbate the fluidity of their warriors when drawing a bow, and in spite of himself feels a little impressed at that kind of dedication. He reads about foot-binding after that, how little girls had their feet compressed into useless stubs in the name of beauty. That just disgusts him, makes him shudder.
Human inventiveness with their own bodies stuns him, never mind that a pak might be considered the biggest body modification of all – no human has entirely replaced the brain with hardware yet. They're working on it, though. The thought that humans may be the ones who invent the pak, mark II is one uncomfortably and not wholly formed in his mind, but the possibility is there.
At any rate – none have plumbed so deep yet. Surface modifications, on the other claw, are common: rings glint in the nose or eyebrow or lip, bars through the tongue or the nose or the brow, rings lining the ears. Torque's is the most extreme. He's still showing off his Ampallang in the locker room after gym class. It sickens Zim, simultaneously provoking the impulse to run off screaming at the sight of that hideous thing emerging from Smacky's groin and the amazement that ugh, a creature would ever do that. Trust a human, a stinky, sweaty, stupid human, to go that distance.
Zim keeps an eye on the other body mods too, both compelled and revolted by the bright scrawl of ink coloring skin, and the rarer piercings he observes. One older girl wears a labret, an two dainty metal fangs protrude beneath her lower lip. And when Jessica climbed up on a cafeteria table and flashed the lunchroom Zim distinctly saw that the girl had pierced nipples.
Everyone (almost everyone) has something, it seems. Not the mark of a warrior anymore, just for looks, cosmetic bits of hardware. Even Gretchen with her crippling shyness displays the with pride the points of metal now adorning her earlobes. The contrast between the shame with which she sidled through youth (why didn't all that metal on her teeth make her a celebrity?) and the quietly building confidence that she walks with now is a little intriguing. Not enough to demand further inspection, but a tiny bit interesting. Just a little.
Zim can only think of one person at the school who seems to have escaped the craze entirely.
Dib is leaner, stronger with age; he's still almost, almost, almost monochrome. That dark hair makes his pale skin flash so bright, and he's gotten big around the shoulders in the past few years, as if he's been swimming. Otherwise he's not fat with muscle, but lean, a runner's spare build. He'd be all black, black, white, if he didn't bruise like nobody's business.
The human's whole body is a telltale to their violence. Thundercloud bruises darken his torso, legs, shoulders; Zim once noticed a round dark navy blue bruise sitting just over Dib's heart, as if someone had thrown a baseball at the boy, hard. Blue marks, some shaded with purple, some lightening to yellow or green; some nearly red, like blood tracks in snow. No earrings, no ink other than blood spreading below his skin; no piercings, no glinting bits of metal to catch Zim's eye and cry to be ripped out.
Dib's knuckles are thick from throwing too many punches; often at school his eyes are blacked and puffy, or his lip is split. A constant parade of minor wounds marches across his face. Some are gifts from Zim, and some aren't.
It's sort of exciting, thrilling, really; at bearing witness to the growing ferality in Dib's eyes. They flicker yellow like a wolf's, and Zim can't be surprised, at how close the savage is to the surface in these creatures.
That cold uncoiling of primal fire seems to jump a little quicker when Dib spies him. It is impossible not to notice.
That's fair; after all, so many of the displayed cuts / bruises are courtesy of Zim. That's the way he wants it. Dib is a primitive, a descendant of primitives; Zim likes it best when he's reflecting that. Angry, quietly boiling, like a bed of coals that could at any second flare into life; that's how Dib should be.
Like his blue-painted ancestors beating their war drums, like the breathless, soundless moment before the towering storm breaks.
3.21.08
An ampallang is a kind of male genital piercing.
