Happy Birthday, Imo!
*o*o*o*
Once she gets past the resentment and rage, the worst part is the boredom. Uusoae can't get out - she's tried just about every way she can think of and then a few more. She gets as big as she can, but the room doesn't budge. She gets as small as she can, but there aren't any holes to crawl through. She rakes claws over the walls, kicks at them, vibrates them with sounds to weaken them, disintegrates and tries to pass through them (or pass them through her) and, in a fit of pique, stabs at them with poison spurs. Nothing works, but at least it gives her something to do. She still has a little pinch of stardust left, which she carries with her like hope. Maybe Uusoae could clap it into a weapon that would break the walls down, but for now she's saving it; she doesn't want to use it unless she knows it will work. Surely her parents will let her out before then, anyways.
Although... she's tried that, once, too. In a bad moment, big tears rolling down her face, she remembers what she was like when she was new - fits herself into her limbs and her face and holds on tight. Only when she opens her tightly screwed eyes, she can tell she's not right. Her skin is scaly blue and it's not... She screams and dissolves into black feathers. Uusoae can't believe she doesn't remember how she started out.
"Mother! Father! Please! I'll never do it again," she sobs, apologizing without knowing why. "Just please let me out."
But if they can hear her they don't reply. She stops speaking after that.
When she's not figuring out new ways to get out, she thinks about all the things she knows. Holds onto the names of her new siblings, thinks of things she'll create when she's free again, imagines there's gravity like on the world she created and flips it so she's standing on the ceiling or the wall instead. Seeing as how she can just shift into something that will hang from the wall or the ceiling, it's not incredibly satisfying.
She gets the occasional short visit from Lou and the others to break up the monotony. (Mithros comes once, to apologize, but Uusoae is already not speaking so he goes off in a huff. Susan and Shakith come to be polite, Kyprioth and Lavinia come to goad her, and she's never really sure about Mynoss' motives. She thinks maybe he wants information. Gainel... is different.) She pretends that they are talking to her through her floor or down through her ceiling when they think they are against her wall.
Lou tells her about her people mostly. How they're getting on, who's in love with who, how much they worship and adore her. She also tells her about the exploits of Cat. It's tedious and Uusoae loathes it. Can't stand hearing it, can't help listening for more. She also tells her about what their siblings are up to.
In the beginning, Uusoae would ask about her people and Lou would answer that they were fine in quick clipped tones. She wouldn't say another word about them, though, and eventually it's just another thing that Uusoae gives up on knowing.
And then there's Gainel.
Gainel comes and talks and his voice echos from all sides and surrounds her so she feels like it's muffling her, or that she's running into it, depending on her shape. He doesn't seem to mind that she never talks back.
He speaks to her in poetry, in snatches of words that he has heard, maybe that he has put together himself. He tells her about dreams.
Oh yes, Lou mentioned this. After Uusoae was put away, Mother and Father divided up all the responsibility of caring for the people on the world she created. Mithros and Lou got to keep the people they already had, and were given war and love respectively. Shakith took justice, Mynoss took trade and they both set up to the East. Lavinia took art and went South ("She's made herself look like an old hag, can you imagine?" Lou crows), Susan opened a hole into a parallel Universe and takes souls through to the other side and Kyprioth took crime and goes wherever he isn't wanted. Uusoae doesn't ask if she has anyone or anything for herself, and Lou never says.
And Gainel was given the realm of sleep. Gainel's story is all the stories. Over and over again, endless magnificent variations.
She breaks her long silence to ask him for the story of how she escapes.
He tells her she hasn't written it yet.
"Can't you just go snatch it out of time?" Uusoae begs.
"Can't you?" Gainel wonders and Uusoae tries to no avail. She howls at Gainel like he's both pack and the moon. "Maybe it's possible in the Universe, but I don't think it works like that here," he says, gentle
"I could make it work like that here," Uusoae says darkly, thinking of her stardust.
"And where would we be then?" Gainel replies profoundly, as though it were both question and statement.
Uusoae sighs, irritated. "But I will get out?" she asks.
"You will," Gainel says, and Uusoae isn't sure if he knows it or is just trying to make her feel better.
Against her will, she does feel a little better.
She starts thinking of the things she's already tried and wonders where to go from there. Changing her shape hadn't done anything. Trying to change the room hadn't either. Maybe the space inside the room? But no, it won't budge when she tries to move it elsewhere. What about the temperature? If a star gets cold maybe it will die, or explode if it's hot. Stardust might work the same.
Uusoae changes to a dragon. She thinks it might be able to withstand the cold, but she would have to be asleep. Who knew what would happen to her if she got trapped inside a dead star?
She paces and breathes fire at the walls instead. They catch nicely, licking up and out, a fantastic shade of greenish white. The blistering heat is too much for her eventually, even as a dragon, and she shifts to a phoenix. Her feathers go up almost immediately, and she has time for a final painful, "Maybe this wasn't such a good..." before she's gone.
.
.
A blur of... turns towards it, but...
.
.
noise...
.
.
too loud, want...
.
.
a terrible blear, and then too much...
.
.
What happened?
.
.
panic, flail! but nothing will move...
.
.
noise starts again, painful and shrill. goes away when it's too weak to keep it up.
.
.
wait... that was. The noise is her?
.
.
What happened?
.
.
Colour. Light. Open your eyes!
.
.
She forces her eyes open and looks around. Really looks. It takes some time, remembering who she is and words for things and how to distinguish one thing from the next. She blinks dazedly all the while.
Takes in the scorch marks and the stain from where her ashes were, and remembers how she tried to explode the walls apart, or at least burn a hole right through them.
The evidence points to it not going so well.
Then Uusoae looks down and realizes that she feels so strange because she came back as a baby. Juvenile eyes, juvenile brain. Tiny, weak limbs. How embarrassing. She doesn't think she was ever a baby before. Not like that, all helpless and pathetic.
She regrows herself, and that is painful too. Much more painful than changing shape otherwise, which would be interesting if she weren't in so much pain.
Uusoae loses her bones, oozing into a jellied sea creature and tries to think what she can possibly try next.
Maybe it's because she'd rather not move again, ever, that she decides to try finding a way out in her mind. She imagines all the walls collapsing around her opens an eye to see if it's had any affect (it hasn't). She keeps going, too exhausted to stop or to think of something different. She imagines someone opening the box, cutting through it. She builds a world inside of it. Eventually she even stops checking to see if it's working.
Uusoae's in the middle of a hedge maze, staring up at a sky of argyle-patterned moons and twinkling fish when Cat shows up. She offers him a bristly appendage and he rubs up against it after a delicate sniff.
"Did I imagine you here, too?" Uusoae asks.
"Hardly," Cat snorts. "I only go where I please."
"Oh?" Uusoae says. "Then I suppose you know the way out."
"Of course," Cat says and adds casually, "I can show you if you like."
Hope, long forgotten, wells up in Uusoae's chest. But then Cat says, "You can't go like that," and the hope rises up and sticks like a boulder in her gizzard instead.
"What do I do?" Uusoae pleads. "I'll do anything."
"No need for theatrics, you just have to dress the part," Cat sits and unconcernedly licks his paw.
"You mean..." she starts and peers around at her scales, some leathery, some more feathery.
Cat pauses in his grooming, his tail twitching rhythmically behind him.
She shifts then, remembering how it was to shape Cat. When she settles, he stalks around her critically. She licks her paw at him, mocking. It is exceptionally difficult not to bat at his tail as it goes by, but she stubbornly restrains herself.
"I suppose you'll do," Cat says grudgingly.
"I should think so," Uusoae reproves. Only Cat has already taken off, and she has to scramble to catch up to him.
They slink between the hedges and cavort across fields, pouncing on field-moose (watch out for the antlers!) and chasing pocket-watches. Schools of fish follow them in the sky and Uusoae and Cat sit for a while, tracking them with narrowed slits of eyes, hoping they'd swim low enough to catch. They vault up and over walls, and run until eventually they are at the wall. Cat rubs all along it, purring at it shamelessly like it's a long lost friend.
"Really," she scoffs.
He glances back at her, smugly, and then goes right through.
Fine, Uusoae thinks, refusing to be impressed. She follows his steps, rubbing up against the wall - it is excellent to scratch against, she'll admit, prickly but cool at once. Delicious.
Maybe she purrs a little. What of it?
And then she slips through, too.
She blinks
And sneezes, nose wrinkling at the soot and ash.
Cat has led her back to her room..
She glares at him.
But, "Oh. You got in here, too."
Cat doesn't even deign to reply. The obviously is implicit.
"Then..."
"Are you coming, or what?"
And they leave.
It's part of Cat's story, Gainel tells her later (Cat would have her believe that it's simply because he is Cat, and therefore superior in all ways). Uusoae may have created him and given him nine lives, but it was people who believed in Cat's ability to get anywhere that made it part of his mythos. They also gave him an insatiable curiosity, but that's a tale for another time.
*o*o*o*