Chapter 5 Meeting of a Supernatural Kind of the Female Persuasion
"Are you me?"
The voice is barely understandable, tobacco-rough and booze-slurred and drug-hyper, yet it is clearly female and young. It seems to come out of everywhere, and at the same time from within their heads, like the voices a schizophrenic hears.
"I mean, I'm pretty sure I am me, so, um, you must be you, but herm… oh look your hair is so shiny, and woo where is the monster? Oh and but what you did it was like me, so for a while I wondered but look! There they are, in my domain!"
The young woman the voice belongs to seems to step out of nowhere.
The word mismatched was not enough to describe her.
Her shoes are mismatched. She has fish-net-stockings, but one half is mismatched from the other. But the four elements, two shoes, two sides of fishnet, exchange with each other randomly. Around her waist she carries a Classical Bell Tutu in iridescent rainbow. She has a tank top of several drab tones of camouflage gear exposing her midriff. Only the tutu and the tank top also exchange randomly. Man-sized peacock-colored butterfly wings protrude from her shoulders. She has a belly piercing of a rainbow iridescent butterfly.
She is emaciated. Her features are ravaged like those of a twenty something girl on a steady diet of all the psychotropic substances ever discovered or created by man. One side of her hair is a fine stubble of an iridescent fairness. The other is unruly and unkempt waves in a matte rainbow. The halves of her hair exchange sides too. Her eyes are also mismatched: one is green like emerald, the other is blue like a sea when you can see the bottom with little fishes floating somewhere above the bottom. The eyes exchange sides too.
Nuala attempts to kneel down, but Pah restrains her, so Nuala has to settle for a deep one sided bow. The strange youth chooses that moment to distract herself with colorful phosphorescent butterflies.
When Nuala finally finds her words:
"Exalted Lady! To what do I owe the honor?"
The youth smiles uncertainly, looks behind her. Then looks back at Nuala even more uncertainly. Then a light bulb lights on; literally:
"Oh, you mean, me, you are talking to me, you are asking me, why am I here?"
Nuala attempts to abase herself even more, preempted by Pah who has not let go of her arm in just such eventuality.
"I already told you!"
Exclaims the youth triumphantly, clapping her hands.
The deepest most troubled confusion stamps itself across Nuala's face.
"I mean, you were being me… Oh, I mean, you were being like me, that is, you were doing things like me, that is, like I do, and you sent three sets of three people all in a row to my realm, so I felt drawn to you…"
She ends her confusing speech confused herself by her answer and leaving Nuala even more confused.
Nuala attempts to smile, unsteadily.
The youth has lost herself inside herself, chasing hard after a thought that is evading her even faster.
"There was something else…"
She mumbles.
"Someone told me that you might need me further on…"
She chases the thought even harder, but it grows more adroit still in evading her pursuit.
The confusion in Nuala's face grows painful.
"Pah! So happy to see you! Long time no see! How are you!"
"I am well enough, Lady Delirium, well enough."
Delirium hugs Pah wholeheartedly but clumsily, to which Pah responds primly.
Nuala is left looking like what had felt like solid ground before has just become the flimsiest of covers, growing flimsier by the second, and all that is left between her and a gaping pit that leads to an unfathomable abyss, and about to give up the struggle.
The two ladies move on ahead, hand in hand, Delirium chasing away erratically errant butterflies that she herself has just created, Pah walking extremely self possessed.
Leaving Nuala behind.
Pah glances briefly over her shoulder, the shoulder opposite to the one that leads to the hand that holds Delirium's, at Nuala.
That breaks the spell.
