fangednconfused (fangednconfused) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-11-09 20:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | derek mitchell, shimmer |
You Know What Makes Everything Better?
Who: Shimmer, Derek
What: Friend Stuff
Where: Las Vegas, Shimmer's Place
When: Present
Ratings/Warnings: Low
Shimmer didn’t just exist. One could be forgiven for imagining she just coasted along and, true enough, that had been the case, but belongings needed somewhere to be kept and, eventually, enough of those accumulated to require more than just randomly designated places to hide them.
Which didn’t mean to say her choice of residence was exactly on the conventional side.
The address given to her undead friend had gone past apartments and more traditional architectural designs of houses. Where Derek had ended up was in front of what amounted to a shipping container. Or at least, one which had been converted into somewhere which could be lived in. It wasn’t unique within Las Vegas to see them, but they weren’t the most common forms of abode.
And Shimmer lived in one.
“Heyyy! Come on in!”
The greeting had been accompanied by the equivalent of a floodlight when the door had opened up. Shimmer was her natural ball of floating light and suddenly realised she was probably a little too bright, going, “Oh! Let me just… HNNNNNG...!”
With a great deal of strenuous effort, Shimmer now stood in her more human-like guise and beamed a big, wide smile, opening arms to embrace him in a hug.
“Yayyy, you got here!”
She waved behind her at the interior. A strange fusion of haphazard and almost bare, because there were all manner of strange trinkets on walls and second-hand shelving units, yet with a great deal of unused floor space. Shimmer didn’t, technically, need things like a bathroom or kitchen, after all. Not even a bed. Some plastic chairs people used in their gardens were arranged in front of a TV with a number of weird electronic devices and cable attachments. Old game consoles, too. There was something like a coffee table with… Culinary oddities upon it. A small stereo with surprisingly loud volume could be heard tuned into a radio station.
“I almost got blood oranges, but then someone said they didn’t have real blood, so… And there was a virgin Mary statue with stigmata, but it dried up before I got to it. But then I realised, hey! Raw fish! So, I got you a bunch of haddock, man! A-a-and a pig’s head, ‘cause there’s gotta’ be some blood in there. You can suck on its snout, right? Make as much slurping as you like, I don’t mind! So… Um… Yeah! It’s Derek party-time! Woo! Excitement, applause, yayyy...”
After returning the hug, the smell of raw fish and dead pig made its way to Derek’s olfactory senses, a dozen times stronger than for a human. He looked down at the display, his stomach feeling like a stalling car engine. “Oh, you shouldn’t have…” he told her, smiling. “Thank you for the hospitality. I just ate though, so, maybe later!”
Instead, he chose to focus on the various other elements of Shimmer’s living space. He hadn’t quite been picturing this. The vampire drifted over to the trinkets on display, his smile upon seeing them more genuine. Derek almost forgot the package he held in one hand, a rectangular gift box with a shiny bow. It was Christmas-themed and he held it out to Shimmer.
“For you. I know you’ve probably lived here for a while now, but this is what people call a housewarming gift.” Inside were a pair of shiny salad tongs.
“O… O… Ohh… It’s a… You gave me a...”
Shimmer made a series of staccato movements, one hand splaying over chest and clearly looking emotionally touched. Then it moved over her mouth and she managed to speak a thank you and… Proceeded to take the box, still unwrapped, over to an empty space on a shelf.
Ah, pride of place!
“It’s pretty because it came from friendship!”
Derek watched her put it on the shelf, confused at first, then realizing what the miscommunication was. “Oh, no, you’re supposed to open it. There’s something inside for you. Something special,” the vampire grinned.
“Hang on, I’ll show you.” He pulled out his phone, navigating to YouTube and searching for ‘kids opening presents’. Derek held it up to show her a video of two children ravenously tearing open Christmas gifts.
“Like that.”
"Oh, it's..." Shimmer was suddenly operating in very unfamiliar territory. She knew people, but her actual circle of what might be termed friends was not the largest. "I didn't think... You got me a present?"
Shimmer's mentality seemed to be one of cruising along, mostly thinking the best of others, but not expecting much in return. Her facial expression was caught somewhere between lost confusion and gratitude, with the decorative gift retrieved and in the process of being opened.
"I mean, it's not big enough to be a car... Technically, I'm not even road-legal, hint-hint," she observed with quotation marks and stage whisper. "And I'm not saying a pony wouldn't be cute as balls, but it's just going to shit everywhere and how am I even going to get that much hay?"
Perhaps the way in which Shimmer was casually reeling off pre-emptive ideas of what her gift might be, was giving her vampiric friend cause to fret. If it wasn't anything of that league, who in their right mind would be impressed with the contents he had thoughtfully provided?
Indeed, once it was opened, she just seemed to stand there in silence. Nothing registered on the celestial being's human guise of face. Shimmer just slowly tilted her head, removing the implements and holding them up.
"OH, MY MONKEY-SHIT! HOW DID YOU EVEN?!"
Suddenly as animated as a cartoon, Shimmer blew her top like a volcano. So much so, that the nymph actually flickered with emotional volatility, shining within the storage container's carpeted interior like a miniature star.
"Yes-yes-yes," she celebrated, lunging and swiping her new tongs in the air like tiny swords. "Now I can finally... Do you know what this means?! It means I've made it! It's status! I don't even have a kitchen, but if I did, I'd be able to use these! No waiting! It means I'm someone!"
Thus ended the mystery of Shimmer's salad tongs obsession. It wasn't so much what she could do with them, it was what they represented. Things which only someone who had made it in the world would have any reason to own. She could now see herself as having climbed that first rung on the 'people-ladder'.
It earned Derek his second hug of the day and, quite possibly, a personal simulation of how it was like to be squeezed by a boa constrictor. No sooner had it ended, than Shimmer had joined his hands with hers and was bouncing up and down.
Derek was swept up in Shimmer’s unique roller coaster of emotions. “I’m glad you like them. I got them from a department store and everything. I had never shopped for kitchen wares before.” His face was plastered with a pleased grin as he held onto her hands, and he couldn’t help but bounce too.
Once the adrenaline or dopamine or whatever lessened, he looked toward the table of dead animals. “I don’t know how to tell you that you should throw that stuff away,” he laughed. “It smells awful. But I really appreciate what you tried to do. Really.”
Shimmer quickly darted her attention between the vampire and prepared feast fit for a garbage-king. "Oh, I... It's not what you...? I didn't even know what to get. That's OK!" And she was already bounding over to energetically dispose of the assorted... Delights on offer. "Can you...?" She asked, gesturing to one of many rolls of black plastic bags. A suspiciously large amount of them, actually. He was asked to help keep them open, so that they could be disposed of; paper plates and all. Then made sure they were placed immediately outside.
"Alright! Well," Shimmer began, slapping hands free, "can you suck a potato chip? I don't think they've got blood, but... Like, I don't, either. Does normal food turn you into a giant bat or something?"
The vampire laughed at her questions. “Shimmer, you’ve seen me eat mozzarella sticks. I’ll be fine. I don’t need to drink blood constantly to survive.” Derek looked around at the shipping container home. It was unique, certainly, and he supposed that matched her personality well.
“How did you find this place?” he asked. “I might be in the market for a new place to live, so…”
“I just thought it’s like… Plankton for whales,” Shimmer explained with an upwardly bunching of shoulder. “I mean, you don’t have flippers, but sometimes it’s better that way.”
Nodding at the logic of her own statement, one could only imagine what might have led the diminutive adventurer to that conclusion. When it came to Shimmer, sometimes it was better to leave such queries there.
Then, suddenly remembering the reason for their meeting, she thwapped him on the shoulder. “This is all about me, you big lug! C’mon, take a chair! This is meant to be, like, brightening you up with cheer and stuff!” Which was what caused her to immediately bounce over to a big plastic box, removing the lid and digging around for the contents. There were huge bags of food which didn’t need to be kept refrigerated - not all of them even labelled. Shimmer never knew when she might need to entertain some company. “I gooot… The weird flavours and non-weird flavours and…”
Remembering his question, Shimmer made an unintentional impression of a meerkat and suddenly took her head out of the contents.
“Well, it was…” She squinted, trying to recount the memory. “You can buy them. This one was more… Sort of... I found it? And maybe…Moved it here?” There was a very heavy pause in the air and she awkwardly added, “Technically, the electricity supply isn’t… Strictly speaking… Paid for. I mean, it totally is! Just… Y’know… Not by me.”
Derek smiled and sat in one of the plastic chairs, his knees bunching up. He got a mental image of an adult in a plastic chair meant for a kindergartener. He tried to peer around her and into the box. “I’ll take the non-weird flavors of...whatever that is,” he offered. The vampire couldn’t help but keep looking around her abode. It seemed like he kept missing things he never noticed before.
At the mention of electricity piracy, he nodded and made a zipping gesture over his lips. “Your secret is safe with me. Sticking it to the man. I like it.”
Shimmer glanced upwards, doing the required mental gymnastics. "Um... Yeah, sticking it to the man. OK, sure, let's go with that," she uneasily nodded, then put on a big, wide smile and went back to the snack food, taking ahold of what could be fitted under arms and spilling it around his seating position. Potato chips, breadsticks - virtually anything cheap, easy to get ahold of and could be stored at typical room temperature. Very little of it would be considered as healthy by human standards.
In a weird way, it was more akin to the interior version of an improvised picnic.
"So, do you mind me asking? Why you're feeling down?" Shimmer was kneeling down, jacking cables into the TV and turning it on, while music radio continued in the background. There were old games consoles, a couple of VHS machines and a DVD player. "Did you ever catch 'The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air'? Ooh! Or this exercise video I found! Humans squish up funny!"
“Uh…” Derek had been in the middle of opening a bag of potato chips. “Well, I’m feeling down because…” Was it a divorce if they never got an official marriage license? What was the legality of a Vegas chapel wedding, anyway? All questions that should have been asked before getting married, maybe.
“Penny and I are no longer together. As a couple. And I’ve seen every episode of Fresh Prince, even when he goes to college and it gets kinda— “ The vampire made a thumbs down gesture.
Shimmer’s head went up and there was a puppyish little whimper. “Oh, but… Oh, no. No, that’s not right, at all,” she spoke, shuffling towards the vampire on both knees. “No, you… You were… She’s your marriage-buddy, right? The one you had wedding vows with? That’s… Derek, that’s not how it’s meant to work, at all. Now you’re going to be in limbo and visiting that… What’s his name, the guy on TV, who says he’ll let you keep all all your stuff, but you have to pay him money. He-he’s a lawyer, so… And then she’ll get a lawyer and… And then there’ll change into attorneys, I think, because - are they like Pokémon? A-and the judge has to catch them all? So… So, but, then you go to prison and you’re a vampire, so… But… You’re also legally dead and…”
All through her meandering train of thought, Shimmers was fidgeting, then graduated to wringing her hands together. Her facial expression was getting more and more worried and then she looked up and gave what had to be at least the third hug of the day.
“Derek, this isn’t meant to happen!” Then she grabbed him by his hands, looking suddenly ultra-serious. “Did you kill her? Do you want to kill her? Did she try and kill you?!”
“Wait, no, I…” Derek was suddenly overwhelmed again, unsure which of her concerns to address first. He tried to give her hands a calming, gentle squeeze. “We’re not getting lawyers, I’m not going to prison, I would never hurt her, and she wouldn’t hurt me. It was all, you know, amicable? Well, maybe not amicable, that just sounds good in movies and stuff.” He shook his head, trying to get back on track.
“Everything will be okay,” the vampire assured Shimmer, even if he wasn’t confident of that, himself. “Broken hearts heal, right? Time heals all wounds. Um, the grass is always greener -- No, shit, that’s not right. Silver linings! I have more free time now.”
Shimmer’s mouth was open. She was frowning and trying to mentally take it all in, because the personified ball of celestial light was, just now, remembering that they both had the status of non-humans. And that made things both easier and more perplexing, because…
“Ohhh... Man, you guys had a hybrid relationship and you… Wait, did you get married according to human traditions? I mean, I thought it was either a siren thing or a big gothic do with a castle. Vampires have a culture, right? Man, three-ways are tricky!”
Yeah, Shimmer was now wide-eyed, sneering and looking all kinds of confused, casting her gaze down to the floor before looking back up. She seemed ready to say something a couple of times, thinking better of it, then decided which words to choose from on the third.
“Alright! So… Alright!” And she reached down, grabbing a family-sized bar of chocolate and thrust it at his chest. “Yeah-yeah-yeah! So, I’ve got to make sure you’re happy! A-and if there’s some really vampire, I’ve got to be all, hey! Uhhh... Wait there! Let me ring up my friend! And then you can make vampire babies with eachother - but this time take longer! Look-look-look! These are games! We can play games!”
Over-compensating, Shimmer rushed to the little stereo system, turned it up and jammed the first console in.
“A-a-and I can be like your personal disco ball! Watch! And you can take a bunch of drugs while I’m doing it!”
At that, she started straining, like she was trying to take the biggest dump in the world. He needed her to spew light all over the place so that he could dance! C’mon, Shimmer!
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, pause, Shimmer.” Derek placed a hand on her arm. “You don’t need to be my disco ball. I’m okay, I promise.” He set the chocolate bar down beside him and leaned forward, the plastic chair tipping a little as he did so.
“It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it did, and I know each day, it’ll hurt a little less,” the vampire assured her. “You are an amazing friend, and I appreciate it. I really do.” Derek gave her a brave smile to emphasize this.
"Wha...? I don't? Huh? Really? But... What?"
Shimmer had energy regulation issues, to say the least. She was somewhere between an adrenaline-fuelled hamster and hummingbird, fretting over how to make things better, because that was what she should do and... But now he was telling her it was OK, so... She'd listen.
"A-alright," she relented, halting the attempt to turn herself metaphysically inside-out. It would have been something to see, though. "Well, are you sure we... No, I'm overthinking and you're div... No, you're single," she immediately corrected herself. "And that's a good thing, if you think about it, because it means you're available when the next chance comes along, see?"
Ever the optimist, Shimmer's eyes lit up. "I know something I can do!" She blurted out, flapping her hands in excitement and pointing a finger in the air. "Your... Your heart's a little achey, right? Like, spiritually? You'd say you qualify as a-a-a being in need?"
Derek tried not to regard her suspiciously. He shouldn’t be suspicious of her. But there was something in the way she was asking him that made him think that perhaps Shimmer might be offering to turn him into a ball of light, too. “Well, I mean...maybe? I guess I could say I’m in need,” the vampire stalled. She looked so excited, he felt bad.
“Yes, I’m in need,” he clarified, sitting up straighter. “I need spiritual, um, healing.”
Wagging her finger at him, Shimmer undertook a series of hand gestures, calling out to the air, which seemed to turn a little electric. Within the storage container’s interior, an unexplained breeze picked up and then, suddenly…
Heavenly music! Rainbow lights! Beautiful choral music!
“GREETINGS, EARTHLY SOULS, YOU HAVE HEREBY VENTURED-”
“Hey, guys!”
“OH.”
“It’s Shimmer! I mean, now it is, but you know who I am.”
“SHIMMER… YES… WHAT IS THE REASON FOR THIS COMMUNICATION?”
“I have a friend!”
“IT IS A BLOOD-SLAKER.”
“Well, yeah, but… He’s a kind-hearted one! And he saved me.”
“SHIMMER, THIS BEING IS-”
“But, see, this is important! It’s an affair of the heart! And it’s left him… Love-hurt.”
There was a lengthy pause and the melodic voices seemed to chatter between themselves.
“THIS REQUEST IS MOST UNUSUAL… BUT WE SENSE A VOW UPON HIM. HE SEEKS IMPROVEMENT. NOT UNLIKE YOURSELF.”
Somehow, there was an impression of a smile and, thus resolved, dozens of sources of light, just like Shimmer, poured forth, of all different colours and shifting hues. Floating towards Derek with a tangible sense of energised compassion enveloping him. Emotional, spiritual healing made tangible.
“Brace yourself,” Shimmer warned. “This part might tickle!”
At first, Derek was slightly worried, maybe a little frightened. If the constant consumption of pop culture had taught him anything, it was that bright light coming from what seemed like the heavens above meant impending death. Was he about to go to heaven? Then he heard voices, not just Shimmer’s and…
Was he being hugged by light? The vampire felt something that was familiar yet not at all. He thought of being a little kid, hurting himself by doing something stupid, the way his mom would hug him and make it better. This was like that, but times a thousand. Add in a few hits of molly and a warm blanket of divine intervention, and that was the closest Derek could get to describing it. His heart felt light, literally, like it was glowing through his chest. He began laughing, the sound devolving into stoned-sounding giggles.
They might be angelic, but they weren’t literal angels and the bathing of compassionate, loving energies the vampire was about to receive was not intended for beings like him. It was meant for for higher-level celestial entities; god-like beings. So, it would require a little improvising to make sure he didn’t… Well, there were a good trillion or so possibilities which would be best to avoid.
Shimmer, for her part, was laughing, seeming to levitate as she was lifted up by a tangible force of gravitational light and made an entranced form of dance with her limbs, like a one-woman memory flashback sequence. She was literally glowing - and it wasn’t even being directed at her. She was just surfing along on the proverbial tidal wave.
It was Derek who now experienced the spiritual equivalent of being oozed into a swimming pool of orgasmic chocolate, feeling somehow at one with the very essence of creation, itself. It was like getting jacked into a nuclear fusion power grid and it was so very… Welcoming and healing and… The one thing a vampire only might really ever truly feel when parasitically imbibing the life force from another.
A feeling of being alive.
But everything had its end. At least for those who dwelled on a mortal plane of existence. When it did so, Shimmer could be found sitting beside him, glowing like a radioactive slab of polonium, giggling to herself as she bid a thankful farewell to her sisterly healers.
“How was it?”
Derek stared at Shimmer; watching her glow next to him like some big Christmas tree topper, unable to form words and vocalize them. Instead, he let himself fall back so that he was splayed on the floor, looking up at the ceiling.
After a few moments, he said, “What was it, exactly?” The vampire felt winded even without the necessity to breathe. It was good, but also crazy. When he closed his eyes, the light was burned into his eyelids.
"It-!"
Realising, before she spoke, that the terminology might sound distinctly Willy Wonka-like, Shimmer's immediate wide-eyed response was tempered down with a series of smiling head jerks, until she finally answered with, "I helped mend your love-hurt." Encapsulating, as best she could, the sort of metaphysical concepts which even leading physicists might never truly quantify in technical human terminology.
"I mean, it's not a cure-all. It won't, like... Last. But if you focus more on the 'love' part than the 'hurt', it should help float you along way better than... I don't know. What do human-people do? Buying a car? A week of amazing sex? Winning all your favourite video games at once? Spring-cleaning your soul, basically! They dialled it way down, but it's like a foot massage for..."
She shrugged. How best to term this?
"For gods. Sort of? Um... Yeah," she decided with a forthright nod, "let's go with that!"
He sat up slowly, carefully. His head was still swimming a little, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Just on the verge of being overwhelming. “I mean, I feel good, I think.” Derek smiled at Shimmer tentatively. The vampire quickly patted himself down, as if determining that everything was still present and in one piece.
“You can help people with this,” he realized out loud. “Like, people who are suffering. The ones about to jump off the Golden Gate bridge and stuff. Walk up to them and do the glow-y thing and you can save them.”
This was something which had made Shimmer think she perhaps shouldn’t have gone through with it, but impulse had got the better of her. It was someone close, he was in trouble and…
Uneasily smiling, Shimmer looked awkwardly away. “I… It’s not something… I’m not over there now. And rechannelling’s one of those things I…” but she realised how it ran a danger of coming across and, even as the new ethereal shine she was displaying was steadily diminishing, Shimmer bit lower lip and tried to meet his gaze.
“Derek, you’ve seen me. I can’t even change my own form unless it feels like I’m blowing a gasket. It’s why I came to Earth… I’m meant to find a way to fix myself, but, well, mostly I just find stuff which makes it weirder. That’s why I had them do me this favour on my behalf.” She made a one-shouldered shrug. “I’ve got a guy I do deliveries for. He knows magical systems. He said he’s going to try and figure something out.”
A pause.
“Right now? You’ve got more of that power to help people in trouble than me. You grew up as a human, you know them.” Then, pondering what that could mean: “Maybe… That should be your calling? Now you don’t age anymore? I mean, you’re between death, right? Maybe you should find people and talk ‘em out of it?”
Derek sat up a little straighter. It was an interesting idea. “Yeah…” he said slowly, “I can help people. That’s even better than just not killing them. Like that’s the basic, neutral option. I can actually be a positive influence.” He turned to look at her, astounded.
“Do you know how many times someone’s parents called me a bad influence? And I hadn’t even killed anyone at that point.” The vampire smiled broadly, then leaned over to hug her again. There was a lot of hugging going around.
“You’ve really helped me,” he told her. “And I want to help you. If there’s anything I can do that will help, I don’t know, work toward fixing whatever’s wrong, or at least making this transition easier for you, I want to know.”
“Ending a lifecycle, I mean… It’s not always bad, just…” And Shimmer made a hand-waving gesture to indicate her agreement. Continued to listen, frowned at the vampire’s revelation of parental disapproval. Then shot that frown upwards upon the receipt of gratitude.
Was it undying gratitude when a vampire was involved? Yeah… Maybe? Kind of?
Giving an audible exhaling sigh, not too unlike that of a horse blowing air, Shimmer squinted, looked to one side, then back, again. “I don’t know if you can? Buuut… I’m happy knowing that makes two of you!”
Oh!
“You know what makes everything better? Video games!”