It's Brittany, Bitch | Ερις (eristic) wrote in paxletalelogs, @ 2017-04-05 19:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | eris, uke mochi |
and i believe this may call for a proper introduction, and well
Who: BB [Eris] & Alice [Uke Mochi].
What: BB and Alice share a dream as their god-selves.
Where: The afterparty former wedding of Peleus, Ancient Greece.
When: A long, long time ago.
Eris laid on the table, facing a clear blue sky dotted with clouds shaped like sheep. Eris stood vertically on the table, on her head, facing a room strewn with broken furniture, smashed food, broken pottery. Eris's feet rolled over the ground, her body still lying on the table, her pieces just as scattered as the contents of the room.
Eris was not very together after the party, but that's what made it a good party, right?
Eris wasn't very together on a good day, anyway, so this really wasn't a new thing for her.
Her eyes rolled (shifted, turned, slid?) toward the room at large, left alone once the party-goers had seen fit to be elsewhere. Her brother was readying his chariot, her myriad cousins from that wickedly pompous Mount Olympus strategizing their various pieces along the game board called Troy. She'd be there soon enough, but for now she wanted to wallow in the chaos she'd created. She was oh so very good at creating chaos.
One lion's paw tossed her little golden apple to a fish's fin, then back to what was now the cloven hoof of a goat. Then the other one turned into fog and she lost her grip on her plaything, sending it spinning through the room and onto the floor where it came to rest at the rooted foot of Uke Mochi.
Uke Mochi knew what it was like to fall apart and come together. She knew the gathering of oneself and the release of collapse.
Watching the ever changing woman before her, Uke knelt to the ground and stretched out the buds of rice that created her fingers until they knit around the apple and held on tight. “Your apple?” She offered as she stood up straight, the leaves of her body settling to keep her form similar to what her human body once was..
Eris sat up, rolled up, moved up on the table and blinked at her sudden and uninvited visitor. Her hair vibrated in the air around her before falling flat and taking the semblance of true human hair, though the very tips still writhed like the snakes on Medusa's head.
"Who gave you an invitation?" she warbled, the sound eking out of her mouth a cross between a bow string being pulled taut and released, her words arrows taking flight, and a bubbling stream that was soothing and calm. Regardless, she took the proffered fruit, wrapping a tentacle around the golden bauble and collecting it to herself as she regarded the interloper. "You're not from around here, are you?"
“No, certainly not,” Uke replied as she turned her head to take in the sight of the room. The wheat that served as her hair ruffled, creating the rustle of a soft breeze through field. “And I was not invited either. I've only just arrived and do not know how I came to be.”
She looked back at the creature who had moving hair and tilted her head to study. “You are not from my home either. Is this yours?”
"My what?" Eris tossed the apple in the air, catching it easily as she fully stood on the table and flowed down over it, her dress acting almost like rushing rapids. It remained so until she was standing next to the woman made of wheat, circling her in the same manner as a shark. Her eyes had bled black, her hair turning to flame atop her head as she surveyed the woman. "My place, my room, my party? No, except yes," she replied. "To each of those. I was not invited. Can you believe?! They invited everyone, even my brother, over me."
Her face turned sly, and she kicked a chair with a quick foot, one that suddenly looked very human. It slid along the floor, broken pottery and plates cracking further in a crash of sound, and the hurtling object stopped only when it struck a wall. "But you know what? I think, I know Zeus did it on purpose."
“Zeus,” Uke said simply, the grains of rice that made her lips moved to make a frown. “A man, yes? I'm certain he did it on purpose. Men...they have a way about them. One that seems to take control, to defend their behavior, as if they can do as they please. They do not understand the repercussions.” She stepped away from the woman, parting from the circling behavior and looked at the mess of the room. “Did you do all of this? For not being invited?”
Eris shrugged, the movement becoming more of a wiggle before reverberating down throughout her whole body. Again she reached out with a foot, toying with a piece of broken pottery.
"Not all of it," she finally conceded, sounding a little upset at the prospect. She was certainly capable of as much damage, if not even more.
"I just sent my little apple in," she explained, holding up the other hand. She'd mostly settled into a more human form, mirroring the wheat woman. "And my cousins did the rest. They had a contest about who would get it, as though it could ever belong to anyone other than me." She laughed, rolling her eyes. "They had a mortal decide. Have you ever heard of anything so foolish?"
“Ridiculous,” Uke murmured with a small shake of her head. But she turned her gaze to the woman and looked her over. “What is your name? This isn't my world, I do not know the players in it.” She lifted a hand and touched her rice-laden chest. “I am Uke Mochi.”
"Oh," Eris replied, curling her apple to her chest, eyeing the woman anew. "Eris. AIR-ESS, can you say that? Do you...are those...lips?" The hand holding the apple extended anew, eyes narrowing in inspection as she took her visitor in with renewed interest. "What are you?"
Uke’s lips formed a straight line. “I was once human. Whole. But my life was ended and I came together again like this. He, the one who killed me, doesn't know I am in this form. I would rather he remain oblivious. But now I am this, grains and grass, and brought together as I please or apart.”
For emphasis, she collapsed; Eris hopped back, her skirts rising and falling in a far more dramatic fashion than was necessary. A scattering of rice, seeds, and grain spread out upon the floor. Nothing more now, certainly not human, but slowly the pieces quivered and jumped. Slowly they came together and returned to appearing as the figure from before. “And that's all I am now, Eris.”
"Well," the goddess replied, crossing her arms over her chest, "for a bundle of little more than grain, that's quite impressive. You were a human before? How did you remake yourself into..." Eris gestured vaguely, starting at the woman's feet and motioning to the delicately featured face that did not look like any she'd seen before. "This?"
“A goddess in human form. A woman who tended fires and made meals. The moon asked for dinner, I offered it, and he killed me in return. I suppose the grains reclaimed me as their own when I died.” She gave a shrug and the wheat rustled. “I would hide my face otherwise. I would rather not suffer death again, would you? Would you rather be any form than nothing?” She looked at Eris, her grain face oddly displaying interest.
Again, Eris shrugged. "I have been nothing, and something, little and big. They're all interesting, in their own way. Besides, there is no thing such as nothing; nothing is unmade, everything is remade, all is restructured." Her hand passed in front of her face, and she turned away from the grain woman to step over another chair, then a shattered table, seemingly heading for a window before changing her mind mid-way and turning back.
"Who are you, again?"
“Uke Mochi,” the plant woman repeated. “And who are you other than Eris? Party guest? Owner of apples?” She reached a finger up to tap at her millet-made chin. “Where have all of your family gone? You mentioned them, your cousin, your brother, this Zeus. Why have they left you?” Now she was the one circling but not so close as Eris had done to her. No, Uke Mochi slowly moved around the outer edge of the room, her footsteps sounding like crushed grain.
"They didn't leave me," Eris shot back, the sound from her mouth a raging fire. She crossed a wing and a reptilian claw over a chest made of sand. Falling to the floor, she swept back up again in her humanesque form.
"They're just...not here," she continued, shrugging and then dancing a little across two, three steps as she approached Uke Mochi. "Where are you from, o lady of the grain?"
“A house by the sea, but the sea is also a part of me. The animals that graze, the birds in the sky, they come from me. So I am them and they are me. I am from everywhere. Unless this place of yours doesn’t have such creatures.” She looked around once more. “I know for certain this is not my home. I am not certain how I came to be here at your party.” She frowned, considering the oddity of the situation.
Now this woman had Eris's attention. She moved around her, circling not unlike a hawk, yet stomping in place as she tried to understand her anew.
"Neither do I," she admitted, though it sounded less and less like she cared. "But tell me more about this place you come from. It sounds as if you carry it with you. That you are this place, one and the same; different, and yet not." She continued in slow, lazy concentric circles that spiraled out and away from her 'guest.' Somehow, her feet always managed to miss a broken piece of plate or a chair leg, though all of it was swept up under the train of her dress.
“My life consists of before and after. Before I was a woman, whole and solid. But I could make the creatures that we feast on. I would let them free from my lips and thereby give food to the mortals. But then I was murdered and so I became after when the grains which we can eat, the organisms that do not move freely, spouted from my body and made me what I am now.” She came to the edge of the table and touched it with the tip of her finger. Seeds of grass rolled off of her finger tip, bouncing along the table edge until they lay flat.
“But my home was a place like any other. A shelter with a hearth, with a table like this. It was nothing new, nothing unique. The moon disagreed though. He disliked my practices of producing food. It disgusted him, the judgmental sod, and he took my home away, he put an end to my before.”
Eris's brows drew together, two caterpillars that broke free from their moorings and began to move about her face at large. The rest of her expression followed, her eyes rolling up and down, her mouth turning sideways as her whole body seemed to suddenly explode and pull back into itself. "How rude," she commented, dryly affronted. "Did you have no recourse against his actions? No one to turn to?"
“What could I do? I was dead and the grains took hold of my body. I lay there, festering with growth, feeling my body come apart and I had no control over it. I couldn’t move it, couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t until I was fully decayed and accepted by greenery that I was able to move.”
She reached up and gathered her rice and wheat hair, brushing her fingers through it. “Already the moon had returned to the sky and the sun had parted with it. She was my friend and she was mad at what her brother had done. But she’s up in the sky now, too far away from grain. She visits me by day, showering me with her warm, but at night I collapse to hide from the moon.”
Eris nodded slowly, drifting to and fro as she suddenly pulled her legs up under her to sit in midair. She settled her chin into her hand. "That was all your friend could do? Turn her back on her brother, as though this was a fitting punishment for his crime?"
“They’re never to see each other again, to my understanding,” Uke replied, twisting her body to turn and push herself up onto the table so that her feet tangled off. With each kick of her feet, bits of millet dropped to the floor. “So they are never in the sky at the same time. An eternity apart after being together for so long…” She gave a shrug. “The punishment could have been much better but what can I do?”
"Strike back, of course," Eris replied, as though this were a perfectly viable solution. She stared at Uke Mochi, surprised the goddess had not thought of it herself. "I would never allow someone to do something like that to me, and I would certainly make them pay. Blood for blood, pound for pound, I would draw out what I was owed. This moon, he has a form," she continued, spiralling down to the ground and unfurling herself to her human self. "If you could die, could not he?"
“I assume he could, but you’re missing the key point,” Uke said carefully as she looked at Eris in her human form. “I am earthbound now and he is of the sky. I can’t stretch myself high enough to grasp hold of him and pull him down. I would if I could, I would reach up and strike him down from the sky. I would fill his throat and lungs with seed until he choked. But alas, I am here and he is there."
"There is so much grain in the world!" Eris replied, her hands rising to great heights, her form enlarging as though to mimic her words. "Can you not control all of it? Can you not make yourself huge and take your revenge?!"
Uke remained motionless for a moment, slowly tilting her head to the side for the next, then hummed. “I haven’t tried to gather that much grain. Perhaps if I found a field of wheat and rice I could gather it all around me and extend myself.”
Eris threw her arms into the air in celebration, her grin so wide it seemed to hang from each of her palms.
"Yes! If you cannot make him come to you, go to him! Surely there is more than enough to bridge the gap, or..." Her arms came down, one finger pressed to her overly large lips. "Or, what if someone were to invite him to another meal? Not you, of course, but someone to lure him close enough? It is a thought.
"But you see," she continued, "there is more to do than hide." She nearly sneered at the word, dropping it to the floor like a used tissue. "There is nothing wrong, of course, with living to fight another day," she added, waving her hand dismissively before any complaints could be voiced. "But there is a moment where you must take advantage, and attack."
Uke smiled. “You’re right, you’re certainly right.” She pushed herself off the table and when her feet hit the ground, a few strands of wheat fell to the floor. She began to approach the goddess, her hair stirring around her with the movement of air and a smile on her lips. “So tell me, Eris. You grow and shrink, you change form quicker than a thought. You move swiftly and with power. Give me your instruction, how may I grow, how may I reach the stars?”
"Come closer, and I will tell you," Eris replied, crooking a finger that turned into a claw with the same speed as Uke Mochi described. The two goddesses conferred, one doing what she could to instruct the other in things she herself could not describe.