Entry tags:

bastet, eris

411 on the DL
Who: Max & BB
What: Max woke up with a terrifying surprise and immediately calls BB for help.
Where: Max’s Apartment, 204
When: Monday, May 29, 2017



Max had woken up exhausted, which was weird because she’d actually gone to sleep early the night before. She’d been unusually tired and had flopped into bed around 9pm, only to wake up just as tired as before.

Cali was curled up on the bed next to her, purring and watching her. Max smiled at her, but noticed right away that something felt strange in her mouth. Her hand immediately came up to investigate, only to find…

A sense of dread immediately bottomed out her stomach and she flung the sheets aside, racing to the bathroom and flicking on the light. What greeted her was...fangs. Her shocked expression only made them even more visible and panic set it. “No no no no no no…” she muttered, climbing up onto the sink to get closer to the mirror to inspect her new teeth. She tried pulling on them, tapping them to see if they were real, but they were as real as her old teeth. Solid and firmly stuck into her jaw.

Her incisors seemed to have shrunk, and her top and bottom cuspids had lengthened into fangs. Further inspection revealed that her molars had also changed, fusing into larger, longer teeth that were completely strange and terrifying to her. One thing she did notice though was, despite the change, they felt comfortable in her mouth, not strange or too big or painful.

Still, the panic didn’t subside, but the reality of this is a thing that is happening right now and it isn’t going away started to settle terrifyingly over her. She fumbled down from the bathroom counter and ran into her room, grabbing her cellphone off her desk and typed out a frantic text to the first person she thought of.

---

BB showed up her promised few minutes later, her skin tender and raw from doing her best to quickly remove the charcoal mask.

"Last time I try one of those spur of the moment," she muttered, as she lifted her knuckles to rap on Max's door. She had no clue what the other woman's emergency was, and secretly hoped it would have nothing to do with the rest of the apartment complex; of course, there was no way of knowing. Alice coughing up seeds, the weird dreams, floor changes, the unsuccessful outing to CASKET... She needed another problem like she needed a hole in her head.

Max was already waiting on the other side of the door and she yanked it open right away, eyes wide with fear and bobbing nervously from one foot to the other like she'd already has too much caffeine. Her mouth was clamped shut so tight her lips were pursed. She stuck her head out the door, looking side to side before yanking BB inside and shutting it behind her. BB yelped, surprised by the sudden grab.

Now was the hard part. Max's heart was pounding with anticipation and she found herself hesitating, her tongue unable to stop poking at the new landscape inside her mouth.

Finally she forced her jaw to relax and opened her mouth, pulling her lips back in a wince so she could see. “I woke up like this,” she explained, her voice a little less confident than usual. BB's eyes went wide, immediately focusing on Max's mouth, and not how like she used to -- this time around, there were fangs, honest to God fangs inside the other woman's mouth. She glanced from Max's mouth to the other woman's gaze, clearly weighing whether or not the other woman was attempting to play a joke on her. It was obvious that she was not.

"What..." BB's hands rose of their own accord, setting themselves around Max's jaw, a thumb moving over the woman's bottom lip without permission as she tested them for herself.

"OK, so wait," she said, pulling her curious grasp back. "You just woke up like this? Because this ain't no Beyonce song, Max, this is....that is weird."

“I know,” Max whined, a look of desperation in her eyes. “What do I do? How did this happen? I can’t work like this! Ohh god, I have a class tonight…” her eyes widened in shock, thinking about having to stand in front of a room full of people who were all looking at her and give instruction. With her mouth, which was currently full of fangs.

"You could...wear a mouthguard? Constantly?" BB winced at the ridiculous suggestion, but she felt incredibly taken aback at all the questions Max was slinging at her. If she were more self-aware, she might have mused over the idea so this is what people feel like, being on the receiving end, but such things were beyond her. Instead, she hopped from foot to foot, Max's anxiety feeding into hers.

"So, what, like, what did you do last? What... Did you eat something, or like.... I don't even know." She moved forward again, her hands moving as though they were going to grab Max's face and hold it still for a closer look, but BB retained some semblance of societal niceties and forced her arms back by her sides.

“I don’t know, I don’t know…” she groaned, her hand coming up to feel one of the long fangs again as if hoping they wouldn’t still be there. “I had...this morning I didn’t eat yet...last night I had pizza…” she paused, going through the past few days in her head. “Mac and cheese...Lucky Charms...takeout souvlaki...grilled cheese and tomato soup...corn pops…” she paused again. “Thursday I think I had nachos for dinner that night, with lots of guac and hot sauce. I remember that ‘cause I went out to eat after I went to that spa thing. I had berries and yogurt for breakfast.”

BB's eyes immediately widened as Max casually mentioned the spa. Without thinking (as she so often did), she jumped forward and grabbed Max's hands.

"Hold up, you went to the spa thing? Did you... Tell me what happened. Exactly what happened." Her gaze met Max's evenly, pumping in a level of intensity that the situation may or may not have called for.

Max’s eyes widened in alarm, but she didn’t pull her hands back. “I dunno, spa things,” she said. “I had a mani-pedi,” she said, lifting her hands a little in BB’s to show off her short shiny black nails, “and a facial...they gave me tea,” she offered with a shrug, as if that might be significant. “And champagne...but that was in the hot tub. Then there was the hot stone and deep tissue massage...it was so relaxing I actually fell asleep while they were working on me. But I felt fine after I woke up…great. This just happened this morning, but that was like...four days ago.”

"You fell asleep?" BB quietly screeched, as though Max had committed a deep transgression that was utterly unforgivable. She threw down the other woman's hands, throwing her own into the air, turning around in a mad dash that looked like she was about to leave the apartment. Well before she got to the door, however, she stopped, spinning about again. "Oh my god, oh my god, why can't people see this weird shit coming from a mile away?? Oh my god, Max, and now Alice is spitting up seeds and you've got fangs and that weird trash person from the first floor is missing and when do I get to spray paint on the fucking building I told you so???" Her words crashed out of her throat into the apartment space in a low but quick fervor, tripping over themselves as BB convulsed, her gesticulation as wild as the rhetorical questions spilling out.

Max, completely forgetting to cover her teeth when she spoke, couldn’t help herself. “Alice is spitting up seeds?” she asked. “That’s...weird…is she okay??” She tried not to think too much about what she’d said about Brent. She was still worried about the guy, but she had no information about him beyond ‘that weird guy who helped me that one time with my cat’.

“Okay so...what do you think it means? All of this weird stuff?” she asked BB, gesturing to her teeth. Clearly she had ideas about what was going on, but she wanted something a little more useful than all her X-Files ‘trust no one’ shit.

BB's shoulders rose and fell, but the fact that she was there and not in Alice's apartment spoke volumes about her friend's condition.

"She's getting there. And I don't fucking know what any of this means. All I'm saying is you both, and Brent, went to the spa and now weird shit is happening." She nearly hopped in place, unable to remain still. Her eyes narrowed as she pulled her gaze away from some distant object and looked at Max. "Are you...having dreams?"

Max shook her head automatically, but then paused, thought about it. “Well, a few days ago I dreamed I was running a marathon with the cast of Big Bang Theory, and Rainbow Dash was the judge…” she said with what must have looked like a terrifying grin. “Before that I dreamed that I was helping the crew of the Starship Enterprise rescue the Queen of England from Terminators….” she added. “But...hmm, a few weeks ago I dreamed that I was playing with Cali, here in my apartment, but that I was also a cat...that was a fun dream. She kept calling me her ‘queen’ or something.” Even as she said that Cali hopped up on the couch nearby, bumping her forehead against Max’s leg.

BB latched onto the last description immediately, stepping forward once more into Max's personal space. "Seriously? What... Is that all that happened? And a few weeks ago... You mean during the floor change?"

“A few days after they changed back,” she said, stumbling back a few steps. “It was just a silly dream about playing with my cat,” she said, though details of that dream were starting to come back a little. Cali had called her ‘mistress’ and ‘Queen Bast’. It had occurred to her after waking to look up the name, but she never did. Cali had also told her she’d changed several times in her sleep, but seeing as how it was in a dream and her cat was telling her this, she had reason to doubt the truth of it. She shook her head.

“I bet lots of people dream about playing with their pets…” she said, though the fangs rubbing against her lips said different to her.

"OK, yeah, true, maybe, I mean, Rafe's never told me that he dreamt about his fish," BB shot back, annoyed. She took a deep breath, calming herself. "You haven't, like, dreamt with someone else? Not, like, of someone...but...like thought you were someone else." She almost added something else, but then a small voice in the back of her head went ugh in offense and, for the first time in a long time, BB curbed her tongue in the presence of a stranger. She shook her head, either trying to clear out that voice or put her words in a better, more explanatory order.

"Like, nothing weird--except this--has happened to you, here? Anything?"

Max shook her head, frowning. “No...nothing like that anyway,” she said, her eyes falling to Cali on the couch, purring and looking up at them both, almost expectantly. “She called me ‘Bast’,” she added, pointing at Cali, and then looking up at BB again. “In the dream, I mean. She said I ‘changed’ a few times before, but always in my sleep, and I don’t remember those times,” she added unhelpfully. Cali kept watching them, not doing anything useful like opening her mouth to corroborate her story. “I can’t believe this...I’m taking dream advice from my cat…”

She looked up at BB then, a question on her features. “Did you? Have dreams like that?” she asked curiously.

Here, BB grew uncharacteristically sheepish. She paused, then nodded. "Yeah. Not, like, with pets or anything, just... Things. Where I'm not me." She turned the word 'Bast' over and over in her head; it didn't sound anything like Uke Mochi, or Eris, or Ares. She knew the latter two were Greek, and Alice had deduced that her seeming counterpart was Japanese. Bast sounded guttural, old.

"What about, like, the gifts? In April? What'd you get?"

“Some kind of cream,” she said with a shrug. “I haven’t used it yet, it’s in a little unmarked pot...looks like an ointment or something. I shoved it in the medicine cabinet and forgot about it, actually.” She was starting to relax a little, her self-consciousness ebbing now that her secret was out. She wandered towards the bathroom and pulled the little jar out of the cabinet, bringing it over to BB to inspect. “So...you had strange dreams...what are they like? What happens in them?”

BB made a face about hanging on to anything without a label, but she took the container all the same. She shrugged at Max's other question.

"They're just... It's weird dreams. And we've shared them, me and a couple other people in the complex. Daniel, and Alice. One where we were here, in this closet thing in the lobby, and then in other places. Old places, that feel like..." memories? She wasn't sure she wanted to say such a thing out loud. Unscrewing the cap from Max's April Fool's Day gift, she swept her finger along a little of the inside, lifting a small bit to her nose.

"Well, it doesn't smell like it's gone bad..."

Max’s eyebrows rose at the idea of shared dreams, with other people in the building. “That’s...weird…” she said carefully. She watched BB swipe a bit of the cream like she had when it first appeared in front of her apartment door. “It doesn’t smell like anything I recognize,” she commented. “It could be face cream, hand cream...butt cream?” she asked with a little smirk, a little of her old sense of humour returning. “I’m a little nervous to try it out for anything, but...is there such thing as a cream that’s bad for you?” she asked. Then she grinned, showing off the fangs a little better.

“Maybe it doesn’t do anything at all...it was an April Fools Day gift, after all…”

BB's eyes flicked to the fangs and back down to the cream. It was weird for her to get a benign gift; she'd gotten that weird DVD, Daniel had gotten the cop's badge, and now this?

"I guess there's only one way to find out," she replied, and rubbed a little more onto the back of her hand. It didn't do anything, not immediately; there were no adverse effects, and her skin didn't change color. She shrugged, capping the jar and returning it to Max. "Those, though," she said, pointing and wincing a little at Max's teeth. "Maybe time to see a dentist?"

Max had been watching with rapt attention to see if the cream did anything to BB’s skin, but slight disappointment followed when nothing seemed to happen. She frowned at BB’s observation. “What am I gonna tell them? ‘I just woke up with vampire teeth, can you put them back to normal’? I’m sure they see that all the time. They’d think I was high or something, wouldn’t they? And these,” she tugged hard on the fangs, “are not coming out on their own. And look...it’s not just fangs, all of my teeth are different,” she said, pulling back her lips on one side so that BB could see that the shape of her back teeth had changed as well, fusing into a few large and very sharp teeth with points that fit perfectly into each other, like shears.

BB rose up on her tip toes, looking deep into Max's mouth. She shrugged, even as her eyes widened at the sight of all of Max's teeth having been transformed.

"I mean, who cares? Do you wanna be stuck like that?" Mental images of Max going down on a guy made BB shiver, and she forced the picture out of her head. "It's not like they're gonna deny you service or something, Maxie, dentists aren't a no shirt no shoes no service kinda franchise. No human teeth, no service?" At least Alice's issue had been temporary at best; she couldn't even imagine if her arm had stayed a giant crab claw like it had during the floor change.

"You know, maybe it'll go back... I mean...." She glanced around conspiratorially, though there was no one else present in the room than the two of them. Her eyes came back to Max's face; she lifted one of her arms, her left hand going to her right bicep. "During the floor change, my arm... It like, changed, OK? I swear I was not high. Alice was there too, she saw it." She squeezed her fist, glancing back down at her appendage as though to reassure herself she was still whole. "It's kinda what I dream, too. Not exactly, but... yeah."

Max started to pull her lip between her teeth in nervousness, but then remembered what a bad idea that was now and stopped. “But...if...uggh, would you do it? Go to the dentist?” She wanted answers, but she also didn’t want to have people staring at her like a freak. Which, it seemed, would be happening to her all the time now if they were permanent. Which she now had hope they might not be.

“Go back?” she asked hopefully, her eyes lighting up. “What…” she looked down at BB’s perfectly normal arm, “what did it...change into?” she asked, not exactly sure she wanted to know.

"Um, yeah," BB answered to Max's first question. "I'd go and I'd be like fix this because I can't function like a normal person. Well. I mean. Mostly. If anything, it might give me an edge over some of my competition, but, I mean, in this day and age, people are doing a lot weirder things to their bodies." Some transformed completely, altering their skin to look like scales, changing their teeth like Max had, even adding implants and removing pieces. The more she thought about it, Max's un-asked for alteration was less surprising than it could have been, though it was still more than BB would have asked for.

"And, uh, a couple of things. A tentacle and a crab claw. I guess it was having a Red Lobster kind of day," she added, looking at her arm again.

Max’s nose scrunched up at the idea of a tentacle or claw arm. “Suddenly the teeth don’t seem all that bad,” she said, “but then, yours went away...how long did it take for it to change back?” she asked, trying to tamp down the hope flaring in her stomach. She didn’t want to get too excited, in case this was a forever-type thing. She couldn’t help herself from lifting one hand up to touch one of her fangs, rubbing her thumb against the point as she thought. She both wanted to go to the dentist and didn’t, not wanting to have to deal with uncomfortable questions like ‘how did this happen’ and ‘are you a vampire?’. But they’d be able to tell her about them, she was sure. Maybe it was an actual medical condition that she’d never heard of, and the dentist would look at her and say ‘ohh, that? That happens all the time.’

BB shrugged. "A few hours? I was on that floor, the Asian one, and ate some of the stuff laying around on the ground. And then my arm, uh, attacked me." It was a less than happy memory, and the recurring dreams that accompanied the change were equally weird. The last one had something to do with Dali....

"But it's your call. I mean, you're definitely gonna scare some people, and attract a certain kind of guy. Life's about living, though, right?" She threw her hands into the air, then crossed them over her chest, then let them drop to her sides. "I should probably go, but let me know what you decide to do, OK? Just, like, keeping tabs on everything." She definitely needed to update Daniel, Kal, and Alice on this latest development.

Max’s eyes had widened in shock at BB’s story, a sudden mental image of her new teeth suddenly biting her arm or something coming to mind. “A certain kind of guy?” she echoed with a dubious grin, “I’m not sure I want to know,” she said playfully.

She groaned in frustration. “Uhh, I have to lead a class tonight with these,” she said, indicating her fangs with both hands. “Maybe I’ll just get Daniel to talk and I’ll do the actions? He can put his leg up and I’ll give him a megaphone or something,” she said with a chuckle, showing off the fangs again.

BB's grin cut wide across her face. "You know, I think he'd love that. If you do, I think I might drop by just to videotape the whole thing." With that, she waved, her grin shrinking as she turned toward the door and showed herself out the way she'd come in. Then she immediately went to Daniel's door and pounded on it, demanding to be let in.