I Embrace My Inner Tarzan [open post]

[summerdude]

There's a massive old oak about fifty yards west of Magnus's favorite clearing. It has thick, sturdy branches; he can climb nearly forty feet up it before he starts to worry about them holding his weight. There's a family of squirrels that lives nearby -- good squirrels, nothing like Ratatosk -- and Magnus likes to listen to them discuss their acorn deposits. Sometimes, when they're not looking, he'll grow and stash more acorns for them to discover; he's not sure how long the winters here get.

He's pretty sure it's cold outside, but it's not cold enough to affect him, and so he's still barefoot and in a t-shirt pretty much all the time.

Today, he's been scrounging in some of the out-buildings. There's a portable outdoor fireplace. While he doesn't feel the cold, he finds (contained) fires comforting, and it'll be nice to have some hot food, so he shoulders it and a makeshift grill surface, and lugs them to the base of his oak tree. Now he'll have an easier way of preparing the fish Mothwing sometimes leaves him than trying to summon the right amount of summer into them so that they cook and don't explode, at least.

He lights a modest fire, feeding it with fallen sticks. Then he shoves an apple, picked from another nearby tree, into his mouth and a book he'd pilfered from the library into the waistband of his pants, and climbs up an easy ten feet to his favorite branch. Things don't seem so bad, living out here.

Comments

[summerdude]

"Whoa," Magnus breathes. "With grass? Who was it? I mean -- what did he look like? Besides handsome."

[thepurpledanger]

"I don't know! He acted like a Taoist priest, except he wore--he was only wearing two layers, and the sleeves were see-through, like he was some kind of prostitute," she says. She doesn't seem to have any negative associations for "prostitute"; it's only another job to her, and she says it just like she'd say he looked like a butcher if he wore a bloody apron.

[summerdude]

Magnus considers this description, and then exclaims, "Shen Yuan can kill zombies with grass??????! He never told me that!"

[thepurpledanger]

"Yeah, that was him! You know him? You should make him show you all his grass powers!"

[summerdude]

"I sure fucking will," Magnus says, emphatically.

[thepurpledanger]

Then, with a mighty push of her thighs, Gu Xiang releases her branch and somersaults gracefully to the forest floor. "I'm going to go eat now," she says. "But next time you and Galahad taste lots of things, you'd better invite me!"

[summerdude]

"Of course I will," Magnus promises. "Good luck with your bad poetry, Gu Xiang! Write something about your next meal!"

[thepurpledanger]

Sticking her tongue out at him, dragging her thumb insultingly across her cheek, Gu Xiang leaps off and toward the mansion again.

Later on, Magnus will find a note stuck under a rock near his fireplace:

Frying black stinky tofu
Smells like pure shit
Tastes like pure heaven
I gobble it up