citizendetective: (let's use our powers of anxiety)
[personal profile] citizendetective
Taylor! Four, three, two, one, zero - I assume!

[This coded message from a just-demoted Patient is actually completely innocuous, as far as the ship as a whole goes, but feel free to assume it's a countdown to a bomb or something.]
qingofcats: (Default)
[personal profile] qingofcats
Who: Da Qing and YOU
Where: All around the Clipper, especially the tree and the catwalks
When: throughout the month
Warnings: none atm, will add any if they come up

Da Qing has yo-yoed from Assistant to Patient a good few times already in the time he's been here--he's a very cute kitty, after all, but he's also cynical, snarky, mouthy, and prone to clawing up people who irritate him. Which means he never manages to stay an assistant for very long. Honestly... he's not happy here? But he's not happy at home either, and it's not such a bad life. At least he doesn't have to see Zhang Shi walking around wearing Zhao Yunlan's body like a badly fitting suit, with all the mannerisms and expressions that made Zhao Yunlan himself, and Da Qing's master and best friend, gone or badly parroted. Or go home to Lin Jing living in the apartment that he and Zhao Yunlan had shared for so long, knowing he and his mess and laziness, or Shen laoshi and his neatness and good cooking, will never be there again.

So maybe this is kind of like living in some saccharine children's show half the time, and a rabid free for all some other part of the time, but at least it's away from that. And the food's not bad, even if there's never quite enough fish. The food at home hadn't seemed like anything special without lao Li's dried fish or Shen Laoshi's exquisite cooking anyway.

None of that, of course, means he has to be nice, or well behaved... which is a big part of why he keeps bouncing back to being a Patient every time he 'graduates'. (Graduates, what a joke. He's the ten thousand year old King of Cats, and he's never graduated from anything and never needed to before this.)

He shows up at the morning singalongs just because it's an excuse to sing the song of his people at the top of his lungs and drive everyone, especially the Assistants who take it seriously, up a wall, and no one can say he isn't trying or being 'well behaved', at least at this. He's singing, isn't he?

He naps in various spots (and positions) on the great tree, as well as the catwalks and the garishly colored furniture... and in other peoples' rooms. And on other people if they sit still long enough and he either likes them or wants to irritate them (and knows they won't do something awful to him in retaliation).

He offers running commentary on other peoples' activities, no matter where they are or what they're doing, usually snarky. And loud.

And at meal times he has to (annoyingly. The WORST part of being stuck in this form is NO THUMBS, though otherwise he'd rather this than stuck on two-legs) prevail upon someone else to carry his food to a table... and then more than likely harass them for some of theirs, or simply make the rounds begging, quietly or loudly, from anyone who has something that looks interesting, or looks like they could use some harassment (either because they're an asshole or because they're not and maybe need some company). (Fork he hates that he can't even swear in his head. Or even in cat.)

And speaking of cat, he's also known to occasionally perch on the rails, or a branch of the tree, and caterwaul at the top of his lungs, running through every curse word he knows in every language he knows (which is quite a few, now that he has his memories back. He's been alive for ten thousand years of Chinese history, after all, and even if almost everything between his youth and the present is still blurry and indistinct, because Yashouren minds aren't meant to hold thousands of years of memory, he does remember bits and pieces of a lot of languages) and then yowling about how there's not a single language that the Nurse doesn't censor curse words in. And since he can't curse in any language, he rotates through an assortment of, more or less creative, insults--he's currently partial to 'stupid monkey humper' or telling people they look like the wrong end of a baboon. (And that's just almost as frequent for people he actually likes.)

[For Zhao Yunlan]

The clumsy Taylor person with the butterfly whiskers told him his stupid, thoughtless, self-sacrificing, neglectful, suicidal idiot of a Master is here somewhere, and Da Qing is going to find him. Now. And then he's going to rip his face off. And then he's going to never let him out of his sight again. Which is why he's currently running up the stairs to the catwalks above where she'd said she'd last seen him, yowling at the top of his lungs. "Zhao Yunlan! ZHAO YUNLAN! WHERE ARE YOU YOU MONKEY-FACED PIECE OF STINKY TOFU!" (Tofu is a complete waste of time and energy to fake being food, it's the worst insult he can think of right now, all right?!)
skitter: (Default)
[personal profile] skitter

((All of Taylor's posts this month will be cw: bugs and emetophobia))

The small white room was bad. And Taylor knew she should have kept her head and kept calm, made herself sound reasonable. But almost all the swarm was gone, and so was the link to the twins, and she was disgustingly alone in her own head and the room was so small. And then the Authority had refused to tell her how to reunite with Dad, with Hunter, with Shen ge or anyone at all, and she had said things. Screamed things.

At least the door to her room here is open, can't be closed. But the swarm situation is... worse. The bugs aren't all gone, she can feel some around her, little grounding points of orientation and senses. But there aren't enough, and and the ones she can feel, she can't control. Like limbs half-asleep, wandering around in and out of her painfully contracted range on their own.

Like her first day on the Barge, but so much worse.

She doesn't give herself any time to acclimatize. She has to find people. She staggers out of her room, never quite able to trust where she thinks the floor is or how far away the wall is, but that's not going to stop her.

Week 1

She's a frequent visitor to the Sick Ward at first, for various reasons. The over-the-counter-strength anti-emetics they give her help a little. The stairs up to her Floor 4 cabin don't, though at least the padding means she hasn't broken anything.

Then Norton's request comes through in a sizable explosion of butterflies, and life gets a lot easier for Taylor. She traps a few dozen before they can disperse through the ship, carrying them with her, and plans her day around staying within range of the large majority. During the morning, that's upper decks, sitting in the glassed-in walkways outside the cabins. Later in the day, she can move to the main common room. She sleeps there, sometimes, so long as there's someone familiar present.


((Further weeks to be added))

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