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ladytrollfishes · 6 years

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Inktober 16th, Gift

Herlyn Frigus | 4 sweeps, 7 years old | Neuja City | 1517 words

Your bum hits the concrete with a jolt and your eyes tear up but you snarl and bite your lip. If you cry now, Elkive’s gonna laugh at you, and Elkive needed two other kids to take your food.

“Give it back!” you yell as you jump to your feet to run after them, but you have to jump back when the olive kid takes a swipe, and all three of them get enveloped in orange psi and just lift up out of your reach. “You jerks! You fucking assholes! Get back here!” You hop up and down, trying to grab Elkive’s foot, but she’s way out of reach.

You can deal with Elkive by herself- she’s slow and all you gotta do is punch her or bite her and she loses focus and drops everything, but now you guess she’s got friends you gotta brawl through now. You spark right back at her, neon orange and teal sparks jumping off your face, but she just laughs at you.

“What kind of yellowblood are you?” she sneers. “You don’t have spark worth half a grub loaf?”

She sticks her tongue out at you, and you gasp furiously at the insult then start climbing the nearest box of crates. Maybe you could jump and catch her.

“Hey.”

A flicker of blue slices through the orange and your lunch drops to the pavement.

“What?” Elkive squawks, and drops. She’s lost focus! You jump off the box and spring, tackling her to the ground and punch her twice in the face before another foot meets your chin and you sprawl backwards onto the pavement again.

You shove yourself up dazed, rubbing your chin. Someone’s wailing and you’re pretty sure it’s Elkive.

“Come on!” one of her goons shouts and they all go running off.

“You got guts, kid,” someone completely new says. The blue psi comes back then, taking your lunch and dropping it back into your lap. You turn to see who’s speaking. It’s an older kid, maybe six sweeps. They’ve got a red symbol on their shirt, a headband that sits over two blue psi eyes, and a casual swagger that makes you want to like them, if you knew what they wanted.

“What do you want?” you say, suspiciously, holding up your lunch. “Saw you nick that from that olive in the square,” the stranger says. “Pretty smooth work. And when you got jumped like that, well-” they shrug. “I don’t think much of bullies.”

“Still don’t know what you want,” you say, and clamber to your feet.

“I wanna make friends,” they say. “I got some people I want you to meet, and they can be your friends too.” “Yeah?” you say. “The sort of friends that can help me?”

“Yeah sure,” the stranger says. “The sort you can help too.”

You consider that for a second. Elkive got friends and she got what she wanted. The older maroon kid helped you and then you got what you wanted.

“Okay,” you say with a nod. “I’m Herlyn.”

“I’m Halkat,” they say. “Nice to meet you.”

---

Herlyn Frigus | 5 sweeps, 10 years old | Neuja City

With your eyes squeezed shut, you can feel it. You can feel the power inside you, inside everyone in the room. You tug it from inside you and hold onto it.

“You feel that power?” Halkat says. You nod. “Imagine wrapping it around the bottle and just. Lift it up.”

You take that power, wrap it around the bottle, but when you lift and you crack an eye open, the empty bottle still sits on the ground. A whining groan escapes your throat. “Uuuuuuuuuuuuuugggggghhhh-”

“Come on, Lyn,” Halkat says. “You’re definitely sparking-”

“-hhhhhhhhghhghghghghhaaaaaa-” you sink to the ground and flop onto your stomach, a piece of gravel on the floor of your secret hideout poking into your cheek.

“Herlyn,” Halkat says. “Herlyn.”

“-aaauuuughhhhhhhhh- ow!”

Something hits your head and you sit up and wince. It’s a half full bottle of soda.

“Shut the hell up!” Ferra yells. “Give it up Lyn, you’re basically flat.”

You make a face at her.

“Like your psi is any better you half cracked Spiderman,” you say. You take her soda and down the whole thing as she colors.

“Gimme back my soda!” Ferra exclaims.

“Shouldn’t have thrown it at me,” you say, standing up. Psi or not, you can definitely still beat Ferra. “Hey hey!” Halkat exclaims. “We’re trying to do something here, and we don’t have time before Alkire and Berthe get back. Ferra, don’t throw things at her. Herlyn stop whining.”

You throw Ferra back her empty bottle and stick out your tongue.

“We’ll keep trying,” Halkat says. “At the very least being a shitty telekinetic means you’re not gonna get picked up to be a ship.”

Elkive stopped being a pain your butt a couple perigees ago, when she disappeared all of a sudden. You’re not sure what really happened, but people were saying that it was one of those program recruiters. It was weird. You’d never liked Elkive, but she was still one of you, and now she was gone. At least you don’t really miss her.

“I still don’t wanna be useless,” you complain. “At least ships do something.”

“Oh shut up,” Ferra says. “You’re so fucking whiny.”

You end up tussling instead of doing more psi practice. Ferra sticks your face to the ground but you manage to lick the packaging of all of her snacks and when Alkire and Berthe get back with more loot, you and Ferra both get kicked out of the hideout for awhile.

At least you still get to eat her snacks.

----

Herlyn Frigus | 6 sweeps, 13 years old | Neuja City

Ferra’s just straight up strong. She hauls you up 90 degrees up a building, and you gotta admit her psi is fucking annoying, but you guess it’s good for something, since neither of you can fly. The wind gusts and pulls off all the heat from your skin and you shiver as you stare down to the city streets, bright below you.

“Ferra. Ferra come on,” you say. “Let me get back down there.” You sound half hearted, even to you, and you kinda hate it.

“Halkat’s dead,” she says harshly. “And at least they picked that, you know, so don’t go raring off on me. The last thing we need is for the imps to decide that you’re also helm material and get culled when they figure out you’re not.”

“They’d believe it long enough for me to kill a couple of em,” you grumble. You’re pretty good with a knife, even without psi. Ferra stops to stare at you.

“You’re insane,” they say flatly. “That’s your plan? Yeah I don’t feel bad about this at all.”

You gather that familiar, useless power around you until your eyes start sparking that good old orange and blue.

“Hey I look very convincing,” you say. “You look at my face and tell me I don’t look like I’m about to start throwing cars at people.”

Ferra does look at you, and instead of her normal sarcasm, she’s looking at you in surprise.

“Hey,” she says. “Have you ever considered that you might not be telekinetic?”

You roll your eyes.

“What else is new, Ferra,” you say. “I’m barely better than flat-”

“That’s not what I mean,” she says impatiently. “Herlyn, you’re warm all of a sudden. Like we’re high up enough that this is weird. Maybe you just, I don’t know. Do heat stuff?”

You think about it for a moment.

“Weird,” you say. “You really think?”

“I dunno,” she says. “Can you make me warm too?”

You shrug, then wrap that power around Ferra too.

“Oh dude, yup,” she exclaims. “You can make things warm.”

Now that you’re paying attention, you can feel the wind push and pull at that power. The heat. It’s so weird. You’ve had it all your life and you never knew what to call it. All those bottles and boxes you tried to lift, you guess you were just heating them up. What the fuck.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” you exclaim, staring at your hands.

“Keep me warm while I haul your ass out of trouble maybe,” Ferra snaps right back at you and keeps on climbing.

You had barely paid attention to that schoolfeed about thermo-whatevers, but maybe you should go back and look to see what the heck you can do with this. Whoever heard of psi that you need to study to use?

Ferra heaves you to the top of the roof, and sighs, taking a deep breath as she crosses her arms and looks at you.

“This sucks,” she says. “A lot. But don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

You pull a match out of your sylladex. If you could just… shove as much power into the head as possible maybe it’d- you spark and it lights.

The two of you stare at the little flame burning between you.

You grin very, very widely.

#inktober #herlyn drabbles

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