TITLE: Mysterious Happenings
E-MAIL: eli @ popullus.net
RATING: PG-13
POSTED: Aug. 28, 2004
SUMMARY: Different day, slightly different dren.
NOTES: On one particular week, sometime in the past, the Farscape Friday challenge was to write a snippet in the style of a famous author. This? This is a poor attempt at Good Omens authors Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. My abject apologies to the both of them. And my (somewhat dubious) thanks to Apathy for the sanity check. Call it sometime mid-S3 with Moya!John.
DISCLAIMER: Read
The man standing in the middle of the bright orange room looked and smelled like a human, and was very important to several people, extremely important to a few, and nearly vital to perhaps two, including himself. Some of them even wanted him alive.
The man standing beside him, whose ancestors appeared to have mated with an octopus at some point along the line and come out on the poorer end of the deal, was really only of interest to a select group. No one had ever had the gumption to say that to his face.
The physical distance between the two at that moment was precisely that of nine and nine-sixteenths inches. That number, on the whole, was meaningless. [1]
"Can you move, John?"
"Nope, not even the pinky finger, D. But..." The standard-sized tongue of the human-smelling one flicked out, licked his lips, and then waggled around a bit. "...the mouth seems to work just fine, so there's a bright spot."
"I don't need my mouth to work!"
"Hey, better than it not working, isn't it?"
A rather longer tongue shot out from the mouth of the other. It hit nothing but air, which apparently wasn't the desired outcome as the tentacle-headed man snarled.
"What the frell did you do, John?"
"Now why does it have to be my fault?"
"There's you, and then there's me. With those options..."
Once that growl died out, they stood for a while longer. As they were silent, possibly sulking, it was not entirely clear what was going through either head. Every so often a grunt would come from one or the other, although never so regularly as to imply that there was any sort of combined effort involved.
"Ooh. I think I twitched a toe."
"Are you sure?"
"A little hard to see when I can't look at a damn thing except your ugly ass -- and the lack of x-ray vision is now very comforting -- soooo, no."
Given the look in the eyes of the Luxan [2], if movement were possible, it would be safe to assume that the human would have been limping home. As it was, the emotion that look vented was the source of the one abrupt movement that had occurred in that room in the past hour -- the Luxan rocked forward off the center axis.
"Hey! How'd you do that?"
A low rumble of frustration emerged from between gritted teeth as the larger man rocked back, his toes lifting from the floor.
"Whoa, there. Try forward again, big guy, don't want you--"
With a surprised howl that would normally be accompanied by flailing arms, the Luxan toppled.
In the end, after much cursing and muttering, they both walked out of the room, each with their own newly-acquired array of colorful bruises and without the food they'd been sent after.
[1] The exception, of course, being if it were to be measured by someone standing in the acoustical center of the Dome of Barlena. If someone were to stand there at this point in time, however, it is highly unlikely that they would care much about measuring, being rather more busy trying to keep the dome from falling in on their heads.
[2] Yes, he's a Luxan. And, no, it's not entirely clear who came up with that name.
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