I'll stop wearing black when they make a darker color

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Ven laughed.

He had an honest laugh, one that he rarely tried to suppress or quiet. It rolled deep from his stomach and made his shoulders shake with the movement of it.

"okay," he said. "I'm going to hold you to that. I want to see Thievenne the Wolf next to Kiss my Ass, universe."

Ven's phone went off and he picked it up to turn off the alarm notification. He reached into his coat pocket, popped the lid off a pill bottle, and washed his medication down with a dose of coffee just as the sun started to dip beneath the horizon. Ven watched it with joy while he listened to the other boy's story.

"So you weren't always like you are now?" Ven asked. He considered this and then said, "Is that better? Worse? Or just different. Because honestly clawing someone's face sounds like a pretty bad ass way to get here. "

Ven frowned, shrugged, and smiled again.

"I guess I don't care so much about the way I got here since it at least sent me here and now, for the first time, I've got a chance of fixing this," he said. He frowned again and gave him a very serious look and asked, "How did you not burst out laughing everytime you talked to someone named Bertha? I mean, I just said I don't like when people make fun of other people's names but...Bertha?"

It sounded acutely to Ven like something a whale would do. Bertha.
 

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Ven was laughing. Tez always thought he was a pretty funny guy, so having someone laugh always reaffirmed this in his head.

"Nah i started life as a normal looking guy. Then when I shifted the first time and scratched that dudes face up, I shifted back when the scouts calmed me down, I looked like this. Wierdo jaguar feet, the white eyes, the teeth, the whole shebang. Although these"

Tez tapped the tattoo on his left arm with a finger

"These aren't tattoos. They're actually my skin. If i get a cut or something, the tattoo appears on the skin when it heals back. They got more prominent each time I shifted. They're kinda as prominent as they're gonna be I suppose. Glamours and I... don't get along. They make me sick. So for the time being, I guess, I'm stuck here. Although getting attacking Ernest Bundabrook still felt pretty good. Thats the kid I scratched up."

Tez broke the moss into two pieces, and began rolling each one into a ball with his fingers, before turning it to obsidian. Tez fiddled with things, compulsively. It used to be rolling another cigarette, but he was trying to quit. One of his friends had got him a fidget spinner last summer, but the whole attitude around them means he never used it.

Were you slipping out of your body and doing ya wolfy spirit running thing when you were young?"

Ven had asked about the people he went to school with, before the island. It had been a long time since Tez had dug into those memories for sure. The narrow realities seemed like a strange dream to him now.

"It wasn't just Bertha." Laughed Tez, before putting on a posh falsetto voice for the next sentence "It was Bertha Higginbottom the third of the Harrogate Higginbottoms. She was kinda the cliquey girl of the school. I think most people had stupid names, myself included. That's when I started going by Tez. My full name is Tezcatlipoca Gann. Which is an awful name."

@ReD
 

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Ven considered this.

All things considered, he'd been pretty luck with his powers. His outside appearance hadn't changed. While it wouldn't be healthy or practical, in theory, Ven could go back home. He always assumed he had.

Talking with Tez made Ven wonder what life would be like if things turned out differently.

He took another sip of his coffee. He was nearing the end of it and thinking he'd have to pick up more before he came home. While he had his own pot, he loved the island coffee. Ven didn't have the convenience of coffee shops in his hometown, and the city life of the island made going out for coffee a bit of a novelty that Ven was enjoying.

"Not sure," Ven admitted. "I thought I was dreaming the first couple of times it happened. Then, when it started to get bad, everyone told me it was just stress, you know? Only it never went away, and it just got worse, and eventually I pieced the details together. It felt nice not to feel totally crazy anymore."

Though, Ven had to admit, sometimes he did feel a little bit crazy. He'd heard of new kid syndrome but he hadn't experienced it particularly. Rather, Ven was dealing with lonliness.

Ven eyed the tattoos. He wanted to touch them, but he hated when people touched him without permission she he restrained himself.

He asked, "Can you change the images on them? Or is this somethnig you can't control?"

As for the names, a smile spread across Ven's face.

"Tezcatlipoca," he said, messing it up at least twice before Ven felt like he was pronouncing it close to how Tez did. "I mean, at least it makes sense. My mom could have gone with just Steven, but noooo. It had to be Thievenne."

He made a face and said, "My dad used to tell me it's because my mom bit through her tongue when giving birth to me and that's what the nurse heard and wrote down on the certificate. I'd like to think he's joking but I'm not too sure."

Ven saw the scar on his mother's tongue.

"Does your mom know about what you are?" he asked.
 

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"I kinda got thrown in at the deep end, huh. But i suppose it's good that you're not crazy huh. I never had that. People tended to... react to how I looked"

Then Ven asked about Tez's tattoos. Tez kinda liked them. He had always wondered if they would eventually settle. The first time the tattoos had changed when he was 13 had kinda freaked him out. If the one on his right shoulder settled and didn't change for about ten years, he planned to have the strange grinning face tattoo'd over and replaced with a skull.

"A few of them have changed over the years, but I have no control over them. This one" said Tez, pointing at an image of a turkey creature on his left forearm "used to be a picture of some reeds, fanning out around an abalone shell. Now it's this wierd turkey, bird, thing. and Thievenne sounds cool. Kinda posh and french. You've got Ven, something unique, instead of Steve. Ven is an artist's or an adventurer's name. Steve is a mechanic."

Tez laughed at this. Names were a strange thing. Since he'd first arrived on the island, first had the visit from his godly parent in the clouds, telling him what to do, he hated his full name. For a while, in his edgy teenage stage, he had planned to change it to something 13 year old Tez had thought was cool: Umbris. In hindsight, Tez had realized how absolutely fucking stupid that would be. He had met vampires named Shadowfang, and werewolves named Nightclaw, and, unequivocally, without a doubt, they were all insufferable idiots. The kind of people who hung around in graveyards and wore capes. Although he had heard capes were making a comeback.

"Well... erm... my mum." said Tez, nervously playing with the moss in his hand, flicking it from stone to plant "That's kinda... a long story. She knows, but this place, and what I am and all that kinda freaks her out. Last time I saw her in person was my high school graduation, and even then it was shortly. She's an archaeologist. She spent years digging up artifacts with gods and demons on them. Then she comes here, and finds out it's all real, and that a God worked his magic on her so she'd give birth to me. I think the thing that really freaked her out was she went to buy a pint of milk while I was at work and she saw a sphinx just like getting groceries. She kinda left after that. I skype her sometimes. I wonder if she'll visit when I graduate from scout academy."

Tez looked kinda dour for this. It saddened him that his mother had such issues with the island, but he supposed it wasn't for everyone. I'd be like a harry potter fan suddenly finding out that Hogwarts was real. The world was far stranger than Tamsin Gann had ever imagined, so she just shut it out. Tez sighed, but brightened up afterwards.

"Hey, if i go into extraction, maybe I can go see her."

@ReD
 

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"I mean, it's possible I am crazy and that you are a very very elaborate hallucination," Ven mused. "But I don't think so. I'm not creative enough to make up someone like you."

Ven was pretty set in where he was and how he anticipated life going. Or so he liked to think, anyway.

He did have to admit, Tez's description of his name made him feel....something.

Warmth wasn't quite the right word. It wasn't embarrassment, either. It was something close to optimism though, some kind of relief at the validation that maybe his name did destine him for more than passing out in classroom hallways and having to spend hours of each day frantically looking for himself.

That was a bit of irony, wasn't it? Ven was usually doing the opposite of soul-searching.

"I guess I can relate to you with the mom one there," Ven admitted, though now that it was his turn, he found himself hesitating at sharing his own mom story. "My dad doesn't know at all though."

That one hurt a little bit more so he ignored it.

He asked, "What's extraction?"
 

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"Dude, if I was a hallucination, you would be truly mental" said Tez, with a laugh "and i'd probably be doing more dancing. And there'd be music. And a pink elephant floating around somewhere. Real yellow submarine type stuff"

This Ven guy is alright, thought Tez, as he absentmindedly picked bits off the obsidian moss, and flicked them away, the fragments of obsidian moss becoming organic again as he did so. He seemed to have both his feet on the ground. It was wierd to find someone slightly chill. A surprising number of people on the island completely lost it at the smallest things, but Ven seemed a realitvely hardy type. Tez felt there was something Ven wasn't telling him, about his parents, but it must be something serious, so Tez decided to not push any further.

"Extraction is... err... i'm not sure how to explain." Said Tez, thinking for a moment. "Right, so when most future students are brought to the island, it's pretty peaceful. Maybe they got seen, or something happened. But when it's not peaceful, like the student is stuck somewhere like a warzone, or somewhere heavilly guarded, it's Extraction's job to get them out. They kinda help the people stuck in the worst situations."

@ReD
 

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Ven considered this and then shook his head in disagreement.

"No, no pink elephant. Not if it's my hallucination," he said. "We would have florescent and rainbow giraffes instead, maybe riding....what are those Victorian-era bicyles called with the one super big wheel and the one super small wheel?"

Ven shook his head and dismissed it. Instead, he threw himself entirely into the idea of extraction.

And he kind of liked it.

He thought it might be the kind of job that he wanted to do. Ven thought he would want to help people one day, but it was kind of hard to think of a future when every part of his present was dictated by his condition.

He nodded and then said, "Okay, but how would that help with your mom?"

He wondered if it would help with his own.
 
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