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

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

"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

"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