fandomtownies | The Park; Late Saturday Afternoon.

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adah price

The Park; Late Saturday Afternoon.

It was slightly disturbing her, this sudden sort of restlessness she'd been feeling all day today. It was one of her roaming moods, the kind that had her disappearing into the jungles all day, the kinds that had her disappearing and thinking that lions had eaten her. Hopefully, with the new tide of new people on the island, among them wasn't a witchdoctor that would try to spread vindictive rumors of her death. So she was roaming, slowly, limping her way toward the coffee shop for a small pitstop before heading into the preserve. Left...behind, left...behind, her natural funeral dirge that seemed to be getting faster, or maybe that was all in her head.

It was a nice day, cold and grey but nice, in a way, a stillness in the air in sharp contrast of the excitement from yesterday. The sort of day where you noticed things...or rather, where some people noticed things and Adah was that kind of person. Things like a dark shadow over by the base of a tree, that she didn't think much of until she saw it move, a twitch, a familiar action for her. Her head quirked; she rerouted her course toward the tree in the park with the twitching shadow underneath it. It started to move more the closer she got; finally, approximately a foot away, it let out a sound; she realized that the sharp movements were that of wings. A bird, a black one, a crow, Corvus corax. Quote the raven, nevermore. Adah had barely taken another limp forward before awkwardly, desperately, it had finally pushed itself from the ground in a bendy, twisty flight up toward one of the branches of the tree. It squawked, deep and throaty, down at her, and she stood still, underneath it, peering up toward it as its wing twitched again, its dark, glistening feathers ruffling. Its left wing, opposite of her. She looked up, watching, quietly.

Standing under the tree and staring up into it. For all her restlessness, Adah could probably do this for hours, or until it decided to twitchingly try a different tree. Whichever came first.

[[ intended for a particular meeting, but also definitely opeeeeeen! ]]

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Glitch had slept for hours, letting his synapses recover from the excitement. With a new kind of energy, he set out to explore the island.

They didn't have islands in the O.Z., and he wasn't sure what would be on one other than what he'd already seen.

Slowly, he made his way to where he saw trees. He noted, happily, that there weren't any villages in them, no cages, and no flayer.

Thank Ozma.

There was the princess, though. She had always preferred being outdoors, so he didn't really process the fact that she shouldn't be here.

"Hello DG!" He waved at her, informal and friendly because she'd told him to quit his bowing once and his synapses didn't let him forget it.

The bird had stopped twitching; it had stopped squawking, too, although it did continue to make that deep, annoyed sound in its throat for the girl staring up at it that wouldn't leave it alone. In fact, it seemed to have stopped twitching as much as it could for exactly that reason. Adah smiled, lightly. Stubborn. She liked that; but she wondered if it had any idea that she could be just as stubborn herself.

A slight voice caught her attention, though, dragging her eyes from the bird toward the sound of someone calling. It was a natural response, she imagined, for the human brain to hear a call and then to immediately try to seek out its source, before even realizing what had been said. But then, a moment later, spotting someone waving as she processed the words, she returned her eyes up into the tree. Someone she didn't know, calling to someone else she didn't know. And bird were more interesting that people...most people...anyway.

He frowned. That wasn't exactly the reaction he had been expecting. Usually there was smiling and 'Hello' and hugs.

Her silence worried him, too. "DG? Princess? Are you alright?"

A few synapses were firing off that she might not be DG, but the rest discounted that notion. Of course she was DG. Who else could she be?

The awareness of other things around her was starting to encroach on Adah's attempt to focus her awareness on one singular thing. Her eyes shifted, slightly, away from the bird, down to her right, in the consideration of the fact that the park was still fairly empty. He could be talking to the tree, but Adah doubted it. Her eyes shifted again, toward the man; she imagined herself giving him the same idle, waiting, expectantly bored look she gave almost everyone when first meeting them, but, she had to admit, the look left her as soon as she saw him. There was a zipper. On his head. Adah noticed details; that one was kind of hard to miss. It warranted a little bit of staring, and a quirk of her head.

That would make surgery so much easier. It almost made her wish that was going to be her field of expertise and not virology.

She still didn't say anything! While a good deal of his synapses tried to explain why she was so quiet, the few that were convinced of the Not-DGness of the girl were pounding themselves against the zipper, looking for escape from this madness.

A few, toward the front-left, offered up that maybe she was upset with him for leaving. His face fell as he considered it.

"Are you mad at me?" His voice was small and questioning. While having her be upset with him wasn't the best thing, it was better than the 'Glitch did something stupid and now everyone was banned from speaking to him ever again' option. Far fetched, sure, but the fear of it was there.

Her own mind rather heavily distracted on the notion of zipper being planted in key surgery spots, the stomach, the pancreas, around the whole of the knee, Adah had to pull herself reluctantly away from the wanderings of her mind when the man with the convenient zipper on his head was talking to her again. Adah's head moved before her eyes, as if the eyes were still not finished contemplating the mechanics of it all, and then, finally, they settled on the man's face and she blinked. Her head tilted, forehead frowning slightly. She hadn't brought her notebook with her; it would be too cumbersome to use it at a moment like this, anyway. It was an odd question to as a stranger. And an interesting introspective that her silence would be taken as anger. She'd forgotten that not everyone knew that she was impeccably rude in social situations.

So she simply asked, "Should I be?" and drifted her eyes upwards to see if the bird was still there. He was. Good.

"I, uhm," he considered it.

"I hope not. But, maybe, because I left the O.Z.? Or," Glitch's face blanched, "I might have done something?" He had no idea, really, what he might have done. He tried to remember something that would fit, and the lack of it only seemed appropriate.

His tone was eager, now, for forgiveness. "If I did do something, I forgot it, and I'm very very sorry." He blinked. "I'm sorry for leaving, too, if you're upset about it."

Adah's eyebrow quirked again. She really had...no idea what the person could be talking about. And she saw, really, especially in the eagerness in which this stranger seemed to be for forgiveness for whatever it was, a great opportunity to completely play it up. However, there was also the fact that it seemed almost too easy, no challenge, and there was also the downside of the fact that the flailing hadn't given her enough of who this person apparently thought she was to play it off. Who the hell could she be mistaken for, anyway? Even her twin sister didn't even look that much like her...

"It's okay," she decided to go with, shrugging a shoulder. If anything, she could try and see where this case of mistaken identity might go. Could be very, very interesting.

He sighed with relief. Then there was that small, dry chuckle. "You know, Deege, you had me pretty worried there for a minute." He smiled.

Then, finally, it hit him. The trees weren't any they had in the O.Z.

Right, he was in Fandom.

The synapses in the back finally fired off at him, not that she wasn't DG, because he'd just ignore it again, but leading to that conclusion anyway. Isn't DG back in Finaqua?

Glitch looked at her, quizzical, and tilted his head to the side. "Aren't you supposed to be back in Finaqua?"

Adah had to strain a little more than she'd like to admit against the grin that was trying to surface over the response, and she was starting to formulate a little more of a picture of this person who apparently looked like her. She'd have to stay put, she'd imagine, unless there was a startling coincidence that this Deege person had a limp.

The brief idea the the limp would be backwards of Adah's own crossed her mind and amused her far, far too much; keeping a wry grin back after that was pretty much impossible. And her head tilted slightly as she considered the question. She didn't know where this Zipperhead was from, but she was starting to feel like she liked it. Easy access brain surgery and places with names like Finaqua.

Of course, she had no idea what Finaqua was or why she would be there, so this was a complete stab in the dark.

"I, uh, changed my mind."

And then, cross her head, hope to die, stick a needle in her eye, hoped that it was something her other self would have been able to change her mind about.

She was also wondering if her American Southern accent was going to be a factor there. She hadn't been saying much, so maybe it wasn't noticeable. But she might want to try to reign that in slightly.

Actually, she wouldn't mind reigning it in completely. That accent was half the reason she hated talking.

A few of his synapses went to figure out why she sounded odd.

The rest, however, were caught up in a sudden whirlwind of anxious worry.

Both his eyebrows shot up. "Does the Queen know you came here? Oh, Ozma, what will your father do to me when he finds out you ran into a travel storm after my example!?"

Glitch began wringing his hands and pacing, two steps, back and turn and back again.

"He'll probably drop me from that balloon of his!" He looked at her, nervous, "You know, just because I got my marbles back didn't mean you had to go and lose yours."

He went back to pacing, and a hand went up to cover his face while the other swung at his side. "And what will the court think? First, the Royal Adviser runs off to the Other Side, and then the Princess?" He sighed. This was not good.

Adah was watching the man pace back and forth, muttering, wringing his hands, with eyes particularly wide, eyebrow particularly quirked. This? Was definitely something else. In fact, Adah's own brain was firing its own faulty synapses with all the rambling, finding it difficult to even keep up with half of the things he was saying. She winced, slightly, gave her head a firm shake. Just because the things were odd didn't mean her brain had to go and be all difficult with understanding them. They were all concepts she could handle, it was just the idea of trying to continue the charade with any sort of effort that was catching her up. Her brain was telling her that it should be focusing on things like standing and breathing, not dealing with crazy fairy princess stories, or whatever it was he was talking about.

"I'm sorry," she blinked. "I'm a bit lost."

She figured that would be a better way than just admitting that she'd utterly failed.

He stopped and looked at her.

"DG, what in the whole Outer Zone..." His words trailed off.

The synapses at the back were revolting, gaining followers and tumbling slowly towards the front. They joined the ones that said She sounds odd and DG doesn't act like that and She wouldn't have left Azkadellia in Finaqua alone.

Glitch's face went blank, his mouth left a little open, as all the synapses sparked and fired and popped in realization.

NOT DG!

Most of the details of the conversation he'd just had with the girl were gone, now. He was very still, except for a shake of his head.

He looked at her again, noting the similarities and the differences. The only things he remembered about it now were that the differences were important, and that while she looked so much like the princess, the sense of not was still hanging there.

Glitch blinked and smiled as he came back to himself.

"You look familiar. Have we met before?"

Now that was interesting. Adah, in all her confusion, had resolved to watch the stranger with particular care, and it lead to quite a conclusion. Her chin lifted slightly, her mouth opening to say something, but then closing it again shortly after as she thought about the little quirks and tics and responses and what back those eyes and the zipper with its tightly closed teeth gnashed together across the curve of his skull.

And she smirked, crookedly, and shook her head. "No. No, we haven't. Funny how the mind plays little tricks on you like that, though, isn't it?"

Glitch smiled and nodded in agreement.

"Trust me, Doll," he gave her a wry look, "I know alllll about it."

The synapses, happy now that at least he wasn't making a complete fool of himself, settled back.

One, though, still popped away that he should introduce himself.

He gave the Not!DG girl a very small, informal bow. "I'm Ambrose. You can call me Glitch, though."

There was a nervous chuckle as he straightened. "You know, you look a lot like someone I know."

Adah's smirk grew, mostly fueled by the nervousness in the chuckle, and she gave her head a slight shake. "While I do have a twin sister, I highly doubt anyone could actually mistake the two of us. Or that you'd know her. I'm Adah. And, well, you can call me Adah, though."

She continued to watch him carefully, closely, as she spoke, though. Watching him, it was almost like she could hear his brain working. It could have just been her own, too, at the same time, she couldn't be sure, but she found his mannerisms absolutely fascinating, just as much as she'd originally found the zipper.

"Adah," he said, smiling and trying to commit it to a more permanent memory.

"And no, I don't think DG is your twin. But she does have a sister." He was remembering them, now, as children running and screaming through the halls in the Northern Palace. Pestering and questioning hiding behind their mother's skirt in the middle of Very Important Meetings.

He concentrated on it for a moment. "I think I used to make them toys, when I wasn't working on something else." Glitch couldn't be sure about it, of course, but the memory seemed right.

Idly, Adah found herself unable to help wondering if there might be other similarities between this person that she wasn't and the person that she was, besides, clearly, appearance and sisters. Then, she thought more directly about the man and what he was saying. I think I used to... I don't think.. Her eyes drifted upwards again, but not to the zipper, but past it, really. A faulty memory, little gli-- She rolled her eyes at herself. Well, at least she understood where the name came from now. She bit her lip in thought; too many people around here with brains that made her seriously consider abandoning viruses, herself included.

"You make things, then?" she asked, almost as if to distract herself.

He nodded enthusiastically and smiled.

"Before I was the Queen's adviser, I was an inventor. Well, I was an inventor after that, too, but not as often."

Glitch had mentioned the adviser bit as more a reference point for himself than to look important.

"Now I'm the Applied Inventiontronics teacher here. Though, I don't know really how that happened." He paused. "They were expecting me," was said as if that would explain it.

And, oddly enough, it did. As far as Adah was concerned, being confused for some sort of princess was a bit more significant in her mind than worrying about the semantics behind a school that had her in frequent congress with telepaths and people from the future. Space, no less. "An interesting progression," she commented; she was a little surprised at her conversational disposition at the moment, but she liked to think that she kept talking merely so she could watch him respond, "from inventor to adviser to teacher."

He thought about it for a moment, considering the hows and whys of each transition.

Then he nodded. "A good one, though."

A synapse snapped up the memory of his conversation with Liir the day before about Inventiontronics.

"Are you going to be in my class?" He kind of hoped she would be. There was already one face he would know there, and would be happy to add hers.

"Inventiontronics?" Adah asked, recalling up the name. She remembered seeing it; she remembered being intrigued by it because of the smushing of words, which she highly approved of. She also remembered thinking that she knew nothing about mechanics that didn't involve the mechanics of the human body and therefor it wouldn't be a very successful class for her, she'd imagined. Ruefully, she shook her head. "I'm afraid not. I wouldn't be any good at it."

"Oh, well," his lips quirked in something not quite a smile, "I suppose it isn't for everyone."

The synapses crackled again, trying to think of something else to say.

"If you ever need a clockwork or mechanism fixed, though, I can help you with it."

Yes, helping was good. It was why he was so drawn to becoming an inventor in the first place.

Another synapse reluctantly fired off, reminding him that things on the Other Side were probably not the same as they were in the O.Z.

"At least, I think I'll be able to help you with it. Things here aren't exactly what I'm used to." He gave her an apologetic smile. "But I'll try."

Still watching and remembering and analyzing every little detail, Adah gave a small, slow nod. "I'll remember that," she said. She considered, briefly, turning the favor around, eyes against past that zipper, but she figured she should probably work on fixing her own damages in that area before encroaching on someone else's.

He noticed her eyes, and where on him they were close to looking.

A memory of DG, Your zipper's undone, surfaced. Not this girl, and not this place, but it still shook him to think he might have opened it and forgotten. Then left it like that. His mouth opened and closed as his hands flew up to check.

His eyes were wide as he ran a finger down the zipper, from the bottom stop at his hairline all the way to the back, checking that it was closed.

Tugging the pull tab a little, just to make sure it was done all the way, Glitch sighed with relief to know he wasn't open to the whole world.

"It's fine," Adah found herself assuring him, despite the fact that he already knew it, her crooked grin showing clear amusement. "It's just a little...distracting, that's all."

And, so he didn't feel too bad about it, she added, "There's a kid with an eyepatch, too. I stare at it the same way. I can't help it. I get caught up in thinking about what's underneath."

He looked back at her, remembering suddenly that she was there.

There was another nervous laugh (a synapse noticed that Glitch was doing a lot of that lately, but didn't alert the rest) before he tried to explain.

"I, uh, just thought I might be," he lowered his voice to a whisper, "undone."

Considering, for a moment, the idea of a student with an eyepatch (Didn't the man from the other day say that those pirate people had those? He couldn't exactly recall anymore), he smiled at how easily she admitted to staring.

At least it wasn't pity.

"What's underneath? Well, underneath this zipper is a bunch of misfiring synapses, but I think I'm getting them to calm down again."

He thought about what he'd just said again, and decided to amend the statement. "Well, they may not be calm exactly, but at least they're all there now." It was a happy statement.

Adah maintained her grin. Part of it was because she had been correct on her evaluation of all those pauses and twitches, but most of it was just simply the way he talked about them. She, of course, allowed the possibility that what he meant, considering that he had a zipper on his head where most people certainly did not, was technically different than what she was thinking, but, for the most part, it was close enough. "Wouldn't want them calm," she pointed out. "Because then you'd probably be dead. Or at least partially so. I have that problem a lot, too. Misfiring," she amended, "I mean, although the dead part has been a problem, too."

Slowly, the synapses rattled and considered themselves.

"Well," he decided with a smile, "calmer, maybe."

The were bristling, again, at the word 'dead,' how she applied it to her own synapses, and he looked to her with an empathetic concern.

"Dead part?"

Synapses crashed into each other to keep from leaping to any number of conclusions.

Adah's smile lessened, became more crooked, as if the right side just gave up entirely, but the left was still trying to keep going, even though it shouldn't. She gave a small nod. "It completely shut down. It had to. A parasitic virus had entered my system, and my body wasn't strong enough to fight it unless it gave something up. So it shut down my brain; my body was forced into a vegetative state so that all my energy could go into what was needed to, first, survive, and second, extract the viral infection."

The grin pulled itself to its previous condition. "It was interesting, really."

Glitch was a little surprised at such a scientific explanation. He didn't quite grasp the details of what she'd said, but understood the implication.

"I'm sorry," he offered, then tried to give her some common ground with himself. "A Witch took out half my brain, and I just recently got it back."

He patted the top of his head, his zipper, and said, "Still getting used to it, I suppose." A smile, then, and a dry chuckle, as he considered just how strange brains were, really, when one thought about them.

"Ha!"

The sudden burst of a slightly bitter laugh that overrode Glitch's nervous chuckle surprised even Adah herself, and she blinked, her face turning red at the outburst.

But she wasn't about to feel guilty for it. Still, she moved along quickly. "At least you could get the other half of yours back," she added, by way of explanation, lifting her chin. "My sister ate mine. Unintentionally and metaphorically, of course, but it's still gone for good."

He blinked.

Ate? By her sister, no less. Inside Glitch's be-zippered head, synapses rattled away at the idea.

"Sisters do strange things sometimes."

He was thinking, again, of DG and Azkadellia. Caves and Witches and death and saving each other. Royal magic that linked them together so tightly they were hardly apart from one another as children. Distantly, his synapses were thankful that he didn't have any sisters.

And just think. Adah had three of them.

Presently, though, she drew in a breath, her eyes focused distantly elsewhere. She didn't talk much; sometimes, when she did, it was to say something that left her completely without anything else to say. She was feeling, definitely, like this was one of those moments. It might not have even been Leah. It could have been Orleanna for all she knew, something she had done during the pregnancy. Or, even worse, Nathan. If it was Leah, then she couldn't help it, and Adah couldn't be angry. But she still was, every so often, and she was having one of those moments. She shifted her eyes again, the opposite way, and then they drifted back up to the bird.

Well, the tree. The bird had gone in the length of their conversation, but she was looking back up almost as if it hadn't gone anywhere. As if the conversation, at least that last part, didn't even happen.

Maybe he'd glitch and she could keep on believing that.

He followed her gaze up into the tree, half expecting to see a net or a cage or a painted turkey of a little person. When there wasn't any, he looked back down at her.

Again, the synapses considered her, this DG-but-not girl, and tried to put a note at the forefront of his mind.

You are not in the O.Z. anymore. This girl is not DG. She is Adah. Don't. Confuse. Them. You. Dolt.

Had Glitch confused them? There was some bristling as the synapses assured him that it didn't matter, because even so there wouldn't be a second time of it. If there had been a first time. Was there a first time?

More crackling, and he lost his train of thought. They started over, going down the other path.

He added to the note that she was much quieter than DG, and sounded different when she did speak, and had a twin who had had metaphorically eaten half her brain.

And you're probably bothering her, it added, making him frown.

"I, uhm, think I'll be going now." Dry chuckle, nervous, again, then, "It was very good to talk with you."

Glitch took a step back as he spoke, a prelude to excusing himself from the conversation that had halted so suddenly.

Since there had been no bird, Adah was following the lines and angles of the tree branches, barren in winter with the cold and lesser sunlight, started counting and calculating, numbers, angles... So when Glitch came around to talking again, she gave a nod of acknowledgment, but kept her eyes on the crisscrossing lines above her head.

"See you around, Glitch," she found herself saying and, even more surprising to her, she found that, when she said it, she was feeling the rare instance where she felt like she actual meant to make it happen, too.

There was a small wave, even though she wasn't looking at him, before he turned to walk away.

His synapses went to say something in return, the same sentiment, and "Ditto," was what came out. Satisfied with that, he smiled and walked back to where he figured his new home was.

Left? Right? He held his hands up in front of him, weighed the options for a moment, and went right.

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The Park; Late Saturday Afternoon.

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