Please Don't Pick Me Up [Anzy] [PG13]

[Anzeh]

He agreed with Coyle wholeheartedly. Moss didn't mind snow or the idea of being cold so much as just cold was uncomfortable. Hot was where the party was at. No one ever went outside saying, "OH GOODNESS WHAT A WONDERFUL FROZEN DAY!" No, they always enjoyed the idea of warm, toasty days when you could curl up under a tree and no one could tell you you were crazy. If anything, as soon as they saw you relaxing under that tree, everyone within a thirty block radius would be scoping out trees to chillax under. Weren't those the days?

But even with his blatant dislike for the coldness of Washington and wondering what in all hell made him come here instead of south towards the warm marshes of Florida. That was something he had to think about. Maybe the feeling of other supernatural beings nearby drew him towards the school like two magnets of opposite poles attract each other. Not that he really understood magnets all that well, it basically described what he was probably feeling maybe possibly.

When he was tossed to the side, he stumbled a couple times before regaining his balance. Thank god he didn't fall--these were new pants. He couldn't buy a new pair, not to mention that they were practically custom made. He couldn't destroy custom made pants. That was just wrong. Wrong on so many levels. Anything custom should not be destroyed.

Anyway, he looked over to Coyle to see what the heck had been his problem, and noticed the fleck of white on his shoulder. Moss might have not been the most savvy when it came to weather phenom, but he knew what a snowflake was.

"You mean the snowflake? Yeah, I saw that." The barguest walked back over to his demon friend, rubbing his arms through his jacket. It wouldn't give him much warmth if it started to rain or anything like that. They needed to get back over to the castle ASAP, or Moss was gonna become a Moss-sicle. "If there's one, there's bound to be others. Let's hurry back to the castle before it starts snowing seriously."

[ωΘĿƒ]

Coyle looked up, horrified. Others? More snow? That was very bad. Very, very bad. Snow was bad. Disgusting, filthy water! And it was frozen too!

What was with all this liquids stuff anyways? Coyle didn't get it. The whole planet seemed to revolve around liquids. Water in the blood, water in the drinks, water in the food, and water in the sky! Hell, there was even water in huge puddles called seas! It was crazy!

There was no water where he came from. It was actually very lacking of anything. "Oh it's a nice, temporally stable day today." was the most it ever got where he came from. No corporeal objects. No stuff that came from other stuff and dropped from this "gravity" to touch you with its cold and wet. It was very odd, and the beast didn't like it.

In fact, the only time he did like any of this weather was when he was hot. Really hot. And not sunny day hot either. He liked to spend time in volcanoes. He liked to swim deep into the veins of the earth in the nice seething lava. That was good. This was bad.

Taking it upon his drunken self to be the hero, Coyle grabbed Moss by the arm and had one of his tentacles appear.

"We're leaving... We aren't walking through this water stuff."

He tore a hole in space, and dragged Moss through it. Instantly, it was warm and dark.

They were in the catacombs of the castle. He had tried to get them in the upper levels where all the food and blankets were, but it was hard to drive drunk. He was just glad he got them inside and not landed through a wall. That would have sucked...

"Ahhhh!" The beast sighed, happily. Nice and warm. The catacombs weren't optimal temperature, but they were always a balmy constant. No humidity change, no temperature change.

"Let's get go this way." Coyle pointed to a solid wall, and then when he hit one of the blocks, the wall opened wide.

He knew all the secret passages around here. They were only a few minutes from the surface. Then to sleep.

Well, Moss could go to sleep. Coyle didn't sleep. He could, but he didn't. It bugged him too much to actually become unconscious. That was just odd.

[Anzeh]

Yeah. More snow meant more cold. And more cold meant more problems. Then there was the issue that if it snowed, Moss got irrationally sleepy. He was probably getting ready for hibernation whenever it snowed. His body assumed that whenever it was cold that it was time to hibernate. And even if it wasn't time, then he slept for so much longer than normal. He couldn't stand snow. It made his body react in a whole bunch of goofy, irrational ways. It wasn't fun if every time there was a snow day he had to lay there and sleep his life away.

Being a barguest sucked royally sometimes. Other times he assumed that it was pretty sweet, but as the fates would have it, he hadn't even come across any times that being a creature of sadness and despair had its rewards. When he did, he would party like it was 1985.

Once more, Moss pulled his jacket around himself. He found himself wondering what it was like in Coyle's world. He'd seen the temporal beast without his skin, and that was not mythical being of this dimension. Even he knew that. So where was he from? Some odd, impossible place? He was like an alien, perhaps so much so that someone would hunt him down and try to dissect him. Ooh, he wondered what his kidneys looked like. Did temporal demons have kidneys? Or did they have Squeedily Spooches? He didn't know. Maybe they had both. Oh, wouldn't that be the bee's knees?

Wrapped up in his own world, he was shocked when Coyle grabbed him and ripped a hole in the fabric of time and space and dragged him through it. Making holes through time and space couldn't be good for the universal fabric. Wouldn't that be suckish if one day everyone woke up and the universe was in shambles thanks to all of the space tearin'.

When he regained his composure, he noted that he couldn't really see anything, but at the very least he wasn't cold anymore and didn't have to worry about getting snowed on. He looked around. Where were they? He knew that they were in the castle, but where in the castle was the big question.

He knocked against a block on the wall and it opened up. Oh goodness, not another adventure. Here's to hoping this one doesn't have Gargoyles he thought to himself.

[ωΘĿƒ]

Even though it wasn't his practice to listen to the thoughts of everyone around him, often times when there was just one person in the vicinity, he tended to "auto-lock" on that person and subconsciously skim.

Like reading a magazine, it wasn't that he was looking for anything in particular, he simply liked the pretty pictures. And Moss had some interesting pictures. However, when he heard the space tearing comment, he couldn't help but respond to it. It seemed like that would be important to understand. He didn't want the space time continuum to be ripped full of holes either.

"It isn't exactly like tearing a hole." The beast shrugged. "That's just what I call it, because you guys and your science fiction come up with funny terms like that. You'd probably have to tear something up to get through it. Me? I'm built for it. The space time and all the layered dimensions are a semipermeable membrane of sorts. I just slip through the membrane, easy as can be. No harm done."

He paused for a moment.

"But it takes some effort to fit things that aren't built for plane travel through. You, for example, are kind of heavy. Made of elements. Not good for the fabric and such. You cause stretch marks to fit through. It took me a long time to figure out how to squeeze you in without leaving any damage. Once it's figured out though, it's easy as ever."

Continuing through the newly made tunnel, Coyle zigged and zagged for a few hundred meters before finding another hidden tunnel.

Yup, it was hard getting through this place, but hell, it was better than trying to phase again. Coyle laughed his drunken laugh at that, imagining Moss and himself stuck in a wall, or in the floor.

That'd be rich!

Right.... now it was wither right or left here....

[Anzeh]

When Moss was around the demon, he sometimes forgot that what he thought was out on display for the other to hear. He was always thinking random thoughts, and usually those thoughts made no sense in the grand scheme of thing with little or no bearing to the plot. But still, he tried.

It was all just because he was unused to people hearing his thoughts. He was used to people just staring at him and wondering what he was thinking, being forced to suffer in silence until he acted on his facial emotions. But things were not like that with Coyle. If he wondered what Moss was thinking all he had to do was take a little look-see into his mind. That was... a creepy thought. An extremely creepy thought.

The barguest listened as he explained that he wasn't really ripping holes in things as just going through them He was made to go through dimensions--walking was for squares when it came to him. Apparently the fabrics of time and space were like the membrane of cells and he was the thing that could just pass through it via osmosis. Moss however was different.

Apparently he was too... heavy. Unfit for sliding through the membrane through osmosis like Coyle could. So it was sort of like he was being forced in though the an opening that under normal circumstances he'd be too large to fit through. Knoei smirked. Ah, he loved his brain. He was ever-so grateful the school didn't allow zombies. That wouldn't be awesome. Then he wouldn't have his lovely brain to think perverted things with.

Moss's eyes attempted to adjust to the darkness, but that was all but impossible when there was no real light source around to light the way. He was completely sure that his pupil had completely overtaken his eyes, but he couldn't see a thing. Good thing He was still being led by the demon from another dimension. Down another hidden tunnel (of course, all the tunnels were hidden to him), before Coyle finally stopped.

Uh, Moss didn't have any clue how to navigate this part of the school. It was all up to how much the temporal beast's drunken mind remembered. If he was still drunk at this point.

[ωΘĿƒ]

Staring blankly at the wall in front of him, Coyle heard another of Moss' funny thoughts, and the accompanying image to go with it. He cackled, finding it even funnier now that he was drunk than he would normally - and he would normally find it very funny. Coyle was no slouch when it came to good, quality dirty humor. In fact he was a connoisseur. Unable to think that way because technically speaking he wasn't built the way mortals were, he could only laugh at the strange little things they created.

And they were damn funny sometimes.

"Ah.... Have I ever told you how much I like sick minds like yours?" Coyle snickered, still staring blankly at the wall.

He didn't need light to see. He didn't even need matter to see. If it was there, Coyle saw it; didn't matter which plane it was on. That actually got kinda confusing at times, but oh well. He was made to see it all.

Wall. What did he do with the wall? Oh right!

Coyle pushed a stone in, and the wall made another door. He then dragged Moss up a crazily winding flight of stairs until he was exactly where he needed to be.

Dorms.

"****! I found 'em!" he smiled, proud of himself. He was more than happy to normally wander around drunk until he sobered up, but in this case Moss had made him do something useful. That worked.

Coyle closed up the passageway and wandered aimlessly down the hallways.

"Hey, where the hell's your place? Never been there...."

He thought about it a second, then it was very important to see the inside of Moss' room. Was it all pervy like he was on the inside? Or was it a normal dorm room like everyone elses'. He could just look it up in Moss' memories, but that was too boring.

He wanted to see.

"Where?" he repeated, looking around. He seemed nearly capable of using motor functions now, but he was still a bit loopy from the sheer amount of booze he'd guzzled.

He'd be fine by morning...

[Anzeh]

"Uh, no not that I can remember, but it could just be me and my crappy memory." Moss responded as he waited for the temporal demon to remember what he was supposed to be to doing here at the wall. Knoei stared straight ahead with his inferior human vision as Coyle continued to decode the meaning of the wall. After some time, he head the stones shifting as one was apparently pushed in and he was tugged forward.

Unable to see he stumbled on the first couple steps. After the third step he had gotten the rhythm of the stone spiraling steps and was managing to keep a pace right behind his friend inter-dimensional friend. Once again his mind wandered off to some bizarre subjects. He wondered what would happen if Coyle had a child with someone of his dimension. Indeed he wondered if Coyle could have children at all. After that wandering down many frightening paths he swore to himself he would never take again, they finally appeared where they apparently were supposed to be.

They were in the dorms. Why were they here? That question was answered when the school demon stated that he had never been to Moss's dorm. How would he explain taking home the school demon to his roommates? Not that he really had roommates anymore. They all died mysteriously... THAT was bizarre... so now the entire dorm was practically his alone.

After glancing left to right, he walked down the right until he came to a door with name on it. How inconspicuous, right? The barguest pushed the door open since it wasn't locked--in fact, it was hardly ever locked even when his roommates did exist. Whether that was a plus or a negative consequence for him or Coyle was something he'd never thought that hard about.

Into his room he glanced about wearily, glad to be home. There was a bookshelf filled with innocent schoolbooks, all hollowed out to hide his precious magazines. His computer was whirring quietly, and had innocent files named essays and research topics, all filled with his favorite video files. From the front he looked like he was 3-D, a studious pervert who cared about his grades (which he was) but from the back he seemed 2-D, only caring about materialistic and physical aspects. While that was also true, it was hard to know which side was the real Moss.

Tired, half-buzzed, and did I mention tired, the woodland bear collapsed on his bed, even though he'd gotten Coyle in the situation he'd been envisioning that day they met.

[/size]

[ωΘĿƒ]

Coyle looked around excitedly. It was in his natural inclination to be fixed on something at any given time - how else was he supposed to stave off the ravenous boredom? - and for the moment he was completely fixated on everything in Moss' room.

He'd never really been in a room before. Well, he'd been in rooms but not an actual, lived-in room. Those were usually boring, right? That's what he had thought, so he'd never given them another thought as he drifted through this dimension.

But here he was, and he had to say.. this stuff was in credible!

"What the hell's this?!" Coyle held up a book, staring at the cover in a perplexed manner. It looked.... solid. Yup. A solid object. And look, it had funny thinner solid parts to it that moved if you opened the solid cover. Oooooooh. Aaahhhhh.

"What does it do?"

Throwing the thing aside carelessly, Coyle began to rummage around everything else. Bed. He'd seen a bed before. People slept on beds. Chair. He liked to sit on chairs - they were nice to pose his new corporeal body on. Floor. He was very familiar with the floor. People used it to walk on, because apparently all life needed solid stuff to utilize for more life. Odd.....

"What's this?"

Coyle held up a shoe, then remembered what it was, and moved on.

"Or this?"

Oh wait... Nail clipper. He knew about those too.

"How do you work a computer?"

He sat down at the desk, pulling the lid of the laptop up and down boredly. How? How how how how how how how? He needed to know.

How did this stuff work?

[Anzeh]

Moss's eyes had slid closed once he'd collapsed upon his blankets. His head was pounding and if he didn't get some rest he'd be so irritable that he'd claw someone's eyes out. Not that he wouldn't do that when he wasn't irritable, there was just a much higher chance when he was. As hard as the Barguest tried, he could not drop off from his consciousness. No matter how hard he tried to simply block the temporal demon out, he couldn't. And he realized what he was about to pass op by going to sleep. What kind of self-respecting manwhore let perfectly good prey slip between his fingers?

And just like that, as though to brawl for his pride, Moss was on his feet watching the other tear apart his room as he looked at things he didn't recognize. When he picked up one of the male's "school books", Moss smiled and said nothing. Part of him dared him to open it. There was one book on the shelf--an orangish book entitled "The History of Gay Literature." A random upperclassmen had left it in his room after an eventful night, and Moss had hollowed it out and used it as a storage space for his favorite type of gay literature.

He tossed a random book across the room and it hit the wall with a loud thud. Calmly, Moss went over to retrieve it and replace it upon the shelf as Coyle tossed one of the bear's shoes and a nail clipper he didn't even know he had, taking care not to be hit by either of these objects. That would be no good, especially not the nail clipper.

Once he'd gotten his stuff back into its proper place, he turned to Coyle whom was sitting at the laptop waiting for it to start working. Or maybe he was just having fun lifting the lid up and down, as the screen went from lit to dark, lit to dark, and then the process repeated again.

"I'll show you, alright?" he said, although he knew he was fighting a losing battle here. He bet that the other would become bored of the machine before he even learned how to properly work a mouse. Wouldn't that be a total shame? All his precious work for nothing. He'd do his best to squeeze this down to being less than a minute.

[ωΘĿƒ]

Coyle stopped flipping the lid up and down. Although it did provide some very interesting light variations, it wasn't entirely interesting as it looked.

What he was really fishing for finally took the bait.

Goody.


Coyle sat perfectly still, waiting for Moss to show him how to work the computer. He wanted to know. He really wanted to know. But... he wanted a conscious mortal to pay attention to him more.

Now that Moss seemed to be free of this "sleeping" idea, Coyle knew he was going to have a bit more fun.

Damn, even when he was drunk, he was crafty. Drop the bait, let the line slack, and wait for fishy to bite. And he had a nibble. Now to nurse the line in a little.

"Doesn't it use thought command?" Coyle asked, pressing a button with the letter "U" on it. "What are these?"

Coyle had noticed Moss smiling as he threw certain things across the room. Hmmmm... Wonder what that was about...

He'd find out. Coyle always got what he wanted. He just had to be patient enough.

Errrrrgghhhh.... He hated being patient.

[Anzeh]

"No, it doesn't use thought command." Moss replied with a slight roll of his eyes, but he couldn't disguised the amused smile. Maybe it was the booze. No, it couldn't be the booze, because Moss wasn't drunk. He was buzzed, and only half-buzzed at that. He was completely conscious of himself and his actions, he just cared a lot less. That counted for something. It had to. Knoei demanded it.

He saw Coyle push the U key (why the u key Moss hadn't the foggiest idea) and asked what the keys were for. Moss opened notepad and pressed the keys so that they made a very simple sentence with a subject, a verb, and a direct object. He erased this and typed his own name. "So you can write things for other people to read." he said, and decided he'd try something. Holding down the control and the alt keys, then hitting the arrow button, he flipped the entire monitor display on its side. It was something he did completely by accident one day, and he did it with increasing frequency. It amused him to watch himself type sideways.

Once he'd done that he showed Coyle how clicking things opened them up, scrolling over his innocently named files, though not clicking them.

[ωΘĿƒ]

Coyle played with the mouse a little after Moss had shown him how to use it. Cool. It moved that thing in the screen. Coyle poked the screen experimentally. It made a ripple, like water. Coyle phased through the screen, then pulled his hand back though to try pressing the keys.

Oooh. It spoke!

Coyle typed out several things on the screen, fascinated by how the physical keys could be seen in the flat, illuminated screen. He used to be flat - one and many dimensional without form or shape. Plasma. Not even plasma. Pure thought. Now he was like the keys - three dimensional and stable. Booorrring! He liked the idea though - turning something only 3D into something made of flat, symmetric light on a screen. How poetic. No wonder people on this plane thought they were going somewhere when they died. Everything they made dictated just that.

Coyle typed out a few more words, then tried the flip screen thing. He got it right the first try. Turns out he was a quick study.

"Hey Mossy," Coyle said, "Where do ya think you're going to go when you die?"

It was an innocent enough question, and Coyle legitimately wanted to know. He could have jsut read his mind, but he found it was more interesting to see the exact words that Moss had to say.

One thing you could give these non-mind readers credit for - they were very elegant. If you thought anything at all where he came from, that's it - it was out there. You didn't have time to refine and clean it up, it just came out as is. Moss and the others could think about things though, and fix their sentences up a bit. They made communication an art, not a blob of consciousness that radiated out for everyone to hear it. It was nice, to hear the "final draft."

[Anzeh]

He watched the demon play around with the computer for a little while before feeling sleep attack his body again. 'Must... fight... the sleep...!' he thought as he yawned lightly. Coyle never yawned. From this he surmised that Coyle probably doesn't get sleepy either. Perhaps the demon used some other mode of rejuvenation. Like what was the question, one that Moss didn't feel like asking. He went at one of his school books and pulled out a magazine from the hollowed out pages.

He threw himself onto his bed and amused himself with the pictures. For once this wasn't to be taken as being dirty as he didn't open his pants and whack off there on his bed. He was simply laying there looking at the magazine with one arm cushioning his head, looking as nonchalant as he was simply there alone while Coyle made mental poetry.

"When I die?" he asked, shutting the magazine lightly, not moving his fingers from the pages so that he could open it and get right back to the good stuff once he'd answered his friend. After some time--just a pause, not even thinking, he said: "Into the ground."

[/b]

And that was his response. Nothing fancy or deep, or him going into some tear-jerking story about how he feared for his immortal soul, but a simple straightforward answer. It wasn't a euphemism for hell--it was a simple answer. He'd simply prefer to be buried than to be cremated, and once buried it would be in the ground. That's it. That's all.

"I don't buy into all that stuff about religion. If you ask me religion is just the construct of a mind in crisis." He answered, scratching at that special spot between his eyes that always seemed to make him itch in the oddest of ways.[/blockquote][/blockquote][/size]

[ωΘĿƒ]

Coyle, still amusing himself with the computer, smiled at that.

"Awww, but don't you want to go to heaven?"

He knew, even without reading the Barguest's mind, that he didn't. Just a joke. A joke among friends, right. Coyle noticed the magazine that Moss had taken out.

"Or you could visit Hell. Nice place. Very cozy."

That, he joked a little less on. There was a reason for it, but he didn't feel like demonstrating that reason with thought. It was just to long and arduous to think about.

So he typed, and when he was bored, he went and sat down next to Moss to look at the magazine.

"Heaven and Hell. Funny concept. Why are there only two of them?"

He'd been to plenty of realms. Some "lower" some "higher" some in exactly the same space. It didn't much matter the height of the layer and the things in that layer. It was more about the complexity. Complex layers were more interesting. There were better things there, and a nicer atmosphere, as it were. More simple layers tended to be the ghettos of existence. People weren't nice. Living was crappy. Life just sucked in general on those planes.

"Maybe Heaven is the most complex dimension and Hell is the most simple."

He thought about it, and nodded appreciatively of his half-assed philosophy.

"And this place... Is kind of near the top actually. You wouldn't believe the lower class dumps I've been in. Real sewers."

He snickered.

"I'm nearer the top level than your guys' layer. I actually haven't found a more complex one yet. But it's still kinda suckish. Nothing to touch. Tht gets boring. And weather is kinda cool here, once you get the hang of it."

[Anzeh]

At the other's question, Moss gave a quiet chuckle and shook his head. Him? In heaven? No way. He'd never make it there. He'd come to terms with that long ago, and he lived by the principle that he was not going to heaven. He was too envious, too slothful, too gluttonous, too greedy, too prideful, too wrathful, and too lustful to go to heaven.

Especially that last one though. Yes, what was Moss if he was not a flaming sack of hormones and meat? Nothing! That's right, he thought of himself as being nothing more than fate's little asstoy. He was just waiting for fate to be done so he could curl up and sleep forever in his warm little hole in the earth. At the prospect of spending eternity it cozy lil' hell, he shrugged and thought about it. Why not?

After some time he relaxed himself and turned to Coyle, as he asked why there was only two. The temporal beast had left the computer and was now sitting on his bed. Without missing a beat, Moss replied that there was only good and evil in religions. There was no grey area--no embodiment of evil that saw the error of its ways and became good, no bright shining light of purity becoming tainted and evil. Things like that didn't happen in bible stories. There was no middle ground. And because there was no middle ground, he doubted most people went anywhere when they died.