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Post by Eli Wellington on Feb 11, 2010 1:54:13 GMT -6
"Ohhh..." That made plenty more sense. If they didn't know that Vampires actually existed at the time, then they couldn't be blamed for making them look like such pansies. Eli had begun to wonder if humans were stupid enough to create happier versions of things they had every right to be afraid of. If that had been the case, it would have been like handing Eli meals on a silver platter.
He tried to follow Klove's ramblings about different kinds of movies, but most of them didn't make any sense to him. The whole concept of movies was starting to hurt his brain, even moreso than the headache that had already been growing with all the lights around. "No way I could watch them all?" Eli lifted an eyebrow. "You underestimate my lifespan."
He glanced back at the little table with the container on it as Klove motioned in it's direction. Apparently he wanted more. Eli had no problem with that, as long as he didn't have to smell it. After all, it was making the cat far more easy to talk to.
"Yeah, sure," Eli got up so he could reach the container, pausing to find the light-switch on the far wall and flick it off. He sighed in relief as the room went dark, save for the light omitted from the screen. He could deal with that light for now. "Much better. Man, I don't know how you live in all that light all the time. My eyes fiking hurt," He commented, reaching for the container and sitting back down on the edge of the bed. He handed the drugs--whatever they were--over to Klove, giving him a pat on the head. "Here you go, kitten."
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Post by Klove Makem on Feb 11, 2010 2:24:09 GMT -6
"You underestimate how many movies there are. And they're still making them. Every single day, there's a brand new one, and more TV shows and documentaries and everything. They've got thousands of 'channels' you can subscribe to, and they all have shows."
Klove tried to growl at Eli touched his head, but a purr came out instead. He took the catnip, and popped off the top, taking another good sniff of the green herb. His fingers felt weird and thick by the time he managed to get the lid back on. "You get used to it. After a few years, you won't notice it too much. Nox is more and more of a dump everytime I go back. Dark, and ugly, and boring."
He tried to scroll to something else, but then gave up when his fingers refused to cooperate. Instead, Klove offered the remote to Eli, "Just use the arrows. It's easy. They've got everything on here."
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Post by Eli Wellington on Feb 11, 2010 3:18:22 GMT -6
Eli could hardly contain himself when Klove surprisingly purred out of nowhere. He grinned, watching Klove sniff at more of the stuff in the container. Well, this was unexpected... he thought as the cat then fumbled with the remote, looking even more out of it now than ever. He took the remote when it was offered to him, glancing at the buttons. He pressed the down arrow, and the screen moved. "Huh. Cool."
He patted Klove on the head another time as he scrolled through the lists of movies. He didn't know what half of them were, so he figured he'd just pick something at random to test out. He stopped scrolling and landed on something. He guessed the middle button picked it, so he pressed it. Apparently it was just video of some lady at a desk, talking. Already he was bored, so he went back to scrolling on the remote, and petting Klove's head with his other hand.
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Post by Klove Makem on Feb 11, 2010 3:36:35 GMT -6
Klove knew on some level he should tell the vampire to get his hand off Klove's head and maybe get out of the room. But the rest of him was telling that bit of him to shut the hell up. He kept purring, a steady even rasp that sounded slightly odd coming out of a human-shaped throat, and just enjoyed the feeling of being pet.
"Yeah." He managed, eyes lazily fixed on the screen. It was hypnotizing to watch the remote scroll through title after title. "Human entertainment is great. I like westerns. Gunslingers, and showdowns. And cattle. They rustle it, and make it go all over the desert. Good guys have white hats, and the bad guys have black hats. And harmonicas." Klove wasn't aware that he'd stopped making any sense.
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Post by Eli Wellington on Feb 11, 2010 20:20:22 GMT -6
Eli mentally made a note not to let himself get too carried away--Klove would be sober again eventually--but he couldn't help but increase the petting as Klove's purring increased. It was rare he had a Were purring under his touch. Usually, they were growling, screaming, hissing, and all other forms of of negative reaction. He usually enjoyed it, but the purring was an interesting, yet still enjoyable change.
"Westerns, huh?" Klove's ramblings made absolutely no sense to Eli, but he began searching for something labeled 'Western' in the menu in order to figure it out. "Good guys in white hats, bad guys in black hats... what if they don't wear a hat?" he wondered, not really caring about the answer. He just wanted to note if and when Klove stopped answering.
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Post by Klove Makem on Feb 11, 2010 21:04:09 GMT -6
"You're not a cowboy then. Cowboys wear hats. You have to keep the sun out of your eyes. And handkerchiefs over your face to keep out the dust." Klove was barely paying attention to the screen. All he could feel was the wonderful feeling of being pet, and being floaty and warm and safe, and Grace's scent curling inside his nose. The itch of his healing shoulder was all but gone, totally blanked out by the catnip. "In Westerns, bankers don't have hats. And whores don't. And town folk. And they're just there to be the stuff that makes the cowboys fight."
His fingers lost their grip on the catnip and it dropped to the ground, and Klove let his eyes slip close too. He wasn't quite asleep, but he wasn't anywhere near awake anymore. The steady content purr kept going. After the past few days, it was so easy to just give in and forget that the hand on his head belonged to something Klove hated.
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Post by Grace Forjacks on Feb 11, 2010 21:11:40 GMT -6
Grace did all her usual checks, looking in on the engine to make sure it was working fine and looking at the food-stocks to see what they needed more of. They wouldn't be stopping at the spaceport on Antheia, so they'd have to skip on stocking up there, but they might be able to do a little quick plundering while out at night, depending on who would be coming with her. Not Kenna for certain, she'd be keeping her far away. She'd have to send someone else to watch the dwarf. Not the vampire, he'd be coming with Grace so she could keep an eye on him.
She let herself into her quarters to see how Klove was faring. The lights were off, so she slid the door shut so she didn't wake him up in case he was sleeping. The viewscreen was on, and light from it helped illuminate the room. She paused, giving her eyes a moment to adjust, and then realized that Klove wasn't alone.
Klove seemed to be okay, if the purring was any indication. She raised an eyebrow at Eli. This... was not what she had expected. Ever. "Well... good to see you're getting along."
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Post by Eli Wellington on Feb 11, 2010 21:26:46 GMT -6
"Bankers, whores, and townfolk... now those are words I recognize," Eli replied, having inched his hand down to the back of Klove's neck, scratching him at the base of his skull. Klove didn't reply, which meant he was finally drifting off. Eli weighed his options carefully.
A crack of light appeared and Eli glanced towards the door to see Grace slip in. Well, at least she wasn't freaking out over the situation. He just grinned. "He's purrrrrring. It's adoooorable." He glanced back at the screen, finally spotting something that said Western. "Ah ha!" He clicked it and waited for the video to load.
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Post by Grace Forjacks on Feb 11, 2010 21:39:35 GMT -6
Grace smiled a little at the pair. She crossed over to the other side of the bed, settling down by Klove's legs and reaching up to scratch the small of his back. Klove rewarded her efforts with a noticeable increase in volume. She'd figured out all the sweet spots ages ago, back when he was still half her size and spent half his time sleeping at the foot of her bed in his cat form. "That's how he managed to worm his way onboard. I never had any pets growing up, and I wasn't prepared for the purring."
It made her heart swell a little to look at Klove like this. When she looked at him, she understood why Holo had kept her, even when Grace suspected she may have been hell to deal with at age seventeen and eighteen. An hour ago, he was a pain in the ass, but now he was a complete sweetheart.
Eli found whatever it was he was looking for. Grace glanced at the screen. The menu disappeared, and the opening credits started rolling. It seemed familiar for a moment. The title finally came up and Grace grinned, recognizing it. "Los Desperados? This seems more up Klove's alley than yours."
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Post by Eli Wellington on Feb 13, 2010 1:34:50 GMT -6
"Honestly I don't know what the hell I'm watching," Eli admitted as he watched the beginning of the video. "He was going on about Westerns and whatever the hell a cowboy is. Is it a Were-Cow? Cause those things piss me off. They're like double the tease and no reward."
He eyed the screen, watching the movie carefully. Everything in it besides the people seemed foreign to him. Yet there was something intriguing about it, and he couldn't quite place it. There was so much dirty sand, and so many long borings scenes of people staring at each other, and...
He dropped the remote, getting up to be closer to the screen in sudden surprise as his cold, dead heart skipped a beat. "Holy shit, holy shit... that's the... that's the sun." The overwhelming brightness of the screen was starting to hurt his eyes the way the other artificial lights did, but the fact remained, he was staring at the sun, and he wasn't dying or even burning up at all.
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Post by Grace Forjacks on Feb 13, 2010 1:57:37 GMT -6
"That's a real cow." Or, considering the time the film was made, it probably was a CGI cow. Grace thought about trying to explain that to Eli and decided not to bother. Film was likely overwhelming enough to the vampire without learning that the camera could not only film things, it could also film things that weren't even there.
However, watching Eli react once he realized he was seeing the sun was worth sitting in the dark with a vampire. It was awe. Grace knew that feeling, maybe better than anyone else on the ship. Eli hadn't seen the sun in over a thousand years. Maybe he'd forgotten what it looked like after so long in the dark, and so far out in the system.
She smiled a little to herself, stroking Klove's back. "Yup. And now you can see it anytime you want."
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Post by Eli Wellington on Feb 13, 2010 23:44:36 GMT -6
He decided he didn't want to know why they would call a cow a cowboy when one could just call it a cow and not run the risk of confusing it with a boy who turned into a cow, or even just a boy.
Eli simply kept staring at the film, not even paying much attention to the characters that were being played out on the screen. He couldn't take his eyes off of the sun. He ran his fingers across the screen where the sun shone. "Is it... really the sun or is it like a fake sun?? I don't think I ever saw the sun this bright... I've never seen so much light... even when I was human."
He was continuously surprised at how many memories had been triggered since getting on the ship. Before this, he could barely even remember that he hadn't been a vampire his whole life. Suddenly he was remembering all sorts of things from that time. A new thought dawned on him. "Wait, is this even Terra? I thought it was all city..."
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Post by Grace Forjacks on Feb 14, 2010 0:24:08 GMT -6
"Well, you were born on Nox. The light you get out there is dimmer than the light the inner system gets." Nox existed in an almost eternal twilight, going pitch black in a way that the night never really was the closer you were to the sun. "But this is brighter than normal, since it's a Western and it's all about the weight of the light and the way it weighs you down."
"That's complicated. This was shot on Terra, since this was just before they finally developed an engine that could get us off Terra and inbetween planets in a timely fashion, but there's no place on Terra that looks like this, not anymore." Grace tried to find a quick way to explain CGI to the vampire, and decided to skip the whole bit with computers, since that would just be more questions. "It's not real, it's just a set they dressed up to look real, and then they used technology to perfect the illusion. A lot of new westerns are shot on Heimdall, since it looks like this and it saves them time."
"Before the city took over the planet, some of this was real. We've got pictures of it, and old film. But it was swallowed up at least two hundred years ago, maybe more." Grace's parents couldn't remember a time before the city, but they had been born poor, and their parents poor, and their parents poor, until all they remembered was living in the shadows of the great buildings. She was the first person in her family in however many generations to have gotten out, and to have seen the oceans, grey and full of garbage. But she'd managed to bring her family with her, and now every Forjacks had seen sun and sea. "You should watch some documentaries. They've got the history of Terra, and the history of things like film making."
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Post by Eli Wellington on Feb 14, 2010 18:58:55 GMT -6
"So... this is fake... like that building there..." Eli couldn't help but feel a little heavier realizing he wasn't looking at an image of the real sun. "Damn."
He backed away from the screen a bit, the brightness of it starting to really hurt his eyes. He scanned the overall landscape that was being displayed, amazed that it wasn't real either. Even though it was a foreign land that he wouldn't recognize on first inspection, it still seemed real to him. But, maybe that was the issue. If he'd never been there, he wouldn't know what's wrong with the image, like he was able to tell that the building in the background was just a prop.
"Hmn. Well. I never liked the sun anyway," he stated, matter-of-factly, backing back up to the bed. It was partially true. There wasn't much to like about something that could make your skin burn if you spent too much time in it. But there was no denying that he'd felt excited at the thought that he could look at something so dangerous without worrying about it harming him.
He sat back down with a sigh, putting his hand back on Klove's passed out head, giving him another scratch.
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Post by Grace Forjacks on Feb 14, 2010 19:41:41 GMT -6
"Not everything on film is fake, but most of it is. We've gotten very good at making things that look real out of things that aren't." Grace told the somewhat dejected Eli. "There are still some tells, but those are things you'll learn to spot."
Grace shook her head a little, grinning mostly to herself as he declared he didn't like the sun. A child's story had just popped into her head, about a fox and some sour grapes. She wondered idly if Eli knew it too. For growing up on a different planet, it seemed that Nox's humans and Terra's humans had some similarities.
The remote was lying on the bedspread, and she picked it up, switching back to the menu and quickly scrolling through the choices. She found documentaries easily enough, and then brought up one about the System. It was for use in Terran schools, and as such, would provide a simplified and sanitized version of each planet, but it was a good starting point. And unlike Los Desperados, most of the footage of the planets was real. "Here, watch this. It's a little easier to follow, and it's got real footage, mostly. You can trust what you're seeing with your eyes in this one."
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