One Step at a Time
*BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* *BEEP* whoosh CRUNCH.
Five-Fourty Five in the morning, and Aria needed a new alarm clock.
The number of them that she went through was rapidly approaching staggering, and Adagio had long since resorted to buying her ten-dollar-or-less 'throwaways' as she called them. Aria claimed innocence, the purple haired punk couldn't imagine why they kept spontaneously going for flights of fancy across her spacious room, it had to be a conspiracy.
Indulging in a languid stretch as she got out of bed, Aria got ready to go for her morning run. It was a habit she had gotten into when they had first been transported here; thankfully clothed, but nearly incapable of motion, with no food, no money and a pittance of their normal reserves of magic, all three of them had been ... testy. Yes, we'll go with that for the word; there was a more fitting one, but it wasn't nearly as polite.
Aria had started going for walks; then later jogs and runs, to help blow off some of the near constant rage she perpetually lived in. Already largely solitary - not to mention territorial - predators by nature, the three Sirens had been oddities among their own because not only did they band together due to the boost it gave the reach of their powers, they frequently went to not just the surface, but to land in general. The power that weaving malcontent among the surface dwellers gave out was - at the time - extremely tempting and hard to resist. But, after that damned old goat sent them to their current dimension, Aria had a hard time justifying the losses.
While getting into spats with Adagio could certainly be cathartic, it rarely ended in anything but frustration for the middle Siren, her leader could talk circles around a criminal defense attorney. In fact; she had done just that a few times. It made even token attempts at subterfuge laughably useless. So, she ran. Years later, she started taking up various martial arts, but running had always been her go to for blowing off steam.
Gathering her headphones and mp3 player, the petite girl closed her bedroom door and made her way down the hallway leading to the front. She stopped short just in front of Adagio's room and debated knocking to ask if the eldest wanted to come along, before thinking better of it and continuing on her way out the front door without bothering to look in the disaster that had to be the living room and going straight into a sprint once out the front door in an attempt to shrug off her sudden onset of malaise.
Aria knew that Adagio preferred to swim, though she couldn't understand why. The clumsy flailing that these bodies performed paled in comparison to the sleek effortless movements that they had once been capable of in their true forms. The single time that the purple haired siren had gone with her blonde compatriot, the disparity very nearly drove her to tears. She hadn't been to any body of water larger than a bathtub since.
An hour and a half later, the now heavily sweating and elated runner made her way into the kitchen to get some much needed hydration. After chugging her first glass, it wasn't until she was halfway through filling her second at the sink that she felt eight small and sharp claws making their way up her thin jogging pants and headed toward her side. Startled, she glanced down to see two giant red eyes looking up at her. A pitiful mewl emerged from the kitten's throat before Aria realized with a start that the damn thing was probably thirsty. Setting her glass in the sink, she was part way toward getting a bowl when the little heathen shoved its face full into her drinking glass and started merrily lapping away. Still riding her runners' high, she couldn't muster up the irritation to do more than scoff at the cheek of the mewling soot sprite. Aria merely shook her head, left the glass where it was for ready access, decided to get a can of pop instead and headed toward the living room. She figured she might as well get a head start on the clean up her and Adagio were going to have to do because of the mess Sonata caused last night before stopping short at the threshold, gobsmacked.
The place was spotless. The pop stains she was certain last night would have to be steam cleaned were gone, the chips, pretzels and game pieces were in the garbage or safely stowed in their proper places respectively and the garbage had been taken out. Aria stood in surprised awe for a solid minute before she realized with a start that Sonata was still sleeping on the couch, cocooned in a blanket and snoring like a yeti.
Sonata ... cleaned. Sonata cleaned. Sonata. Cleaned. A startled "What the fuck?!" escaped her mouth far more loudly than she intended, followed closely by a frightened yelp and the thud of the youngest Dazzling falling off the couch in her shock, thoroughly entangled in her blanket. Drawn by the noise, the kitten galumphed over to start licking and nibbling on the entrapped Sonata's ears. The sight and sound of her most frequent headache source being tormented by a four ounce ball of fluff broke something in Aria's head. Her suddenly weak legs gave up the ghost as she sat with a muffled thump on the rug, nearly crying in hysterics.
After disentangling herself from the kavorkian scarf that she had previously mistaken for a blanket and pulling her new kitten earring off, Sonata looked over in borderline panic to try to explain to a surely furious Aria why the kitten was still here and why she will absolutely do everything to take care of it and - was she laughing?
It took a few minutes for the lithe Siren to stop howling like a hyena, and once the laughter settled down to giggles and then mild tremors in her shoulders, Aria wiped the tears from her eyes and took a few long, deep breaths to calm herself further. She glanced down to see two bright red eyes looking back at her in interest, and then looked at the youngest Siren with as stern of a gaze as she could muster before speaking.
"I won't clean up cat shit. He's yours, so that's your responsibility, and if it ever gets to the point where I can smell it, I will take him straight to the pound. We clear?" At Sonatas frantic nod, she continued before the blue haired airhead could muster a response. "I won't deal with you feeding him crap food either, if you feed him something he can't digest, he's gonna be barfing everywhere, and I don't want to clean that up. Do your research, find out whatever cat food is actually good for him and only feed him that. Savvy? Good." Aria got up, stretched and started heading back to the kitchen. "We'll take him to the Vet to get shots and get the essentials for care after I have my shower and coffee. Go get dressed, I'll wake up Adagio so she can drive -" before she could finish her sentence, she was bodily tackled from behind by a gleeful and babbling Sonata.
"Thank you so much! I promise I'll take care of him and you'll never smell the litter and I'll do everything right and this is so awesome!" The blue haired menace shrieked in her ear before squealing happily, scooping up a bewildered Zim and running over to Adagio's room to give her the good news. The muffled snarling of a woken up and ergo grumpy Adagio and the gleeful cries of Sonata babbling excitedly that followed shortly after went entirely ignored by Aria as she filled and set the coffee maker before heading for a much needed shower.
Oh yeah, while they were out, she still needed a new alarm clock.
This ran much longer than I meant it to. Does anyone else have their stories run off on them, or am I just way too lenient on my muse?
For reference:
^That's Zim. He's based heavily off of my childhood cat, Vader.
*Edit* Thank you Tatsurou for showing me how to imbed an image! You're awesome.
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This is so sweet.
And my muse runs away with me all the frikin' time.
And if you want to embed the image, use this link
http://orig01.deviantart.net/65d9/f/2016/195/1/6/zim_by_firimil-da9xu85.png
and the image button between the hyperlink and youtube buttons in the edit bar. To get links like that in the future, open the image in a new tab and use that URL.
It should work like thus:
orig01.deviantart.net/65d9/f/2016/195/1/6/zim_by_firimil-da9xu85.png
7388542
Ooooh, that's how it's done! Thank you so much for taking the time to teach me! I feel like such an imbecile.
And thank you for the compliment, I had some fun writing this one.
7388548
No prob. It took me a while to figure it out too the first time I tried to upload cover art back when we could do that from the net instead of from the device.
That is the best name for a cat I've ever heard.
'The daaaaaaaaays are so daaaaaaaaaark... but I have Kavooooooooorkian Scaaaaaaaaarf!'
7388818
~Around my neck!
7388569
You mean Vader? Yeah, the geek was strong in our household. She was a pretty awesome cat too.
7389178
Well, when you name your cat after a character voiced by James Earl Jones, I should think so.
7389188
Hehehe, my s.o wants to get a cat, and since we both prefer to adopt older cats well past the kitten stage, I've warned him that if we get a ginger tomcat, my nickname for him is gonna be Mufasa. Nothing could possibly go wrong there right?
7389868
Well, he IS voiced by James Earl Jones. That would give that cat badass credentials just based on that.
7389998
That was pretty early on, she got a lot better as time went on.
Always, almost every 'short, uncomplicated story' I try to write ends up double what I expected.
Well, Sonata showing some responsibility is not a thing I expected.
This is followed by Adagio going swimming... I mean... I understand the siren connection, but damn... It has got to be a PAIN to get all that pool water out of that tangled mess of hers!
Nice chapter! I hope they take the kitty to see Fluttershy.
7391155
Remember our conversation about the both of us not believing that she was stupid, so much as flighty and short sighted? This my attempt at dipping my toes into character development. Headcannon says the cat thing is set about three years before Rainbow Rocks, the first one shortly after microwaves became affordable in households.
Two words. Swim Cap. Mostly because we have precidence that her hair compresses quite nicely, and the mental image of the mass sproinging out from under a cap makes me giggle like a mad woman.
7390519 Feed the muse. Even better, when the Dazzlings in your head stop in the middle of the scene you're writing, look over at you and say "That's not right! Do it *this* way...," that's when you've got something special on your hands. Or maybe galloping schizophrenia... But hey. As long as you're all okay with it, everything's cool, right? :)
But at the moment it's only alarming.
i.giphy.com/bQCWmEgKHasZG.gif
I don't read nearly as many siren fics as I should, but I'm glad Justice led me to this one. I can tell things are gonna be fun.
7398411
7398441
Nah bud, the "God help us all" comes into effect when Sonata gets her terrifying little hands on a vat of Chlorine Trifloride. The phrase "the concrete... was on fire" will be uttered... I just don't know when that particular instalment is going to come in.
I personally don't have any preference for cats or dogs, I'm currently living with two cats, but have owned dogs most of my life, I like them both equally for very different reasons. I just seriously doubt Adagio would tolerate a dog for longer than the amount of time it would take to feed it into a woodchiper, she doesn't seem the type to like 'needy' for long periods of time.
Thank you very much for commenting and the fave!
7402504
Less to do with cereal in specific and more about food in general, the presence of the word 'cereal' in the analogy is perfunctory at best. It just made the most sense given the narrative.
I've never met a retriever- Golden or Labrador; and I've known quite a few- that chewed as more than an afterthought, and every single one of them has been able to put away meals larger than what their stomachs should be logically able to hold at a pace best described as 'alarming'.
Hope the clarification helped, sorry for the confusion.
Zim picture..Oh oh, my heart stopped......Ahh there it goes.
Form Urban Dictionary
Very darling, and definitely enjoying the thread happening.
Zim is now my new favorite Dazzling
8639064
He's pretty lovable. :D
That cat looks like it's part fucking vampire...do we need to call Alucard?