Episode 5: Elusive Air November 24, 2008

Kendra

It was good to have Kimmy back with us eventually, even if she had changed a lot. Or maybe because she had changed a lot, but don’t tell her I said that. She looked and acted like a whole new person, said that since her brush with death she was ’so over’ the whole ‘goth thing’. Good on her. You can say a lot of things about Kimmy, only some of them good, but at least she was always smart enough to make her own decisions and stick with them.

She was stronger than I’d expected. Let’s be honest, those are some nasty burns and she must look at a complete stranger in the mirror, but I’ve never seen her so… chipper is all I can call it. She used to be bitchy and sneaky and very, very bitter. Then she almost dies, gets mutilated and magically becomes the most pleasant person around, when everyone expected her to become even more angst-filled and bitter. Maybe she’s just acting tough, I suspect she is really, but I respect her all the more for it.

China Doll

So nobody was paying attention to me, which was fine. They’d all been angels, I mean that, watching out for me and making sure I was never alone and all that. Truth is, I like to be alone sometimes, you know? The only peace I got those days was on the can and even then they’d be knocking on the door every two minutes, like I was gonna disappear into thin air on the loo. I suppose we did become better friends though. Like in that movie, you know, when a rough crew of oil drillers or whatever have to work together on a spaceship and stop a meteor by digging a hole? Or something? Okay, maybe it’s nothing like that at all, but we were in a dangerous situation and had to work together to survive, see what I mean?

Yeah, so anyway, while they were talking to Kimmy I sort of snuck off to… I dunno. Use the bathroom or order some more pie, whatever, be by myself for a little while. Maybe have some soda. I probably shouldn’t have done that though, because that’s when they got me.

I don’t really know how to explain. I don’t know a lot of pretty words like Kendra does, but I guess it was sort of like being drunk. Um… Not that I know what being drunk is like, obviously, heh, but do you know what it feels like just when you’re about to faint, and the world starts spinning and everything looks wavy and pretty? Like that. Lack of oxygen to the brain, I think that’s why it happens, that’s what I read somewhere in any case. Suddenly the world looked different and it felt like I was on roller skates all of a sudden.

So that’s when I took off.

“You left? To go where?”

Well… upwards, obviously.

“Excuse me? You took off…”

Up. To the sky? I just went up, like a little balloon some kid let go, and I didn’t feel drunk any more. Actually it was sort of fun.

I think Kimmy was the first to notice, but I’m not exactly sure. I’ll tell you one thing about spontaneous flight, moving around is really hard. I have no idea how those birds and fairies and balloons do it, really. You’d think it would be a lot like swimming, right? But it’s not, because air isn’t like water at all and you should think about that.

I have to say though, I was thinking, this isn’t so bad. Not really fun either, because, you know, I didn’t know how to land properly and I didn’t like the idea of being a balloon until I was an old lady and people having to drag me around on a bit of string, but I didn’t panic as much as the others did. Come to think of it, they just looked vaguely confused. It was weird.

“I gathered that.”

The more I floated around, the more worried I got though. I was kinda waiting for the other shoe to drop, you know? I mean, Kendra woke up in a coffin and Kimmy got burned to a crisp and I was just being turned into a human balloon? Doesn’t fit the pattern, right?

“Quite.”

Didn’t think so. I felt a little guilty for having fun too so I tried to look real serious, but I’d like to do it again sometime. It was… different.

Anyway, I didn’t have to pretend like I wasn’t having fun for long, because that’s when Rosemary spotted something, and I managed to somersault, sorta flip to have a look.

And there was this… woman there, although she obviously wasn’t a real, proper woman. More of a huge fairy I guess, with wings and all that, and she looked a bit scared. And the weird thing was, nobody at the diner took any notice of her.

So Rosemary got angry. She’s always getting angry when we’re in trouble, and you have to admit I was sort of in a little bit of trouble right then. But then I remembered how she got angry the night we lost Kendra and I hoped this was the same kind of angry. The kind of angry that says, don’t mess with my friends! That would help me out tremendously, I thought.

Rosemary yelling completely freaked out the fairy lady though. I’m not surprised. Rosemary can scare police officers with her yelling, I’ve seen it happen, true story. She’s sort of like a pit bull that way, tiny and nasty and… well, not nearly as sloppy and ugly… Okay, so she’s a little bit like a pit bull…

“Okay, not like a pit bull really, then what happened?”

Well, she ran, obviously, straight towards the old junk yard. I didn’t come down though. I sort of floated after her so I was sure she was doing it then. That’s when I panicked properly too. The other three followed her of course, but I still didn’t have my feet on the ground and I was getting scared again.

They followed her into the junk yard, which now I think of it could’ve ended really badly for all of us, but in the end it didn’t. It was a good thing, really.

This is where it gets really exciting. So Rosemary storms through the gate and gets all Trinity on that yellow lady and screaming things like I’ll kick your yellow ass, bitch! It was really all kinds of awesome, but I suppose she should’ve looked properly before going all Matrix on anything, because Kimmy and Kendra did and they had the common sense to be really really scared.

There were four of them and they looked really cool, and this red orange sort of lady was screaming too, like, bring it on, kitten! And striking kung-fu poses and everything and it really looked like they were about to get into this huge fight, which I guess we wouldn’t have won because they obviously had all sorts of scary magic.

Apparently Rosemary thought so too, although she still didn’t look scared at all, and she calmed down a little and put the ass-kickery on hold to demand the yellow fairy lady put me down, which I thought was pretty nice.

The yellow lady got annoyed then and she said something strange. She said, fine, she’s safe now anyway. Strange, huh? Bad luck she got annoyed though.

Maybe if Rosemary hadn’t pissed her off, she’d have put me down gently, but no, I came down like a fucking meteor, sorry.

I’m fine, by the way, thanks for asking.

“Well, obviously you’re fine, you’re here telling us about it.”

Huh. Fair enough then. It did hurt though, I’ll have you know.

“Point taken, but you’re fine now. So next…”

Next the orange red lady started talking again and I could tell she was sort of the Rosemary of that bunch. I mean, she talked in the same way, with lots of cussing and swearing and ‘bitch’ thrown in. She said we were all ungrateful bitches, they were doing their jobs and saving our lives and we should be a little more respectful.

Kimmy

That’s exactly what she said. They were protecting us. And I just got so angry. I could feel the angry just below my stomach in a hard angry ball of… anger, like I was about to puke pure hate at that bitch.

China Doll seemed fine, a little woozy maybe, but then again she always sort of looked like that. And you know what? Call me a heartless bitch, but that made me angry too. I got such a rough fucking deal. I’m scarred for life, I spent weeks in a burn ward, I went through the worst pain ever and all she had to go through was a bit of bobbing around in the air and a slightly uncomfortable drop?

Fuck that. I love China Doll, bless her silly little heart an all that shit but I hated getting such a rough deal. It was probably stupid, but I was on that red smartass in no time. I don’t really remember what I said to her, probably a less polite version of what I said just now. That they messed up protecting us pretty bad in my case.

Bitch had some attitude though. Still insisted that without them we’d all be dead as dodos by now and we shouldn’t have been playing with fire in the first place.

She got as sick of us as I got of her, I guess, because that’s when she decided to take off.

“You mean they flew away?”

What? Don’t talk shit, of course they didn’t fly away, what gave you that idea? No, I was just about to clock that orange cow when they went all shiny and hazy and translucent.

That sucked so much. I swear I’d be a better person right now if I got to take a swing at any of those fairy twats right then, but no, they went poof in a shiny cloud of blue… stuff.

It went really fast too, and by the time the last bits of sparkly blue bits had fallen, we were alone in the junk yard with no idea what to do next. I guess if it were up to us, we’d have tried to go back to the way things were before. It seemed like it was over, you know? We’d messed with magic, we got out karmic comeuppance, all’s well in the universe again. But I suppose it wasn’t up to us. We all went home then, but it wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.