paixaorpg | Duck out of water [complete]

Entry tags:

Duck out of water [complete]

Characters: Duck. Et tu?
Content: Duck arives in Paixao
Setting: Joutenheim
Time: mid-morning
Warnings: There's always a strong chance of under-aged nudity where Duck is involved...

Duck yawned and rubbed her eyes. She must have dozed off again. It was just so easy to do on these warm days...
She paused suddenly and frowned, her hands still over her eyes. That was... what?!
She took her hands down suddenly and stared at them. They had four fingers and an opposable thumb on each. They were attached to thin, little, pink wrists which disappeared into familiar gray and blue sleeves. Duck just stared. She had HANDS!
After a shocked pause, she used her hands to search out the red pendant nestled below the collar of her dress and pull it up to her face to examine. It was... it wasn’t the same pendant, but it was close. The shape was just slightly different, thinner, more tear-shaped, than the piece of Mytho’s heart had been. She stared at it for a long time, unsure what to think.
Then she noticed something else that was odd. A salty, wet smell on the air around her. She looked up and found herself staring out into a vast expanse of water. The ocean. She’d never seen the ocean in person before. It was breathtaking. It couldn’t even be compared to the pictures she’d seen. She stood up slowly, watching the waves crash against the beach.
There definitely wasn’t an ocean anywhere near the city. She’d been outside of it with Fakir, since the story ended, and there were just miles and miles of thick woods outside. The ocean was much too far away for a day-trip.
This must be a dream, she concluded.
“Ow!” she exclaimed, shaking out the hand that she had pinched to be sure. “Ow! What the heck?!”
This sure didn’t seem like a dream. And she wasn’t usually aware of things being a dream when she was dreaming them. This was... strange.
She turned slowly, surveying the scene around her and was startled again to see a huge building made of several overlapping domes. Duck blinked. She’d definitely never dreamed of anything like that before...
On the side of the dome nearest her, she could see a large gate with a line of people coming out of it. Or, going in, rather. After considering for a moment, she decided to cue up. If it was a dream, she’d like to see what was in the domes, if it wasn’t... well, she supposed she’d still like to see what was in the domes.

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Simba wandered around on the inside of the dome, smelling the air for anything seemingly familiar. This had been the gate he had come in at, where he had met Squall and Harry, before that weird woman had taken him. He had managed to lose Timon somewhere near the restaurant to go and wander around by himself, now paying more attention to anyone who may be wearing a black coat.

So, for now, he was wandering, hoping to find the people he had abandoned before, not by his choice anyway.

The people here mostly seemed to ignore Duck when she tried to ask them questions. The only thing she'd managed to figure out was the name of the place, but nobody would tell her how she got here or what she was doing, and she was beginning to decide that the blond people were rather rude! She was getting thoroughly annoyed with them all when she spotted somebody distinctly different.

A lion was walking peacefully through the crowd and Duck perked up a bit. She usually had pretty good luck with animals, they tended to be polite and she'd noticed that they were generally more central to the Story. She moved through the crowd to get closer to the animal and then spoke. "Excuse me, Mister Lion, do you live here?"

Simba's ears perked up and he lifted his head from smelling the ground when he heard a voice talking to him. Turning, he saw a young human girl standing there talking to him. Well, that was a change from normal. Not very many of the humans here wouldn't talk to him...he was a lion after all.

"I guess you could say that I do now... I just got here though." He said, shaking his head to shift his mane a bit. "My name's Simba...And why aren't you afraid of me like everyone else?"

He watched as two of the older human natives were whispering and pointing at him, looking on as the girl talked to him.

"Oh!" Duck blinked, suddenly realizing his point. He was a fearsome predator after all. She'd never have approached him as a duck... that was just asking for trouble! "Well, I suppose if you were a ferocious people-eating lion that I needed to be afraid of, you'd already be eating someone!" she said brightly. "It wouldn't make sense for you to walk around being perfectly nice to everyone until one of them approaches you and then eat them, right? After all, lions are ambush predators, so if they're going to eat you, you don't see them until you're about to be eaten, and I could see you just fine!"

Duck nodded happily to herself, the logic was perfectly sound. "Besides, Lions are usually the kindest and bravest characters in a story! They represent bravery, and nobility and benevolent rule and they're hardly ever villains!" She paused, winding down after her ramble and frowned. "So you just got here too... Hm... I suppose you don't know how you did it?" She remembered another pertinent piece of information that she'd noticed seemed to differ between this place and how her home had been before, but maybe it was just because she had experience with stories? "But you do remember being somewhere before here, right?"

"You won't need to worry about that." Simba said with a small smile. "I don't eat people...or other animals for that matter. And thank you." He explained, then thanked her for the nice compliment.

"Before here? I lived in the jungle right outside of the Pridelands." He said, answering her question. "But I don't know how I got here. I went to lie down and go to sleep, and the next thing, I woke up here. Is that how you got here too?" He sat down to wait for her answer, once again looking towards the growing crowd of people who were staring and pointing at the girl and th lion.

Duck frowned. "You don't eat animals at all? Is it okay for a lion to be a vegetarian? You don't get sick?" She had never heard of a lion getting along without meat. That was an interesting concept. But then immediately following that statement was another baffling one. "I thought lions lived in grass-lands and tigers lived in jungles..." her confused frown deepened. Finally he said something that was equally curious but not confusing in and of itself. "Mm, yeah! That's how I got here... I'm not sure what I was doing before... I must have just gone to sleep too." She nodded and then suddenly jumped slightly, realizing that she hadn't introduced herself. "Oh! I'm sorry! I'm Duck, by the way! It's nice to meet you!"

"Well, I eat bugs, does that help?" He said, after listening to her barrage of questions. "I lived in a grassland once, I like the jungle better though." He listened to her explanation of how she had arrived in this place too.

"I wonder if that's how everyone gets here. And it's nice to meet you Duck." Simba mused. He twitched his tail once as he thought.

"Huh," Ducky tilted her head to the side, blinking. "I never heard of a lion doing that... It must take a lot of bugs though... But I guess there is a lot of bugs in a jungle, and after all, wales are the biggest things ever and they eat the little tiniest things, so I guess it make sense that that would work." She smiled. "Yeah, I think I'd like the jungle better too. I like forests."

"It's nice to meet you too, Mister Simba!" she said happily.

"It does, but Timon, Pumbaa and I are normally really good at finding enough for all three of us." He chuckled after that.

"So, where are you from, Duck?" He hadn't asked before, and since she had asked, he figured he would too.

Duck smiled. To some, the idea of eating bugs might have been upsetting, but then, she was a duck. Though Fakir gave her plenty of bread and duck-chow, she still felt the urge to snap up bugs and weeds from the water when she was swimming. Fakir generally gave her a look somewhere between horror and disgust when he looked up to catch her eating something slimy and invertebrate.

"Oh! I'm from Kinkan Town!" Duck said happily. "You probably haven't heard of it though, it's a long way from Africa..." She frowned slightly, glancing around herself. "I guess I can't go back right now... At least not until this story ends or something... I wish Fakir were here, he's a lot better at figuring things out than me." She sighed and then squared herself. "But I'm gonna figure this out and I'm gonna help who needs helping and make sure this ends happy!" she declared with a decisive puff.

"No, I haven't heard of it." Simba said, after taking a moment to think. "It must be far from the Jungle and Pridelands." He tilted his head to look at her.

"You keep mentioning a story...Why is that?" He asked, wondering. "And if you want help, I'm willing to help you out." He said, which was true, he was interested in finding out why he was in the strange place too.

"Oh, um, well see, the place that I came from was kind of like this, where people just show up and stuff and most of them don't really remember anything before that and they just kind of do what they're supposed to do. And that was because it was a story. See, there was this guy called Drosselmeyer a long time ago, and he wrote stories, and the stories came true when he wrote them, so because of that and because he kept writing tragedies and it was really sad these creepy guys in robes chopped off his hands so that he couldn't write anymore. But then he built this machine that kept writing the story for him, even after he died, and he made me one of the characters in his story because he said it was really unique that I was willing to disappear to save the Prince and so I had to be the heroine, but he really never planned on letting the Prince have a happy ending and so he was really just being a jerk and stuff and we had to fight against his story-machine really hard to make it be a happy ending. And this place kind of seems a lot like Kinkan Town was then so... I think somebody might be controlling what happens in the same way that Drosselmeyer was in my world... Writing this as a story, and that's why it's so hard to do anything real and why it's almost invisible what's happening here..." It would probably seem to the outside observer that Duck had not breathed nearly enough during her ramble, but she did not appear to be winded at all.

"Thanks, Simba!" she replied brightly to his offer of help. "I think, um, let's see... I guess what I should do first is see if I have powers again..." she mused quietly, pulling her pendant away from her chest a bit to look at it. "That would really make a difference for what to do next..."

Simba sat and listened to the explaination she provided, blinking. It was an interesting story to listen to, and was quite hard to believe, but considering what happened to him, and how he was here, he'd believe it for now. And, he didn't really know what was going in in this place anyway, and how it ran.

"Powers?" He asked. "What do you mean?" He stood up again to look at the pendant she was holding. It looked normal to him, but apparently it wasn't.

"Yeah, um..." Duck glanced around, fisting her hand around the pendant unconsciously. This was definitely not the place to try transforming. They were in the middle of the street and surrounded by people. "I can't do it out here... I need to find somewhere without people for a minute." She started scampering towards an empty-looking alleyway along side a slightly dilapidated-looking building.

Simba followed her as she ran off, but he stopped outside of the alleyway. She said that she couldn't be anywhere with people, so he figured that included him too. So, he sat with his back to the alleyway, looking as menacing as he could, to make sure that no one would follow her in.

...and for being as nice as he was, people were definitely scared of him.

In the alleyway, Duck looked around and then glanced back towards the street, before pressing back against the more shadowy wall and closing her eyes, concentrating on the heart-fragment clasped in her hand.

She felt a thrill of excitement as the sensation of plunging into cool, bubbling water came over her. It was working!

Moments later she stepped gracefully up next to Simba. Even if she weren't raised on the points of her toes, she would have stood several inches taller than before and her body had filled-out noticeably. Her hair had become short-cropped and seemed to turn to into white feathers near the bottom. And, of course, she was now clad in a tutu.

"Okay. I think we have a chance of helping fix this now," she said in a smoother, richer voice than before, a small, determined smile marking her lips.

Staring out at the people who were still watching him, Simba just sat, calm as ever. For a second, Simba could have sworn that he smelled water, as if there was a lake nearby, or a waterfall at least, just like what was in the jungle. But, he hadn't seen one nearby when he had been walking around. Everything here seemed fake to him, there wasn't a smell of life anywhere, besides from the people around him.

His ear twitched when he heard footsteps come up behind him, and he turned to look at Duck when she stood beside him. Something changed... he thought, and he didn't just mean the outfit. Her voice was different, and she smelled less like a human, and more like...a swan? That was a change.

Princess Tutu tilted her head slightly, considering things. "I think it would be best to ask anyone if they know of any strange places, just to check, but it's most likely that the place we should look is somewhere no one's ever even considered going..." she said quietly as she produced her pink journal from who-knows-where. "I'll ask, but I think that our best bet is just looking everywhere." She smiled down at Simba. "Although, that could take a while."

Simba watched as she pulled out the journal and began typing on it. His still hung around his neck, and he could still only use the voice activation feature.

"Well, what should I be looking for?" He asked her, standing back up again. "Or listening, smelling, any of that?"

Tutu sighed slightly and tucked away her journal ~~to where? nobody knows!~~. "That's kind of the problem," she said with an apologetic smile. "The things we want to find are the things no one would think to look for." She thought for a moment before continuing. "I suppose that it would be a good place to start to figure out what this story is about... and to see if we can identify the main characters. If we know who the main players are and what they're trying to do, we might be able to figure out what's controlling all this."

"Hmmm." Simba said thinking, then quickly shaking his mane so his journal fell onto the ground. "If we look on the journal thing this place has, we can probably find the people who are the most obvious, or who talk a lot." He had a feeling that Timon was one of them, but Timon? in a story? nah...

"....Just don't talk to a blonde woman with hair like a bug."

"Larxene..." Tutu nodded slowly. "She's definitely an important antagonist, but I'm not sure yet if she's evil or... confused." She thought of Rue, of the cruel things her friend had said and done, of the way she'd insisted again and again that they had to be enemies... Even then, her tiny, fragile heart had been hiding somewhere under all the confusion and anger within the girl. "There's something wrong with her," Tutu noted, coming back to the woman in question. "Something in her has been broken. I wonder if it could be fixed..."

She took out her journal again and started scrolling through message board entries. "Mister Meerkat stands out a lot..." She stopped suddenly, staring at an entry in shock. "There's a little girl that's been kidnapped. Lots of people are talking about it. Most of them sound like they don't even know her but they all want to save her..." Tutu bit her lip as she scanned through the replies. "... She seems more like a plot-device than a main character... Oh that poor little girl! This is horrible!"

"I have no idea, I only met her for a second...She grabbed me from the gate when I first arrived here. We really didn't talk." Simba said, listening as she started listing off people from her journal.

"Mister Meerkat? You mean Timon? He's from my home, good friend of mine. As for the little girl, I don't know her, but that's horrible. We should look for her too!" Simba said, standing again, and grabbing the journal he had shaken onto the ground to swing it over his head again.

"So, for either what you're looking for or the girl, where do we look first?"

Tutu frowned. That was a difficult question. The little girl might well be a distraction, to keep people from finding what was really going on... But then, Mythos had still had to defeat the Raven before they could defeat Drosselmeyer... No. The characters had to be saved first, or there was no point in finishing the story at all! There could not be a happy ending if a little girl was the cost of winning!

"We help the little girl," she said firmly, her mind made up. "The message says that they're forming a search party near the central train station."

Simba nodded. "Sounds good, let's go!" He said, starting to walk towards the direction of the central station, having been there a bit ago...plus the signs were a bit obvious. He'd wait for Duck though, of course.

"Right!" Duck nodded and followed after Simba, easily keeping pace with her graceful leaps.

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Duck out of water [complete]

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