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Gen's Got a Car--VROOOOM! IT'S ALIIIVE! *zombienoise*; Maybe it's a story.
Topic Started: Jul 13 2009, 02:09 AM (359 Views)
Celestial-Fox
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I decided I'd like to make some sort of story with a handful of dormant characters I've had laying around. I haven't written much, but you know, I figured that I owed Jessie something after forcing her to write some prose for me. 8D

Reciprocate, reciprocate.

This is a direct reflection of my views on the USPS--SLOWSLOWSLOW. Like, sickening.




“Heed, miss, I am in a bit of haste—”

“My apologies, sir. Things have just been busy here, and it seems like we can’t get a break. . . .”

“It’ll be quite the time before I return here, Di,” he grumbled under his breath as he adjusted his sharp, frameless rectangular glasses.

Geneses drummed his long fingers on the front desk while the postal worker had went in the back to retrieve his package. He had been in the post office for about forty-five minutes and was getting quite antsy by that point. The man had already made a scene by merely entering the establishment—the lanky, seven foot tall man was quite the spectacle wherever he went. His sharp features, exceedingly prominent nose, and he.

“Ehm,” the girl said as she returned to the front desk. She glanced at the pink slip and compared it to the addressee title on the package. “Ulysses Erickson, right?”

“Correct,” Geneses said curtly, picking up the parcel which was addressed to his alias. “Thank you, ma’am,” he added, already turning to exit the establishment. Heads turned as he shut the glass door behind him and made his way out into the rainy parking lot.

The man opened the back door of a beat-up car and dropped the cardboard box into the backseat. He quickly shut it and rounded the car, splashing in the crater-like puddles in the asphalt. Opening the front passenger door, ducked into the seat, banging is head on the ceiling.

“Agckh,” he breathed, both from the post office experience and the tingling on the top of his head.

“Hiii, Gen,” the woman in the driver seat drew out.

He said nothing in return.

“You’re such a—” She stopped halfway.

Geneses slouched in his seat with a tired looked smeared across his face. “Say it.”

“Cynic,” she said. The girl kept her face forward, unable to look at his irritated expression.

Geneses peered intently at her as the rain plopped like transparent golf balls all over the window. She was vastly tall as well, standing at six-foot-four. She had white hair that cut off in a straight line mid-back with a jet black underside. Her bangs cut off horizontally right below her brow line with thick, ebon “skunk streaks” throughout her scalp, as Geneses put it. Her skin was quite tan, like an ethnic mocha. He looked at her bony wrists that kept her hands clenched tightly around the wheel, her knuckles white. She tried to hide her tiny wrists with large black leather watch cuffs, but Geneses knew better. Large, layered greyscale rhombi tattoos covered her entire forearm like scales. She had them all over her back, and they were usually hidden by her hair and clothing. People who walked by usually had to steal a second glance at her—the strange beauty in her skeletal body and the towering height which she shared with Ulixes made her quite the individual.

He looked forward once more. “Are you planning to move any time soon?”

“Gen, I told you,” the girl said, “that today was going to be a good day.”

He frowned promptly. “I believe it fair to state that such goals are set every day.”

“It’s your birthday, though,” she pleaded, looking back at the brown box in the seat behind them.

“Just another day, Diandah. What age am I going to claim for myself this time?”

“Your ID says 25.”

“It remains merely our diurnal routine—wasted on the slow postal service, at that,” he mused.

“I suppose you’re right,” Diandah sighed as she put the car into gear and began to drive away.

The windshield wipers squawked out each time they passed by the two. Cars whizzed by as they slowly made their way around the city. Diandah slouched over the wheel as an exhausted gesture as Geneses peered out in the sidewalks, intently taking in the physical qualities of each passerby. Eventually Diandah got caught up in the activity, and Geneses monotonously muttered, “Green light, Di.”

“Oh—!” She quickly pressed the gas pedal to catch up with the traffic ahead of her. “Seen anyone yet?”

“Not by our criteria,” Geneses droned. “Let’s just return to the house.”

“This project seems like it'll be much harder than we initially thought,” Diandah commented as she accelerated through the sleepy streets of the interior city.
Edited by Celestial-Fox, Jul 14 2009, 04:08 AM.
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I am interested...
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That's always good, Blake. B]




“I do believe it to be time to give up entirely.”

Diandah pulled over to the side of the road and slammed onto the brakes, causing Geneses to lurch forward. Her eyes watched the wipers mop up the constant rain as she digested his words. “Never,” she concluded. “Never.”

She opened the door and jumped out, jangling the keys in her left hand. Geneses just sat in the car as if the words she had just spoke were still there, a hollow shell of a company that was once there. Diandah just stood out on the sidewalk next to his door, watching him. She, being an impatient one, went inside the nearby building and disappeared while Geneses just watched his invisible breath steal the oxygen from the air in front of him. A car passing by splashed water onto the windshield, and he watched the mass of water trickled down and break into various tributaries. In this, he saw a glimpse of himself—tired, irritable, 25, and nothing to show for it. Except her.

He slowly pushed open the car door and carefully leaned over to get out. His arm wove through the crowd passing by on the sidewalk to create a path for himself to cut through. He looked back at the grey, wet world behind him with his hand on a doorknob and pushed through, away from it.

“Salmon pink is most definitely your color.”

“Pardon?” Geneses whipped his head around the clothing boutique and zeroed in on Layla, manager and fashionista. She was dressed like a seventies clotheshorse and was speaking to a customer, holding out a blouse over the woman’s torso to make a comparison to her skin and further solidify her point.

“Ulysses?” she commented half-mindedly. She never saw either Diandah or Geneses during working hours; they usually went through the back door that was accessed via alleyway.

“I forgot my keys,” he explained quickly and disappeared in the back, climbing the stairs by the thirds. The smell in the shop was absolutely atrocious, and if Geneses stayed for too long, he feared he may pick up a trace of the overwhelming scent of the perfumes. He opened the door in the upper hall and took off his shoes as he entered. Diandah was banging away at a pair of white leather pants with a hammer. Geneses squinted his eyes at her face, bent over her work.

“Do you not already own a pair of leather pants?” he bitterly commented, looking down at the black leather that she was wearing under her white sleeveless jersey top and monochromatically striped undershirt.

Diandah set down the hammer and took off the leather stamp which had her design logo on it. Pulling out the piece of wood she kept in the pocket to protect the interior pocket from being indented, she pulled up the pants and looked at the back pockets. “Yes, Gen, but these are for a client.”

Geneses sat down on their flattened, old couch and watched her finish up her commission work. She folded up the pants and put them in a white cardboard box lined with black tissue paper and placed her business card on top of it: Diamondback Designs — Tomorrow’s Trends Today. She stuck the box on the counter and yanked open the fridge, grabbing some cookie dough. She reached for a spoon in the sink and plopped herself by Geneses on the couch, sitting cross-legged and digging into the plastic store-bought bucket of salmonella. She reached for the remote that was between them and brushed his fingers when he tried to grab it, too. She looked at him and he quickly snatched his hand back.

“You can have it,” she said.

He just sat there, blinking as he took in the sight of her eyes, black like space. Geneses somewhat envied her. She was very attractive and was still short enough to carry on a somewhat normal life. Her mind was so creative, on a completely different level than him. She, undoubtedly, was the provider for them, and without her ownership of the boutique downstairs, they would have nothing. He was completely unworthy of all she was offering him.

Then he snapped back to reality. She was still staring blankly at him, fingers hovering over the remote. “Uh. Ladies first.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.”

She grabbed the remote and leaned it toward the television as she pushed the power button. She flipped through a few of the channels and settled on one of the local news stations, which was covering a story on the grand reopening of a major street after reconstruction. The project director spoke coolly and casually to the camera, explaining how the project was beneficial to commuters. Geneses wasn’t particularly interested in the story, but something caught his eye in the background.

“Di, stop the television.”

“Wha—?”

“Pause it.”

She fumbled for the remote and pressed pause. “What is it?”

“Rewind it a bit, then replay it in slow motion. I believe that I may have found something.”
Edited by Celestial-Fox, Jul 14 2009, 03:58 AM.
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The suspense...it is killing me...
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FEAR NOT. As it is not important. X)




She played the scene back and they both watched the background settings under careful eyes. The people on the sidewalk moved incrementally toward their individual destinations. Geneses pointed to a tall figure that stuck out from the crowd, causing Diandah to gasp. For the both of them the occurrence seemed too good to be true. Then Geneses realized it, indeed, was.

“It’s just a hat.”

Diandah whipped her head around. “Woah, woah, woah, woah. You got me all excited for a hat?” Geneses opened his mouth to retort, but she spoke instead. “I mean, how long have I been hauling you around in search for the others? Really, now? And the one time you have an actual lead, you pull the rug out from under me?” She slouched back in the chair and shook her head up toward the ceiling. “All for a guy in a stupid black top hat and a cheap, unfitted prêt-à-porter blazer.”

“I am putting forth quite the effort to advance our search,” he began stiffly. “However, I do believe that our little adventure is getting vapid. To whom am I desirable? No one. Who would want to be like me? A lonely, pathetic writer that can’t—”

“Maybe if you shared your work with others who would appreciate it. There is all this garbage all around the house, and if you just suck it together and stopped wallowing in your scathing hole of ignorance, you could stand your own!” Diandah’s chest moved up and down as she breathed hard through her row of white, clenched teeth.

“You’re a wonderful euphemist.” He watched her grab the back of the couch and keep it locked in her grip and began to delicately pick at his nails as he whined, “What a shame that someone like you doesn’t appreciate my idiosyncratic ways . . .”

Her nostrils flared, and it became very much evident that she couldn’t handle it anymore. Her palm slapped across his face at full force. “Don’t you talk to me like that,” she said sternly.

Geneses slowly swiveled his head to face her. “And to think an empathically channeled being like you would have some tact. I’m finished here.”

Diandah looked down while holding her face in the same place that she had hit him. She tucked her feet under her and shielded her face with her hair so he wouldn’t see. But she knew very well that he had gone. The sound of the front door closing proved it.
Edited by Celestial-Fox, Jul 14 2009, 11:14 PM.
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ahh!!! I want to know what's going on. And what's the story behind these two?? I want more......XD
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Ahh, good. Hook-and-line! You'll find out soon, because I can only drag you along for so long. What do you think's going on? Guesses? 8D
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honestly, I have no clue.
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It'll come together soon.




Geneses walked briskly down the dark hall and sat down at the top of the stairs. He genuinely hated it when she treated him with such hostility. It sometimes made him wonder if she possessed any power at all. He remembered the first time they met. It was a dark rainy day like this one. Geneses was walking down the street on his way to his apartment after work, and she was on her way back home from a wedding at the chapel. Of course, she was dressed carefully in her monochrome garb, but he was donned plainly in black slacks, a white button-up, and a black vest—a typical busboy uniform. She had a brisk walk; he strode slowly. As she passed, her black lace parasol struck the side of his face, causing him to drop a notebook in his arms into a puddle at his feet.

Geneses smiled as he remembered her eyes. They were black, but wide and genuinely shocked as she quickly ducked down and brushed hands with his as she beat him to the notebook. The letters had already began to smear and bleed, and she apologized with raw sincerity. Awkward as the situation was, he had never interacted with anyone that was as believably sorry as she. Her hand let go of the limp notebook as he took it from her.

“Again, I’m totally sorry, man. This looks super important to you and—”

“It’s fine,” Geneses said offering a weak smile. At first, he was absolutely devastated that five months’ work of lunch break poetry was potentially gone forever in that puddle, but her whole attitude toward the incident (and breathtaking looks) shifted his mood dramatically. “Really.”

She dispensed a business card from a pocket of her white trench coat. Diamondback Designs, the same one she used currently. “I’m Diandah. What can I do to make this up to you?” she asked.

“Ulysses,” he said, taking the card from her, slightly becoming embarrassed over the fact that he himself didn’t have a business card. “Uh, you don’t owe me anything. Seriously.”

She looked at him. “Are you sure? How about coffee? Are you free tomorrow?”

Geneses opened his mouth to protest, but she left no room for him to speak.

“Seven o’ clock at Ferris, okay? I’ll see you there.” Then she walked off, lace umbrella and all.

He stood still as the pedestrian crowd swam by him and watched her go until she disappeared entirely. He looked down at all the sodden pages of his notebook and repeated, “Seven. Tomorrow. Ferris.”

Geneses hated coffee.
Edited by Celestial-Fox, Jul 25 2009, 08:47 PM.
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He hurried home and ripped a sheet of paper out of a tray on his desk. His apartment was exceedingly cramped with papers snowed over almost every open surface of the floor. He reached for his black fountain pen and scribbled the date with the mysterious girl onto the piece of paper. To put it simply, Geneses was thrilled—if only beautiful women could dump his cherished poesies in puddles every week.

At the top of his priority list was to find something to wear. Of course, he couldn’t just show up in his busboy garb. He wanted something nice, but not to stiff. He wasn’t going to show up looking like he tried so hard, even though he was trying. The final verdict was that he would have to go to the store, the only place he hated more than work.

He caught the bus to the mall and made things quick. The preppy girls working the floor in the men’s department were very much intimidating to him, flitting around like bees. He was very skeptical of their ability to help him out—what did the know about men like him, anyway? A girl came up and asked what he was looking for. He was quite specific and simple: a short-sleeved button-up to go under his usual vest.

“Vest?” the store employee, Rachel, repeated, noisily chomping and popping her gum. She looked up at Geneses, who was nearing a foot and a half taller than her. “Hmm. I suppose you could pull it off, if anybody.”

Rachel led him around the men’s department, holding up shirts that would potentially look good on him. After lots of searching, they found that Geneses was just simply too tall to fit anything that looked good in the store. He had never been in desperate immediate need for nice clothes, so the conclusion came in absolute devastation to him. Rachel gave her apologies between the collapsing air bubbles in her gum, but before he knew it, she was off helping someone else. Typical.

He walked out and stood in the now-drizzle. It was dark, but the city lights made it very easy to see where he was going. He made his way in the cool night air to the bus stop and sat on the metal bench encased in a glass box with no front wall. People scooted over for him, afraid, but in simultaneous awe of his giraffe-like structure. Then someone plopped down right next to him, shaking his head of all precipitation.

“Hey, man, why the long face?”

He paused before opening up to the stranger. “Women.”

The middle-aged man seemed to sympathize, nodding along as he absorbed the ambiguous answer, bobbing his head along as he fished for a suitable reply. “Just do your thing. If it works, it works. If you’re puttin’ too much work to it without returns, trash it.” His necktie was adjusted loose and crookedly, and he dug his finger on the underside of it and swiftly jerked it undone. He exhaled and filled the space in between them with the scent of alcohol.

Geneses forced his neck to twist his face toward the man. “I presume you’ve similar complications.”

“Ha. Yeah. But not anymore. It’s a word to live by, I’m tellin’ ya.” The man slouched back, letting his short brown hair drip down the glass behind him. “Yes, yes,” he slurred. “Some great case, this love, yeah? Not a person on the world that know why. . . .”

Some part of Geneses knew that the intoxicated man had nothing to offer him, yet another part of him thought he had a point: if it works, it works. He looked out at the flashing lights of the bus and disregarded the shopping dilemma. Even if he did manage to find anything that evening with gum-smacking Rachel, the girl of his dreams was far out of his league, anyway. He stepped onto the bus and rode silently home, calculating his odds at even a shot at love. He didn’t know what he was doing or how it would work, and after a few minutes of trivial planning, it had seemed as though it was he that had had the drink, not the man at the bus stop.
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I'm still interested
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So am I. When do you find time to write? Because I didn't even know this story was here until yesterday. XD
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Lindsey: Before bed. In school. When I'm not focusing. Lol.
Blake: Lol, thanks. I'm surprised you're still reading; this is an ultra-rough outline for something that will be much more detailed.






Fifteen minutes later, Geneses pushed open the door to his apartment. He was exhausted; what work was done with no accomplishment always was more tiring than hard work with great attainment. With shopping, he should have been aware of that long, long ago, though it always seems to take a moment of exigency to amplify the feeling. He went straight to his room, sidestepping the leaning mounds of stray paper lining the edges of the walls. His fingers touched the edge of the window overlooking the dark, disgustingly littered alleyway below just before he sighed in dissatisfaction and yanked the metal blinds shut. Tall buildings, long legs, bright mind—no matter how hard he tried, he was never above it all. Geneses spread his fingers and reached for the ceiling, and he pulled off his shirt. He took in the last sight of his room, dropped onto the bed, and surrendered his mind to sleep.

The next morning came too quickly, too early. The day as a whole went by in a blur: He woke up and wrote some poetry, deeming it terrible shortly thereafter. Work was ho-hum; he was really not built for the food service industry, considering the fact that restaurants were not generally interested in having a freak show waiter employed, so his responsibilities usually concerned bussing and washing dishes. Geneses never wanted to be a janitor, much less a dish-and-table-janitor, but it’s what paid the bills. Several people commented that he seemed more detached from his job and the everyday workplace more than usual, but he just shrugged them off.

Seven finally came, and he was sitting at Ferris. Geneses had changed into jeans and had rolled up the sleeves of his button-up, but was still halfway in work clothes. At least he had an excuse.

“Hi, Ulysses.”

He looked up from the mosaic on the table and met her eyes, smiling. “Hello.” He paused for a moment to pretend to scrape the interior of his skull for her name. “Diandah, right?”

“Yeah, you got it. How’d you . . ?”

“I’ve got a good memory,” he laughed. “Sit down.”

She lowered herself onto a seat and sat across from him, setting her coffee down before her. “Well. Ulysses, that is very impressive. Most people can’t even say my name right. Then to remember it? Forget it. You can call me Di, though.”

“Hmm. Di. Okay.” Geneses smirked. “I know you’ll think I’m absolutely absurd, but Ulysses isn’t my name.” He nervously met her eyes again.

She set her coffee down. “No way. Ulysses is actually short for something?”

Geneses beamed and snickered, “Nooo.”

“I’m listening.”

“My name’s Geneses. Geneses Erickson. I write under the name Ulysses Erickson, and usually tell people to call me that. I learned quickly when I was a kid that Geneses wasn’t the greatest name around. That, and Ulysses, though sounding similar, is a little more common.”

“Ugh,” Diandah spat out, rolling her eyes. “I know exactly what you mean.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You do?”

“You can’t lie and tell me that you’ve met another person named Diandah, have you?”

“Depends,” Geneses started. “How do you spell it?”

“Oh, shut up,” she said, laughing along with him as she took off her coffee sleeve. She pulled out a pen and wrote it down: D-I-A-N-D-A-H. “Dee-awn-duh,” she phonated, pointing to each corresponding group of letters.

Geneses pulled the pen from her fingers and wrote his directly above hers in a blocky print—seven letters, upside down from her letters.

She dug into the pocket of her jacket and produced a second pen. He remembered the way Diandah looked at him at that moment. Her eyes were gentle and her lashes long. She spun the sleeve around on the table so that his name was right-side-up for her, and vice versa for him. Her hand wrote the four digits of her phone number under each of his seven letters. He took his pen and did the same underneath her name.

Her lips curled up into a grin and she reached over beside her chair. “I’m so sorry about yesterday. I’m sure you’re prolly thinking that I’m just another jerkish city girl mowing over anyone in my way, but I could tell that the book was something you really cared about.” She placed a brand-new notebook with some sort of animal skin cover and slid it across the table toward him. “This is for you. Moleskin.”

“I can’t—”

“You can. Please. I’ll feel terrible if you don’t.”

“Thank you,” he said, looking down at his through his glasses. He stopped. “Moleskin?”

Diandah grinned and nodded. “I have one and love it. Figured that I’d bother to do the same for you. It’s the least I can do.”

Admittedly, Geneses had a difficult time accepting her gift, but came to terms with it after the had started talking. Di was 24 at the time and had finished design school three years before. Her mother was a freelance painter, and her dad was a doctor. She wasn’t really one for academia, so she took the creative route. She had a sister, dead. She came to the city when she was 18 to get out of the close-knit country and to go to school.

After introductory things on both of their behalves, they talked about anything and everything for hours. It neared 10:00, and Diandah had to get going. She opened the front cover of the notebook she had given him and slid the coffee sleeve with her number on it inside. “Call me.”

They walked outside, and she hailed a taxi. They said their goodbyes, and he watched the vehicle drive off. To be frank, Geneses almost died inside, thinking about her. He looked down at the coffee sleeve poking out the top edge of his notebook.



“Pathetic.”

He jerked his head back and saw Diandah standing right behind him.

“Come back inside, Gen.”

“What. You’ll feel terrible if I don’t?”

“Don’t manipulate me.”

“Get out of my head.”

“You know that’s not how it works,” she reinforced, sitting beside him and looking up at the sky beyond the grey cityscape. “I got you something,” she added, putting the box that Geneses had gotten from the post office on his lap.

“Why did you make me get this myself?”

“I’m a jerk,” Diandah said, rolling her eyes. “Besides, getting outside every once in a while wouldn’t hurt you.”

His hands pried off the packaging tape and opened up the flaps of the cardboard box. He pulled the object out of the pastel-colored Styrofoam peanuts. “Oh. Wow,” he said, marveling at the book.

Diandah could sense the appreciation radiating out of him like an odor.

Lexical Lattices: Skyscrapers, Art. I’ve been most interested in reading this.”

She smiled. “Funny title.”

“I do agree. But thank you.”

She hugged him briefly, knowing that he preferred not to be touched. “Happy birthday.”

He stood up and helped her to her feet. They had turned to walk back into the apartment, but a loud shout split the murmur of city ambience. Geneses turned quickly and leapt down the stairs by the pairs. It was Layla in the shop.

Diandah skidded around the corner behind Geneses and slipped between the back door which he had quickly flung open. “What is going on?” she yelled into the white room, clothing absorbing her every echo.
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