Snippet #2523723

Well, at least his tribulations managed to provoke what looked like a sincere smile from the forbidding young bassist-- that was, what, the second one Cormac had succeeded in evoking, through one method or another (well, primarily through the method of making a massive fool of himself)? Surely an accomplishment of this magnitude could not be boasted by anybody short of such historical figures as Subutai, who had conquered thirty two nations and had once crushed two entire sovereign empires simultaneously, or Queen Tomyris, who reacted to the efforts of Cyrus the Great, liege of what was then the world's greatest military power, to conquer her realm by beating the fuck outta his troops, chopping off his head, stuffing it into a wineskin full of human blood, and then crucifying his carcass, because seriously, fuck Cyrus the Great.

... he actually wasn't sure where he'd been going with this. Honestly he was just impressed with himself for retaining that much of Izzie's drunken history lessons.

Oh yeah! Suffice to say, he felt pretty damn proud of himself for having managed again to elicit such an open expression from Kodie Toivonen, and so, whether or not he was conscious of it, the drummer adopted something of a precocious swagger. Of course, he didn't have a whole lot to do here-- outside of a handful of exceptions (King Crimson, Jethro Tull, a bit of Pink Floyd, the like) progressive rock and metal, perhaps ironically, wasn't much his sorta thing, unless there was death metal involved; as far as metal was concerned, death metal was certainly a passion, and he admitted something of a penchant for thrash and even a smattering of grind, but the less extreme variants had yet to quite connect with him. He sorta just milled about, glancing over the racks and vaguely noting the occasional interesting name, until Craig posed his quandary.

Something to do after this... Cormy's brow furrowed. "Well..." he began slowly. "There's that one festival goin' on that we saw Izzie at. That looked like fun." An idea struck him, and he hastily added, "Also, there's that new X-men movie that just came out. I mean, I dunno how enthusiastic you two are gonna be about that, unless I'm only just now going to discover you're both diehard Marvel fans, but that could be cool. Barring that..." He shrugged his shoulders, and a vivid expression came over his mien. "I mean, it's New York City, man!" He wheeled around on his heel, pointing off sensationally toward the wide windows that dominated the far wall of the record store, see-through portals to the city life just beyond their bounds. "One need but step a foot outside the sanctity of these four walls, turn in any one direction, and begin walking, and one is simply bound to stumble upon something exciting."

He paused suddenly, and frowned visibly. "I mean, that something might be a mugging, but shit, ain't that sorta unpredictability just the thing that gives this city its flavour?"

... okay, maybe not.






Chris appeared absolutely incapable of comprehending that somebody could not be so enlightened as he was as to the minutiae of Star Wars and Ring of the Lords-- and hell, maybe he had a case for it. Lestari supposed this was the sorta shit that was pretty much ubiquitous in modern globalised society; she'd known fuck all about Star Wars up until a couple days back, but she had certainly heard the 'Luke, I am your father' thing long before she'd ever even felt the vaguest twinge of interest in watching the films. But most of the other shit... yeah, that was completely lost on her.

Maybe it could be attributed to the fact that as a kid, she'd never really... well, never really done much with anybody else. Until the age of fourteen the extent of her interactions with other people, in particular her peers, was punching them until they fucked off and stopped making fun of her voicelessness, or silently forcing herself to go through the motions where interaction was unavoidable-- shopping, or turning assignments into her instructors, the like. It wasn't until the age of fourteen that any of that had changed, and even then, it wasn't like she'd become some social dynamo with a hundred thousand friends she could pick up on cultural memes from. She'd had exactly one friend, and she and Kaede... A hint of a rare frown tugged at her thin lips. Now that she thought of it, she and Kaede had never done anything much together but play and listen to music. Even when Lestari had been just fourteen years old, she remembered how they would spend hours on end together, just relentlessly blazing through every damn song they knew, and learning more on top of that-- and that hadn't changed much after they'd begun dating. They'd never curled up together in bed to watch a movie, and neither of them had ever really been much for the whole video game thing-- it'd just been music, day in and day out. They'd made better bandmates than lovers.

In fact, when she thought about it that way...

One could always count on Chris's absolute cluelessness to avert a delve into the sort of introspection that only ever resulted in dejection and cliched, action-hero style brooding. It was his baffled exclamation of "Wait, Alex is bi?" that stirred Lestari from her brief funk, and she only had to half-force the smirk that came upon her lips. Or pansexual, she reminded him. Or polysexual. Or asexual. Or of divergent romantic and sexual orientation. Or hell, maybe she's an ally. Y'know, straight but not narrow and all that shit. Of course, Lestari was pretty sure she had good reason to suspect that Alex definitely had some degree of sexual inclination towards women-- there was just no faking what had happened only ten or fifteen minutes ago-- but sexuality was a bizarre construct, and Alex's biological child didn't necessarily make anything clear. After all, Lestari knew plenty of asexual folks who'd decided to bear children for reasons of their own; for all anybody knew, Alex coulda been homoromantic or panromantic but strictly homosexual, which was, upon second consideration, a pretty valid reason for why her marriage might have collapsed...

But that was none of Lestari's business, and she was pretty sure attempting to explain the oddities of human sexual and romantic orientation to Christopher Addams would at the best of times have only confused the poor guy even more. She'd encountered plenty of bigots in her time in the metal scene, here or back in South Carolina, who'd tried to give her shit because she was lesbian, and as long as the people she was playing with now weren't of that fetid ilk, their knowledge of LGBT issues otherwise wasn't a big deal to her. So she dropped that matter, and instead answered Chris's question. Movie indeed. The deadpan was almost tangible on the paper.