2020-07-01 The Girl and The Gremlin
The Girl and The Gremlin
Location: Foreboding Jacobean
Date and Time: July 1, 2020 7:23 pm
Summary: Jinny cleans up while something observes
Mood Music: Jerry Goldsmith - "Gremlins (Theme Song)"
The party was over.
The ballroom was quiet.
There were no guests that needed to collect coats, or to bid farewell to, or to call a cab for drinking too much to drive safely home. There were no staff to send home, no DJ to thank for their service, no catering to clean up. The room was mostly empty.
The lights, once throbbing and pulsing with life, were off, their housings still warm from dancing along with the music through the night, their metallic exteriors almost glowing from the residual heat. The air conditioner had been running at full blast for the entire evening to keep the temperature comfortable and only now was starting to make headway from the heat put off from the lights. Yes, it was taxed, but it was still doing its job. The sound system was quiet, too, the barest of mechanical hisses coming from the speaker as electrons danced hither and yon between mixing board and subwoofer, providing an underscore to the one moving thing there. A woman, dressed in shorts and a bra, covered in paint, was walking towards the main power in her stocking feet, flicking the orange switch to dark and then pulling the plug from the wall entirely. For the first time in many hours, the house was quiet. Jinny turns, running a hand through sweat-soaked hair as she takes in the scene. Her gaze transitions from the wall of art produced in a manic phase to a disco beat just a few hours prior to Luu. There, in the middle of the floor, is the hostess of the evening, laying in a heap in the middle of the ballroom where she collapsed, a miasma of exhaustion palatable even from across the room.
There was a lot that needed to be done to get the house in order, but right now there were important steps that must be taken care of in the event Luu was to wake up with anything less than a little bit of pain. In her time away from the dance floor, Jinny tried to get an idea of the layout of the place and the location of things she may need. Carrying Luu is an option but if it were possible to find a cart of some kind, it’d be much easier to use that to move the unconscious dead weight around. Little things were found; the chair lift on the back staircase that led to the second floor and a wheelchair in an out-of-the-way room full of bolts of cloth. After carefully moving the half-broken mannequin, Jinny went into the ballroom and started making a plan to collect the collapsed Luu.
In order: Upstairs for a quick Bath, then Bed. An IV would probably help with the dehydration, but without any talent in medicine, that might not be the best plan at the moment.
People who collect weird things tend to die alone; a realization Luu had after returning from one of numerous estate sales with a fresh haul of mundanely paranormal treasures. Shortly after this realization, she had another one, that she herself collects weird things. The sincere, but kitschy artifacts of UFO cults, The North American Bigfoot Society, ghost hunters, psychic charlatans, emerging religions, and things of that ilk were an obsession to her, even if she knew better than to believe in them. There of course is also her massive wardrobe and shoe collection, but that really goes without saying.
It was a realization that stuck with her and would crop up from time-to-time. It’s not that she feared death or felt lonely in her day-to-day life, but still, this idea had decided to make its home somewhere in the back of her mind. These thoughts were helped much by the fact that she now lives alone in a large and slightly spooky house, or the way her Word seemed destined to sabotage her love life. Being an only child of distant parents did not make her accustomed to this idea, but rather all the more acutely aware.
What Luu has not yet realized is that she is very wrong about all of this, in a variety of ways. Sometimes among those weird collections, there’s sometimes even something stranger. Unbeknownst to Luu, one of those recent hauls contained something unexpected, and she no longer lives alone.
The night’s activities had confused and agitated her new housemate. The loud music made it so neither of the women could hear it’s frantic skittering across the house; the Disco lighting made it so they never saw just how close it was at times. Now that everything has settled down around the house, it stays still, keeping its eyes on Jinny.
With the wheelchair’s hard rubber wheels locked into position on the polished ballroom floor and several bath towels collected to drape over the vomit on the floor, it was now Jinny’s duty to get Luu off the floor and somewhere more comfortable. Really, she’s too tired to even register the sensation of being watched. Jinny crouches and bends down, her hands slipping beneath Luu’s arms and around her back, pulling and positioning her in a slumped kneeling position between Jinny’s legs. It’s only a matter of Jinny flexing her thighs and grunting as she stands. “Up we go…” she grumbles, locking her knees, turning a half turn, and then lowering Luu into the wheelchair. The roller skates - Luu’s wonder - are left on for now, the foot pads of the wheelchair coming down with a squeak and Luu’s feet put on top of them.
“Told you I’d catch you, Luu.” Jinny says softly, brushing the unconscious woman’s cheek with paint-stained fingertips, letting off the brakes and heading through the house to the back staircase, her stocking feet quiet, the wheelchair’s squeaky right front wheel loud on the floor as they go.
The staircase requires a little bit of thinking, an undignified transfer of Luu from one seat to the other before she’s buckled in, and the wheelchair carried upstairs while the power lift chair does its thing. A leftover from when the previous owner was here, the fact that it’s still here and works is a testament to the amount of work it’ll take to get the house situated properly. It does get stuck about halfway, but it takes a little jiggling of the up and down buttons for it to make it past the hump in the middle to the top landing where Jinny and the wheelchair await. Down the hall, past the bedrooms where Luu’s shoe collection lives, past the bedrooms where her fashion collection is gathered, to the master bedroom and bathroom where, thankfully, the stall shower is exactly where Jinny hoped it to was. A bath would definitely work better in this regard but, with Luu being out cold, putting her in water where she could potentially slip under is not something that Jinny wants to do. So, with a little bit of ceremony, Jinny turns on the shower, makes sure it’s nice and comfortable, and then sighs as she looks to Luu. “This is not the way I was hoping to see you naked.” Jinny says with a sad little smile, brushing one hand through her hair before she steps in and tenderly undresses the sleeping woman, still in the wheelchair. The basketball jersey, shorts, and socks get tossed in a pile near what she hopes is the laundry basket and the skates are carefully unlaced and slipped off almost certainly bruised, swollen feet, the socks unrolled and tossed to join the laundry, the skates set aside on the counter to be dealt with later.
Fully dressed, Jinny rolls the wheelchair into the shower and steps in behind, the warm water washing away multiple hours of exertion, paint splatters, and the like from Luu’s bare body. She’s careful and efficient, starting from Luu’s rainbow-colored hair (using the white bottle on the shelf that she was told was Luu’s secret to keeping hair healthy through multiple colors) and working her way down, the coconut-scented soap and a soft washcloth combining to cleanse every bit of grime away. She’s inevitably leaving out several dozen steps in Luu’s bathing regiment, but beggars really can’t be choosers and Jinny is really, really trying to not explore too terribly much, no matter how much she wants to. After a few minutes Luu is mostly clean and, with a long spray of water to get all the soap off the seat of the chair, Luu is rolled out of the shower and dried off, covered with a towel, and pushed into the bedroom.
Jinny will get her shower once Luu’s in bed.
A quick search of the drawers finds a simple pair of boxers - cute ones, of course - and once Luu’s been moved….okay, dumped, really...on the bed, the boxers are pulled on and the woman is tucked in. And only then, once Luu’s in bed, does Jinny relax, just a little, slumped on the carpet next to the bed, arms crossed at the wrist on bent knees, head slightly down, her back flat against the nightstand.
“Holy crap, what a day…” she murmurs, letting out a soft sigh.
Having exhausted every ounce of energy in her body and then some, Luu sleeps soundly in her bed. The sound of the running shower is far quieter than the pounding Disco beat that had earlier engulfed Winters Retreat, but it still manages to muffle some of the activities in the house. The quiet skittering, the door to the bathroom slowly opening, all of this goes unnoticed by the woman enjoying a well earned hot shower.
For hours, it had observed Luu and Jinny skating around the house in Muse inspired manic energy. It had never seen roller skates before, but it quickly began to understand their strange properties, and the enjoyment they seemed to provide. It doesn’t need both of them, it’s simply not that large. After a few missteps, it understands how to work the strange device. No longer needing to skitter, it makes its way out of the restroom gliding on the ROCKET BUNNY, moments before the shower is turned off.
If one thing can be said about Luu’s house that’s factually correct, aside from the whole Mummy business, is that her showers are amazing. This would be the second time Jinny has experienced them - the first after her poorly-timed two drink session at the bar that ended with a mannequin shattered into shards and several traffic cones being placed on statues’ heads around the city, and now now. After getting Luu into bed, Jinny had to force herself to get up before her muscles started locking up from the strain of a sixteen hour day that included six hours of skate dancing. Now she found herself in the shower, her clothes discarded on the floor along with her skates, the massaging showerhead sending streams of water to pound against her shoulders, the hiss of the water sending her to her own little meditative spot.
The white bottle was used sparingly, Jinny lathering her hair, along with the body wash and the washcloth being used to scrub away the paint from the evening’s artistry, rinsing it all down the drain to be recycled and reused somewhere else in the city. She turned the water off and looked around for a towel, wrinkling her nose when she remembered that she didn’t grab one coming in. Dripping wet and wringing out her hair, a very naked Jinny steps out of the shower, hits the tile where a puddle of water had collected; a problem normally prevented by the bathmat that was shuffled out of the way for some reason.
One step out of the shower and something is definitely wrong. The world starts moving in a way that it really shouldn’t, and Jinny’s attention whirls. /Her foot slipped out from under her, sending her hurtling face-first to the floor. She’s falling - that much she registers - but it happened so fast and she’s so tired that there’s not much she can do about it. There is an attempt to lift her arms to cushion her fall, but she can’t get them up fast enough. Now she knows what those people who fall and can’t get up go through.
Her last thought before she hits the floor? “Huh...My skate’s gone.”
- THUD*
Darkness.
Another loud noise, but the repetition does not follow, the Disco has not returned. Sliding across the floor in the ROCKET BUNNY it makes its way back to the bathroom to investigate. The door opens a little bit more to reveal Jinny, naked and unconscious on the bathroom floor. It’s very observant, and one thing that’s become clear to it in short order is that they belong together. It knows what must be done.
It grasps the flesh and begins to pull. It puts its plan into motion, inch by inch. Jinny’s unconscious body begins to be dragged across the bathroom tiles. Slowly it maneuvers her through the door, begin to take her away. Across the hall it’s unnatural movements continue, drawing her closer and closer to the destination it has chosen for her.
Another door is opened, another body already there. Soon, soon, getting closer, almost there. It begins to struggle, yanking, pushing, doing whatever it takes, but it simply is not enough. Sliding away in the ROCKET BUNNY, it gives up on it’s task. Jinny’s body is left behind, slumped against the bed on which Luu soundly sleeps.
