Information

Hellion has a minion!

Pemm the Ears

Hellion

The

Golden Tigrean
Owner:

Age: 5 years, 7 months, 3 weeks

Born: October 28th, 2007

Adopted: 5 years, 7 months, 3 weeks ago (Legacy)

Adopted: October 28th, 2007 (Legacy)

Pet Spotlight Winner
July 5th, 2012

Statistics

Level: 415
Strength: 1,038
Defense: 1,030
Speed: 1,030
Health: 1,032
HP: 1,032/1,032
Intelligence: 333
Books Read: 333
Food Eaten: 15
Job: Stock Worker

TIGREAN, GOLDEN,
ANOTHER NONSENSE PET BY CORGI

tktktktk go skinny tined feet on a floor that sounds like sheetmetal under the blue grass. The noise drops off and varies: you blink and she's changed, morphed from a regular Jack Skellington to a hulking two-toed animal, gone from pale wheat-yellow to a sheen of gold. You suspect nothing about this creature stays the same for long.

Having stopped before your path, the thing appraises you with wide and hysteric eyes. Her voice is wheezy and shaky-hoarse as if from screeching, too long and too often, and she speaks softly with words that rattle around your ears at the same frequency as pennies in a tin can. "It's not often I have visitors!"

No, you imagine—that's not a hard stretch of the imagination. It is fairly seldom one comes across a place that feels like a synesthesiac's fever dream: color runs rampant in otherwordly plant life, and creatures without faces watch you from afar. Far-off cities with slanted, ruined buildings blink bleary lights.

You're not even entirely sure how you got here, actually, and that question grows larger with each ticking second (sounded off by a faraway Big Ben, shaped like a crow). Time seems to pass in snapshots—in still frames—in the panels of a comic book, you might even say, in a way that borders on the metanarrative.

The Hellion, as she introduced herself, has a smile that could dwarf chasms.

"I think you are quite lost."

You concur. Her grin, if possible, grows wider.

"Oh, good."

"So?" she asks, after treating you to something that might have been tea but had the consistency of spit. It had tasted like the best peppermint, sharp and strong and cool. You shrug your shoulders at her, and she somehow scowls without losing her smile. She has not lost it since you began following her. "That's no answer."

The world has changed as you move. What was blue and half-dreaming, half-nightmare has twisted itself as the Hellion talks, her thoughts meandering haphazardly. Glass trees sprang up from the cracks. Beautiful, twisted metal structures mimic landscape, dripping rainbow oil. Vivid color still douses everything in sight, and you can feel passion thrumming in the air like hummingbirds.

You reply that she didn't really ask a question, and she laughs hysterically in that hissing, broken voice. She does this so often you have already begun to tune it out, instead watching her tail.

It is like a snake, almost alive, and it changes as often as the rest of her—that is, any time you aren't looking. The Hellion is like a series of photographs, you think, or the drawing of something that has been described to a dozen different people who each drew it in their own way. The Hellion, as portrayed by the artist. Kind of a neat idea and whoops she's just knocked you down to the ground. It's wet, and the grass feels like vinyl.

You missed the actual question, apparently. She looms over you, finally—legitimately—frowning. Her mouth looks like a stitched-over wound leading up to her eyes.

"Aren't you scared?" she asks, pleadingly. And as you consider the question, you realize you aren't.

Sure, you've just had mutant-tea with the boy child of the Cheshire Cat and a manticore, but for all her strange appearance and teeth and pointy edges, the Hellion isn't terribly frightening. You tell her as much as you sit up, and her frown only deepens. She looks away. The world around you desaturates, the life there faltering.

"No one ever is."

Her words sound like a stuttering winter wind. So suddenly that it does startle you, just a little, she jerks her head back around. "Why? Why is that, aren't I frightening? Aren't I big and terrible and—"

From nowhere an irritable voice snaps at her to knock it off, Hellion, good god. The Hellion's huge head lurches backward, and every single one of her teeth is suddenly visible in a huge, manic grin. Beyond you both stands what looks like a dog.

"Pemm, tell me I'm scary."

"Terrifying."

The dog is orange, walks on two legs, doesn't stand higher than your waist and has ears fit to make the Hellion jealous. Around her, too, the world has altered itself; the path she has walked marks its way in endlessly repeating checkerboard patterns, cutting a meandering swathe through the landscape.

At her words, the Hellion pouts. Very effectively. You didn't know something so large and monstrous could pout like that. "You're just saying that."

"Isn't that what you asked?" Pemm questions, and the Hellion's smile drifts. The dog-beasty next addresses you. "She gave you tea, didn't she?" You nod. "She always brings out the tea when she's feeling depressed. Hellion!" Little fingers snap, and the Hellion arches her scorpion tail as if struck. "Quit making rips in space-time so you can have strangers come feed your ego."

The Hellion hisses at her, lackluster. Her ears droop comically as Pemm rubs her head, the loud black stripes shifting in form with every ruffle of the fur.

The wind smells like lilacs, and from your new vantage point on a high stark tree with leaves like stained glass you can see them.

Hellion has curled up in a ball of pure, distilled existential crisis, barbed wire stubbornly curled around her gaping wound of a mouth. This maleable reality drank in her gloom and she seems to lay in a tar-pit, slowly sucking her under the surface of the world. The faithful dog pats the huge paws that flicker in and out of shape going there, there, telling her whatever it is she needs to hear to bring her color back.

You drink your peppermint-spit tea and watch the two of them. Theirs is a dance that is old and comfortable to themselves, constantly replayed, that much is clear.

You hang your teacup on a glass branch. No one notices as you quietly disappear—not even the tree.

The Hellion is like [...] the drawing of something that has been described to a dozen different people who each drew it
in their own way.

[x] - Sheana
[x] -
[x] - Crowfoot
[x] - overlay edit,
[x] -
[x] - ???
[x] - Nef
more?

Hellion has a minion!

Pemm the Ears

Lesson One:
NO MAN IS ALONE.

Within all of us are a thousand million beautiful, stupid, amazing worlds, and they whisper among themselves in the dark lamplight of the mind. The hearts of a hundred thousand creatures beat in each of these worlds, all breathing quietly, waiting, patient, to be found.

Some are found. Others claw their way out.

THE HELLION

She (for, at least, we think it is a she, most of the time) ripped her way through the collective unconscious with teeth and more teeth, dragging behind her the weight of silly teenage heartbreak and insane expectations and crushing loneliness. Drooling vitriol and a naïve smile, she maimed and reshaped herself with every new thought, never perfect enough! never happy enough!

A mutilation of the positive, the Hellion's smile was stitched in place; her scorpion tail held no venom, for it was all contained in the vicious, seething words that crawled up her throat with hysteric emotion. She was bloated with rage and emaciated from a sewn mouth—had this beast ever been a being of good, it was not recognizable.

PEMM

Nothing but a ghost, at first, Pemm was born of Hellion's grinning shadow as it dyed the ruins she left behind black. Stripped of the pure, raw energy that the Hellion possessed, Pemm focused on her humanity instead: the arts, the social game, everything the raging beast shied from and could not handle.

The opposite of her begetter, Pemm was quiet and quietly opinionated, and staunchly opposed the Hellion's wild and unchecked displays of emotion. Canid and cartoony, with a fair measure of wit and more rationale and pragmatism than is strictly healthy, Pemm was not as easily turned aside as the others—the ones the Hellion had crushed as they crawled up out of the cracks she left behind.

NO MAN IS A UNIFIED CREATION.

There is the you that is confident, and the you that shrinks and shirks and fears from whatever it is you may be afraid of. There is the you that is busy and productive, and the you that is lazy and wants nothing more than to be catered to. There are these and a dozen more in us all, all quietly shuffling for a fore position. Most are unaware that they are no cohesive whole; those that are seldom give it thought. These are the things that crawl from inside you to make up who you are.

We may call these things facets or personas or they simply may have no name at all. They may look like nothing, or like you, or like monstrosities, and these monstrosities are living too, with fears and hopes and loves, and in need of a home.

YIN & YANG

Finding one another, things changed.

The Hellion found she could not eat this small, loud thing, with her logic and her words. Pemm found she could not stifle the surging torrent of emotion that dictated the monster's actions. They hated one another, warring for control over the endlessly mutable landscape of Mind.

And then there was one stalemate too many. They both threw in the glove at the same time, fed up, and it was then they began to examine one another. Pemm had order and calm that the beast lacked; in turn, Hellion ate the world and vomited lava, reveling in passion that the dog had forgotten.

Together they made a pact. Together they are a whole, a foil to each other's eccentricities, a pair of complete morons in a big, wide world. They would watch for one another when the emotions run too hot and too fierce, and when the status quo roars and looms and demands respect it does not deserve.

(And, too, they secretly swore to never give up that back-and-forth, that vicious infighting, for what are soul sisters without a few teeth?)

So here they stand: Pemm and the Hellion.

Take them as you will.