The net beneath her wobbles as she tries to avoid flailing. She presses with her toes to flatten herself as close to the pit wall as she can and avoid being flung, thrashing, on top of Isaac. He was cute and all, and damnedly funny, and charming, and great, but they’d just met and it didn’t seem like the proper time to really be falling all over him. She wasn’t super skilled in the ‘tact’ column but she at least had the feeling it was not the time for that.

Maybe later.

Maybe.

She thought she caught a flash of silver fur over the top of their little pitfall but she might have been seeing the sun filtering through the leaves. Disasters, Isaac called them, and he was right.

“Maybe it only counts as a warnable offense if you’re going to die from it,” she mused, fingers gripping into the netting to hold her in place. She fell quiet as she watched Isaac navigate the net and maneuvering Watson into place. He looked like the stereotypical up, periscope on a submarine in a funny movie. She couldn’t help but laugh.

“I-- I wanted to write movies,” she said, once she’d gotten ahold of herself. “Write, produce, direct… act a little, but I don’t really have the charisma for it.” She shrugged-- as much as she could whilst still holding onto the net. “But I was very, very poor, and trade schools were basically paying for people to go to them.”

She had the vague notion that she could get her Gengar to lift them out of the pit but it was kind of comfy. For now.

Isaac Merlo

☉

“I am too,” Cyg said, pushing herself up to a shaky stand with a grunt, “unfortunately.” Between weird haunted houses and swarms of angry Tentacool and ghosts and demons and everything else she’d been through in the last few months, she was amazed she hadn’t gotten offed. Well, Felix had been there to pull her through a lot of it. Unfortunately, again.

She windmilled her arms to find balance and leaned forward, pressing the net to the wall. “I’d say that you just don’t have enough sense to stop talking,” she said, shooting him a grin over her shoulder.

She grunted noncommittally when he talked about dream-chasing. She was still looking for anything on the side of the pit that may help her climb up and out. “Me, and a thousand other people,” she said, letting the subject drop when it was clear he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. At least, he backpedaled out of it fast enough.

When she couldn’t find anything to use to climb out and she figured she’d pointed her ass in Isaac’s direction enough-- which she didn’t realize she was doing until well past the point of no return-- she sighed and slid a Pokeball off her belt. With a hup she tossed it up, and Elisabet burst out in a flash of light.

“Hi, honey,” Cyg called up to her Gengar, who was floating confusedly over the pit, toes dangling in the air (she’d been a haunter so long she wasn’t used to having feet). “Can you help us out?” Her big, Gengar face split into a big, tonguey grin, and she hovered down to wrap an arm around Cyg’s waist, holding out her other hand to Isaac.

Isaac Merlo

☉

Cyg looked at him, curious. Was she really about to bare her artistic soul to this guy-- this stranger, charming though he was? Who else had she told about her dark and nefarious past as a horror film writer? Elisa, Ana, Mars… okay, quite a few people. What was one more? Especially when it didn’t matter?

“Some scripts, mostly horror ones,” she confessed, as Elisabet wrapped her cold fingers securely around Isaac’s hand and began to lift them out of the pit. “Some screenplays, some-- some short stories that are supposed to turn into screenplays, eventually. When I have time.” She never got around to recording or filming or casting or any of the actual important steps because, until recently, she hadn’t had the time, or courage, or brain cells remaining after a long day of work.

Cyg jumped at the voice, stumbling forward out of Elisabet’s hold with a gasp, then clapping a hand to her chest and laughing. “Oh, god, I thought you were an actual threat. Holy shit.” All these emotion had somehow distracted her from how horrible and weird real life was!

Isaac Merlo

☉

She watched Isaac’s face go off light a lightbulb and wonders, with a small, secret smile of her own, how he’s going to play this one off, because he’s been doing a poor job of deflecting. She doesn’t need to pry to be able to tell that he’s talking about himself, no matter how many loops he throws into his stories. It’s funny, honestly, like something out of a sitcom.

“Eh, I guess,” she says, shrugging. “I’d think it was romance. I think horror is a lot harder to do well. Anyone can write a story about a serial killer and throw a bunch of blood and torture into it to make it ‘scary’. I don’t want that, though. I don’t want Eli Roth horror.” She can’t help the eye roll that shakes her body to the core, though she’s still smiling.

She does have to dial it back though because she can go hard in the paint about the subject of what constitutes good horror and she doesn't want to alienate her new friend so soon. There will be time for that in... well, in time.

“Misfits like us, huh?”

She felt like the protagonistic foil in a shounen anime-- or a veritable Bob Belcher. “You know it’s okay to, like, like things, right?” she asks, tone suggestive, smile big.

Then her attention was drawn back to the freak in the suit and she rolled her eyes.

“I take it back,” she said, shaking her head, “I was going to say cringe is dead, but it is clearly not.” Beside her, Elisabet laughs, small, quiet hisses that set her purple body to shaking.

Isaac Merlo

☉

For anyone who wasn’t a cinephile, or if they had good taste in movies, Eli Roth is a big, bloody, terrible director-- part of the Splat Pack, so named for their penchant for violence and gore. He never saw a mental illness he couldn’t turn into a horrible movie.

At least, in our world.

Isaac continues to hem and haw and dance around the subject. A little deflection there, a twist and a bit of well-placed difference here, and wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, you have a boy who has never liked anything in his life, cause he’s so cool.

Okay, Dave.

“They’re just movies, Isaac,” Cyg says, waving away the Absol Mascot with a dismissive hand. “You can want to be an actor. Or a writer, or director, or whatever shoes your horse.”

She actually hid her head in her hands as Absolman dropped to his hands and knees to show them what he was capable of.

“Oh, god. Oh, dear god, why?” she moaned, fingertips dragging at the skin of her cheeks. It turned into a delirious sort of giggling laughter that she couldn’t quite get to quit.

“Oh, my god. That’s great. Haaah.” She fanned her face as tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. “Look, I don’t think we’re going to see an Absol today. Not with--” she gestured at the pit-- “and us being, you know, us.” She wiped at a teardrop rolling over her cheek. “Let’s head back to civilization and I’ll buy you a beer to make up for it.”

Isaac Merlo

☉