Vox gasps, the sound like a bubble popping inside a dial-up modem, rich with static and reverence.
The horror that had gleefully unleashed rubber chaos on an entire city turns, slowly, to Noe. His grin is a ripple of shifting shapes; his many mouths twitch with words that never make it past his lips. For a moment, it seems like he might burst: from delight, from shame, from something unnameable that coils in the invisible place where his heart might be.
Her words echo in him, vibrate through his jelly-like bones. Arguments rise—But I offered prizes! I built a stairway! I made everything colourful!—only to drop like anchors, one by one, into the silences between his anatomically placed ribs.
”Where we came from...” he begins, quiet now, quieter than anyone has likely heard him, ”asking was considered rude.”
One of his eyes slides sideways. Another turns inside out, blinking through misty static. A sigh—wistful, synthetic, sad—threads through his frame.
”I’ve been trying to learn Caidoian customs,” he admits. ”But they are so very strange and so very slippery. There are so many rules, and they change depending on who’s looking, and I—“
He cuts himself off.
Instead, one of his longer tentacles unfurls—the motion as gentle as wind through kelp— and in it rests a single, shimmering bouncy ball. Not like the others. This one is warm to the touch, humming faintly with a strange heartbeat. On its surface, in childlike scrawl, is a single word:
"Yes?"
Vox tilts his head, a dozen hopeful expressions flickering across his not-quite-face.
”Do you want to be my friend?”
The horror that had gleefully unleashed rubber chaos on an entire city turns, slowly, to Noe. His grin is a ripple of shifting shapes; his many mouths twitch with words that never make it past his lips. For a moment, it seems like he might burst: from delight, from shame, from something unnameable that coils in the invisible place where his heart might be.
Her words echo in him, vibrate through his jelly-like bones. Arguments rise—But I offered prizes! I built a stairway! I made everything colourful!—only to drop like anchors, one by one, into the silences between his anatomically placed ribs.
”Where we came from...” he begins, quiet now, quieter than anyone has likely heard him, ”asking was considered rude.”
One of his eyes slides sideways. Another turns inside out, blinking through misty static. A sigh—wistful, synthetic, sad—threads through his frame.
”I’ve been trying to learn Caidoian customs,” he admits. ”But they are so very strange and so very slippery. There are so many rules, and they change depending on who’s looking, and I—“
He cuts himself off.
Instead, one of his longer tentacles unfurls—the motion as gentle as wind through kelp— and in it rests a single, shimmering bouncy ball. Not like the others. This one is warm to the touch, humming faintly with a strange heartbeat. On its surface, in childlike scrawl, is a single word:
"Yes?"
Vox tilts his head, a dozen hopeful expressions flickering across his not-quite-face.
”Do you want to be my friend?”
vox
