ArchivedLogs:Just Playing

Just Playing
Dramatis Personae Hive, Tag
In Absentia	2018-06-28 "Anyone ever complain there's no new paint smell?"
Location <NYC> Construction Site - Clinton
Though still sequestered behind a tall chain-link fence advertising the development company responsible for its construction, this elegant spike of a building is in truth nearly ready for use. What that use is, however, might not be immediately apparent, since the building as yet lacks signage, furnishing, and all the other trappings of human usage, commercial, residential, or otherwise. Inside, its cavernous ground floor spaces look faintly surreal without the softening effects of furniture or decoration. Though undoubtedly beautiful and filled with natural light, there's a certain forbidding quality to it, as though it is not a place for /people/, at least not yet. The soaring emptiness of the lobby especially seems to say, in its own alien language, "This is not for you." Tag's already diminutive figure looks especially small and lost in the vastness of this space. His hair is subtly sparkling rainbow colors and unevenly shorn with the fringes left long and parted, tucked behind his ear on one side (red) and hanging loose against his cheek on the other (purple). He wears a fitted t-shirt that resembles a blue sky with fluffy white cumulus clouds, an asymmetrical black denim skirt with a vivid yellow bolt of lightning down one outseam, and bright holographic pink combat boots. After turning a slow circle, eyes scanning the walls critically, he nods slightly, perhaps to himself. His thoughts are busy with the client's requested colors, but not only in the familiar painters' wheel sort of way. Each color is moored to a sensory profile that is not visual and which is probably more or less incomprehensible to just about anyone who isn't Tag. /Just/ about anyone. Then again, Hive is Tag -- at least at the moment, in most ways which matter. Right now his only presence in the room rides, quiet and watchful in the back of Tag's mind. Brushing a mildly inquisitive touch up against one shade and then the next. Something vaguely dissatisfied stirs within him -- them -- gradually giving way to a settled kind of acceptance. Tag tilts his head, keying in on the faint dissatisfaction, looking around again. It is not that he doesn't understand its source so much as he does not see it as an important distinction, at the moment--and so, when Hive comes to accept it, so does he. All the while, though, he continues sorting through colors, finding the correct profile for the vast wall nearest the entrance as he walks up to it, boots squeaking softly on the pristine granite floor. He stretches out his left hand and lays his fingertips against the cool, matte surface of the wall. From the five points of contact, a light and faintly pearlescent green spreads as if alive, racing across the surface of the wall to cover it. To Tag's senses, though, there's a lot more going on. The color feels, at the moment, more like an extension of his mind than something separate from it. Under his expert guidance, it seeps down into all the divots, flaws, and microscopic crevices in the wall, saturating the material at least two millimeters deep, giving the finish a depth and durability no coat of paint can match. A small smile spreads across his face, a deeper bloom of satisfaction buoying it up. The satisfaction blooming in Tag pushes back some of the lingering traces of unease. From deeper in the yawning open space there are footsteps, echoing oddly in the emptiness. Then a louder thump as Hive roughly shoulders open a stairwell door. His hands are shoved in the pockets of his jeans, his Death Star 'ceci n'est pas une lune' t-shirt kind of wrinkled, heavy workboots thumping louder now without the door between them. "Anyone ever complain there's no new paint smell?" Across the distance, his voice is quiet; he doesn't bother to raise it enough to carry. The words register clearly enough, all the same. Tag's smile widens fractionally. "Oddly, no." He walks along the wall in Hive's general direction, trailing his fingers against its surface as the color continues to spread. Inwardly he presses against the remnants of the unease in their mind. "In fact, I've received very few complaints of any kind. Well, in person, anyway." His mind automatically sifts through the complaints he's overheard, via Hive or otherwise. "...But I think it's still better not to have flatscans watching me work." The green color stops neatly at the edges of the wall he had been working on precisely as he pulls his hand away. "If you think the new paint smell would be a nice touch, though, my sister could probably make it happen." "Most likely. Even customers who've hired me aren't always..." Hive presses his lips together, mouth twisting briefly to one side. His shoulders hunch slightly further inward. "It still smells like sawdust. That's something, anyway." His eyes track away from the wall Tag has just colored to the others around them, blank and bare. His teeth grind in a slow quiet creak that ends in a small shake of his head. "I envy you that. I get nothing but complaints the whole damn way through." Tag tilts his head to one side; the purple side of his fringes fall partway across one eye. "Oh, if you're counting requests for amendments and changes of heart as complaints, then I get plenty, but, well..." He shrugs. "My work is a little easier to adjust after the fact." As he says so, a light gray box appears on the wall near where his hand had just been, inside it a simplified image of a paintbrush beside two contrasting swatches of gray--the icon for the "Color Replacement" tool in Photoshop. "Client demanding something else impossible now that the thing is all but finished?" He touches the adjacent wall to the one he had just finished and reaches inwardly for a pearlescent gray that then ripples outward from his touch. "Oh, man, to be able to tweak buildings as readily as I do the models." Hive watches the paintbrush icon appear, a wry flicker of smile crossing his face. "Pff. They asked for /twenty/ impossible fucking things in process, got mad as hell when I tried to explain basic goddamn physics to them, spent three months arguing over revisions and are mad now it doesn't look like the original designs I gave them. You know, after they asked to change fucking two thirds of it." Somewhere distant in their minds' eye the building they stand in is growing into a ghostly sort of life, similar to the tangible structure around them but sleeker, sparer, more economical in its use of space. Tag pulls his hand away from the wall before the gray has covered all of it, though it continues spreading absent his physical touch, his mind still guiding it, little attention though the process requires. "Ugh, great. You know...with me--like, I get it, they're just hiring me because I can do the job faster and cheaper." His attention stretches out for the ghostly structure now, a bit more uncertainly, like a toddler putting out their hands to grasp at objects as yet out of reach, but it gets there eventually and pours color into the building of the mind with more careless ease than he had with the actual one. The building that did not come to pass gets bolder colors than its corporeal incarnation, vivid green and metallic gray and accents in a crisp, deep black. "They don't see /this/ as an art or a science. But you...presumably they understand your degree and portfolio and references /mean/ something. Why pay a skilled artisan and then ignore the advice they paid you to give?" He finishes off by turning the floor of imaginary building into a honeycomb pattern of tesselated golden hexagons. "You're presuming a lot of people." Hive's smile eases at the brightening of his would-be building, his hand coming up to touch the grey wall in front of him though his eyes are somewhat unfocused as he brushes fingers against it. "Anyway, you work with richass motherfucking white people, they're gonna talk down to you no matter /how/ many degrees are behind your name. Doubt they'd learn much better respect even if they could begin to understand --" There's a feeling, here, in lieu of words to finish the sentence. Tag's senses, seeping into the walls, changing their structure at the molecular level. The part of Tag's mind still devoted to actual work has moved on to the next wall, also gray (against his recommendation), but he's having much more fun embellishing the the imaginary building, adding trim and highlights and tinting its immense glass windows. "/Respect?/ No. Maybe fear, though. It's not like I don't explain it to every single client, but few of them seem to actually pay attention to that part of my spiel. Mainly they want to know the price point and whether it'll give people cancer." He turns this thought over in his mind, discards it. "Actually, that second part's /probably/ too generous, even if they do ask. But then..." His smile returns, rueful and thin. "Like you said, we're little people to them, scary or not." "Oh /shit/ is that where I got it from?" Hive's eyes have widened briefly, though his voice is flat. His fingers lift from the wall, skimming lightly against the scarring hidden underneath his hair. His gaze skips from one wall to the next, tracking the spread of grey with a slow thoughtful spread of curiosity blooming inwardly -- focused more on the bright colorful /fun/ dancing in Tag's inner decoration than on the drab walls around them. His fingers move back to touch the grey wall, though a gentle mental probe, soft and wistful, pokes at the playful embellishments in their shared mental construction. "Oh yeah, dui bu chi." Tag bows his head. "You know, I just couldn't let my little brother monopolize the carcinogen...ing." << Oof, Tian-shin could probably cause all kinds of cancer, too, if she learned to synthesize the wrong chemicals.... >> He pushes this thought aside as quickly as it's come up, an easy task as his attention is tugged along by Hive's--/their/--curiosity, his--/their/--touch on the colorful imaginary walls of the building that could have been. "I guess it's a bit more logistically involved for you to just...have /fun/ with your art, huh? I mean...I gotta paint this how the client wants, but when I leave out that door, the whole city's my canvas." Hive just lets out a quick chuff, head shaking. The clench of his teeth and sharpness of the puff of breath might easily be mistaken for aggravated; the wash of amusement that ripples warm across the surface of their shared mindspace belies any outward brusqueness. Between them the mental plane is shifting, expanding. The view now encompasses the city /around/ the colorfully embellished building as well. A flicker of change unfurls outward from the building they (don't really) stand in, all the buildings around theirs shifting, growing more graceful lines, sleeker facades. The imagined neighborhood continues reshaping itself into his style even when Hive looks over, speaks again. "-- Yeah, making the city /mine/ might pose some challenges. Feels nice, though." His hand drops back to his side, thumb jammed into a pocket. "Actually just playing." Tag's smile comes quick and bright as the view of their mindscape expands. His senses stretch out, too, riding the wake of Hive's attention as it touches the image of each building. Where Hive reshapes the structures, Tag splashes them with color--some bright, some dark, some bold, some pastel--until the imagined city around them looks like a sci-fi utopia, beautiful and faintly alien. He's finished with the boring gray wall of the more solid edifice in which they stand, and pads over to Hive, pivoting as he walks to look. though well he knows he needs not do so to pan around the city of their mind. "It's amazing!" His eyes literally sparkle, though their color does not visibly change--Hive can tell he's simply changed them to a prismatic version of their usual shade. "Play, I mean. But you know, also, this!" He splays out both hands, gesturing physically at the mental construct of the city they've made together. "Wanna see how much of a city we can build while I paint this one?" << This bad boy can fit so many neutral earth tones, >> his mind contributes, in the form of a 'Slaps Roof of Car' meme. Unfazed, he hooks his arm through Hive's and tugs him along. "C'mon!"