ArchivedLogs:Vignette - Paint with All the Colors

Vignette - Paint with All the Colors
The wind is optional
Dramatis Personae Tag
In Absentia	2013-06-06 Tag has a chat with his favorite Bodhisattva and invents a color.
Location <NYC> Rooftop - Chinatown
There is still a touch of chill in the early morning air high above Manhattan. Tag huddles beside a pigeon coop at the foot of a small Guan-Yin statue roughly but elegantly carved from dark gray stone. He looks like little more than a bundle of hoodie and jeans, both of which fluctuate in color at semi-regular intervals. "I know I shouldn't be up here," he says. "I'm glad you remember me. I bet old man Lin doesn't. I spent so much time here as a teen, crying and thinking and drawing. He used to give me tea and rice cakes." His smile is sad and wistful. "But I heard he's losing his memory, so maybe he wouldn't recognize me even if I looked the same as before." He chuckles. Every item on his person, and an irregular patch of concrete beneath him, flushes soft pink briefly. "I haven't believed in you /completely/ since I was maybe ten, but I know that doesn't bother you. I didn't even know you used to be a man until I got to high school. And you really /were/ a man, right?" He nods emphatically. "That's just how reincarnation works. When it works." The edge of the sun disc peeks over the tops of distant buildings. Tag tilts his head back to look at the statue's face. The hood of his sweatshirt slides off to reveal mint green hair hanging almost to his chin, parted haphazardly on one side. "So if time doesn't exist outside of Samsara, then am I already in Nirvana? Or have I /always/ been there?" A pause, a beatific smile. "Anyway, I think I am ready, now." Rolling onto his knees, he produces a worn blue paisley bandana from his pocket and unfolds it. The scent of Nag Champa and marijuana blossom in the air. He spreads it out on the concrete before him and gazes fixedly at it. The patterns on the cloth shift and divide like abstract microbes. They grow smaller and produce a new color with each generation, until the entire surface becomes a riotous tessellation of squirming colors. The bandana starts turning an undifferentiated brown as each colored region shrinks. Tag bites his lower lip. His hands clench and unclench. He sucks in a breath and holds it. The fabric abruptly shifts into a solid field of unsettlingly dark black with an animated prismatic sheen. It seems to pulse with every conceivable color--and some inconceivable ones--almost too quickly for the eye to perceive. Tag lets out the breath he had been holding and leans forward on his knees, panting. "No, no," he mutters. "I want /all the colors at once/, not the /color out of space/." With a long sigh, he waves his hand over his makeshift canvas. Nothing happens. He cants his head far to one side, and a fluid sketch of a pigeon in flight appears on the wall of the coop beside him. "Okay. That still works, so why..." He wrinkles his brows at the bandana, but it just sits there, looking like a cloth woven from rainbow obsidian and Existential angst. "That's not supposed to..." Tag shakes his head a few times and blinks rapidly. "Probably just a side effect, huh?" He folds up the bandana, hands trembling faintly. The other side remained faded blue paisley, concealing the color he had created as he tucks the whole troubling bundle back in a pocket. Then he puts his palms together and bows to Guan-Yin before rising, unsteadily, to meet the day.