Everything is always for the band (Ch. 5 sidestory 2)

Mie · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2012 12:26 pm

OOC: Collab with the Matt-man.

Home-away-from-home number...
...

...Who even knew anymore? It was an airship. It was vast and cold and armed to the teeth, and it scarcely seemed important to remember which it was, but for the moment, it was home. Who could expect Jam to feel any differently, though? The past couple of weeks or so had been spent shuffling from space station to aircraft, to base, to other aircraft so frequently, the punch-colored primate had begun to forget where she was on a given day -- or even what that given day might have been, to boot. Time was another sort of fuzzy, nebulous thing, as the days blurred together, and Eggman hadn't really been a page-a-day calendar kind of guy, so it may have been excusable that

"We missed your birthday," the monkey substituted for a proper good morning (it was 1:13 in the afternoon), as she clomped boisterously up to the the diving board of the olympic-sized pool where Rock was swimming laps.

"Did you hear me?" asked the simian girl, a pout evident in her tone, as she set her hands onto her hips. "It's like, half-way through August."

Rock's lunging, double-armed strokes made it seem unlikely that he heard her, his head plunging and rising as he worked his way back across the pool toward the girl. With an emptiness of breath, batting water-flushed eyes, he surfaced and uttered but a "Huh?" He had come to a stop just beneath where she stood, his hands grasping the metal threshold of the pool.

Fidgety with fuss, her hands jumped from her sides, and laced themselves rigidly amidst her folded arms, her displeasure, wont to be known, persisting diligently.

"Your birthday!" she repeated, brows furrowed. "You know, it fell two days after that romantic getaway to the abandoned space station with the zombie robot infestation and the broken clocks."

"Oh," sputtered the white primate with a single, watery cough. He shook his head lightly and blinked some droplets away as he looked up to her, white, more-overgrown-than-usual hair laying damply flat across his forehead

"So?" he asked plainly.

The corner's of Jam's mouth pulled exaggeratedly downward in the same motion that, she, too, sunk to a crouch at the pool's edge, glaring half-liddedly into the soggy simian.

"Not 'so,'" she corrected with mock-irritation, dipping a hand into the water, and sending a vindictive splash right back into Rock's face. (Rock spat water and shook his head again and gave her a piercing but jovial look.)

"You're s'posed to say, 'Oh, how silly of us both,' and 'what surely pleasurable festivities have you planned for my belated enjoyment?'"

Somewhere along the way, her alleged impersonation became convoluted with a droll accent, batting eyelashes, and flouncy, folded hands alongside her cheek, but all the same, she stood, and stared expectantly.

"C'mon, get out. I made a cake."

"Fuh, cake?" huffed Rock in a noise that may have been some sort of tired laugh, but it was hard to tell. He started to obediently pull himself out, but stopped after one grunt and a couple inches' worth of headway. "You made cake?"

He lazily reached up to solicit a hand for help. He may have tried to minimize any emphasis on the you component of his question, but probably failed to some small degree.

Rock received in reply a look that was patently unamused, as she obligingly extended her hand.

"Har, har, har," she jeered. "I'll have you know I can follow most directions that fit on the back of a box."

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psikeout · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2012 3:15 pm

He put way more weight in her grip than was necessary as he pulled himself out, threatening to yank her into the drink. But, he didn't. He was just being obnoxious, but he couldn't be that obnoxious to someone who had just made him a cake. Then again, he hadn't tasted the cake, yet.

"You really don't have to make a big deal about my birthday anymore, y'know?" he commented. He steadied himself and plodded over to where his towel had been left, draped on an Eggman-scale beach chair's arm.

She grunted and resisted, and powered through Rock's (unbeknownst to her) half-hearted trolling, and actually flashed a haughty little "didn't get me" smirk when she prevailed.

"And you," countered Jam, with a sassy cock of her hips. "Will maybe someday learn that it is pointless to advise me as such. Your comments have been logged and disregarded, blah, blah, blah, hurry up, the candles're gonna set off the fire alarm."

"Aah haa haa," Rock mock-laughed in sarcastic, nasal voice. "Alright, alright."

He ruffled his scruffy head with the towel as he approached to follow. "What're we even callin' this one? Is it twentieth?"

"Yeeeeah, about that. I don't really got a head for numbers t'start with, and y'know, all the dimension hopping and world take-overs, and alternate universes and ret-cons, et cetera --" she paused, brandishing an impish grin. "Kinda fuzzes things up."

Her stride broke abruptly with a sharp turn, as she held both hands up in a sort of "stop" gesture. There, at the far end of the pool, near the doors, Jam nodded toward a pair of beach chairs with a small cabana table between the two of them.

"But then I figured," called the girl over her shoulder, as she ducked out of the cavernous room. "Can you ever really have too much fire?"

She reappeared very nearly instantly, juggling a very large, cumbersome, and badly wrapped package under one arm, and a very sad looking cake, that only by virtue of gravity supported the weight of all the frosting, canned whipped topping, sprinkles, and blazing candles and sparklers on top of it.

"Make a wish," she chirped, awkwardly setting the semi-solid lump of HFCS crookedly atop the small, circular table.

"Good God," was all Rock could say, aghast at the sight of the luminescence of the thing. "I mean, thanks," he quickly added, forcing a smile, brows raised high under his makeshift towel-hood.

His face quickly went neutral again and he leered, as if to blow out the candles, but not. "How do I even—" he mumbled and dodged to another angle, "I don't really know how to, uh, start with this— and how much older am I than you, now?" he suddenly snapped his focus back on her again. "You're not still thirteen, right? I know I'm a cradle robber, but—"

"Oh, bite me, y'creepy old man," she cut back with no shortage of mock-venom, and different kind of impish grin. "We both know you like 'em young and spry."

She, too, however, became similarly distracted by the sun-like surface of the cake.

"I uh... brought this," she muttered, raising a small, kitchen-sized fire extinguisher.

"You know. In case..."

By the time Jam's attention turned to matters of fire safety, Rock seemed singularly distracted by the act of staring far too deliberately and thoughtfully somewhere well below her face.

"It's true I do," he observed in quiet, nodding approval.

"Yeah?" replied the pinker primate coyly, her brows raised loftily. Dumping both package and canister on the opposite chair, she cast a completely unnecessary look around, her teeth digging into her lower lip.

"Well, uh, it is getting pretty hot in here..." Which could have nothing to do with the nigh volcanic cake activity on the table.

"Maybe," Jam prefaced through pursed lips, as she sidled slowly back toward the pool, losing gloves, boots, and socks along the way. "We could both stand to cool o--"

*BZRRT! BZRRT! BZRRT!* was the sound the alarm made, as every sprinkler in the room suddenly spewed a torrential downpour of nice, cold water. At the very least, it stopped pretty succinctly once the fire was out.

Anything Rock may have been feeling about that moment became narratively irrelevant as he now stood drenched in cold water. One big, literally-visible shiver ran up his body like a cracking whip from heel to head; with a deep breath, he turned, looked back at his now-destroyed cake, and sighed.

...

"So what'd y'get me," he blurted, his tone restored to the appropriately mundane as he reached out for his soggy-paper-wrapped gift.

Mie · Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2012 1:53 am

Jam held her head high, maintaining precisely as much dignity as any drowned rat could, as she walked stiffly back to the chairs, and very slowly set herself sideways into one.

The tiniest of smiles spread as the whiter primate inquired of his gift, and she nudged it toward him.

"Open it," she urged, evidently somewhat cheered by his curiosity. Honestly, though, he didn't really need to. The package was A) not wrapped very well, and B)conspicuously shaped like either an oversized acoustic guitar, or perhaps more likely, a guitar case.

Being a good sport, Rock did not let on that he had any idea what was in the dreadnought-shaped package until he actually sat down at the table and unwrapped it. He had to shake wet gobs of wrapping paper off his hands, but eventually, he got to the hard, black case, and gave Jam a furrow-browed, suspicious kind of smile. He laid it across the table and popped it open.

"Wow." The quiet exclamation sounded genuine, but maybe a little confused.

A glossy, red, acoustic-electric guitar sat before him, laden with more knobs and switches than could be comprehended by someone of his comparatively limited musical understanding.

"Thanks," he uttered hesitantly, "it's awesome, but,... I haven't played in like... a really long time."

It was all he could say to avoid outright asking why.

Though throughout the big reveal, her giddy grin had gotten progressively larger and larger (one might pause to wonder who was actually receiving a gift, here), she appropriately stifled her excitement by the time Rock's less than ecstatic thanks and addendum came up.

"I know what you're thinking," she prefaced bracingly. "And I don't get to say that often, but, hear me out."

She stood briskly, crossed to the other chair (the one Rock was currently occupying), and invaded it.

"Here's what I've been thinking: For whatever reason, our bee-eff-effs have not yet blabbed. There is zero reason to expect this to last, when they were pretty pissed at us before you sent' em on that little trip to the asscrack of the world. As far as I can see, all this stuff you've done to protect our identities? It ain't gonna mean a damn thing first bullhorn they stumble across."

"We need an alibi. I have one, annnnd now, you do too:" She paused, her countenance the epitome of the cat who ate the aviary.

"We're rockstars."

Rock stared like a statue at her. He didn't move at all. His eyes squinted and shrank in size by the rate of a fraction of a millimeter per several seconds of awkward silence.

"I've already made all the arrangements," Jam continued, blithely oblivious to Rock's silence not being rapt with attention. "I've already touched base with Shane and Jared; they have nothing to do, and Boogie's on summer vacation. Since we're pretty much the economy lords, I went ahead and booked us at a couple of choice venues in Casino Park and Starlight City, and retroactively edited some old posts on CfA's Tooter account to talk about being on the road."

Despite the physical improbability of it, that grin had just progressively gotten wiiiider and wider throughout the divulgence of Jam's master plan.

"We're kind of on tour right now," blurted the monkey with heavy emphasis on the "we."

"Pretty cool, huh?"

Rock's eyes stayed frozen in their squinted state. His mouth opened as if to respond, but nothing came out. He licked his lip once, opened his mouth again, drew a breath... and exhaled, shaking his head, still flabbergasted and squinty.

"Don't you—... don't you think this is all a little... over-indulgent?" he asked earnestly. "I mean, it's not that it's a bad idea, but, it's... just..."

"I dunno," shrugged the monkey with an impassive sniff. Her smile had gone, and she was no longer looking at Rock, but she wasn't pouting. "Maybe. Just think that sometimes the best way to hide's in a big, damn spotlight. And anyway..."

Sighing heavily simultaneous to a sizable slump in posture, Jam spared a very brief sliver of eye contact for the other sopping simian, before her gaze continued up to the ceiling.

"Kinda... feel like we've earned a little self-indulgence... a little fun. Hell, maybe we'd even actually be liked for a change. Wouldn't that be something."

psikeout · Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2012 12:18 pm

Rock watched the girl sitting next to him from the corners of his eyes with a sort of indirect focus, from the periphery of his vision. It was a pensive expression, and one could almost envision the gears turning in his head as he considered her feelings, and weighed them in the balance with his own.

He looked down a moment and drew an audible breath.

His nearest arm found its way around her shoulders. He gave her a little squeeze.

"I'm not sure it's really for me, or if I can even play that good, but,..." he trailed off for a few seconds. "It sounds like fun," he concluded with a smile, and a more direct lean and leer for eye-contact.

The problem with Rock, and one Jam felt she'd never really adjust to, was how easy it could be to feel like whatever you said to make him think about it that long must have been idiocy on a record-setting level. She was surprisingly unemotive about it, however, maintaining a pretty resolute poker face until that arm slipped unexpectedly around her shoulders. She'd put so much effort into being unaffected, the neighboring primate had managed to sneak up on her from right next to her; she started a little, but tried vainly mid-way through to pass it off for a restless shifting of posture.

She couldn't put much effort into feeling sheepish, though — She was too busy smiling.

"You know it's not for you..." responded the girl apologetically, as she pushed a clump of obnoxious red from her eyes, which, though flighty at first, eventually found his. "But I wouldn't've asked if I didn't think maybe it could be for both of us. It will be fun. You'll see."

With an enthusiastically grateful peck that landed nearer to Rock's neck than his cheek, Jam popped off the chair, suddenly full of energy, lunging off into the direction of the door with a definite bounce to her jog.

"C'mon, let's towel off, and head to your folks'," she called over her shoulder, disappearing from the room in an excited blur.

"You're gonna love the bus!"

Everything is always for the band (Ch. 5 sidestory 2)

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