st_ormscoming: (Default)
st_ormscoming ([personal profile] st_ormscoming) wrote in [community profile] strangetrip2018-10-07 09:40 am

[EP] Recon Mission

Ororo had been at the inn for only a couple of weeks and while she'd gathered some information it had been limited in nature. She'd decided to expand her search and it had the added benefit of getting out of her room.

She'd heard there was a beach, that was something that she'd never seen before in real life. Ororo had seen it in pictures and on TV, but not in person. The closest beach to Cairo had been two hours away and not worth the trip on the bus. She'd needed the money that she stole for living, nothing frivolous like a beach trip.

That wasn't the case now, so she'd walked in the direction others had said to go until she smelled the salted water on the air. Ororo paused, before she caught sight of it and just felt the difference in the atmosphere, it was nice. She continued on until she reached the line between the pavement and the sand. Ororo bent down to take off her shoes before she stepped on the soft sand. To others, it probably would have burnt the bottom of their feet, but hers were so used to hot desert sand, that it didn't register. The only thing that did was the difference and she liked it. There was a small smile to her lips and she ran to the water's edge to kick the salty sea letting the water splash around her and on her.

Ororo had stayed at the beach until her stomach growled from hunger which sent her back toward the inn and food. She thought about getting the meal to sit outside by the pool, but she found that she preferred the ocean water. At least for now, so she'd found a table to enjoy her grilled fish and vegetables. It was another meal that she rarely got, even at the Professor's mansion.
st_igmatized: (Naija)

Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-10-20 10:47 pm (UTC)(link)
Knowing that the British Empire had its claws in both Egypt and Nigeria at one point, Sunny would have thought the roots of English and its commonality were deeper and more insidious than that, but she only nodded. "English is just the official language in Nigeria. There are too many ethnic groups and languages to function as a country otherwise. Though if you want a common language, you speak Pidgin." Speaking and writing what most of the world would call standard English was a mark of being urban, educated, and upper class. Few people spoke it as their first language like Sunny did. "And even then, it can be a crap shoot if you're far enough in the middle of nowhere."
st_igmatized: (Thoughtful)

Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-10-21 07:27 pm (UTC)(link)
"Communication always finds a way," Sunny answered, faint fascination and reverence for that in her tone. Pidgin and Creole languages were amazing and deeply interesting things, born of necessity to talk across cultural boundaries that were previously insurmountable.

She had to ask, "I'll back off if you'd rather not, but your hair. That's not a dye job, is it?"
st_igmatized: (Beyond the pale)

Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-10-23 01:23 am (UTC)(link)
"There are several in residence here," Sunny said in lieu of a yes. Though she hadn't seen it manifest as anything physical.
st_igmatized: (Default)

Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-10-26 06:29 am (UTC)(link)

"That can't have been easy," Sunny mused. Or maybe it was easier, when it was only your hair and you weren't white all over.

st_igmatized: (Default)

Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-10-28 06:09 am (UTC)(link)
Sunny had to laugh at that. "No." Anywhere a black girl went with white anything, there were black people who decried them as traitors and white people who thought they were upjumped bitches who didn't know their place. Not that either of them could help it. Genetics just worked that way.

"So what came with the hair?" she asked. "In my own magical tradition, outward physical signs point to a person's talents, but..." she spread her hands. Their power came from different places, clearly.
st_igmatized: (Beyond the pale)

Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-10-29 02:02 am (UTC)(link)
Ah, that did make sense and Sunny brightened. "Very cool." She couldn't do anything like that without her juju knife, even a spark that small. "Nature thought it would be funny to make me good at being invisible," she added wryly. "Since I'm half a ghost already, apparently."
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Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-10-31 05:49 am (UTC)(link)

"That's... complicated," Sunny mused. She paused to chew, which wasn't a no so much as a gathering of thoughts. "I'm what we call a free agent. Someone magic born to non-magic parents. It was there since I was born, and had I been raised in other circumstances I would have been more openly magical from a very young age. But it more manifested as there being something strange about me until I was initiated. I could always sneak up on anybody, if I really put my mind to it." And there had been that near death experience with malaria when she was two or so, but she never knew what to think of that. "My dad hated when I did that."

st_igmatized: (Default)

Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-11-02 06:40 am (UTC)(link)

My father's had a chip on his shoulder about me since I came out both female and albino. Had she been one or the other, she might have been acceptable. No such luck for her.

But Sunny only shrugged. "They don't know."

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Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-11-04 02:15 am (UTC)(link)

"I'm not allowed to tell," Sunny said, something that was simultaneously very simple, but extremely difficult. There were times that she wanted nothing more than to tell her mother, but...

"There are punishments for that, and they're pretty severe." Of course, most punishments in the Leopard world were severe, and only became more so when you were grown. It wasn't uncommon to die or go insane as a result of being put in the Library's basement. "There's a very low tolerance for anything to do with exposing Lambs to our world. And by low, I mean basically zero."

st_igmatized: (Default)

Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-11-04 07:32 pm (UTC)(link)
"It's not entirely new," Sunny had to admit. "I've already got Nigerian and American, what's one more?" Even though those were public things, which yes, made it very different. She couldn't talk to many people about this one. There was no one to guide her through, to share experience. Isong's book was helpful, but reading it was like someone spitting in your eye nonstop.
st_igmatized: (Blue)

Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-11-05 04:45 am (UTC)(link)
"Honestly," Sunny said, even as she felt the potential well of panic open up inside her, "I really don't know. If I ever figure it out, I'll tell you."

The longer Sunny was at the inn, the more she felt the divide that made up who she was and the less she knew what to do about it. She missed her family, her friends, her world, she missed them so much it hurt. But she also knew that while this world didn't have the people she loved most, it was also the only place she'd ever been where she could be completely herself all the time without worrying about letting something slip to people who couldn't see.

Her mother could never know her. Her brothers could never know her. If she married outside of the Leopard community as her grandmother had done, her husband and children would never be able to know her. It killed her having to lie, and being here was a stark and sweet relief from it.

And she hated that.

None of this being something she was about to tell a stranger.
st_igmatized: (Witch)

Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-11-07 04:11 am (UTC)(link)
Sunny made a face at that. "That's why we just hide. The kind of monster you have to be--as a person, as a people--to force integration or superiority when they frankly have a good reason to be scared is..." She shook her head. "I know I don't want to be that. It's easier if they just don't know to get upset in the first place."

Though of course in cases such as hers when there were Lamb friends and family to lie to, on that individual level it very much was not. But the world was bigger than her, and went on regardless.
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Re: Ororo & Sunny

[personal profile] st_igmatized 2018-11-11 04:26 am (UTC)(link)
Sunny nodded. "We have something like that. Several places, actually. There are sides to cities that only we can find. Places we can be ourselves. Out in the world, though, we pretend we're just like them."

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