entrancelogs | [Open] What an extraordinary child...

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[Open] What an extraordinary child...

Who: Coraline Jones & OPEN TO ANYBODY!
Where: The Grounds, Your Bedroom Door, The Halls, The Dining Room
When: Early November
Rating: PG
Summary: Being a mansion busybody, and sampling sounds for spooktunes
The Story: (But first, mood music...)

Out and About

The grounds feel extra chilly these days, air crisp with all the pleasantries of autumn, and the forest edges along with some of the garden is shedding crunchy leaves this way and that. There's a distantly smokey smell too, that's impossible to pinpoint the exact source of, but it pleases Miss Jones immensely.

She wanders the grounds with a sense of open-minded purpose, wearing a slouchy wool cap and a cozy sweater underneath her bright yellow coat. It's not quite cold enough for snazzy gloves, which is just as well- easier to carry a handheld tape recorder, pointing it at scattered leaf piles just before giving them a hearty kick with her wellington boots. Coraline walks hard along the cobblestone pathways too, trying to put a little more deliberate weight in her footsteps, occasionally bouncing from foot to foot rhythmically as if playing on invisible hopscotch boards.

She bothers the vendors for a bit, knocking on empty turtleshells and strings of pretty glass beads, bowls of jangly trickets, poking about at their wares with absolutely no real intentions of buying or bartering. Once the faceless merchants have realized this, and she's had quite enough of their cold shouldering, Coraline moves on quickly, finding a branch with some leaves still attached (not poison oak!) to run along the fences, making a glorious racket. On the review playback, it's not quite as satisfying as she'd hoped. Maybe she should have thought to arm herself with fancier microphones.

Soon she spots someone else out here, probably minding their own business, or lost in their own thoughts, and hurries over wth the branch dragging behind her on the grass.

" 'Scuse me?" The girl pipes, waving mid-approach. "Hi there, uh... Are you busy, right now? Would you mind, um... holding this up for me, for just a second?" Turning the branch around so the leafy ends are facing her sound recorder, she smiles hopefully and makes a flimsy, demonstrating gesture. "Yeah. Give it a good rustle?"

Door to Door

There's an eerie sounding disturbance in the hall, off and on during the day. Maybe you've just been too tired or preoccupied to investigate it's source. But that's okay. The sound machine's about to come to you!

(Knock-Knock-Knock.)

Yep, that's the sound of smallish knuckles on your bedroom door. Did you perhaps forget to put the No Solicitations or Please Do No Disturb sign on the door handle today? Or is a mild distraction a most welcome visitor, right now?

This one might be a little impatient, piping up before you can quite make your way to the door, or yell at the drop-in to go away

"Hello?" Sounds precociously girlish, and not with any particular panic. Like there might be a wagon of Girl Scout Cookies involved? And there's the knock again, repeating. "Is anyone home?"

No cookies in the wagon, alas, though it's rigged with some kind of dated recording equiptment, wedged in alongside a tangle of wires hauled out of her closet, along with one too many odds-and-ends noisemakers. In front of it stands Coraline Jones, a blue-haired girl in a silvery soft sweater that's a couple of sizes too big and stripey neon leggings.

Hallway Sound Effects

Sounds like someone with far too much free time on their hands has raided the music room's percussion and hand-instrument cabinets.

And it sounds like that someone has assigned you a few of them, and has been innocuously tailing you for as long as you can bear to dismiss your shuffling footsteps accompanied by the rattle of maracas, or every turn of your head punctuated by slide whistle. She follows at just enough of a distance to duck into an open doorway or lean up against the wall beside a mirror, examining a chip in her clipped painted nails.

But Coraline's harmless mischief can probably only continue on for so long, before she's called out for being a general nuisance. Or until she can get one of her victims to crack a smile.

Wish to Table

It's on the later side of suppertime, and Coraline has just managed to snag herself a seat in the dining room, staring down at her plate with the usual sigh of indecision. Pepperoni Pizza sounds like a great idea, but she's already had that three times this week, and that annoying naggy voice in her conscience that sounds like her well-meaning father is reminding her of food groups and variety.

She heaves a sigh, and quietly grumbles 'Okay, Dad' under her breath.

"Hmmm..." She strums her fingers on the fancy tablecloth and peeks up and down the long table for some inspiration. "What do I want, what do I- Oh! A...Chicken Pot Pie?" Coraline requests, remembering a microwaved one that she used to help herself to on nights when her father made stuff like Creamed Kale with Goat Cheese, or Seafood Paella. "With no mushy peas, please." She adds, before the magic can complete it's thing. "Ooh, and extra crusty crust!"

Yum. That's perfect, and perfectly sized for her appetite with room for dessert, too.

But after a second marveling sniff of the air, her face pulls a grimace of disgust. Gross. Where is that coming from?

Her attention goes scurrying a few places down in curious horror as she stabs a fork into her pot pie, steam rising from the pierced crust.

"What are you eating?!" Coraline exclaims, eyes wide with revulsion.

"That looks, um..." (Gosh, don't be completely rude, Coraline. Even if that smell is turning your stomach) "...Different?"

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"Yup!" Coraline nods a little breathless with relief for such easy compliance from an adult. A few buttons pressed, a slight volume adjustment- and then she's giving the man a smart salute. "Thanks!"

And then to her real business here, since her approach was really half-pretense, and that growl kept her from leaping straight into her real curiousity.

She brought the recorder behind her back, leaning to one side, and peered around at the cybernetic dog.

"Is that a... robot-dog?" She ventured, her voice carrying a bright sort of excitement. She's seen few things cooler.

"Sure." He hands her the branch back, and grins slightly at the inevitable question about the dog. Oscar sure is a conversation starter, and the reactions to him vary. Of course a child would see him as something curious rather than frightening. The dog wags his tail as he notices the attention, and heads right over to Coraline to be petted.

"Heh, yeah, sorta. Go ahead, y' can pet 'im."

For his part, Oscar tries not to give Coraline much choice in the matter. He pushes his wet nose against her fingers and makes a chuff sound.

"'E's cybernetic. Part of 'im's real dog, part ain't."

Nothing makes her face light up more than seeing the dog's tail in friendly motion. She crouches and claps, trying to whistle, though the sound passes her lips a little thinned and weak.

"Here boy!" Coraline calls as Oscar trots over, holding out both hands. Soon she's stroking the sides of his neck, rearing her own head back a little with a laugh to keep from getting licked on the face. "Gooood boy!

"That's so cool, I've never seen one before like this!" Beaming up at the man, she points curiously at the dog's domed cybernetic head, wrinkling her nose at the sight of something fleshy and pink beneath the glass. "Is that really his brains?"

Like most dogs, Oscar revels in the attention without the need for approval from his master once the first word of assent is given. While she pets the animal, Dan crouches down and rests his hand on Oscar's shoulders.

If only to curb his enthusiasm if the attention gets too exciting.

"Yeah, that's his brain." Very gently, Dan taps the top of the glass with one fingernail, then rubs the glass a little cleaner with the cuff of his sweater. "Lotta people seem real concerned about that. Don't think it bothers him, though."

Edited (when u got 100 icons but still pick the same one) 2016-11-28 09:59 (UTC)

"Gross!" She laughs, incredulous. It was the wildest thing she's ever seen, and more anatomically eye-opening than any science lesson. You had to look closely at the fur near all the metal bits to figure out where dog ended and robot parts began.

"It would bother me, if my brains were showing all the time!" After a shake of her head, scratching the cyberdog behind his ears, Coraline sighs, shrugging up her shoulders. "But I guess it doesn't matter much, when you're a dog. Still... maybe you should find a hat he can wear?"

Coraline had a whole trunk of assorted hats at the end of her bed. She might be able to find one perfectly dog-sized, which could be secured over his dome and hide his brains. It would protect his smarts from the cold, and also zombie attacks!

After a few more moments of petting at and cooing over, Coraline got down to the inevitable business of asking a million questions.

"Was he always a robo-dog, or did he get hit by a car? Does he just eat normal dog food, or do you have to plug him in at night, or change out batteries? Does he know any cool tricks!?"

He can't even chide her about calling the dog 'gross'. Anything with its brain hanging out for all the world to see easily falls into that category, and besides.. he's always liked kids for the way they just say exactly what's on their minds. Dan might like dogs more than (most) people, but he likes kids more than adults, too.

At the mention of the word 'hat', Oscar rumbles out a low growl, and Dan lifts both eyebrows in momentary surprise.

"Guess he don't like hats either," he hums. Much like Rex. He hadn't been thinking of that particular detail when he'd summoned the creature from the closet. "He was made like that. Don't have cars where I come from. Eh, none that work anymore, anyway." Oscar gets a light pat across the shoulders.

"'E eats normal dog food, but I gotta keep an eye on the robot parts. And his brain. Won't last forever."

"Guess not-" Coraline giggles, although she shrinks back a bit when Oscar growls, raising both hands in apology. "It's a shame," she laments, before returning to fondly baby-talking the dog, ruffling his ears. "I bet you'd look really cute in hats!"

"You don't have cars?" That was only halfway weird- Lots of people in the mansion were from places that didn't. If dogs could be robots, then the world had probably advanced to something a little more high-tech, was her guess, despite Dan's somewhat scruffy looks and lack of a spacesuit. "Do you use teleport pads and hoverplanes?"

Her expression softens with a bit of sympathy when he mentions that a dog's brain won't last forever, heaving a deep sigh.

"Back home, my new neghbors downstairs keep scottish terriers." She tells him, with all the unfiltered disgust of relaying something bizarre and vaguely disturbing. "It's... really weird, actually, When they get too old and die, they make them doggy costumes with wings and fill them up with... stuffing? Put them on the wall? It's honestly sort of creepy, but Miss Spink and Miss Forcible say they've got all their little angels looking over them."

Oscar grumbles, but is essentially all growl and no bite, submitting to Coraline's petting with eager wags of his tail and headbutts up into her hands.

Dan, though, shakes his head. Maybe if things had been different, maybe if they had followed a different path than they had before the War, the world he had been born it wouldn't have been such a mess. "No teleports. Military organisations have vertibirds, but uh... things went real wrong for my Earth a long time ago."

He doesn't generally soften things up for children, but she didn't ask about the War. No need to shove it on her until she does.

"Tch... some people got weird habits, huh? I knew a guy who kept snowglobes. Doesn't sound weird, but they're real rare where I come from. Some of 'em had t' be worth a fortune."

"Gosh, people in the furture have got to start getting it right already!" Coraline exclaims- and no worries, Dan, it's obviously not the first time she's heard that the World Went Tits Up Somehow. In fact, it's starting to become such a pattern that she wished she knew who to blame, just so she could find them if they existed back in her own existence and stop them from making an awful mistake or two. "Why are so many earths totally messed up in different ways! You all make me worried sick!"

But she sounds the sort of worried that's more like a vague annoyance, quick to slide like water off a duck's back and be done with a moment later, as she continues ruffling the dog's head.

"We keep snowglobes!" She added, not sure what exactly was so weird or wrong about that. "My folks and me... we got one from the zoo, when we went last time."

Dan laughs a bit, and rubs the back of his neck. Yeah, his isn't the only world he knows of that went the way it did, though a great deal of the other apocalypse scenarios he's heard have involved zombies. The day he comes across someone else from a world where humans literally blew themselves up will be.. not a happy one, but certainly an interesting one.

"Way I figure it, ain't the people from the future that's the problem," he says to her, giving Oscar a scratch behind the ears so the dog can be sure he's still being paid attention to. "We sure ain't droppin' bombs on ourselves."

The courier pauses, then, and snorts a little at the thought. "Well, most of us ain't."

"Well don't look at me, I'm too young to start a war!" The girl protests, wrinkling her nose.

She doesn't think she could ever bring herself to drop bombs on people and ruin the whole world, either.

"Do you have other kinds of part-robots, back home?" Coraline asks in earnest, still preoccupied with petting Oscar. "Or just dogs?"

"Mostly dogs. Other kinds ain't too friendly."

Like the roboscorpions, and the robobrains, and the (shudder) Y-17 trauma override harness. The less said about the horrors of those things, the better. He can only hope none of them ever make their way here, because really, there are only so many people he could trust to use the kind of weaponry that worked best against things made mostly of metal.

"Dogs like this come outta some place called the Big MT. Prob'ly the best thing that ever did come outta that place."

"Big Empty?" Coraline squints. Weird. "So...are they made by a bunch of evil Frankenstein scientists?"

But that's really neither here nor there now, is it? Much more importantly, she's interested in the dog that's right in front of her. "Does he know any cool tricks?"

Dan pauses, his mind working. Frankenstein. That was that book.. by Mary Shelley, wasn't it? He'd read it not too long ago, as luck would have it, and catches the reference after a moment of thought.

"Y'know what, they were," he tells her, but her attention is more on the dog and that's just fine by Dan. The less he has to talk about the Big MT, the better, as far as he's concerned.

"Sure, he knows sit, stay, shake. He's real good at fetch, too."

"Yeah? He likes fetch?"

Well, that would certainly explain why Oscar keeps snuffling at her branch with a wag of his tail and attentive interest.

"You wanna play some fetch, boy? I think it's too heavy to throw very far, sorry...Can you even drag it around?" Coraline laughs cheerily, stepping on one end of the branch to try and snap a more manageable-sized stick off. "(I wish I had a tennis ball or something...) He's a great dog. Maybe I could record some of his growly sounds, for spookwaves? Or barking... or any dog-sounds, really."

"Hang on, hang on."

He brings one hand up, then swings his rucksack down from his back. Even on a short walk, he'll still bring out some essentials (just in case) and of course one of those essentials is going to be a baseball. Just because he doesn't need to hoard random things in a place like this doesn't mean he isn't going to do it. Habits like that are hard things to shake.

"Here y' go, use this. An' if y' give 'im a couple'a treats y' can record 'im all y' want. Go on about hats fer a bit. That's usu'ly enough t' get 'im talking."

Right on cue, Oscar grumbles at the mention of hats. Had he been a bit too specific when he was thinking about the kind of cyberdog he wanted out of the closet?

Coraline chuckles at the dog's responsiveness, shaking her head. Seemingly silly things have reasons behind them, though, and she wonders if maybe she MT scientists had scary hats. Or hooked his weird brain-head up to special crowns with wires.

"How come he hates them so much, anyway?" She asks, while chucking the ball as hard as she can across the lawn and watching Oscar tear off after it, bounding about in an enthusiastic loop. For all the growls a moment ago, he looks like a very happy dog at full tilt, robot legs working just fine.

"Y'know, I've got no idea." Dan stands up and straightens his shoulders, then loosely folds his arms as Oscar goes bounding away in search of his ball. He taps his fingers against his elbows.

"Had a dog jus' like 'im back home. Rex. He didn't like hats 'cuz 'e didn't like rats, an' 'hats' was just too close to bein' the same word." Look, he knows it doesn't make any sense, but that's just how it is.

Oscar comes running back and drops the ball at Coraline's feet, wagging his tail.

"Guess it carried over, or somethin'."

Coraline plucks up the spit-covered ball from the grass, pulling a bit of a face for it's drooly dog dampness, and then winds up to hurl it away again.

"The cat back home hated rats too." She says, once Oscar's out of earshot.

"I guess sometimes the closets know when you miss someone weirdly specific." The girl shrugs, watching Oscar snap up the ball and fling himself into a hairpin turn to hurry back, frolicking.

"I never thought about asking it for another Cat." Coraline considers quietly, staring off towards the fences, a little melancholy to find herself interrupted by sudden wistful thoughts of home. "It's not like he actually belongs to me, or anyone, first off... and I don't think there can even be an Other like him anyway."

With the mention of cats, he remembers something that a certain megalomaniac asshole had said to him once regarding the assumed extinction of the creatures. Ridiculous, of course, since Dan had seen cats alive and well in the Commonwealth. It had been his first indication of the limitations of Mr. House's reach. The recollection makes him smile faintly, though Coraline seems to be thinking of a particular cat.

"Don't think they actually bring the same animal through," he says, giving Oscar a quick pat when he returns with the ball and eagerly pushes it against Coraline's hand again. "Had one back home like Oscar, called Rex, but Oscar ain't exactly the same. Don't have the paint on him that Rex did."

He thinks for a moment, then adds - "Not many cats left where I come from."

She doesn't want to know why.

She doesn't think she'll get bored of throwing the ball for Oscar anytime soon, because he certainly looks thrilled like it's the best thing he's done all day, but the tennis ball is getting kind of slobbery, and Coraline wishes she'd worn her gloves.

"Paint?" The girl cocks her head, squinting. "You can paint on dogs?" That's new. She'd seen some poodles dyed pink once in a magazine before, with ridiculous haircuts, their fur like cotton candy... and she'd wound up feeling a strange sort of secondhand embarassment for them.

"...That's sad." She remarks a little softer, at the thought of a world with not many cats left in it. "Did they all get spayed?"

It does occur to Dan that he should probably play with the dog more often than he does, while he watches the eagerness with which Oscar brings the ball back to Coraline each time. He might look half made of metal, but he was still entirely dog.

"Sure, paint. On the metal. My old dog used t' belong to a gang."

He pauses while the ball gets thrown again, and pulls a face at her question. It would have been stupid to think she wasn't going to ask. "... Eh. Not exactly. After the War two hundred years ago, I guess people got real hungry real quick. An'.. cats were easy t' catch."

Dan scratches the back of his neck. He can't even say he's not speaking from experience.

Coraline giggles at Oscar. His impatient enthusiasm waiting for the tennis ball is pretty funny. She's almost forgotten how scary the Other-world bat-dogs were, watching him bound`about playfully. Even if the terrible Other-neighbors' scotties were viscious and winged and more numerous.

"Like The Little Rascals?" The dog Dan was talking about probably belonged to a rougher sort of gang, but Coraline rather liked the idea of some kids keeping a dog in their secret fort.

"Oh." She gulped, voice darkening. "So people ate all the cats."

How horrible. "I was never in a war, outside of events. Hopefully I'll never ever go hungry enough to eat people's pets. Or even a homeless cat! I don't think I could do it! "

"Little who?"

Forgive Dan his lack of knowledge of any popular media past the equivalent to the 1950s. Holotapes are rare in any case, and he gets most of his entertainment from music.

He almost wishes he hadn't told her, but she'd asked.

"Most cats ain't people's pets anymore. Dogs, neither. I ain't about to go take a potshot at an animal what belongs t' someone." Dan shakes his head, frowning. "And kid, I hope y' never have t' make that kind'a choice."

"It's just a movie about kids." She explains with an offhanded wave of her hand. "They have a gang."

Coraline nods solemnly, hoping she'd never have to make that choice too. "The cat who helped me back home wasn't anybodys pet. He was just a good cat, that's all."

"I'm sorry Oscar!" She added apologetically to the expectant dog with a drooly tennis ball stuffed in his mouth, now growling impatiently at her feet "I wasn't saying Hat!"

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[Open] What an extraordinary child...

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