Give Me Steam

"Hey Aegaeon, bring your watery self over here."

If the Water Blade could bristle through his surface tension, he would have, but then Minoth's inviting smile disarmed him, and he responded in kind.

"What is this?" he asked brightly as he stepped over to Minoth's so recently designated corner of their camp by a gnarled tree covered in a curious dressage of rotting leaves and creeping woody spindles.

Minoth didn't answer, just grinned broadly at him, and then Aegaeon began to become faintly aware of something moving, fluctuating, oscillating, in fact dancing on a tree branch. Like a twig flapping helplessly in the moorish afternoon breeze, it fluttered its pale brown feelers with smattered panache this way and that. It was almost amusing.

"You called me over here for a piece of loose shrubbery, Master Minoth?"

The Flesh Eater was still grinning. Shameless, he was, and as ever, that much Aegaeon knew, and yet...no. No. This was some otherworldly foe. A minuscule mite with such power as to fiddle its tenuous, tenacious, unblushing grasp against this incongruous oak and audaciously taunt the very warriors who courted it.

Perhaps Master Minoth was foolhardy. He was well entwined with the Master Addam, and though bladed apples falling not so far from driven trees was not a concept at play here, it certainly seemed possible.

A huffing sound came then. The beast was mounting its attack!

In one moment, Aegaeon was calm, cool, collected as ever. In the next, his katana was drawn and pointed somewhere near what must have been the throat of the modest-immodest creature.

Before he could stamp-choke out a "Name yourself, villain!" Minoth, the emitting center of the huffing sound, had slapped the readied arm down with the yet-bony far end of his gloved palm.

"Aegaeon, that's a stick bug."

Any trace of wariness or admonishment was gone from the Dark Blade's voice, if it had even been there in the first place, which it hadn't; his contender had merely expected it, anticipated it in folly. He wasn't angry, only amused, perhaps a little concerned.

"Ah," Aegaeon said lamely as he sheathed his katana. "I have been fooled."

"Hey," Minoth started, slinging an arm around the relaxing shoulders, "no fool are you. Just my little joke, eh? His name's Cole."

"Cole?" Aegaeon repeated, suddenly just as confused as ever. "You named this insect?"

"Well I can't just going around calling him Mr. Sticky, can I? 'S not nice. You gotta have names for your friends."

Names for your friends. This scintillating Master Cole was a friend. One didn't name simple acquaintances. Friends were indicative of something longer-held.

"Have you known each other long, then?" he hazarded at last. Minoth laughed, a warm sound.

"'Course I have! Here, I'll answer your next question - he rides around in my hair. That's how I make sure to keep him apart from the rest. Not that he's snooty, mind."

Oh, fascination after fascination. Many of these bendy-ramrod individuals, and all of them friendly. But quickly, to the most important and pressing inquiry - or rather, if you'll excuse the pun, nit to pick: "I've never seen him there before. This is a surprise to me."

Before Aegaeon could blink, Minoth had abandoned his avuncular grasp and had leaned up jovially close to the still-wobbling Cole, throat at thorax and hair at head. "Same color, see? He hides himself well."

Would wonders never cease, then? Very clever, indeed, and Aegaeon pronounced it as much. "Ah...a worthy addition to our team."

Minoth also nodded his approval; good. The progenitor and connotational referee should always be party to new acts within and withon the theatre of war - or that and those of peacetime, even.

Then Aegaeon got a sly smile on his face, a phenomenon that was even rarer than that base action was at its usual, and he gestured at and to Minoth with a single steady finger before calling out (only Aegaeon's mellifluous aquine timbre was inmitable and his voice was never, never raised):

"Brighid, come observe this."

Brighid raised a violet eyebrow, and the skin around the paired supine eyelid twisted somewhat (in an approachable nigh-imperceptibility, to be sure) with measured intrigue, but she trotted obligingly over nonetheless.

What she saw, of course neither of the two male or male-adjacent figures could tell, and it was with bated breath and rippling rainish that they watched her peer about their occupied area.

"What is it, Aegaeon?" she asked after a minute of searching hadn't satisfied for the source of the prompt. Brighid's arms crossed; her patience for friend nor foe was no marvel, as yet, in this age.

Minoth, normally one to get cagey in a situation like this, just stood comfortably back, safe and secure in the knowledge that it wasn't his hapless, chapless ass that was getting burned today.

"You..." Aegaeon began with a proud lift of his chin and an anti-musical clattering of his tubes, "...have been stick bugged."

Something blue ignited, and it wasn't the ether lines on Aegaeon's face. You see, Brighid was no fool either, and she caught out her prankster with truly magmatic (and never magnanimous) speed and impunity as he yelped and made to scamper, as much as a two-meter-tall cowboy ever can scamper, straight away.

Too soon (for Brighid's tastes and perhaps also those of the readers), he returned, dragged by the enthusiastic hand of his...partner in more ways than one. You know, because cowboys, and perhaps then also princes, make do.

"Now, Minoth," he was saying in that perpetual half-conciliatory half-enamored tone, "what's got you all out of sorts, hmm?" And Minoth pointed, at the bug and at Brighid, and then it was Addam who looked out of sorts.

"Oh that's...an interesting fellow, isn't it."

Minoth, suddenly back on the stick (ha ha) rolled his eyes and jerked Addam's clutching hand to communicate as much of the same exasperation.

"Look, scaredy-prince, he's like me, right? The long, limber bug man, or whatever. Nothing to be afraid of." Cole wiggled in his feeler-steps to mark his agreement.

Capricious, capricious Mr. Origo. As soon as he got to stitching together the metaphorical similed analogy (he had a hard time keeping straight the literary terms his boyfriend so often tossed off, you see), his face lit up with immediacy, and he proclaimed in his beaming, "Ah! Well, if that's so, then of course I like him very much."

Aegaeon and Brighid exchanged a not-knowing glance. They were...one couldn't call the odd pair cute, per se - and yet, as Addam leaned in to kiss Minoth's cheek and Minoth leaned out to avoid Addam's chasing lips, it was the sort of thing that made one's heart warm and warmed, and all that.

"Well then. If I recall correctly, it is my turn to prepare the evening meal, yes?"

Jin nodded evenly at the asking Aegaeon from his station at the campfire, watching Lora and Haze demonstrate, somewhat fruitlessly, to Mythra their chosen crafts.

"And will you help me gather supplies, Jin?" Now the Ice Blade shook his head negation just as evenly. Aegaeon looked quizzical; Jin explained himself in brief words, as ever: "It's my night off, isn't it? Maybe Lora will help you."

His Driver did indeed perk up at the mention of work to be done, and as Aegaeon gazed over the small-amassed group and recalled his conversation with Brighid and Hugo (the latter of whom was engaged in some spirited exchange of rejoinders with Minoth as Addam reclined sleepily against the taller man's chest) of some days prior, he thought he'd try his own little joke.

"Very well. Lesbians," he gestured to and at all the women present, "let us go."

All but Brighid blinked one, twice, three times, and she gave the selfsame impression of having done so too, and then they stood in uncanny yet still happily dissembled synchronicity.

"You've got a lotta nerve, Aegaeon," Mythra warned as she rose, shaking her ratty mess of a macramé in a way that was not at all menacing nor even denotationally intimidating. "Perhaps that is correct," he replied, "but I know you."

And off they went, to frolic and to forage, or perhaps to forage and to frolic, and Minoth yelled something nonsensically inharmonious like "Give me steam, Aegaeon!" and Addam shouted him down and Minoth relented and bestowed a kiss himself and...never you mind.

An odd day, for that just-as-odd troupe, but it was indeed real - real as any place and time they'd been.