[location- Sanctuary] [The day after Etrigan is summoned]

[personaldemon]

Morning dawns bright and sunny over Taxon. The spring weather is holding, the blue sky is filled with puffy clouds, and oh yeah, there's graffiti over much of the Sanctuary.

It's 'art', if you can call stick figures and vulgar caricatures in spray paint 'art'.

Some, but by no means all, features of this impromptu all-night graffiti session feature the following:

There's a vampire being kicked in the ass by a blond girl. Subsequent doodles down one side of the building seem to involve the use of stakes as impromptu sexual aids.

There is a crude rendition of a woman reclining amid skulls and demons, with an even cruder sidebar of a stick figure stubbly man in a costume apparently fapping away at the sight of her, captioned with a thought bubble saying 'close enough!'.

Two men, one wearing a cowboy hat and an outsized star stuck on his chest, and the other waving a gun wildly in the air, are engaged in very pornographic stick figure sex.

There's an obscenely well-endowed stick figure Catwoman being leered at by a drooling man in a sort-of bat costume, as the kick-off of a sequence that gets less and less G-rated (not that it ever was to start with) and winds up being apparently bondage with a pearl necklace. At least that might be a pearl necklace. (The artist got bored with detail, and the art on this one gets increasingly terrible.)

Not all of the drawings are sexual: there's a cartoonish vampire with an apparent collar of bones that leads back to the hand of a dour-looking figure wearing what might be a suit, who is tossing a (lovingly-detailed) femur and saying Hol, Bruder! in the speech balloon over his head.

Here's a curly-headed man with a vacant smile and a jagged line on his head, hands holding it open to reveal nothing inside, multiple question marks hanging in space above it. At his knees, a long-haired boy is kneeling, mouth open in a vapid, receptive 'O' that seems to be ignored by the man above him.

Here's a skull-- the artist spent time on this one, it's one of the better images on the wall-- with a cartoon heart above it and the words "KEEP TRYING!"

Here's a pointy-eared, long-haired man bent over with a doctor behind him, peering through an exaggerated monocle. Caption: "NO WAY WE CAN GET THAT STICK UNJAMMED, SORRY YOUR HIGHNESS"

A messy-headed, lanky youth uses an oversized magnifying glass to follow, hunched-over, a series of footsteps; he seems on the verge of walking off a precipice, but too caught up in his clews to notice.

A stick-figure girl with a sword walks away from a blob that, on close inspection, might seem to be a swaddled infant.

A dog, perhaps a dog anyway, howls at the moon while scratching at fleas with a hind leg. A collar around its neck reads REMUS.

A scrawny looking dragon snores at the bottom of one 'panel', oblivious to the sexual shenanigans happening above it.

An unkempt man with a fro and exaggerated pot-belly wanders around through the entire multi-character tableaux, with dotted lines showing his progress like a Family Circus strip; ever so often his uncertain progress is punctuated with a "WEED?" speech bubble.

Finally, there's a cheerful doodle of a man with a skunk-stripe in his hair blowing his brains out with a gun.

The artist has not bothered to sign his or her work.

Comments

[skinandbone]

And here is Metody, drifting slowly through the maze of obscenities and making the occasional noise, too stunned to react further.

Which one is her? The woman lounging on skulls and demons is a possibility, but she's got boobs, and no one with eyes is going to draw Metody with boobs. She's practically got anti-boobs.

She hesitates at what is obviously Horst and Johannes, studying the collar and leash of bones. But the thing that binds them is blood, or the debt Johannes acquired from Horst's death and false rebirth, and has nothing to do with her. So that's not it at all.

Oh, second lady, is that - Metody pauses in front of what is undoubtedly Nuada, and makes a tiny chirp of horror. He is going to go absolutely weasels when he sees that. And so she hurries off.

And finds the skull.

She spends a long time standing there, staring up at the heart and really getting to be familiar with the deep, resentful offense she feels.

[imperial_long]

Long also studies the art, with his brows delicately furrowed.

"I am unsure as to the point of most of this," he says aloud; he's probably close enough to Metody for it to be heard by her should she be listening.

[skinandbone]

"Someone desperately wishes us to know that they're a steel plated jackwagon."

That heart. It's really freaking annoying.

[imperial_long]

Long's building frown switches to a sidelong glance over at Metody, one brow arched.

" 'Jackwagon'? I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with that term."

[skinandbone]

"It's an all purpose descriptor that substitutes for a great many curse words."

She frowns, tossing her hair out of her eyes. "What cleans off spray paint? I think some of these are going to embarrass people."

[imperial_long]

"A pressure hose, I suppose?" Long offers after a moment's thought. "I admit I have never cleaned spray paint off a surface before. I suppose that paint thinner might also suffice."

He balls his hands into his pockets, studying the caricature dragon a moment before letting his eyes wander on.

"Jackwagon," he repeats, half to himself, rolling the word around on his tongue. "Hmmn."

[skinandbone]

"Oh. I don't know if I'd be able to handle a pressure hose. But paint thinner, that I could do...maybe with sort of a push broom scrubber thing?"

She glances at him and back. "A very useful word."

[imperial_long]

"Your dedication to a graffiti-free Taxon is admirable," Long says with a slight, diffident smile. The conversation-- or perhaps the combination of conversation (a new slang term to use) and offensive graffiti-- is putting him in mind of Party Poison and Jet Star, the troubled and colorful brothers who had, oh, how would they have said it?

'Lit up this deadzone like a pig bomb!'

Something to that effect, anyway. He misses them both-- in his way, his dry and detached way. Poor children. From unhappy world to unhappy prison and back again.

Well, they are all of them to be pitied; he is as much prisoner of samsara as they were, and Metody Green. He draws his attention back to the immediate situation.

He is not about to offer to help you with cleaning off the wall, Metody. That is suspiciously like work. "I wonder if any of this contains a message beyond mere needling."

[skinandbone]

Of course it's work. Life is a long battle to prove usefulness and worth, and what better way to do that than with the dirty, boring jobs that no one else wanted to do?

It was an impulse that carried her through a lot of deer guts and slow carving.

"It seems aimed to offend, really. Did you see - " she hesitates. " - there were some - ah. I've noticed that people are not very open about sexual matters here - "

[imperial_long]

Long's brows arch again and his gaze travels from the graffiti to Metody's pale, earnest face. A smile threatens at the corner of his lips.

"Are they not? As you can see from my depiction, I'm apparently not very observant to the social activities happening beneath my nose."

[skinandbone]

Metody contemplates the pictures.

"....if anything, I'd say it implies you're oblivious to shenanigans happening directly above your head."

"Man. That is one awful picture of you. You don't look like that at all."

[imperial_long]

"A figure of speech," Long says with his smile broadening. "Above my head. Beneath my nose. Within my purview, at any rate."

He tsks slightly. "It's true. I was always very well-fed. This poor fellow looks emaciated."

[skinandbone]

"I don't really see why you'd care anyway, if they don't directly involve you."

Metody brightens.

" - you know, we could just paint over this stuff, and add some color."

[imperial_long]

"Because humans are terrible gossips," Long says drily. And so is he, but that's neither here nor there.

He arches his brows again at Metody. "Paint over it? Add color?"

You might be talking in Greek, with the comprehension he shows of your idea. Actually, if you were talking in Greek, he would have no problems.

[skinandbone]

"It's...not a bad skeleton of you? It has the basic shape, at least. It could easily be turned into the basis of a mural."

"Maybe of you napping after you ate in the woods?"

[imperial_long]

"I defer to your judgment on murals," Long says with a slight spreading of his hands.

He merely looks wistful at the mention of napping and eating in the woods. "It really was a very good deer."

[skinandbone]

Metody grins. "I will paint a deer in the background, then. And yes, it did look like a good one. And a whole forest, too. It will be nice to have something beautiful to do."