This one's a bit later than I thought it would be, sorry about that. I was going over it last night before posting it and realized that it kinda sucked, so I took some extra time to make it not suck.
-~o~-
The idea of looking for jobs really didn't appeal. She'd never really had to do it before now, and she wasn't sure where to start. She'd have to make a CV, probably? Or a résumé. That was what they called them here, right? And she didn't really have the type of work experience that would get her... Any sort of mundane job, really.
It was going to be hard, and that was the perfect reason to put it off. She still had to settle in a bit, get her feet wet. She would figure out something out for rent later. For now, meeting people seemed like the best idea. Having connections would make anything she had to do here easier, she knew that from experience.
It had been maybe ten minutes since the noises from the next apartment over had ceased. That was probably enough time for them to have cleaned up. It occurred to her that she should probably bring them a small gift. That was a thing that Americans did, right? She had bought a box of cookies at the store, maybe she could arrange them nicely on a plate and-
"That was quite a mess you made."
That was a new voice, one that had come from inside her own apartment, right behind her. She leapt up to her feet so fast that she knocked the table and chair over, and instantly, reflexively, cast a ward about herself.
The voice, it turned out, belonged to a man. A very small man, with glimmering, insect-like wings and glittery purple hair. He was wearing a tiny, perfectly-tailored white suit, hovering in the air a few feet away from her. "What the hell are you doing!" he hissed. "Drop that! Hurry, hurry!"
She let the ward fall away. "Fucking hell, Quick, you know not to sneak up on me like that. How on earth are you... Why are you here? How'd you get here so fast?"
"Say my name and ask that again," he said, rolling his eyes. "I'm just here to deliver a message. Your mother sends her regrets that it had to come to this."
That made her snort. "We both know that she doesn't care. If she did she could have come here and told me that herself. By the way, who the fuck told you that you could watch me jerking off? Just because we hooked up once doesn't mean that you can just float on in here and watch me masturbate whenever you want, you little creep."
"For your information," he said primly, "I came in when you were cleaning up. It looked like you missed the sink by quite a bit, if that's what you were shooting for."
"I can suffocate you in my tits, you know. You're tiny. You wouldn't be able to escape."
"If that's how I have to go," he said solemnly, "then I accept my fate."
"Just tell me what you need to say, Quick."
He sniffed. "So impatient. Fine." He reached into the breast pocket of his suit and pulled out a card, which was bigger than his own torso. The logistics of it made her head hurt. Fairy magic. Best not to think about it too hard.
"United States of America Permanent Resident," she read as she took it.
"I believe that the locals refer to it as a 'Green Card'," said Quick. "With your accent, nobody would believe that you are American, so we felt that this would be a plausible cover."
"There's no name on it."
"We thought that we would leave that up to you. You'll want something that's suitably different from your real name, of course."
She thought for a moment. "Mélodie. Mélodie Monet."
"The alliteration is a little on-the-nose."
"Plenty of people have alliterative names. It's not unusual."
"Mm." Quick tapped on the card, and suddenly the name field was filled in. "It will do, I suppose. Internalize it. Practice answering to it. Tell no-one your real name, or what you used to do. I don't think that I need to tell you the danger that you could be in if you let too much slip."
"Yeah," She said. "I know. Anything else?"
"Good luck. She said to tell you that, but I'm saying it too, and I mean it sincerely."
She frowned. "That's it, huh? A thousand dollars, a fake ID, and and a 'Good luck'? That's all that she had for me?"
Quick pursed his lips. "Yes. I'm sorry."
She pinched the bridge of her nose. "Not that I would have expected anything different. Well. It was good to see you, Quick. I'm guessing that you've got to go soon?"
"Now, in fact. But I'll be around here and there, popping in every once in a while to check up on you."
"If you come in while I'm jerking off again I'm going to shoot you right out of the air."
"Judging from what I saw, your aim is terrible, so I don't think I'd be in any danger." She flexed her fingers, and he held up a placating hand. "Kidding. It was good to see you too, Mélodie, even if it was only for a moment."
"It already feels like it suits me," she said with a sigh. "C'mere."
Quick was small enough that hugs weren't really practical, so he kissed her on the cheek, and she kissed him on the top of his head. His hair tasted like cotton candy.
And then he was gone. With a wave, he zipped out of the window. He didn't seem to care all that much that the window wasn't actually open - it let him through all the same. More fairy magic.
She looked at the card again. She didn't even know where they had gotten this picture, but it was her, alright. Mélodie Monet. Mélodie was her second choice when she had changed her name after transitioning, and she had just made up Monet on the spot. She still liked her first choice, her real name, better, but these were desperate times, and it would do in a pinch.
---
The apartments had no doorbells, so she knocked, balancing the plate of cookies with her other hand. There was a scuffling sound from inside. "Who is that?" said one voice. "Did you order food or something?"
"No," said the other. That was the one who had been doing all the talking, earlier. "I'm not expecting anyone. Uh, go and hide out in the bedroom for a second, I guess?"
"I'll just get dressed. I was about to anyway."
More shuffling, and then the door opened.
A couple of things happened at once. First, Mélodie had to start up the English-speaking part of her brain. The last time that she'd had to use the language extensively was when she lived in London, about five years ago, and she was still a bit rusty. Second, she had to take a moment to take in the sight that was now before her.
Her neighbor's apartment was not dirty, but it was very cluttered. There was a huge, poofy couch that was covered in pillows, a TV that would have been a state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line model about fifteen years ago, a bookshelf that was overflowing with books, so much so that there were two stacks on the carpet next to it, and another bookshelf that was also overflowing, but this one was covered in nerdy little toys and knickknacks. The walls were, likewise, covered in posters from old movies and anime, and prints of artwork (a suspicious number of which depicted very scantily clad, often buxom women).
What really caught her eye, though, was her neighbor. She about the same age as Mélodie, probably somewhere in her twenties, and was very short - Mélodie had at least a foot on her. She had a round, soft face and round, soft hips, brilliantly yellow eyes behind a pair of rimless glasses, and long, black hair that had a streak of purple in it. Also, and this was notable, she had some of the biggest breasts that Mélodie had ever seen. Not the biggest, but close. She had them in a bra that was, amazingly, fitted perfectly to them, which Mélodie could see because all that she was wearing above it was a very large spaghetti-strap tank-top. There had to be at least thirty centimeters of cleavage showing, and that was with her breasts still more covered than not. Or, rather, she supposed that she should try to start thinking in Imperial measurements. She was showing a foot of cleavage. Thirty centimeters was about a foot, right?
"Hello!" she said, putting on her friendliest smile and holding out the plate of cookies. "Sorry to bother you, but I'm your new neighbor! I just moved in next door, and I wanted to introduce myself."
"Oh, uh..." Busty neighbor girl seemed taken aback. "Hi?"
"My name's Mélodie." It felt weird to say it out loud for the first time. "I'm very new to Missouri, so I'm still settling in. Would you like a cookie?"
She offered the plate, and her neighbor took one. "Uh, thanks. I'm Yuriko. Or Lilly. You can call me either."
"Do you have a preference?"
"Not really. Uh..." She looked back into the apartment, a little awkwardly. She was probably just shy, or not in the mood to talk. Usually Mélodie's Gift helped people relax around her, but it only did so much, and it didn't tend to open up people who were really shy. She would go ahead and wrap this up, then. No reason to be pushy.
"Anyway, that was all. Just wanted to let you know my name. It was nice to meet you!"
"Yeah, you too."
She was about to close the door when, from somewhere in the back of the apartment, the other voice called out, "Whoa, wait, hold on! Attendez, attendez." Yuriko hesitated, and another girl came hurrying out of the bedroom. She was still pulling on a stylish tunic even as she rushed to the door, and Mélodie caught a brief glimpse of a set of toned abs much like her own before she pulled the shirt down over them. This new girl was tall, slim, and athletic, just like Mélodie. Unlike Mélodie, she had big hair and big boobs. They weren't nearly as big as her... Roommate's? Girlfriend's? Wife's? But that was a very high bar, and they really stood out on her thin frame.
"J'ai entendu votre accent," she said as she reached the door. Mélodie could see now that she was taller than this girl, but only by a few centimeters. Inches. She was taller than her by an inch or two. "Vous êtes française?"
Mélodie found herself slightly taken aback. Not only was her French good, it sounded completely fluent and natural. "Ah, oui. Je suis née à Lyon mais j'ai grandi à Paris."
Her face lit up. "Sans blague! Ma mère est lyonnaise! Je m'appelle Rose, et voici ma petite amie, Lilly. Enchantée!"
"Ah! Je suis heureuse de vous rencontrer. Moi, je m'appelle Mélodie. Alors venez-vous de France aussi?"
"Oh, non, Je suis américaine. J'ai grandi ici, dans le Missouri, mais j'ai..." She looked over at her girlfriend, who was staring at the two of them, clearly not following. "Ah, maybe it's better if we speak English. But yeah, I grew up here, but my mom wanted me to speak French really well, so she sent me to this immersion school over in Jeff City for pretty much all of elementary school, and exposed me to as much French as she possibly could when I was growing up. I think I've got it down pretty well!"
"You do! You sound like you were born in France."
Rose beamed. "Merci. Hey, do you need help moving anything into your place?"
Yuriko immediately looked alarmed, and said, "Uh... I'm not really built for moving heavy stuff around."
"You don't have to help, Lilly," said Rose with a laugh. "I meant just me."
"Um, I might," said Mélodie. "Later, though. I don't have anything put in there yet. I still need to buy furniture. This was a 'sell everything and buy new things when you get there' type of move."
"Wow," said Rose. "That sounds like an adventure! Did you come here directly from France?"
"From Sweden. It's a long story. Hey, I hope that this isn't weird, but you smell absolutely wonderful. Is that your Gift?"
"Yeah!" said Rose. I smell different to everyone. What's it like to you?"
"Like sandalwood and seawater," said Mélodie with a smile. "It's lovely. I think we have the same one! How do I smell to you?"
"Cinnamon rolls," said Rose.
"Like Rose," said Yuriko. "You both smell exactly the same to me. I think you do have the same Gift."
"What a coincidence!" said Mélodie. She looked over at Yuriko and...
Whoa. Her clothes had changed. Instead of her tank-top and fluffy pajama bottoms she was now wearing, well... Not much. There were leaves and vines and flowers growing in her hair that hadn't been there a moment ago, which hung down in wide swathes which covered her breasts, sort of. Mélodie could just see a hint of wide, pink areolas underneath the greenery. And her eyes were closed. She looked like she was sleeping on her feet.
And then Mélodie blinked, and it was all gone. She was back in her clothes, eyes open. "Are you okay?" Yuriko asked. "You look really pale all of a sudden."
This was alarming. What... What was she? Had Mélodie been tracked down already? "I, um... I'm fine."
"You sure?" asked Rose. "Do you want to come in and sit down? We both have to leave here pretty soon, but we could talk for a few minutes."
She felt herself starting to sweat. Clearly Rose hadn't seen that, and Yuriko seemed unaware that anything about her had changed. Mélodie's instincts were telling her to run, to track down Quick and tell him that he needed to help her figure out what the hell was going on with her new neighbor... But another part of her brain was telling her that it was nothing. She had seen things like this before, in her line of work. Or, well... Not things exactly like this, but weird things. Inexplicable things. Or, at least, things that were inexplicable until she investigated them a bit.
And besides, she had just cast a ward not a hundred feet away. If anything was going to happen, it would have happened then. "Sure," she said, doing her best to hide the hesitation in her voice. Her best was quite good - this wasn't even close to the first time that she'd had to appear more confident than she was.
They led her inside, and Yuriko quickly and subtly snatched a very large bra off of the couch before Mélodie sat down on it. A bra that, she couldn't help but notice, had two large, wet stains on the insides of the cups. She only caught a brief glimpse of them before Yuriko folded it over on itself, hiding them, and tossed it aside. "Sorry it's so messy in here," she said. "We weren't expecting company."
"Oh, no problem at all." The couch was so soft that she sank down several inches into it. "I like it. This place is lived-in. Homey." She watched Yuriko carefully as she took the plate of cookies when she offered them and set them on the kitchenette counter. "So, are you from Missouri as well?"
"I was born in San Francisco," said Yuriko. "My parents and me moved here when I was ten."
"Ah, I visited San Francisco once, years ago. It was..."
"Filthy," said Yuriko. "You don't have to sugar-coat it."
"Oh." She was legitimately taken aback by that. "I liked it."
"I mean, I do too. I grew up there. It's a nasty fuckin' city, though."
"It sounds like you travel a lot, Mélodie?" asked Rose, with a glance at Yuriko.
"I do. Um, if you don't mind me asking, Yuriko, what is your Gift?"
"Usually when people ask me that it's their way of subtly saying, 'Why are your tits so huge?'"
Mélodie actually blushed at that. "I didn't mean to-"
She waved a hand. "It's fine." She didn't seem offended or angry. In fact, she looked down at her chest and gave her bared cleavage a light slap, which made it jiggle slightly. "They are pretty out-there right now, and people tend to notice them even when I've got them covered up."
"I actually would have guessed that it was your eyes. Yellow isn't exactly a natural eye color."
Yuriko leaned forward on the counter, which meant that her breasts squished up against it and bulged out of her top. She didn't seem to care. "I'm kind of a weird case. I don't actually know what my Gift is. Yeah, my tits are gigantic, but they were always gigantic, even before Gifts were around. My eyes were always yellow, too."
"There is that weird thing with your dad's eyes too, though," said Rose.
"What weird thing?" asked Mélodie, intrigued.
"My dad's eyes used to be yellow, right up until the night that he got my mom pregnant with me. Literally moments after... You know. The deed, his eyes turned brown. My mom saw it happen."
"Really?" said Mélodie. That was intriguing.
"Yup. That's not even the craziest part. The same thing happened to my grandma. Her eyes were yellow, right up until she got pregnant with my dad, when they turned green. She told me that it was the same for her mom and her grandad."
Mélodie scratched her head. "So this gift of yellow eyes runs in your family, passed down to generation to generation?"
"Seems to. Presumably if I ever have a kid, they'll get yellow eyes and mine will turn... I dunno, probably brown. I actually looked into this, and from what I can tell, when the weird yellow-eye thing leaves a member of my family, their eyes turn a color that they likely would have been anyway based on genetics."
"Lilly's a biologist," Rose added, a distinct note of pride in her voice.
"So, it's almost as if the yellow is sort of... Sitting on top of your natural eye color?"
Yuriko shrugged. "I guess so. The really weird part is that all of this was happening way before magic came back. It's been in our family for generations."
"Yes, that is very strange," said Mélodie. That had to be related to the vision that she had just seen. She didn't know how yet, but her gut was telling her that the two couldn't be coincidences. "So, your Gift could be your breasts, but it might not be, or it could be your eyes. But Gifts don't pass from parent to child like that. They aren't genetic."
"You wanna know the weirdest story I've found about it?" asked Yuriko.
"Oh, please! I'm all ears."
Yuriko clasped her hands together in front of her, which made her arms press up against her breasts, which made them muffin out of her top even more. Good lord, they really were gigantic. It was hard to focus with them in her sight. "Okay, so, back in the 1800s, my great-great-great-great... great grandpa," she actually counted out the 'great's on her fingers, "Shigesuke, got my great-times-five grandma, Aki, pregnant. Shigesuke's eyes turned from yellow to brown. But then Aki had a miscarriage a few weeks later. When it happened, her eyes, not Shigesuke's, turned yellow, which they had never been before. And then a few years later, they tried again. When Aki got pregnant that time, she lost the yellow eyes again, and her daughter, my great-times-four grandma, came out with them."
"That is incredible," said Mélodie. "I've never heard of anything like that." It wasn't a lie, and she knew far more about magic than most people.
"I had to piece that story together from retellings from a bunch of my older relatives who still live in Japan, as well as a newspaper clipping from Sendai in 1884 which had my great-times-four grandma telling the story as it was recounted to her by her parents. It was difficult as all hell to find, and I still don't know what it means."
"Something magical is being passed down in your family. Obviously your eyes are tied to it, and it might account for, ah... Your chest. It can't be a Gift, though. Those aren't passed down genetically. Did anyone else in your family who had the eyes have any other unusual traits?"
"My dad never noticed anything out of the ordinary while he had them. My grandma, his mom, had huge boobs too, but like, hers were, like, natural huge. Like, you look at her and think, 'Wow, she has big boobs,' and not 'Wow, those have to be from magic or surgery,' like me."
"It doesn't sound like a curse," said Mélodie. "Those can pass from parent to child like your eyes have, but it doesn't sound like there are any really negative things associated with it. Unless you don't like having big breasts, I suppose. Do you have back pain from them?"
"Nope," said Yuriko. "And I do like them, believe it or not. They're heavy as hell, but I've never had back pain or anything." She pulled away from the counter as she said it, and they fwumped back down onto her chest and stomach weightily, as if to demonstrate.
"The fact that it's inconsistent between different members of your family is odd, too. You're sure that your father had no extraordinary traits before the Quake?"
Yuriko shrugged. "If he did he never told me about them. I mean, what it's going to do, make him grow huge tits too?"
"Sure," said Mélodie. "Why not? It would be even more of a curse if he didn't want them."
"Honestly?" said Yuriko, "I've always suspected that my boobs are not related at all to my eyes, or even magical at all. Huge boobs kinda run in both sides of my family, even for people who missed the eyes on my dad's side, and I've got all sorts of weird hormonal things going on on top of that. I suspect that I'm so big as a result of a combination of the two."
"That's possible," said Mélodie, "but magic that changes the body often works, at least partially, by releasing hormones that result in the changes that you wanted the magic to make in the first place. Self-realization, the reason that everyone's so hot nowadays, can make breasts grow or shrink by causing the right hormones to be released by the brain."
"You seem to know an awful lot about magic," said Rose, who up until now had been listening with interest. "Do you study it? Is that why you were in Sweden?"
She sounded excited, like she was interested in making a new friend who knew about this stuff, but Mélodie was kicking herself internally. Sweden was home to the biggest institution of magical research in the world, and it wasn't an unreasonable assumption to make based on the knowledge that she had just dropped. "Oh, uh... No, I'm just a hobbyist. I find it interesting."
"Yeah, but who doesn't?" said Rose with a smile.
"Hey Rose?" said Yuriko. "I hate to cut things off, but look at the time."
"Oh! Yeah, jeez. Sorry, but we sort of do need to get going now."
Mélodie stood. The soft couch seemed almost reluctant to let go of her. She was going to have to see about getting one of those. "Oh, not a problem." She was glad for the change of subject, anyway. "We can talk some other time. You know where to find me, of course."
"Yeah! Hey, if you want, you should swing by Tomino's Pizza later tonight. My parents own the place, and I'm going to be running the kitchen for them from eight to midnight. I can get you a free pizza if you come in while I'm working."
"You could also come over here if you want to hang out," said Yuriko. "I'm just going to be dicking around all night until Rose gets back, I could use someone to talk to."
Both sounded like intriguing propositions. "Thank you! I may take one of you up those offers."
They said their goodbyes, and Mélodie went back over to her mostly-empty apartment, head still swimming. She was going to have to keep an eye on Yuriko. After speaking to her, she was pretty sure that she wasn't a threat or anything, but she was a mystery, and she wanted to learn more about her. She was also very much interested in the prospect of free food.
Before that, though, she had several free hours to kill. It was only 13:30. Or 1:30 PM. She never understood why Americans didn't use the twenty-four hour clock, but she was going to have to get used to that too, she supposed.
-~o~-
UPDATE
Mélodie's next course of action has been chosen, and writing has begun! Thanks for your suggestions, everyone!
---
It's time for the next decision, and this time I'm gonna try something different. There's not a poll for this one. Instead, I'm taking suggestions for Mélodie's next course of action, early Homestuck style! What should Mélodie do to kill time before meeting either Rose or Lilly later tonight? Leave a suggestion down in the comments, send them to my Curiouscat, or DM them to me on Twitter! I'll pick the suggestion that I like the most and roll with it!
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