Neopets - Aldric Beign x Tulah Kisner
Fandom: Neopets
Pairing: Aldric/Tulah, blink-and-you-miss-it Mor/Vere
Theme set: Gamma
Title: A Most Peculiar Glow
Rating: G to PG
Warning[s]: None, unless you think anthropomorphic animals interacting merits a warning
Notes: Well, I actually did this. I'll brace myself now!
Naturally, since there is limited information on these characters, I took some liberties with characterization. I think (hope?) that I did all right!
I tried my best to include insight from and development into the minds of all the team members as well as the two forwards.
#01 - Ring
“And you’ll have to race around him like this,” Aldric demonstrates, enthusiastically scribbling what might only generously be labeled a figure-eight on the chalkboard next to a stick-figure opponent as Tulah struggles contain her laughter.
#02 - Hero
The team knows that, in the grand scheme of things, the great upset against the Pirates probably won’t bring them much closer to the top; still, it doesn’t stop Mor from heaving the two forwards into the sky with his great arms and presenting them proudly to their fans.
#03 - Memory
"Promise me we'll never forget this moment," she whispers to Aldric as the four green rectangles blaze on the screen, and the look on her face is so absurdly unlike her usual scowl that he can't help but take a mental snapshot before reaching for her hand, tentative, and replying, "never."
#04 - Box
“All right, team, they're saying Roxton Colchester’s in the celebrity box today, so we need to win this one, got it?”
#05 - Run
She feels the force of his paws as he hurls the ball in her direction, still slightly off-target, and hesitates to roll her eyes as she snatches the thing with ease and sprints off toward the goalpost.
#06 - Hurricane
The small charcoal blur is Tulah, expertly dodging steadfast opponents with a ticking time bomb clutched in her arms: an image of chaos attempting to avert itself.
#07 - Wings
“And you’ll have take care not to burn poor Vere to smithereens with your wings next time,” Aldric nods, gesturing to an apologetic Zax as Tulah shakes her head.
#08 - Cold
“Remember the old days, before our dip in the pool?” he asks her, solemn for the first time in a long while; it requires every measure of discipline to keep from blushing as she answers, “I remember always being freezing.”
#09 - Red
It’s the color preferred by both of them, the color of their team, of fire, of spirit and of passion; but it is also the color of defeat.
#10 - Drink
“Tulah, here!” Aldric practically chirps as he shoves a mug of hot borovan in her general direction; the look on his face is so stupidly euphoric that she can’t bring herself to decline.
#11 - Midnight
She’s always awake at this hour, unable to sleep for the nerves, and uses the time to shoot flaming rocks against the wall while Aldric slumbers soundly in the background.
#12 - Temptation
He has to stop her at times, after a particularly stinging loss, from burning down the field in her anger, a thoroughly daunting task in itself; but once the consolation match is over, the number 18 flashed up on the ranking board next to their symbol for the second year in a row, Aldric realizes he’d like nothing more than to watch it all go up in flames.
#13 - View
The image of Moltara from their practice spot is stunning, a luminous picture of magma and metal and multicolored specks of light; Aldric often wonders how any world in all of Neopia could rival such a scene.
#14 - Music
Tulah can’t stand the harsh, repetitive throb of the Altador Cup theme tune, but Aldric finds it a perfectly rousing beat to toss around Yooyus to.
#15 - Silk
Sometimes she finds herself missing the softness of her old fur; but when she sees her reflection, the swell of pride that courses through her veins far outranks this or any perks of her old, unremarkable coat.
#16 - Cover
“Yeah yeah, but you’ve got our backs, right?” Aldric grins to the hulking Relic moehog, who entertains him with a vexed expression.
#17 - Promise
After they had emerged from the pool together, marveled at their newly-encased magma bodies, he’d placed a paw on her shoulder; there were no words, no unnecessary isms, merely an unspoken pact and a long-held gaze.
#18 - Dream
She dreams of wires and steel and insurmountable walls, of opponents that knock the ball from her hands and her captain’s devastated face, of numbers that plummet and rectangles of red; when she awakens, she nearly always finds she’s shaking.
#19 - Candle
“Something to remind us of home,” Zax says brightly, handling the thing with all the grace of a Grarrl as the rest of the team smiles, appreciative.
#20 - Talent
His potential is as vast as his grin, and as Tulah watches him exponentially increase his skill, his swiftness and endurance, she can’t help but wonder if one of the things that might impede him on the path to greatness ... is her.
#21 - Silence
Tulah can count on one paw the amount of times Aldric’s been driven speechless: their second consolation bracket loss, the upset of Krawk Island, the team’s first sweep against Faerieland -- and the first time she ever hugged him, immediately after.
#22 - Journey
One day, late in the game -- when her doubts were at their highest point and her confidence at its lowest -- she asked Mor hoarsely what the purpose of continuing on would be, what the team could possibly hope to accomplish with such a forthstanding record as their own; when he finally spoke, the words rang lucid in her mind: "we'll be the team who keeps blazing the trail even when everyone expects us to quit."
#23 - Fire
They fight with it, are tempered in it, and look to it for strength; it is the source of their power, a destructive force of nature and a constant memory of home.
#24 - Strength
"Hey, firecracker, Altador wasn't built in a day, you know," Vere exclaims cheerfully, plucking a seething Tulah by the back of her jersey and dragging her forcefully away from the practice field, into the night and the looming prospect of sleep.
#25 - Mask
“This is going to sound silly,” Aldric begins, staring with fiery eyes into his best friend’s newly hardened Magma face, “but you look more like... you, now, than ever before.”
#26 - Ice
When the rest of the team discovers that it’s Vere’s favorite Yooyu, the chaos that ensues is enough to rival their initial response to being accepted into the Cup that first year.
#27 - Fall
They’ve all (with the ever-anxious exception of Zax) learned to bite back their concern when they see Tulah storm off in anger after a loss, secure in the knowledge that the Acara wouldn’t ever do anything too foolish.
#28 - Forgotten
“It’s in the past now!” the captain all but yells in the direction of his grappling team, and they all look toward him wearily before shuffling away from the board that shamelessly broadcasts their sixth loss in a row.
#29 - Dance
“They might as well be doing the tango,” Vere remarks offhandedly, grinning at Mor as they continue to watch the fiery pair exchange the yooyu between them at marvelous speeds, leaving nothing but dust in their wake.
#30 - Body
Aldric once asked Mor whether the goalie could feel any sort of physical contact, or whether the density of his stone body hindered his nervous system; the older neopet had simply glanced down at the team captain and rumbled, “I feel enough to catch the ball.”
#31 - Sacred
Mor knows that one day, they will both find the words they've been searching for all this time: through lava, through gravity, through scores of red marks and palpatations of the heart, each will realize the feelings that burn there; and even before the keeper can take the time to concern himself with the possibilities of how such a revelation might detriment the team, he curls his lips upward in spite of himself at the sheer rightness of it all.
#32 - Farewells
Facing the gravity of one hundred and sixteen losses that first year, the team expected to be met with a silent departure, even a defamatory one; what they did not expect was the hundreds of fans, some screaming out and others brandishing handdrawn posters, that had gathered by the moon's light to send them on their way home.
#33 - World
They’ve toured the worlds, seen Neopia in all its beauty; but at the end of the day they wish nothing more than to return to the boiling underground spot that gives it all meaning.
#34 - Formal
They all laugh a little at Zax’s consistent politeness, but agree that his careful behavior is part of what gives him his charm.
#35 - Fever
When they're feverish, their faces burn alight in the most peculiar glow; the same phenomenon occurs when they're blushing.
#36 - Laugh
Vere got Mor to do it once, and the experience ranked up there in memorability with the team’s first ever win.
#37 - Lies
They're normally the underdogs, the team to be pitied; but on that 23rd day of the Month of Relaxing, after Krawk Island's designated space lit up in red, the malicious rumors that propagated throughout the worlds gave them their first taste of what it was like to be a high-tier team.
#38 - Forever
When he thinks of inevitable roster changes and continuing hardships he cringes; through every tribulation, every jeering mouth and every possibility of failure, Aldric finds himself wishing with desperate abandon that they all could just stay here together, playing this game, for all time.
#39 - Overwhelmed
“We did it,” he mutters, as the team stares upward in awe at the four green rectangles next to Faerieland’s symbol; and Tulah thinks it's the softest voice she's ever heard him use.
#40 - Whisper
"No," she mouths as she heaves the flaming Yooyu toward him, and in that hanging second of time there is nothing except the lines of her forehead and the fury of her eyes as the wretched cable finally snaps: "NO!"
#41 - Wait
She's just about to follow Zax's dragging tail into the campsite when he stops her with a paw to the shoulder; when she meets his searing gaze, she finds his face indecipherable as he mutters "toss the ball around with me... just a little longer."
#42 - Talk
“ --And it’s absurd that they call you Pecs, I can understand the basis for the rest of our nicknames, but yours is absurd and furthermore, how do you suppose you'll live up to this hype they're giving you, you aren't even--” and only on that last word did she notice the paw at her mouth.
#43 - Search
The game, to the team, is many things: it is the scrap pieces of an answer to a question they hadn’t ever been aware of asking; it is a remedy to all the skybound dreams and raw, molten energy that’s a natural result of living underground; but, above all, it is the ups and the downs, the euphoria of a win pitted against the despair of a loss, the next step toward an even greater journey.
#44 - Hope
It’s a natural thing to Aldric, even in devastating loss: a phenomenon that Tulah was never able to understand.
#45 - Eclipse
When Aldric discovered that the team had missed the lunar phenomenon during night practice, he'd been devestated; so the rest of them all got to talking and began to formulate a plan that culminated in Zax punting a Fire Yooyu into the sky and shielding it with his wings -- a personal eclipse just for their captain.
#46 - Gravity
Their fans know it's possible to feel it, by placing all their faith in the offhand hope of a win that becomes reality; the team knows it's possible to evade it, by training in the harshest of environments and continuous improvement their dexterity; and now Aldric is finding that it's possible to defy it, through small smiles after a hard-earned win and the softest paw on his shoulder, through the shimmer of sand left in a fiery wake and the dizzying brilliance of her eyes.
#47 - Highway
They may have had their share of difficulty following the road to gold laid out before them years past, but they've forged their own path now: a superhighway, constructed of fire and hope, where trials and memories zoom forth like so many cars.
#48 - Unknown
The final seconds are the worst, those stretches of time before the scoreboard shows them all whether they accomplished something in that round, or whether morale would be dampened yet another day.
#49 - Lock
“You know, I think you’re finally starting to let us in,” Zax tells her quietly, his foot brushing awkwardly against the sand, “and we have him to thank for it.”
#50 - Breathe
They're the softest three words ever uttered, a breath on the wind, barely audible even with advanced Kougra hearing; but as soon as they've been uttered into the night air, as soon as his arms enclose around her back, he finds he wants nothing more than to shout them out into the night.