the great sage (avoiding the horses’ plague)
(written for @flashfictionfridayofficial‘s prompt: FFF167: Leap of Faith. Not related to anything else I’m working on, but a resurrection of a very old story idea I never finished! Title, quite literally, Sun Wukong’s. Enjoy!)
While there is rather less green and quite a bit more grey, he could see why the humans called cities concrete jungles.
He cackled, throwing himself into a backflip off the streetlamp steel to land on a windowsill. The lamps cast his shadow upon the pavement as he flew, the remaining leaves rustling off branches as he flew. Autumn had always been his favourite time of year, more so now that the Jade Court had bigger things to worry about than his eminent self.
Wukong had thought they had forgotten him, to his indignation. What a horror, to be forgotten! Him, the great monkey god! He had angrily climbed a taller specimen of those buildings the humans had constructed in his absence, only to reach the garden to loud shrieks. It rather turned out that they hadn’t forgotten him, but rather were struggling with bigger issues. Such as getting humans to believe in them again.
He hadn’t quite got their meaning, but apparently, in his absence, there had been a deep erasure of their existence in favour of some other god. He gathered it had been violent and rather miserable, judging by the exhaustion in the farmer’s eyes and the shudder in the tails of the animal spirits he had come across. The forests fluttered sadly to him, the great peach trees of his home mountain reaching joyfully, if fearfully towards him. He had searched, almost frantically, for his old compatriots, the great monkeys of the Mountain, the great rulers of the hill in his absence.
He felt the fear grip his heart, and he understood why they no longer worried about him.
He had found the daughter of a daughter of one of his old advisors. She looked upon his face, fingers reaching gingerly to his staff and the family marks upon his fur. He remembered the way her great-grandmother laughed arrogantly as she threw gods out from the mountain for daring to disturb her rest, and his voice shuddered as he asked her where the rest of them were.
“They hide.”
He had felt a surge of revulsion. What was there to hide from that the mountain could not protect his own? But she had only nodded solemnly, her fingers clenching the same way her ancestor’s had.
“I stayed here to wait.”
And so she told him the story of how the monkeys had gone out, mischief used to defend their forests using mist and the warm waters of streams flowing out from the rivers. But the rivers had dried and the forests burned, and one by one, they had stopped responding to her messages. The forest itself poisoned and the rivers stinging where they once soothed, she told him the story of how her family had been chosen to remain as the strongest and wisest.
The waters of time had long since taught him not to rush off impulsively as the anger, fear, and grief warred in his heart. If he had been younger, he would have drawn his staff immediately, surged off in a burst of wind to the forests to seek out his monkeys. But age had told him to wait and research. To learn more about this new world, to listen to the spells the human now cast, the whispers of the forests until he learnt how best to help those he considered his.
It hadn’t been all gloom. She told him proudly of her younger sister picking the freshest apples from the conqueror’s banquet, throwing them into the air and disappearing in a laugh. She told him of her partner’s twisting the river to throw the humans off balance as they tried to sail down it, calling the current to his will. She told him about her own visit, leaving her young daughter in charge, to the Dragon of the East River.
“Does his palace still miss its pillar?” He asked, laughingly.
“He remembers you. And so does his palace.” Hetao said, responding with a smile of her own.
And he had talked the night away, staying and resting for weeks until he had been ready to reenter the city.
It helped, of course, that he had always been drawn to mischief. He looked at the arching neon sprays of paint across school walls and added rude points of his own. He stole important documents from offices, folding them into flowers and scattering them in mounds across the ground. He threw himself into the air, again and again, seeking the same joy he had once felt in it. He shifted form, bird, fly, mosquito, lion, human, and then monkey again, tricking swans as he dove into lakes as a fish before taking flight.
Wukong sought out the warriors of this time, his staff in hand as he kicked and slashed through fights. He bowed after, of course he did, and he always held back his strength, but it was always just a little bit not enough for him.
He tricked other spirits and demons, but it was no fun.
And all this, he did while he waited, while he learned how to craft an identity for himself to live in this world as he did his research. He learned the new mediums for trickery, shifting himself as easily as he did while alive. It was a fascinating experience, as he remembered fondly how he first learned to shift between forms, as he applied those same lessons to learning new things.
No one believed in his name, but it was no bother. They invoked him casually, teenagers bored out of their minds while stuck in their homes. He deigned to respond sometimes, sparks of magic that shorted out the capillaries of electricity to their places, sudden colour changes to plain facades. But he had learned to listen, and so he did.
What use is constantly leaping, after all, if you don’t know what you’re jumping into?
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9 and 17 for the writers ask!
ooo ty ty kat!!!
9: what’s a series or franchise you secretly or not so secretly think you’d be, like, a REALLY good writers for if they’d stop being cowards and hire you already?
*stares directly at b@tim and d1cey dunge0ns* i could fix them. i could make them so good, or even better than they were. i coULD FIX THEM LET ME IN-
17: at what point in the process do you come up with titles, and how easy or hard is that for you?
oh god titles are so hard LSDKJFSLK, i usually end up going with a pun or a really simple one just to get one on paper X]
i try to come up with titles as fast as possible when working on a project! after all, naming it lets me organize all my posts/tags easier, as well as for my own like. personal state of mind. if im working on a project it needs to be named or i'll explode SLKDFJ
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another nd realization like i’m always going “it’s better when there’s an Ensemble Comedy & no ‘relatable’ audience standins or fixed Straight (comedically) Roles imo like why do we Need the back and forth where someone’s clearly doing the sillier / more spontaneous / Not Ordinary thing & someone else is just weirdly flatly Pointing Out like ‘hey...This isn’t normal’ or otherwise issuing Bemused Reactions questioning How this makes sense or Why it’s happening” like not only does it make everything less funny to me imo but i’m like why would you even like, react like that, even in a clearly fictional scripted situation why would it seem Normal for someone to just like insistently react Only in this way or act like they cannot function in this situation / they simply can’t wrap their heads around it
i find it all the more exasperating irl lol and then like ah right i mean i Guess nt people can learn how to be funny, man, but also like got it, it’s also clearly another manifestation of like dealing with The Brick Wall of [this is The social approach & if that’s not what other people are playing at you truly cannot adapt at all to their routine (except Maybe to recognize Goofarounding & only react by laughing / being the Audience)] in the way that you know, it’s like wow autistic people are so rigid & inflexible (as autistic ppl mask all the time / have to try to learn how to best accommodate any/all allistic individuals they interact with; & allistic ppl react to talking to an autistic person with kneejerk assumptions that’ll never be changed, hostility, &/or disinterest / rejection / exclusion, & think that their individual social approach is the sole correct one that they’ll never be changing, thanks) & oh autistic ppl lack Theory Of Mind & are never realizing that someone’s mind doesn’t work the exact same way as theirs (while autistic people Know there’s this lack of alignment from experience, vs allistic people unknowingly misinterpreting shit through their own lens & assuming their “oh this person Must have meant xyz by abc behavior” is immutably correct & never that they might be wrong abt this other person’s thoughts/feelings/intentions actually, and even if Knowing someone’s autistic & thus having some concept that they operate differently it’s like oh so it’s a Lesser version of how I operate then? & they should learn how to think like me? right)
anyways it’s also like obviously getting some more control over your situation if you’re being “weird” in a way people have a framework for like ohh a Joke, i see lmao, various reasons people might try to be The Funny One and/or just like connecting / communicating via humor & having a capacity to do Unusual things on purpose, since they also already exist weirdly / wrongly anyways, and the various reasons they might be seen that way.......like why do i find it irritating to like do anything silly & get the [i am being the straight person here] response of either essentially pointing out it’s Weird / not how things usually work! or Only laughing is like, yeah i already knew it’s b/c like cmon someone get in on the Bit, is the hope here, what was the point if that ball’s completely dropped. like i’m seeing it as a way to have an Exchange, not have a monologue moment (although if i Am monologuing it’s gonna be theatrical / trying to be humorous/entertaining while i am) or so like, not Just this one sided moment, it was an invitation to that Exchange with a clearer setup like, here’s how you can operate at All closer to [on my terms] than like, an nd style group convo which doesn’t really work great lmfao, like being Funny = not small talk, not only/mostly Listening, not getting distracted anyways thinking abt xyz or Knowing if i talk in earnest abt info i have it’s like oh well that’s too much if it’s an interest, that’s also too much if it’s like relevant trivia/fun facts, etc etc. and of course that your being Odd is more resented if you’re just hanging out / trying to participate the way other people are, vs like ohh they’re odd in the good, at all deliberately funny way, that’s more acceptable lol
and like the [smh]ocity of getting along more easily w/people sometimes if they’re at all drunk b/c ppl will get more vivacious / spontaneous like well woe to you but that’s just my usual shit wherein like, the other side of that is someone like oh those antics you were engaging in?? were you drunk lmao??? like no, no i was being myself & engaging my Personality. live a little. you gotta learn how to be funny, man
or at Least just learn to roll with it or god forbid Only have the “lmao” response to other people being spontaneous / silly / responding to something in a way you don’t find Makes Sense / wouldn’t be Your train of thought
this is very much most directly inspired by that text post reblog chain about the dna & someone copy pasting a genome & the other person is like awhat........why would you.......huh..........how..........who........... and the other person explains it like yep a little bit nonsequiturry but the connection is clear & everyone was already joking around, makes sense. with the Other belabored “but............Why” & the final “eh” like i think it’s funny in that i think the copy / paste dna sequence side is fun but i find the Other like “wha??? why????” side Exhausting lmfao, or let’s say, tiresome. but it makes me go “oh yeah, back to the concept of [the Normal One who goes Wha Why Omg] in comedy scenes that i find tiresome & impeding the humor, i guess that just is how plenty of people would react lol” still think it’s unnecessary just full ensemble comedy, anyone can play off of another character or play Against them, we don’t need the person throwing up their hands & looking at the camera quite that hard
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