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Bunny Tales	By : ChrisCross Category: +S through Z > WW: World of Darkness Views: 1627 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own White Wolf's World of Darkness or Changeling:The Lost, I make no money from this. I also do not own some of the supporting cast, If you want me to take yours out, let me know. The only borrowed OC's are from ppl I know.

Chapter List
- 1-Frying pan to Fire, Nothing is Free
- 2-Textural Changes and New Discoveries
- 1
- 2
My life is rough now. Yeah, I know, boo-hoo, life is hard on everybody sister, get over it. That isn’t what I meant by that, what I mean is, all lives have a texture. Some people live on the smooth flat plain of polished stone, their trajectory goes straight and easy, and when they do hit some obstruction, it baffles them because it is abnormal. Some people live a life of un-sanded wood, evenly riding over a steady grain of small problems and predictable annoyances. My life was like that once, before I ran into the arms of a Keeper. I’ve told you that story already. The stuff I went through BA (Before Arcadia) would give most people nightmares. The abuse, the strung out mom, her dealer boyfriend, the molestation, it adds up into something so huge and nasty that the people I’ve told about it wonder how I manage to not be any more insane than I am already. But it was a constant in my world then, it was predictable to a fault. And it wasn’t swallowed in one gulp like how the people who hear the story have to get it, it was spread out over fifteen years. I spent the first fifteen years of my life learning how to surf it, to adapt to that texture of life. Then I wound up in Arcadia with the Hunter. My life became like a serrated knife. Regular points of pain alternating with rest, and although predictable, much more painful than what I had been through before. I spent five years learning how to avoid letting the knife of that life hit any major arteries. Now I live out here, back in the real world again. Only I don’t quite fit here anymore. I’m a fairy tale character trying to make her way in a world that thinks that fairies and Changelings and half bunny humans don’t exist outside children’s books and over-active brains. And if I ever meet someone willing to believe that Arcadia is real, I’d still have a hard time convincing them how utterly fucked up fairy tale land can be. Interesting foot note, which I learned doing research after I got out: the early versions of most of those sappy Disney fairy tale plots are super grim and gory, meant to scare people away from the things in the dark, the deal offered for your hearts desire, the forest and its wolves. Snow White made her step mom dance in red hot iron shoes at her wedding. The wolf raped Little Red before eating her. Sleeping Beauty wasn’t woken by a kiss, but the pain of child-birth, and then wound up eating her kids. Rumplestiltskin asked for sexual favors the first two of the three nights that the future queen was given straw to spin, and he was spotted eating baby soup the night his name was revealed. There was an oddly large number of accounts of infanticide and cannibalism going on in those old stories. We were meant to be terrified of the weird stuff out in the darkness. We forgot that somewhere.
And the Keepers laughed.
So, that’s why my life is rough, now. It has the texture of low grade sandpaper. Unpredictable in the location of the bumps and how big they are. One day I’m doing okay, winning bar bets for food cash, starting and mostly finishing fights to gather the emotional energy needed to work the wicked cool changeling magic I’ve learned, supplying my hide hole and keeping a big floppy ear out for things that need doing. Before I know it, the next day I wind up in a fight to the death I very well might not win.
They call them Loyalists. They used to be human, and then they were changed by a Keeper. Only, they’re not Changelings as I see it. They like being lap dogs to the Others, they are willing slaves, they crave the approval of beings so not human I don’t even know if they have the concept of approving of a person they have enslaved. It’s weird, to the Others, we have about as much self-identity as a toaster oven. Why anybody actively wants to be a toaster oven, I don’t know. The Keepers need them, because Keepers can’t or don’t cross over into our world much, so they need those born here to do errands. One of those ‘errands’ the Loyalists run is finding and recapturing the ones of us who escaped. Loyalists have magic too, just like us, have been reshaped, just like us, but they attack solitary Changelings in packs, out numbering and overpowering them. I hate their cowardly weasel guts. When I learned about them, partway through my trip across western Kansas, I decided to make them pay for taking their own kind back into captivity whenever I could. They would put us all back into the serrated blade life of Arcadia, and that is just wrong. There’s a certain amount of understanding why the Others do it. They are so intensely, extremely, definitively not like us that I’m not sure we register as something that ought to be respected. Kinda like knowing that a hungry shark will eat you, but not out of malice. But Loyalists were once human. They should be able to see it. For that blindness to pain, I say they die. Usually I can beat them in small groups or pick them off one by one, but some days are just not my day.
That time, it was a sting gone pear shaped. I had word that a trio of Manikin Loyalists were in the area. So I sent about the rumor that a lone bunny Changeling hid out in a poorly defended Hollow in the Hedge just outside the Kansas City limits. Bunnies are soft and cuddly prey animals, so most people who hear “bunny Changeling” think a weak, timid, prey-like person. I felt pretty sure that the trio would come alone, and three Manikins I can take in my sleep. I was wrong.
I wound up having to fight twelve tin soldiers in the worst terrain for my style. I rely on getting up speed before landing a kick, which takes space. My selected ambush site had plenty, if there were only four people in it. With a baker’s dozen, I had to work up close. It meant using my knives, which I can do, but it’s messy and I’m not as good at knife fighting as I could be. I had my knives made for me, custom. It was a fair trade with a Wizened weapons Smith, he needed some things from this funky place they call the Scrapheap. They’re spots in the Hedge, a special place that attracts the detritus that is left in a certain portion of Hedge. It’s all junk, you’d think, at first glance. But time in the Hedge warps stuff as much as the Keepers warp people. Things become magic, and can be helpful or hurtful, but usually powerful. Tokens, they call them. My weapon maker needed a shoelace that became a lasso that would tighten at a thought and a Swiss Army knife that he said not to try to activate. He had traded with someone else who could look for things from a distance to find those things, but Scrapheaps are creepy and most of us avoid them, even if there is good stuff there. So he needed someone brave to go in and get the tokens. Two tokens for two knives. I had him pattern them after the blade the Hunter used on me my first day in Arcadia. The top curves a bit, like a scimitar, and then angles back on the bottom in a straight line, and then the edge cuts in and toward the tip, forming a hook, as the blade is straight from hilt to the inner corner of the hook. They do loads more damage than a straight blade or a rounded hook would.
The fight was tough for me, because there was always danger at my back. If I stayed near the middle, tin men would surround me. Don’t even ask how bad it could be to put my back up against the Hedge. Trust your back to the Hedge and you deserve what you get for being an idiot. If Changelings could earn Darwin Awards, that would get you one. So I did a lot of turning around to face new assaults. I did figure another way to get kicks in without the linear room. I spun at high speed on one foot, like a ballerina, letting my other foot whip into their sides and backs, my toe claws slicing them open. I had to space doing that out so I wouldn’t lose balance. In between I was slicing and ripping with my knives. They fought me with bayonets, stabbing at any opening. I’m just glad the muskets they were attached to were dummies. Or maybe they were real but wouldn’t work in the Hedge. Technology in there is a crap shoot. It’s why I like knives over guns, and my own body best of all. It took nearly three hours of my time. From the outside, the fight with the metal soldiers took a day and a half. Time passes oddly in the Hedge and in Arcadia, and you learn to count in your head to keep track, because there are good odds your watch won’t work. You also learn to check bank signs for the day and time once you’re out, because the time you spent and how long it’s been here might not be the same. (For instance, I counted five years under my Keeper, so if time went normally, I would have gotten out four years before I did.) I got all but the last one, and I would have had him too, but the next to last one got in a lucky shot at my back, right above the fur, on my spine. Four injections of numbing agent went in that exact spot during my time as a captive. The nerves are jumpy there, and I lost the use of my right leg for a moment. I got the one who hit me; a solid gut cut with my knife, but couldn’t follow the last as he ran. I figured he’d report back to his Keeper, and I was probably not going to be able to use the “weak widdle wabbit” bait any more. At least not near here. There wasn’t much I could have done, so I just focused on waking up the dead limb. When I could walk again I got out of the Hedge, once in the real world I realized I was in bad shape, shallowly cut in a ton of places, but with a few gouges deep enough to be worrying. I had learned by then not to try hospitals. For some reason I short out any equipment that might pick up on the bunny parts. I had a small kit in my hide hole, just rulers and duct tape for setting bones, and super glue for sealing cuts, and a mix of white vinegar, honey and cinnamon that made a wonderful antiseptic wash. I avoided ever buying things that were obviously for medical purposes because I would need to get so much, it would call attention. Attention I did not, do not, will not need. So I used less obvious remedies.
If I could just get to my hide hole, in a separated portion of the storm sewer that had a big enough entrance with no grate, I’d be fine. Med kit, food, sleeping bag, I’d be fine. I just needed to get there. Only problem was that my six foot cube of safe space underground and its med kit was in midtown, ten blocks past the university, and I knew I had lost too much blood to get much farther than Crown Center, five miles away from that safety. I was so pissed that I was going to die in the street and nobody would notice except other Changelings. The mask that hovers over us to make us look normal, it also covers wounds. Not one person I passed had any idea I was hurt, much less cut up so bad I was sure to die. They also didn’t see my blood as I left it behind in drips and small splashes. I didn’t know for sure, but I felt certain that when I inevitably collapsed, people would walk around or over my body without seeing it. The anger helped with the pain some, and I’d gotten just past downtown when I hit the level of numb that means you don’t have enough blood to feed the nerves in your wounds. That, if you couldn’t figure it out, is a very bad sign. The weirdest thing happened then, as I’m staggering by the old train station. A rush of strawberry scented hot air hits me from the side. It was forceful enough to tip me so I was walking toward Union Station, not beside it, but has no effect on anyone or anything else. The last time I had felt hot strawberry scented air, I had just sworn my oath to the Summer Court. I’m not a magic expert by any means, but I know omens when they batter me into going where they want me to go. I ducked in the station, and saw at least three changelings in the crowd. That’s not much for a big city, in a public place, and all that, but they were all going in the same direction. No need to whack me with strawberry air twice! I followed them. That curious veil that hides how we really look to the mundane folk, well it covers a lot of what we do in the hocus-pocus department too, but I had never seen an entrance to the Hedge hidden in a wall out in the open, in a building housing half a dozen restaurants, a science museum, and an IMAX. “The normal people are blinder than I thought.” I said under my breath as I watched a tall girl with hair that looked like flowing blood and skin like a corpse opened the gate in full view of the crowd.
It opened with the use of a quarter and a little tribute of magic. I could afford both, and the message had seemed pretty clear, I was supposed to be in there, besides, I figured, if I died in there, everyone could see my body, so I’d get picked up and buried or cremated or something, which was way better than leaving my corpse lying unnoticed on a crowded sidewalk. No need to litter after all! The gateway slid open, and inside was a palace. No shit, I am dead serious. It looked like a huge white and gold marble palace. The ceiling was twelve or thirteen feet up from the floor with a lacy gold chandelier lit with taper candles and the room I entered from the train station was maybe thirty feet by thirty feet, with one solid slab of the whitest marble I had ever seen for the floor, and the walls were sheets of creamy marble veined in gold, and there was a huge gold door in the opposite wall. I went through the golden door unchallenged, other than the physical challenge of opening the damn thing while dizzy from blood loss, but I got greeted pretty soon on the other side by a woman I didn’t know. She seemed intense, driven, she wore a rapier at her hip, and was dressed in black and red. Her skin was pale enough to almost look blue, like super skim milk, and her hair absorbed all light. She had that not quite as solid as the things around her feel, so I was relatively certain she was a Darkling, a shadow-person, as I am a bunny-person. I felt the heat coming off her in waves and I knew that whoever this Darkling was, she was higher in the Summer Court than I was. She started to challenge me, not to fight or anything, just because it’s what you do when a stranger shows up in your home for no reason. I opened my mouth to respond, and the world tumbled one way while I slid another way, and I was swallowed by a red haze that deepened to black.
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Bunny Tales