Monsterous!

Writers: Yvonne
Date Posted: 27th February 2007

Characters: Mariss, Cyrek
Description: Mariss gets a pimple. The world ends.
Location: Amber Hills Hold
Date: month 2, day 3 of Turn 4

"I'm not going out there."

"Mariss..." Cyrek sighed and leaned against his daughter's bedroom door frame. Her room was dark even though it was already morning, and breakfast would be served soon in the dining hall. And after that, there was work to be done. "Get up. You're not sick, so you can't sit in here all day."

"Yes I can," came the petulant reply from beneath the bed covers. She flipped up the top blanket enough so that only her eyes peeped out.
They glared daggers.

"Mariss," Cyrek started again.

"No! I look hideous! I am _not_ going out there so I can be the laughingstock of the entire Hold!" There was enough animosity going around without her fuelling the fire. "You look fine. You're beautiful."

"No I'm not!" she wailed. "I have a _pimple_!"

Cyrek sighed. Young women were impossible sometimes. "You can barely see it-"

"It's huge and pulsating and red and right in the middle of my forehead, like I've got a disease or I'm growing a third eye or something!" Mariss sniffled and used her fingers to comb her hair down over the offending red spot. Nobody at Amber Hills Hold liked her anyway, and this was just another excuse to point and laugh.
Well, _most_ people didn't like her. "I hate it!"

"I know," Cyrek said placating, "but you can't skip a day's work simply because of a pimple."

"Yes, I can."

"No. You can't. Get up."

"No!" Cyrek rubbed his eyes tiredly. It was too early for this sort of nonsense. And it was times like this that he wished that Vivvi was still alive... or better yet, Mariss' mother. He felt ill equipped to deal with things like traumatic pimples. "This is the last time I'll ask you, Mariss. Please get up."

"No!"

"You're being unreasonable!" Cyrek snapped, finally losing his temper.

"I am not! I look like a monster! Small children will run away from me screaming!"

"Get _up_!" He strode into the room and grabbed the bottom of the blankets. Mariss grabbed the top half, and for a moment there was a fierce tug-of-war as they fought over the sheets. Cyrek won when he sent Trouble over to Mariss' side of the bed to distract her, and the flit stuck his tongue in her ear. Mariss shrieked and let go of the blanket, which Cyrek tugged off the bed and tossed into an indigo heap on the floor. "You have five minutes, and then I'm leaving without you. And I am _not_ excusing you from your chores over a sharding _pimple_!"

"Da...!" Mariss wailed and curled up miserable on the bare mattress.

Cyrek shook a finger at her even as Trouble landed beside her and nuzzled her arm comfortingly. "Five minutes!"

He waited impatiently in their tiny living room for his daughter to appear, and when five minutes was almost up she did, looking disheveled and sullen. Her hair was still loose and she was buttoning her blouse as she walked. "You look fine," Cyrek said reassuringly. Mariss glared at him. He suppressed a sigh - girls. "I know it looks huge to you, but it's really not that big."

"I'm seventeen. Shouldn't I be too old for this sort of thing?"
Mariss said plaintively. "I got pimples into my twenties."

His daughter glared at him as she tucked her blouse into her skirt.
"_You_ can grow a beard to hide them."

"Well, sort of... come on. Let's go get breakfast." Nothing he could say would restore Mariss' confidence, apparently. This had never been a problem back at Amethyst Cliff Hold. She'd had pimples there and had never insisted on staying in bed, but something about Amber Hills was changing her into a young woman that he didn't know so well anymore...

Last updated on the February 27th 2007

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Monsterous!