Just Can't Sleep [Lilo]

[Deleted]

It was a beautiful night. Akinyi had seen it coming in that evening, the clouds sweeping out over the ocean and leaving the sky perfectly clear and open for stargazing. It was one of the first times since she had been here that she could step outside and stare into space.

So though she tried to lie down for a while, eventually she gave up on the idea of sleep and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders before climbing to the roof of the dorms in order to lay out and watch the stars.

"I've missed this," she told herself as she climbed the stairs. "I can maybe sleep late tomorrow. It's only math. I can miss math. And I'll sleep more tomorrow. But this is important. I just need to see if the stars are the same..."

She pushed open the door to the roof and walked out, heading toward the ledge so she could dangle her feet off the edge as she looked out through the dark night.

[lilo]

Someone was already up there. In fact, that someone was currently staring into space while wearing what appeared to be a tin foil hat of some kind. The hat had been twisted into a shape not unlike a Hershey's kiss, though lacking in that annoying bit of paper that usually stuck out the end. The girl herself seemed to be beating a control box of some kind. Beating was very much the word for it too: she was hammering it as though it had wronged her and her family. It was no surprise, therefore, that she didn't notice Akinyi's relatively quiet arrival for several seconds.

Not until Lilo turned around did she realize that there was, in fact, someone else up there with her. She paused, mid-gesture, stared at the other girl, then pointed. "Are you normal?" because clearly Lilo was one to judge. She hurried over to rummage in what appeared to be a perfectly functional pile of garbage. Soon, she was coming out, a hat in her hands and the control box between her teeth. It sparked a few times; the box, not the hat, but if this bothered Lilo, she didn't seem to notice.

Instead, Lilo headed straight for Akinyi, holding out the hat. "You need to put this on, so the alien's don't detect your thought patterns and home in on us," was what she tried to say. However, the box was still in her mouth, so it ended up sounding more like: "U meed to oot is on, oh uh ufhens on't uhect urgh ought ffatterns an' home un on ufs."

And clearly Lilo was the normal one.

[Deleted]

Akinyi stopped short when she saw the other girl there, more surprised at not being alone. However, as she observed the other girl, she became confused as to what she was actually seeing. The girl seemed to have some sort of metal head and was trying to use a blinking box as though it were a drum, even though it wasn't working very well.

But then the girl noticed her, and she dug out another of those metal things, which Akinyi now realized was a hat. She also pulled out another blinking box and started coming toward the smaller girl, who was standing frozen in spot on the roof. A part of her wanted to run away, but she immediately squelched that. She wasn't a coward.

But when the girl clearly didn't speak the same language, Akinyi was forced to rethink her strategy. Where was this person even from? "I'm sorry," she said, tilting her head to one side in confusion. "I don't understand that language. Do you speak English? Prāt U Afrikaans?" If neither of those worked they would be stuck.

Squinting, she looked more closely at the metal hat. It appeared to be some sort of warrior's cap. She'd seen people wearing that sort of thing at the training fields. So this girl was probably some sort of warrior. That made sense.

"Who are you fighting?" she decided to try. "Does that box make music you can hurt them with?" It was all she could think of. "Do you want help?" If the girl was a student here, she was probably a good person. So it made sense for Akinyi to help her in whatever way she needed. She wasn't going to run away just because the girl was different. How many times had she been laughed at for being different? She wasn't going to do the same thing.

[lilo]

Fighting? Well, technically Lilo supposed she was fighting, though she liked to think of herself more as an investigator of sorts. She decided that it probably wasn't necessary to quibble over details. There was science to do, darn it!

So she slapped the hat on Akinyi, who for some reason hadn't thought it a good idea to put on the protective equipment, despite the obvious repercussions. This also had the nice side effect of freeing Lilo's mouth for the whole talking thing, as she could now hold her control box in both hands. She gestured with it now, completely ignoring the bits of drool and the tooth marks showing on the duct tape.

"I'm investigating the alien communications," explained Lilo, adding a nod. "That evil army is likely sending secret signals to the school, bouncing it from satellites, and then stealing our thoughts directly from our brains," she tapped her head. "thankfully, the tin foil acts as a reflector unit, scrambling any signals that would get to you. I mean, bugs and stuff would still be a problem, so look out for Yeerks or something, but don't worry about those. You'll see them. You'll also likely be held down by these giant aliens with razor sharp blades all over their bodies who will also be pointing these death rays at you, soooo, yeah."

Lilo nodded a few more times, before hearing a beep from her control box. She nearly jumped, looking down at it. She frowned, reaching up with her other hand to rub her chin. "I know this controls something... but I can't remember what exactly it controls..."

[Deleted]

Akinyi adjusted the hat on her head so it fit more comfortably over her wild hair. She listened to the girl talk, since apparently it had been the thing in her mouth which had made her so difficult to understand. Which made Akinyi wonder why she hadn't taken it out before trying to speak earlier, but it was too late to ask now.

Even though it was clear now that they were speaking the same language, Akinyi didn't understand almost half of what the girl was saying. She simply nodded and tried to look like she knew what was going on. "If they steal our thoughts," she said, trying to reason out what exactly had been said, "and these hats make that not happen, why doesn't everyone wear them?" Wouldn't everyone want to protect themselves from attack? "Oh, never mind. The knights wear them. But not all the time. Do you only wear the hats at night?"

There was something in there about a fight and being killed, but it seemed like more of a general warning than anything Akinyi could actually follow. She vowed not to let herself be caught by these deathly Rais and that would solve the problem.

When the box beeped, Akinyi looked down. That was an odd sound for a musical instrument. She bent down to squint at it. "May I touch it?" she said, holding out her hand.

The gesture reminded her that she still hadn't said who she was, so she straightened and looked the other girl in the eye. "My name is Akinyi," she said, still holding out her hand. "I go to school here and I work to make people be nicer. Who are you?"

Looking at the control box again, Akinyi said, "What if we threw it? That would make a very loud noise. We could throw it on the ground and see what happens."

[lilo]

"I don't know! It's insane!" insisted Lilo, waving her hands. She'd tried explaining the whole thought stealing thing to people before, but most people just gave her that look. She'd learned all about that look at a very young age, and had spent the intervening years learning how to completely ignore it and go right along with whatever she had planned anyway. "I think they want the aliens to implant their secret plans into their heads," screw pronouns.

Lilo had started waving her hands at some point, which would likely make it a little difficult for Akinyi to actually reach the box. As the other girl asked though, Lilo did end up handing over the device. "Sure, touch it or poke it or whatever. I'm still not sure what it does though, so it might explode or spray acid at your face or something. It's not likely that it does that, but you never know. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm building."

Lilo shrugged, then turned to look out into the starry night. This really was an excellent time for searching for the signs, and Lilo was trying to remember if that was what she had been doing prior to running into Akinyi.

Oh, yeah, there was an introduction thing in there somewhere. "I'm Lilo," said Lilo, turning and smiling at Akinyi. She took the offered hand and pumped it with a vigor usually left to pushy salesmen. "I just got here too, fresh off the space ship and everything. We totally found out about the portals and knew that we needed to send a brave explorer here. Or something. Nani was just glad to get me to school. I miss Stitch though, but I'm pretty sure he's okay, what with being nearly invulnerable and all. But yeah, I'm here to spread the word about the stuff that people keep ignoring," Lilo shrugged and waved her hand, obviously making the mission more important by making it sound less important. This is what people did all the time, after all.

"But yeah, that's a control box," she continued, returning back to the conversation as if she hadn't just launched into another overlong explanation. she pointed at the box in question too. "So you could probably throw it and not a lot would happen. I usually build the stuff pretty durable, because Stitch liked to eat it and stuff. But then again, that could explode or something. Actually," she dragged the word out and pointed in the near distance, "if you threw it, it might just do that! It could also just break open and spew parts everywhere, but that's unlikely..."

[Deleted]

"To plant their...wait, aliens put their...who...in...okay." Akinyi was realizing that she likely just wouldn't understand all of this conversation. She had to make herself okay with that. Apparently it was a bad thing. But it seemed to only be a problem at night, so Akinyi would just make sure to always wear the metal hat at night.

Akinyi took the box from Lilo after watching it get waved around and almost knocked into her face, then flipped it over in her hands. "You made this?" she asked, looking over it. It didn't appear to be overly harmful. She tried knocking on it to see if it would make a good drum noise, but it didn't sound very good. She bit her lip as she thought over the problem.

The long introduction left the small girl's head spinning. She tried to make sense out of the information overload. The girl came in a ship. She was from over the ocean? She was a brave explora-something. And she missed a stitch...someone who could sew? "And what are people ignoring?" Akinyi asked, that being the only thing that she could manage to respond to out of that whole slew of information. She tucked the rest of it away. Lilo knew how to sail a ship, she knew how to sew, and she liked to explore. That was good to know.

Lilo wanted her to throw the box? Akinyi fingered it again, looking it over to see if there was anything else that could be done with it. It didn't much look like there was anything else to do, so the girl decided to take her new friend's advice. "Okay. Should I throw it off the building just in case it decides to explode? I will throw it toward the courtyard. I don't think anyone is down there." She pulled back her arm to chuck the box off the roof. "If it makes a really loud noise maybe that will scare away any enemies."

Thinking about enemies, though, Akinyi had to wonder what Lilo thought about the army that was coming up. She had heard a lot about what was coming and just had to know what everyone else thought. "Are you going to stay here when the army comes? I thought I was going to, but now I'm not sure. They might need my help on the island."

[OOC: Unless Lilo actively stops Akinyi from throwing that box, she threw it before asking those last few questions.]

[lilo]

"Yep, made that," said Lilo, pointing. She turned to the pile of objects around her: "and that, and that, and that, and, okay, Jumba actually made that one."

She paused to stare at the last object she named, trying to recall what precisely it was that it did. Jumba usually liked to go into detail about how his brilliant inventions did something or another, which meant that Lilo had developed a knack for tuning a good portion of that stuff out. She liked to call it "exposition filter." Good for saving time, bad for remembering important details.

"People ignore a lot. Vampires, demons, aliens, chupacabra, conspiracies, the Illuminati, Governmental spy projects," Lilo had been ticking those off on her fingers, and seemed to be reciting from some mental list. She paused as Akinyi gave the small box a good toss, having no real reason or motivation to stop her. They would both watch the controller head to the ground, where it landed and let out a fairly decent sized explosion: roughly the size of a medium sized firework. It also was brilliant green.

"Huh, didn't know it would do that," she said. "Must have been a trap or something."

It didn't seem to bother Lilo that the explosion might, in fact, cause something of a stir. There were more important things at hand, and they didn't involve the people that were currently looking around to see where the explosive device had come from.

"I'm going to stay here and fight! They need me! I've been inventing stuff and finding out all sorts of things! Plus, you can't trust the Grayle Corporation! They're totally secret Illuminati members. Or vampires," Lilo dragged the last word out, pronouncing every syllable carefully. "I'm not sure which..."

[Deleted]

"You must be very good at making things. Do you like it? What do they do?" Of course Lilo would know what these things did. Why would you make something that you didn't know how it worked? "Can you make other things, like traps and knives?" Those were things that Akinyi understood, far better than any of this stuff with electricity.

She watched the box blow up in a flash of color. It hurt her eyes--she wasn't expecting it to be so bright. "Do you think that did any good?" she asked, wondering if it really had been the right move. "All those people, they are bad people? But there are others out there stopping them, right?" Nothing else would make sense, really. All evil needed to be stamped out.

It made sense to stay and fight, though Akinyi wasn't sure what this had to do with trusting Grayle. But it sounded like they might be bad, too. "Well if they are vampires, then maybe we should just get rid of them. Would that help? And then we would go protect all the people on the island. They need help, because they don't know how to fight. That's why they're leaving, so I need to go protect them. When I am finished helping here."

[lilo]

Lilo spent most of the last post looking at the explosion on the ground. It wasn't that she found Akinyi uninteresting; in fact, Akinyi was probably the first person relatively close to Lilo's age who didn't look at the girl as though she'd grown a second head and started speaking in Chinese (you have one off day with an Experiment, and they never let you forget it). She would have especially appreciated having questions asked about her, especially ones that treated everything she said as though it were important.

But there was an explosion, and Lilo's priorities were skewed toward fiery death over people.

Which, come to think of it, was probably why she had so much trouble making and keeping friends.

"Did you see--" she started, turning to look at Akinyi. "Wait, did you just say we should go after the vampires and stuff?" see, she had been listening. Sorta. "We can't do that! They're the lords of the undead! They suck blood and turn into bats and stuff! We don't have sunlight bombs or special swords or silver bullets or anything," she waved her arms a few times, before hearing a shout. Lilo turned slightly, looking out into the Courtyard again.

"I think they might have noticed the explosion..."

[Deleted]

Akinyi didn't really see what was so exciting about the explosion. It had looked interesting, but there were more important things going on. Besides, hadn't Lilo said that was what might happen? She was confused as to why Lilo wasn't listening and briefly wondered if she had slipped back into speaking Afrikaan.

But no, Lilo had listened, at least to part of it. "Well, yeah," Akinyi began. "I mean, if they're causing--" That was as far as she got before Lilo took over the conversation again.

"But you're good at making things. Can you make the...the sunshine bomb and the silver bullets?" She was trying to understand how this whole thing worked and why you could fight some people but not others and use machines that didn't work but then exploded.

Speaking of explosions.

Akinyi glanced over the edge of the roof to the courtyard below. There was a bit of a scorch mark on the tiling next to the fountain, and the trees might have been smoking a bit, but other than that everything looked fine. She stepped back.

"We should apologize for waking them up," she said and turned to go downstairs. "That was a very pretty explosion. Do you think maybe they want to ask how you did it and if you can make it again?"

It hadn't hurt anybody, and it hadn't done any real damage, so Akinyi was having trouble understanding why anyone could possibly be upset by the fact that she had thrown something off a building and it had blown up.

[lilo]

"I'm not... sure," admitted Lilo. She paused to lick her lips and tilt her head, considering. Making sunshine bombs and stuff really hadn't been high on her priority list. It wasn't very high on Jumba's priority list either, which was probably why Lilo didn't know a whole lot about it. Experiments and evil alien schemes to take over the world, sure, but sunlight bombs and ways of defending the human race? That was more something you looked into in your spare time.

"We should actually probably leave," said Lilo. She glanced toward the courtyard, looking nervous for the first time. Despite having a remarkable knack for it, there was little Lilo hated more than getting into trouble. The getting, explosions and all, that was fun. Less fun were the disapproving looks and the punishments. "They're probably going to be all upset that we blew something up. People usually are. For some reason," said Lilo. She stood on her tiptoes and hazarded a peek. People down there were starting to notice, at least they pointed.

"C'mon," said Lilo, reaching for Akinyi's arm, "let's get out of here before they sic their evil guard dogs on us!"

And there was tugging toward the stairs that led back down. They'd have to hurry if they didn't want to get caught...

[Deleted]

"You could probably do it," Akinyi said, thoroughly convinced of her new friend's building skills. "We can buy anything we need to get. I have a job." She was very proud of this in spite of the fact that her job did not actually pay. Anything she bought was by hunting and attempting to sell animals to people who pitied her (not that she knew it) and gave her some money for her efforts.

"Leave?" Akinyi said as Lilo pulled on her arm. "But isn't that running away?" She looked around at the empty roof, then at the stairs down. "I don't think they have evil guard dogs. I don't hear any. Maybe they just want to tell us to be more quiet?"

Still, though, she followed her friend down the stairs and began toward her bedroom. "Why do you think they are so mad at us? We didn't hurt anyone. I've been reading the rules for the school to help me practice reading. They say a lot about not hurting people, but I haven't read anything about loud noises." Yet, anyway. It was hard to get through those big words sometimes.

"Do you have any special things you have made that will help us to run faster?" she asked, holding her tin-foil hat onto her head. It was starting to come off as they raced through the halls, not wanting to maintain its precarious perch on her curls.

[lilo]

"It's relocating to a location of better defense," insisted Lilo. She'd heard that term used by Jumba, like, a lot. Stitch wasn't a fan of the whole running away thing either, though Lilo didn't quite get what their big deal was. It certainly beat getting into trouble. Lord knows that Lilo didn't have the knack for talking her way out of rough situations that most troublemakers did.

"They're fascists," said Lilo over her shoulder, proving her remarkable ability to jump to the most likely conclusion possible. "And everybody knows that fascists don't like anything loud or colorful. It messes with their heads. Plus," this last Lilo muttered as low as she possibly could, "it'sagainsttherules. Sorta."

This running thing would work a lot better if Lilo had some idea of where they were going. There was down, and then.... mostly it was running around. Lilo was trusting her natural instincts, when really, she should have known better. Especially when she nearly barreled into a suit of armor. That made her take a step back, nearly losing her own tin foil hat. She took a stance that one could generously refer to as being related to martial arts as seen on late night TV.

"They've got their traps everywhere!" she insisted, finally flinging her hands up. "We're dooooooooooooooomed!'

And she flopped to the ground, unwilling to move, at least for the moment.

"Just go on without me," said Lilo, waving in a distracted manner over her shoulder. "Save yourself."

[Deleted]

"But why do we have to be somewhere else? It's not like we're fighting...are we?" Akinyi wasn't really sure she wanted to fight with the school officials; she worked for them, after all. "We're just going to be talking to them. It doesn't matter where we are for that." Even as she argued, though, she continued to follow Lilo around. It beat just standing there.

She was running alongside of Lilo, falling into her natural stride for when she hunted out on the desert. "What are fascists?" she asked, scrunching up her nose. "And why don't they like color?" Were they some sort of monster? Were they allergic to color and noise? "Against what rules? I haven't read any rules about that," she said in defense. "Which rules was it breaking?" If they really had broken a rule, well, then they should turn right around and receive their punishment. That was the way the law worked. Everyone had to obey.

When Lilo came to a stop, Akinyi slid to a halt beside her, looking confused. She watched her friend flop onto the ground and stood so she was looking over her. Then she glanced around the empty hallway of the dorm. "I don't see any traps," she said, glancing around. "We could just go back to my room. Here, do you need help getting up?" She extended her hand toward Lilo.

"We should probably stop yelling, too. If they don't like loud noises. Why were you standing there all funny a minute ago? You looked like you might try to fight someone, but your feet and hands were all wrong." Even just looking at the girl Akinyi had known three ways to make her fall down with one movement. Was that the only kind of fighting they taught here? She had expected better.

"My room is just over here," she said, pointing. "And then I want to get some water."