Fan Service

I haven't posted for a couple weeks because I've been working on a large set of art that I want to post all at once.  I'm almost done with it, but in the meantime, I thought I'd post this...

My best friend Evie Guerra had a birthday on the third.  She and I LOOOOVE to share writing and art, so I sketched and typed up this really silly story for her. The featured character, Took (it rhymes with Luke!), is one of my brain children, and Evie loves him obsessively (which is extremely flattering to me!).  In fact, it was a comic featuring Took that I was working on in class of my sophomore year that sort of drew us together, so Took is special to both of us.  Therefore, I like to feed her Took-cravings. :D This story and the references made probably will only be funny to the two of us, but I'm okay with that.  I'm really only posting it here so I can revisit it later.

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Took lay flat on his back beneath one of his projects. It was an old one, one that he'd grown frustrated with and decided to take a break from some time ago, but the night before he'd had an epiphany as to what he'd been doing wrong and was back at work on it again. He was up to his elbows in grease, and was therefore in an unusually good mood as he fiddled away. His foot was tapping the beat to the song playing in his head, and when he didn't have his wrench in his mouth, breathy, poorly sung lyrics crept out.

"Baby, baby, oooooohhhh, like baby, baby noooooo~"

"Took?"

Took jerked and abruptly tried to sit up, banging his head against the hard underside of his creation. I heard him swear furiously and hiss through his teeth.

"Are you alright?" I asked, my eyes finally finding his legs poking out from under his machine.

"Ugh! What do you think?" he snarled, trying to shimmy out so that he could fix me with a choice glare.

I duckede down to look at him. "Where you just singing Justin Bieber?" I asked, trying to keep the delight out of my voice, but not quite able to stifle it.

"Don't be ridiculous, you know I don't sing," he snapped, though I could see his face redden behind his freckles. He emerged, holding his sore forehead. "What do you want?"

My face fell as I remembered why I'd come. "Oh, Took! I--I need your help. Evie's birthday is tomorrow, and I don't know what to do for her!"

Took groaned. "THAT'S why you came to bother me?" he demanded, rubbing his bruise.

"I needed someone to bounce ideas off of, and Vahaadi's tied up in an RP..."

"Imagine that."

I ignored him, and began wringing my hands as I launched into my dilemma. "You don't understand--I forget every single year! If it wasn't for Facebook, I would have totally missed it again! But for once I actually have a little time, and I need to do something great for her!"

I began to pace in agitation. "It's too late to mail her anything, and I can't afford to anyway--so I thought about drawing for her, but I don't know what! Vahaadi and Spark would be fine, but I always draw them so it's not very special...and then I though about finishing that portrait of Opal for her, but I can't find it...and if I drew Vitiator or Conrad I'd practically just be drawing for me, so that's hardly a present! Flint is too hard to draw, I can't think of a pose for the Viceroy, and if I tried to draw Mytho for her, well, I'd want to make him look like man, and she likes the way he looks so that would just be in bad taste..."

Took watched me with one eye, the other screwed up in irritation. "UGH, why don't you just do something simple, then? What do people normally do for each other on their birthdays?" He squished up his face, as if straining his mind for memories of such a pedestrian activity. "Why don't you make her a...cake, or...whatever..."

I made an impatient noise. "Took, she lives in Indiana! What good will that do?"

Took stuck out his lip and spoke in a derisively mocking tone, "make her an imaginary cake, then. All you two ever do is bash your imaginations against each others...just tell her you're sending a cake and she'll believe it."

I was about to retort, but I paused, thinking. "That's not a bad idea..." I said, beginning to smile. It was so silly, it just might work! I stooped down and all but dragged Took to his feet. He was so startled he forgot to resist me. "C'mon, come help me!"

"I don't know how to make a cake!" he whined in protest.

"Eh, neither do I--that's what recipes are for!" I replied jubilantly, ushering him into my imaginary!kitchen.

"This sounds like a recipe for disaster, if you ask me. Why do I have to be involved?"

"Oh, because you're her favorite!" I insisted, shooting him a smile as I pulled ingredients out of the cupboards and fridge. "If she knows you helped make it, how could she not love it? Wash up, you can't bake looking like that."

Took scowled, but obediently bent over the sink and began scrubbing at his wasted arms, muttering under his breath. "Alright, what do I do?" he intoned resignedly, shaking his wet hands as he turned to me.

"Here, put this on."

"AN APRON?!"

"Oh, c'mon, Took. You don't want your clothes to get covered in food, do you? It would clash with all the grease you're wearing. Fine, you don't have to wear that one--this one's manlier," I said, offering him a plainer one.

Took huffed, dramatically rolled his eyes, and dawdled as much as humanly possible in the act of taking the apron. I slid around him to help him tie it, but he batted me away, and we had a brief debate that consisted mostly of stifled vocalizations and aggravated expressions. For his sake, however, I backed down, and watched him stubbornly struggle to tie it himself.

"There," he said, pursing his lips and gesturing stiffly and sharply to his new garment. "Happy?"

I grinned, barely suppressing an unexpected upspring of delight. He was, in fact, ridiculously cute in an apron. "Yeah, you look great! Er, OK, let's get this started then...we're going to need butter, eggs, cocoa..."

After a minor fiasco involving a rogue egg and an upturned vial of vanilla, Took was tasked with stirring while I added in the ingredients. We were both a little raw around the nerves, since he insisted on making a fight of everything and I was worried about the way the cake would turn out.

"Five cups of sugar..." I read, tipping the first measuring cup into his bowl.

Took blinked, and craned over to look at my recipe. "Geez, are you sure? That seems like way too much."

I drew his face longer than usual.  I think I like it better this way. Oh, and yes, that dweeb on the right is me.

"What do you know about how much sugar goes into cake?" I sniffed, tipping in the fourth measurement, although secretly I began to doubt.

He frowned at the mixture. "It's like all sugar now," he complained, jutting his jaw to one side as he aggressively churned it with his wooden spoon. "Who wrote that recipe?"

I scanned down the page, expecting to find some home-making queen's name. When I found the credit, however, my eyebrows lifted in surprise.

"Iryl," I stated, blinking.

"Huff, good grief..." Took hissed, both at Iryl and at the exertion it was requiring to mix in the sugar. "No wonder the recipe calls for glow-sticks."

"This is going to be horrifically sweet," I said in dismay, examining Took's batter. It was, indeed, mostly sugar. "Hopefully Evie has an appointment with a dentist lined up in the near future...and maybe the Poison Control Center, too, just to be safe. Last I checked, glow-sticks aren't actually safe for human consumption..."

"Well, we haven't added them in yet. It's probably safe for now."

"For now," I emphasized, disappointment in my voice. I looked back at the recipe, my lips scrunched up. I should have known better than to try and make a cake. What did I know about baking? "Maybe we should just--Took, what are you doing?" I asked abruptly. I had looked up just in time to catch him licking the spoon.

He buried the spoon back in the batter hastily. "Nothing!" he said, his voice cracking.

"Oh no, don't put it back in!" I popped it out of the batter with a wide-eyed grimace, examining it as if I could see his germs crawling all over it.

Took bit his lip in a disarmingly guilty expression. "Sorry, I...thought that's how you cook. You have to taste it, right?"

"Yeah, but..." I began. But then I sighed, and summoned a wan smile. "Well, how did it taste?"

"It's actually not too bad," he replied, looking down at it. "It's..." he pulled a funny face in emphasis, "REALLY sweet...but Evie likes sweet, right?"

"If memory serves," I said, squinting at the batter as well. Then I chuckled.

"What's so funny?"

"Well, I'm just thinking, Evie might like it even more now, knowing it has Took-spit in it. Ah! And look at that..." I reached over into the bowl and delicately grasped the pale wisp of a hair. For its color it could have belonged to either of us, but it was long and wavy. "One of my hairs ended up in it. Charming. I knew I should have tied it back..."

"You might as well leave it in--Evie loves red hair, remember?"

"Not to eat!" I burst with a laugh.

Took shrugged, an endearingly affable smile gracing his usually scornful features. "It's an imaginary cake, right? Tell her it will give her red hair."

I cracked up laughing, shaking my head at the silliness of the whole thing. "An imaginary, Took-spit & CallyAnn-hair glowstick cake with an Iryl-dose of sugar...she certainly won't get a birthday cake like this ANYWHERE else!"

"Exactly," Took said, pouring the batter into the cake pan. 

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Oh!  And speaking of Took fan service, I dug up another pic I did for Evie, circa 2008.  It's not accurate (he's missing his glove, and his skin is too nice-looking XD ) but it's supposed to be a joke as he's TOTALLY out of character anyway.  He's too anorexic-skinny to be walking around with his shirt open! Also, he still believes in cooties and doesn't know anything about girls. Part of his charm, I guess.