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Elmo’s home has seen plenty of weird things. Floating birthday cakes, an army of dentures, a talking accordion… All in a day’s play, really. Even so, Elmo can’t help but be surprised when he wakes up one Friday morning to see a vaguely female figure licking his piano.
“Hello?” he says, a little apprehensive of the person dragging her tongue across the pink of the sheet music holder. The instrument itself is resisting, or at least trying very hard to. The girl, however, is pretty serious about what she is doing, her fingernails digging into the edge of the frame.
It’s at this point Elmo realises that her skin is grey. Is human skin supposed to be like that? he thinks to himself. That could be today’s question of the day, except that he’d covered the topic of skin quite a while back in his Elmo’s World segment. Hmm.
“Hello?” Elmo repeats himself. The girl probably didn’t hear him the first time. “Elmo would like to know your name, and why you’re licking his piano!”
The girl releases the instrument raises her eyebrows at the puppet. “Candy red!” she chuckles. “I’d just settled for pink. Cherry blossoms aren’t bad, either.”
“You taste colours?” Elmo asks, curious. Colours. He hadn’t covered that topic before. Maybe this grey-skinned girl could be a guest performer…
“Of course I do, can’t you see? I’m the blind one here,” the girl cackles, flashing a toothy grin. Elmo mentally crosses out the guest performance idea. She’d scare all the kids away.
“Was that why you were all over the piano?” Elmo asks.
“Your door, too, before you came in.” She points at the door, now devoid of all colour except faint smudges of extremely light pink. How he didn’t notice before, Elmo has no idea.
“Anyway, my name is Terezi Pyrope.” The girl sticks out her hand in a gesture Elmo does not reciprocate. The sharp claws, he thinks, are reason enough for his apparent rudeness. It’s only when he sees them that he finally registers the fact that the Pyrope girl may not actually be human.
Well, there’s no way he can get her out of the house until his show segment starts, at least not without being unnecessarily rude. Besides, the maybe-human-but-probably-not girl seems starved. Why else will anyone do something as silly as lick Crayola furniture?
“Elmo may have some snacks in the house,” he says. “Just stay here for a moment, please!”
Terezi watches until he walks off before she resumes her work at the piano.