[center][url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/5560259][img]https://i.imgur.com/hKreI84.jpeg[/img][/url][/center][hr][hr][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][sup][color=e3e3e3][b]【Location】[/b][/color][color=bdbdbd]landow: food stands 🠞 harbor[/color]
[color=e3e3e3][b]【Time】[/b][/color][color=bdbdbd]sunday, 6:30 am 🠞 7:00 am[/color]
[color=e3e3e3][b]【Interactions】[/b][/color][@teyao][/sup][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][hr][hr][justify][color=bdbdbd]What kind of man presumes to tell a demigod where she can go, what she can do, by what mode she must travel; how she will behave and conduct herself? These masked men who placed their trust in CBRN filters to protect them from the microfine, all-pervasive residue?—whose bodies would not be crushed for all their fanciful magnetorheological T-drip armors?—whose Crystal-pricked adrenal glands would surely see them speedily to shelter in their hours of need? Or was it the men who controlled [i]those[/i] men: the highest bidders in a room full of politicians, bureaucrats, and shareholders? All praying to the same superstitions, clinging to the same fetishes: stunsticks and pulseguns and riot shields for some, but to the rest, contracts? NDAs? Parapets and oubliettes of red tape?

It should not have surprised any one of these men when their metal baubles and paper trinkets did not frighten the divine; when she flouted all the little rules they built up around themselves like so many feeble bricks. And yet......

One more warp later and Beth had safely evacuated the densest thickets of shrine-goers, breaking line-of-sight through a threadbare treeline. Another and she'd infiltrated the food stands, bypassed the breakfast lines; plucked skewers of grilled fish and glazed [i]dango[/i] indiscriminately from the charcoal-blackened grates, from the sticky hands of eager customers, or wherever she found them waiting for her, soft and glistening. The smoke rising from the troughs of glowing coals, and the breaths which steamed and dewed in the morning chill, and the diesel exhaust guttering from rust-licked fishing boats, all of these shimmered, stiff in the congealed air of Godtime. And from this once more she emerged, this time stepping out from behind a cluster of dock pilings as if from the very shadows, giving the disquieting illusion that she had all that time been crouched there just beyond purview. But with her precious loot in tow she chose for herself the most secluded spot by the water, and sat there peacefully among the barnacles, spitting up bubbles through their clamshell smiles. Tired planks sighed and sagged beneath her weight, slight as it was. They needed replacing.

Working her jaw against the dense, tacky treats, she placed a finger to her temple, feeling for the tactile [i]click[/i] of the button hidden just beneath the skin. A moment later and a faint, downpitched whine ushered in a darkening, a blindness, as her ferroglass eyes powered down within their sockets. A mere functionality—for maintenance, recharging, the occasional refitting or adjustment—but the waifish death-priest sought none of these. It was, in fact, that very blindness she sought; or, more precisely, what followed. For as her vision relented—not to any mere blackness, but to a kind of nothing which only one without eyes could see—in minutes her other senses, like so many courtly pretenders at the death of their tyrant, sharpened. Emboldened. First the nose, detecting more easily than before the distant whiffs of charcoal beneath the reeks of salt and rotten seaweed, of dead mossbunker floating belly-up in diesel-choked harbor. The tongue followed, coaxing sesame oil and delicate, sweet [i]mirin[/i] out from underneath the all-smothering soy sauce, perfuming the chewy rice balls with a newfound complexity. And her ears. Whetted to the world around her, it seemed to come alive, in panoply and panorama. Out on the bay winches creaked and whirred as crab pots were reeled up from the churned, silt-swirled seabed. Only a few hundred feet from shore, a child aboard a charter boat squealed with delight as he pulled in a struggling flounder, twirling and pirouetting at the end of a snapper rig. Carnival games gulping up coins with blinking, chiptune laughter. And footsteps. So many footsteps as those dejected crabbers hopped from gunwale to wharf, piled their empty traps thereon; wound up their shrimp nets, untangled their lines. As a pair of bird watchers oohed and aahed, wondering aloud whether that shearwater skimming the shallows for sand eels was longtailed or blacktipped or Cordessan.

Beth shrugged out of her baldric, allowed the immense, clumsy thing on her back to loosen its grip on her. The sword she propped more lazily against one shoulder as she sprawled out in the legs, throwing one by one into the bobbing, buoyant water all the skewers she'd picked clean already of their contents. The [i]dango[/i] all eaten, she nibbled then around the pinbones of a grilled mackerel, delicate flesh melting against her tongue, the skin crispy and brittle, and rasped with salt which vanished in her mouth. The rising sun's first needles pricked the sweat from Beth's wan skin, broiled her in her raiments black; she cared not.

More footsteps; beginning at the farther end of the pier, and pursuing some purpose which brought them past Beth's chosen resting place. At first—before the person to whom those footfalls belonged—before they'd paused so purposefully while crossing her shadow—Beth found them easily enough ignored. It was in the silence—the weight-shifting, board-creaking silence—that she began to wonder.

From the length of the stride, and the heaviness of the footsteps, she could have surmised of him a height of about six foot. Give or take a thumb. Well-built, but nothing clumsy, not so lumbering or corpulent. Light on his feet. Some kind of athlete.

If thoughts could kill, Beth's would have scorched to ash this meddler, this intruder upon her peace, ere he could ever have opened his mouth.

[quote][indent][color=ff2400]"Hello, miss."[/color][/indent][/quote]
Thoughts alone, of course, cannot kill; nor beggars nor residue addicts nor any other breed of miracle-seeker; leaving Death's champion, Odin's poor Regalia, bedeviled and exposed, like warm skin to all a summer evening's legions of mosquitoes.

The taste of the mackerel, a moment ago so oily and smoky and delectable, then curdling to ashes in her mouth, Beth sighed, and threw the half-gnawed carcass into the water. Securing her immense scabbard in one hand and scrabbling the other up the side of the dock pilings against which she had claimed her short-lived rest, between these two effects the blinded girl rose unsteadily to her feet. Gripping her weapon by its hilt, and probing ahead of her with the chape as one would a walking stick, she started down the pier, seeking her solitude elsewhere.[/color][/justify]