Leila was mostly staring at Lesley’s wound instead of his face as she received the handshake. The man’s hand was quite a bit larger than her own, and it felt rather heavy.
Limb losses are at least nearly painless when adrenaline concentrations are sufficiently high. Got it.
Leila took mental note. There were probably a few other things she didn’t take into account, but well...she decided that the approximation will do for now.
“...Leila.” She said as she nodded, peeling her attention away from the severed hand and to look at Lesley.
Her self-introduction was short, and she broke away from the potential chain of questions she would’ve thrown out to utter that introduction only because Lesley seemed willing to change the topic. It ended up being seemingly unnecessary, though, as the man showed that he already knew her name. She winced a bit at Lesley mentioning her “taming” the dragons.
“I didn’t exactly - ”
The sentence cut off short again as Riley approached the two of them, and spoke of the events at the mansion enthusiastically - complete with excited gestures and overly passionate exaggerated phrasing. Actually, she believed that Riley was the one who found the book that triggered the concealed passage, and speaking of that - Leila was still pondering upon how exactly how Riley was able to instantly deduce the location of that trigger.
She was about to mention that, but then remembered being told somewhere that it is convention not to correct any erroneous statements unless necessary. She was also going to ask Riley about that - she didn’t have a chance earlier - but this chance, as well, slipped away as Riley promptly turned around in an equally exaggerated gesture and marched of to further examine the house.
“uh...”
Leila appeared rather absent-minded for another moment or two as she actually tried hard to catch up with all that was going on. The conversations died off quickly as she struggled in vain to find proper responses to what was said. Biting her lip in frustration, she then turned to look at Lesley and his smile, and resolved that she wasn’t sure what to take of his attitude that seemed to be taking her as he would a much younger, much less sophisticated being.
Then she noticed that she had been staring at Lesley’s face for a while, and upon that realization she quickly turned away.
“Burning the house down doesn’t seem like that terrible of an idea though? Provided one maintains proper control...”
Her attention then turned to the interior of the house as she mused over Ace and Riley’s suggestions, mumbling fragments of her thoughts without consideration of the fact that people around her would probably hear them.
The house wasn’t exactly spacious, so there was really no need for a spread-out search like they carried out in the mansion. Instead, the lot walked around quite randomly, bending over to look around corners of furniture and whatnot. Watching the scene, Leila smiled, only to later become puzzled by why exactly she’d be smiling about applying a Brownian motion model to the scrambling of the individuals across the worn wooden floorboards.
“Is he okay?”
“uh?”
Leila looked to her side to see the item hunter standing besides her. Songbird, she remembered. He retained the pretty fluffy clothing that seemed to be characteristic of him, although a few stains and tears could be seen here and there - probably inevitable considering what just happened. He also lost his hat - a pity. Leila really liked the hat.
Songbird was still pretty though.
This Nobody didn’t talk much, but that made this character even more intriguing. Leila’s attempt to follow his line of sight to who Songbird was referring to was disrupted a bit by the fact that the Nobody’s hair nearly covered his eye, but she could make out that he was speaking about Avian - the soldier that had accompanied them since their arrival at Sol.
Was Avian okay? She didn’t see any significant injuries. Internal? Didn’t really appear to be in pain, or ill in any way. Leila struggled to make out any discrepancies between what Avian was doing and what a typical Nobody was supposed to be doing, and failed miserably due to the lack of an appropriate model of a “typical Nobody”.
Leila never really was good at reading people.
“He...is, I suppose.” She provided Songbird with a non-answer, not knowing what to say but no willing to seem impolite by not responding either. “...Soldiers are always okay.”
Mind drifting back to the particle model topic. Maybe she was laughing at herself because she knew that such a naive model wouldn’t suffice to approximate the much more complex behaviour of these people. It fails to take into account aspects such as the avoidance of looking through places that they have already searched - although observations prove that that does slip sometimes and several places were examined several times by the same people, only to draw identical conclusions. Maybe the communications and coordinations between them invokes patterns that a particle model cannot emulate. Everything had to be inaccurate to some level, after all.
"Hey, what were you guys doing during that last day of 2013?"
“I was watching fireworks.”
Leila didn’t really know why she decided to answer that out loud, for there seemed to be no-one in particular to direct the response to. All those thoughts, however, occurred only long later, and for that time being Leila sort of just rambled on.
“People set of fireworks on New Years Eve.”
Relevant background information.
“They were...beautiful.”
She would’ve taken the course that a writer of traditional literature could’ve and started throwing around metaphors and implicit connotations and flamboyant vocabulary and the such. She could do that, even though there are multiple instances where her likening something to another resulted in much fretting on the part of the listeners. Which, incidentally, she didn’t have many.
“...like flowers.“
Okay, you did it, didn’t you. She wasn’t sure whether to regret that, but she figured it wasn’t entirely her fault, if you take into account of reinforcement. She thought that as her wandering footsteps stopped in front of a shelf, placed on which is an old, half-collapsed flower pot, with the remains of leaves and a stem extending from the dirt that it still contained, and dead, half-rotten pedals piled in the proximity. No trapdoors behind here (she didn’t entirely forget the task at hand), but she decided to stop and stare for a while (isn’t extremely devoted to that task either).
“...so I followed them. And I ended up here.”
And she decided that was all she had to say.
Maybe she was smiling at herself because there was this very, very vague realization that these people aren’t to be likened to the components of a reduced particle model; and that, not in the way that any other person shouldn’t be considered a source of non-uniform random variables - not just the complexity and sophisticated unpredictability of a human being, but something more, something that she can’t yet explicate. The idea that this was a special lot of people, and perhaps special in a way only comprehensible to her own mind.
No, scratch that. She had no idea why she felt that.
These people, though - like dead pedals piled near the bottom of a broken flower pot - were to be considered beautiful.
Leila thought that, much oblivious to the temporary celebration that had just broken out behind her surrounding Jasper and the newly found artifact.
