Family Bonding - Revelations

[KhaoticBliss]

08.29.2016

Saila is hanging out at the Red Dragon when Amare arrives, antagonizes Charlie and then demands that Saila leave with him to go swimming.

Shoving off the bar, Amare came to his full height, putting his cigarette between his lips and shoving the pack and light back into the inner pocket of his jacket. His eyes went back to Saila and he pointed at the door with his cig, "I'm going to swim naked. You will join me. During which time you'll say the big whatevers which can't be spoken here. And if it's boring we're going to get you a tattoo or something to fix the level of boring you are starting to be because JESUS."

Saila laughed outright at that. "... Boring," Echoing the word, she grins, and that grin is pure delight. The science project's favorite thing ever is being underestimated, don't you know. "...Oh, Rabid Baby. You'll learn." Hard to say whether she's talking about him thinking she's boring or... the futility of sparring with Charlie Darling. "Fine. We'll go swimming. You'll be naked. There's a thing I've never seen before." These words are spoken in a flat monotone, though the mirth is still there in those eyes that don't look like they even belong in the same face.

"Saila, I'm about to suffer Revenge of the Peter Pan Nerd if we don't go. She's just getting more and more wordy. I've offended the books and she's about to throw the Dewy Decimal system at me. Or explain it at length. I'm not sure which is worse." Cigarette back to his mouth and stride out the front door. There was swimming to do and then, really, a Saila to harass, which technically had been first on the agenda for him. Stepping out the door of the inn he held it and looked at Saila, "Don't make me say it."

"...Excuse him," says Saila to Charlie and Raychicago both. "He's ...uh. Well, he's something alright. But he's kinda my problem, so." There's a flash of a grin for Charlie though, a kind of solidarity for not being cowed. She tips a nod to both of them. Her grin splits in a knowing way, and the long legged girl eases out from behind the bar in pursuit of a semi-rabid werewolf.

"You are going to make me say it. Slow. Slow as **** That was your stripper name in the previous life." Once she had caught up to him he sighed, flicking his cigarette out onto the gravel. His jaw tightened, his mind rather fixed on the original topic, "So, talk. Spill your guts. Huh..." he put his hands in his pants pockets as he walked, "Spilling your guts is, quite literally, spilling who you are." The idea of which seemed to be staying with him.

"This doesn't feel much like a game," came her answering comment. "How do I win? And anyway we're not swimming yet."

"Who said that the point was for you to win?" He said it with the annoyance a person had when a dumb question was asked. At the bit about not swimming, his eyes rolled, "Seriously? You're such a prick, a goddamn squirrel eating up the inside of my house." His arm wraps over the top of her shoulders again. Something in there, in him, ached in a bad way. But she already knew that.

She did, and so despite his words, the razorblades in his tone, the girl wrapped both arms around his waist. She'd rather, well... eat up the inside of his house than call him on it, though, so she took a breath, directed her steps down the stairs, away from the Inn. "...How much have you figured out already...? "

"I'm not the Rain Man. I exist in a word where words are the magical way that people exchange knowledge." A lift of one eyebrow, blue eyes giving her a pointed look. In an all black suit, well, he could be quite the handsome devil. Or jerk devil. Ahhh... jerk devil. He sucked in a breath and rolled one hand impatiently in the air, "I might literally spill your guts. It seems like understanding you would be faster that way. I can't make a game if I don't know what we're playing with." Amare had a way of devouring people. Of being both comical and horrific. He couldn't seem to know the difference of playing with a puppet or a corpse.

The difference? Why choose! Amare plays puppets with corpses. Saila's seen it done. Effin' puma. "...You callin' me a Rain Man?" Her voice trails off, becomes indistinct as they move away from the inn, and the only reason she even knows what a Rain Man is has to do with the way her arms are still draped around him. "Tell you what. I can explain this better if I tell you about you..."

"I don't want to know a **** thing about me," his hand tightened on her shoulder and he rolled that other hand impatiently, "And you're using a dumb delay tactic. I am asking about you, not about me. So don't distract me with me to not talk about you. Jesus H Christ. That weaselly thing is just offensive." All of that made sense.

They went the route which let to the shoreline where Twilight Island was. Being a werewolf meant abandoning certain things. Fear of nudity was one of them, though honestly he had never suffered from that. It wasn't that he had the build of an Adonis or the endowment to make a porn star blush... it was that it was him. He seemed to think it was just a flesh house, that his body was slightly expendable but also the vessel to be worshiped. His clothes came off in a heap and then he waded into the waters. The tattoo of a wedding band on one finger, the wolf tattoo over his ribs. The ink image was damaged, cut over and then his flesh had healed. The interruptions looked purposeful since there wasn't any scarring.

Saila knew his body, as sure as she knew Quinn's or Dirk's. The girl had precisely zero inhibitions - her reasons for wearing clothes had absolutely nothing to do with being self conscious or concerned about her own naked frame. She knew enough about such things to know that what all those heavy black layers concealed was apparently attractive. Even Quinn had been caught staring at first.

She watched from the shore line in a distant way as the wildest of her 'brothers' kicked his clothes off and walked seemingly purposefully into the water, charging ahead like there was something--someone-- in there he needed to fight, or eat, or ****. Debating whether or not to join him, the teenager found a rock not far from the water's edge and perched on it, crossing long long limbs underneath her.

The muse pulled her bag into her lap, digging around in its seemingly infinite cargo space until she found a bottle of bourbon, which was lifted out by its neck and set aside. Putting the bag down beside her, Saila twisted the cap off her booze, digging her nails into the wax to make the cork pull free more smoothly.

Mismatched eyes on the water's surface, she tracked Amare's movements, waiting for him to surface. No sense in spilling her guts to the moon - the moon already knew all of her secrets.

The coolish water was what he needed. It brought things into focus. He wasn't really **** sure what had been floating in his brain to begin with, but that present moment was all that mattered. At first he was swimming in a more structured way, but that devolved quickly. His body thrashed and dove, and it wasn't until he found something that he was compelled to come ashore.

It was awkward, and apparent he was carrying something. Locked in his hands was a seaweed-wrapped box. Maybe recently placed there or long ago planted. He sat in some spot beside her, knees bent and the box planted on the ground in between his legs. His skin was still beaded with water, his breath labored from the swimming.

Tempted to join him in the water at least a handful of times, particularly when it became apparent that he was looking for something, Saila ultimately refrained. She picked at the cuff of her sleeve and drank her bourbon, watching him curiously. Waiting to see if he found what it was he was looking for.

Amare stalked ashore looking a little like a recently shaved Swamp Thing, this seaweed and algae choked thing in his hands. He came to a stop beside her and, wordless at first, the purple haired girl offered him her bottle. Mismatched eyes fell past him to the box, curious.

"Yes. So," he threw back the bottle of bourbon and then leaned back, reclined on the ground, propped up by an elbow, "What's the **** deal?" It was the sort of eloquence that was to be expected, and it might have been stranger if it had been any other way. His eyes measured her carefully, in that calculating way he had. Maybe that had always been there since he'd been a predator long before becoming a wolf. Still, he did not stir, or seem overly concerned with the box. The bottle wasn't returned to her, he intended to hold it hostage until she got to talking.

This was a girl who was psychically, physically bonded to Quinn ****' DeFortes. She never, ever had only one bottle of liquor on her unless it had been a particularly bad night. Even so, Saila made no move either to reclaim the one she'd given Amare or to fetch another, not yet.

He posed his question in that totally Amare way - true enough, she'd have been disappointed most likely if he'd gone about it in any other fashion - and Saila's gaze slid back out over the water, her hands working reflexively in her lap. "That's been the question for a minute now, Amare, but I've finally got most of an answer for it." She paused a moment, catching the inside of her lower lip between her teeth thoughtfully. The hesitation wasn't fear: it was just that trying to explain never really got any easier no matter how many times she'd done it, how many words she'd learned to describe it.

"I'm a made thing," she said quietly, parroting the phrase that Sal had taught her. "A science experiment, essentially. I am ... a whole bunch of things spliced together into one body. S'why my eyes don't match -- they aren't supposed to. Everything about me," she looked down at her hands then, watching her own fingers flex and curl like it was a marvel or a miracle, and technically it was, "... was built in some lab."

"What? That's expensive as ****, why the **** would someone go to the trouble of making a person instead of just finding that cough-of-a-woman who's certain to **** you?" The query was still on point. The effort it took to simply have an organ transplant was well into tens of thousands of dollars. That was his metric, though, having grown up in New York. He didn't measure the "effort" of things in magic, Rhy'Din standards, because it wasn't his first language. Still, even in the magic world, it would have been a tremendous undertaking.

A dark smile touched her face. "I was designed to be a weapon, near as we can tell. To combine the strongest parts of several super natural entities in a way that would enhance their skills and minimize their weaknesses. I don't really need sleep. I don't really need food. I heal as fast as you do." Her gaze shifted to him then, her expression thoughtful. "I'm telling you this because you're my family, Amare. Because I trust you," she said quietly, leaving the implications of that unfinished.

"So yeah. My hands can make you come, that's true. But that's not all they do."

It was all opening up and very sweet, but a distraction from the point that he had pursued. That was what he said, "Well, what all is it then?" It didn't seem to shake him that she was a war thing. Or a thing. It might have been that his lack of sympathy made most people things to him. Beyond that, Rhy'Din had a way of preparing your mind for oddities.

He was ignoring the bit about her calling him family because it was a weird feeling he didn't much want to dwell on. Like a vulnerably, mushy orb of something that was trying to work its way in.

"But, whatever. If you're a weapon you're not **** cheap so who just... lets their BMW drive away and not come looking?" Amare couldn't imagine letting someone take a possession he was mildly fond of, let alone a seemingly unique and one of a kind weapon. Beyond that, she wasn't dead or unstable so she must have ranked as a 'success.'

[KhaoticBliss]

What all is it, then. That was the question she and Cane had spent five months together answering. She had all the pieces now, but they had come to her one by one, and she'd never yet repeated them out loud to anyone. "Lamia. Sphinx. Denubae." Swallowing once, Saila took a breath, reaching one hand out for the bourbon bottle. Her fingers worked once or twice, open and closed, a tacit request.

Saila nodded, hand still outstretched for the bottle. "...Exactly. I woke up in a graveyard not far from here last October with no memory. I'm not just talking amnesia like... who am I, where did I come from stuff. I mean like I didn't know how to talk, how to walk, anything. I also wasn't covered in these yet." The teenager retracted her arm long enough to push her sleeve back to the elbow, revealing the network of brightly colored tattoos that completely covered her from wrist to elbow. It was a series of apparently interlocking designs, each complete and independent, but interwoven with the next. If you fixed your gaze and looked long enough, you could actually see them undulate and move. They weren't tattoos so much as an apparently living web of ideas that swirled lazily across her skin. She stretched that arm out again, still seeking the booze.

"My ex was looking into it." Coilin, the werewolf that Quinn hated with a blinding, seething passion so strong that Amare probably knew about it, part of that whole pack mind link thing. "I haven't seen him in months now, but last I heard he was investigating a break in at a facility just outside town that had been covered up." Her smile was dim, humorless. "...It appears that I was stolen and then let go. And yeah. I'm pretty sure there's somebody out there real interested in locating me."

Another swallow. He eyed her hand and was hesitant to turn over the bottle, but it happened anyway. Fine.

"Well," he paused and then slumped so that he was laying bare back to the ground, his exposed body turned up to the night. Calculating thoughts ticked over his brain before he spoke, "People with the kind of money to make things would have had a more present force. Like people with money buy guards and all that ****. I mean," nonchalant shrug of his shoulders, "I'd torture and kill for less. But you know what?"

"You torture and kill because it's Wednesday," the girl scoffed.

"I know, right?"

His blue eyes went to her, eyebrows lifting up, "The problem with living beings," as opposed to mannequins, "is all that **** free will. I'd concern your pretty little head about an 'off and on' switch before having a chat with the folks that could throw it. Anyway!"

His arm swept over the air, his want for the devil in the details more apparent, "What can you do?"

Saila took the bottle back once it was relinquished, leaning sideways over the rock she was perched on to get to it, and then hefted it to her lips for a long swallow as she righted herself. Listening to Amare work through it in his mind, the teenager just really couldn't help but to laugh a little. Not because what he said was funny. Not because she was making fun of him.

Because Amare was literally the only person to date who had hit on the reason she kept her tattoos covered all by himself. Even Cane had asked her what's got you feelin' like ya' need to hide, chere? when she'd wanted to know if he could make a spell that would help her cover them.

"...Exactly, Rabid." Saila pointed at him like he'd just won a prize. Maybe it was just that Amare actually had that kind of money, that kind of obsession. "I'm ... I wasn't built to be concealed," she went on, gesturing herself in general. The hair. The eyes. The height. The science project stood out, even in Rhydin. "But I'm doin' my best not to get found, anyway." Her gaze spilled out over the lake, thoughtful. "S'gonna happen sooner or later, though."

Shaking her head, her attention snapped back to Amare. Looking down at him as he asked for details, Saila thought about it a second and then held her hand out. "Can I touch you? --Not your hand, we don't need a repeat of that. Just your arm or something."

"Anyway, if it was something important even I could hire a goon squad. The fact that no one has harassed you yet is kinda a clue."

When she said exactly, he shrugged but it wasn't a clever or meaningful revelation to him. He could only be expected to care so much outside of himself. A partial **** was given. Money and obsession might have had a way of rotting people. It was by a very narrow margin that he was not some pawn in what had happened to create her. Generally, he was mostly geared to exploiting someone's weakness.

She said she would he found sooner or later and he snorted, "Well, **** them. If you didn't stand a chance to fend for yourself then your savior was some bleeding heart fool. Who frees a **** dog that can't fight or fend for itself? Either they were a goddamn idiot or you'll be... you know, whatever, fine." A dismissive shoot of his hand through the air.

He had already decided to sit up when she asked about the whole touching thing. A scattering of pebbles was embedded in his back, a few immediately falling while others insisted on staying fitted to his skin. An arch of his brow as she talked about touching, "If it means you finally give me a goddamn answer, sure." Amare was the sort of person who knowingly set aside the Holy Grail to collect its pedestal for some... project he was on.

Saila rolled her eyes but said nothing right away. That last part of what he'd said, either they were a goddamn idiot or you'll be... you know, whatever, fine, hell, that was almost a compliment from the Rabid Baby. Taking another deep swallow of bourbon, she passed the bottle back to him as he sat up.

Shaking out both hands, she rubbed her palms on the front of her shirt at her midsection and then shook them out again. Shaking them out a second time, she stretched one out and, just before she rested it on his shoulder, the girl gave him a single warning. "This won't be as intense as last time, but you're still going to feel it. I have no idea why it only affects wolves that way, but." She shrugged. It would be his only warning as she planted her palm on the top of his shoulder, her fingers curling around the ball of the joint.

"Watch my arm," she said softly, and even as she said it, the tattoos that laced her forearm began to vibrate and glow. One pattern at a time, they lit up one by one, making a zigzag line that disappeared under the sleeve where it was bunched at her elbow, only to start again at a different spot on her wrist and follow another pattern up. He couldn't see it, but those streaks of light would roll all the way to the center of her chest before they stopped.

"See that? I'm absorbing the magic in you. Not much - I've learned how to control my intake, finally, so I can turn it all the way up or most of the way down. You can only feel it because you're a wolf. To almost anyone else it wouldn't feel like anything." She lifted her hand away, squeezing it into a fist and then releasing again. Her strange mismatched eyes were shimmering, giving off their own phosphorescent light.

"I can absorb magic, energy, knowledge, memories and pain. I can learn... anything about you. I can pick up any skills you have that aren't magic. I can ...drain you to the point that you can't transition to your other state, to the point that you come, to the point that you feel stoned, to the point that you fall asleep." What she didn't say is that she could also drain him to death.

Bourbon accepted, but he took it with a grumble, "**** sand."

She holds his shoulder, which was a little more weird than he thought it would be. People touching him randomly was weird to begin with, nevermind a touch that was planned out and carried in it a purposeful drain. Tattoos glow and move, but that wasn't what disturbed him about them. His eyebrows pushed together in a more severe expression, "I can feel it more than others... just the wolves? What the **** is it like for everyone else?"

Saila must have known, from her encounters with him, that he and Dirk had their run in with the vampires. That they had been experimented on, tested. That it explained why the skin in places of his tattoo seemed so cleanly cut from his body. The idea that there was a made person, powerful, able to drain werewolves especially, smacked of a creature made to take care of the werewolf 'problem' the vampires were so worried about. Absorb and collect them all.

He climbed to a stand. He was all long limbs and mostly dry, the hand not strangling the bourbon bottle reached back to brush off his ass. His foot reached over to grab his underwear with his toes and pull it over before he did an awkward one-handed redressing of himself. Determined not to put down the liquor for the task. Amare managed it pretty well in that he didn't face plant the ground, bottle in hand.

Because she'd been touching him, Saila knew the tenor of his thoughts just then, and she was quick to amend as he stood, dressed. The fact that it more or less put her at eye level with his crotch didn't seem to faze the teen. "Not especially wolves, Amare. I have the same effect on everyone with magic in them." She smiled just a little. "...And life itself is magic."

Her fingers flared and stretched at her sides before she folded them deliberately into her lap. "It's just that wolves can feel me and no one else can." No one else but Hex, anyway, but he could also sense and manipulate energy. "I'm not a vampire," she added quietly, though it was hard to say which of them she was trying to reassure. "If anything, I have an affinity for the werewolves--I'm more drawn to you guys than others."

"Then that makes you like the magic life sucker. Which kinda means that if you were a special made person that it is the point of you, yeah?" When she mentioned being drawn to them he laughed, tipping back the bourbon and turning partly from her to look down at the box he had dug up.

"Yeah, I mean, vampires aren't drawn to humans... or have a particular affinity for them at all." For him, all people fell into various degrees of abusive and manipulative. At least with predators and prey there was no mystery to the interaction.

"Ohhh yeah, you dated that wolf guy," Amare hadn't met Coilin, and truth be told he had an enormous amount of trouble caring about people he hadn't met that didn't seem immediately relevant to him.

[KhaoticBliss]

He had a point, of course, and Saila was quiet a moment as she considered it. The girl caught her lower lip in her teeth, chewing on it unconsciously as her strange eyes tracked his movements. Not that she particularly needed to--she could track him just as easily with her eyes closed.

There was a lot more to it, more to explain, other traits and skills, but the wolf seemed restless. She wouldn't volunteer unless he resumed his line of inquiry. Lifting one delicate hand, the girl raked over long, spindly fingers through thick, doll like purple waves. She nodded. "I was built to kill, yes. I was also built to learn, gather information and skills as necessary." There was something like relief in her expression when Amare mentioned Coilin--not a thing that happened often when the Irish wolf came up. In this case, though, it was further evidence that she wasn't just out to eat wolves.

Saila dropped her narrow chin in another nod. "Yes. I'm also bonded to Quinn." Turning her hand over to expose the top of her wrist, she held it out to him, displaying the green cross pattern that seemed to glow more brightly them any of the others. "This mark here is Quinn's. We can hear each other's thoughts--he's the one person whose mind I can read without having to touch him, the one person who can read mine. I know where he is, can see through his eyes, can access his strength. And he can do the same to me."

Arguably, the other skills she mentioned were just supplemental to the 'built to kill' one mentioned first. Learn about the enemy, where the others are hiding. She talked about being bonded to Quinn and he leaned over, glancing momentarily at her mark before he looked away. The flat of his foot pressed to the side of the metal box and pushed it along, over the rocky face of the shore until it was in front of her, "Do you know what's in this without opening it?"

He could be like that stranger on a train to confess things to. Moments of caring dominated by distraction with a primary emphasis being on whatever it was he thought was the most important.

Since he clearly wasn't giving up the bottle again, the mercurial girl tugged her bag back into her lap, fishing out another one. Her eyes were disconcerting. Even among those with heterochromia, they were strange: the colors drastically, dramatically different with no leakage of hue between them. Like they belonged in separate faces, or maybe it was that they did separate things.

Her gaze fell to the box as she pried the cap from the second bottle, and she nodded, her attention lifting back to his face a moment later. "Yeah, probably." Came the reply. "If I touch it, I can usually tell you who made it, how it was made, what it's for, what's inside it, who held it last, and a bunch of other mostly useless information." Successfully opening the bottle, she lifted it to her lips for a long swallow. "Or if you know what's in it, I can figure it out from you."

"You know what the **** that makes me think of?" He said, in regards to her gaze. This was largely because he didn't know if she did like Superman in the old tv show with his X-Ray vision. In his grey and black striped boxers, he crouched in front of her. The elbow of the hand holding the bourbon was on his bent knee, the other pointing at her face. Her eyes. "Those **** old school 3-d glasses. You know? That ghetto special effect they used to do to make you see 3d or whatever. Like the contrast made the images pop out and look like they were doing ****." This might have been a story with too much context for her to really follow. Maybe Hex would fill her in a little more on those details.

"Well, what's it got?" Saila was a brand new toy with things to do, apparently. Swig of the bourbon followed.

Silvery pale brows arching, those strange eyes went wide. Clearly mystified, her expression was blank. Lifting her free hand, her fingers flared and twirled once as she tangled them in long violet locks, but it didn't really help. Well, file that one away for later, then.

Taking another few mouthfuls of bourbon, she unfolded long nether limbs, pulling herself off the rock in order to reach the box. The girl dropped to a crouch beside Amare in his underwear, and she placed her free hand flat on the seaweed-choked container's surface. Fingertips traced its outline, running along the edges before she turned it over, repeating the same pattern of touches on the bottom. She was a blind person reading braille.

"Jewelry," she said after a moment. "A ring, a locket. A....what's it called. A comb? There's something rotted and mushy that used to be pictures and letters. A little metal round box thing with like....part of a person in it." Urn. The word Saila's looking for is an urn. "Somebody named Elaine."

It was arguable that parts of a person had drawn him to the box. In reality, it couldn't have been so. Amare was powerful, but that didn't mean he could smell underwater. People tended to be in pieces around him, if not literally then metaphorically. He reached over for his pants and pulled them on, not bothering to fasten his belt. With his jacket nearby he took the moment to dig around his clothes and light up a new smoke. When the cherry of it glowed he was back to crouching in front of her and the box.

Huh. Okay. Second test. "Open that rusty bitch up. Your scrawny, gross little fingers can manage that?" There is a tug of his cancer stick and then a blow of its smoke at her face, "This box isn't alive. So what the **** is that?"

Amare was getting dressed, one gradual piece at a time. Apparently time for swimming was over? Her gaze went back out over the water for a time, distant. Could be she was seeing, reliving in a sense, whatever series of events had landed that box in the water in the first place. Other people's memories projected like a home movie or a cellphone video onto the blank screen just behind her eyes.

The girl shook her head after a long moment, her peculiar gaze redirecting to the wolf beside her just in time to blow smoke back at him, her lips forming a perfect o shape as she redirected that tobacco cloud with a short, sharp burst of her breath. Though Saila didn't technically smoke, it seemed that most everyone around her did. The scent - the smoke itself- didn't really bother her, but that didn't mean she would let the intended insult of it pass.

...And speaking of insults. Her brows arched quizzically, amusement in the edges of her smile, when he challenged her to get the box open. Really? Her expression seemed to say, though she remembered that Amare lived in a strange opposite world where the more he insulted you, the more technically acceptable your company seemed to be. The girl shook her head. "I started to ask what the **** my fingers ever did to you, but." But then she remembered exactly what they'd done to him. Oops?

"I told you. I can pick up skills, knowledge and memories. Everything I touch tells me its name, what it's for, how to use it. If the last person to use it was particularly good at it - say... knife throwing, or archery - then I can be really good at those things, too. This box has a trick to it. S'not about strength." She turned it over again, her fingers crawling along the side of the box until she found its catch, buried as it was under algae and slime. Her nose wrinkling, Saila forced the mechanism anyway, wiping her hand on her shorts a moment later.

The lid sprang free, the box's contents exactly as she described.

Some argued that blowing smoke was being flirty. Making that near-kiss-face at someone as you breathed out smoke. Or others thought it was an insult. It seemed far more likely that he hadn't intended it flirtatiously. He didn't counter her when she pushed the air back at him, but smiled halfway at the exchange. His eyes measured her and then his laugh came out harsh, "What the **** your fingers did was to finger ****." What friendship wasn't held together by semen?

"What the **** did you get from me? Did I fix that whole goddamn missionary problem you had?" Truth be told, she had never had that issue, but Amare had dubbed her Missionary with Lube at their first meeting. Saila wasn't viewed by him as being particularly kinky, she just was. This might have had to do with the fact that he didn't actively sexualize her or who she was.

"Get the jewelry. You and Mannique should wear it." Accessory shopping for the woman you love was a lot of work.

There was a trace of amusement in her expression as her shoulders rolled in a shrug. Yes, actually. That's exactly, inadvertently, what her hands had done to him. No sense in denying it or talking around it now.

Her strange eyes fell from Amare back to the contents of the box. She picked up the urn first, long fingers plucking it gently from its waterlogged grave. Wiping algae from its surface, she turned it over, wiped again. "Elaine Redding," she read from its inscription. "1975 - 2004." Not that the numbers meant anything to her - Saila couldn't have said what year it was now on a dare - not without borrowing the information from someone else first, and even then she couldn't have really understood what it meant. Setting it back in the box, she plucked a locket from the moldering sludge of ruined paper next, examining it curiously.

What the **** did you get from me? The teenager's thoughts snagged on the question, bypassing the second half of his query altogether. She mulled that over while in theory taking a closer look at the necklace in her hands, seeing whether she could get it to open. As her hands worked, she located and then sorted through the box of information in her mind labeled Amare, contemplating what to say. What was free information, what fell under other people's secrets? Of the secret information, how much of it was free anyway - things he already knew, was prepared to know?

"I got a lot from you," said the girl at last, quietly. She set the locket aside, picking up what had probably been an engagement ring next. Glancing rapidly up at him, a dim smirk touched her lips. "...Granted, between you and Quinn, I got more gay porn up here than I know what to do with," Saila tapped her temple lightly. "...I keep secrets like a goddamn champion, though."

[KhaoticBliss]

He could smell the sludge paper, the bacteria in it from the water a disgusting scent that stabbed him in the face. His nose wrinkled and it seemed that he might reach over and slam the box shut, but he never did. Amare never shut away those unpleasant things. It was likely he was beginning to calculate how it all might be useful. Saila was unfazed, like a medical examiner spreading a cancerous lung out on the table.

The necklace glinted, just barely, in the evening light. The shine of it was subdued, the hinges promising rust or just being so goop encrusted that she might be taking her chances to pry it open. And, why not? What was the point in the thing if it had sealed itself off from the world? The cigarette between his lips, his fingers dove into the moor of rotting debris. His eyebrows came together and dropped in a pensive expression as he drew the comb out of its depths. Maybe it was ivory, it was white and had the feeling that all bones had when his fingertips pressed into it.

"I swear to all of **** you don't know how to answer questions," this said with the cigarette jumping from where it was held between his lips. Eyes stayed on the comb like he couldn't understand what it was for.

Oh it reeked, to be sure. Saila's ability to smell wasn't as sensitive as Amare's - they weren't close enough to the moon yet for her to be borrowing Quinn's senses just now - but it was enough to make her wrinkle up her nose as she inspected the engagement ring more carefully. It was a small, delicate thing in what appeared to be heavily stained gold, a thin band with six little clear stones encircling a slightly larger, darker center stone. The girl learned the names of the metals, of the precious gems they contained, and at the same time she learned the story of Elaine.

Mismatched eyes strayed to the comb Amare had picked up, watched him run his fingers over it. Lifting to his face when he addressed her, the teenager sighed, shook her head, relented. "What's Mensa?"

"Only **** answer questions with questions," he stood up, stepping up to the water to wash off the comb so he could tell what it was, better. He knew it was bone because he knew what bones felt like, what they were, and how the indescribable delicacy of its marrow lurked inside its structure. Ivory was close enough. Beyond that, no one would have saved a comb like that unless it was being stupidly sentimental or some other nonsense.

"Mensa is latin for circle jerks." He said as he crouched back at the ground before her, the box separating them as they peeked. His hand went up to his mouth, adjusting the cigarette so he could take one good pull of it. The only indicator that she had hit on something was a second long bite of his lower lip when he looked at her. **** if he was going to say anything, though.

Saila was there, though, meeting his gaze. She had worded it that way on purpose, plucking a more deeply buried word from his mind to ask about. Maybe only **** answered a question with a question, but she had, in fact, answered his question. Where else would she have gotten that word?

Her gaze fixed on his face, the purple haired girl wiped her hand off on the leg of her shorts, reached across the void of space between them. She caught the middle part of his cigarette between two fingers, plucked it carefully from his grasp, brought it to her own lips for a quick drag and then offered it right back to him, her chin dropping in a little nod.

"You tested into that when you were... what. Thirteen?" Her head tilted curiously. "...Dropped out of some really impressive school, too. You are... probably the smartest person I know, and sometimes I think maybe I'm the only person who knows that." Still wondering what I can do?

"Ciirrrccllleeee jerks," he reiterated, neither proud nor wanting to linger on the subject of his wit. That had very little to do with him being humble and more to do with the fact that Mensa had not impressed him. It was a small society made to make someone 'like him' feel at home, and to that end they had failed. What they represented, what they wanted, all of it had failed. There was no home.

The returned cigarette was put out in the sludge papers and left there, like a little white grave marker sitting up in the decayed swamp that had been Elaine's story. The comb was shoved into his back pocket. Who didn't need a really durable comb for something? Amare stood back up, looking down at the box, "This **** is boring. Let's find some strays."

A flicker of amusement flashed across her features, there and gone again in a heartbeat. She reclaimed the locket she'd previously set aside, putting it and the engagement ring into her bag for safe keeping. Exhaling smoke, Saila picked up the little urn - sorry to bother you, Elaine - and as she stood, she threw it back into the lake, watching for a moment as it described a bell curve in the sky and then sank below brackish black waters with a distant but audible splash.

Wiping her hands on the seat of her shorts again, the girl turned, her peculiar eyes on Amare once more, willing him to understand without making her say out loud the other things she knew about him. "I understand you," she said quietly, and that was the last thing she had to add on the topic. "Strays it is."


((heavily adapted from live play with Amare Kellis))