cityofhex | [open & closed] We walk these streets, but not alone

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[open & closed] We walk these streets, but not alone

1. Open (Nov 4th)

There is a very basic problem that occurs to Kitty towards the end of her first day in Hex, around the time when the candy from the night before runs out: She has no currency on her that would be accepted here, no place to return to in the evening where she will find food, and no way of finding work that she could earn some money with. Even if there is something that she could do to earn money, she wouldn't know what it would be and how to get to do it.

She resorts to shoplifting that evening, but that really only helps for one meal and smuggling food out of a shop is not that easy when you're young and thus turn people's head just by being in the store alone and not in the candy section.

No. She needs to find something better to do. So that night, she can be found out in the streets where there are bars, or even just shady looking backalleys, hoping to find someone who passed out from alcohol and still has their wallet on them. Or who can't resist her searching hands for other reasons, she isn't picky (and doesn't even think to call an ambulance or police because that just wouldn't even be an option back home). It takes all night, and doesn't turn up with much, but she has a few bucks in the morning, enough to last her for a few days. But she's tired, and it was a pretty tedious search with more than one disappointment and one or two unpleasant almost-encounters.

Still, the money doesn't last her long and thus she's out on the nightly streets again a few days later. She almost squeals in excitement when the first limp body that she finds still has its wallet, creepy as the corpse is. Because that is what it is, she notices. It isn't even the lack of breathing that tips her off, it is the unnatural lack of essence. As if someone forcibly removed it... Her head shoots up and she jumps to her feet and dive under some garbage bags that are piled up behind her, just in time as a woman turns the corner. She can hear the woman curse about children (?) and then some shuffling and rustling, and when everything is finally quiet again and she crawls out from under the garbage bags, only enough to peer down the street, stinking and shaken, the corpse is gone.

If nobody finds her there, she will quickly retreat then - not to any specific location, just to somewhere else, further away from the bars, and once a quiet corner is found, sit down there and try to catch her breath. "Drek," she whispers and closes her eyes for a moment. "Drek."

2. closed to Ryoji (Nov 5th)

Kitty is a busy bee during her first week in Hex. Aside from trying to figure out how to eat, she also tries to learn more about two people: Corwin and Ryoji. The former because something is just seriously wrong with that guy, and the latter because ...well, he gave her her phone number and is local. He might be a very useful contact, but she wants to know more about him before she uses this.

It doesn't take her long to find him - knowing that he is a college student helps a lot. She follows him for two days - mostly in her cat shape - before she finally decides that he might be eccentric, but safe enough and calls him. She'll just let the phone ring until he answers, no matter how long that takes.

3. closed to NPCs (Okt 31)

She's been around for a few hours, joining other children while trick-and-treating, and thinks that she has a decent enough grasp on the concept. It's for children that still have early bedtimes and need to be attended by an adult.

So seeing a group of children who are still out and about and who don't have an adult with them, a good while after she has parted with her second group and watched the trick-and-treaters vanish from the street gives her pause and makes her halt her steps just after stepping around the corner to watch them.

Sure, she's still out and about without an adult herself, but that's different. What are they doing here?

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There's a long pause, because she wasn't actually the only person Ryoji told to call him over the past week, but she's definitely the only one that would sound so young. "Ebru?" He really hopes it's her, because otherwise he's going to start being worried. "Hi! How are you doing?"

"Yes.

I'm fine. Do you have time to meet?" Good would be an exaggeration, but she's fine. She has found a place to stay that is hopefully safe, she's found a way to get money though it is only an emergency solution... And she's working on things getting better. Or at least more interesting and less tedious.

"Yeah, sure!" He can make time, anyway. He has to make time for a lot of things, in between everything he has to or feels like he has to do. And if she's asking to meet up, there's a good chance she needs help with someone. "When did you want to?"

"Anytime, as long as it's before 11."

Not because she needs to be home or in bed then, but because she needs to scour the streets for people who can't defend their purse anymore again. She was too shaken the night before to continue, and she has barely enough money left to buy a can of whatever for dinner.

People tend to not lie around drunk or dead too early on at night, though.

11 seems like an awfully late curfew for such a young girl, anyway... "Alright. Ummm, how about around 6 or so? D'you have a place you'd want to meet up?" He probably has enough money to buy her dinner if she needs it.

"There is a place with benches and picnic tables at the park side of the corner of Fifth Avenue and Jackson Street."

All of which are made out of wood. Which vampires are allergic to, if she remembers correctly. She'd just really like to not run into one again if she can avoid it.

"Ok. Do you want to have a picnic or something? I can bring some sandwiches, since that's around dinner time." Assuming she'll trust something he makes. She seemed like a pretty wary kid, but maybe they're over that now.

She does wonder if there is a deeper meaning behind this than just that he doesn't want to eat while she's not, but sandwiches are a pretty nice. Especially when the alternative is soup that could be made of soy going by how it tastes.

"Yes!" Yeah, definitely not going to say no over here.

Oh good. Not the most suspicious of him then. "Alright. I'll see you then, ok?"

He will make several types of sandwiches. In case she doesn't like peanut butter, there's some deli meat and stuff too. And steals some of his roommate's leftover tuna salad to make some, too. Seriously he has no idea what this girl likes, he'll take a bunch of different things.

"Until then!"

She'll eat all of it and get a tummyache, probably.

When he arrives at the location, she's already there, sitting on a bench with both legs pulled up so her feet are under her butt and her knees rest against her chin, her ...well, it looks like a fancy smartphone lying on the table before her, apparently playing a movie or something similar. At the moment, she's too immersed to notice his approach.

There are so many kids with smartphones and stuff today... maybe she really does have a place she belongs, if she's got one that streams and everything. Ryoji smiles as he approaches, sitting down across from her and plopping a lunchbag with sandwiches and a few chip bags on the table. "Hey! What're you watching?"

She just grins and turns the screen around. On it, he can see a bulky woman with strongly enlarged lower canines and pointy ears, wearing a uniform that seems to belong to a security service, scream at a human in a suit. The human screams right back - the content of their fight is lost to the lack of sound, though.

"Barney's eye. My friend gave it to me last week. It's pretty good, but they could've cut out the romance. It makes no sense." She's pretty sure that no upper class human would actually date an orc from the barrens, romantic as it sounds before you start to think about it. But that's TV for you.

...Ryoji has no idea what's going on. He must be really behind on TV, but seriously who is letting this kid watch all this weird stuff. "I see... do you like it other than that?" While they talk he'll unpack the bag, each sandwich in its own plastic container. "You can pick whatever ones you want, by the way. I didn't really know what you liked."

The film lies forgotten when she catches sight of all the sandwiches, and she leans over the table to grab the nearest container and pull it over towards her to open it and sniff the contents.

...Right, he asked something. "It's fine. Her best friend is really funny." She tried to get a sense of his reaction to the characters on the screen, but it's not really conclusive. Hm.

She'll have to figure out how to directly ask why pretty much everyone that she has seen so far seemed to be humans. Or well, people who used to be humans or at least looked fairly human. Where are all the other metahumans?

He is getting so many mixed signals off of this girl. She's not lying about her hunger or her movie or... much of anything at the moment, which is possibly more confusing than if she was. She doesn't make a lot of sense.

"That one's peanut butter," he says, because sniffing them is kind of weird, "This one's tuna salad, and this one I think is turkey? And that one is cheese."

Tuna.

She grabs the container with the tuna salad in it excitedly, completely abandoning the peanut butter sandwich, and sticks her face into it as soon as the contained is open.

Yes, that smells like real tuna, not the awkward soy flavouring. If Ryoji doesn't stop her, she'll totally use her hands to shovel it into her mouth.

That was kind of abrupt, to be totally honest! Back to being concerned about this child's welfare. He'll go ahead and take the peanut butter one, then, munching on it while she absolutely devours the sandwich. He'll give her some time to ear before asking, "So... what's up?" It could be a casual thing, or if she called him out here for a reason...

She swallows the last bit of the tuna salad sandwich and licks her lips for the last crumbs before answering, trying to project as much of a business-like feeling as she can.

"You said you know this place, and that you were born and grew up here. And I'm not from around here and this place is different from where I'm from, so maybe you can answer me some questions.

But some of them might be weird so I want your promise that you won't tell anyone about them before I ask." And now to the bit that seems the most problematic to her. "But I have nothing to pay you with for the answers and the silence, so I'll owe you two favours if you promise me to not tell anyone and answer my question."

The photographer guy worked with favours, too, so she at least hopes that that is a currency that will work here, too. The big disadvantage for her is, of course, that as she knows nobody around here, breaking his word won't have much of a consequence for Ryoji. If she can tell nobody, it can't affect his reputation.

Sorry, Ebru. You're not really looking business like to Ryoji after that particular display. Luckily, not being business like doesn't make him take her seriously. And the way she's planning on wheeling and dealing is... interesting. He's becoming more and more sure that there's something different about her, and whether that something is supernatural or not hopefully something he'll figure out during the course of this.

He feels a little weird, holding favors from a kid, but... it's not a bad trade, really, if that's what she wants to go for. And kids can know way more than more adults give them credit for, so Ryoji nods. "Yeah, ok. What are you questions?"

She almost breathes a sigh of relief when he agrees - he could very easily have not taken seriously or demanded more. She is just a kid, after all, for all he knows. And she doesn't really want him to learn much more. Not at this point, anyway.

But what she needs is vital enough to raise the stakes for her.

"I haven't seen anyone here who doesn't look human, or like they used to be human. Are there really no others here?"

Ryoji blinks at her, eyes slightly wide. He can hear the rattle of Thanatos's coffin wings behind him, a little disturbed by the girls' question and what it implies. Like... where she's from, non-humans are out there publicaly and normal. That's a little bit concerning, from his point of view.

"I... you might need to give me a bit of context," he says, looking over at her. He is definitely taking her seriously, though. "What do you mean by people who look like they used to be human? And what non-humans are you used to?"

"There are all kinds where I'm from. I can't list them all. Like," she peers over at the screen of her commlink. Currently, the human protagonist is in a conference. She stops the feed and quickly zooms in on one of the background characters, an elf in a suit. Unless it was pointed out, it might be missed, but the woman is distinctively too slender, her features too sharp, and her ears too big and pointy to really look human. She's also fairly tall, "her."

"...I saw a vampire last night. And I've seen at least two others who were not really human. But they all looked human." If everyone is so uniform, or at least attempts to be that uniform, there must be strong repercussions if you don't fit in. She'd think that this place just has a weirdly low mana level, but she has witnessed too many signs of magical activity. The place is full of very, very basic spirits, for one.

Ryoji leans in to see the screen, taking it all in. So... it's not just some kind of fantasy series. That's how things look where she's from? "Where are you from?" he mutters, more to himself than to her. And she's already run into a vampire...

He sighs, moving back to look at her. Thanatos rattles more in agitation- he doesn't want to let people into their world, even Ryoji reasons to him that they need it. As long as she doesn't meddle with the dead... it'll be fine. "You're right, we don't have anyone here that looks like... um, that." At least, not on the outside. "But you ran into a vampire? Are you ok?" He doesn't think vampires usually mess with the kids, but some of them are even bigger jerks than the rest.

Instead of answering that, she turns the question back at him. "Where is this?"

She powers the screen of the commlink down. "Is there a reason why you don't have anyone who doesn't look human? And I'm fine. I don't think it noticed me." Or at least she assumes so. There was no sign of being noticed, and wouldn't she have been attacked if it had known of her presence? Especially with how the infected seemed to not have wanted someone to find the dead body there.

"Hex?" Which he would have hoped she'd know by now... especially if she came here. Why doesn't she know any of it? She seems too street smart for that.

"I... because humans are the normal thing? Most humans don't even know that non-humans exist." Which might be something he needs to warn her about right now so she doesn't get herself in trouble or accidentally start a panic. "I'm glad you're ok. I don't think they would have messed with you, but you can never be sure."

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