Shoshannah Mitchell
Padre only came 'home' yesterday, and so of course
Shoshannah hasn't left Chantry property since then, until now. She's
given the man his space, of course, as he wanted it but she's always
been there, near, just in case. Just in case what? Well, that's
anyone's guess. At any rate, here she is with her bike and her guitar.
As anyone who's ever seen a concert held here - even on DVD or
something - knows, the acoustics are phenomenal. They make even
mediocre bands sound great, and Shoshannah's playing is so much more
than mediocre.
It'd probably started out as a hike or a bike ride,
but now it's fairly meditative, sitting there so - or perhaps
contemplative is a better word, as she doesn't seem to be shutting out
her surroundings. If anything, it's the opposite.
[Char + Perf because why not? We'll say -1 diff cos everything sounds amazing at Red Rocks.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (1, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
Shoshannah Mitchell
[And Per + Aware, also why not?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
Ian Lai
It
was mid-afternoon in Colorado and even though autumn was fast
approaching, the temperature certainly didn't feel like it. There was a
dry, baking heat in the air around Red Rocks park: that kind you get in
desert climates. If Ian hadn't already been tanned from his last trip
to Thailand, he might be a little concerned about sunburn. But the
place was as beautiful as it looked on the website, and it made for a
nice getaway from the usual routine of his day.
(There's something sacred about natural places.)
He
was on his way back to the parking lot where he'd left his poor car to
cook in the sun, moving down the sandy path through an outcropping of
rock formations. And then... there was music. And the he stopped to
tilt his head and listen to the lilting notes of sound brought to him on
the breeze. When he began to walk again, Ian shifted direction,
turning down a fork in the trail toward the source of the music.
And
then there she was. Sitting there off the side of the path with her
guitar and her beautiful voice and... something else entirely
otherworldly. Spectral and cold and creeping. But Ian, see... things
like that didn't frighten him. So he smiled lightly and waited for the
song to finish before saying, "That was lovely. You should try the
amphitheater next."
He cut a pretty appealing figure, even in
casual clothes. Lean and elegant and with the kind of beautiful, planed
features one might expect to see in a painting. Dark hair. Dark eyes.
Full lips. And somehow oh-so-very-catlike. It fit with the resonance
Shoshannah would feel coming off of him. Like a lithe and graceful
predator. Cunning and Elegant.
Ian Lai
[Oh, me too! Per+Aware]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
Shoshannah Mitchell
This girl? She may well be a bit pinker than usual when she winds up wherever she calls home (or doesn't - for all that anger and defensiveness
that rolls off of her like a shield, like barbed wire, she doesn't seem
like the sort who puts down roots easily), but under the sun her skin
turns more olive-brown-tan, something vaguely middle eastern looking,
not quite at odds with the freckles that come to pepper her cheeks and
nose. What all this color does, though, is make the blue eyes that come
to meet his all that much more stunning, more compelling.
She
sits in the middle of a brightly colored crazy quilt, all different
colors and textures and shapes combining to make something fine and
beautiful, and if that's not a metaphor for life in general and mages in
specific, then nothing is. She's dressed in white - a tank top and
skirt, perhaps, or a sundress, it's difficult to tell with her sitting
as she is, and well done crocheted arm covers that mirror the eyelet of
her calf-length skirt - but for the leather, silver and turquoise belt
that provides a contrast. Her hair, long and wavy-flowing is caught
back just enough to not obscure her vision when the occasional breeze
catches it, toys with it, whispers around her.
".....thank you."
It's
clear that she's not entirely certain what to make of this sudden and
random approach, even as her eyes say she recognizes something about
him. She's expecting something, goodness knows what other than not
good, as evidenced by posture that shifts to challenge, to dare. Still,
her words are polite, tinged by the American south and something far
further away than that, a lot of things really. Her accent is
here-there-and-everywhere, making it that much more difficult to profile
her by superficial means.
"It's just a hobby. Something to do to fill time, you know?"
Ian Lai
Ian raised an eyebrow at that, fixing Shoshannah with an amused look that seemed to say: I don't believe that for a second.
Both
of them were dressed in white today. Ian's contribution consisted of a
t-shirt that looked deceptively plain considering its price and the way
it hugged his frame like it'd been tailored for him. His jeans, on the
other hand, were a dark selvage, and they outlined what looked to be
nicely-cut leg muscles.
Even dusted with sand and patched with
sweat, Ian seemed like he'd just stepped out of a photo shoot. It was a
rather infuriating quality of his.
He walked forward a step and
crouched down on the pads of his feet - just outside the perimeter of
the quilt. "Pretty girls playing pretty music in parks. How very
Colorado." He smiled again. "You don't sound like a local though."
Shoshannah Mitchell
"Tropes
and cliches become so for a reason. Can't have them without truth
somewhere," is the answer to the first bit, and she's not all that
different than he; this close, he can see sweat sheen turning her skin
something akin to pearlescent, an effect that costs the people who stage
model shoots everywhere a fair bit of money. Hers isn't the every day
sort of beauty at all, and she'd be just as at home in the pages of some
magazine as he, though the campaigns and designers would likely be
quite different. "But I'm not a local. Or, well, I guess I am now.
But I wasn't until recently."
Her fingers have stilled though her
guitar - a gorgeous red acoustic electric that no doubt cost someone a
pretty penny - is still in her lap, picking up the reds in the blanket
beneath her and the rocks around them. And her voice, just speaking, is
far deeper and more nuanced than her singing would imply; that had been
passable, somewhere between decent and good, nothing to write home
about. Talking, though? Hers is the sort of voice one could listen to
for days, if she only chose to employ it more. Deep and milk-and-honey
rich, with those oddly shaped vowels and stretched or contracted
consonants that should be distracting, but instead are rather
captivating.
"I'm a military brat," she adds, which explains the
hodge podge but not why the American feels tacked on and relatively
recent. "Lots of travel. You? Are you a rugged Colorado boy behind
that model exterior?"
It's almost playful banter, or as close thereto as Shoshannah comes.
Ian Lai
One would be hard-pressed to imagine a moment when the word "rugged" might apply to Ian.
"I'm
from a few places. None of them here." He picked up a small stone
from the ground and ran his thumb over the surface. "Sadly not as
exotic as you." (Ironic, considering that was a word often used to
describe him at first glance.) "But I'm here now. So I'll have to
acclimate. Are there many of us out here?"
Shoshannah Mitchell
"Austin
isn't all that exotic," she says as one corner of her mouth pulls up
into something like a smirk, and of course that isn't where the
strongest notes of her accent are from, though that explains the
southern twang. "And Tel Aviv . . . I suppose it depends on your
perspective." She's Israeli, then, or lived there for a long time.
Strange, for an American military brat, but not unheard of. "But
there's lots of other stuff too."
Then there's the question about
others, and look at that? Shoshannah actually knows how to smile,
though it seems an almost foreign expression on her face and doesn't
last long. "There are a few. Some bad, though I think we got rid of
them for now. Some boring both in dress sense and ideology. Mostly at
least decent, though there are only a couple I really talk to or hang
out with."
Ian Lai
Ian listened with a calmly
interested expression. When Shoshannah was finished, he pressed his
lips together and nodded. "Could be worse, I guess."
Finally he reached out with a hand to offer an actual greeting. "I'm Ian. You?"
He
didn't supply any further information regarding his own particular
brand of ideology or affiliation. And truthfully, none of them really
knew what to expect of each other until confronted with the reality.
Even then, sometimes...
He might be a bad person. That he seemed
entirely unphased by the way Shoshannah's resonance felt (and had not
made any attempt to comment on it) might even be interpreted as a red
flag. Or it might mean that he, too, trafficked with ghosts. (It
didn't.) Maybe it just meant that he didn't judge people.
He might be a bad person. So might she.
But neither of them seemed afraid of the other. And here they both were, having a perfectly friendly conversation.
Shoshannah Mitchell
"Shoshannah."
Of course it is - it fits her, that name that's a desert flower (both
in meaning and sound), something exotic and earthy and not entirely of
this world. Her hand meets his and though one expects it to be a clammy
sort of death-cold (and the impression exists, to be shaken off or
not), Shoshannah is very much alive.
And, of course, she offers no
more information than he does. Either of them might be a bad person.
Either of them might be one of those that she calls boring. Who knows?
Without proper introductions, and given preconceived notions, it's
terribly difficult to tell.
"Are you staying in the city, or out
here in the wild?" He doesn't look rugged, no, though there is a
controlled sort of not-tame about him; he could well go either way. So
could she, for that matter; maybe she floats through walls and into and
out of dreams in Denver, haunting the unwary or unwise. Or maybe she
lives on a farm out here in the middle of nowhere and has pretty much
given up on fixing the fence now that there's no one to help her figure
out what to do.
But neither of them is passing judgement, just
now. It's a thing that lends itself well to this sort of talk, though
now that it's been more than a few passing seconds she nods at the
blanket. "You can sit, if you want."
Ian Lai
When
they shook hands, it was the first (and only) moment when Ian gave some
indication that he felt the touch of the dead on her. But his reaction
here wasn't fear or disgust. He glanced at the point where their hands
met, turned hers over slowly as though to inspect it, and looked at the
fine bones of her fingers with a quietly curious expression. As though
he found her... interesting.
But he didn't say anything about it, and when he released his grip his eyes returned to hers.
She offered him a place to sit.
"I've
got a place in the city. And... sadly, I have to be back there soon,
so I'll have to take a rain-check. You should give me your number." He
smiled and winked a little, charming in a way that was conscious of its
intentions.
Shoshannah Mitchell
"I should, hmm?
Is it always that easy for you?" It's teasing, that, but with her free
hand she's reaching into her guitar case, there next to her, for a pen,
which hovers over the skin of his palm, now turned in hers, as she
looks up to catch his eyes again (and my, aren't hers disarming?), a
brow raised. "May I?"
She has no paper, so assuming the answer is
yes, he gets a number written in a rounded hand that is as vaguely
exotic as the person who creates it, and just as artful, there on the
fleshy bit of hand below his thumb.
"That's my new cell - the
first one I've had, and I don't always remember to carry it around. But
if you don't get me right away I'll probably call back."
Ian Lai
"Not
always," he answered honestly, but the pleased and subtly flirtatious
smile remained on his features as Shoshannah brought forth that pen and
scrawled her number on his hand.
Like he was back in college.
"Thanks."
He
stood up and turned around, walking back toward the trail. When he got
there, he turned and offered a final nod of goodbye. "Have a good
afternoon, Shoshannah."
And then they parted ways, though it was likely that they would see each other again soon.
