#*open starter

with a brand new wound that she'd have to let heal, she leaned over to look into her reflection and touching her cheek lightly, barely touching the wound but all the same flinching.

“Okay, so...this is gonna sound a little weird, but...”

What an awkward way to ask someone for a favor. But what else was she going to do? It wasn’t like she could keep testing out her echolocation on stationary and inanimate objects. She would need a moving subject with hearing and the ability to report back to her if she wanted to get proper results. A tree or a rock or whatever wouldn’t be able to tell her if they could hear the screech or not, and animals were too unpredictable for her to test the accuracy of her echolocation.

So, it would have to be a human. And Anise had already been sitting on the same bench at this person with her notebook in hand and her pencil tucked behind her ear. All she had to do was ask. Which, for Anise, would be no less than incredibly awkward and uncomfortable. She had already been stressing over how to ask this incredibly awkward and uncomfortable question for several minutes when she finally asked it.

“You know those old gangster horror stories from the 1940′s? Where they tell you you’re gonna ‘swim with the fishes’ or whatever the fuck those caricatures in movies say these days?”

A pause. And yes, he’s drunk.

It had been a gorgeous sunny day, which meant the golden afternoon light was particularly radiant. Ferus had brought some of his work outside to bask in the warmth; in Ussa, there was no restrtiction on data flow, and so he’d spent most of the day in one of the parks, lying in the grass while he worked on his datapad.

Sometimes, the job took a lot more out of you. Sometimes you needed three computers at once in order to make something happen. Sometimes there was an influx of clients. But for the last week, work had been easy. Quiet.

There was a sense of peace. And that peace was part of the reason Ferus had chosen to indulge in the beautiful calm liveliness of his city today, instead of staying in the office.

He’d brought the vioflute on a whim, honestly. But as he finished his tasks and the sun went low on the horizon, he stretched out and picked it up, picking idly at the strings as he looked out across the lake. The surface wasn’t still, but the movement of the waves caught the sun’s reflection, making it glitter.

It was easy to love this place. It was easy to love being home.

Outside the window a dead branch tapped on the glass. It was a steady and constant sound, that was made to keep the guest in room 2C always on the edge of slumber, never quite there.

Tap, tap, tap.

Bram liked this room. Because when they visited the unsuspecting guests they were always tired and they wondered if the strange movement of shadows on the wall was just their imagination. It was never their imagination, it was always the shadow creature who had come into their room through the vents, up from the basement. The same creature that was supposed to be locked away for safety purposes. If only Luke knew that the monster he despised the most was on the prowl, hungry for pleasure.

Tonight Bram had snuck beneath the bed, where their body was swallowed by the shadows there and they felt bigger because of them, stronger. Above them in the bed, they could sense the warmth of the guest and hear their heart beat. Perhaps they were close to sleep now, after trying to stay awake for so long. Bram hoped they wouldn’t mind staying up a little bit longer.