#inkblxxd

cities sound different after midnight. / @inkblxxd

The skirts of her dress breathe out at the hips as she folds, impulsively and quickly ⸺ the wafer-thin silk nicks where she sits, and then traces everything it touches. But she does sit, listen ... her eminence in supine.

❛ Je suis désolé. My voice ... is my voice. ❜

Her tone squeals down an octave to reflect the mood ... now. Where his sounds like velvet until each punctuation mark becomes cleaver heavy. It occurs to her when fiddling with a frill that he likely means mind your place.

If he insists on his tone, he'll have to welcome the kicked-puppy way her eyes bulb twice their normal size as she looks up for him.

I am late

Mina tensed when she saw him on the ground, it took a moment for her mind to realize that an powerful being, older than some civilizations was losing his balance. She reached out on instinct and steadied him quickly. Her hands closed around his shirt in an effort to right him.

"Are you alright?" she asked, concerned and checked him over for any bodily injuries.

✦✦✦ ─────── WHAT COULD THIS possibly mean other than a threat? Yet he didn't feel as though the stranger was implying anything to that tune; the seven paintings needed to be procured still, and Warin retained to finish what he'd started.

After all, what the plant did was natural -- feeding, sapping away nutrients, digesting. No morality to toothed leaves that sustained themselves on the horrors of killing prey. A beetle is unsuited for it anyway; too strong, it would wriggle free rather easily from the gentle green grasp.

Owlish blinking, a genuine show of being caught off guard. Perhaps in the back of his mind, Clark wasn't surprised. But this hadn't been at the forefront of his mind, nor had he expected it to be so openly declared. Was this some sort of play? Was a specific reaction the goal here? A piece on the board had been moved and yet the cambion still did not know what game it was they were playing...

Had Ishaan found anything there? No, not possible. It wasn't his flat in the sense he was actually living there. It was another part of his cover, another way to leave a false trail because the lack of one somehow raised more suspicion than a loose and fraudulent cover. But that was the problem. He wouldn't have found anything there. It wouldn't have looked lived in. It was a set piece that was never meant to be entered, the front of a theatrical backdrop you were never meant to walk behind to see how two-dimensional it truly was.

His lips parted and all that toppled out with a simple, ❝ Oh... ❞

Unsure as to what he should be expressing, he went with honesty for once. Confusion, uncertainty.

❝ You didn't scrape my locks into oblivion to do it, did you? It's a rental. ❞

Mina glanced at her friend....er...acquaintance? What was he exactly? And then back at the group of monster bait in the corner that were talking amongst themselves.

"Every few years it's always the same," she chewed on her pencil as she looked over the crossword, "Some suprnatural hit show or movie or book will come out and people will fancy themselves hunters. And they will set off and usually they die but there's always one or two that can adapt."

Speaking as someone that 'd been one of them

She looked at him, "Be careful. I doubt those pencil necks could ever hope to best someone like you, but sometimes idiots get lucky. And the only thing worse than someone that has a vampire they have plans for are idiots that have no plan at all."

She would say it wasn't because she CARED or anything like that. But Mina had met deranged hunters that had managed to get their hands on a vampire and the thing had barely been existing. There'd been nothing in it's eyes, it'd just been broken beyond repair. Something beyond even whatever it was in Armand's eyes. Mina never wanted to see that again in anything, much less Armand.