#riful01

@abyssalribbons

Naki apologized to his stomach once again. He patted it, like one would an unruly child. His first attempt at feeding had ended in a fight with some stupid hat wearer, and no food for all his trouble. Now here he had, looked in every shop on this block to see if there could possibly be a ghoul bar around. Even if Naki was not subtle at all in his observations, he could tell by one of two familiar smells, either of fellow ghouls, or raw human meat. Just when he reached the last shop of the lane, and had started to buckle forward with hunger, giving up hope. The smell reached, and almost physically tugged at his nose, guiding him forward.

Naki wandered in, not making any attempt to hide how lost and starving he felt at the moment. If you called being obvious with your emotions wearing your heart on your sleeve, Naki had basically ripped out a human heart and stitched it to the white sleeve of his suit, still beating. He looked up at the lady at the counter, she smelled of raw human meat, but she didn’t smell like a ghoul.

[ ❦ ] —— "Greg? Greg!"

Wirt's voice was beginning to wane, but he had no mind to notice, as his mind was currently occupied almost wholly by the fact that it had now been two days since he'd last seen Greg. While his natural unease in large crowds had kept him bound indoors during the holiday rush the day prior, his growing anxieties now pressed him to scour the city streets for his brother. Those same anxieties skewed his sense of time; it felt that only a few hours had passed before the sun began to sink out of the sky, and with another blink, it was gone altogether.

But even as the daily working crowd slowly transformed into rowdier, late-night partygoers, Wirt pressed on, his worriment growing by the minute. As the temperature began to follow the sun down into darkness, he pulled his cape tighter around him, glancing about in every direction as he continued his roaming long into the night. He knew in the back of his mind that he should reach out to people and ask them if they had seen a boy with Greg's description about--a kid with an upside-down teapot on his head couldn't be difficult to miss--but although his concern had pushed him out the door, it was not quite strong enough to overcome his aversion to approaching random strangers.