Log: Between the Lines
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
School wraps up, and streams of students pour out into the frozen streets, reinvigorated by the sharp air. Most of them gather together in chattering groups with friends or pending study groups, taking a brief break from the endless slog of studying between the end of the formal day and the reams of homework that await.
Some do not. Eien is among the latter group: in winter boots and jeans, a long sweater, a hooded vest, she's a single anonymous blot of green fabric and denim that peels away from the others, hoisting her backpack against the curve of her spine with her thumbs hooked into the straps, to keep it secure while she moves quickly into the city.
A number of blocks and busy intersections stand between she and the perimeter of her destination: a shabby part of town, where sullen glances from doorways half-opened onto dim interiors convey reserve and suspicion, and most curtains are drawn, even against the daylight. It's here, in this neighborhood -- where the duplexes are overcrowded, hunched up against one another shoulder-to-shoulder -- that Eien keeps her second apartment, unbeknownst to her family. Dark Hour patrols and fights with monsters of every description make it impossible for her to come and go from her own home as she pleases; bloody, torn clothes are a fact of life, and her mother would probably have an aneurism to see her daughter carrying a firearm.
So: this run-down flat, on the third floor of what is little better than a tenement building: the livingroom bare boards, old fifth-hand furniture she couldn't afford to reupholster, and so simply draped with quilts. The couch doesn't even have feet on it, anymore. The CB radio is of decent quality, and the corkboard pinned with a smear of case details, photographs, maps with notations...the trunk of equipment underneath not new, but at least in good repair.
The rest of the apartment is dusty, unused, and smells that way.
She doesn't stop to look around when she reaches the front door of the building -- she just pushes her way through it and begins to climb the stairs to the third floor landing where the apartment door is -- a stairwell where all of the lights have been out for as long as she's held the lease. She's not even sure they actually work.
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
At first, nothing seems particularly unusual about this day compared to so many others. Eien leaves school along with the other Fra Mauro students, and takes her usual sharp turn away from the paths most of them take, and winds her way to a part of town most of them have probably never even seen: much less lived in. Despite the danger of the streets she walks down, no one bothers her, and she reaches the front door of her building without incident.
The streets remain empty as she pushes the door open and ascends the stairs. The building halls remain empty as she reaches her apartment and hurriedly lets herself in.
She'd probably start to feel her guard letting down, once she shuts the door behind her. That is, up until-- a few minutes later-- she hears a polite knock. It sounds innocuous enough, as far as knocks go. No particular urgency, no threatening heaviness-- just a casual, abbreviated rapping. She can look out the peephole, if there is one, but whoever is at the door is standing to one side, out of eyeshot.
There is a faint drifting sense of Resonance, but whoever it is is damping their presence pretty heavily. It would take an exercise of her spotter's capability to break that veil...
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
Jacket draped on a chair, bent over the open trunk as she rummages for the things she'll need tonight, bag against the far wall, Eien is caught in quite the vulnerable position when that knock sounds on the door, and she freezes like a deer, eyes widening. She turns her face that way, but her hood has fallen forward over her head in her forward bend...and when she sends out a tickle of her awareness, she meets with a curiously empty void, a dull, malleable feeling that her psychic awareness can't grasp, which slips out of her mental fingertips as though greased.
Her eyes narrow.
She straightens -- slowly -- and in one of her hands as they clear the boxy inside of the trunk, the dull metal of her pistol gleams.
Her hood tips back as she rises, but streamers of hair still cling to her winter-damp features, strokes of ink over the faint rose flush of the bitter air. Olive eyes fix to the doorway, beyond which could lie...anyone.
It wasn't that long ago, after all, that she stormed Tatsuya Sudou's apartment, and read him the veritable riot act about his Poor Life Choices, threatening to have it out with Shion. A little bit longer ago, she'd agreed to help investigate a human trafficking ring. To say that someone like Eien might have enemies is laughable on the surface of things...but not without possible truth. In any event, the neighborhood isn't without its problematic criminal elements, and she does take a risk, coming here alone -- even if mundanes would be more at risk in a fight with her than they might realize.
And so: there is a time for being a psychic...
And there is a time for using a gun.
The snap-pop of the weapon cocking is quite loud in the stillness of the unheated apartment.
"Come on in," she invites, with a bravado she doesn't feel. She takes two steps backward, until her vest whispers against the leprous paint on the wall.
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
Eien's invitation sounds in the quiet air. It somehow seems all the more vulnerable once it leaves her lips, the joys of hindsight making the danger of it doubly and painfully apparent once it's extended. Sumaru is a place steeped in the supernatural, and it wouldn't be hard for the imagination to go into overdrive... picturing what she might have granted license into her home by those simple three words.
There is a distinct pause after their last echoes die in the air. Then the doorknob turns slowly, the door pushes open, and what's revealed might well legitimize such superstitious fears.
It's just a boy. But it's one quite familiar to Eien. From around the opening door, Kyo peers warily in at the girl, blond hair falling across his eyes as he affects an intimidated display. Playfulness is seated in his eyes despite the obvious fact he clearly heard her cocking a firearm. "I was going to ask you what you were thinking, keeping a residence in such a dangerous place," he offers. "But it looks like I don't need to worry."
He invites himself two steps into the apartment, and she might be gratified to see that despite his words and his playful demeanor, he does move with a little more careful respect. "But that's a very poor reception for someone who just wants to talk to you. Just a few questions. Yes? Why don't you put that down?" His features cut into a sly sort of smiling. "I won't even ask you to kick it out of reach."
He leaves the door open, for now.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
Eien's is not a face meant to hide anything. Expressive by default, it's only by some force of will that she crushes out the expression that Kyo's appearance gives rise to -- and even then her success is only partial; surprise, consternation, and the wariness of uncertainty still make themselves apparent.
The gun tracks him when he moves, held in both of her hands.
"I can take care of myself," she murmurs, and there's cool iron in the words despite the veneer of distraction in her tone. Whatever she's contemplating, she keeps it to herself, and only after several beats does she lower the nose of the gun. Chilly intensity has replaced the wary acceptance of several nights ago: the slightly cocked angle of her head, the sidelong regard, her body's taut lines. Cornered animals look this way.
"I wouldn't if you asked me to. What are you doing here, Enda-san? You could have asked me questions at school."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
"I'm sure you can," Kyo murmurs placatingly when Eien insists, even through the surprise and dismay on her face, that she can take care of herself. His Resonance unfolds again now he's in the apartment, and it stretches its temptations towards Eien with the insidious subtlety of a snake's unraveling coils. "You don't need to prove that to me with the point of a gun. Let's have that set down, please."
His eyes half-lid. "You wouldn't want to make me become something I think could survive a bullet."
Eventually, for whatever reason-- whether her own decision or his cajoling-- she lowers the gun. Kyo blinks once, then seems to accept it as the best compromise he'll get. She insists she wouldn't kick her weapon away even if he asked her to, and he laughs. "Smart girl. Well, pointed elsewhere is good, too," he says encouragingly. "That's a start. Now, I think, we can talk." And his heel moves, kicking the door shut behind him. The sound of it clicking closed punctuates his statement.
He leans back against the door afterwards. "As for what I'm doing here, the things I want to ask you benefit from a little privacy. Even if they don't remember any of it anyway, it's rather silly to talk about these things in front of normal people... and there might be some not-so-normal people in the mix there, too. No, I wanted to know about that book. It was all very creepy, wasn't it?" Kyo says this as if completely unaware of the irony.
"--And don't look that way," he advises with a genuine air of trying to help, his eyes raking down her cornered-animal tension. "You make me hungry."
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
Distaste curls the corner of her lips over his addendum, and her eyes tighten, lashes narrowed into something that stops well shy of a squint. Behind closed lips, inside of her mouth, she roughs her tongue over the ridges of the roof of her mouth, to erase the memory -- it rises, unbidden -- of how it felt to have human hands fluttering desperately against the prison of her (his) teeth.
The suction created in so doing lends a casual 'tch' sound to the opening of her lips, and for reasons that have no grounding in logic -- absolutely human reasons -- this helps to ease her into a modicum of actual self-confidence.
"The book," she repeats. Spidery fingers finally part from the pistol's grip -- on one side -- to rake back from her crown into the charred brown of her hair, impatiently sweeping all of those pieces stuck to her freckled face out of the way. "It's a strange book. It had a few strange, creepy stories in it. What does that have to do with..." She gestures vaguely with the hand that has the gun in it, and as she slides off of the wall, flecks of peeled paint dribble onto her shoulders. "...with not being able to ask me questions at school?"
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
Kyo's smiling just sharpens at Eien's reaction to what he considers 'teasing.' Unaware of just how she found out about his predilections (unaware of just how graphic her means of finding out was) Kyo, in all his arrogance, presumes she found out this way: "Oh, that reaction. I see you've heard about me."
His vanity actually seems stoked by this, as if it were something desirable to be recognized for such vile acts. Then again, he really doesn't have much of a context to understand the true breadth of how vile those acts are. He knows only that everyone reacts with the same disgust Eien does when they hear what he does with his own kind--
His amber eyes follow her hand as it leaves her pistol to push her hair back. He doesn't at first appear to be listening to her impatient words. "It's a strange book. Maybe a little too strange. I've lived in Sumaru a long time. I've seen very odd things happen here before."
Kyo's expression flickers. For a moment, he seems to shudder as if from some unpleasant memory. What could possibly cause a creature like Kyo to shiver like that?
He doesn't explain. He just says, "Let me put it this way. I've been feeling some very weird things ever since I got those pages. I'd think it was you trying to get at me with some kind of spell--" He pauses, with a grimace. "It sounds even stupider said aloud, doesn't it? But I've had people do it to me before, and you wouldn't believe who. Anyway, I'd think it was you trying to get at me, except I'm pretty sure most of the others felt something weird, too. Where did you get it from?"
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
Whatever else she may be, Eien is a good listener. She's so accustomed to being a tuning-fork that resonates with the subtle vibrations of the world that she's quite adept at prising the most delicate of nuances out of expressions and tones of voice. Most of the time, that would yield little of value with someone like Kyo, whose expressions are of excellent but definite manufacture.
She feels the chill, though, when the steady light and wryness, the hard self-confidence of his expression glitches, falters like an interrupted circuit.
Her expression only shifts when he winces about how stupid it all sounds, brows tilting together, one slightly arched, and a smirk barely suggested at the coral curve of her mouth. /Yes,/ says the expression, /it does/. But though there might be a trace of sardonic, darkly flat humor there, she never stops taking him seriously, and there isn't anything mocking about her tone when she speaks.
"You'd be amazed what I'm willing to believe. But no, I have no idea what you're talking about. I got the book at an estate sale in the north, in the country. It's supposed to be part of a trilogy, but I couldn't tell you what it's called; there's no title on the binding. I don't know where the other books are, either." She dips her chin slowly, and searches his expression with skeptical, dark jade eyes. "Are you sure, about this? Why would /I/ come after you? I don't even know you."
What isn't said, but perhaps implied, is that Eien thinks Kyo may be having...paranoid delusions. He's clearly unstable...and now he thinks she's put a spell on him...with a book.
If only.
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
An interrupted circuit is a good way of seeing it. His outward demeanor is, after all, just a facade, one through which reality occasionally glitches through. And the reality of Kyo is not always in line with his self-confident, suave exterior. Things have happened to him... odd, alarming things. Things which have left their own mark even upon such an inhuman creature as him.
It's a glitch that is swiftly smoothed over. Kyo resumes his conversational, pleasant exterior with a smoothness that borders on eerie. Like a news broadcast interrupted only briefly by some unforeseen error, Kyo gets straight back to the fake friendliness. He even, in the interest of keeping that gun pointed at the floor, lets her smirk at his expense go by.
You'd be surprised what I would believe, she goes on to say. "Huh," he answers. "Well then, go ask Miwa Saitou about it sometime, she knows all about trying to spell people. You won't be so surprised about me thinking it's plausible."
He does listen, however, as she explains about the book. "Well, of course you'd say all this even if you were intentionally targeting me," Kyo muses. He seems to have gotten rid of all self-consciousness about how this sounds. People think worse things of him than that he's a paranoid conspiracy theorist; and frankly, in a city like Sumaru, paranoid conspiracy theorists are more often right than wrong. "Still, if you're being honest, that's interesting."
But then Eien pauses. In a tone that obviously questions his mental stability, she asks: why would she come after him? At that, Kyo's brows lift. "Why not?" he answers bluntly, and his voice is bitter. "Most people around here would call it a public service if you'd try to get rid of me, irrespective of whether you know me or not."
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
Both of Eien's brows wing upward at Miwa's name, their slim raven contours expressing genuine surprise. "You know Saitou? I guess it's a small world." Her look melts toward one of faint amusement, softening the contours of her face. "She and I specialize in different types of magic. The kinds of celestial things she likes best seem pretty providential, so I don't know if I'd mind Miwa casting spells on me, if I were you. I hadn't pegged her for the sort to hex anyone." With fluid malleability, her expression changes again; this time, it's a sharp fishhook curl in the corner of her mouth that transforms her, a fountainhead of wickedness that is at all odds with the doe-eyed lack of guile that makes up her default look. "That's really more my area of expertise. Blood rituals and summoning circles and dancing naked in the snow with old, heathen gods -- not really Miwa's style, as far as I know."
As with all of the others, that expression wanes; it's like the banking of fire, most of her emphasis bleeding out of her in favor of matter-of-fact neutrality, set off with the slight, arch loft of one brow. "But you've got it all wrong, if you think I had anything to do with any funny business -- I bought that book under a few strange conditions, but I've had it for months, and nobody's complained about anything strange. Until now." In the bald glare that comes from the room's exposed bulb, she visibly debates with herself about the safety of doing what it is that she does, and then resolves herself to it: she shrugs out of her vest, leaving it to rumple on the floor at her feet, and goes back to what she'd been doing when he knocked on the door: bending like a reed, she retrieves a webbing of straps from the chest and, straightening, begins to untangle it. The holster clipped to one of the sides implies its use; moments later, she's threading her arms through it, pulling the banner of her hair out of the way as buckles jangle beside her ribs.
"I don't like what you do," she says after a moment, with a slant of her eyes his way, "But I'm not your judge and jury. That's for other people to worry about. The book, though..."
Her cheek hollows as she bites at the inside of it. If something is wrong with the book, it /is/ her responsibility to sort it out. Agreeing to that, though? Suggesting it? With someone like Kyo? Is that an honor-debt she wants to take up?
Faintly, she hears the baying of hounds, and a thread of breath leaves her nose in a reedy, resigned exhale.
/Fine,/ she thinks at the hag that lives in her breast. /But don't blame me when this all goes wrong./
She tucks the pistol into the holster, and binds it with a snap. "...I can look at it, if you want. But I didn't sense anything strange about it the whole time that I had it, so I don't know how much use that'll be."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
Kyo laughs, outright laughs, when Eien asks if he knows Saitou. The expression of amusement doesn't reach his eyes at all, which sharpen with anger and hatred at the very name. "I know her," he says, with a very questionable emphasis on the word 'know,' "very well. The spells she wanted to put on me were love spells. I suppose you can decide for yourself if those are things you mind people trying to cast on you, regardless of whether they work or not."
His eyes narrow, just a little, as Eien goes on to suggest /she's/ the type to go dancing around naked flinging hexes. A similar smirk flickers around his mouth. "Really? I'll have to follow you more often."
The sentence is simply left there, for Eien to take as she will.
He moves on readily enough. As Eien moves away, finally comfortable enough to resume what she was doing, Kyo seems to relax in kind, and when she looks at him again it'd be to find him having genially invited himself onto her feetless couch. The holster doesn't seem to concern him-- not outwardly-- and in turn he seems perfectly at ease and not inclined to attack her. Not now, anyway. His smile widens when she effectively states that he's Not Her Problem, and he folds his hands docilely in his lap like Eien's particularly obnoxious New Best Friend.
The book, however... ah, the book. Kyo looks at her mildly as she agrees to 'look at it.' "Well, let's throw aside skepticism for a minute. It rarely does any good to maintain skepticism in a place like Sumaru. That gone, let's look exactly at what happened. You buy a book that is old and creepy, at an /estate sale/, on an explicit condition to separate the stories and distribute them, and the minute you do just that all the lights go out and I get weird visions in my head." He shrugs. "You can disbelieve the last part, but the first couple points anyone with eyes can see."
He leans forward. "I wouldn't put any stock into it if not for two things: old and creepy tends to take on a life of its own in Sumaru; weird shit has happened to me before because of that."
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
"Only if you /really/ like demons," Eien murmurs, to his threat about following her into the woods.
She does not sound or look as though she's joking.
It's a grace note in the broader conversation. She thins her lips a little when he moves, but when he chooses to seat himself like a civilized human being, even that fades into the background. Her resonance still hums like a wine glass with a finger drawn around the rim -- she is always aware of him, particularly when he's at her back, like a furnace she can feel at a distance -- but for as long as he appears ready to behave himself, she seems willing to carry on with the reason she came here, which is 'getting ready for work.'
The SIG P230 isn't the only weapon she carries. An athame, blade stained green, and a bullwhip both find their way onto the floor, followed momentarily by something that looks a bit like a plastic half-circle, designed to be worn around the throat. A bit scuffed, now, and worn: D4 doesn't have an immense budget, but what psychic amplifiers it has access to, she takes advantage of.
This readying makes up her every-day, so half-kneeling, she goes through the motions and is otherwise preoccupied with listening to the case that he sets forth, every now and then ticking her verdant gaze over in his direction.
"Less skepticism than...taking into account the possibility of less fantastic explanations than magic, Enda-san. I'm usually pretty sensitive to that kind of thing. I was touching that book for weeks, handling it directly, and I didn't get a /single/ hint that something was off...just a little bit about the mailman who delivered it. Psychically, it was just...a dud. It's a little hard to imagine it as being nefarious, in light of that. But...okay. Let's say that something strange is going on," she allows, pivoting slightly where she's crouched, and using the slender fingertips of one hand to brace herself, and meet his gaze.
"Maybe it's not the book, maybe it's...something about supernatural people interacting with the stories. Like...kotodama. Maybe it's /you/."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
Only if you really like demons, Eien counterthreatens. Kyo sniffs. "Oh, you're one of those." He does, however, fail to push the point further.
Instead, Kyo watches with faint interest as she unpacks all her equipment. Each piece gets a studying, thoughtful gaze. It's hard to say what he thinks of her little arsenal, and even that will have to be left forever to conjecture when Eien gets a little too comfortable with him.
Maybe it's you, she says. There is a very long silence after her words, and in that silence Kyo steadily meets her gaze. The amusement, the playfulness, the flippancy... all have drained out of his expression. What's left to stare at Eien is no more than a beautiful mask thinly covering a machine.
The machine is offended, and oddly enough the mention of kotodama just seems to sting him more.
"Maybe," he says, as he stands up. The movement is slow, like the unfolding of a serpent to strike. "Or maybe whatever it is is beyond YOUR abilities to detect."
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
"Maybe," Eien allows, with a nod that fails to rise to his ire, which she neither understands nor feels equipped to contemplate save in the sense that it poses a more direct threat to her own safety. She lifts her hand and sets it on the butt of the gun beside her bicep, and rises.
Her tone is steady, quiet -- like that of a hostage negotiator, dealing with an unstable suspect.
"The world has more mysteries in it than you or I can guess. But if that's true -- if it's beyond my ability to sense -- then I don't know what more I can do, unless you learn something more. You're the only one to come to me about it, and you haven't been very specific. All I can do is ...guess. Make conjectures. So."
Silence, for two heavy beats.
"If you do decide you want or need my help with something specific, you can ask. Otherwise, if you're going to decide to threaten me every time I give you a suggestion you don't like, maybe you're better off asking someone else."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
Kyo seems nonplussed when Eien just allows his objection-- and proceeds to meet his hostility with an even tone. He's used to Miwa's cringing, to Yisa's explosive temper. Simple equilibium from a woman brings him to blink. He could use force, could hurt her, but if he turns out to need her for whatever reason...
Eventually, he seems to decide what to do. And that thing is to laugh, apparently genuinely amused at her shown teeth. "The girl has some claws. All right. I'll play nice. Today, anyway.
"But all I'm saying," he continues, a little oddly childish considering what she knows he's capable of, "is if you want to blame anyone, you might as well blame yourself for not seeing it, as me for triggering it."
Eien then goes on to patiently opine that if it's beyond her abilities to sense, then there's not much she can do about it. Kyo folds his arms and frowns. "It was better to have conjectures than nothing," he says, and this time he sounds a little plaintive. "I get some pages that cause some very strange things to happen. Is it so strange I'd suspect whoever gave them to me? That I'd try to make them own up if they did something?"
One look at his face would make pretty plain that in Kyo's worldview, 'randomly disseminating things to cause harm to other people' is fairly normal behavior and to be fully suspected at every turn. Not surprising, considering Kyo's own tendency to view people around him as toys.
"But let's say you didn't." He shrugs. "There's still something going on, whether it's just me or not, and if it gets worse..." Well, he's going to be darkening her doorstep again, whether it's her fault or not, if only to complain. Or maybe do worse than that.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
If Eien were further along in her self-confidence than she is, or more prideful, she might find Kyo's laughter, and his observation about her 'claws,' somewhat flattering; as things stand, she just lets her frown touch the skin between her brows, as unconvinced about that as she is about almost everything he's said or done. Skepticism is a strange status quo for a girl who has a poster in her room that says I WANT TO BELIEVE...but without it, flights of fancy would be considerably less special.
She has the advantage over Miwa of not ever having experienced the worst that Kyo has to offer, to bolster her courage...and a vastly larger storehouse of patience than Yisa, though she's certainly more prone to experiencing fear...or maybe it's just a different set of fears. Regardless, she attends to his dizzying shift in moods with the watchfulness of someone dealing with a volatile, little-understood cocktail, a living, mutable puzzle.
"Enda-san, believe me when I say that if I'd had any inkling the book was unusual, I'd have kept it for myself. The whole thing, not just a few pages. I'm charitable, but I'm not /that/ charitable." She tucks her lower lip between her teeth -- not a coy expression; she worries it hard, brows tilted together, until it gleams white and bloodless from the abuse, and flushes as she frowns afterward.
But Kyo isn't a complete mystery, is he?
No. She knows a few things. For whatever meager worth they might have...if they have any, at all. His resonance is wholly different from the last time she saw him, and she has no idea what that might signify.
"You may have been intending to do this already, but I might suggest tracking down the others and trying to compare experiences with them. Maybe there's a consensus that would help me understand what you're dealing with. Maybe...you'll learn something I couldn't."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
Kyo's own brows lift a little when he compliments Eien on her spine, and she just expresses the same skepticism she has at everything else. "So much skepticism in a witch," he remarks. "That's a little odd. Though I suppose even witches have use for it. All those demons must talk pretty sweetly. Can't be too careful..."
He's smiling, as if at some private joke. The joke is, of course, how often he himself has been compared to a demon over the course of his life.
He seems to accept her insistence that she wouldn't have disseminated the pages if she knew they would cause trouble, at the least. His irritation calms, and for the moment it seems any danger has passed. She suggests tracking down the others and talking to them, demurring that he may have thought of that already--
Kyo looks blank. "No, I didn't," he says. "There's a pretty simple reason why. I'd have to figure out which of them, if any, don't want to kill me on sight." He muses a moment on this with perfect seriousness, before he finishes with a resigned sigh, "Hn. Very well."
And with that, he simply turns to walk blithely out again, as quickly and randomly as he arrived. He pauses on the threshold though, long enough to admonish, "And if you're going to stay here at any point, get a better lock, this one's awful."
Well, leave it to Kyo to know about the quality of locks.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
Which of them, if any, don't want to--
Oh.
Eien flushes a little over that -- the obviousness of it, but by the time she opens her mouth to suggest that she could put him in touch with them herself, he's turning smoothly around to walk out the door, and leaves her with her mouth hanging open.
That is precisely the expression he'll see when he pauses and looks back to deliver a remark about her locks, which causes her brows to dip down into something vaguely like irritation, and her mouth finally closes.
And so does her door.
She stares at it for a long moment, and then sags back against the wall, looking down at the pile of things at her feet. Not even on the clock yet, and already exhausted from trying to keep up with the strange emotional weather of Kyo Enda. The sigh that fills the room borders upon the theatrical, and the words she mutters as she kneels down to go back to rooting through her trunk just do not bear repeating in polite company.
