Closed Do you swim or fly? (Cambare)

[Felicity]

9th of Summer, 515 AV
Location: Beach near East Street

There was a tingle along Felicity's skin as the salty air licked at her bare legs, a reminder that despite the change in season the chills of winter passed would not be so easily forgotten when the suns warmth faded over the horizon. The winking light reflected off of the waves just a little distance from where she walked, her hands splayed against a bare chest that was darkened by days in the sun and knotted with muscles born from a lifetime of working a sails rigging. Her eyes danced over his body, looking at him as he greedily pawed at her own, working his fingers beneath the color of her shirt to play with what he found there. She smiled up at him, as he was nearly a head taller than she was, and leaned in closer to trail a few soft kisses up and over his collar bone, hooking one hand under his elbow to work his hand from its position in her shirt so that she could re-position it at her waist.

He said something to her just before she felt the tickle of his beard on her neck, but her mind was absently wandering back over the scenery and she missed the words entirely. Instead of answering she hooked a hand behind his neck and puled him closer, trailing teeth over the skin of his nape, rewarded by a shortened breath and a laugh which seemed to say he liked her reply. Felicity had already forgotten his name. They had met at the bar, but even when they first met she could smell the alcohol on his breath and the intent in his pants at a glance.

"What did you say?" Felicity asked, nuzzling his neck and wrapping her arms around his body, nails digging into his back releasing a satisfying grunt from her partner.

"Lets go back to my place." He breathed, one hand pulling her back so that he could press a sloppy kiss on her lips that tasted like he smelt. he deepened this action, one hand hooking on her neck and pulling her hard against him so that it became less a kiss and more of a face press.

Freeing her lips from his she laughed and smiled a coy smile, "But I like it here. Its a nice setting don't you think?"

"Someone might see us." He whispered, diving in once more for another kiss but Felicity tilted her head, both arms now rapping around his neck as she trailed her tongue over his cheek right to his earlobe. His shiver made her smile broader.

"I know. Thats what I like." Her voice was deeper, a rasp of desire and pent up sexuality that begged to be satisfied not later, but now. Upon her neck the Mark of Ionu felt warm as she drew upon its power to add the feelings of passion to her voice she did not actually possess.

His voice caught for a tick before he growled deep in his throat, a primal thing that made Felicity shiver for the first time during their entire encounter, "Alright. Right here it is."

Pulling hard on her hold around his neck again Felicity threw her legs around his waist, letting him support her weight fully as he cupped her thighs with greedy wandering fingers, finding their ways to the restraints of the feeble clothing that separated flesh from flesh. She felt the sand burning her naked skin, passion burning through her punctuated by animalistic sounds of desire and lust as sweat, both hers and the mans, mingled as the two became as close as any two people could. He raged around her, inside her, enthralled by the act as she tilted her hips to match his and gasped and made little sounds when she was supposed to. She felt him fulfill himself completely, shuddering full body as the burning of his soul was flared and then quenched. All the while Felicity waited... waited for something more than the weak throb in her chest which was her final reward when the end finally came.

*****

He left not long afterward as the sun dipped finally behind the rolling waves, stumbling in a drunken stupor of contentment having satisfied the desires of the flesh fully this night. Felicity, however, lay there for a chime, eyes closed as she felt the warmth of the sand slowly begin to seep away with they dying light. Her body felt heavy, wet and sticky as she slowly sat up and ran fingers through her hair. Glancing to the side she saw her clothes thrown half hazzardly aside, unwanted until that time as they were merely an obstacle for him. Now Felicty stood and eyed them dispassionately, her gaze shifting away as she made her way toward the lapping waves of the sea, to wash off the grime and sand of the evenings activities.

[Cambare]

"Love, lust, lackluster, lonely." A soft, deep whisper licked the waters around him as sombre eyes drank in the scene before him. He floated in the waters, his head just barely breaking the bay's surface, the cold wrapping around him like some distant blanket, its details obscured by the object of his focus. "Craving, cringing, clawing, cold." Every word seemed to pull the corners of his mouth ever closer to the distant earth that lay hidden beneath the gentle lap of the waves. "She searches while he craves..." His tail moved with languid motions, keeping him afloat and little else more, though the very tips of his fins did flick ever so slightly faster as the scene continued to unfold before him.

"'My love is not yours to take, but mine to give.
Should you receive; it is nothing but a farce.
I search for something more, a meaning to live...
I find only emptiness, a world made sparse.'"

They fell, writing in the sand. He noted the manner in which their bodies moved, they way their voices broke and rippled. Each tick, he watched and remembered. It was not death. It was not dying. Still, there was something about it, something taken and something lost, yet nothing ever found that called to him with a peculiar allure. There was no blatancy in the feeling, rather it was one that was like a tickle of the spine or a shiver of one's flesh; and had he not been put off by the effort needed to procure himself his evening meal, Cambare would have passed it by. Yet, he lingered. His gaze never left the two, the bodies separate, joined as one, only to fall apart and drift away like the broken body of a rotting plank. There was no joy, no wonder... only emptiness; a hollow exchange.

It was interesting.

When the woman rose, so too did he. His head fully surfaced, shoulders meeting the dying breath of the sun's last kiss, the chill of air and water negligible as most things were to him and his people. Instead, his eyes followed the woman's. The man's departure was not of his concern. He had been filled with lust, with craving, from which he had emerged sated. There was nothing of interest there, nothing to extrapolate, investigate, ruminate over. They both paused, gazes affixed to the discarded scraps of clothing. They were lifeless, a state of neither life nor death, existence without purpose beyond that which was given to them. She denied them whatever purpose it was the legged had thought to contrive for them, casting them into nothingness once more as she stepped into the lapping waves of his briny cradle.

He drifted closer, his wings folded against him while his arms trailed to either side of him, his tail shifting beneath him to move him in a steady glide so that he could better observe her. Never had the thought occurred to him that might conceal himself. There had been no ill intent, no desire for secrecy. He had simply remained hidden for no other reason that to reveal himself would break the illusion, disrupt the scene, blot the image. As he moved, he felt questions rise up within him, and he remained a brooding, contemplative man indeed as the gathering darkness shifted, some light revealing him quite plain to any who would look for him. "The night spreads with the withering of the day, a shadow wherein dreams take root where thoughts once grew. What does this woman dream of? Or have thoughts not yet been laid to rest?" His voice was deep, probing, hardly introspective as it traveled over the waves, his curiosity quite evident.

Pausing a distance from the smooth, pale skin of the woman who stood unabashed before him, he found her odd for those of two legs and no wings. Those of the land wore clothing to hide their flesh from the eyes of others. They carried themselves with something that Cambare had known only words to, though to connect "pride" with what it referred to was not a difficult feat to accomplish. The woman had pride, certainly, but there was something else. There was something more or less or somewhere in between in a realm of greys that Cambare couldn't navigate, couldn't grasp. "Darkness, dreams, desire..." He rose further out of the water, the waves licking his slight frame just above where flesh faded to fur. "Disease?" He couldn't decide if sadness or loneliness were sicknesses, ailments that could be both cured or a path towards one's own destruction. Could one die from loneliness? From sorrow? Perhaps the woman would know, or perhaps not. He had questions a plenty, but the answers, he doubted, were quite so easily gained as their partners were created.

[Felicity]

A breath escaped Felicity's lips as the water rose to past her calves, lapping at the upper edges of her knees as she continued forward, trailing fingers in the rising tide as she went to draw circles in the sea foam there. The waters were warm and licked at her sweat stained skin to was away the much and sand of the night, and just as the waters were reaching her waist she would crouch to let the waves lick at her shoulders and brush her hair aside like gentle fingers, soothing as a mothers touch. Her hands slowly washed away the reminders of her earlier acts of fleshly desire, sand and sweat and other being pulled from her skin as a slight sting of the salt reminded her that she was still alive.

She had not expected anyone else to be out here at this time, though even if she had known she would have done nothing different. If someone wished to see her body the woman held no shame in showing it to them, fully and without cover, but even so there was a sense of surprise that fluttered briefly within her breast as the voice came from the direction of the deeper waters. Blinking Felicity looked out in the direction it had come, seeing a head and shoulders there of a man she had not noticed earlier. How odd... had he always been there.

A small smile came on her lips as she ducked her head beneath the waves, rising and tossing the now wet hair over her shoulder while her hands ran thin fingers through the tangles, rubbing her scalp to relieve it of the sands of the beach, "Hello my stalker. You're words are beautiful, but I do not think I understand what they mean."

Standing fully once more she shook her head, sending a spray of droplets cascading back to their home before pushing the locks of light blond hair back behind her ears so that she could see him fully once more. One hand was still playing with her hair, while the other rested gently on her waist, making no move to hide herself partially or otherwise as she closed her eyes and tilted her head back, "I hope you enjoyed yourself. If you wanted you could have come closer. I would not have mind and I doubt he would have noticed."

The dark and the way the waves moved hid the true nature of the man before her from Felicity's sight, or rather she was not looking for anything different about him. She offered him only a glance before she was once more turning away, pushing out the water from her hair and running hands over herself, testing and seeing where else the sand had crept for her to try and wash away before she returned to shore. Little mind was paid to her watcher, though she was enjoying the sudden and unexpected attention.

[Cambare]

It was a shame the woman seemed incapable of comprehending what it was he said, just as much as he found it so difficult to place what it was about her that drew him. With a slight rise and fall in a shimmer of starlit skin, Cambare replied, his tone as gentle as the sea and doleful as the moonless sky. "Beauty carries no burden of meaning, nor meaning a mask of beauty. They are like stars, glittering with luminescence individual, becoming as one when night falls as the sky scintillates in all its myriad glory." He rose a hand upwards, no higher than his own eyes as they lifted towards those of which he spoke. A slightly more breathy tone followed as his eyes remained fixed on the little pinpricks of light had had begun to emerge from their hiding with the loss of the sun's light. "Until they too fall into the endless sleep."

With a shake of the head, he let his hand drop. The slight splash seemed oddly quiet, as if both bone and skin were less than they seemed. He had gained no answers where questions had been presented, but that did not mean that all was for naught. She was not of the kind to follow his speech, his grand elocution that had filled him like both drug and poison to the point where anything else was too meager, too lackluster to express. He shook his head at the woman's next words, again unsure of her motives but subjectively clear in his own. "Pleasure of passion... Certainly a laudable endeavor to capture-" His head tilted some, tone rising slightly in question. "Peace? Sanctuary? Cosmic latitude?" It seemed he did not expect an answer as again he shook his head, the dark wave of his hair gleaming in the half-light of the night. "These things are carnal, corporeal. They lack the gossamer touch of necrosis, the gentle drift into worlds unknown. No... This one beholds as a witness, one who dances with distance as easily as this woman might coalesce flesh both native and foreign."

His eyes glided over her figure, appraising though perhaps not quite so in the manner one might expect from a young man in a star filled bay at the cusp of spring. She was beautiful, certainly, filled in the proper places, gentle curves giving way to generous rises then falling once more into careful valleys. These things were registered, understood, but not taken into account. He searched for something more, for the something that had drawn him. There was no rot, no frailty, no sickness, no pain, no strife... There was nothing.

He drifted after her, stopping when the bottom of his tail brushed against the uncertain earth of the world below him. Their distance had been closed to the point where should he have whispered, it would have taken only a slight strain to perceive both word and meaning, should each be of a clear locution. Cambare continued to watch her clean herself, the water drawn up only to return to where it had been taken, a poetic reflection of life in all its futility, ever moving forward only to be reset with each crying babe. And the nothing. It was still there, in all of her movements, an absence that was not entirely imagined, yet certainly lacking a physicality. "Where does it begin and where does it end?' The words were quiet, a verbal acknowledgement of his own thoughts.

With a gentle hand, he pressed his palm against her back, the warmth of her skin rising to meet him, the beat of her heart sound and steady. There was death there, in the life that sang beneath his touch, only there was something more, something else. As sudden the desire to feel, it drifted away, his hand once more resting within the shallows of the water around him. "Were this woman to waste away into ivory pillars, a rich velvet of crimson marking her passing, would release even be realized?" He stared at the back of her head, the golden hue all the more honeyed from the water's caress. "Or has ruin found a place in one who's temple is yet to falter? What might this woman call it? Life? Death? ...Athanasia, perhaps? Only... It is a reversal of inevitabilities, not a denial of the oblivion to come. How strange." He paused, finding words that she might follow.

"This woman before me, who shares both sea and sky with he who would be Cambare, what calls she her name?"

[Felicity]

Felicity looked over her shoulder at the man who spoke words as beautiful as they were confusing. Hands moved to scrub away the grains of sand, a sting of salt upon her skin as her eyes thoughtfully shifted upwards and then back toward the shore. She was a native of East Street, and while perhaps there she was not under educated she had never had the chance to gain anything more than the basic understandings of literature and poetry. Having never cared for reading herself, Felicity had not sought out any further education from books or the University. What was the use of books and pretty words, anyway, in a world like this one. A world that was dirty and smelled, where the body sold better than the pen. She never could understand why others around her sought desperately to scrape together the funds to attend the University. It was not like the courses would fill their bellies, and the act of study was tedious and boring to say the least.

To all the poetic words and phrasings Felicity could find no response, or rather nothing she thought to say seemed to match or mingle well with the rhetoric spoken, and so she remained silent. At his touch she did pause, but neither did she flinch or pull away but instead turn ever so slightly to look back at this person, one eyebrow raising as if to question the motives of the contact but where she expected lust she found only mild interest. Like an art enthusiast would touch the bare skin of a newly created masterpiece carved from stone. Pleasing to the eye and perhaps to the touch in its shapely state, but with no more expectation of it than that. Is that what he thought of her? Felicity wondered if she was, for him, only a marble statue.

Just as quickly as the touch came it was gone and Felicity looked away once more. Now both of her hands ran fingers through the dripping locks, a strange curiosity beginning to hum beneath the perpetual grey of her worldly view. While she could not be sure, his words still baffled her mind and forced her to examine their meaning for several ticks before understanding came to her, she thought he was asking her name. Was that so? That then, of course, lead to another question in her heart that would require as much attention to answer as any might pose. Who, in fact, was she tonight?

Pulling at her hair ever so slightly Felicity sighed and shrugged her shoulders, "I am a simple girl stalker. I am afraid I do not understand most of what you are saying. Your words are too big, too complicated..."

With her hands still tangled in her hair she slowly turned to stand sideways, the curves of her chest now visible from one side as she tilted her head toward him. Where once there were eyes the color of a fresh morning sky they were now a deep, emerald green. Upon her neck her fingers nimbly trailed, brushing the inverted triangle there before both hands drop to her sides and the woman smiled, "If you are asking for my name, it is Marisa Kay."

It was then that she finally saw, something that should have been obvious from the start. There, upon his back, were wings that seemed to be made of moonlight, tendrils of dark arched through their translucent depths like ink spilled upon a blank canvas. So unlike anything she had ever seen, neither bird nor bat like, but like... a butterfly, if a butterfly's wings could be so darkly beautiful. He himself was as complicated to look at as he was to listen to. Dark brooding eyes and a slim figure that may have made Felicity herself jealous, if she thought of such things. Perhaps more odd though was that, beyond the depths of the water she could not see his legs or feet but that was not quite so curious as the wings. Oh the wings, they were beautiful and made a throb in her chest that set her fingers to curl over that spot, clasping at her breast as if she were afraid that the organ might beat out of her chest. It was something new, and unexpected. Did she like that?

Eyes softening the more she looked at the wings, after a tick Felicity looked back to the man's eyes, biting her lip and sinking down so that her shoulders were once more below the waters as she whispered softly, "What are you?"

[Cambare]

He raised a brow at the woman's words, the dark charcoal black arcing into the appearance of a skeptic. "This woman would have this one believe her a girl?" Cambare's lips curled ever so slightly, a dash of amusement sparkling in the depths of his otherwise monochrome gaze. "It would seem neither the girl who is not a girl nor the stalker who is not quite might know the cerebrations of the other. This woman - girl - speaks plainly without embellishment, but her locution is as tangled as the webs woven by the quiet creatures of the shadows nights. Perhaps this one may perplex this girl, but know she that this one is know omniscient. A thought is a thought is a thought. Listen with ears tuned not for words but for the essence that lurks within and about them." He shook his head, hair only damp enough to remain inert in the face of his motion. "Though this one is loathe to confess it has proven a difficult tactic to employ as it stands under the darkened sky's endless arc."

There was a complexity to simplicity. Where grandeur could certainly be used to mislead, it required one to do so quite intentionally. Those of the more reserved tongue had fewer words in which to communicate, whether by choice or necessity, which made their meanings far more myriad in possibility. He found the woman who gave her name as Marisa Kay, to be odd indeed. She spoke words, but the words themselves did not speak - and there were her eyes. They were changed, different than before but to a degree that he could not quite discern what they had been before or what they had become. He couldn't place it, but the nothing he had felt before from her was quite certainly there without being there, for how could nothing truly be unless it wasn't. "A woman gives a name, but the name rings... Hollow." Still he gave her a polite nod, repeating the name in his own rich timbre. "Marisa Kay."

She continued to move, to groom and clean, and the motions were very much alive, very much healthy and strong. There was seduction, certainly, but it fell flat against him. His interests were not piqued by supple flesh and batting eyes. There was no rot, no strife, no loss of life to entice him, to light the flare of passion within his chest and bring this thoughts to a halt. She was curious still, however, and his eyes remained upon her as her own began to fill with something he knew quite well: surprise.

His wings fluttered on his back, a reflexive motion that would have otherwise been noticed only by the woman before him, only his attention was drawn to it as she stared, hand drawn over chest not in fear or revulsion, but something else he couldn't place. Another question, only this one a clear request for something he had an answer for that even a child might understand. "This one is a child of sea and sky. The Akvatari, godless and forlorn, yet still we thrive - or perhaps simply survive. They are people from across this cerulean expanse, artisans all, though some would think otherwise." He paused, tilting his head as his wings expanded, stretching to their full width in the pale light of the rising moon. They fluttered for a moment, pulling him slightly higher out of the water's embrace to reveal the thick, dark fur that started from a trail about his navel into the beginnings of his tail. "This girl, this Marisa Kay, is she not of the mortal race who would name itself human?"

He settled back into the water, causing barely a ripple as his thin frame once more appeared as human as it might with wings shivering behind it. "Abura is a child short, for this one seeks this girl's kind. Their existences of pain and pleasure, their sicknesses and frailty... He seeks them for their vulnerability and foolishness. For their variability. What does this girl seek?"

[Felicity]

"Akavatari..." Felicity whispered, her eyes raising to the fluttering wings once more after she had taken the time to notice that, in fact, this man had no legs at all but a tail. It spit her face wide in a grin, childish in nature as she laughed and pressed two fingers to her lips as she examined him further. Without warning, or asking, she would lean forward, ignoring any semblance of personal space to try and touch one of the wings with searching fingers, falling back to the water once more if she was given even the slightest touch and if he pulled away.

Her smile never faded as she laughed again and sunk in the water until on her nose and eyes peaked over the water, in thought it seemed though in her mind nothing coherent formed. She just enjoyed it, this moment now when she felt a tingle in the back of her mind. This before her was something new, and exciting that she had never experienced before. What did it want? Was it an animal? A monster? Would it kill her and eat her when it had grown bored with her? Was she about to die? The thought of it all made her toes curl and fingers twitch in realized excitement.

It took her a while to realize the words that had flowed from his lips were further questions and statements, ones that again traveled over her head to settle somewhere around her stomach. It reminded her that she still had not eaten today. Had he? Or was he now about to eat?

"Why do you talk like that? Do all Akavatari talk like you do?" She said as she stood, apparently having completely missed what he had said before to her about his speak. Then again those words, too, had fallen on deaf ears as more and more she was beginning to tune out what the man said. It was far easier than simply trying to understand his long explanations with big complicated words she didn't know.

Ringing her hair out once more Felicity looked down at Cambare and shrugged to his question, the one she actually understood, "Human... Is that what you want me to be?" With fingers now running through her damp hair, prying at loose tangles the woman began to look toward the shore, pausing to turn back and ask absently, "I don't really understand what you are asking me, or why you are here at all Akavatari," She substituted his race name for 'stalker', still unaware that he had given her a name at all, "I don't seek anything at all." The lie came quickly to her lips, and she did not even blink as she spoke it, "Are you going to eat me now? Is that what your kind does?"

[Cambare]

Her laughter sounded as healthy as the rest of her, as natural and alive as the rest of her. There was something about it though, an amusement that was almost unnerving, had Cambare a firm handle on the nature of the human condition. Instead, he simply stared back at her, his own face somewhere between a wisp of a grin and a twist of befuddlement. She found his race humorous, something that wasn't entirely unwarranted. The Akvatari were a godless race, forgotten by both mortals and their masters alike. They were, essentially, a cosmic joke, though that the woman, Marisa Kay, might pick up on that timeless jest so quickly seemed unlikely, unless it wasn't, which made her all the more interesting. In either case, his thoughts were wrapped around the larger, far more sombre, state of his people, something that he felt directly linked to, though the race as a whole was not quite his main concern, if at all. When she reached forward to brush her fingers against his wing, his attentions were brought back to the present, his brow arching in a sudden display of dubiety, her intentions too cloudy to determine whether he should stop her or not.

The moment of indecision stretched one too many ticks, and by the time her hand returned to drift on the gentle roll of the bay's surface, Cambare found that his deliberations were no longer so urgent that he need come to a decision right away. Instead, his lusterless stare found a small spark of curiosity as she sank beneath the murky blue, her eyes fixed on his with an amusement that, in all seeming, seemed entirely for the nature of the emotion itself, rather than some deep seated understanding of some universal witticism. It was strange, more than enough of an oddity to hold both his attention and tongue as he waited for her next move, her next step in the performance that he couldn't quite determine was one of candor or something more steeped in the complexities of secrets and shadows.

Shaking his head at her question, not without his fair share of disappointment hanging in both posture and tone, Cambare replied, his words ever carefully pronounced and rhythm a metered canter. "The Akvatari are unified only in their deep seated desire to create and express. A path is not paved for those of the sea and sky, only expanses of blue above and below dictate where one might travel. This one finds a specious comfort in the poignancy of elegant articulation; however misleading, it is simply a prepossession, little else more. An assuetude, a habit, if this girl prefers, that this one has settled into so wholly, it makes shedding such a praxis an operose endeavor indeed." Of course, there were others in Abura who spoke in a similar fashion as he, but they were few and far between. The written word wasn't entirely the most common form of trade, and the spoken found even fewer supporters.

Her next question was certainly a far more worthy path of thought, and Cambare's lips turned in a pensive frown as he regarded the pale, elegant frame of the curiosity before him. He had no reply for her, at least not within the time before she spoke again. What he wanted did not involve her, not yet, anyway. She had life still ahead of her, though to see it snatched away would certainly be something worth his time should it occur. As far as he was concerned, the woman, Marisa Kay, was an anomaly in an endless monotony of the living. It was the dying he craved, the sickly he loved, the hopeless and fatalistic throes of death. Marisa Kay was none of these things, yet still, the hollowness, the emptiness, called to him in a gentle whisper. Imagined or not, it held him there under some silent vice, even as she turned to share, once more, that neither he nor she quite understood the other, the barrier between their respective modes of communication sizable enough to warrant notice beyond a passing mention.

The statement struck him far more important than the questions that followed, and Camabre only shook his head, amusement far from his gaze that had found a deeper shade of muted repudiation. "Perhaps there have been those before and after this one who have partaken of flesh beyond that which swims beneath the ocean's cerulean curtain, but this one finds no such craving." The answer given, he turned his attention to that which truly interested him, his voice carrying with an undercurrent of doubt as well as a fair amount of interest in the baritone lull that complimented the gentle lapping sound of the waves as he drifted nearer, pushing himself along with his tail as the water began to shallow with his approach towards the shore. "Even the most humble of creatures lives chained to the most base desires that bind those who would walk and breathe within the realm of those who have yet to find the embrace of the unending slumber. How can a girl, one who's season has yet to wither into the autumn time, not seek anything at all?"

He tilted his head, wings fluttering behind him, pulling him a small distance upwards as he continued. "Is there no guiding cogency with which this girl might claim compass? This one is... Skeptical of such a thought. A farce? A feint? A facade? What say this girl?" There was no accusation within his tone, though it was apparent that the young Akvatari had been thrown for a loop with the woman's near thoughtless fib, a whisper of agony in his own voice at the thought of something so entirely unknown.

[Felicity]

She could pick out a word or two here and there, a note of recognition in her mind when bits and pieces of a long finished half education surfaced. A bit more meaning was beginning to come from the gibberish and tongue wagging to the point that Felicity started to believe she knew what it was he was saying. A race of godless creatures, and this one who talked as he did out of habit. For what reason? To confuse people? That was why anyone here talked like he did. Using big words to twist and deceive those who were more simple than they were. trick them to take them for all they were worth. To Felicity it seemed that this was the most likely reason he was even talking to her, to create a mask that he could hide behind as he worked his ulterior motives. In the end, however, none of this mattered at all to the her. The newness was beginning to wear, and the happy buzz in her chest was starting to fade to leave the usual hollowness behind.

"So you are not going to eat me?" She asked, her lips tilting upwards even as she saw his tilted downward, "That is a shame. I have heard that I taste quite sweet."

She laughed again and looked back to the shore. Soft sand squished between her toes as she made her way back to the land, escaping the sea's tugging fingers of foam still clinging to her bare skin. The breeze that washed over set a rise in her skin as a shiver rocked her body for a tick before Felicity ran her hands over those spots to ease their agitation. Summer nights were usually perfect, but even so a chill sometimes was unavoidable and unexpected. Though to stand fully nude upon the beach at night perhaps one should expect a shiver or two.

Looking back she saw Cambare as he rose slightly from the water, equal parts amused and amazed that wings like his could lift him so bodily. If she were to have wings like that could she fly as well? She wondered, and as she did one hand drifted along her shoulder and neck before angling toward her back, contemplating what it must be like to have wings and what it was like to fly. Maybe one day she would fly too, or perhaps only fall. Either way it would be fun, if only for a moment.

"It's not polite to guess at a woman's age." a playful note in her voice as she wandered to where she had left her clothing, "Or to speculate to her reasons for what she does."

There was no answer anyway. Felicity did not seek anything at all, at least not anything that could be explained. Could you tell someone that there, in your heart, there was a void that begged to be filled but instead it devoured everything thrown in it, leaving nothing left at all? Surely not. No one could understand, and it had become boring to try to explain it again and again. Felicity did not seek anything... but what about Marisa Kay?

There was a slight pause as the woman crouched, one hand stopping just before picking up the clothing where it lay. Who was Marisa Kay? Did she have wants and desires? Did she seek something with a burning passion? He asked, after all, and would expect some reply. So... who was she tonight?

"What guides me..." Standing slowly Marisa edged her fingers along the plain cloth, green eyes looking down at it with a thoughtful expression. After a short time she began to pull the clothing over her head, the simple grey shirt now falling down past her knees as a dirty, unkempt dress. "I suppose I want what anyone wants."

Her left hand pressed over her right eye, massaging as from her mind she began to weave with the aid of the warming mark on her neck. An image was coming to her mind, of a life that wasn't her own, a story that she did not write. Turning slowly Marisa looked at Cambare, her face turning down in a sad expression, still biting her lip as a finger trailed along the underside of one blackened eye. Then she shrugged and looked away, "I've not thought about it really. Every day I just... I just want to live, and eat. I wish for a day I could stop selling my body to the disgusting men in this city. What I want..." She looked fully at Cambare, her brow coming together as she opened her mouth to speak, closed it once more and shook her head with closed eyes, "I want to go to the university, and escape my life here, but there is no point in wanting or seeking when it is completely impossible. Wrapping her arms around herself Marissa turned away, looking anywhere but at Cambare.

She may have overdone it. The eye might have been a touch too much, and the story of going to the university? As if anyone would believe that. Thankfully Felicity had decided not to try and cry. That skill was still far from her grasp as she could never quite get the face right. How do you cry convincingly? Even now she wasn't sure, and if she did not know herself how could she create an illusion of deep despair and tears? This then was the best she could do. Still though she wondered, what should she have for dinner tonight?