Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me (Sondra)

[Trista]

Late Autumn, 509 AV

It was midday, and Trista was curled up in a corner of Unity Circle. A sketchbook was in what passed for her lap, and a pencil was in her hand.

This was a place to which Trista had come often, both in her previous time in Mura, and now upon her return. It was a place where she could go, work on her art, and enjoy being in the company of others without having to actually interact with any of them. All of Konti had a sort of otherworldly peace about it, but that feeling was especially noticeable here. It was quiet, very quiet for a public space, but even more than that, it was serene.

Idly, without thinking very hard about it, she outlined the scene in front of her: a wall with a mural on it, and a few figures in front of it. This was a warm-up for Trista, and so she was more concerned with getting her wrists loose and her eye sharp than she was with the quality of the drawing that she was producing.

She added a few birds in the sky -- not because there were actually any to be seen, but simply for practice -- and then turned to the next sheet. Now, Trista became more focused. She tilted her head, looking to see what was present that might be interesting to make a drawing of -- an intriguing person, or a clever piece of architecture perhaps. Something to occupy her attention and allow her to practice her craft.

[Sondra]

"Can you tell us our fortune, Miss?"
A pretty human asked a Konti who was sitting on a ledge around fifteen strides from Trista.
The human girl squeezed her companion's hand and glanced up at him adoringly.
"Perhaps of our future together."

The Konti stopped drinking from the flask in her gloved hand. Her expression said the human couple must surely be joking.

The humans kept on looking at her expectantly, though, like she was going to suddenly pull spring daffodils and handfuls of pink sparkle from her ass. Some of the visitors from the festival had lingered too long for the Konti's liking. Then again she didn't care much for the island's regular inhabitants either.

Sondra sighed, "Kids, I know Mura's great and mystical and I'm sure every pale woman hear has been murmuring all kinds of pretty things, but I'm not that kind of Konti."

Taking affront the man retorted, "Then what kind of Konti are you?"
"The busy kind."
He looked around, seeing the empty circle then looked down at Sondra's seat, noting nothing there save a coin purse.
"Yeah, real fusting busy."

At this point, the young girl was pulling on her man's shoulder, encouraging them away.
"Let's go, Edric, she's not like the others."

No, she wasn't, and it made her suddenly sad. Instead of keeping her disappointment to herself, Sondra welled with the selfish urge to pass it on. She took off a glove and snatched the man's hand. Startled, he didn't react initially, but when he felt like his blood was being drained, he yanked his hand away.

Sondra grinned and leaned back.
"Oh he's a peach. Know any Vantha girls who work as scribes?" She asked the girl.
The woman opened her mouth, beginning an answer Sondra promptly ignored.
"If you do, keep Edi here away from them."
Sondra winked, "Married life can get dull, if you know what I mean."

His reaction wasn't unprecedented, but it did take Sondra by surprise. The man picked up her coin purse from the ledge and hurled it at her head with savage force. His lady didn't let him stay for the aftermath. They were running from sight while Sondra was blinking between a night sky and a sunny square.

Sondra snapped from her daze to see some of her mizas had scattered on the ground. She stared at them a while before picking them up, maybe contemplating the wisdom of her choices. A red splotch was forming between her eyebrow and hairline.

Sondra was glad for the relative emptiness of the circle. But there was an Akvatari who had witnessed the whole quick, sordid scene.

The Konti called to Trista with a wry look, "Get a sketch of that?"

[Trista]

As Trista glanced around the plaza, her eye settled on a Konti resting on a ledge nearby. She was trained well enough to be able to work without staring, and she quickly began blocking out the scene, sketching the angle of the wall, and then moving on to the basic outline of the figure.

She was in the middle of putting the initial folds of the woman's clothing on the paper when the pair of humans approached her subject. Trista didn't pay them much mind at first, simply taking the opportunity to view her subject's face from another angle. But her ears perked up at the woman's off-hand mention of the Konti being "not like the others." Trista was a stranger here herself, no matter how much time she had spent in Mura, and it intrigued her to hear a Konti characterized in a similar way.

At about this time, the Konti said something to the man that seemed to strike a nerve, and before Trista could react, the Konti was lying on the ground, and the pair of humans were beating a hasty retreat.

She was fluttering over to help the Konti retrieve her coins -- and check on her health -- when the woman spoke to her. The Akvatari returned the wry half-smile and shrugged.

"I'm a fast worker, but I'm not that fast, I'm afraid," she deadpanned.

Trista handed a few coins that she had picked up to the Konti. As she did, she looked a bit more closely at the woman's face; it was a nasty bruise, but no serious threat to her well-being.

"I'm Trista, by the way," she said, feeling like she ought to say something else. She knew that she ought to be polite, ask the other woman's name, make some kind of small talk, but she wasn't very good at that sort of thing, and there was something that was nagging at her.

"What...what did you do to that man?" The Konti had powers, strange and variable powers, but whatever this woman had was something that Trista hadn't seen before. The Konti, though she did not and could not really belong here, had been uniformly kind to Trista, but nonetheless, she was feeling a trifle cautious at this particular moment.

[Sondra]

"Did to him?"
Sondra shrugged, "Told him something he already knew but didn't want to hear." She veered sharply from honesty, "That he's a piece of Shyke. Used a few more choice terms for him and his lady friend."

The Konti stood with her coins and slipped the meager pouch into her trouser pocket, exchanging it for her glove and a leather cord. She held the glove between her teeth as she tried to tie her hair back with the cord. Messy strands still fell into her face, but at least it was off her flushed neck. A few scales showed at the base of her neck, a gray iridescent color, like mail.

As the glove was tugged on, Sondra tried to be polite.
"Thanks for the hand-" she glanced the Akvatari up and down, "-flipper, whichever, Trista."

The Konti stood in awkward silence for a beat. "Rusty" was a forgiving description of her people skills. She'd perfected the art of discouraging them, and forgotten how to be normal in the process.
"Sondra." The Konti cleared her throat, "I mean, my name's Sondra. K'Sondra actually, but I uh don't like that…" she was trailing off, her face coloring.

Alright, that was enough fumbling like a drooling dimwit. Me Sondra, you flippered.
Akvatari were boring anyway, she told herself, moody, moping things. And when they started reading poetry you wanted a fork in the eye.

"K'Sondra!"
The name rang across the circle. A large-eyed Konti with braided hair was gleefully heading towards them, waving her arm. Sondra muttered an epithet in Kontinese as she glanced over her shoulder.

"Right," Sondra said, "Bye then."

Sondra stepped into a full jog past Trista. The waving Konti's face flickered to disappointed puzzlement.

[Trista]

Sondra was lying to her, that was fairly obvious. The man's reaction was too visceral, and the woman's too fearful for that to be the case, at least the way Sondra was telling it. But Trista didn't feel like pressing the issue.

She half-smiled at the thought of lending someone a flipper, but was quickly interrupted. Sondra said something under her breath, and most visitors to Mura wouldn't have understood it -- but Trista wasn't most visitors. She was no idle tourist, come to gawk at the drowned architecture and pretty women. The Akvatari had spent over a year here, learning as much as she could about the place and the culture, and one byproduct of that was that she had the local language down cold.

"That's not very polite, Sondra." Her Kontinese was accented, her vowels not quite as round as a native speaker's, but it was perfectly intelligible. A sardonic grin flickered at the corners of her mouth before disappearing.

At any rate, it was clear that Sondra wasn't very interested in talking to the second Konti who had appeared. Trista glanced at her retreating figure, and then back to the newcomer, who seemed to be as perplexed as Trista. She wasn't sure whether to follow Sondra, talk to the other Konti, or simply fly away...and so, for a few moments at least, she did nothing except hover in place. She really didn't know what to make of the events of the last few minutes, and tried to process her thoughts as she continued to observe.

[Sondra]

The disappointed Konti rocked between her feet, deciding whether to give chase or gather information. The latter was chosen and her step lost its anticipatory spring.

"Hello, there!" she smiled prettily at Trista, emanating waves of goodwill.
"Sorry about that," she remarked peering towards where Sondra vanished, as if she was somehow responsible for the woman's behavior.
"And anything else K'Sondra might have done. She's a bit..." the girl considered the most forgiving term, "...troubled."

Another smile appeared to assuage any impression of ill-will.
"I've been after her for a while, trying to persuade her home." She tried humor to make her point, "It's like following a child, save it doesn't have to listen to you."
The Konti's eyes flicked to Trista's wings.

"I know you have no stake in this..." Her expression added the "but" before she spoke it, "...But I could use another pair of eyes. K'Sondra's family will be grateful."
She twisted the end of her hair while waiting for a reply. These Konti certainly did vary in their style of conversation.

[Trista]

"Don't worry about it," Trista said, although she wasn't sure exactly why the other Konti was apologizing. She turned reflexively in the direction that Sondra had fled, though there was of course nothing to see.

And then the question. It seemed to Trista that a lot of people had been asking her to help with things in which she had no stake of late. The charm that rested against her neck was proof of that -- and proof that she hadn't been unwilling to give aid. Trista sighed, a sound not directed at anyone or anything in particular, and then faced the Konti.

"I don't know how much use I'd actually be, but I can try," she said. "But I need to know some more things. Who are you, and who is Sondra? And why, or from whom, or from what, is she running away? And, if she's troubled, what troubles her?"

That seemed to cover the basics, at least for the moment. Trista pushed her red hair back off one ear and hovered in place, waiting for an answer, or answers, or anything at all that would make her feel less like she'd been dropped into the middle of a melodrama after missing the entire first act.

[Sondra]

The Konti shrugged genially.
"Fair enough questions." A quick smile hemmed her sentence.
"I'm Veya, K'Sondra is friends with my sister Vena. They lived in Avanthal together. But I know K'Sondra more through her Grandmother."
Veya's face warmed with admiration for the matriarch, "K'Sondra's Grandmother is a very gifted Konti. She's taken me under her wing."
This was obviously some sort of especial privilege, a fluffier, lavender brand of squire.

"While K'Sondra's been visiting, she's asked me to keep an eye on her. You see..."
The Konti bit her lip, as if sharing the affairs of others made her uncomfortable. Her voice lowered to avoid notice, though no one was within earshot.
"She and her Grandmother fight over some of her habits, so K'Sondra doesn't want to be around her. But Grandmother really just wants to see her happy."

Veya sighed, burdened by Grandmother's pain.
"It's hard to watch your granddaughter give up her potential and worse yet, her family. Poor K'Sondra, she doesn't like her gift and tries to smother it will all manner of dissolute living."

Clasping Trista's hands, Veya implored, "Grandmother is getting older and K'Sondra will regret avoiding her. I can't fly up like you and see where she went. I just want a chance to reason with her a little."

[Trista]

Frankly, Trista found the whole family drama that Veya outlined more than a little hard to follow. But it seemed like a reasonable enough request that Veya was making, and Trista nodded her head.

"All right, although if she's gone inside anywhere, I'm not going to do you any good. What do you want me to do if I find her?"

After she'd received whatever answer Vaya was going to give her, she flipped her wings and rose easily into the air. It was, the Akvatari thought -- and not for the first time -- simpler up here in the sky, less messy and complex. The same, of course, was true in the sea, where the openness and emptiness of the vast water had an almost hypnotic lull. It was only on land where things got complicated.

She stopped about fifty feet above the ground, high enough to be out of the way, but low enough to be able to recognize individuals. Slowly and methodically, she began scanning the streets, looking to see if there was any sign of Sondra.

[Sondra]

Veya bestowed a dazzling smile on Trista, clasping her hands in enthused gratitude.
"Oh, thank you so much. I'm going to start asking others about her along the road she took."

To avoid confusion, Veya pointed to the gently sloping path between the edges of the circle where Sondra had fled.
"If you can't persuade her back to the circle, you can find me on this road." Ever positive, Veya chirped, "I'll at least have a better idea of where she is, even if she runs off again."

As Trista flew away, Veya gave an elegant wave of her white hand.

From her slightly elevated vantage point, Trista discovered the tops of Konti heads were frustratingly similar. Pale, pale and more pale, with a curl thrown in for good measure. However, Sondra's stubborn predilection for trousers and defiance of pastels worked against her.
Streaming and weaving like ribbons in the wind, the moth like Konti came and went. They made beautiful patterns, moving in anticipation of another. The cloud of divination and sensitivity created a wondrous proprioception between the women.

Sondra was disengaged from the design, trotting inelegantly down the road, her back towards Trista.

When the Akvatari came within sight, Sondra's expression crinkled with confusion, followed by mild embarrassment.
"Er, hello again."