[The Bizarre] Another Encounter [Seidaku]

[Dra-Sinsa]

Sinsa took the meat and sniffed it, eyebrows furrowed in confusion. She looked up at him with wide eyes, then took a hesitant bite.

Citrus flavor exploded in her mouth and she fought the urge to pucker her face in surprise. She laughed in surprise and delight as she savored the food.

"So good..." She whispered, more to herself than anyone else as she took another bite.

The second bite, however, tasted bitter like unripe fruit, but still appetizing. She coughed a little, licking her lips as she swallowed the fruit.

Bite after bite gave her different fruit flavors and alternating tones of sweetness and bitterness, but she enjoyed every moment of it. Before she even realized what had happened, the 'meat' was gone, and it had taken ten minutes for her to devour the entire thing.

She looked at Seidaku sheepishly, then murmured, "I'm so sorry." A light, barely there blush covered her cheeks as she felt embarrassed for eating the meat and leaving none for him.

[Seidaku]

Seidaku watched with a broad grin as the child took her first bite of the 'mutton' and her face lit up in surprise. As the son of a chef and an artist, though his mother would have said she was an artist with the medium of food, he took a special pleasure in seeing that first experience with Alvadan food. It was almost universally a positive response, though he had seen the rare individual react with disgust at what they saw as deception.

He liked to think of it as a game. Even living his entire life in the city, he could still be surprised with an astonishing ease. At the last festival, he had seen what appeared to be a fully functioning time piece. As near as he could tell, it had even kept accurate time. And then, once the festival was done, they took it apart and served it as a meal to the festival goers.

His smile dropped into an expression of astonishment as the child tore into her meal with abandon. He had thought he had bought enough for her to have another meal later. He could almost feel his coin pouch cringe at the prospect of ever having to feel a child of his own routinely.

"There's, ah, nothing to be sorry for," he said with a small smile at the embarassed girl, "That was yours."

He raised the teacup to his lips and took a small bite out of the side with what sounded like the crunch of glass. The flavor of strongly smoked meat exploded into his mouth. He had never figured out how they did got the meat to the proper texture to pose as glass. Every time he had tried, it had just toughened into leather, or worse gone mushy and awful. He took another bite from his cup, "This is all I need. It's, umm, heartier than it looks."

[Dra-Sinsa]

Sinsa watched in horror as he bit into the teacup, then relaxed slightly. Everything was not as it seemed here.

She pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked at him.
"Thanks again...for the food. I really appreciate it."

She looked around at the vendors and the different people bustling around the streets.
"This is such a strange place." Sinsa admitted to him.
"I feel overwhelmed here..."

"How long have you been in Alvadas?" She questioned, looking up at him.

[Seidaku]

Seidaku laughed nervously at the girl's thanks. He was not really sure how to respond beyond a muttered, "You're welcome." He still felt a small pang of guilt at the coldly pragmatic voice that whispered in the back of his mind that he could have bought himself a great deal of food for what he had just spent on some random urchin. The rewarding feeling of a good deed done drowned out that cynical whisper, though.

"I, uh, I wouldn't know," he said, taking a smaller bite from his cup, "The rest of the world feels much the same way to me. Far too fixed and... dead. Alvadas, umm, has a life of it's own. Quite, umm, quite separate from the people within it. Even without us, Alvadas would continue to live and breathe and change. There is something, ah, well, comforting about that."

He laughed again, louder this time, at the girl's next question, "I was, umm, born here."

[Dra-Sinsa]

Sinsa listened as he told her what he thought of Alvadas. She nodded as he told her how Alvadas would live and breathe on it's own.

When he laughed, a small smile crept to her lips. "I see. That's...amazing. It must be like a new adventure every day for you."

She smirked at him, then asked, "What is your name? I didn't get to ask you...since I was trying to rob you before."

[Seidaku]

He had been about to disagree with the girl. With constant exposure, he figured that even a city that was never the same between two glances could become mundane and commonplace. Before he could answer though, he thought about the last few seasons. And then, the several years prior to that. Even if the city had not been an adventure in and of itself, the people and events it had steered him toward certainly qualified as such.

He wondered about the people that he had met in Alvadas, and how oddly suited to the city they had been. Even those who, on the surface, had seemed as though they would not mesh with the city had fit into place almost as though guided there. Perhaps that was simply the will of the gods. In the wake of the Valterrian, a place for everything and everything in its place. Maybe every city in Mizahar was the same, populated by those the gods had deemed needed or deserved to be there.

"I suppose it is," he finally said with a chuckle, "It's certainly, never- oh, my name? Oh!"

He could scarcely believe that he had been so rude. Chasing her through the Bizarre, buying her food, and chatting along without ever even attempting to learn her name or offer his own, "My name is, ah, Seidaku," he said, blushing slightly in embarassment at his poor manners, "What is yours?"

[Dra-Sinsa]

Sinsa smiled as she watched him think. It was strange, seeing and interacting with someone after months of not doing so.

When he realized what she had asked, and then became flustered, she giggled softly at him.

"Seidaku." She repeated once he had told her. When he asked her her own name, she answered with a simple, "Sinsa."

[Seidaku]

Sinsa. There was something about the way she had said her name. Some inflection or manner of speech that gave him a strange sense of deja vu. He knew that he had never heard the name before, but it felt... familiar? That was not really the right word, but it was as close as he could put a finger on.

After her answer, there was a period of silence with neither of them speaking. In order to fill the silence, which had stretched long enough to grow uncomfortable, he asked, "How long, umm, how long have you been in Alvadas?"

[Dra-Sinsa]

Sinsa watched the people go by, wishing for some reason she could look as carefree as they did. His question brought her back to the present. She looked back at him, then counted on her fingers to herself before saying, "Two weeks?"

It had felt longer than that. She shook her head and laughed. "What about your...family? What are they like?"

Her eyes shone excitedly as she asked him this, anxious for a response, since she never exactly grew up in a family of her own. Him being the first person she had talked to in weeks, she wanted to know what his family had been like.

She knew it was probably a strange 'getting to know you' question, but she couldn't help herself. She had never known her parents, and no one seemed to know what happened to them, their names, or anything.

Or they just didn't want to tell her.

[Seidaku]

The fact that she had only been in Alvadas two weeks and was obviously penniless immediately raised the next question that popped into his mind, how had she come to Alvadas? Had she come with her family, or by latching onto a caravan, or something else entirely? He was capable of exercising some small degree of tact though, and so he did not ask how she had come to be stuck on the streets of the city.

Sinsa's next question took him by surprise. His immediate answer was that they were just like any other family. But expression of open, shining excitement told him that that answer would not be satisfactory. Her interest was certainly strange. She had to know-

Oh.

The depressing realization struck him with an almost physical force. She was an orphan, one of a distressingly large number of children cut off from the fabric of the world and cast adrift. It made him realize just how lucky he had been to grow up the way he had.

"My mother was a chef," he said, deciding to provide the detail the child was obviously wanting, to be able to have a family vicariously, if only for a moment, through him, "And my father was, ah, was a painter, umm... an artist. Well, both of them were artists, really. Are artists. Alvadas is, uhh, probably one of the few cities in Mizahar where that is normal. Very artistic." He laughed softly and said, "My mother says, umm, that Alvadas' chief exports are art for the wealthy and a smug sense of superiority because of it."