Closed Is this your home? (Keene)

[Felicity]

37th of Fall, 515 AV
Location: Keene's Cottage
Time: Dusk

The taste of kelp bear clung to the back of her throat as Felicity licked her lips and rocked forward to sit on the corner of the bed. The bottle of greenish liquid was held loosely in her right hand, just a hairs breath from slipping free of her limp fingers as she stared blankly at the wall, eyes unfocused as her brow knit together in concentration. Pushing back a greasy lock of blonde hair she slowly stood, using the footboard of the bed to steady herself as the world seemed to tilt before her eyes.

A smile touched her lips for just a tick before she remembered she was supposed to be forlorn, and so she turned the corners of her mouth down in a frown once more. THat, however, did not last and slowly faded to the neutral expression as was natural for her. The world of the drunk was one that Felicity liked to visit often. It was windy and twisty and tilted at strange angles often times, and it made her arms and legs feel heavy in an amusing sort of way. It was perhaps the only time that Felicity really felt enjoyment without need to climb to the top of a ships mast or dangle over the city streets. So, naturally, she tried to stay this way as often as possible.

Half stumbling, half walking across the room to one of the only other pieces of furniture, a dresser with a small mirror attached, Felicity gripped the sides of the wood paneling as she leaned forward to stare into her own reflection. She hadn't bathed in a few days now, but it was getting too cold to bathe regularly in the ocean. Same with laundry. Dirty, partially torn clothing that was a faded grey color, shoulder length blonde hair and blue eyes. Blue eyes like her mothers, or so her father said.

A shiver reminded Felicity that the door was still open, more so than the soft clomp sound the wood made as it swayed gently back and forth in the salty breeze. There was never really a point in closing the door, this cottage was abandoned. Straightening Felicity turned so that she could lean her butt against the dresser now, bringing the bottle to her lips to down a few more gulps while still eyeing the open doorway. No one ever came back to this place, no matter how long Felicity waited. It was abandoned she figured, and so had decided to make herself at home. The bed was often slept in, the few possessions in the drawers and chest were already taken out, examined, and put back, though not as neatly as they had been before.

Wiping her mouth on her sleeve Felicity turned her eyes away to look down at her wigging toes. The beer made a sloshing sound as she swung her arms back and forth, leveraging herself up to stumble back toward the bed where she twisted and fell back. More sloshing sounds, but Felicity was careful not to spill even a drop of the precious liquid. Who knew when she would be able to afford another bottle.

She lay sideways on the bed so that the headboard was on her left, and the end of the be don the right. Her heels tapped the floor as she absently kicked her legs, humming a nonsense tune under her breath as she cradled the bottle as if it were her own infant. She even whispered to it, a slurred speech that was little more than just a mumble. Already she could feel her eyelids getting heavy.

[Keene Ward]

The very first thing that crossed Keene's mind as he stepped from the ship's gangplank to the dock's wooden pier was how inconvenient it was there were no golems to carry what had been consolidated into a single, large crate of supplies. It was, no doubt, a sentiment shared among those wizards who left the ship along side him, though few spoke to each other, and of those, there were only several words passed if that. The journey had been a long one, though it had not gone without bearing fruit, of which Keene had only gained a small taste for. That was the thing with knowledge, the more one knew what one didn't know, the more one craved to know it. As things were, however, the unexpected intellectually inclined vacation from the daily drain of what his life on the island had been had come to an end, as did all things. With slow, deliberate movements, he pulled the dark leather gloves over his fingers, concealing his hands in a distantly familiar manner. No longer was magic a privilege, not within the city he currently stood. It was a liability, one that should he be found out would cause little else but trouble, and if he had taken anything away from his time on Sahova, it was best to avoid trouble whenever possible, even if it meant minor inconveniences.

Fortunately, the weather in Zeltiva was considerably colder than it had been in the muggy, near tropical climate of the Island of the Sleepless, and the gloves were a welcome addition to Keene's growing wardrobe. His cloak had already been donned some days earlier as the weather had shifted, his lowered internal temperature threatening his health with sickness should he be so careless as to allow his body too much exposure to the more frigid inclinations of the weather's whims. That, and the breezes that had decided to accompany him across the vast expanse of seemingly never-ending azure had yet to depart from his side, a constant - though subdued - current of air fluttering at the edges of his more loose attire.

With the questionable scars on his hands properly concealed, Keene calmly gave the immediate area a steady scan, searching for any wandering eyes that might give him pause. Though the docks had seen a temporary inflation of foot traffic from the currently departing Sahovans and assorted Sunberthians, there were few people who were concerned with anything else that the two or so inches directly in front of their feet. Creeping from his ankles, a thin, pale mist drifted under the crate, pausing at each of the four corners as Keene stared blankly ahead, giving no indication that there was any reason for anyone to bring their attentions to him. In the half-light of the fading sun's rays, the mist hardly stood out. If anything, it was a fitting compliment to the gentle lap of the waves against the wooden posts that held the pier in its place. With a twitch of his fingers, the mist wrapped itself around the corners of the box, hardening into a thin, fine film of ice. Keeping the mist tightly wrapped around the corners in a relatively obscure manner that made it seem like what one might expect to see from melting ice if one were to look close enough, Keene drew on the element itself, his magic pulling on the crate, lifting it just a small fraction up off of the ground.

Squatting down in front of the box with his backpack firmly attached about his shoulders, Keene slipped his fingers under the sides, using the res to assist him in his efforts as he rose. Though the spell wasn't enough to make the load weightless, it alleviated quite a bit, making the lengthy walk one that was more dependent upon time rather than the strain of weight pressing upon his back and arms. Even then, by the time he arrived at the familiar-yet-not-so-familiar rise of the path that led to the house he had lived in for most of his life, sweat had found its place near the small of his back and at the sides of his face along his temples. The ice had, for the most part, remained thanks to a constant reapplication, but the res itself had dwindled to the point that, as Keene stepped through the open door without even once considering it was odd that the wooden portal had not been securely locked after nearly a year of his absence, he carried the majority of the burden all the way to the floor as it was set down with an unceremonious thump followed by a slight rattle of the various contents within it.

It was only after Keene stood up, wiping his brow with the cloth of the shirt that was gently stuck to to his forearm, that his grey-green eyes caught the very clear differences from what his memory recalled and what his vision presented him. The very first alteration to what had been the well-kept, minimalist quarters of his childhood, was the woman laying on his bed. She, first and foremost, was a concern, though Keene's eyes had little trouble flicking back and fourth between the woman and the rest of the interior with a blank faced, almost mechanical expression. Several pieces of furniture had been taken, slight scrapes along the well worn wooden planks of the floor noting the passage of the icebox, the table, the chairs, and the chest that Mella had kept various trinkets and baubles within - and, though Keene was not aware of it, her life's savings. That which remained consisted of the medium sized tub, though the bindings had broken and it was essentially just scrap, the wash basin, the dresser, a chair with three legs, and the bed with the woman.

When he finally spoke, it was without much emotion at all, though if one were to pay close attention, one might notice it seemed a bit loud for what one might expect from the controlled features of Keene's physiognomy. "Who are you?" It was not a threat, nor a greeting. It was exactly what it was: a question. As far as Keene was concerned, he had never held ownership over the house he stood in, staring at the uneven strands of blonde hair, odd, sleepy grin, and tattered clothes of the woman whom he addressed in his soft, quiet manner. His gaze, held steady and unrelenting in its blankness. He was confused, certainly, but it hardly showed in the shallow pools of pale green that stood as limpid windows into a soul that seemed to burn with as much fire as the stones buried deep within a mountain's embrace. Though his eyes revealed little, his skin tingled with the apprehension of potential combat, the djed of his body shifting and roiling within him, preparing for the myriad of possibilities that coursed through his weary but able mind.

[Felicity]

There were the voices again, random and inconsistent. They usually talked just below a whisper, near the back of her mind layered deep deep down beneath the apathetic disinterest of the world around. For a while Felicity thought about giving the voices names, unique tones and qualities, but that was just be silly. Addicts and the mentally insane heard voices often enough, and talked with them as well. She was sure that they named their voices, as her father had, but Felicity wasn't insane. She was perfectly within her right mind, right thoughts, right everything really. So, she wouldn't name them.

"I haven't decided yet." But she could still reply to them. It was just her own thoughts bubbling up without her meaning to call them, so it was perfectly fine to reply. Besides this was a question she asked herself every day anyway. There was no point in being rude.

Clucking her tongue Felicity rolled on her side, propping her head on one hand as she sipped from the bottle, sighing as she swallowed the burning liquid, "Maybe I'll be merchant today. I've always wanted to try that." Her words were slurred but there was a very strong Zeltivan accent there.

Shrugging one shoulder Felicity slowly sat up, scratching her tousled hair and tilting the bottle back once more. It was only until a few ticks later that her unfocused eyes wandered over the new person in the room. When they did those blue eyes squinted, bottle still to her lips as she stared, trying to piece together what she was looking at. Lowering the bottle slowly she let it hang from her loose fingers as she rested her elbow on her thigh and blinked blearily at Keene.

"Hello." She extended the bottle out to the man, "Would you like to drink with me?" Felicity smiled.

[Keene Ward]

When the woman first replied, Keene wasn't entirely sure to whom she spoke, the manner in which the words seemed to drift off of her glistening lips to simmer in the air above her gave him pause, his lips turning only slightly into a shallow frown. His hands found a place against the crook of his elbows, arms folded against the slight chill of the night that rode within the gentle inquires of the breezes that flowed through the open door, the hem of his cloak fluttering in their wake. It was difficult to say whether the woman was a threat or not, but there were ways beyond the mundane to ascertain such things. As the woman made her lazy roll across the stained, shoddy sheets of the worn mattress, Keene's djed shifted, the natural flow rising up to fill his senses with a steady, tingling stream of power, illuminating the world before him with information, tantalizing in its novelty.

He focused on her, the blank expression of his face becoming even more so, his eyes seeming to stare through rather than at her. Like with all living creatures, the first thing that Keene saw in the haphazard mess of aura was a slow, inebriated pulse. Within the layers and through the woman's being, there was an odd, blue light, one that felt vaguely familiar, reminiscent of the pale white light that had taken him by surprise when he had first looked into Master Relos' aura. Whatever it was, it was weaker than what he had seen before, a not-so-subtle indication that she was not as strong as the nuit, though from what Keene had been able to tell, the master was more focused upon the strength of resolve rather than pure destructive power. The more the looked, the less he understood. There were colors that clashed, winding and weaving through the uncertain haze of what Keene assumed to be the base of her aura, though what any of it meant, he couldn't tell, as it was something he had never seen before. Sickly yellows strangled gossamer threads of pale teal and soft rose; blooms of vibrant silver tainted with splotches of a fetid green, winding its way throughout her nature to the point where, even though everything seemed to shimmer as if behind a haze, Keene could discern little more than that the woman before him did not possess magic of any sort that he could tell.

What she did possess, or perhaps better, what possessed her: that was entirely uncertain.

The voice, however, was discernible as a native Zeltivan. Keene had been told on more than one occasion that his own accent was hardly indicative of his hometown, and he imagined it was something more similar to how Mella had spoken, a Syliran in voice only, he was sure - though just as equally not a Zeltivan, as she had affiliated only with herself and nothing else. Thus, from the information provided him and the odd sort of answer she gave, Keene's cautions relaxed some as he pulled the djed away from his senses, placing it carefully back along its intended path to settle into the steady, rolling clouds of his natural nature with a few steady breaths. She did not seem to be a threat beyond the common riff-raff of the destitute denizens of East Street. While it was inconvenient that the house he had spent his childhood years in had been laid claim to by so tangled a woman, it would have been more inconvenient if she had been an enemy rather than a passing stranger.

Her offer was given a short, curt shake of Keene's head, his eyes still steadily fixed upon her, the natural light of focus glinting under the moon's influence that swept in through the grimy windows towards the opposite end of the room. "I would not." Stepping through the door, Keene positioned himself so that he was able to push the box with his foot, sliding it along the wooden flooring with a slight creak of effort before it was out of the way of the door that had been left open for far too long. Shutting it behind him, Keene turned to regard the woman and her bottle, his grey-green gaze a passive reflection, almost like the glass eyes of a wealthy child's doll. "Please leave." Again, it was a statement more than a command, though the words themselves suggested otherwise. While he had not necessarily missed the abstract concept of "home", Keene had found that there had been an expected sort of peace that might come with returning to the house. What he had found, however, was nothing short of what should have been expected, and he didn't fail to remind himself of that with each tick his eyes remained, vaguely expectant, upon the blurred blue of the female intruder's.

[Felicity]

With the subtle shake of his head this man denied the ever so kind offer Felicity had presented him, but rather than be put off or offended as maybe she should be the woman just shrugged and took another drink herself. She didn't really want to share anyway. The level of her intoxication was just now getting to the point where she could ignore the taste and the sting completely as the fogginess enveloped her senses in a soft pillowy cloud of indifference.

Thin fingers wrapped around the neck of the bottle, both hands clasped firmly as she tilted backwards, draining the last of the contents in three large gulps as she collapsed back onto the bed. Her arms spread eagle on either side of her, the bottle finally slipping from her too drunk hands to clatter to the floor with a noisy thud without quite shattering. That was disappointing, and it made Felicity frown slightly as she rolled on her stomach to look over the edge of the bed at the only slightly cracked bottle as it rolled beneath the mattress.

"Why is it nothing ever seems to naturally work out the way we want it to." Ignoring the final statement Felicity once more started kicking her legs, head still hanging the other side of the mattress as she stared after the still rolling bottle, "A crack is a sign of weakness I think, but despite that some things simply refuse to shatter." Her slurred philosophy ended abruptly as she came to her hands and knees, pushing down with all her weight upon her heels as her legs swung out and forward so that her arms were now positioned between her thighs, legs perfectly straight as her butt hovered in the air. Then, with a grunt, one leg swung around and carried with it her body, pivoting on one arm that still remained on the bed until she almost clumsily fell back on her stomach now facing the opposite direction, her head toward Keene now and her feet away. One arm reached down and caught the bottle as it rolled out from beneath the bed.

Turning the bottle around Felicity propped herself up on one arm, looking with unfocused eyes at Keene as she smiled for no real reason at all, "I'm like this bottle. Just a little cracked, thats what Papa says, but still not broken." She said this almost triumphantly, just before the bottle slipped and fell to shatter at last on the floor.

Blinking Felicity slowly lowered her arm and rolled back onto her back, head leaning back over the side as her hair swept through the shattered remains of glass that still stank of their toxic contents, "Well there you have it. Everything shatters eventually."

Finally Felicity began to focus, pressing fingers to her temples as she blinked once, twice, and stared up at Keene. Her eyes flickered to the large chest, widening slightly as if she had only just now noticed it, before coming back to those eyes. A crisp green to her pale blue. For a tick Felicity wondered what she would look like with those eyes, and with that thought came a strange desire to pluck out those beautiful eyes and carry them with her forever.

Extending a finger and wagging it, still upside down, Felicity slowly pieced together the statement, "It isn't polite to barge into someone's home without knocking. Are you a thief? Or are you here to have your way with me and leave my battered and used body on the floor dirtied and soiled." She paused and sat up, now sitting on the edge of the bed as she ran her nails through her hair, little pieces of glass falling out as she did, "How will I ever find a husband now that you have assaulted me so..."

[Keene Ward]

The expectancy faded away, leaving behind nothing more than the stark blankness that came when he had nothing to consider before him. The woman was beyond whatever realms of reason the common populace partook of, a plane that Keene often found more confusing that not most of the time; with the giggling slurs and groggy contemplation, he might as well have been speaking to a wall for all the effect his words had had on her. The breeze had disappeared with the closing of the door, and its curiosity had faded from the room, leaving Keene alone and as stoic and stone as he stared with an impassive gaze at the scene before him, too detached to see the pitiable creature for what it was.

The words she spoke, while perhaps stemming from as vapid a place as her face indicated, were not wholly without merit. There was a point of resonance somewhere in the pit of his stomach, his mind weary from his travels and worn from the endless work he had subjected himself to since his departure from the city almost a year ago. Everything in his life had been planned, carefully and dutifully, and yet fate twisted the straight paths, tangled them and led him to curves and forks he had never intended. As far as an answer to the rhetorical question, however, Keene had little to offer. There was no way to know what fate had in store. It was an outlier, an entity that held a firm governance over the flow of time in a way that it was unaffected by it. In the world, there were things that could be studied, could be understood. Many of those things seemed impossible until one understood them, but with fate Keene knew full well that there was no refuting it. It was not an equation to solve or a skill to master: it simply was.

As the bottle dropped, Keene watched its descent, eyes shifting towards the advent of movement more out of the novelty of it than anything else. Hitting the floor with a wood-softened thud, watching again as it shattered the second time. If there had been wisdom in her words before, it broke along with the bottle, and Keene's lips tilted slightly more into a frown, his lack of amusement clear only by the curve of his mouth and austere gaze. "So it would seem." Again, the words held no thread, no emotion, only they were a firm portent. He had started weary and only grown more so in the past few chimes, and as the woman began to spout more nonsense, Keene's patience was raked across the jagged shards of the broken glass that littered the stained boards of the wooden floor.

"It is not polite. I am not a thief. The thought of touching you is revolting, and your marital affairs are your own." He listed off his replies in a slow, steady meter. His soft voice at odds with the severity of the words, though neither gave much indication of how Keene felt on the matter, only what he thought. "Please leave. I will not ask again." His res shifted, clouds growing dark and ominous within him, prepared to rally forth should he need them. Murder was not on his mind, nor was any sort of malice or the like. He wanted the woman gone: she was a nuisance. Once she was out, he had no issue shielding the house from her, as he doubted a simple removal of her person would last more than a night if that. Waiting, for the last time, Keene allowed her time to leave of her own volition. There would be no third chance.