Sure, this sounds like fun!
The following piece is about a character from a novel I plan on writing (eventually). By way of explanation, there IS such thing as magic in her world, but it's not something wielded by humans. If you're human and you somehow have magic, you're thought to be helpers of the "dark" race of the world (who want to essentially turn the world to dust). As such, she's not really thought of as "human" but still has to fake it to make it, y'know?
Anyway, enough preamble. Here goes nothing! 4laugh
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It was another one of those dreary, dreary days at the hotel. Mother kept trying to send her out on errands – various bits of shopping here and there – and Father kept trying to give her busy-work around the place, like dishes and laundry… anything to keep her out from the common area, where the smoke hung thick with the bored exhalations of many a patron.
Not that that stopped Cella from getting around them, of course. She was a resourceful girl – very resourceful in her attempts to lazily smoke her days away, one by one. Ever since she was an infant, she’d been fascinated by smoke. Always found her playing in the stuff, running her hands through it like a potter worked clay or a baker with their dough. It unnerved her parents a bit at times, Cella reflected. She chuckled to herself a little in amusement. They didn’t even know the half of it.
She lit up the end of her cigarette with a flick of a match, her breath hitching at the first inhalation of smoke, savouring its sharp feel within her lungs. She watched as it climbed its way out into the air, releasing itself from her lungs in a vaporous cloud, twisting into small tendrils and sussing out its new environment. Cella laughed to herself as a poetic thought struck her – it was like with every exhale, she was giving birth to new, smoky life.
“Cella? Cella!” her mother’s sharp voice cut in, interrupting her hazy reverie. She flicked an eye up in consideration, not shifting in her lean against the counter, and then lowered it.
Whatever.
“I need you to talk to the baker again about the sweets order – we’re going to have to cut down on the amount of croissants if they keep raising their prices like that. Oh and – are you even listening?”
The cigarette was sharply yanked out of Cella’s mouth, eliciting a shocked reply. “Yeah, yeah, I hear ya – I’ll get a bargain from ol’ Marta if it kills me.”
“If this doesn’t first,” her mother replied with a twisted smile, letting the cigarette be snatched from her fingers from her departing daughter. “You really shouldn’t smoke so much, you know.”
With a sidelong smirk, Cella joked back, “Well, it was either that or forest fires. I thought you said you preferred smoking!”
Her mother waved her off, laughing with a couple of nearby patrons at the display, and Cella retreated, the smoke in the room trailing after her for a moment as if missing her. Her lips twisted for a moment in realization – she missed it too.
Talking things out with their contracted baker was hardly even a problem – over a smoke, Marta realized she’d been accidentally charging them for her meat pies or some such and offered a discount on further purchases. They’d parted ways happily, Cella mock-saluting with her ever-present cigarette.
The walk home, however, was irritating. There was another one of those anti-magic rallies going on, railing about the inhumanity and treacherousness of the magically inclined. It was the kind of thing that made her want to show off, really get them all good and startled over something actually terrifying, but that wasn’t how her gift worked – she was “all smoke and mirrors”. (She chuckled to herself over her pun.)
“Do not be fooled by their appearances! Despite appearing like one of us, their taint runs deep – yea, deeper than the blood – it runs in their very soul! Hope and wish though we might that these dark-spawned creatures are one of us - ”
‘
Smoke-spawn, actually,’ Cella wanted to interject,
“ - these creatures are naught but trouble. It is your duty as citizens of our fair and righteous kingdom to report any suspicious behaviours or activities, no matter how small. Even something so small as your neighbour’s propensity to talk to themselves when they think nobody is around could very well be something – they could be communicating with their dark-spawn masters, seeking to gain the upper ground on good, honest folk like us.”
Cella suppressed the urge to scowl as she pushed her way past the growing crowd – she certainly had no wish to incite a crowd already crying for blood. The smoke from her cigarette curled close to her, as if shielding her from their hurtful words. Each word was like a fistful of stones slung her way – was she really all that inhuman for simply wanting to live peacefully, smoking away her days and ways, feeling the joy of the smoke curling and tumbling around her?
Sometimes she could shrug off the old concerns of “Am I unwittingly propagating the downfall of my race simply by existing?” Sometimes, it was all she could do to not run away with a bag full of food and clothes and smokes and live out the rest of her life in solitude. She’d been rolling her own cigarettes since she could remember, so it was not as if she would need to return again to get more – she could always just make her own. But then again...
Cella shrugged her shoulders up, resolutely staring at her feet as she walked the rest of the way home, letting the burden of her conflicting ideas battle around her, ever-trailing after like smoke on her heels.