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Who: Mouse, Fredmitri, Bauta
Where: An open-air market in Durem
When: A week or so after the New Year, early afternoon
Weather: Chilly but clear; occasional snowpiles on the streets

New Year's resolutions. For a lot of people that meant trying (and often failing) to improve themselves somehow, such as losing weight, quitting smoking or trying not to get so angry at the idiots from the office. Mouse, on the other hand, usually set the same goal every year and it was something not too difficult to accomplish: go do something or visit somewhere interesting. Changing her hair color again didn't seem like it would cut it this time. So instead, she decided to go visit a new city.

Not counting the times she had been to Isi and Eiry's estate (and that was far enough to not be in the city in her book), this girl had never really been to Durem. Skirted past it a few times while taking her car out for a spin, maybe, but never an honest visit to get a good feel of the place.

It didn't take her very long to decide that this city was very nice. Buildings got a bit close together and some people were more pretentious than the kind you'd run into up in Gambino, but it definitely possessed a flavor that Mouse hadn't really sampled before. And it was a great deal more palatable than Aekea-- before this she would have had a hard time believing that a city could actually be pleasant, let alone the sky even being any shade remotely like blue while in it. Needless to say it was simultaneously blowing her mind and motivating her to take more-than-fleeting glances at ads selling homes. If she just sold her car and some other junk she had lying around...

Hmm. In any case, the slightly crowded buildings soon gave way to a much wider open space... that is, the place wasn't dominated by walls and roofs any more. There were still stores all over the place, but of a different brand: an open-air market, with stands selling everything from wide varieties of honey to hand-sewn articles of clothing to corn dogs and fresh pizza. Whaddya know, people could sell things outdoors that weren't fruit!

Mouse just had to check it out. With all the activity and variety, people must have had a lower chance of noticing that her scarf was a live cephalopod with cat ears.

Busy, busy, busy. Everyone was bustling about and yet knew exactly where they were going. For Mouse, who wasn't all too busy and was just sort of wandering around aimlessly, this could potentially be a bad thing. Add the fact that she had some vertical deficiencies she never grew quite out of, and it was almost guaranteed to be a bad thing. She couldn't see where she was going for part of the time, and when she did she just barely missed running into someone, stepping on a foot or having her own foot stepped on. It was kind of exciting to try and figure out the flow of human and humanoid traffic in this place.

By the time she actually managed to squirm out of the crowds and to a stand she had become a bit winded from all the dodging, half-blind sauntering and generally wandering around in very elaborate circles. "Next time I come to a place like this, I'm bringing a map and a compass," she muttered mostly to herself. Her scarf wiggled a bit and meowed and response, shaking his bulbous head a bit to try and get rid of some dizziness he was suffering himself.

Needless to say that turned a head or two, but the chimera wasn't impressive enough this time around to draw much more attention than that. When he got a whiff of the fresh fish at the stand they had wandered to, though, Fredmitri became a bit more active, pleading for his owner to at least buy just one. They all looked so tasty!

Holy hell did this stand smell awful.

It was covered in nearly every kind of sea life that anyone could pass off as edible. Whole fish. Whole live fish, by the looks of some of them. They were still twitching a bit on the ice they were dying a very slow and unpleasant death upon, and she swore a few mananged to flop with enough strength to send a few flakes of it into the air. Couldn't they at least have cut off the heads or something? Peeled the shrimp so they weren't slowly wriggling their little legs around like poisoned roaches? At least the squid didn't appear to be moving any more... not that she cared either way, those things usually tasted like cheap tires.

The only thing that was keeping her there was how happy her chimera was getting seeing all of this potential food-- that, and her attempts at walking away only made Fredmitri get even more fussy. Did she bring money...? Fishing around for a moment in the pockets of her coat led to the answer being yes.

"Alright, if it'll shut you up..." Mouse sighed with an exasperated smile. A minute of browsing later and she had purchased a small handful of shrimp, raising an eyebrow from the stand owner as she asked him not to wrap them up and more or less had them dropped in an outstretched hand.

The green-haired girl whispered something to her chimera that made him climb down her leg onto the ground- she then started tossing her purchase a few yards away from her, and the octopuss would chase it down and eat it (while fighting off the occasional pigeon) before returning for more.

A slightly closer look at the woman's hair would have been enough to determine that green wasn't her natural color: their roots were a warm auburn, with enough showing to make it look like her head was some sort of fleshy planter housing a crop of soft and feathery grass. And until either of their fashions became the normal trend, both of them were probably doomed to a life of unique individuality. The horror!

Hearing Bauta's utterance of disgust and confusion made Mouse jerk up straight in surprise, looking for both the source and potential danger. When she found that it was the tall winged man saying it, she tried to trace his line of vision with the feeling that it would lead her to a fight or something breaking out there... instead, there was nothing but her chimera finishing off his last treat for the day and squirming back towards his owner.

It's said that a pet can make for a good conversation starter. "Oh good lord," then, must have been the octopuss equivalent of "Oh, what a cute puppy!"

The grasshead was silent for a while, taking the opportunity to get a look at this man while gathering a blissful Fredmitri back up in her arms. He was tall. And big. And dressed fancy. Those wings couldn't have been fake either, a human trying to pull those off probably would have had trouble standing. They were huge too... also, he was tall. The fact that he seemed both oddly familiar and mostly harmless made it possible for the shorter girl to not be intimidated.

"Is something wrong?" she finally asked, peering curiously at the winged man while allowing Mitya to lick the shrimp smell off of her fingers.

Technically speaking, the velvety creature Mouse held was a cat once. And he had also been an octopus. But now, thanks to the powers of magiscience and technology, he was now an odd mixture of both. His owner, however, had adjectives to describe her pet that were very far away from "ungodly", "horrible" or "twisted", and her affection for the creature was fairly obvious.

She had to give the harpy a few bonus points for at least trying to be polite, even though it wasn't too hard to tell that he was one of the type of people who didn't find Fredmitri absolutely adorable. It was written clearly on his facial expression as well as in his less than enthusiastic words.

The shorter woman backs up a bit- not because she was repelled by him, but so she wouldn't have to crane her neck so much to make the right amount of eye contact. With a curious smile, she corrected, "He's not a thing, he's a chimera. You can call him Mitya."

Well, 'unique' was sort of a compliment. Mouse nodded enthusiatically in response to it. "There's only two others like this one, and Mitya's the first," she said with notable pride. His apology either went entirely unnoticed or she just didn't think it was really worth it to comment on him apologizing for being awkward. Either way, he was still looking at her kind of funny.

Why was that, and why couldn't she shake this huge feeling of deja-vu? She had had a conversation like this somewhere before...

No matter. Since this conversation was more or less focusing around Mouse's pet, it was necessary that she follow the formula. She had given his name, talked a bit about how awesome he is, which means that the next part of this conversation should be...

"You can pet him if you like. Don't worry, he's pretty harmless."

Yes, Bauta, slime and fur. That would perfectly explain why there is absolutely no trace of cat hair anywhere on Mouse's person, even though his buttery coloring would contrast blatantly against the girl's ensemble of green and brown. Even though such a feature would have it smeared all over her clothes and make very difficult to clean off. Fredmitri, being half mollusk, didn't really have much in the way of fur at all; instead, his skin tended to be a warm and pleasant velvety texture.

One of the green girl's hands was about to drift toward's her chimera's bulbous body-head in order to give him a nice rub between the ears herself. Quite frankly, she was a bit surprised and disappointed by the winged man's declining of her offer. People usually loved to pet Mitya! "Inconvenience? Mitya's part cat, he really loves being petted--"

This line of conversation abruptly stopped when Mouse found herself suddenly wondering what sort of tear in the fabric of reality had just turned her into a princess.

Was he... kissing her hand? His mannerisms were proving to be as old-fashioned as his attire, and the sudden display of chivalry left the girl feeling extremely confused and possibly more awkward than the harpy had been feeling just a few seconds ago. She didn't have any responses ready for this sort of thing, and as such the color of her face was gradually starting to make it look a bit like she was Christmas trying to make a comeback. How could he stand to do that; her hands probably still smelled like fish.

"Mouse," she answered. While taking a breath to chase away the small invasion of color on her face, a thought hit her that was quick to drain the rest of it away. "Wait, I've seen you somewhere before..."

One would have thought that such an individual as Mouse would be the type to stick in the mind of an individual like Bauta, as it wasn't very often that someone would see someone with her name, height, and demeanor wrapped up in a single person who was also accompanied by a mollusk with feline appendages. She was actually a bit disappointed since now she was sure she had met Bauta at the Halloween party-- it was equally rare to run into an uptight Dandyist with wings more than once.

"Yeah, that's it! Mitya was dressed up as a jack-o-lantern," the girl responded cheerfully, now fully recalling the events of that evening and how a charismatic confectionary and his feathered friend had dropped by for a moment. "So you dress like that all the time, huh?"

She's almost taken off-guard by Bauta's concern, but is able to laugh it off after a couple of seconds. "No, I'm fine," she assures. "It's just that I was raised thinking that chivalry was dead, is all."