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 Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2012 4:30 pm
Region: Castelia City
Muirín watched as the sun set over Castelia city with brilliant effect. The shifting colors that played on the water, from white to gold to orange to red to bruised purple as the last vestiges of light left the city behind, were nearly worth the price of admission into the city on their own. Muirín always did this when he came to a new city: find the best place to watch the sundown, usually the docks in port cities or the highest building in places further inland, and spend a good few hours just watching. Nothing showed a city's true colors quite like it; already, the people behind him buzzed and bustled as they shifted from daylight to nightlife.
And now Muirín set his sights on the sultry, dusky pleasures of this city's nightlife.
Muirín's feet, which had been kicking against a pillar that supported the dock whose edge he now sat upon, gradually slowed until they merely dangled as the sun finally disappeared. Only the streetlights behind him cast any light, and his shadow drew long on the water below before eventually disappearing. When nothing but the gentle lapping of the waves against the dock remained, Muirín stood and turned to face Castelia. It had turned to a veritable wall of artificial lights and bright colors, a bullwark against the darkness of night. Port activity had slowed, and now all the noise came from it, the very epitome of civilization. Muirín smiled and moved towards it.
As the once-goldeen boy became immersed in the sights and sounds of the main streets, he cast his eyes about, looking for something interesting to kick this night off. Very quickly, he was presented with a choice: A brightly-lit street, filled with rather normal-looking people who crowded around ice-cream stalls and into various shops, or a not-so-brightly lit alley, with neon lights dotting the walls and less-normal looking men crowding around the doors below them. Mundanity or abnormality, something non-offensive or something... exotic. He had all the time he needed to see the other streets. For now, the narrow alleyway held the real adventure.
Audacity carried Muirín into the obviously shifty Narrow Street, and his inability to focus kept him from looking too closely at anything in particular. A faintly unpleasant scent emanated from the dumpsters that cropped up between the doors, but Muirín glossed over it. The men in the doorways gave him greedy looks, but Muirín never met any of their eyes. There was litter here and there and graffiti on the walls, but Muirín didn't once consider this place to be seedy. Fortunately, nothing predatory inhabited this alley, at least not tonight.
Eventually, Muirín's roving eyes fell upon one of the men, this one standing beneath a particularly gaudy neon display of words he couldn't read and images he didn't understand. The man stared very intently back at him. When the man seemed sure he'd caught Muirín's eye, he called out to him, motioning while he spoke.
“Hey, c'mere! Been looking all over for you, come on!”
Muirín approached the doorway, pressing past a different man who brushed a little too close, to stand before the one who'd called him, finally asking, “Me? What for?” when he got close enough. The man was short, shorter than Muirín himself, with a receding ring of hair at the top of his head and a healthy paunch pushing his shirt out. He smelled better than the garbage bins all around, but not by much.
“Cute, kid. You're the guy we hired, ain'tcha? Exotic dancer? Don't you know about the entrance in the rear? Can't have these knuckleheads out here getting too touchy with my merchandise...” Without waiting for Muirín to respond, the fat little man turned and motioned for the barely-legal boy to follow him inside.
“Exotic dancing...? Sounds fun!” Muirín followed without a second thought, without a clue what he was getting himself into as he followed the balding man through an employees-only door and through a few narrow hallways as quiet music with heavy bass pulsed like a heartbeat.
Muirín wondered if he should mention that he didn't know how to dance.
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Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 2:25 pm
Skitty’s had just been an ordinary, seedy strip joint for most of its existence until the niece of the previous owner inherited it following the portly man’s unsurprising death (heart attack). No one quite understood why she had decided to keep the place instead of selling or renting the space for ridiculous amounts of money, but she kept it she did. And not only did she keep it, she completely renovated it. Every chair, every table, every tile was replaced. The only thing that remained of her uncle’s legacy (if one could call it that) was the name.
While still surrounded by less than savory places, under the new owner’s careful eye, Skitty’s actually made itself into a somewhat reputable place. Well, as reputable as a place whose workers strip off clothes for money could get. The clientele went beyond your average Hiker and Biker to the more upstanding Gentlemen and Socialites. When business was steady enough she had expanded the place to include two stages and a bar at the center. On the left, the original and larger of the stages, was where the females were designated to dance and the new, smaller stage on the left was for the male dancers. It had been a gamble to include both sexes in her club, but it was a gamble that paid off, as Skitty’s quickly became known for its talented male dancers.
When gijinkas began appearing she had taken another gamble and allowed them onto her stage as well. Once again, business boomed as Skitty’s became known for their exotic, inhuman workers. But unlike the last business decision, when the novelty had worn off, there was an outcry from her patrons. They no longer appreciated the mix of humans and gijinka. Business began to tank and, in order to keep it from going into a tailspin, she immediately segregated the humans and gijinka. Prime time nights and days were reserved for human dancers and the slow nights were designated “gijinka” nights.
Tonight was a gijinka night and, as luck would have it, Suri had been scheduled to dance from the beginning of prime time to close. And while Suri didn’t particularly enjoy exotic dancing when compared to his other styles, it was still better than standing still behind a bar with only bottles to twirl every now and then. So when gijinka night finally arrived and his shift came around, the volcarona was practically buzzing with excitement and barely restrained energy. The heavy beats of the club vibrated through him, causing his hips to sway languidly as he walked around backstage, simply itching for his turn to be on stage. Tonight was an especially exciting night since he would be dancing in tandem with a brand new gijinka boy! The details had been kept a secret from him for days (which, of course, felt like months) simply to drive the volcarona mad with curiosity and speculation.
Was he going to be brawny and buff? Or maybe he would be one of those wispy, flowery pretty boys…Suri really hoped it was the former. He wanted some hulking bulk of a man to grind on under the guise of “work”. There were so many femme types surrounding him that he might as well have danced with the women. Was it too much to ask for a manly man by his side? The thoughts depressed him just a bit as he realized that, even if his hopes came true, he wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing with the gijinka of his dreams. Work relations were prohibited. And if he even tried it his boss would immediately know, for she was also his roommate.
“Hey Suri,” the man whom Muirín was following called out, motioning for him to come to him. “Meet th’ new kid and uh, y’know. Tell’m all ‘bout what he needs to know eh?” Suri rolled his eyes quite obviously and shuffled to close the few feet of distance between them. He would have called the man lazy right to his face and mentioned how that was HIS job but the look of the new kid was enough to expel those thoughts from his head. “Kid is right,” Suri murmured and leaned in to get a closer look at Muirín. “Riley are…are you sure he’s old enough?” Riley shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. “Eh I guess?” Suri frowned harder. “You guess? Riley he…he doesn’t look like the type Felicia would hire…are you sure this is the right guy?”
A shout came from the green room (of sorts) for Suri and his partner to get ready since they were on stage in ten. “Don’t matter now do’t” Riley remarked with a laugh. “’s gotta be’m now. No choice!” The fat man walked off laughing, leaving Suri to chew his lip in contemplation and concern. “Erm.” The volcarona scratched the back of his head and sighed. “Well, he’s right.” Suri held his hand out to the golden boy with a semi-sweet smile, still obviously concerned about whether this was legal or not. Felicia made a very big deal about it, and so it was a big deal to him as well…though he didn’t quite understand why. “My name is Suri and I’ll be your dance partner for tonight!” No sooner than the words had left his lips did the gijinka seem to cheer up, his previously worries cast aside in favor of being excited about their upcoming dance. “It’ll be real easy for you okay? The mix they’re gonna play has a lot of easy beats, you can just do whatever routine is comfortable for you and I’ll follow suit okay?”
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Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 6:16 pm
Muirín followed the man who'd grabbed him off the streets down corridor after narrow corridor, the bass intensifying in his footsteps as the two of them ventured further and further. Though this place was so new to Muirín, he couldn't help trailing his fingers along the claustrophobic walls, something about their rough material and the general dim murkiness of the place that made him feel curiously at home. He passed by several doors, most closed, all sporting plaques of some form of metal with wording on it that he couldn't read, but he still gazed at each, trying to get some meaning out of them. Only one was open, and this was the one that the man led Muirín into, and Mui followed easily enough.
Dipped in, really. Muirín had to turn himself sideways to avoid getting his flowing tasset caught up in the doorframe. Learning how to maneuver in tight quarters such as this was something he'd learn very quickly, something he'd HAD to learn in order to keep wearing the tasset, and he did love it so. It jostled slightly in the doorway regardless, and was still settling when Mui turned to face the room's other occupant: A man with half a head of height on the Goldeen and a distinct lack of pants. Mui stared for a moment at the black cloth that made up his... skirt? Loincloth? Something like his own tasset, only out of a flowing black cloth, looked like silk, as opposed to his own tasset, which was much stiffer. Then he realized he'd been staring a moment too long and jerked his attention back to the conversation.
”Technically, I'm not a kid anymore!” Mui offered to the tall man, with a cocky grin in the face of his close inspection. ”At least, about half the world doesn't see me as a kid anymore. Just a thought.” Mui honestly didn't know or care about what he was or wasn't old enough to do; He'd done worse than dancing before at the age of seventeen, and nobody had come breaking down his proverbial door to stop him. He had too much to do and far too little time to worry about silly things like legality.
Muirín took Suri's hand in his own and gave it a firm shake, in the manner that Ross had always taught him was proper when meeting a man bigger than himself, and added his own flourish: he used his index finger to rub Suri's wrist gently, even as he continued on with the gesture. He giggled boyishly, then added, ”Name's Muirín, but people seem to have an easier time calling me Mui!” For some reason, the second half of his name gave people more trouble than they could handle, and he'd adopted the moniker for sheer ease of use.
Muirín still grinned wide as Suri threw a whole lot of dancing jargon at him, but the look in Mui's blue eyes was completely blank incomprehension. He stood and stared for a moment, nodding.
”Right... Easy. I, uh, don't know how to dance. I feel like I should mention that. How about you lead and I follow, seeing as I've never done this before?”
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