Welcome to Gaia! ::

She sat in the seat directly across from him. She took a second to glance at the pen and the papers before she realized that she was supposed to fill them out. Picking the writing utensil up, she began filling out the first page. Aileen sighed, "A million mile journey begins with one step" she whispered under her breath. She didn't acknowledge Marc's stare but did look up when he asked about her past. The fateful day. The day everything changed.

She felt her eyes glaze over as it flashed through her mind. Her on her knees trying to keep calm. Two people speaking in a foreign language back and forth. Aileen remembered the helpless feeling, and remembered what the person hired her said, "You will become a hero, for selflessly defending your country." Selfless right. They didn't say that this job required more selfishness than most Aileen closed her eyes and when she opened them she was back to reality. She met Marc's eyes, "I don't want to talk about it."

Aileen smiled, "While I'm listening to you, I'll stop you if I do."

After she said that she put a fork full of lasagna in her mouth and settled in to hear a very long story. At least, she hoped it would be long.

Whitney was shocked to hear the man reply in Japanese. Shocked and wary. Japan held no fond memories for him and though he occassionally slipped into the language, he preferred to keep his nationality hidden. There was nothing to be done for it now, however. "Erm...I'm fine," he replied in English. His lips were stretched into a polite smile, a position that his facial muscles found unfamiliar. "Please, let me buy you another drink." He may be abrasive and tactless but he could be polite when the occassion required him to.

The man before him was exotic in his own way, a study of contrast with his pale skin, and ebony hair and eyes. Aesthetically, Whitney classified him as good looking. But the way the man kept smiling was unnerving. Whitney found himself fingering one of his shield ofuda that was hidden in his pants. There was just something dangerous about this man and the smile brought to mind a smug predator as the prey came closer and closer. After all the years spent alone, he trusted his instincts.

Part of Whitney was telling him to get out of there but he could not help being fascinated by the man. As a child he was always too curious about everything, and as an adolescent nothing had changed. He wanted to know everything about everything. So it was with this often-harmful curiosity that he accepted the cigarette. "Thank you. But please let me buy you a drink anyway, to celebrate our home country." That was the biggest piece of BS to come out of his mouth since he pretended to be a girl for two days - it was a dare that he was never going to accept again.

"My name is Whitney. And you?" He deliberately did not tell the man his family name, too many people had heard of it for all the wrong reasons.

The diatribe Whitney categorised as 'bitter', surprised him into laughter or to be more accurate, a snicker. It perfectly reflected the way he felt about his home country. And the way the man slipped from raging to suave was impressive all on its own.

"That one's my treat then," the man said when a drink came to a stop in front of Whitney.

"Thank you," Whitney said with a polite but distant smile. The enigmatic grin he received for his troubles reminded Wthiney of the cheshire cat. And like the cheshire cat the man before him was not someone to be trusted.

He began to take a sip from his drink, which smelled alcoholic in nature, but froze for a mere second when he heard the man's name. "That's a very pretty name," he said quickly in an attempt to cover up his minute reaction. "You were born in Japan? "

Having heard the man's name, Whitney was more careful with his drink, alcohol would only hinder his actions. He knew something of this man from the chatrooms and forums dedicated to the BSPA and its members. This man was famous for all the wrong reasons.

"You must have as well, or at least lived there a while, to speak Japanese so fluently," the man commented, after ordering another drink.

Had he been his grandfather, Whitney could have deflected the question and changed the subject. As it was however, he was only sixteen and had less than a fifth of the training his grandfather had. Therefore, when the inevitable - but unspoken - question came, he could not help the contemptuous twist to his lips that was reflexive. "Born," he said, trying to modulate his voice into something resembling casualness. Somehow, he had a feeling he failed entirely.

Dom watched Marduk's actions with a sigh. The Fae was angry, that was for sure, and his treatening shrinking of the sidhe's cage was evidence of that. On the werewolf's part, he was less angry and more confused. This sidhe seemed almost positive that what he was saying was correct. But Dom had to remind himself that methods like listening to their heartbeat and watching their movements worked with humans and may not have had any grounds on the physiology of sidhes and other fae.

"Well, it looks as if you've gotten yourself in a bit of a bind," he told the sidhe. "Why don't you tell us about the teleporting that got you here and we'll all try to figure out what went wrong and why you ended up here."