Welcome to Gaia! ::

The elf had wanted to inquire more about the origins of the Shattered children, but Ioyla's comments ended her confidence on pressing the issue. The demon girl was right. No matter why or how it happened, the point was that it did in fact happen. So, watching the fiesty pair sitting across the table, Akina pushed away her feelings of ambiguity and instead tried to focus on the, uh, joy that Brimstone brought to her life.

Meanwhile, Brimstone surveyed Ilistala with increasing curiosity. Ah, so this one liked capers as well? Plus ten cool points. And for each time Stala chimed in, Brim would respond, "Capers! Yes, caaaappeeers!" His voice was still high in his toddler status and had a whining lull in its timbre that carried sharply across the small outdoor seating region.

"Oh, yes, I do remember Eight as well. It's a confined world!" Akina's attempt at salvaging an age old adage was less than perfect, but she smiled nonetheless, assuming her point got across. Even after being here for a few years, the elf was still adjusting to the concept of slang and adages. "She steals babies?" Akina joked, curling Brim closer to her. "I'll keep that in mind." Winking festively, blue eyes searched again for the waiter as Akina throat was already parched from a long day of power plant touring.

"Brimstone is really my only adopted child, but my roommates have lots of children. They all bonded with me originally, but... well, they chose to realign themselves once they aged a bit. Yurimi is a feral-humaoid child attached to my roommate Calliope, and Naraka, who is closer to my age, has her blood daughter Anarriima and her two angel children Renon and Jubilee. Oh, and I also watch over a girl by the name of Nadia during the summer." Slightly embarrassed by the wealth of information that she had just uncharacteristically rattled off, Akina let a slight blush cross her cheeks as she smiled and dropped her eyes.

Hoping to steer the conversation back away from herself, she glanced back to Ioyla and asked, "So, Ilistala is your only child then? It's so strange how creatures in need of guardians seem to congregate here. Gaia is like a nexus for all the magicks and energies of all the different planes of existance." Or a sanctuary, Akina finished internally for her own personal motivation. Glancing back up, she awaited an answer from Ioyla.

"The difficulty of rearing children translates through all cultures," Akina replied with a nod, tracing her finger across the atom design on Brimstone's tee shirt. The Shattered eyed her for a moment, but allowed her to continue. Secretly, he liked it. It was soothing for the little bugger to feel a matronly touch.

Green eyes seemed to swirl in agreement with Ilistala's demand for capers, pushing Brim to stare at Akina with a hungry glance. Smoothing Brim's hair from his eyes, the elf shot fierce glares at all the staff that passed by from across the restaurant. Her little boy never ate in front of her, and the one time in his life thus far that he wanted to the assholes were late.

Determined not to miss the opportunity to see Brim eat, Akina clenched the arms of her chair, deciding she would give it five more minutes before she ran into the kitchen and relocated their waiter's face up his colon where it seemed to belong.

Lucky for the waiter, his bad-dye-job-self had the wine, water, and capers in hand already and was sluggishly making his way toward the table. He set two glasses of water by Akina and a needlessly large soup bowl of capers (likely to prevent a need for a second trip to the table on his part) in addition to the wine and juice.

Wordlessly, he turned on his heel and left, though Akina did not mind. She would just as soon he not be anywhere near her vicinity anymore. Ready to move the conversation away from the waves of emotion that Ioyla's revealing confession had sent shooting across the table to Akina's empath senses, the elf pulled the bowl of capers close to the center of the table and ventured, "Ilistala may have some capers if she wishes. I very much doubt Brimstone could finish all of these even if he wanted."

If Brimstone had of been paying attention, that statement might have annoyed him, but lucky for Akina, he was busy staring up at the smoke stacks with the kind of hungry stare that a junkie gives a needle three weeks after rehab starts.

Unsure of what the giggles were about, Akina just chose to execute the old smile-and-nod manuever that she had used numerous times back before she spoke English. No matter how long she was here in Gaia, the elf was still prone to missing out on cultural jokes or turns of phrase that she was unfamiliar with. Ah well, it was an uphill battle!

Blue eyes dropped to the capers as Ioyla mentioned them, surveying their sickly army green hue with a raised eyebrow. "No, they are pickled peas, actually. But I imagine lizard eggs might be a bit tastier..." Smirking, Akina signaled that she had made a joke, and just to reinforce that point, she chuckled to herself a little.

Brimstone, meanwhile, was fully ready to dig in, extending a hand toward the bowl when he was struck by a rogue caper right in the forehead. But instead of boinking as Stala had desired, the caper actually sunk into his skin, wedging halfway in. Brim narrowed his eyes as the caper began to dissolve having touched his skin. This, too, had been another talent Brim had developed: the ability to dissolve things at will as opposed to just destroying everything (though he still slipped up when surprised or distracted).

Looking not much unlike a pale green bead of sweat, the remains of the caper began to drip toward the tip of his nose, but were completely evaporated before they could bead up and splash onto his shirt. Akina tensed, waiting to restrain Brimstone from retaliation, but to her surprise, he merely snatched the bowl closer to himself as he stared at Ilistala.

Then, in one fluid motion, he slammed his small face into the bowl, engulfing every last caper and making the most horrible sucking noises. In a minute, the bowl was licked clean, and Brimstone returned to his seated position with a satisfied look on his face. Throwing one last stubborn glance Stala's way, he opened his mouth to let out a terrible toddler burp, which sent a partially chewed caper flying toward Stala's face.

The blue-eyed elf watched with curiosity as Ioyla began to have a spasm in her seat over the true nature of capers. Pickled peas weren't so bad, really. In her homeland, people consumed far stranger things than that. Still, not even Akina herself would care to touch a caper. They were quite bitter and did not agree with her earthy tastes.

Quietly scolding Brim for his manners, Akina smiled apologetically at Ioyla and Ilistala. Honestly, the little Shattered had no social graces whatsoever. "Bahahafafahafarhghshshsnort..." Brim's laughter was about as attractive as the late Johnny Gambino in a bikini and cut offs, but the child was too young to realize how atrocious he sounded. He was simply happy to have distressed Ilistala.

Above him, Akina narrowed her eyes in disappointment, raising a threatening eyebrow. Brimstone, in turn, gave her a why-are-you-looking-at-me-like-that-she-started-it look, but let his laughter trail off. Besides, he was really full from all those damn capers.

"There is no need to apologize. Brimstone is quite the little hellraiser himself." Smiling, Akina sipped lightly at her water, glancing to the street from time to time. "So, have you lived here long?"

Something inside Akina shifted uncomfortably though it was not apparent to an untrained eye. Where was she from? That was complicated. Uh...

"Oh, I've been here for some time. I fear its my love of reading that has colored my accent, not my heritage." Yeah so she was being vague, but it wasn't an outright lie. Besides, though she enjoyed Ioyla, she wasn't sure if she could really trust her, especially when trust was an issue that Akina had with her closest friends too.

"Brimstone taught himself to read," Akina interjected, lifting her glass to her lips and taking a long sip of water. Despite her embarrassment at not having noticed her son was reading, the elf was more than anything just proud of his accomplishment. The child couldn't really form complete sentences, but he could read a whole newspaper article. "It's actually a little embarrassing," she confessed in a rare moment of openness.

"I would always see him straining his eyes at books and text, but Brimstone has a habit of surveying everything like that, living and nonliving. It is as if he is evaluating whatever passes before his eyes and logging it into his memory. So, I just ignored it until I heard him reading aloud last week." A thin finger traced the rim of the water glass, blue eyes flickering from the top of Brim's mound of hair back to Ioyla's face. "He always finds a way to surprise me," she mused at last, ruffling the Shattered's hair once more.

While the manners of the two creatures before her seemed to need a little bit of work, Akina could not fault Ioyla and Ilistala for much else. In fact, she really didn't even fault them for their strange table manners. It had been in Akina's experience to appreciate the differences between creatures as that was what made the world so diverse. It also helped that the government she spurned had goals antithetical to that, which made her love individual idiosyncracies even more.

The beams of happiness the two shared leaked through the air into the keen empath's senses, making her smile and giggle uncharacteristically. It happens when you are susceptible to the emotions of others. "Children are definitely... enigmatic!" Eyes upturned in another laugh, riding on the high that the mother-daughter pair was emanating.

Brimstone, on the other hand, just watched curiously as the two worked, eying the bottle of wine skeptically. It smelled faintly of the stuff that Akina had a glass of every night, but it wasn't as rich of an aroma. Pointing a finger at the bottle, Brim inquired, "Juice?" He threw a glance at Akina and Ioyla, waiting for one to confirm his diagnosis.