Welcome to Gaia! ::

"A phone?" Lethe didn't bother to hide her surprise at the sudden change of subject, "Cell phone? Yeah." Obligingly she swept her hands over her neck, fingers seeking out the thin cord that kept her purse at her side. Following it down, she located it pinned between her and the back of the bench (a lump that was indistinguishable from the knots in the heavy fabric of her shirt, and the River Fa'e didn't tend to give much thought to physical discomfort anyway) and shifted to free it.

Pulling it into her lap, she swiftly unclasped it and pulled out a tiny, silver flip-phone -- state-of-the-art and near pristine, with a camera she never really used and probably games and music and all those things. Lethe and modern technology had only a very delicate tolerance of each other (a "fulfill your primary function so that I may have hot baths and soap operas, and I won't short-circuit you and kill us both" sort of pact.) An attempt on Xo's part to convince her to personalize it by smothering it with tiny stick-on gems and charms proved mostly unfruitful: Lethe had secret dreams of using the cell phone like they did in the movies, the mob bosses flatly telling an unheard voice on the other line to 'make them an offer they can't refuse', and everyone could plainly see that they didn't have Hello Kitty visibly winking on their phones. Between Xo's belligerent defense of individuality and the arts, and Lethe's staunch refusal, both girls finally reached a grudging compromise in favor of moving on to flip through horrid trashy romance novels instead: a single tiny black cat charm hung on Lethe's cell phone, teeth marks visible and one of its eyes missing. (It was one the River Fa'e had to rescue from one of her younger 'siblings', and the only one she thought looked appropriately menacing -- at least until someone made a human being with a tiny enough skull she could dangle from her cell phone as a warning.)

She rifled through her purse a little longer but was unable to come up with either paper or a pencil (both things of little use to someone who could neither read nor write.) Instead, she offered the cell phone directly to her companion, figuring this had to be the only reason he had asked, "You want to put your number in it?"

She eyed Nao's phone with subtle interest -- if her suddenly straighter posture was any indication, she obviously enjoyed the incredibly tiny advantage her superior phone gave her -- but otherwise decided not to comment. Trusting that he had performed whatever modern ritual would allow her to contact him from long distances at later, convenient moments, she accepted her phone back and put it away in her purse.

"Guardians don't tend to bring her toddlers out in these parts of town," she noted automatically, and rethinking her statement and what had prompted it, added in a airier tone, "There aren't very many toddlers anymore, anyway. The production of new Fa'e has been slow... If one doesn't count 'Lost' Fa'e as being new, anyway." This, combined with Airi's disappearance, presented a slightly worrying possibility... And a far more intriguing (if slightly heretic by Fa'e standards) one: was it only Airi's blood that could bring Fa'e to life?...

Her slightly darker train of thought was only encouraged by Naolin's next statement. Wrinkling her nose, Lethe thought of the rarely spoken-of moments of human sacrifice in Greek culture -- it was something that waned as decades waxed by, when the clay fools began to think themselves above it. "Unfortunately, not very many people are willing to die for their gods nowadays. I mean, much less us. We don't exist anymore, or even at all, we're just old disproved stories made up to attempt to explain things nobody understood..."

A pause. "...Not that I disagree with you. It might give people a better appreciation of their mostly pathetic lives, at least."