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 Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 12:35 am
 Once again, the kurai found himself taking refuge in the dead front room, busily scanning through a stack of books brushed with dust and antique fingerprints. There was also a tome of fairy tales open at his side, and he referenced it occasionally, flipping from one description of soured familial ties to another which revolved around pelted creatures that spoke in riddles. His chin bore black stains drawn in an unsteady line, done with the tip of the pen he used to write and scratch between thoughts, always heedless of which end was turned toward his skin. He was dark enough that it was hard to spot, and the room itself was heavily shadowed, lit by a single, dim bulb draped with hideous paisley fabric that he'd recovered from a heap of scraps. Rue was not a fan of brightness; it always seemed to plot against him while he worked, marking charts of seas and skies, fumbling with newsprint and circling what he found to be pertinent. Sometimes, he mumbled quiet fragments of dialogue to the moths that found their way indoors and flew blind, sharing theories with their unengaged antennae. He didn't like them much either, but he let them stay where they were, darklings like himself who sought out solitude and were baffled by the light.
It was late, but he often forgot to check the time in his distraction, only the gritty sensation overtaking his eyes signaling that he was deprived at all. But that was easily ignored, and he made another notation before leaning back on his cushions pulled from the sofa, eyeing the fluttering wing-beats and ugly, roiling patterns cast across the ceiling. A second's reprieve was all that he allowed before he lurched back into a hunched position, running a finger down the line of equations he'd concocted, matching them up to the maps and the narratives. His lips pursed, tapping the pen on the top of the notepad to make a small dot-to-dot before he patiently scratched out a section in the middle and rewrote it in his tiny, cramped script. It was, he decided after a steady, century-long heartbeat, little better.
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Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 12:47 am
 As so many of his kind, the muted-jade Yuniko found himself suffering from an over-abundance of curiosity - which, really...it couldn't hurt him, now could it? Curiosity was only dangerous to cats! It was this curiosity that prompted Sceth to be lurking about in the gloomy darkness of various rooms in the building.
Until he came across a shimmering flash in the low light from the front room, all he'd come across were three dust-bunnies, two sleeping Yuniko and a couple of the "pets" that others tended to keep.
Which was why, once Rue had been spotted, the green-eyed Light could not help himself. He had to go in to see what had the angular Yuniko so deeply enthralled. 'Strange looking fellow, sharp edges and such glittering pieces....his horn, and are his eyes shining like that? How pretty! Yes, strange but pretty!'
"What's so interesting?" Sceth bounded in and all but threw himself at Rue and his books.
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Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 1:36 pm
A shift in particles around his carefully arranged workspace came a second before the words did, motion slicing through invisible motes and crying out to his sensitive skin. Even so, his head turned slowly to the source of all the uproar, the silvery-blue mirrors of his irises regarding the other creature with vacant wideness. The words registered late, and he reached out to encompass the things on the coffee table, gathering them up to his chest with thin arms. A few loose scrolls and pages spilled out into his lap, but he ignored them for the moment, too intent on displaying ownership. These were his things - calculations, theories, twisted up memories tied in with geography and dreams - he did not like others seeing his labor in an infant stage. It was one of the many reasons that he kept to himself: he was scribbling and reading more often than he was not.
"Everything." The answer was simple enough to shape, delivered in perfect monotone despite the Light's unnecessary disturbance. Another newcomer? He had introduced the last one, he remembered, which meant that the duty fell to someone else. But the loud being did not appear to be lost or nervous, beyond comfortable in an environment to which he didn't belong. Perhaps just a wanderer then, his territory the house in its entirety, though why he had happened across the location the fey yuniko had chosen was anyone's guess.
Truthfully, the actions of others forever eluded Rue's universal set of guiding principles, the things by which all else conformed without trouble. Numbers, letters, natural disasters, all of these had an understandable basis, an order which allowed the keen observer to make an educated guess about what would occur next. But individuals had that thing, that will bit that made them wildly unpredictable. For instance, what sort of fellow would be strolling around in unlit corridors at such an ungodly hour? His hypothesis about being alone, left to perform his research in peace, did not add up when a white-haired variable was tossed in to demolish the set.
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