Welcome to Gaia! ::

Who: Dani, Yves
Where: Outside Yves' house.
When: Bright and early.
Weather: Sunny but with a bite to the air.



Texting just isn't cutting it, which she supposes isn't all that surprising in retrospect. It is still somewhat early, and Yves' day off on top of that, if she recalls correctly; there's no good reason for him to be out of bed yet, and honestly, if she hadn't gotten her package from Lab 305 that morning, she wouldn't be up, either. Still, here she is, an aged messenger bag slung over her shoulder with the fel essence and empty soul bottle carefully tucked inside, phone gripped in one gloved hand and the other raised to knock insistently on his front door.

He's either going to open the door and let her in, or he's going to have to deal with very annoyed neighbors. He lives in a nice part of town, and she likes it quite a lot -- maybe when she's ready to look for a place of her own to buy, she'll check this one out -- but either way, she knows he won't want his neighbors to hate him.

The call continues to ring out, and she shifts her weight from foot to foot, excitement and impatience warring, two fold: she's dying to share this news with someone, yes, but she really wants to share it with Yves, because he's the only person she knows who will really understand.

She hasn't been back in town long, all right, and hasn't had time to make too many friends. She hasn't even signed up for a gym membership yet, which needs to be rectified as soon as possible. (Her morning run isn't going to do the whole job for her, after all.)

When the door opens in front of her she beams, smile bright and wide, and pulls her phone away from her ear. "Good morning! I brought coffee."

The look on his face would probably wilt the good cheer of a lesser woman, but Dani is nothing if not doggedly determined when she sets her mind to something, and today is going to be A Good Day.

Even running on a full graveyard shift stacked on top of seven hours of sleep.

She tucks her phone in her jacket pocket and reaches for the traveler's cup of coffee, completely unaware that her excitement combined with lack of sleep makes her look mildly manic, and thrusts it toward Yves.

"I was approved," she blurts, shoulders rising and squeezing her scarf close to her face. "To be a Guardian. I have my essence and my soul bottle with me."

Dani completely ignored the chair pulled out for her, not to be intentionally impolite -- just because she was so excited that she didn't think she could sit. The energy humming under her skin demanded that she move, threatened to bubble over if she didn't find some way to vent it, and she was afraid that if she tried to sit and have a reasonable conversation she'd end up shouting in her excitement.

Unfortunately, there was a little too much of her mother in her, and they tended to raise their voices when pleased, when angry, when sad -- just, a lot.

She began to pace, twisting her hands in front of her, and fixed him with an affronted look. "No, not a credit card -- you're not listening, Yves."

Peanut began to shake harder, maybe picking up on her tone, but didn't manage to vibrate out of Yves' hold. Dani wouldn't mind if he did, because she actually enjoyed animals to a certain point, and it would have given her something to do with her hands, but he stayed firmly rooted.

Smile breaking out, she leaned forward to grip the back of her chair, giving it a little shake. "By the Lab. I got my fel essence, it's -- do you want to see it?"

Without bothering to wait for his answer, she reached around into her messenger bag, pulling out a squat, thick-glassed bottle with a beautiful shimmering mist inside.

"Not yet."

Dani winced, a little bit of her enthusiasm waning as she imagined the conversation she still needed to have with her mother. It might have been a little bit easier if she'd clued her mom in on the fact that she was even applying to be a guardian, but it had just felt like borrowing trouble. Potential children had been a huge source of contention for them ever since she'd first admitted to having problems with Tristan, and her mother was much more of a conventional sort of person than not.

Not that she thought her mom would go out of her way to be awful to her future grand-Raevan, just that she wouldn't understand -- and to this day, still didn't understand why Dani and Tristan hadn't stubbornly stayed together and tried to make it work -- and there were few things more frustrating that trying to explain anything to her mother.

Rubbing her forehead, she sighed. "But I'll tell her soon. I wanted to tell you first."

Her enthusiasm came back, brightening her tired expression, she hugged the fel bottle close to her chest. "You're the reason I even applied. Can you believe it? I have so much to do--"

Telling her mother was going to be the least of her worries. She needed to completely overhaul the house, not to mention discuss with her mother the prospect of converting the guest bedroom into her future Raevan's room.

For some people, that might have seemed overwhelming. For Dani, it was just exciting.

"Yves. You have to come shopping with me."

Yves was her best friend for a reason, and that reason was primarily that her understood exactly who called the shots in their friendship.

Okay, that wasn't the only reason, but everything went so much more smoothly when people were amenable to taking direction. It wasn't that she was bossy, per se, she just had a knack for breaking a problem down into reasonable pieces and delegating tasks so that everything was done quickly and efficiently. It only made sense that she be in charge of deciding how and when to do things, because she was the one who came up with the plan! If people thought that made her overbearing or bossy or whatever they decided to call her for her logical, reasonable approach to things, that wasn't her problem.

(She was a little bossy. It ran in her family, and it wasn't so much that she didn't want to admit it, but that she honestly couldn't see it.)

When Yves reaches for the coffee, she smiles again, passing it over with a tired, punchy laugh. "That's why I brought it. I had a cup on my way over," she adds, reaching for the spare and taking a sip. "I'm never going to get to sleep tonight."

His next question brings a furrow to her brow, and she sits down heavily, the bottle still clutched to her chest. She almost can't believe that it's real; she doesn't want to put it down now, just in case she does and she wakes up to realize she was never really accepted after all.

"I have... no idea," she confesses, drawing her lower lip into her mouth and chewing worriedly. "I know I have to find one, but I don't want to kill anything... maybe I can find something sickly, or... well, it needs to be kind of creepy, you know? Because of this."

She digs in her bag until she finds the soul container, juggling the bottle in one hand and the soul glass in the other as she offers it to him. "It's read and it looks like... I don't even know what that looks like. A hieroglyph, maybe? I need to Google it."