Welcome to Gaia! ::

It hadn’t been that long, she knew, but Sarah had already bored herself silly with the small apartment her family had been given. So here she was, aimlessly wandering the vast area of Eastern Commerce. It was almost immediately apparent that the area in itself was huge, but the growing population of shoppers had steadily made her more and more nervous. She had hidden her attributes well with a headband to hide her odd ears and pulling her tail through belt loops, but she was still paranoid of being caught as a godling.
And as always, the cat girl had attracted a small army of cats. Thankfully, there were far less cats here than in Southern, but she still had to deal with about three or four following cats every time she went somewhere.
Sarah had also been browsing a few shops, looking almost uninterested at some of the crap they sold. It was weird, Southern itself wasn’t a really big place compared to Central, but at least they sold some better stuff.

While she was contemplating sending some of the cats inside one of the stores just to piss the employees off, she noticed a darker man in the corner of her eye. It wasn’t really how he looked that had intrigued her, but that sudden flair of caution that creeped into a familiar part of her mind. It was that one guy from the boat! Carefully, she watched him pass her, trying to beat the urge to start a conversation with him. Of course, she lost, and began to catch up to the man. When she was close enough to that she wouldn’t have to shout to catch his ear, she spoke. “A lot weirder here, huh?”

“Yeah. Well, at least it’s here.” The girl mused, looking the man over now that he had realized she was there. He didn’t seem as bone-chillingly frightening as he had earlier, but he still gave off an air that unsettled her—but it was more of her feline instincts than anything.

She gave him a strange look when he said that they had met before. “Really?” Now her own mind was reeling, trying to recall anything about the man in front of her. “Ah, I remember that! That was a while ago.” Now she knew. He was a whole lot younger back then, she guessed his god had seen to that.

Sarah took his hand in a firm grip, shaking it. It may not have been the proper way to greet a woman, but she still wasn’t really used to being treated as such. “I’m Sarah. Nice to meet you, Valeriu.” Huh, his name was really odd, but it matched his accent.
After that thought, she had looked around at her feet to look at the small army that had began to rest around her. “Sorry about the cats, they tend to hang around me.”

As she was met with Vale’s grin, the small poke from his fang did not surprise her in the least. She knew he had feline attributes, even though she did not know which kind—with those teeth, she guessed a bigger, more violent cat. She would still have to be careful around him.

“They should be fine after a while,” The girl said with a shrug, “What choice do they have, anyway?”

She really didn’t put much thought into how her parents felt with the whole ordeal, but probably because she didn’t want to think about them too much—they were still on her s**t list for telling her she was a boy for so many years.
“They’ll get over it.” She added suddenly, her words callous.

Her head drooped down a bit as she listened to Vale silently. She knew that every single thing he said was right, and she was just being childish for not wanting to forgive them. “… I know,” the girl muttered, trying not to look at him. Looking at someone as they were getting onto you about something is one of the worst things, she knew, it was like egging them on.

As he turned his face away in embarrassment, Sarah looked back up at him. She didn’t really see his face flush, so it was confusing to her. “Er… You okay?”

Hearing the new topic of conversation, she perked up a little bit. “Oh, uh… Sure.” She was getting a little hungry, and she had gotten a little money earlier in the day, so it should have been fine.

As Sarah began to follow the man, her awful sense of foreboding seemed to fade. Maybe he wasn’t as scary as she thought, and that a lot of what she had felt when she saw him on the boat was just her overreacting.

“A what?” She asked back, a little surprised at the question. “You mean those really pale girls that don’t eat meat?” At the thought of even being compared to those little pansies, she frowned. “Hell no.”
She remembered a few she had encountered—they were frighteningly tiny and complained on how her and her family was ‘murdering’ animals for their enjoyment. It was confusing, though. Plants were living, too, and by Sarah’s standards they were murdering just as much as she was.

The girl grinned, nodding. “Yeah, true.”
How long had it even been since Sarah went out to eat for a change? She knew it had been a while, since most of the time she had either been fed her mother’s cooking or scrounging out in the streets for whatever she could find. Maybe it was time to actually get something halfway decent in her stomach. After all, she could feel the tremors in the organ almost like clockwork now.

Well, this was awkward. Sarah paused briefly, watching the man as he reacted to a smell with a heightened interest. She tried sniffing the air in order to catch the scent herself, but to no avail. “Odd, I don’t smell anything.” She commented. Well, nothing out of the ordinary, at least—maybe he had a better sense of smell?

“Hm, maybe. You never know.” She commented, shrugging. Ghosts were a definite possibility now, knowing everything else that goes on.

The godling just stared, almost dumbfounded when she saw the man run off around a corner. After a few seconds, she gave chase in hopes of finding out what he was so excited about. Of course, she found out when she turned the corner herself and saw a large array of the type of small shops she was familiar with in Southern. “Oh, cool, at least we weren’t the only ones with these stores”

At the question, she rose a brow. “Huh? Oh, whatever you want is fine by me.”