<blockquote>ALL THIS RUNNING AROUND, WELL IT'S GETTING ME DOWN tria 3rd, 81382. private for charlotte. JUST GIVE ME A PAIN THAT I'M USED TO He was the first person they called, the police told him. Radin held the cordless receiver in his tight-clenched fist to one ear, and then the mohawked drug dealer told him what had happened - "at the Rage; Riot Stormwing was shot and killed," - a gang of men with hooded eyes and viper-teeth. The arden set his jaws, the phone suddenly shaking in his loose, trembling grip, and then it fell to the floor with a resounding clatter of plastic hitting tile. The line went dead: a black humming of flies. Then he was gone out the door, a smudge of green against a sky so pale it was almost white. --- Radin sat on a bench in a park, hunched over his chocolate ice cream - it was completely gone on one side, and on the other, with the blinding heat and sun, it was slowly dripping down the cone. He quickly lapped it up with his tongue, and then shoved his aviators back up the bridge of his nose - behind them was a film of dried tears. He knew this would've happened eventually. Just not like this.
The world was a vacuum of dead heat, the air motionless, giving Alecto the impression that there was no air at all, no atmosphere -- just an impossibly fiery nothingness. A bead of sweat trailed across the naked skin of her back, over scapula, into the groove of her spine, down those many tiny ridges of vertebrae, and finally to the light indentation that indicated her sacrum, whereupon it seeped into the fibers of her light, thin shorts. She shuddered under the droplet's touch, readjusting her grip on her parasol. The park wavered into view ahead as she rounded a street corner, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Those trees, those luscious green trees with long boughs filled with leaves -- they cast a cool aura around them, irregular and organic shapes of blue encircling their roots. Shade. Her pace increased perceptibly when her eyes focused in on that alluring sight. Shade meant the chance to lower her parasol without fear of the sun's rays on her heavily-tattooed, hairless, albino skin. Shade meant a degree of relief from this weary heat. She reached the park in moments, long legs flashing white and rainbowed in the brilliant light of midafternoon. Foregoing the gravel path, she stepped directly onto the verdant carpet of grass and headed toward her favorite tree, across from an occupied park bench. Its boughs reached in all directions, vast and long and wide, its leaves like giant blue-green sheets of paper, its bark glistening the color of wet clay. Taking a deep breath through her nose, she inhaled its citrusy aroma, half-smiled, and set her parasol down at its roots. It was time for a bit of contortion practice.
<blockquote>Leaning back against the bench in rapturous lassitude, Radin plucked a loose thread from the hem of his shirt with cigarette-slim fingers. He noticed, then, the thill walking, then standing by the towering monolith of a tree across from him - she was furless, carrying a parasol to shield her from the sun. Albino, too? he wondered, cocking his be-mohawked head at an oblique angle, and knotted his fingers in his lap, his delicately-chiseled ankles crossing. His slumped, gangling frame reminded one of an cessi just before its docile, maladroit and 'adolescent' limpness matures into the lean, wiry musculature typical of the breed. "Hey," he called out, grinning softly - his eyes were invisible behind his opaque sunglasses, but they were wide with wonder: never before had he seen such an... oddity as this. "Some really nice work you have there," Radin said, gesturing to her tattoos.
"Hey." Alecto's head turned toward the voice smoothly, and a smile lit her pale face upon seeings its source -- its lanky, mohawked source, slouching against a bench across the way. She tilted her head slightly to the side, subconsciously mirroring the arden's posture, and nodded, once, returning his greeting. "Some really nice work you have there." "Thanks," she called back from across the narrow path that separated them, and a soft pink tinged her cheeks momentarily. At this stage in her life, she was more than accustomed to compliments on her ink -- but when they came from lean, bright ardens with killer shades, she was momentarily thrown as off-balance as any. She added with another grin, "Like the hair, by the way. Dyed or natural?" While speaking, she raised her right arm and used the other to grab its elbow, pulling gently until said elbow was nearly level with her left shoulder, upper right arm against the back of her neck. Still smiling, she continued to apply pressure until elbow touched shoulder -- and there it was, the start of her daily contortion warmup. OoC; That last paragraph is confusing. xD I hope it's clear enough that she's doing a tricep stretch.
<blockquote>Radin crossed his legs at the ankle, and then knotted his hands in his lap, grinning wryly. He’d never been good with spoken language; body language and writing were his key modes of communication, and it’d always been that way. As for words themselves - he was incapable of deciding whether or not they ought to be picked up between the ironic pincers of quotation marks, just as someone unaccustomed to fine dining will hesitate before an array of knives and forks. "Like the hair, by the way. Dyed or natural?" she asked, and he sat up some, readjusting the angles of his broad shoulders, his wiry neck, his finely-sculpted arms. "Natural," he said with the unearthly conviction of a clairvoyant, and then, nodding towards her in a subtle gesture accompanied by a brief waving of hands, asked, "what’re you doing? Yoga?" He cocked his head, and then remarked – "my name is Radin, by the way."
