Serve me the sky tonight~

[weaver_girl]

Characters: OPEN to all and sundry
Date/Time: All day on Saturday 28th
Location: The Park, Captain Planet
Rating: PG-13 (If there are higher-rated makeouts in the bushes, please take them elsewhere! Let's keep this entry yellowbar-safe.)
Summary: Outdoor PARTY in the Park. That's it

Comments

All day - she'll be stubbornly returning here between any threads. [OPEN]

[paintitgray]

She'd been a little reluctant to come, but Kurayami had to admit, the residents of the Sphere knew how to throw a party. Something about the colored lanterns and crowds reminded her of something, though she couldn't put her finger on it. As usual. Feh.

Instead, she'd gotten her hands on a paper plate somewhere and gone through a few lines, stacking it up with fruit and crackers. It was as good a brunch as anything she'd eaten lately, and better than most. She wandered away from the main crush of people, looking for someplace quiet, and found a battered picnic table tucked partly behind a bush and sat, smoothing out her skirts and setting her plate on the table.

Taking her portable writing desk from under her arm, she settled it on her knees, flipped open the lid and gazed out over the laughing, celebrating crowd. Well, she thought, a smile touching her mouth. There would be no shortage of people to sketch, today. She'd just have to be quick about it.

[its_me_hooray]

Very quick. After having a brief nap in the tree after helping set up, he was ready to continue life as usual. Night held his arms out, balancing on a thinner branch as he thought of the perfect way to enter the party. That's when he found a lone woman with wings and a halo sitting and starting to draw. Hmmm.

"What better way to start the flow of muse and creativity than a little excitement?" Night asked to himself, and strode on up until the branch was just overhead her position. He rolled his shoulders, took a deep breath...

"Juuuuump!" ... and shouted before he leaped. Down, down, down he went, performing one flip... two... three...!

Finally, he made a half-flip, landed upon the table in a handspring, and neatly bounced from the table to the grass beside. He quickly spun and stepped to face her, extending a finger to point at Kurayami.

"Welcome, welcome to Kagerou's party! You know, you can't party when you're all the way over here by yourself! Come and get a drink, play a few games, and mingle with the other butterflies!"

[paintitgray]

Kurayami liked to think of herself as a fairly tough nut to crack. Still, she jerked back with a strangled "Gah!" as Night pulled his stunt, clutching at the bench to keep from falling off it backwards.

After a shocked, flustered, and wide-eyed second, two facts quickly dawned: that this apparition was a harmless one, and that her writing desk was sliding off her knees. She made a grab for it, narrowly saving it from spilling over onto the grass, and resettled it on her lap. It made a good place to prop her elbows as she leaned forward and gave the stuntman--who was now grinning proudly at her, as though he'd just solved the mystery of life--a Look.

"The other butterflies, huh?" She clapped her gray-feathered wings together once. "I think you've got your taxonomy mixed up. And your idea of a welcome," she added, narrowing her eyes a little.

[its_me_hooray]

"Social butterflies, it's a term for those who flit among many others! Butterflies don't have feathers, you see," he answered, nodding his head as if agreeing with his own reasoning. He rubbed his chin.

"You look more like a bird or an angel than anything, but I'm no taxonomist." Night pondered some more, looking at her in silence for nearly a full minute. Perhaps he'd go look up what 'taxonomy' meant later, because he didn't have a damn clue.

"Hmmm, but my logic still stands! You must party with somebody, or it isn't a party at all! You poor thing, you don't know how, do you?" The demon suddenly looked concerned, making 'come hither' gestures with his hands.

"Come on, I'll teach you! We'll dance, I'll get you something better to eat, and we'll party until something drops, whether it's you or me!"

Backtag, woot! (She just needs a little convincing.)

[paintitgray]

As much as she would have liked to be annoyed, Kurayami couldn't maintain her frown in the face of this newcomer's unflappable joie de vivre.

"I know how to party," she protested. Now that she thought about it, she was becoming uncomfortably aware of her gut was telling her, where her memory had failed her, that she hadn't done anything that could be construed as "partying" in a while. "And I'm not an angel. Believe me on that point."

[its_me_hooray]

Night paused at that last remark, scratching his head. If she wasn't a bird, wasn't an angel, then what the heck do you call someone with wings and a halo? Oh well, he wouldn't let that bother him. His arms extended as he approached her again. The demon's idea of convincing was to take her things and set them neatly aside, then grasp her hands.

He was going to dance with her, right here, right now. The music was nice, and he was going to help Kagerou toward her success. He'd help make people happy, and he sure as hell hoped Kurayami wouldn't mind a little twirl or two!

"Haha, I read about this in a book once, but I don't have a rose to clench in my teeth! Hopefully this should be fine," he remarked, treating her to a little bit of one-sided tangoing.

Ow, my dignity! D:

[paintitgray]

Kurayami bridled as her desk was whisked off her knees, half rising to her feet to protest. "Hey! I--wahh!"

She yelped--yelped, and felt incredibly foolish for it a second later--as the stranger pulled her to her feet by both hands and, while she was still too startled to stop him, dipped her suddenly backwards. Wings flapping out to their full (albeit small) span in an instinctive attempt to balance herself, she grabbed his shoulders with both hands and clung there to keep herself from falling.

"Put me down!" she cried, frantically hoping nobody was watching this.

[its_me_hooray]

Oh, he was good at dipping! He should do it more often, whenever he gets the chance to dance. Night was too busy laughing despite her flapping and grasping in protest, one arm hooking at her lower back to keep her from toppling in that temporary loss of balance. Yellow eyes were bright and somewhat determined, but he didn't seem all that... villainous. Brutish?

"Hey, whoa, don't be mad! I know it's hard to learn to dance, but I'm here to teach you. See, you just follow my lead, and we'll soon be lighting the dance fl- uh, grass- with our vigor and spirit! ...Huh, you're really tense. Dancing's no fun when you're all stiff." And, as if he could not stoke the fire any more, he patted her lower back. Yep. Totally awkward and stiff.

"Relax," Night urged quietly, smiling.

[paintitgray]

He was. Touching. Her.

Kurayami's temper, though sometimes difficult to rouse, gave an affronted roar. People had to be looking by now, and the humor was rapidly leaching out of the situation.

"I said let me go!" she snapped; and before she could think about it, the fingers of her left hand closed tightly on his shirt and her right fist came around in an awkwardly-angled but unabashed punch, aimed square at his nose.

[its_me_hooray]

Hey, she touched him first, he thought it was okay! Either way, that fist connected with his face, sending him reeling and clutching his face. A thin stream of silver leaked from a nostril, his nose screaming in pain. The stinging sensation caused an eye to water up as he dabbed a finger to catch the blood.

"There's no need to be pissy, I'm trying to be nice!" He shouted, all but cupping his nose now. Night coughed and spat what ran into the back of his throat, quickly moving to grab a towel or something to plug it up until it stopped bleeding. He... he needed to find the refreshment table and make it brief, before people asked questions. He'd say he fell.

Yes, that'd work.

[paintitgray]

Kurayami staggered and landed on her backside as he dropped her, and hissed at the stinging in her knuckles, giving her hand a little shake. She hadn't meant to do that--not really hurt him, anyway. It had just sort of boiled up out of her...

Glancing up, she saw him clutching his nose and winced. "Shit," she muttered, and clambered back to her feet. There was blotting paper in her writing desk, and she rummaged out a sheet and offered it to him, feeling rather ashamed of herself. "Here," she said, a bit gruffly. "Pinch your nose hard and don't tilt your head back, you'll just swallow blood."

His blood was silver, she noticed with a stab of surprise. Well...she'd seen odder things, here.

Mid-afternoon?

[feathered_earth]

Krile was making her way around the party, munching on some carrots. She'd made an effort to look somewhat nice for the party, her definition of "somewhat nice" being a skirt that stopped a little way above her ankles. She didn't want to be hindered from running around, after all.

She caught sight of the young, winged woman with... a sketchbook. Krile paused, reminded suddenly of Renae. She'd have loved this party, just like she'd loved the ball when the Sphere had resembled an oceanscape last year, and there probably would have been another painting hung on the wall the next day.

"Hey there," Krile said, making her way over. "What are you drawing?"

Sure!

[paintitgray]

Glancing up as the girl approached, Kurayami's first instinct was to close her writing desk. She'd been absently sketching a couple of children playing a game that she guessed was tag, running and shrieking with laughter. Children were rare in the Sphere; she knew how lucky she was to be able to spend time with Apple.

On a whim, not sure why she'd done it, she'd added little wings to their backs, her charcoal skimming across the paper before she could reconsider. She wasn't sure what she thought of the effect, but it felt...familiar when she looked at it.

"Nothing much," she said, leaving the picture in view with an effort. "Just doodling."

[feathered_earth]

"You're really good." The kids on the page really did look like they were in motion. Krile had tried drawing more than once, but while she could do a reasonable attempt at a person standing or a tree or something, she'd never gotten the hang of of making something look like it was actually doing something.

She did get the feeling that this young woman might not want someone looking over her shoulder while she worked, though. "Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you," Krile said. "There just don't seem to be a lot artists in Edensphere." Sort of true. She wasn't about to say that she'd had a good friend who loved art and had disappeared a long time ago.

[paintitgray]

"There are more than you'd think," Kurayami said, leaving aside for the moment whether she considered herself an artist or someone who drew because she had nothing better to do. "You should see the stuff Qi draws, or..." Shit, she couldn't remember the other kid's name. He'd drawn a boat, once. It was a damn good boat, too.

"...well, I don't know what he's called, but he's good," she amended, feeling sheepish. "Probably better than me."

[feathered_earth]

"Qi's drawings are beautiful," Krile said, nodding. The couple of times they had spoken over the journals, Krile had been pretty well baffled by what Qi wrote. But it seemed that Qi used pictures to communicate in place of words sometimes. She and Renae would probably have had fun drawing at each other.

It had been long enough since Renae's disappearance for Krile to think of her without overt sadness, but she didn't really want to dwell on it or speak of her friend with someone she was just meeting now. "Who? Well, what was it that he drew?" she asked. Pictures were more memorable than writing; Krile probably knew who it was if Kurayami could describe the picture.