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Snippet #2550465

located in New Cairo, a part of Red Apotheosis, one of the many universes on RPG.

New Cairo

None

Setting

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Character Portrait: Khalid Zaman Character Portrait: Katia Pasternak
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Standing Sycamore Apartments | Nile Delta
10 AM





The scene still replayed behind Katia's eyelids every time they closed. It wasn't a memory easily forgotten, despite her attempts to white wash it with a liberal application of alcohol. Even now, in her half-awake dreams the monster was there. An amorphous form created from flesh, muscle, bone, and teeth; shifting and morphing into even more grotesque structures with every moment that passed. Katia jolted wide awake as the memory of the things roar hit her like a shotgun blast to the chest. She found herself leaning forward in her dining room chair having broken out in a cold sweat and panting heavily. The chair's arm creaked in response to the taloned hand digging deep into the fake wood. Predatory eyes searched her kitchen as her survival instincts began to die down. There was nothing with her in the three-room apartment she called home, nothing but the empty bottles of various liquors littering her dining table and the sound of an excited Arabic disc jockey rambling on the radio. Once she realized that, she blinked and her eyes returned their normal shade of brown, and talons melted away back into ordinary fingers.

A sigh escaped her lips as she settled back into the chair, wincing as her right arm brushed up against it's edge. She'd fractured her right elbow when the monster batted her away with one of it's arm and tossed her down the street like a rag doll. The arm was now bound tightly against her body in a sling, and a stubborn ache plagued her with every breath. However, all of the other flesh wounds she had sustained were all but gone, thanking to her Morpher's magic. Skin could be restitched and knitted back together, fractured or broken bones were not so easily dismissed, unfortunately. Neither was a hang-over at that. She could sober up in an instant, but once it reached her head it was all she could do but suffer through it. She reached out with her sole good arm and plucked a wrinkled pack of cigarettes from the table. She then Juggled between placing one into her mouth and fishing a lighter out of her pocket to try and light it. Eventually she accomplished her goals and took a drag on a much needed cigarette.

Once more, she found her thoughts broaching a topic that'd become all too familiar of late. It always began the same, asking herself why had the monster attacked her first. She had not fought the monster alone of course, but it was her it had found first. The way it shattered the entrance to the Nightjar, ate the patrons and then turned it's eyes on her. What happened next was a blur of action and reaction. She'd fought the beast, along with a few others, before the Raptora intervene. She was not so proud or arrogant as to admit without their timely intervention that she most certainly would've died.

Katia was down an arm, and the way it took the Raptora's attack... She stood no chance. And the way it dissolved in front of her eyes, it's skin and muscle flaking off until nothing remained. She sharply remembered vomiting before the Raptora began to question her and sworn into a silence agreement. It wasn't a hard thing to do, Katia didn't think she'd ever want to talk about what she saw. She reached over and grabbed the nearest bottle she could, and juggled her cigarette and the bottle before turning it up in her lips. All for naught, as it turned out the bottle was dry.

Slamming the bottle down, she leaned back into her chair and took a long drag on her cigarette. Her head still throbbed, her arm still hurt, and she smelled of smoke and whiskey. She was a pathetic sight, and she knew this. Her father didn't need to be there for her to hear him yelling at her, telling her to get her shit together. It took only a moment of that before she dragged herself out of the chair. The room began to spin and her legs wobbled beneath, but she still fought her way through the small apartment and into the bathroom, where she took a cold shower. It helped...

A little. She made it a point not to look at the bloody tatters that she'd come home in that night, her ripped shoes thrown in the waste basket nearby. Next she found a clean pair of clothes and set about collecting her things to head into the city. She lit another one up before she stuck a pack of cigarettes and a lighter into her back pocket. On her way out the door, she snatched a pair of cheap sunglasses, immediately finding use in the face of the unforgiving Egyptian sun. Katia left the apartment complex heading toward the tram, her destination: The Old Markets. Maybe there, among folk recipes and herbal healing she could find something to kill the pain that didn't require a prescription.





The Old Market
10:30 AM


Silence agreements, perhaps, were all well and good, but there were simply some things that could not be contained, and it would seem that the rumors and supposed eyewitness accounts of the events three days ago were some of those very things. Khalid had bothered to believe very little of it, sticking to what he saw as the fact that all the accounts had in common—some kind of twisted Morpher abomination had attacked, and it had done things that even high-level Morphers were not documented to be able to do. He had accepted this information—and the destroyed parts of Pulse—with his usual equanimity. To be sure, this was partially due to the fact that the worst effect it had on himself or anyone he knew was an interruption in the supply lines of certain dubiously-legal substances, but an argument could be made that even if the thing had bitten his arm off personally, he would have chosen to take it on the nose and continue as always.

It was certainly, he had to think, a preferable alternative to the general atmosphere of fear that subtly pervaded the air now. He could sense it—blood pressure seemed to be just a notch higher in basically anyone he encountered, and heartbeats would spike at the smallest of unexpected noises now. All the hushed whispering about it was not helping—things would have been better managed with a full, straightforward account of what had happened, but perhaps one was yet forthcoming. Or perhaps there already was one, and it was being ignored, fueled by the general consensus that any government, however just otherwise, would say those things that were most to its own benefit.

Fortunately, Khalid did not need to know what happened exactly, and if he was still curious, well, that could be acknowledged and then laid aside, as the whimsy of a mind that liked to learn and understand. For the moment, however, it was not what mattered. The Market District was still bustling, but not as lively and musical as he generally found it, and this, he thought was a problem in need of remedy. So he was doing his part, standing by a well and drawing the water from within it using his magic, separating out the impurities until a large, perfect sphere of transparent fluid was all that remained.

It was easiest to use kinetic gestures to aid in the manipulation of water, though they were not strictly necessary. Khalid used them because they were more entertaining, and his aim was in fact to do so. It didn’t take long for anything new and interesting to draw attention in the Market area—few here were ever in much of a hurry to be elsewhere, after all, and so when an expansive gesture flattened the sphere into a thick ribbon and another split it several times, he drew a few eyes here and there. It was perhaps not until he started dancing with them, however, that the aim of the enterprise became immediately evident. The coils of water wound sinuously through the air, at times coming perilously close to striking passerby, but always directed away at the last second by the mage, who seemed to push and pull them with his hands and feet, whirling in the practiced, controlled motions of a dervish dancer and something else, something looser and freer. The ribbons molded and split, weaving around one another and himself in intricate patterns.

It wasn’t too long until someone added a drumbeat for him, and Khalid’s mouth turned up into a half-smile, the bands of metal around his wrists and ankles jangling in time with his movements. Several more people joined the dancing—a little girl with a wreath of flowers haphazardly sitting in her hair, an old man with skin as brown and crinkled as aged, cracking leather—some things were universal.

The sun was doing little else than wreck havoc on her head in concert with her two-day hangover. Still, Katia did not allow it to show, choosing instead to keep her sunglasses over her eyes to hide the bags, and her shoulders squared and back straightened. She'd been through much worse, a little sun wasn't about to kill her now. If only she could just find an ancient remedy to ease her ailments, maybe her week could start looking up. However, it wasn't medicine that caught her attention, but a street show of some sort. It was a length of water that she first noticed, drawing dangerously close to striking her before being diverted safely away. It's owner, an athletic young Eygptian man, danced with a number of other water coils, as well as few other individuals. Curiosity took over, and Katia watched the show, her one good hand hooked behind her and pressed up against the small of her back.

The display ended when Khalid drew all the coils of water together back into a sphere, then flicked the fingers of both hands simultaneously, bursting the ball into a very fine mist, which shimmered under the light of the morning sun as it fell, throwing tiny prismatic rainbows this way and that whilst simultaneously cooling off the onlookers. It wasn’t so dense as to get anyone especially drenched, however, and most took it with laughter—really, one did not stand in the proximity of such a display without being willing to bear the obvious potential consequences.

Soon after, the crowd dispersed, and Khalid dusted off his hands, pulling the residual moisture back out of the air and funneling it back down into the well. Waste not, want not. Raking his fingers through his head of snowy hair, he glanced up at the sky, calculating the approximate time from the position of the sun. Almost time to open the shop. Not that he had an especially regular point in the day at which he did that. It tended to operate (or not) with his whim, and predictability was not the same as dependability, however often they were conflated.

From the sky, his eyes fell, landing perhaps by coincidence on a woman he had never seen before. She did not have the look of a local about her, but neither was she obviously a tourist, gaping at the colorful sights and basking in the panoply of scent and sound that was the Old Market. Most likely an import, then—such people were not precisely rare in a city as cosmopolitan as New Cairo. She had the look of someone who had experienced a great deal of life, and perhaps more of death, lending an otherwise fair face a maturity that matched her visual age quite well. He was somewhat surprised to note that one of her arms was in a sling—he would have guessed from her appearance that she was not at all clumsy. Perhaps it was not an accidental sort of injury.

Well, no harm in asking. “If you’ll pardon me for saying so, madam, it would appear that you’re experiencing some degree of discomfort.” Or pain, it was hard to say for sure, but her posture was not that of someone in complete harmony with their body at the moment, that was for certain. He tried first to use English, unsure if she spoke Arabic. There were several other options at his disposal, but he’d found that the majority of Caucasian people in New Cairo spoke at least some of this language. “Might you be in need of something medicinal?” He did not desire to assume—he had met some people that were completely against the introduction of non-food substances into their bodies. He flirted with that line of thinking himself, on occasion. Khalid realized that, apropos of nothing, the statement might be seen as excessively intrusive, and sought to blunt any such impression with the matching one of kindness, and so he smiled slightly, inclining his head in a faintly-deferential manner.

Discomfort. "Something like that," Katia admitted, rolling the shoulder of her good arm. Her arm ached with every beat of her heart, and her head throbbed along with the sour melody. The man who spoke was of the city, or of a city like it from his accent. Now that he stood without moving or dancing, Katia noted that the man was tall, at least comparably, but more than that she noticed his odd hair coloration. He wasn't albino, his skin was still a dusty color and his eyes birght, so it was either bleached or some sort of after affect from the usage of magic. Though he was no Morph like she was, "Hemomancer," She not so much asked as stated, she could tell from his display. No other mage could make water dance like that.

Shrugging with her one shoulder, she stood straight as she nodded in the affirmative. Taking the cigarette from her lips, she killed the flame by pressing it against her finger which for the moment took on a chitinous skin. Placing the butt behind her ear, she spoke. "If you have it. For the arm, as well as the head," she added with a tap to her temple. She then pushed her sunglasses back to the bridge of her nose as she looked at the man before turning back down the the arm in the sling. "That obvious?"

Khalid’s smile remained in place even as she proclaimed his nature. It was, after all, quite true, and something that he was not ashamed of. If others feared it, well
 he supposed that was because they either did not understand it, or understood it well enough, but knew nothing of him. What she was became evident enough when she put her cigarette out on her finger. Khalid had never seen the appeal, but there was a saying
 ah, yes. Everyone had to die of something. It might as well be something they wanted to do, as long as they understood the risks.

“Perhaps a little,” he replied, his smile morphing to flash white teeth for just a moment before it receded. “Please, follow me. But first:” he offered the hand she could actually shake with. “My name is Khalid. It would be a bit rude of me to lead you about by the nose without introducing myself first, no?” Nevertheless, he kept the whole thing rather short. She was in pain, after all—it seemed needless to prolong that for courtesy’s sake alone.

"Katia," she returned, shaking the hand.