With floating rocks. / frw event open
She never minded the city. In fact, she had always found the people interesting, and that enough was good to visit. But being stuck in that penthouse for about a week reaffirmed Mana’s preference to Paralia in terms of living there.
Her ears rang with the sound of blowing horns and people shouting from across their open windows. Perhaps she was too used to the crickets and the sound of the ocean’s waves to adjust to such a thing, but for a certain time Mana was sure that the city of Kairos never slept at all… until she remember that was a catchphrase for another foreign city. But still, she felt that those words applied to this city too. And it was high time that Mana wanted to go back home.
Word about the new plaza reached the complex that she was living in, and finally something peaked Mana’s interest enough to go. With the clothes provided in the house, she got dressed and followed the crowd. Since the station was still busted, people in groups went towards the paths in the forest. Mana didn’t like walking through the forest, as she found it boring to walk through and it was dangerous to just walk through the forest by herself. So she walked behind a few strangers until she finally got to the plaza.
Now this she could live with. “A touch of both worlds… pretty clever.” she said to herself as she went further in. It was also like festival the way this place was set up. There were street performers and vendors all around, but there was enough of that greenery fields and flowers that she was familiar with. Eventually Mana found a place with a small little pond, and a few rocks she could skip. With a smile, Mana gathered a few rocks in her hands and proceeded to skip them across the small pond. But eventually she ran out of rocks to skip. And when she bent down to gather some more, that’s when Mana felt something growing into her hands. A small pebble, bluer than the ocean, was in her hand.
"…huh?" Mana looked at her rock closely, and held it up for her to see. "This is a pretty rock. Where did it—?" she started, before seeing an identical rock grow in her hands. Literally. In a few seconds, a few more rocks formed and grew in her palms. Mana had no idea how or why this was happening, but eventually something else unexpected happened. The blue pebbles started to lift up in the air, hovering around Mana’s cupped hands. To her, it looked like one of those magic tricks that magicians on tv used to do on Saturday mornings. But she had no wires to do that, and she certainly didn’t throw them herself…
"Amazing…!" she said in awe, scarlet eyes mesmerized by the floating rocks dancing in front of her. How was she doing this? She didn’t quite know… but strangely, it felt natural. But this couldn’t be said the same for anyone that happened to see her there, however.
They were the same as dissipating spirits at that time, all those strangers tossed sidelong out of their comfort zones, crumpled dispositions and demeanors gone sour with incomprehension. The entire situation confused him briefly, but Clear was certainly never the type to purposely eschew any attempts to find placidity even where a consistently emotional balance would've demanded a psychotic break somewhere down the line. Vitriol was taken with a grain of salt, and it took much more than a possible abduction to faze him (on the off-kilter chance that he'd be driven to anything more than volatile complaints concerning violence or any hint of waspish ill will). Irrationality didn't arrive in spades, but he'd taken it upon himself to retain his equanimity even as the day stretched to culminate an entire week.
At a thirty-two degree angle tilt of his head, Clear paused in the petering light of the crowd, voices and stranger's forms innocuously losing their forms in sequences to something else. Transfixed by the tinge of compartmentalization, an indecisive period where he'd almost taken as deafness, then it occurred. A flash flood of noise. A curious sound slipping out in sharp, concise snatches — the methodical plunk, plunk, plunk — the death rattle of hail on a tin roof, maybe, or skipped stones streaking across a shallow pond. It's nothing extraordinarily beautiful, but it enraptured — and the compulsion was there in the bloodstream, the hair-trigger impulse to discern where it was, amidst the celebratory din of every participant with at least five dollars to their name in Baselia Plaza.
And he catches sight of her, bright hair and face turned heavenward, not at the epicenter of the sun striking ground but somewhere infinitely more illuminating, because she was fixated, same as him, at the sight of pebbles held buoyant in the air. No rhyme or reason, barely a noncommittal sign that she'd caught onto his presence — it was a solitary audience of two, and in he stood, shell-shocked, progressing from disbelief to wonder to elation in one pronounced, chirping laugh. "Wooooooow ~ ! How dazzling!" Clear lithely hops forward to precariously balance on the rocks surrounding the pool, taking great caution not to accidentally slosh ankle-deep into the water, and perches down next to her.
Blithely, he settles back on his heels. With his palms clapped on both sides of his cheeks, knobby limbs and a fragile unsteadiness in his movements as Clear wobbles back and forth, but he's no less fazed by the instability of his position or his roost as he chortles once again. "Ahaa ~ aaaah, I knew it! You must be a magician!" Gesticulating to the pebbles like constellations scattered, levitating, positively aglow with an airily pleasant sound of affirmation. There wasn't even the inkling of doubt tinging his mind that she was a mage or some otherworldly creature, which made any occurrence of inexplicably acute hearing a nebulous anomaly at best (and a strangely hyperrealistic delusion at worst). Placing the rest of his retrospections on the back burner, Clear continues with a burst of frenetic exultation. "If possible, would you please teach me some of your magic? It seems very useful."
