The Spring Festival always drew in tourists. Nor surprising- while Alba City boasted it’s halloween parade, Tharsis hosted the largest celebration of the Lunar new year outside of earth and- really- it might actually be bigger than the biggest ones on earth, now. She’d have to look that up. The holiday has morphed and changed with time and, obviously, location but at its core it was still the same as what the early Chinese settlers had brought over. But bigger, much bigger, as the city grew and became the home of the Red Dragons as well as a newer upstart syndicate calling themselves the Green Wolves. Julia figured the syndicate’s should get more creative with their names but what did she know? She was a deserter.
That wasn’t the point, anyway. The point was: there were too many tourists in Tharsis around this time, the bumped up population and rainy season making the overcrowded city feel suffocating in the humidity and heat. You could always tell the tourists, too. Skittish. Heading down the wrong streets and holding their too large umbrellas as if they could protect them- easy targets for quick fingered children and fresh syndicate recruits. Her own time picking those pockets brought an odd smile to her lips, of course her thievery was more a product of boredom than desperation.
Heading down a side street, further from the dancing many legged dragons heading down the street after their show had finished, Julia ducks into one of her usual haunts- a small cafe owned by a deceased old woman’s cat, technically, and run by said decedent’s unamused and ungrateful son.
Shaking out her umbrella and sitting on one of the overstuffed couches there in, she watches a young woman with dark hair stroke gently the fur of the owner on the opposite end of the couch as Rafael (a young man who’s been working here since time immemorial— how did he seem to never age?) spotted her and started on her usual order.
“Her name is Puca, she actually legally owns this place, if you could believe it.”
@gildedscripture // Marie
