It was weird, growing up in a city as well known as Paris, but Marie had never really considered herself a city girl before. Perhaps it was just because she grew up in a convent of all places, making the place seem smaller than it really was, but she’d never really left it, so she never had anything to compare it to. Now, she did. Now, she had Inaba.
Marie knew what a small Japanese town looked like, more or less (”Just like in my mangos,” she thought jokingly), but actually being in one now was an entirely different experience. Everything was... not quiet, per se, but still. And not that ‘still’ was a bad thing, but it was a jarring enough switch to throw Marie out of balance for a bit; finding that big supermarket up the road was a welcome, familiar blessing, and one she desperately needed. Raphael would be fine on his own at that tofu shop for a while, Marie wanted lunch.
“Let’s see, that... that says ‘pork’, I think that’s pork katsudon? That one’s definitely gyoza. Hmm...” Marie’s Japanese wasn’t perfect, but she could speak it better than read it. She was much better than Raphael, in any case. “What was the writing for ‘miso’ again? I could go for some soup...I wonder--ah.”
Amazingly enough, muttering to herself in French had yet to get Marie any weird looks in the rest of the town (at least not that she saw), but now in this food court she’d caught eyes with someone looking at her in what appeared to be disbelief. Annoyed disbelief, but disbelief nonetheless. And now he was heading her way. Ohhhhh no, this was the exact opposite of what she wanted.
“...Hello.” Marie smiled and gave the boy a slight nod of greeting, trying very hard to keep her debutante training in mind. He didn’t seem like anyone terribly official (or threatening), but the last thing she needed to do on vacation was start a semi-international incident. Not this week, at least.
