CLOSED STARTER . @effervesvents / alma agassi
LOCATION . midnight steep
One for sorrow, two for joy... she'd heard that once, somewhere — a rhyme associated with magpies. It wasn't that Perdita Otero believed it exactly, the idea that something as novel as a bird could indicate something as trivial (and unprovable) as luck. But that never stopped things from ringing true on occasion. Even if that occasion had been years and years ago. Another lifetime of hers, one that had been far lonelier somehow, ached to be remembered. That of Celia Mendoza, the icy artistic socialite of the 2000s who had a tendency of leading the most corrupt of men to their untimely deaths. Not that they'd ever had her heart.
Was she avoiding Alma? If you asked her, she'd deny it (hell, the pettiest, most vengeful side of her would claim that she hadn't even known that Alma was in Portum). She took a little bit of respite in her plausible deniability, or the fact that her life was so... isolated at the best of times.
Recent events in Portum had impacted her in a few ways, but the significant change in her had been a sense of responsibility and purpose, and it accompanied all her fear and dread in equal parts. Perdita felt compelled to roam the streets again, to partake in that unspoken tradition of patrolling that the gorgons had become known for. And though the weather may have turned sour, the sense of justice she'd felt from a vampire's death hadn't been quelled by it in the slightest.
She didn't know what time it was, but she knew it was late, and cold, and lashings of the wind against her skin had started to take a toll on her. And so, a few hours into a rather uneventfully miserable patrol, Perdita caved. And she caved in more ways than one.
Perhaps if whichever manager was currently on shift at the town's overnight tea shop was listening very carefully, they might have heard her sigh a deep, shaky breath before pushing the business's door open. She just had to pray that it wasn't going to be Alma... or perhaps that it would be, such a simple encounter after years of dancing around each other. Even after settling in Portum, Perdita hardly had a clue about what she truly wanted.
"Do you think you could read the menu?" Perdita asked as she stepped towards the counter, the pulse of her white cane's clicking increasing to match her own heartbeat (her hands truly were the windows to her soul).
