closed starter for riku ( @keyguarded )
she's quiet, but moves with purpose. there had been a time where such a thing had not been true about alice - not so mindful and not so refrained in her approach to the world, but she had sense learned a thing or two about the risks that come with that. risks... well, they simply had to be more calculated these days than they had once been. she sees the proof of it all around her, the fault lines of reality and the weight that they suppress back, can feel the weigh that it buzzes underneath her skin when she looks too closely or for too long. something was coming from it all.
it would have been a risk to ignore it, a risk that no one could afford. alice knew that she could never sit back on her hands and let such a thing happen. but she knew there were areas in her life in which she was underprepared. she knew what people said about her now, how she was viewed... but she still saw that little girl lost in wonderland for the first time. that little girl wouldn't make it through what came next.
that was where riku came in, of course. she was no lost child and now the weight that she carried was much heavier, which meant that she needed to be stronger and more adept at carrying it. alice had reached out a few days ago to set up a time for them to meet and train again.
"morning," alice greeted him with a gentle but warm smile, adjusting the strap of the purse on her shoulder. "i think i'm ready for a few new bumps and scrapes." a mild but inevitable consequence of combat trainings, typically the fault of her own missteps.