turn a new leaf.
Shinji resigned himself to Paralia in relative degrees; headline titles of finicky news papered over every district's window, streamlined efficiency without the M.O. of urban development to set the ball rolling. He trundled everything off on the first day, backpack and all, and took his leave from that strange caricature home, meandering along the hubs of life and vitality that prospered in the city, focal points of familiarity akin to Kairos. The city itself was a strange homage to nostalgia, even if romanticization cut too close for anything more than a maudlin lens of nature at breakneck speed. Summer propagated its form over the environment, evidently enough in the short bursts of Farmers' Markets and flat-out fields of vegetated produce scoping out the entire landscape in a preternatural shade of green with peppered hints of primary colors here and there.
It wasn't sight-seeing, however, that brought him out of his meditatively self-induced isolation, but some medley of ingrained reluctance and morbid curiosity that he set his sights on the bizarre locality of Basileia Plaza that sprung up so shortly in the absence of an en-route expenditure back to his hometown. Out-of-sync with the rest of the demographic, though, left Shinji flitting around the various booths and shoppes like a bird in flight, anxiously seeking out somewhere he could await some sort of change when he tokenly picked up a plate at random, a china dish inlaid with porcelain at its center. Even if only briefly, what came to mind was the spritzing recollection of dunking both palms into sudsy water and washing dishes. Hands drenched in dishes, laughter at a joke long-lost to him, with people whose voices rang out familiarly; fractured fissure-lines of inflections, cutting clean into the air.
The camaraderie of it all threw him through a loop, and in his haste to escape the disconcerting sight, Shinji's feet shuffled through a rag-tag impression of Blues dancing before finally collapsing into someone else, sending his maps of the region flying as he sought to save his bag from the brutality of concrete tiling and ended up grazing his elbow over a particularly jutting corner. The laceration wasn't fazing in and of itself, with shock still reigning clear on his features, but the upturned bewilderment upon seeing someone he did recognize in Paralia, of all places, wasn't feigned by any meaning of the word. Throat closing off with a sudden anxious chortle, he fell back on both elbows, backpack clutched tightly to his chest.
"Huh? ... Oh! You're here t-too, Kaworu-kun?"
