There's an inconvenience with sign language. It requires a certain distance - the sage Zaldar used it to [i]enforce[/i] a certain distance. When someone has stepped inside her guard, inside the swing of her arms then their physical presence interrupts the words she's trying to say. How can a gesture be seen when the eye is too close? How can attention be commanded in a silence that leaves her beating heart revealed?

She dressed up for the occasion. A cream white X of a dress, leaving violet scaled hips visible, a necklace of pink roses collaring her neck and running down her sleeves like a waterfall to collect and pool along the cuffs. She's drybrushed her scales to match, a hot pink delicately powdered along the edges, a mixture of yellow and purple creating a deep burgundy colour that she ran into the recesses. Purple is such an ambiguous colour; it can be a magnificent expression of red or colder than black. Her dress shows that she's thriving, alive, almost princess-pure - but she didn't choose it because she thought it would look good. She chose it because of Mirror.

And it's to Mirror her thoughts go again now that she's distracted, taken away by the tapping and pressure and the implied mathematical rhythm of Crescent's touch. Her mind always goes to Mirror in moments like this. She would be dressing in something dark, wouldn't she? Something subtle, something dangerous. She'd thought at first that she might go to crystal blue coldness, to white lace and delicate strings - but not at a party like this. Not flushed with victory. She'd come predatory, redder than blood, blacker than space. A suit, maybe - or a dress sleek and elegant, enough mobility to raise a leg to the point where it could wrap around her opponent's neck...

Once she'd started thinking of that dress she hadn't had a choice in her own outfit. She needed something that would look good alongside it; something feminine, something vulnerable. Something lace and frills and impractical, something sweet and flowery and easy to stain. Easy to tear and mark with claws. There had been just as many hours searching endless online catalogues, listening to the advice of the ever-chattering ancestors as they suggested TC brands, and spirits to bargain with, and even just learning to sew. She'd even tried that, but the work was taught to her by hands used to weaving thick cloth that could keep out the arrat winds. She'd wound up with something cheap from a TC store and it wasn't right, but maybe that would just make Mirror look better when she destroyed it?

She tries to say all this, hands working when they have space, have time, have observation - or don't. But it's a feeling more complicated than the language Zaldar lets her speak in. It's an audience who isn't listening. It's a narrator who doesn't understand herself. Why is she like this, warrior of the wilderness, drunk on mathematics and the music of a catgirl's claws? Dressed in pink and white and vulnerability? She wants to win, yes, definitely, to confirm that she still has that capability - to show that she can know and predict and anticipate Mirror's actions before she made them. But it was Mirror's fault that the only way to show that was to dress like this - if she'd shown clad in darkness and power then she'd be doing the same thing but worse, if she'd shown clad in fur and godscale then she'd be rigid and inflexible, this was the only way. Can't you see?

She's lost track of where she is or where she's going, hand-speech slurred with the decisive emphasis of a drunk trying to communicate a revelation or conviction too deep for half a brain.

[Marking XP]