The aesthetic is all wrong. 

Rain is supposed to be heavier than this. It should smell cleaner, full of... dust washing away and a clean wet feeling that promises purity. It should be unbearably tense, permeated with the threat of ozone, lightning, thunder, and above all the din of battle. Rain is a thing beloved of Zeus, and a place for battle and omens. It's where blood washes away as fast as you can spill it, so there's no way for it to choke her. But this is musty, city-rain. A thing so absurd it shouldn't even conjure an image. The gentle trickle is too even; it should be a downpour that demands everyone fight just to stand on their feet underneath it. It spatters on a windowpane and runs like the fountain it actually is, carrying with it faint traces of brine dragged up from the depths of the ship where the Tides overwhelm everything around them. 

The neon should be loud. The buzzing should be unbearable, insectoid, insistently pressing until she is obliged to to cut it from her senses. The lights should be bright and gaudy and difficult to look at. Neon is a precursor to pain and abandonment, a weapons system the architecture of war wears as a dress. Harsh. Uninviting. Dangerous. This is... soft. Weak. It hums, but barely. The vibrations are even almost tantalizing. The little flicker and the pop when they struggle to keep shining through the power fluctuations is actually charming. The lights are soft but colorful in a way that simply shouldn't be allowed. Not enough light to see by, not anymore than could be seen in the dark. Certainly not in this "rain". Only enough to mark a presence that by all rights should be fighting to keep itself hidden.

The smell of cigarettes is also wrong. Because that surely, even if everything else about the wrongness of this place was simply a matter of caked on biases...the smell of a cigarette is supposed to be an unholy, rotting thing. It is death itself. Bones and flames and dirt wrapped inside a perfume of drunken spice that only serves to make each each breath of it more perverse than if it had been the naked intention and nothing else. But this... while noxious in its own right, face curling, carries only the tang of burning leaves. Death of a different sort, then. None of the horror of Hades nor of Aphrodite, but simply a toy to be puffed out into the air as if it aided the narration. 

The sights and the smells of this place. All wrong. But the girl... the girl was just right.

Beautiful moves exactly the same as before. The intensity and lust for life of a creature who knows on an instinctual level she is never afforded much time to enjoy it, as fluid as if she could predict the flow of time and as jerky and erratic as if the burdens of perceptions cast too wide for the eye to follow had swallowed up her capacity to focus on silly things like walking. At every moment she seems at once untouchable and as though she is going to walk straight into a wall in the same moment. The promise of death, but wrapped up in paper that would tear with the barest provocation. She invokes a need to stay away and a need to protect her at all costs with every flick of her wrists and roll of her shoulders. 

That perfect, golden hair that begs to be braided like royalty. Even if its owner has forgotten she should ask for it. Did ask for it. Those violet eyes... as deep as the universe and more precious than gemstones. The glimmer of genius inside of them makes them come alive that in Bella's opinion they are the envy of starlight itself. This is what stole her breath away the first time. What made her call the Ikarani Beautiful in the first place. 

For five days, they'd danced. For five days, they'd spoken, less and less each time. Taking more and more from the exchanges. For five days they'd understood one another. For five days they had been best friends. Perhaps that was only possible because they both knew it couldn't last. The smile on her face says it could be again. The strut in her step says it might be better not to. The sparkle in her eye says but wouldn't it be wonderful? The theatrics of the smoke say that things will always be different now. That they should be. It's right for things to change between them. 

A preview of the Lethe, then. At least in small doses. The things that might survive, and the ways someone could be completely different for all of the many ways they're still the same. Bella shivers when she's touched, and says nothing. Memories of stories and crab rangoon drip as insistently as the too-even "rain" outside the makeshift office. She brushes her palm up and down the length of her arm, feeling the softness of her own fur as a substitute for sliding back into the itch and habits her claws demanded from her.

She glances toward Redana for a moment. Even forgets to look stern or severe. They really... the pair of them truly are so very much alike. Bella sighs, and looks away again.

"Last time it was me asking you that question. I guess you don't remember it. But then again, I stuck you pretty hard with that vial. Your idea, by the way. You were very full of stupid, batshit, suicidal... fucking brilliant ideas. It was all Beljani and I could do to keep up. Do you remember at all? Even shadows? You had a bunch of those before, at least.

"You said that... you couldn't be given a name. Something about it needing to be derived from context. So I guess it's whatever the fuck makes sense to you. Doesn't matter what I say. But even so, I still. Still... think that you're Beautiful."