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[indent][indent][indent][color=#808080]The scrape arrived before the greeting did—a chair hauled across floorboards with all the subtlety of a structural collapse. An entire chair, [i]dragged[/i], because apparently the simple civility of lifting it was a refinement too far. Maylisse registered the sound without acknowledging it. She finished her sip of tea, returned the cup to its saucer, and only then lifted her gaze.

The first to speak was the brighter of the two, in every conceivable sense of the word. Maylisse's eyes moved over her once like a coroner establishing a cause of death. The girl — Nelly, apparently, short for Penelope— was wearing what could only be described as an [i]experience[/i]: a printed catsuit in shades of neon yellow and electric blue, cropped inexplicably at the calf. The overall effect was less fashion statement and more chromatic assault, as though a highlighter had exploded in a neon dream. 

Maylisse had attended fashion weeks in three countries. She had sat front row at each, and she had watched designers deconstruct and reconstruct the very concept of wearability. She understood the avant-garde. She did not, however, understand [i]this[/i]. The faint crease forming between her brows announced her bewilderment to anyone paying sufficient attention, a small betrayal she smoothed into oblivion before it could fully form. When Nelly offered a compliment, Maylisse acknowledged it with nothing more than a slight tilt of her head, the gesture carrying the weight of a much longer response she simply couldn't be bothered to articulate.

The second girl arrived in Nelly's wake with considerably less wattage. Fiona. The redness around her eyes was too fresh and too specific to be anything other than what it plainly was. Not that Maylisse cared enough to bring it up, and at the offer of whiskey, she merely regarded the bottle with the expression of someone who had just been handed a live moth. 

[color=#a9c9eb]“No.”[/color] 

The single syllable declined not merely the whiskey but the entire civilizational tradition of drinking before the afternoon had the decency to properly begin. She lifted her tea instead and took another sip, the heat blooming against her palm while the bitter notes unfolded on her tongue. Then, since the appropriate interval had elapsed and she could identify no strategic advantage in withholding it, she set the cup down.

[color=#a9c9eb]“Maylisse.”[/color] The name was offered cleanly without embellishment or warmth. The silence that followed was Maylisse's, and she made no effort to fill it. She returned her attention to her plate and ate with the unhurried composure of someone who had never once felt obligated to perform comfort for a stranger's benefit. If either of them found the quiet uncomfortable, that was entirely their own affair to manage.

It was Nelly who broke it, because of course it was.

Maylisse listened without looking up, contributing nothing beyond the occasional tilt of her head that could, with considerable generosity, be interpreted as engagement. The girl chattered on, her words tumbling out like water finding its level, filling every available space because silence, for her, was apparently a void that required immediate occupation. Maylisse had encountered this particular quality before: the kind of person raised in houses full of warmth and noise who had never developed a tolerance for quiet because they had simply never been required to. It wasn't a flaw, exactly. Merely a limitation, if she had to put a label on it.

Her mother, by contrast, had never wasted a dinner party. Every introduction, every handshake, and every exchanged pleasantry had been an exercise in intelligence gathering, and she had taught Maylisse to treat them accordingly. [color=white][i]Know the room,[/i][/color] she had said, [color=white][i]before the room knows you.[/i][/color] It was advice Maylisse had taken and refined over the years, stripping away the social veneer until only the essential question remained. Not who are you, but what are you made of. And in a camp full of demigods, that question had a considerably more literal answer than most.

Maylisse set her fork down.

[color=#a9c9eb]“And your parentage?”[/color] The question was directed at Nelly first, of course, and delivered in the mild impersonal tone one might use to enquire after the time. [color=#a9c9eb]“I find it useful to know who I am sharing a table with. In the broader sense.”[/color] 

Nelly, she had already privately resolved before the girl had even opened her mouth. The restless energy, the compulsive occupation of silence, the way she moved like someone perpetually en route to somewhere else — it all pointed in one direction with the kind of clarity that required very little deliberation. Hermes produced a recognizable type: children who had inherited not merely the god's speed but his inability to alight anywhere for long, as though stillness itself were a kind of death. Maylisse had read enough to know that much, and sitting across from the living proof of it was, if nothing else, confirmatory.

Fiona was another matter entirely.

Maylisse had been turning the question over since the girl had sat down, running her observations against everything she knew with the methodical patience of someone accustomed to finding answers through elimination. The redness around her eyes suggested feeling and feeling deeply, but that was hardly diagnostic. Half the gods produced children capable of feeling too much—Apollo's brood with their artistic sensitivities, Aphrodite's with their romantic intensities, even Dionysus's with their boundless capacity for experience. The whiskey was interesting, though, and the shadows were more than interesting. Something chthonic, then. That was her first instinct. Hecate, perhaps, or one of the darker bloodlines, the kind that produced children who walked comfortably in twilight and carried their grief like inherited heirlooms. It would account for the shadow trick, certainly. And the sadness. 

And yet. Something still didn’t quite fit. 

There was a particular quality to Fiona's grief that Maylisse couldn't place against that framework. Too proud for it, somehow. Too contained. As though the feeling wasn't a symptom of her nature but a thing she was actively managing. Children of the chthonic gods, according to her father, tended to wear their darkness openly. Fiona, on the other hand, wore hers like a dress that didn't quite fit.

She was still privately deliberating, which was, in itself, unusual enough to be irritating. Maylisse was not accustomed to uncertainty; she had been trained out of it the way other children were trained out of nail-biting or interrupting. Her mother had possessed a particular genius for making ambiguity feel like a personal failing, and the lesson had taken root deeply enough that even now, even here, surrounded by the children of gods in a camp that defied every rule of the world she'd been raised in, she found herself chafing against the sensation of not knowing.

So, she lifted her gaze, her expression revealing nothing of this internal commentary, and waited for one of them to answer.[/color][/indent][/indent][/indent]
[hr][sub][color=9b9b9b][b][i]Location: Main Hall 
Interactions: Nelly [@Pristine1281], Fiona [@Fabricator]
Mentions: N/A [/i][/b][/color][/sub]

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