It was about the time that she had had her dozenth pretzel stick and had absently reached for the end of a ponytail that wasn't there that Mara decided that she had had enough for the moment. Briefly tracing her fingers over the intricately nodded braid that her mother had insisted on weaving her dark hair into at the back of her head, she had just reached for a small sign she could put on the table when she felt like she was being watched. She paused for just a moment before following through with the action and picking up a small wooden plaque that she then propped up on the table in front of her. It said simply: "gone to lunch, be back soon."

Rising from her chair, Mara casually brushed off her pants, straightening her denim jacket that she had slipped on over her lightweight knitted sweater, and used the motion of reaching for her almost empty thermos to look around. She nearly dropped it.

There was a man watching her.

She studied him for a moment out of the corner of her eye as she pulled out her phone to switch off the music, as she reached down and powered off the speakers. There was something strange about him, about the way the threads were circling around him. She had never seen them look so... calm. A faint crease formed between her eyebrows before she smoothed it away in a practiced wiping of her expression. Something about this man made her feel jittery in a way that had nothing to do with the coffee she had consumed. Putting her phone away, she casually put her hands inside her jacket pockets, loosely gripping the silver nail she had stowed away in one of them, and made her way around the table.

Mara tried not to look like she was heading for the stranger, while her steps inevitably took her in that direction. She kept her eyes moving around, as if observing things she passed, but was in reality trying to figure out what she was looking at. For the first time in her life, she wasn't sure. Using the hand that wasn't gripping the nail, she ran her fingers through the space around her head, lightly stroking along some threads of magic that were weaving through the air, trying to get a brief reading from them, but found the magic incredibly unhelpful. She was no more enlightened than if she hadn't touched it in the first place. Sliding her hand back into her pocket, she kept the frustrated look from appearing on her face out of sheer force of will.

Very deliberately, the woman crossed the distance and took a seat next to the stranger on the edge of the fountain. She stuck her feet straight out in front of her, crossing her legs at the ankles. And then she really looked at him. "Who are you," she found herself asking quietly, her dark eyes flickering over his face, the silvery white markings on her temples seeming to intensify for a moment as she did so.