Kei Wentz
The thing she found most interesting, in an off-hand kind of way, was how the open and empty lane awaiting the parade seemed the only thing capable of blocking the human traffic of Danzig without a single whimper of protest. The crowds gazing out at each other on either side of the wide road may as well have been trapped there by the celebratory obstacle of the parade yet to come, but other than the occasional mother-of-three keeping her infants in tow through the crowd and the slumped, grey-haired husbands who had been pulled along with them, Kei Wentz saw barely a single frown.
It was her first celebration of Constitution Day in Poland. When Kei had arrived here just days off a full year ago, she had missed it by a hairswidth. She recognised the face of patriotism, but here in Europe, it seemed so much more real, more heartfelt than the casual and drunken facade of national loyalty she was used to seeing on Australia Day. The parade, her parents had told her as her father waxed nostalgic, was an old tradition, polished and militaristic- Or so he remembered it. Kei had seen uniforms that suggested he wasn't wrong, but she had ducked out of her parent's line of sight before they had a chance to see her surprised by how genuine the Polish flair was.
Her ducking, as it happened, hadn't really made her much more comfortable. The safety texts she'd exchanged with her mother felt awkward, and she still had to weave between clumps and smatterings of people.
Wish my jacket was tailored that well, she thought with an upturned mouth as she stepped through the gaze of a handsomely moustached man in dress uniform. Kei didn't look the part of a relaxed holiday-maker. She'd begged her parents for a black leather jacket, and when her birthday came, she had vowed to get as much use out of it as possible. But her dedication to a rebellious aesthetic didn't suit her whatsoever. She was still too short to look the part, for one, and the material felt strange.
Hell. I feel strange.Kei was lonely, and she was stressed. Crowds, she found, were easier to get lost in than cities, and though she'd expected to have found someone she knew by now, she had yet to see a single familiar soul. Maybe she'd been wrong to expect. Half the girls at her school were immigrants, anyway; She didn't really know how much importance they attached to the parade. Mary was...
Somewhere, I guess. Somewhere around the swill of people, probably, and Kei hoped she wasn't doing something too weird.
Wait, no, that's not right either. She hoped that Mary's weirdness wasn't catching more attention than usual, for her own sake.
Eh, that's better.Even Kyubey had been gone since yesterday morning. Kei liked him. She had long since started doubting the little messenger's ability to really connect with her on an emotional level, but she didn't care. Kyubey never judged you, or declined to listen to you. He was a pocketable friend, easy to be around, asking little. She'd expected him to abandon her once she kicked off as a Magical Girl, but he always came back to check up on her in the end, and she was grateful.
It was her business as a witch-hunter that tickled in the side of her head and left her on edge today. There was something lurking around here, a witch or a sizeable familiar, and Kei was stuck between the urge to chase it down and feel like a hero for protecting a crowd that couldn't care less, and the fear of being seen in her kit in the open, by hundreds, of splashing paint and holding a quaint little crossbow and looking like an embarrassing mess. Kei
really didn't want to be remembered as the out-of-place cosplayer advocating some niche fandom on Constitution Day. Always before she had waited. The people would thin, the night would come, and she could work unobserved.
Today, though... Kei had exhausted her last grief seed two days ago, and between homework stress, culture shock, and a hunt that had come down to nothing, there were new stains on her Soul Gem. Her soul, rather. She polished it regularly to keep track of her brightness. It the only thing she ever removed the little blue earring for other than tracking. In the shade of an alley- These old European cities seemed riddled with them-, she checked her reflection in her phone's cracked glass just to see that it was still there. Yep. Still there, still in need of a good clean. The idea of waking up as a blind fragment of jewellery with her body nowhere to be found was
scary. Like the Hell she had never believed in.
I'll take my flesh prison over that any day, thanks.Kei unlocked the phone, blinking away the reflection, and scrolled through her favourite blogs listlessly. A thrum in her earlobe told her that the witch was closer than it had been. It was here to feed, and it would, and she'd probably let it. It had been a hard lesson to learn that she couldn't afford to eradicate witches completely, that, like a rancher, there was a minimum she needed to leave be for reproduction. And that meant people would die. Strangers, but still people.
At least today there are police to handle any aftermath, she thought, and squeezed her fist.
Fuck that was a callous thought. No. Gross.The idea was ugly and Kei hunkered down against the weathered grey stones to pull a marker from her pocket, began to scribble something gnarled on the brick. A bony hand, she decided halfway through, and added one too many fingers. By this time the action was deeper than habit. The act of putting a bad thought into visible reality was relaxing.
Some other Girl in the crowd will get it anyway, she reflected.
This city has quite a couple. Mary might be onto it already. I'll wait for something I have a better chance at.
Vec
Timemaster