another warmoot-y thing! [attn: ALL]

[mnemosyne]

Charlotte is there. She has been all along. She has been very very quiet and at Erich's side all along, quiet little mouse of a silver-sheened monster. Strange and frail-looking and awkward, sharp elbows and nobbly knees and also,

Falcon-blessed, moon-mad, bird-boned, strangely lovely. She is sitting beside Erich or maybe standing, leaning back against a counter, weight braced on her palms. There is a slightly faded bracelet around her left wrist, made of woven thread, and a platinum chain around her throat with a pendant of some sort that disappears beneath the dark collar of her yellow-and-green Sprite! t-shirt. A weathered messenger bag slung across her boyish body, the bulk of it born against her left hip.

She is nineteen; looks younger unless you catch her from the proper angle, and then she seems older than time itself.

So, she doesn't have much to say. Is quiet and serious and starts to frown a bit when things spark and flare, when Erich's temper catches and starts - but then it passes. He elbows her, is she coming?

"'Course," the girl murmurs back to him, quiet and solemn and a bit indignant that there was any sort of question that she would be anywhere other than where he is. Except, she tells him quietly and with an excess of that same mild solemnity, " - but you know running would be faster than crawling - "

Then he's surging to his feet. Charlotte is surging with him. Packmates, see - even without a totem something physical and animal in the girl senses the bunching, explosive potential in his flanks, in his spine. But her presence is a taut, staying sort of thing. The bright, pale disc of her luminous eyes flashes to the older theurge. Charlotte looks half-bird, half-beast. Trapped between a sort of reactive sort of panic and something else, mad yes - but deeper, regal, unburdened and unbound.

Her posture shifts; so do her eyes. That glance at Phoebe flashes and fades like the flare of a signal fire against the horizon. Then her eyes are entirely on Erich's profile. She nudges his side, an animal presence, calmer than he, as if she could drink down his rage and lash it and leash it against him. Stays a half-step behind him. Telling him, quietly:

dontexplodedon'texplodedontexplode

(something so taut in her shoulders)

but also,

thisisachallenge and notthesortyouthinkitis;

iknowwhoyouare;
i'mrightherebesideyou;

don'tbackdown.

don'texplode.

--

Meanwhile, Javed invites Éva to close the meeting. The briefest flash of surprise in the sweep of her eyes over his features. Minute and not-precisely-calculated, but listen. She allows it to show through. It surfaces in a twist of her mouth, then disappears beneath the surface as she rises a fractional second later,

only for the mood of the room to shift, quite thoroughly, a moment later. The Shadow Lord's jaw tightens. The fine hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She remains standing, still, wary and aware of them both, her spine absolutely straight as her dark eyes cut from Erich to Phoebe and back again. Touching not on their faces but their shoulders, their flanks, their body language. Her pulse is pounding, elevated and she thinks of the weight of the weapon against her ribs. So absurd that her mind goes to it.

Because these beasts, oh,

she knows how they move.