She leant over the bar-top in boredom, rolling her blue gemstone back and forth between her fingers while she strained to listen to the bar's jukebox over the loud, drunken chatter of Silco's men seated behind her. She had half a mind to march over and turn the thing up to drown them all out.
'At least there's less of 'em than usual,' Jinx thought, concluding her scowling glance at them all. The few that returned her gaze did so briefly and sheepishly; even drunk, they all seemed to respect the imaginary barbed-wire Silco seemed to have convinced them was wrapped around her. She supposed they all seemed a bit brutish to offer much in the way of fun conversation anyway.
She heard her favorite bartender shuffle over, approaching her empty cup with hesitation, clearly unsure of whether or not she wished it to be taken. She glanced up at him and flashed a lazy grin.
"You don't ever kick people outta here, do ya, Chuck?" she pondered in a singsongy voice. "You must get somebody to do that for you, huh?"
She did wonder whether he'd ever fail to entertain her with his quaint, bumbling reactions, as he stood there awkwardly scratching his head.
"Oh— I didn't accidentally give you booze again, did I…?" was his abashed reply.
The notion startled her somewhat; she'd emptied four cups of the sweet orange drink over those past hours that she'd been sitting there. She supposed she didn't much feel drunk…
Chuck was eyeing her in a manner that had her doubting herself. In response, she animatedly snatched her cup from the countertop and began loudly sipping air through the straw.
He sighed. "You always start calling me different names whenever that happens…"
Chuck's your name, dummy…
"What different names?" she demanded, refusing to drop the jest.
"My—" he paused, flustered. "Never mind…"
She never sought to treat the man too poorly; he'd often be her sole source of entertainment whenever Silco's doings upstairs bored her. Though, sometimes he simply acted too funny in the face of her japes…
"Chuck," she continued, "you're a good egg, people ever tell you that?"
"Egg—?" he puzzled.
"You know, like, something your mother might say, I don't know," she drawled.
"I… haven't actually spoken to my mother in—" she heard him saying, but she was distracted by the door opening and closing.
"Where is everybody, anyway?" she cut in, feeling beset by tiredness all of a sudden. As she stretched her eyelids, she noticed that many of the chattering men had since cleared out. "Yeesh— it's never usually so dead in here this early…"
"Uh… well, I think Silco took a crew with him when he—" he began to answer.
"He came down?!" she slurred, her face quickly turning sullen. "I didn't even see him…"
"Oh, uh, yeah, about an hour or so ago, I think…" Chuck replied guiltily. "Something might be going down out there— I don't know."
She shot him a look that appeared to make him uneasy. "…Alright, Chuck," she said, standing up, "what do I owe ya?"
"You—?" He gave a confused look. "Just… don't tell him that I got you buzzed by accident, please…"
"What? I'm not—" she protested, "if I were drunk, I'd probably have shot ya by now, or something."
"You've tried to, before," he meekly remarked.
"Oh, yeah…" she recalled, and proceeded to fall into a fit of laughs about it. "I wish I could'a had a tintype portrait taken of your face thinking that bullet glanced your cheek!" The words gleefully spilled out of her mouth as though she were a faucet missing its shutting valve. It prompted her to wonder whether she really had unknowingly imbibed some of the bar's faculty-dampening elixir.
'Chuck wouldn't have…' she told herself. Or rather, she thought, if he had, he'd have done so by accident; she refused to believe the man could act on malicious instinct even if he wanted to.
Some grunt with knife-holsters strapped over his chest approached the bar to have his cup refilled, leaning over at the spot farthest from where she was standing. He didn't look at her, even as she absently stared his way.
"Just the hard stuff— put me to sleep, barkeep…" the man muttered.
She watched Chuck take the cup and then pause, deliberating between two taps that seemed to hardly be labelled in any obvious way. He nodded to himself when he supposedly guessed correctly, sending the man back with his 'hard' drink.
She gave Chuck an amused stare as he tentatively returned to her.
"Wh— what…?" he puzzled.
"Nothin'…" she smirked, before giving a sigh. "Are you afraid'a me too, Chuck? Like all the rest of 'em are?" she asked him in earnest, though she wondered whether it came across.
His dumb expression seemed to tell her enough. "It's okay, Chuck— you don't gotta answer that." She collected her gemstone from the countertop and set her cup down, before turning to take her leave.
"Well, if I don't see ya…" she flatly sang back at him, sauntering outside onto the streets of The Lanes.
Her face settled into a pout, as her mood was compounded by the reminder that Silco had apparently gone somewhere exciting and left her behind. Not that it was unlike him...
She wondered whether the betrayal alone would be enough to sober her, if one or two of the night's beverages had indeed been of the alcoholic variety…
She sighed and continued down the smog-hazed street, flanked on either side by the colorful glowing discharge of luminous signs and merchant stalls that had closed up shop for the night. Among the places that certainly did stay open late were the 'entertainment' venues; Jinx scoffed as she passed by the door to a brothel that she knew some of Silco's crew to frequent.
'Folks really got nothin' to do these days, huh?' she mused, hardly being able to imagine needing to resort to something like that just to pass the time.
Not that she didn't ever get bored; she did find herself aimlessly wandering the Lanes more often than not, as she was now. The only thing she spent more time doing was holing up in the underground crevice where she slept, tinkering and conceiving of new contraptions with which to blow people up, among their ranks being the Hextech weapon-in-progress Silco claimed could rid them of the boot on their neck that was Topside, presumably by exploding their proverbial foot. With the power of her little blue gemstone, she could certainly arrange that, Jinx thought.
Rather, that'd be whenever the whim came upon Silco to assign her such a task. He'd consistently chafe at her acting beyond his instruction, even when it yielded positive results. He only wanted things done his way, she often found. Maybe that would begin to change once he witnessed what Jinx theorized Fishbones would be able to do when finished.
Apart from that, it was up to her to keep herself entertained...
She spotted the entrance to the brothel open up from across the street to reveal the dim and secret wallpapered hall inside, only for a short and ugly man to be escorted in by his taller date, dressed in lace and leather. She could hear the coins rattling about in his pockets from where she was standing.
She'd passed through one's doors once, in an adventure she'd kept private from Silco, if only to see what lay inside; she'd seen people paired up behind patterned, beaded curtains that barely obscured them, she'd seen the strange, colored smoke that they inhaled and how it imbued a hunger about their eyes if it weren't there already, seen their bare bodies pressed up against one another while they danced some kind of strange, lumbering dance from which neither seemed to want to part, heard their wanting moans and smelt their sweat-sheened skin.
She remembered expecting at any moment to be shooed from the place, to be scolded by those in charge and to have been brought before Silco to mete out her punishment, but to her surprise she'd been paid entirely no mind, save for some unpleasant reciprocal glances at her watching. In hindsight it did strike her as strange, though it had happened at a time well before her likeness had been so known, before that recognition turned people timid at the sight of her. She musingly figured that Silco likely had all too much to do with that coming to pass; he'd been furious at the reports of a slight-framed, blue-haired girl exiting by the front door of the brothel, for all to see. He'd asked her over and over who had invited the idea, but her honesty hadn't pierced his rage against all of those under his employ who he'd deemed had played a role in allowing the incident to occur. It had provided her with days of entertainment through which she could only hide behind a straight face.
As a reminiscent smile tugged at the corner of her lips, she caught a glimpse of the glowing gemstone bobbing around inside of her open pouch, and she thought of Fishbones. Before Hextech became an option, the idea of constructing a gun that could hurtle explosives from its barrel had never managed to be anything more than a curiosity; all of her prototyping of such a weapon had proved fruitless when she hadn't been able to concoct a propellant charge that burned hot enough to launch its payload into flight.
She now of course had the opposite problem; the sustained zap of power from gemstone heated the pyrotechnic composition to such a degree that the body of the launcher almost melted in her hands during her previous test-fire. She'd since figured that Fishbones had always wanted to wear the skin of a far larger shark…
As she thought about it, she supposed that finishing reinforcing the inner canister might not even take her the rest of the night; she'd be able to reveal to Silco tomorrow that it was ready, and maybe he could even witness its final test-fire.
All of that after he went and left me behind, without even a word…
Her mind changed on a dime as she grew irritated, all of a sudden. Maybe she'd instead wander off and find herself behind a beaded curtain with some detestable stranger that would only know her for the night, if only to spite him… that way, he wouldn't have the grounds to chide her without first explaining his own secret business and why it couldn't have included her… and then, she'd tell him it was his fault that she'd spent the night playing some skeevy character's sullied lover…
She realized after a moment that the last part of that plan made her shudder a little, and that in all likelihood she'd find herself pulling her knife before she allowed any strange man to touch her, least of all like that.
She supposed that even after her curiosity-led venture those years ago, she still wasn't so sure she'd gained much of an insight into what it was that people even liked about it so much.
Her head had begun to throb.
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"Sir…?" Sevika prodded, observing her boss having turned as still as a statue.
A thin fog crept across the great, spanning platform stretching out into the darkness before them; Topsiders had long ago named it the 'Bridge of Progress,' a cavalier declaration of their rise to a great regional power, or so they boasted. Sevika often considered it more malicious than that; it was a deeply derisive name. For them, she imagined it symbolized the way the great bridge almost appeared to hold the entire archipelago containing the city of Zaun at bay, pressing them out toward the sea where they could all be left behind and forgotten, and crucially, not to get in the way of the great Piltovan ascension…
They'd summoned magic that could transport ships many thousands of miles in the blink of an eye, had invented ways to remotely power mechanical contraptions indefinitely—even the hydraulics in her replacement arm drained the energy from her body as she used it throughout the day—and yet, not an iota of these technologies would see the living standard lifted for the average Zaunite. It was all for them, just as it had always been.
She much preferred the sight of the city from behind the fog of night, in the quiet late hours after midnight, when she could almost convince herself that the unsettling towering structures before her belonged to a mere city of ghosts, long since perished. And she hoped that Silco's plans would soon make it a reality.
Sevika perceived a set of lights faintly through the haze, crossing the width of the bridge at head-height from right to left, as they had been intermittently for the past half-hour.
"Deliver the report again, Krester," said Silco, growing noticeably impatient.
The man he was speaking to leant against the wall to one side of the alley in which their party waited, all seven of them, half of which looked to have been resting their eyes before Sevika had prompted a verbal response from her boss.
"Eighteen hundred hours: the city alarm sounded for the better part of forty minutes," Krester groggily replied. "Bridges were raised shortly after the first alarm sound. They lowered again at roughly twenty hundred, but remained cordoned off in both directions— all but the southern bridge."
Krester was a brawny, broad-shouldered bear of a man whose stature often reminded Sevika of her father, from back when she still knew him. As such, through no fault of his own, she sought to avoid working with the man where she could.
"My bet's on some grand robbery gone sour," Krester added. "Gang of street rats with no discipline— maybe they took a hostage or two, or even killed one."
"We'll know soon enough…" Sevika chimed in. Her guess was far different, and though she wouldn't voice it, she had the feeling the others were thinking the same thing: Jinx went and acted out again. The brat had already pulled the near-indefensible stunt of setting a bomb off in some populated area over there a week earlier, and for all Sevika could tell Silco had let her get away with it. Topsider deaths bothered her none of course, it was the insubordination. Acting out wildly only served to muck up their true objective; everybody understood this, because Silco would have had them sent to Stillwater if it had been anybody else. Sevika bristled in recall of it, but it was nothing new between those two…
She observed Silco pinch at the bridge of his nose. "Do we perhaps suppose that we didn't supply our messenger with enough coin…?"
It had crossed Sevika's mind; they'd sent their man over to deliver a message to Marcus, paying the enforcers for entry into Piltover, but were yet to see him return. She hoped he hadn't been stopped, though the enforcers usually knew better than to interfere with their business. In any case, the possibility lay on the table that they'd yet be waiting for some time.
She clutched at a small paper order folded up in the pocket of her jacket, glancing over at the only jittery member of their party, twitching his shoulder the way he always would when he sat restless. It honestly annoyed the living hell out of her.
"Dustin," she muttered, drawing the order from her jacket. He showed no reluctance in granting her his attention, his eyes immediately darting to the piece of paper she was holding.
"A job?" he said back, forcing his voice into a whisper. She wasn't sure why; the boy was something of an enigma to them all.
"It ain't a secret, kid," she replied, though some of the others took interest in their talking. "I just need this brought to the plant by the deep fissures. You know the one?"
He gave a jerky nod.
"Give it to the foreman there— it's for him. Got it?" she said.
"Plant-foreman," the boy repeated, laughing oddly to himself and disappearing back down the alley with his task. The kid was weird alright, but she figured he could at least handle being a courier.
She sensed Silco's eyes on her.
"I take it that Singed was obliging…" he said. He referred to the task he'd assigned her following their previous conversation; they needed Shimmer in the hands of every one of their fighters were they to wage a war against Topside, and Singed had been working on the new strain for some time. Sevika had already had a taste of it, and man was it potent. She'd even reserved a chamber for it in her prosthetic arm itself, were she to need a hit in a pinch. She almost found herself itching to have a reason to use it.
"He seems to think the plant will need a couple weeks to adjust their manufacture process," she replied.
"Mm… and bleach-purify all of the feed lines no doubt," said Silco.
"How are the books looking…?" She almost hesitated to ask. "This'll leave us only two factories for profitable production, and we're still reeling from the entire damn cargo that went up in flames last week, the one that Jin—"
She stopped herself, as his glare reliably found her.
"The one that you lost to the Firelights, you mean to say…?" he sharply replied.
She knew better than to press the issue, even as the others regarded her unpleasantly.
"In either case," he went on, calling the attention of the rest of their crew, "the Firelights need to be vanquished before we make any move on Topside. We risk everything with their little merry band still prodding and poking at our side— I'll tolerate no further losses that don't finally see those fools scattered entirely to the wind…"
"…To expose their hideout, we offer something up as bait?" Sevika replied, honing in on his meaning. She sure knew who she'd volunteer…
Before he could answer her, the men perked up to a figure emerging from the fog from across the bridge; their messenger had returned.
The man's face didn't look as though he had a positive story to tell.
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Her head fog seemed to have finally cleared.
Chuck had earned himself a box of spiders outside his door come morning, Jinx decided, vowing to pour her own drinks at The Last Drop going forward; he wasn't an egg to be trusted any longer…
'He's gotta be one slip shy of mixing Shimmer into his cereal,' she silently remarked.
The exertion of a brief chase had no doubt sped things along, too; she found herself stalking one of Silco's men in hopes that she could at least conclude the night knowing what it was that she'd missed out on.
This chestnut-haired goon was one of her favorites. The man was thin, sniveling and timid; so timid that she was inclined to call him a boy, though she knew him to be squarely older than she was. As it happened, she'd long suspected Silco to follow some unspoken practice by which no man within even five years of her age would be taken under his employ under any circumstance. She sometimes felt she had half a notion as to why, though the idea of confronting him about it caused her face to flush. As she came to think about it, Silco's previous bookkeeper had only been on the young side of his mid-twenties…
Her tailing began to crawl to a halt. She sighed as it occurred to her that her ticket to the show might not have even known where the show was, so she hopped down behind him, knowing that the ring of the buckles on her boots would alert him to her presence.
He jumped, spinning to face her with his head sunk so low that his shoulders almost met his ears.
"Where're you going, Dustin?" she broached casually.
"'Splosion girl…" he muttered to himself, his face still locked in a goofy look of startlement.
"Talking 'bout these?" she replied casually, unclasping from her belt one of the mean-faced steel grenades of her own design that she'd taken to calling Chompers. She was close to snickering as he recoiled from the sight of the thing, but she was also growing impatient.
"You wouldn't be out here dilly-dallying about while you had a job to do, would you Dustin?" she said, idly tossing the grenade in her hand.
His eyes widened until his dark makeup formed a set of perfect black circles around his eyes. "Straight, straight there," he said, shaking his head, "it's a message!"
He was clutching the piece of paper he was supposedly needing to deliver, showing it to her. "To… the foreman!" he read.
"Oh…" she replied, realizing that one of the processing plants for the city's supply of Shimmer lay scarcely further down their path. "From…?" she asked him.
"Sevika!" he blurted.
She gave a huff when she realized that his doings weren't going to be of much interest to her at all. She'd wasted all her time stalking him this way, which meant that she probably wouldn't have the opportunity to learn of Silco's movements until the next morning.
"Well, be careful up that way," she grumbled at him in farewell. "Watch out for that cliff up the side of the path." She imagined Dustin would be the kind to scream on the way down.
She noticed he hadn't moved, though. "Um… do you really scare that easy?" she ventured.
He tilted his head, the way she'd seen dogs do when they picked up on something with their ears. "Wants to get in…" she heard him mutter.
She quietly huffed, sauntering back over to see whatever it was that had captured his curiosity. There was something happening through the haze; she'd begun to hear the commotion too, whatever it was. "C'mon, scaredy-cat," she remarked at Dustin, leading them closer to the entrance of the factory.
They slowed when they gained a full view of what was going on; the two gruff-looking men who usually stood guard in front of the place seemed to be trying to fend off some unwelcome visitor.
"Just some drunkard…" she concluded to Dustin after seeing the guy take a hard shove, only to laugh at the guard for it. He looked like he might be young; he was lean, though strangely dressed, and had weird, white hair which spiked out at odd angles.
"I'm sure you can handle slipping past—" she began, before witnessing the next development; failing to have him back up, one of the guards decided to sock him in the face, and Jinx was left doubting her previous assumption about the guy being drunk when he gracefully avoided the guard's fist by performing a weird, backwards-pirouette-flip away from them, which saw the top of his foot connect hard against the guard's chin. That one fell while the spiked-hair dude landed in front of the other, in a low pose with his arm outstretched in front of him, supporting half of his weight by his fingers as though he were one of Jinx's spiders.
She was suddenly grateful that she'd stuck around with Dustin. "You always seem to find the action, don't ya…?" she remarked quietly, though she noticed him begin to back away when the white-haired fighter hurtled a fist at the remaining guard's ribs, swiftly following it up with a swipe-kick that dislodged his footing, seizing him and then flinging him down onto the concrete.
She almost giggled aloud with how entertaining it had all been to see.
She turned and held Dustin by the arm before he could get away. "It'll be fine," she whispered harshly, "I'll handle him." His incessant shaking of the head wouldn't deter her.
Though, when she looked back, they were both startled to find the guy had seemingly vanished, despite the great factory doors remaining shut. Her face dropped a little.
'Must've slipped quietly inside,' she decided after a moment, approaching the place warily before Dustin ran up and bumped her.
"Up…!" he rasped.
Puzzled, she lifted her gaze. He hadn't been wrong; somehow, there her mysterious fighter was, up high against the wall of the factory, balancing himself only on the steel architectural detailings of the building. He seemed to be trying to peer through its window, in an odd display.
'How the hell…?' she wondered, but as he answered her question by impressively vaulting himself further upward and scaling the remainder of the wall to the top of the factory, she decided that she wasn't willing to let him get away; she had to know who this guy was.
"It's safe now— go do your job, Dustin," she called in parting, before finding a weathered, narrow ladder that would take her to the top of an apartment tower adjacent to the plant.
She was sure glad not to have been carrying her mini-gun Pow-Pow on her back, she thought as she clambered up the next rooftop, in pursuit. She halted at the next gap to cross, feeling that she wouldn't be able to attain enough height to reach the ledge above it. She stole a quick glance up to where she'd last placed him, then to her side, and managed to spot an alternative way up, moving as quickly as she could so as not to lose too much ground.
After she'd made it, she surveyed the elevated terrain. She would have to have been at the same height he was when she'd last spotted him.
Where'd you go…?
She grinned to herself, finding the sense of chase rather exhilarating.
Crouching down low, so as not to be the one found first, she set off searching; surely his hair alone would prevent him from blending into the darkness.
There you are…
She found him standing casually with his hands in his pockets, seemingly as close to the edge of the rooftop as his balance would allow. He looked down upon a steady trickle of people leaving a club just below, his nose turned up at them as though it were his natural expression. It had her wondering how he was going to react to being questioned by her. She pulled out her pistol and cocked it back before getting any closer, so that the sound wouldn't give her away just yet; she also felt it wise to remove the jangly buckles from the mouth of her boots, slipping them all into separate pockets to reattach later.
He seemed to grow bored of the view just as she made her move, so she quickly crept along behind him, hoping to catch up once he'd stopped. She found herself intently observing the way in which he moved as she tailed him; there was a certain weighted balance about his every stride, hopping from ledge to ledge.
They both ended up on a somewhat narrow wooden catwalk suspended between buildings, where he paused once again to observe the city. She took the opportunity to close the distance between them, rising from her crouched stance.
Her breath caught in her throat, as she felt pressured to make a decision quickly. She dearly hoped he'd have a sense of humor, as she aimed her gun at the back of his head, hastily trying to come up with something funny to say.
Instead, she felt a jolt as her weapon was suddenly snatched from her, the boy having turned around to face her in the blink of an eye. Even after his earlier display, she hadn't expected such speed.
She rejected the urge to back up, as, in spite of everything, he didn't actually look too scary. His featured were sharp, and his eyes fiery; their irises glinted hazel-gold as the faint light caught them.
His eyebrows furrowed as he shot her a quizzical expression.
"What're you supposed to be…?" he met her dubiously, "world's worst assassin?"
She wondered whether they might have been the same age, based on the youth of his voice.
"Uh, they only payed me to scare ya..." she managed in retort, flashing a smirk that she hoped was disarming; she couldn't figure him seeing her as a threat now that she stood weaponless. At least, weaponless to his knowledge; her fingers hovered inches from a Chomper grenade dangling from her belt while she gauged his temperament.
"Yeah…?" he grunted, awkwardly dangling her pistol in front of him with his finger, as though unsure what to do with it. The hand he used was partially wrapped in crimson-splotched bandage, she noticed, the blood seeming to have originated from his knuckles.
"You can admit you were scared, it's fine…" she said, intending to sound playful.
"I heard you comin'…" he argued.
She stifled a chuckle, wondering if his intention had been to intimidate her. "Really—?" she said. "And if I pulled the trigger before you turned around?"
"Would've heard that too," he determinedly replied.
"Dead people don't hear things," she quipped.
He continued to look at her unimpressed, though his gaze elicited a strange feeling from her.
"Um— by the way, Shimmer's not that hard to score around here," she quickly said, giving a head movement in the direction they'd originally come. "You could probably have just asked somebody— all you need is some coin…"
He shot her a look of suspicion, perhaps not appreciating having being spied upon.
"That's all it is, huh?" he asked instead. "The purple stuff— it's only, like… some drug, for losers?"
The question puzzled her. "Are you like, a Topsider, or something…?" she wondered.
He shot her a look. "No…" He held her gun up again to examine it, this time seeming to notice the colorful consistency between it and her attire. "You a part of some gang of freaks, or somethin'?" he asked. "Am I gonna have a bunch of you tailin' me now…?"
She made a face at him and attempted to snatch her weapon back, but he quickly pulled it out of her reach.
"What's your deal—?" she huffed, considering going for her knife.
"You're just gonna point it at me again…" he grumbled.
She decided to change tack, holding up both her hands and making innocent eyes at him, though she began to doubt he'd see the humor in it.
Confirming her notion, he only raised an eyebrow at her, unsure what to do with her gesture. The thought crossed her mind that she didn't much mind looking at him; the strong line of his jaw, the ridges of his cheekbones under his eyes, or at his hair which seemed to dance away from his head as though by some strange magic. And his eyes seemed to pierce through her as she found their liquid-gold gaze, brewing more of that same odd feeling within her.
It seemed that she'd won the exchange, she realized, when he reluctantly handed the pistol back to her. To flaunt her victory she briefly checked that the hammer was still cocked back before proceeding to turn and nail a tin can sitting on the edge of a rooftop about twenty yards away. She then puckered her lips to blow away the pink smoke billowing from the end of the barrel, though glancing back at him she found him looking more puzzled than impressed.
"So, uh…" he began, "who are you, anyway?"
She let out a breath as she realized he'd beaten her to the punch. "Funny— that's what I came up here to ask you…"
He took a step closer to look at her, and though she wasn't afraid, she felt her heart skip a little. "Too bad— asked you first," he said. "Out with it."
She gave him the same stifled chuckle again. "Maybe I'm your damn reckoning— ever thought of that?" she said tauntingly, slithering the barrel of her pistol back up to his chin.
With a touch, he directed the weapon away, seeming unfazed by her. "Sure… and has someone's 'damn reckoning' got a name?"
She relented and let down her weapon with a huff. "Jinx…" she replied, but watched his eyebrow creep upward at that. "What—?" she quickly asked.
"Uh… your parents name you that?" he said.
It flustered her a little. "Well, no— but… what's it matter…?"
He shrugged and made a face, then lowered himself down to sit on the edge of the catwalk they were standing on, dangling his feet over the drop below. She eventually decided to join him, holding herself by a couple of supporting ropes and leaning herself over the edge too, swaying back and forth slowly.
"What's your name…?" she finally returned, but found herself staring again; at his ears, and at his neck, finding his shoulders, then the prominent trapezius muscle that lay between the two. She quickly shook her head. His physique didn't intimidate her; many of Silco's men were plenty well-muscled…
"Garou," he muttered back. It sounded mildly exotic to her; she wouldn't have been sure she could even spell it.
She noticed his clothing again, how out of the ordinary it was even with the way Piltovans dressed; a fairly monochromatic outfit of white, baggy pants which tightened around the ankles, a close-fitting black top that looked to have no seams or stitching, and he wore a weird faded band of cloth around his waist. The little black flats without socks underneath almost made his feet look small compared with the rest of him, she thought to herself in amusement.
He glanced at her, perhaps not appreciating her unbroken eye on him.
"Did your parents name you that?" she quickly retorted.
He gave a curt exhale, before pausing for a moment. "No— I, uh… some other morons made me take it," he explained. "Meant to mean somethin' where they're from, I guess…"
As he spoke he seemed to notice some passer-by staring up at the two of them from down below. To her entertainment he promptly flipped them off, but she remained intrigued by his answer.
"Oh… where are you from, though?" she asked again. "If you don't know what Shimmer is, then I know you're not from around here."
"Don't worry about it…" he grunted, to her disappointment. He stood back up, after a moment. "Why were you followin' me back there anyway…?"
Irritatingly, her face began to flush. "I don't know," she shrugged, "I saw you flatten those two guards…"
He didn't stop eyeing her. "Oh… you live there or something?"
"No…" she said, but stopped at that. She couldn't really understand how he was making her out to sound like the odd one…
Her words almost felt caught in her throat as she watched him make a move as though he were about to walk away. "You know The Last Drop?" she managed to blurt out. He gave her a fresh glance, awaiting her meaning.
"Like, the bar in the middle of town…" she added.
"Place with the loud music?" he asked.
"Yeah!" she nodded. "Or— on like, some nights of the week it does..."
"Sure," he shrugged.
"Well, uh," she said, "if you, um— that's where I—"
Since when did speaking become this difficult…?!
"—like, you can find me there usually, if you wanted to."
Unless he was pitying her, he seemed to take well to her meaning, as the corner of his lips curled into a smirk.
"Y'know, now that I think about it," he said, "I reckon I have been there before… I don't know— got a feeling those folks wouldn't be eager to welcome me back…"
Her mind was sent racing by his statement, but he soon reeled her back. "Could meet you here again, if I ain't busy…"
"Oh, okay," she replied, feeling an unwelcome thudding against her chest. "Like, tomorrow…?"
He glanced her way again. "If I ain't busy."
'Busy with what?' was what she wanted to ask, but he seemed content to conclude their conversation. She watched him slowly crouch down, presumably setting his eyes on the next ledge he'd take to exit the catwalk. "It's late— get some rest, alright…?" he said to her. She wanted to reply with something like 'you too,' but found herself almost distracted by the distance of the jump he was lining himself up to make; the strangest ending the night could possibly have would be one in which he suddenly went splat on the ground, she thought morbidly.
While he prepared to launch himself, she noticed the conspicuous outline of his flexed back and shoulder muscles through the thin material of his top. Somehow, she believed that he might even be stronger than Krester, a man who would virtually tower over Garou were they to stand side-by-side.
His next movement did nothing to damage that conviction; without another word, he performed a near thirty-foot lateral jump over to the adjacent building, about as effortlessly as she'd observed him scaling the wall earlier.
She hadn't at all expected him to turn back after his landing, to catch her staring at him stupidly, with her teeth pressed upon her bottom lip. He might have been far enough away and positioned well enough in the gloom not to have noticed, she told herself while her cheeks began to flush again. Though, she wouldn't have put past him the idea that he might possess night-sight, with those yellow animal eyes of his.
Even as she hastily turned from him, she conjured up an image in which he would do the same, marching off and disappearing into the night as mysteriously as he'd emerged, eventually allowing his bound-up shoulders to sink down to rest beside his chest once he was certain he was alone.
The vision played over in her head the entire way back.