Indifference is not the reaction she had been going for.
Unabashed fear? Yes. Trembling lips and quaking legs? Certainly. Anguished cries into the dark, hot air? Oh, most definitely. But this woman regards her with a calmness that speaks to her familiarity with monsters. Perhaps, Zosma thinks, there are worse creatures out here than she, things more terrible that go bump in the night. It is hard to believe.
But even as she is scrutinizing the other for points of weakness, she is moving closer. The splash of the shallow water sounds distant to her ears. She’s too busy studying the painted lady face as she approaches, as the space between them dissolves into almost nothing. At first, Zosma thought that this is what she wanted. Up in space, it hadn’t mattered that she was ripped apart and resewn thousands of time, the skin crudely drawn back together. It hadn’t mattered what she looked like, that her eyeballs melted from their sockets or that Kangaroos’ kisses left puncture marks on every inch of her they roamed. Even when she was remade into the being she now was, she hadn’t cared. She only worried how she would be received. Now that Kagerus openly accepts her appearance, she longs for a touch of fear.
Kangeroo tried to brutally muscle an ego into her charge, and maybe that’s what surfaces now.
I’ll ask more of you, she says immediately, so close Z can see each individual eyelash curling towards her brow. And you’ll wish there was more. Normally, this kind of talk by a pretty girl would have her stomach pleasantly fluttering. But a heavy weariness sucks at her. She remembers, all too clearly, the last adventure she has just finished (or at least, the prologue to her current adventure). She still sees the faces of her island family when she closes her eyes and dwells in that distant place. So she does not reply. Her opal eyes are luminous, though. It is clear she will go with her anyway, even as exhausted as she is – ever the glutton for the eccentric.
“I was not,” her deep voice intones. And now it is her turn to be studied. She finds herself warming under the roving gaze of the stranger. Extraordinary. “Zosma,” she corrects, clearing her throat and mind both. Because if this examination continues, she’s not sure she will be able to hold herself back. She is not over her goddess – not by half – but this one could prove a pleasurable first step away and ahead. “And you? What might I call the woman who wants to ask so much of me already?” She grins then, and fangs poke out of her black mouth. “What makes you think I won’t devour you on the spot?”
Zosma
@[Sid]