The blonde shuddered as the elf's tincture rolled down her throat, inter-weaving its contents into the ravaged trachea, cracked nasal bridge and bruised internal organs only slightly slower than the placements of the wounds themselves. Her hair was wild as she set her sneer toward the girl kicked back into the alley, her pride throbbing from the attack. "Little piece of trash--Do you know who you just hit? DO YOU!?" She twisted her body slowly, bringing her legs crossed as light sputtered and whipped from between her fingers, a burning, antiseptic scent clearing out the alley's stench.

Zofie's jaw worked back and forth, loose and resilient, as she pushed herself up to a crouch. She kept the enormous cow-femur between her and the trio, now little more than semi-colorful shapes at the alley's entrance thanks to the destruction of her glasses. However, both their shattered remnants and those of the hurled tincture bottle went from rattling to sliding, in a serpentine wiggle, into a circle around the grimy, pink-haired feral girl.

Drath's brain seemed to be bogged down as he looked from the sorceress on his left to the bald elf on his right, and lastly to the elf's still-sheathed sword. Still, the elf had his hand right at the top of that scabbard, staring hard at Zofie with unblinking sodalite eyes. Drath took a deep breath in through his nose, still clutching his dagger in an underhand grip, and sank into his stance. "Alright. Merayne, you soften her up. Inggundr, block the entrance. I'm going in to get her."

Inggundr the elf nodded without taking his eyes off of Zofie, finally slipping his leather-gloved thumb in between his sword's crosstrees and the mouth of his scabbard to loosen the blade. Merayne set one palm upward, fingers curled into a claw. The sparks from her fingertips snapped to a point just above the center of her palm as a pearlescent orb of energy took shape, enough to illuminate the front of the alley. Zofie still crouched, yet her weight shifted to sink through her back leg, coiled like a spring. The ring of glass shards around her moved to accommodate in a whispering slide. Adrenaline expanded each second, freezing the droplets of sweat, making he particles of dust stand out in the dim light like marine snow suspended in the depths.

Merayne centered her eyes on Zofie, taking her aim, and started the whip of her arm to cast the magic orb toward her. For what she lacked in detail, Zofie's dead-channel blue eyes still picked up motion. In concert with touch and hearing, her body launched toward the missile, a hair's breadth from the wall, while the shards of glass followed in her wake. They swung upward, shredding the orb, just in time for the ball-joint of the femur to land hard and square on the blonde's temple. The lights in Merayne's eyes flickered for a moment, like the sudden flare in a bulb, before finally going out, leaving her body to drop like a string-cut marionette.

Drath's head was still in the process of turning to follow her motion as Inggundr's brows went up and ears tilted back, toothy mouth wide in a wail of mourning and fury all knotted together and shrieked from his depths. He held his sword underhand at first, drawing across Drath's front to clock Zofie in the under-arm with the pommel. The strike sent a bolt through her nerves, her own cry a strangled, single sob. Loosed tears splashed across Drath's cheeks as she turned to follow the pommel's trajectory, the curve of bone catching beneath the knife-wielder's knee and drawing it upward. Drath was, after all, but human, and the motion sent him tumbling backward, clearing the path between her and Inggundr.

Inggundr's blade swung toward her flank as he brought it across, just above his friend's descent in the hope that it might take a bite out of Zofie's flank. Unfortunately for him, she pushed against the wall to land dead center at his body, with the remaining shards of glass that hovered around her following her left, hooking claw across his cheek and eyebrow, and shredding the right side of his face. It seemed the providence of fate that a single shard fell through the hole in his cheek and into his throat, leaving him to choke on both it and the blood that spilled into his gullet. As she dropped back, so too did the elf's sword as he stumbled into the street and away from the alley, hoping that same line of fate would see him to a healer. With Merayne's lifeless body at his side and Drath's blade resting impotently across his chest, Drath kept his back to the ground, using the flat of his knife against that of the sword to push it up and off of his body while his free hand kept at his middle, fingers splayed, to intercept anything that might come his way. His hair stuck to his brow, obscuring much of his view, while the thud of his heartbeat and the short, desperate gasps for breath made his ears ring.

Zofie's posture straightened, yet she just as quickly hunched in as her stomach took another loud, insistent growl. Soon, she was right back down in her crouch, pulling the gem-covered clasps and wallet from Merayne's body. Through the shackles of his panic, Drath set his heel against the ground, starting to push himself back from Zofie's methodical, swift looting of his companion's corpse. "St-hh... stop..." He swallowed and took a gasp, floundering for a moment as he held his dagger-hand to his chest and his free hand against the ground, brought low by his own reptile brain. He started to turn the point out on his knife, aiming it at Zofie with a shaking hand.

Zofie's regard to him seemed incidental as she shoved all of the baubles into her jacket's pockets, keeping her toes to the ground. A sweep of both hand and ankle cleared away Merayne's body to rest against the alley's corner, and her fingers took purchase on the femur. She set one knee down against Drath's nearest bicep, sinking her weight into it as she brought the cow femur up to her lips and took a loud, hard crunch into it, slurping up the marrow inside it while watching the fellow pinned below. As the femur disappeared, bit by crumbling bit, into Zofie's gullet, she finally spoke, her voice a quick, gravelly drone, like a hummingbird that survived a war zone and unmistakably tinted with the American South.

"So I'm a ****** dog, huh? What kinda bone were you plannin' on seein' that I wanted?" She wiped off the ball joint's end on Merayne's dress before biting firmly into it, gnawing through the shell as if it were an old piece of butterscotch.

"I don't..." Drath swallowed as his brows went up and his mouth turned down, his body starting to shake before a burst of mucus and saliva ran down his face. "I don't know... I just... I just wanted to be tough--"

With one last, loud slurp of marrow, Zofie threw the last bit of bone closer to the meat dumpster, landing with a resounding klang to disrupt him. "That what you do, huh? Find people who're lost n' hungry and play with 'em like dollies? You got a rich ****face for a dad you're tryin' to impress or somethin'?"

Drath's head weaved back and forth before a sulk overtook him, prompting him to throw his knife away in a sudden tantrum. "Shut up! Just... shut up, alright?" He tried to wrench his arm from under her knee, yet all it did was prompt her to settle more firmly onto it, denying him freedom of motion.

With her own jaw stuck out in distaste, Zofie pulled Drath's wallet from him and stuffed it in her pocket, along with all of the other bangles she'd procured. "Oh yer just precious." She gave his cheek a pat, too firm to be a comfort. She rose to her feet and swung herself off to the side, still pantomiming 'desperate street rat' while her back was turned to the Marketplace. "You do what you like... but I'll eat you without a second thought if you come at me again. No joke."

Drath managed to roll over, pushin up to his hands and knees as he stared at the alley floor. With only the slightest clatter, Zofie ducked into the throng of the Market, disappearing in the casual milling of so many worlds all jammed into one space.

The Sch?tze Arts Festival started about as smoothly as one could expect an art showing to go in the West End. Some scowling, foul-mouthed elves arrived after many of the patrons, about six or seven. Those numbers were cut down to a trembling three not fifteen minutes after one thought himself so safe as to speak ill of trollish metalworking techniques, to receive a demonstration firsthand of what, perhaps, the local trolls had considered their true art. Zofie stepped backward to avoid the spray of blood that billowed from the clean, spiraling stroke of a blade through a torso, with an absent, backward toss of her hair to keep it from becoming unnecessarily sodden. If anyone had questions as to why Zofie seemed to wear cropped pants and walk barefoot, the deep stains made on train dresses and expensive shoes from the growing pool of blood answered them thoroughly. A rather smug aimamancer congealed and coagulated the pool into some fanciful, branching sculpture to the tune of polite applause by the arthaus' major patrons. Zofie simply leaned against one of the few, bare portions of wall to lift her glasses and rub her sinuses with a sigh. "S'always somethin'.

Zofie had left her hair down, brushed to a near-liquid cascade of bright pink, and deigned to wear a cuff on one bare arm, a bracelet set with a single onyx on the other, and a bleak pendant of a metal-worked rose set with moonstone formed to a droplet. A simple, silver halter hugged her from beneath the green leather jerkin, its offset zipper peeled past her sternum. Glittering gold crop pants hung loose enough to swish with each step. She took a few quick glances around the arthaus from behind floral-print frames, avoiding directly looking on any patron long enough to make it seem as if she wanted to engage in conversation. What few of the presenters she knew, she greeted with tight, but genial smiles and waves whose motions were contained mostly in her fingers. Eventually, the critics, patrons, and curious folks who came for free wine and snacks started to shuffle to the six rows of chairs, all aimed towards a screen which unfurled from the ceiling. The hosts spoke, and for how glowing the words seemed, the tone remained hollow. Those three elves, quite literally threatened into staying and being polite, seemed perfectly comfortable with this. Most everyone else had become bored and impatient.

A few short, self-indulgent films about The Hypocrisy Of Deity (which struck the philosophers in the audience as awfully sapio-centric) and disjointed, surrealist pieces (quite a few being purposefully obtuse, but at least one scratched into the psyches of those assembled, into some itch they didn't know they had). Zofie didn't sit as her film reel clicked on. Pacing had begun in earnest, with one arm crossed over her middle and the other bent at the elbow, nails scraping and tapping on her teeth.

The film unfolded much like the other abstract films, yet absolutely no human feces had shown up in it. Broken pieces of dolls, crumpled, walking collages of pictures from classified ads, monstrous, stomping golems of rotten hamburger meat that exploded triumphantly into the spill of beetle larvae and miraculously floating, yet broken, pocket watches marked with phosphorescent paint. Much of it was stop-motion, yet little details seemed to evade her fellow filmmakers, such as just how she managed so many simultaneous movements with high quality film, how she managed the float and spin of the broken-mirror-glass orbs without any string or computer effects. By the time that her reel had closed and the applause had lifted, she had already left the festival, climbing down to the arch beneath the bridge that separated Dockside from the Marketplace. There, she crouched, dressed in her fancy clothes and modest jewelry, amongst the lichens, the stone and the damp that had felt more like home than any bed she'd managed.

A Rip in the Curtain, part 2

Over the course of a week, the sprawling contraption took up more and more of Zofie's living space, the entire process guided by some instinctual need to complete it, yet with the same amount of focus that a spider might place on completing a web. She had gone on autopilot, subsisting off of the royalties from the oddball advertisements she had directed and creative, recently-honed dumpster-diving skills to fuel her nigh-manic desire to see it completed. What had begun as enough space to fit over a bed had become a geodesic dome the size of a house, fitted with all manner of contraptions around the large hole in the building's side for taking advantage of the snow and rain, for producing steam that billowed up to spin a steel rotor, which in turn powered a kinetic generator that she 'borrowed' from the dumpster outside of a workshop belonging to one of the city's many tinkerers and techies. One thing seemed to move another thing, which then moved three more things in a clanking, whirring symphony as the inclement weather dropped its bounty onto the heated plate, whose heat could be traced right back around to earlier precipitation. At various points during this process, Zofie had substituted herself and her abilities for a part that now turned and creaked with the others. As she fitted one last bolt into place with a brittle old wrench, the dome and its noisy, mechanical interior was then complete.

At least one shirt and two pairs of pants had fallen prey to the processes around her, to say nothing of how many times her hair had gotten caught in one gear or another spring to bring everything to a grinding, shriek-filled halt. That same hair had been braided into an updo that doubled as a pocket for her smaller tools, fanning out like spokes on a clunky metal halo. While she was perfectly capable of stepping out into the hottest of summer days in a leather jacket without breaking a sweat, the heat that had collected in the dome saw her in naught but a black two-piece swimsuit, goggles, and heat gloves to keep from burning her hands on her tools. Lights, lenses and prisms flung around inside the dome, breaking apart and reassembling the beams of light as Zofie settled within, finally peeling her goggles from her face, setting her tools outside of the dome, and leaving her gloves next to them. Once all items had been set aside, she padded back to the room's center and sprawled on her back, staring up at the passing beams and glimmering, unearthly crystals above.

Zofie blew out a slowww exhale as she started to unwind her hair, pulling it from the braids to allow it to splay out against the floor. She closed her eyes, drinking in through her skin how the concrete floor cooled where she laid atop it, how dense, hot and damp the atmosphere in the dome had gotten otherwise. The sweat felt strange, bubbling up through her relatively new skin. It emerged black, almost sooty, and indistinguishable from the axle grease and oil that splotched across her. It felt uncomfortable, like a clogged drain about to burst. She bent one leg, readying it to swing over, yet gradually, she let it sink back down, squirming from the slick feeling that had collected in all of the nooks and crannies of her body. All over, she itched too deep to scratch, and her body was too weighed down to try, either way. Eventually, the slick, sickly fluid bubbled out of her skin and spilled across the floor. Its smell was foul, somewhere between tar, vinegar and burnt hair, with the warming of it making no improvements.

Zofie coughed as the scent poured into her nose, her body twitching from the spasms while she curled in, further and further. Finally, she pushed herself up enough to get on her hands and knees and crawl away from the worst of the black puddle, if only to get away from the brunt of its noxiousness. She hissed through her teeth as the heat cut into her palms and legs, closing in on the doorway out of the structure. It was then, as the armatures receded, that a thick metal door closed in front of her, locking her in her own device. In the darkness, she crumbled to the floor with a groan, covering her head in her hands. "Great. I just made the world's most complicated ****head of a sweat lodge."

Outwardly, very little seemed to have changed for Zofie, after the dome-sweatlodge-bad trip incident. She might have had a little bit of an extra spring in her step, a touch greater ease in motion, but her disposition was still a sweet exterior barely coating the animosity that spilled out from her core. However, beneath that hardly-touched surface, Zofie's awareness had expanded, spilling over phenomena which had been better suited to laboratory equipment, with the ensuing clumsiness an inevitability rather than something ignored by choice.

If, say, she wanted to look through a store's selection of salt shakers, the entire supply would begin to rattle under her scrutiny. If she picked one up by hand, at least two others may float in her wake, orbiting her or remaining completely out of her view, to the point of nearly following her out of the store and endangering her good graces with the owners and clerks of the establishment. This phenomenon was precisely the reason that she hadn't gone to the hardware store to pick up nails and screws, and in turn why the floor in her warehouse looked like a very persnickety tornado had struck.

She sat on the kitchen counter, feet pressed to the bottom cabinets and arms crossed over her middle, dressed in naught more than her glasses, a green t-shirt with a tiger face at its front and a threadbare pair of blue panties. She fussed with a long, dangling pigtail while surveying the space, occasionally rolling out her hand and brushing her finger across the space before her. The dust that had accumulated on the floor turned over in its place as her fingers passed through the air, and her lower lip dropped from the sensation that met her digits. "... the... hell is that?" She curled her fingers in and took a deep inhale, easing out a sigh before extending only her index finger to the clutter of Tinker Toys, barely visible in the corner by the welded-shut loading dock. She felt every single wooden rod and spool, the slight variations in density, up to and including the yellow plastic man that came with the box. Inevitably, it scattered over the floor once she tried to pull her senses back, bringing out a long, loud, rough growl of frustration that echoed throughout her home. "Okay, fine, **** it."

Zofie slammed her hands down on the counter to push herself off of it. She only got about as far as getting her rump free before her body slung downward, following the solid plant that her feet had on the cabinet door. A good thump of her hands against the tile kept her from faceplanting, while her glasses started to float up and off of her head, tumbling in slow motion toward the ceiling. "God-dammit!!" Still with her palms to the floor, she lifted one leg, then the other off of the cabinet door to set herself into a hand stand, which gradually lessened to merely the tips of her fingers, until finally, she disembarked from the floor entirely, tumbling weightlessly up to meet her glasses in their gradual ascent to the ceiling. While her actions were deliberate, the hard set to her jaw and the narrowing of her eyes betrayed her frustration. By the time she met the ceiling, she folded her glasses, tucked in her legs, and curled up, hoping to sleep off the wild scramble of gravitational effects.

Zofie was not prepared for the 'exquisite lapsang.' It was like drinking the burnt bits from the end of a roast beef, combined with sweet tobacco. Still, through an obviously blanched and startled expression, she regarded the tea with her sip and bobbed a nod to Geist. She drew her legs up close to her side from her placement on the couch, partially to take them out of licking/biting range of the copper-colored, insect-eyed fluffball that frog-walked up to her, grinning through its beartrap teeth. "It um... it's... a lot different than the lapsang I had at my Nanna's."

The sprawl of Geist's legs seemed to double the size of the armchair that he had dropped into, across from Zofie's spot on the couch. The whole of it trembled once under his silent laugh, half of his mouth drawing up to smile. "I'd imagine she cut it with oolong. Also, thank you for bothering to taste it. Your sort have a way of..." His brows furrowed as he lifted his hand from his knee, turning his wrist in the hopes of coaxing the words from his mind.

"Eatin' crazy **** in large amounts without processin' the taste?" She quirked up one brow as her lips twisted into a smirk, yet her arm still drew defensively over her middle. "I ate a whole ****in' granite table and... like sixteen trash bags of who-knows what. Kinda forces you to slow down and taste somethin' that's actually meant to be food."

Geist nodded, just a slight quiver of his head before he unfolded to stand once more. He bent at the waist to lift the teapot in his enormous hand, cradling it by the base and tipping the brew easily back into his handle-less ceramic cup. "Be mindful of later developments in that regard. The technology that has set itself upon you is relatively new and takes to innovation at sporadic intervals, as you've likely experienced."

"Mnh." The subject seemed to humble Zofie, her limbs seeming to become heavier as she sipped dutifully on her tea. A strong, deep breath of its vapors preceded their fogging of her glasses, yet she settled for a sparse moment of reflection. "... I'll... I'll just deal with it, I guess." She took her next sip a little slower, holding the flavor in her mouth before swallowing, to better process the flavor. "Ennyway, I just... figured that it'd be worth askin' you about like... the business-end of your Domain is. Like... if I can get back home if I need to. Pretty sure I've been evicted and that my Nanna thinks I'm dead. I don't give a flyin' crap about the former, but... Kinda wanna let my Grammaw know I haven't been eaten by space-wolves or whatever."

Geist slowed in his trek toward the kitchen, looking over his shoulder to his guest as he tapped the spent leaves into a small container of compost for Abby's garden. His lips drew in tight, making a straight line across his angular features as he gave the pot a gentle rinse and set it aside to dry. "I... wish that I could offer you a definitive answer. The paths that lead to this land from our home are poorly constructed and often flood with the most wretched flotsam. My Domain here is little more than a buffer for the Occult, mostly set to redirect travelers within it to shores which the powers that operate it. Only two arrived here purposefully, and not of their own will, and the technology to enter the Occult remains with but a few. The best I can offer is an attempt to fashion some manner of device that will allow for you to call her. Would this be suitable?"

Zofie's mug had emptied during Geist's explanation, except for a thin film of liquid and the leaves which had collected at its bottom. She set it down on the counter, away from her eyes before she started to read shapes in them. The little tawny bug-frog-kitten climbed onto the couch to settle itself next to Zofie, turning itself around to face Geist and emit a sound not unlike a very pleasant cousin of a fax machine. She reached over to scritch between its ears, bringing its head to bob happily beneath her fingers. "I'd... very much like just... some chance to get a hold of her, for her sake more 'n anything else. So... yeah, it'd be suitable." She pulled in both lips as she took her hand from the creature, letting it hop down the hallway and off to some dark corner by dint of its own internal logic.

Geist nodded as he settled in the doorway to the kitchen, dipping his chin and closing his eyes, only for them to open, heavy-lidded, once more on his head's rise. "I'll bring it to you in a week's time. It will be a... bit of a task trying to gather the supplies for it."

Zofie slung her legs back down to the floor and gave Geist a quizzical, yet warm look, hiding a smile in the tightness of her mouth. "Well ****! I kin help you with that part! I'm pretty handy in the weirdness. Not... like someone who knows what they're doin', but it's not like I'd be underfoot or ennythang."

Geist let a slow laugh rumble from his middle as he walked back to the living room, standing aside, but still with the anxiety of a polite host looking for his guest to leave. "Excellent. Come by any time during daylight hours. Mine Beloved arises with the moon, and she is fiercely territorial, in the literal sense. I mean no offense, but I'm far more inclined toward her than any other, save for our son."

"Well, far be it for me t'cause strife in the home!" Zofie rose to her feet, all compact 5'5" of her hardly registering next to Geist's solid volume of muscle and angle. She clasped her hands before her and tipped forward, bowing to him stiffly, yet all the same beset with a deeply dimpled grin. "Thank you so much! I'll be here before noon in two days, an' I owe you fer this."

Geist bowed naught but his head in reply, yet her last sentence brought his brows together, pondering the offer. "I shall hold you to this, Miss Kaminsky, and I look forward to this project."

Zofie wasted no time in her frolick to the door, practically skipping from the weight lifted from her shoulders. She stretched out one arm as the other tucked behind her back, loosening the handle and dipping through the door swiftly and shuffling through it with a salute, to keep any unnoticed members of Geist's strange menagerie from following her out. "Take care, now!"