faderift | [open]

She is moving, fast, and then faster, and there's a reason for this. In her hand is a squirming thing - it is, in fact, a pair of rats. Why Luana is holding a pair of rats is a mystery for now - she's heading pas the girl with a pile of books, and this isn't going to end well, because she literally runs past her, skidding on a stray leaf of paper, tripping over the books (who the hell put books there?), and then barrels over her with the grace of a creature whose legs are too long for her body.

That's not the case in this form, though, so they just end up tangled, and-

"Holy mother of god, what the hell-" she shouts, just as the rats squirm, one bites, and Luana throws the other into the air, and it lands on Wisteria. "Shiiiiiiiiiiit!" Luana manages, just before the rat scampers away. Both of them.

Papers: decimated. Perfectly ordered stack of books: scattered down the length of the stairs. Her lap: briefly full of girl before said girl tumbles farther in a tangled knot of knees and elbows, and then, horrifically, full of rodent.

Wysteria slaps the rat with her make do fan, makes a strangled noise that isn't quite a shriek but isn't really anything else, and is well on her feet and two steps removed by the time the rat and its liberated friend have disappeared. She's making repulsed sounds, beating the front of her skirts with the papers like she means to knock the dirt from them and--

"Just what do you think you're doing?" It's unmistakably a demand, the brisk word of a young woman well used to scolding a younger cousin or five. "Running around like a child! You'll crack your head open on a stone like that if you haven't already!"

The rats are gone, and Luana is rolling back onto her back, her hair looking huge and manelike. She stares up at Wysteria and looks at the papers, and she manages, somehow, not to scream. Instead she just snaps. "Hey, I'm not the one who put their entire library on the ground!"

She flops over, then. "At least they're gone," she sighs, and her head is on the floor. "My head is fine. How can you be wearing so many clothes?"

She makes a short noise in the back of her throat - a scoff or a laugh or an affronted little sniff - and settles finally on stamping her foot on the stair. "My clothes are none of your business. And my books were there beside me - a perfectly reasonable place to have them if it weren't for girls running all over and in every direction without paying attention to their own feet."

Honestly.

Sounding just as offended, Wysteria asks to be certain: "You're sure you haven't hit your head? That you're not bleeding. Someone will want to know if you've bled all over the front steps, you know."

She tugs at this girl's skirt, tug tug, easily and without shame. It's not hard enough to move it, but enough to make it clear that her opinion is this shit is ridiculous, girl. She shakes her head. "I haven't hit my head," she says, and tugs again. "How are you not boiling? Haven't you considered something more reasonable?"

Trust a Brazilian to immediately latch on to someone wearing too much in the way of clothing.

The toe of her foot finds the girl's wrist, poking it discouragingly with all the violence of gently nudging away a mouthy puppy. Excuse you, and Stop that.

"These are the clothes I have, thank you very much." She twitches her skirts farther out of Luana's reach. "Get off the ground. Come now, someone will trip over you. Don't be a child."

She snaps her fingers - click click. Come along now. Up and at em!

She sits up then, sitting next to the girl, and smiling a little. She seems. White. And rich. Luana isn't friends with a lot of white, rich girls. "Aren't you hot though?" she asks, lifting her trouser legs over her knees and taking a breath, trying to memorize the smell of her.

She isn't usually so easily nice, but she's in a good mood, despite having lost her rats. The rats were going to torment someone - probably Byerly, but Luana hadn't decided yet - but she can get more. She has a nose for it. She pulls a ribbon out of her hair - somewhere in her mane - and ties her trouser legs up so they don't fall.

"Well yes, but it's warm out. I can't very well change the weather, now can I?" Honestly, what a patently ridiculous thing to say. So much so that Wysteria smooths the front of her dress down for what feels like the fifth time and then gathers her skirts in one hand so she can begin to fetch the scattered books from the stairs with the other. She shoves them a little clumsily under her arm as she goes, dumping them on the stair wall when she's finished.

"We can't all scamper around like wild little things, you know. And besides, they're borrowed clothes. It's what the Inquisition provided me with when I asked for a dress and I can only assume they weren't playing some horrible joke on me. It's cooler than what I came with, I promise you that much."

"No, but you can change your clothes," Luana points out, stretching her legs out and indicating to her now altered pants, coming up over her knee. Still too long. Luana favored shorts that just covered her ass. This is a nightmare. But she's smiling now, because this girl, she's hilarious.

"Just tug it up over your knees. No harm, I promise," she says. "If any dude looks at you I'll punch him in the nose. Deal?"

Wysteria is pointedly not looking at her, all her attention focused on stacking the books in an orderly arrangement. "No thank you, I'd rather not. I'm perfectly fine as I am."

And to avoid discussing the matter further, she takes a conversational hard right turn. "Is there a reason you were running around with a literal handful of rats, or is that just what you do for fun? Put your legs down, by the way. You look absurd."

She looks uncertain. "Well. You're only kind of lying, but let's go with it," she says. She considers this conversational turn.

She could tell the truth, but she also isn't sure she wants to, so she just leans back, legs down. There you go, miss thing. This isn't so bad. "There is a reason, although it's not a very important reason," she says. It's a truth. Just not the whole truth.

Well if that isn't the most suspicious thing she's ever heard, she doesn't know what is. It's like finding a blackberry pie with a hole in it and then spotting a younger cousin with a stained thumb. Wysteria gives the girl a narrowed, squinting look in return. It speaks volumes-- though far be it for Wysteria to let anything ever go unspoken in her entire life:

"Really? My, how mysterious."

"You don't look like the type that would have a good time with someone you don't like and some rats," Luana clarifies. She knows it's a stupid thing, but she also has to find her amusement where she can find it.

She smiles, now.

"I'm Luana Marcos."

Why is it that everyone keeps saying things like that? 'You're awfully posh' and acting like she doesn't know how to appreciate a perfectly good rat. It makes her feel like altogether a terribly old and grandmotherly old woman. Or at the very least, like someone who ought to be much better at playing an instrument or embroidering handkerchiefs. It might be exceptionally depressing if it weren't so annoying. Finally, her mother can rest easy knowing her daughter is painfully respectful somewhere.

Wysteria relentlessly squares the pile of her books. She dusts her hands.

"Well Luana, it's clear to me then that you have absolutely no idea who you're talking to. Which is to be expected and forgiven, given the unusual circumstances, so of course consider yourself that. Forgiven, I mean. And we'll work together to remedy the situation immediately beginning with--" She offers her hand, though it's comically out of reach for Luana to shake given that Wysteria is a full two steps above her. "I'm Wysteria Poppell, but of course you may call me Wysteria instead of Miss."

"I would never call you miss," Luana replies, just so Wysteria knows. She shakes her hand, firmly, and smiles a little. "Do you want to go after one of those rats? We can try, anyway," she adds after a moment, that grin on her face widening. "I want to put it in the shoe of someone who kind of annoyed me."

Well, at least she's honest.

No, she absolutely doesn't want to go hunting a rat through the Gallows. It's too warm and too sweaty and she has an entire stack of books to mind and she doesn't have any desire to be caught red handed doing something so fundamentally ridiculous when she could be spending her time on better things like trying to force herself to learn Thedosian (Thedasian? Good gods, which is it?) geography or politics or... whatever.

Spirits, what a bore she's become over night.

Wysteria frowns down at Luana, her face pinched so narrow that it looks for a moment like she's tasted something sour. Then she fetches the books up and dumps them into a planter under an anemic fern.

"Why not."

Take that, everyone who keeps calling her particular or posh or critiquing her perfectly reasonable wardrobe.

She grins in response, because good. She stands up, her trousers falling back over her legs. She can tell that they're going to be best friends and by best friends Luana absolutely means that they're going to either get on like Donkey Kong or they're going to murder each other.

"Great! I won't harass you about your dress anymore," she offers, as if that's tit for tat.

Well you shouldn't harass anyone over their clothing, you petty little thing, Wysteria thinks but has enough good sense to know there's no use in it. Handling cousins are the same way - you can't simply repeat yourself, no matter how true, and expect anyone to suddenly be reasonable.

"Go on then," she says instead, gathering her skirts with a perfunctory flick of the wrists. "Lead the way."

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