psychoshenanigans | For Guin // Street Urchins

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robin

For Guin // Street Urchins

Ah, another day in a strange new world! Brought here by some unknown force for some unknown reason, everyone is still adjusting to the idea of being somewhere that isn't home--or wherever they were before.

The town they have been brought to has no name. It's a strange place, a sprawling mix of old, rustic aesthetics and modern, mechanical automatons. Quaint one or two-story boutiques and bakeries line the streets surrounding the main square, but a strange clockwork servant walks past them on its way to fulfill whatever tasks their master has given them. Two villagers browse handmade wares in brightly-colored market stalls, but one of them checks what looks like an astrolabe every twenty minutes or so.

Overall, it seems like a quiet, charming little world... But no world is without trouble.

This morning, trouble comes in the form of a small, pale boy skittering away from the sound of yelling behind him. He squeezes between some crates and nearly stumbles on a storm drain in his hurry, darting into a crowd and then out of it again to try and get away. A couple of people look up to see what the ruckus is about, until they catch what the men in pursuit are yelling.

"Stop, thief!" There are two of them. "Get back here!"

The boy makes the mistake of glancing back as he rounds a corner... Which means he doesn't see the person turning the corner from the other direction, and nearly slams into them head-first with a startled yelp.

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It's another boy, in fact, not as pale but even smaller, big eyes and baby face. He skips backward to avoid losing his balance, cursing, and then bristles up like a cat. "Watch it," he hisses in the fugitive's face, with a viciousness that shouldn't even fit between those skinny ribs.

(Neither should his heart, the way it's pounding, but he doesn't back down.)

The pale boy is momentarily taken aback by the sharp remark--which makes him very easy to see. Bone-white hair and big, blood-red eyes. He's dressed in clothes that are much too big for him, no shoes, and is clutching some kind of a purse close to his chest.

He isn't surprised for long, though. It only takes him a second to bristle up in response.

"You watch it," he snaps back, causing a few loose coins to be jostled out of the purse and go bouncing off in random directions. This distracts him, somewhat, along with the yelling behind them that's getting closer.

The other scowls. His eyes track the coin's flight for a split second before snapping back to the pale boy - sharpen suddenly, as he registers the pursuit and puts it together.

"You gotta be kidding me," he says, in a tone somewhere between indignation and disgust. He backs up again, still scowling; which does nothing but draw further attention to both of them, from bystanders already taking alarm. "Shit!"

This boy might be mad at him, but now he's thinking of other things... He already knows that he'll be in trouble if he's caught, but now there's another kid at the scene of the crime, and he has spent too much time protecting other, younger children to not instinctively feel like protecting this one, too.

"Go!" He suddenly says, grabbing the other boy's hand and trying to pull him in a direction away from the approaching voices, "Go! Go, go, go!"

That's about all he can manage to say as he starts looking for somewhere to hide, somewhere to run, anything that will get them out of this potentially dangerous situation.

It's almost superfluous; he's in motion even before the words are out, jerking away from the handhold like he thinks it's meant to hold him back. Without hesitation he dives left, into a dark, rancid-smelling alleyway so narrow that no (human) adult could begin to squeeze through, and he fades into the shadows as naturally as the older boy shows up like a torch against them. There's a squelch and a thump, and then a small voice hisses, "Drainpipe."

Well, this one isn't about to try and take control away from the kid who clearly knows what he's doing--so he keeps a close hold of his stolen bag and scrambles along behind him, fitting easily in through the alley behind him.

He does stick out like a sore thumb, though. He's had to get very clever at hide-and-seek.

"Drainpipe--" He repeats out of instinct, sliding down into whatever hiding-hole his accidental accomplice has found for them without hesitation. And before anything else can happen, he puts a hand up towards the entrance and whispers under his breath.

"Don't find us... Don't find us..."

The air in front of his hand seems to shimmer, a little. Just a minor illusion. He's not actually sure what it is or what it looks like from the other side, he just knows that it sometimes works.

A slithering, scrambling noise, and then an impatient "Come on," this time from overhead. Eyes adjusting to the dimness can just make out a small figure wriggling its way up the wall.

Man, this kid is pretty quick. The older boy has to take a moment to secure this bag of coins to his person, eventually managing to wedge his hand through what should have been a belt loop and tying its drawstring around his wrist to keep it closed.

And then he climbs. It's a little slippery, but he's used to climbing trees and scaling old, abandoned ruins--so this isn't that different.

Whether it's the quickness, the shimmer, or a little of both, the pursuit storms past the alleyway with barely a pause, making more than enough noise to cover the creak and scuffle of their ascent. At the second-story mark the going gets a little easier; the bricks of the wall less slick with filth, the rusted remnant of a balcony clinging to a boarded-over window. The little boy swarms up the last couple of feet, vanishing as he hauls himself over the edge of the roof.

But after a moment he peeks back, frowning, and stretches down one skinny arm in a grudging assist.

His heart skips a beat as the men chasing them rush past where they would have spotted them... And breathes a sigh of relief when they don't double-back. Part of him has trouble believing they're really out of danger, but the remainder of his climb is a little less stressful after that.

When he gets near the top, he looks entirely surprised to see a hand being offered down in his direction. He has to stare at it for a second before taking it, making sure it isn't some trap before hauling the rest of his skinny body up over the edge and onto the dilapidated rooftop.

"Hey..." Maybe it's a weird time to ask, after all this, but he adjusts his bag and asks anyway, "Who are you?"

The child gives him an opaque dark stare. "Someone who doesn't get caught."

The older boy gives him a flat look right back.

"I meant your name, stupid."

"Should have said that, then." He scrubs his hands against the shingles, wiping off the moss and the nameless gunk, incongruously fastidious. "Cassian. Yours?"

He watches him do this. He would have been more annoyed with him for being weird, but he lives with a boy with no legs and a girl with two heads, so his bar for strange behavior has been significantly raised in the last year or so.

"...Alex," he hesitates. There's more to it than that, but he doesn't want to say. Instead, he shakes the purse hooked around his arm, making it jingle.

"You want some of this stuff? I don't need all of it."

Cassian eyes him warily. "What stuff?" He hasn't been here long enough to get a sense of how things work - what's safe to risk, who to watch out for - but older kids, in his experience, don't hand out favors to the little ones. Even before-- even when he was really little, they didn't. He doubts this is any exception.

"This stuff," he jingles the purse again, before working on untangling it from his arm. "Wanna see what's in it? I haven't looked yet."

Despite Cassian's wariness, the boy called Alex crouches down, opens up the bag, and starts going through the contents. There are plenty of gold coins, some silver, some copper, and then a few tickets and coupons that seem to catch the boy's attention most of all.

"How do you know you don't need all of it if you haven't looked?" skeptically. But he props himself on his hands and watches Alex rummage, all the same, with moderate interest. "Are those what they use here?"

"Uh..." The first question is a little confusing, to him. "Well, I can't carry all of it, right?"

Even as a child, he's focused very much on the now. He isn't much of a long-term planner, never having a reason to consider that he'd have much a long-term to live through anyway.

"Yeah, they buy stuff with these coins. And I saw them put these paper things in a big... Uh... It was like a..." He isn't sure how to describe it, gesturing widely with his arms to indicate something very large. "Like one of those metal people, but bigger. And it has arms on the inside, not the outside."

He is essentially trying to describe a claw machine without having even the slightest clue what a claw-machine could be. "--Hey, does that mean you just got here?"

"You just were," Cassian points out. He keeps count in his head of the coins as they appear, the different colors and sizes; he doesn't recognize the symbols stamped on them, but worry about that later. The little flimsy slips are equally unreadable. "No. A couple days. You?"

Alex shakes his head. "Nah, only keep enough for your pockets. They'll think you stole it, otherwise." And, a little bitterly, "Even if you didn't."

But he's used to a world where he was a target no matter what he did. Hearing that the other boy has only been here a couple of days gets a look of surprise out of him--and he tilts his head a little, like a curious bird.

"Really? I've been here, um..." He's not good at counting, either. It takes him a moment, "Four days. It's weird here."

Privately Cassian agrees, but he's not about to admit that to someone older and apparently better informed. You don't just hand out advantage like that. He shrugs instead, hitching himself a little further up the shallow slope of the roof. "Where were you before?"

"Umm... I don't know."

Which, funny enough, doesn't sound like the sassy 'I don't know' of a kid trying to be a brat. It sounds like he genuinely doesn't know where he used to be.

Apparently, this fact doesn't bother him all that much, because he starts picking out a few coins and putting them into obvious pockets in his pants and less-obvious pockets up his sleeves. He lifts his shirt to reveal a wrapping of bandages that may not be for any reason other than for him to squirrel things away into.

"How do you--" Cassian begins, and then gives it up. It's none of his business, anyway. He watches the proceedings for a moment or two with detached interest. Then he darts out a hand, surprisingly deft for such small fingers, and extracts three of the silver coins, the smallest: flick, flick, flick.

"That's for almost getting me in trouble," he informs Alex gravely.

"I don't know what it's called, okay?"

He could have let Cassian drop it, but this has come up... a couple of times, and he's getting a little defensive about people getting weird about him not knowing where he used to live. It was supposed to be a secret anyway, or so the Priesthood said.

Just as he commits to fully sitting on the ground, he watches the younger boy snatch three of his coins, eyebrows raising at how quick he is.

"Oh..." He isn't sure what to say at first, but after thinking a moment, he tilts his head and adds, "I'm pretty sure those guys were real' bad, it would have been nasty."

Are you trying to humor him, glowstick boy. Are you really. Cassian levels another flat stare at him, while the coins disappear into some fold of his own threadbare clothes; then shrugs. "Next time watch where you're going," he says, but without heat. For whatever reason, Alex isn't pushing him, the way he's grown used to big kids doing; which means that he doesn't have to push back hard, and that's... nice, he concludes begrudgingly. Nice, for a change.

...He had been trying to use subterfuge to get Cassian to take more money, but he's never been very good at it. He can imitate his more clever brothers and sisters, but he's missing something. Charisma, maybe.

"Yeah, yeah..."

Still, he leaves the rest of the coins in a pile between them as he rolls his eyes, carefully smoothing out the tickets he's been so interested in.

Though, suddenly struck with an idea, he holds the tickets out at arm's length, towards Cassian's face. "--Oh, hey! Can you read?"

"Yeah," warily; it's an admission that's gotten him into trouble before. "Kind of." The letters on the little slips are strange-looking, like the ones on the coins, but he thinks he might be able to figure them out. He's good at picking up things like that. (You're very quick, a man's voice says in his head, warm, and he stomps on it before it can scald him.)

If the other boy doesn't already have plenty of reason to think Alex is weird, his face breaks into a small, but excited, smile. He flaps the paper tickets in Cassian's direction.

"Can you try reading these?" He nods a little, too, as if to encourage him. "All of my brothers and sisters read better than me. Except for the little ones. Because they're little. And one's blind."

Cassian leans back a little, pointedly, maintaining eye contact as he pulls the scraps out of Alex's hand. "How many do you have?" He knows, or at least is acquainted with, kids who have a sibling or two too small to fend for themselves; but this sounds like five or six at least, which seems impractical to him.

The letters are definitely weird: nothing like the angular blocks he's used to seeing on signs, or the intricate curls he used to practice copying when he was little. These are tall and spindly, sprouting little twigs and loops to one side or the other, but they're clearly letters of some kind. He hasn't seen any people in this place except humans and weird-looking droids, so probably all the letters make sounds humans can make...

He bites his lip, frowning down at the biggest ticket. Absorbed in the puzzle, eyes bright and intent, he looks - softer somehow, more open.

When he no longer has a ticket to hold, he drops his hands into his lap, starts rocking gently back and forth where he's sitting, for want of something to do. The earlier chase feels very far behind him, now that they've calmed down.

"Eight. But they're..." He hesitates, making a face before deciding it's probably okay to tell this kid. "Uh, they're not really my brothers and sisters, we just kind of... Found each other. We're related, but not like normal people I guess."

The ticket, by the by, seems to be advertising some kind of prize.

Cassian might have argued, once, with this explanation; now he just absorbs it, with a strange feeling of indifference. Other people, not him.

It takes him another minute or two before he's confident enough to read out, carefully, "In-ef-tant Win. One quart any... somebody's Bubble Tonic." And then, more dubiously, "prefent ticket at any park-- park-something, price oh matic limited patent something."

His eyes flick up to meet Alex's, bemused.

“Huh.”

The boy thinks for a moment, nodding, and then...

“...Yeah, I dunno what that means.”

Shrug. He doesn't entirely understand it either, but there's no percentage in admitting that. After a moment's thought, he says, "You said you saw people putting them somewhere."

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For Guin // Street Urchins

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