View source for Talk:Adithan Varma/Templog2

It's morning o'clock, stores-are-open o'clock, and it's overcast and below freezing, and everything outdoors is grey and gross, especially the sidewalk and street frozen-slush was-snow. The Wegman's is large and warm and bright and welcoming, and their vegetables are fresh, and the guy who's just turned off his shitbox car and started a careful sprint across the salty gravelly parking lot toward the doors is...

...practically lighting up the parking lot all on his own. Somehow this guy's managed to score a down jacket in Superman blue with giant yellow Hawaiian-print flowers all over it, and he's wearing a red toque with a pompom on it. His jeans and snow boots aren't bright but they don't HAVE to be.

He bursts through the doors and his glasses immediately fog up, and he clears his throat and fogs his way over to the shopping baskets, unwinding the scarf that got lost in the pattern and yanking his hat off, and jamming them both in his pockets. His hair is going ''everywhere''.

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An old, ugly green Ford Ranger truck thunks into the parking lot, creaking and groaning. The engine is loud, the music is cranked up even louder to drown out the sound of the engine and jostle the occupant inside of the truck awake. A tawny-skinned mortal is behind the big wheel and Mavis parks her truck as she watches a young, lithe man sprint like a daredevil across the parking lot. Shaking her head about his sense of urgency at this bleak hour, Mavis turns off her truck and the 90s music crackling from her speakers immediately stuffs a sock in it. 

The driver's door squeals opened on its cold hinges and out hops Mavis. She's wearing her winter gear, but left her jacket at home since she wouldn't need it in the store. Mavis makes due with a scarf, hand-knitted beany with matching fingerless gloves which are knitted in gradient shades of gray and pale yellow. The human has a hoodie pulled over her frame, scarf half-tucked inside with a navy-blue tail hanging out. Her black, scuffed work boots are splattered with neon paint. 

Mavis hurries into the grocery store, bleary-eyed still and bitten by the cold. The mortal doesn't run, though, just ducks her head down and hurries for doors. Once inside, she beelines for a buggy, pulling it free, then fishes in her hoodie pocket for a folded sheet of paper. Mavis unfolds it while leaning against her shopping cart, peering around the grocery store at the workers milling about this early in the morning for opening. It's hard to miss the fellow she'd seen sprinting for the doors in the parking lot. He must be in some kind of dramatic Thursday hurry. And, he's hard to miss. Dressed like that. 

The mortal rubs a knuckle against an eyesocket and squints at her girlfriend's neat, handwritten shopping list with the other, trying to decide which direction to push her shopping cart in first. 

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Hawaiian Print Parka Guy does not, in fact, have neon paint on his boots. He does, however, have a list ''too'', and he can't read it though fog, and by the squinting he's doing, he's having trouble reading it through blear without glasses, too. After a second, he gives up. He's close enough to Mavis -- without being too close in any way -- that, with the scarcity of store occupants, he can be heard when he asks in her direction, "Can you read this?"

If she *does* look at him, then by the time she looks, he's looking frustrated and apologetic, holding his glasses in one hand and the paper in the other, and is trying to be as nonthreatening as possible despite being 6'1".

And... he's too pretty. And his voice is like honey, and his accent is musical, and his attention on Mavis is like-- is like a hill interestedly taking notice of her. He's very, very *there*. "I cannot. But I cannot tell if it is my eyesight, my boyfriend's handwriting, or some mix of the two."

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Mavis Octavia Baines isn't oblivious. She notices the brightly dressed man's struggles with his glasses, his poor eyesight, and his shopping list, but she's too polite to overtly stare and give conspicious notice to him. Instead, the young, twenty-something artist glimpses at Adithan out of the corner of her honey-brown eyes, barely tilting her head in his direction. She could have pushed her cart off by now to commence her shopping, but Mavis lingers while using the pretense of staring at her own list longer than is necessary to dilly-dally nearby the tall, dark-skinned stranger who's so vibrantly dressed. 

"Sure," she chirps back at him when he does, at last, break down and ask and it's almost like she'd been expecting to play this role of good Samaritan.

She keeps one hand on her shopping cart, Amity's list bunched up in it, and half-turns to him with an easy, albeit sleepy, smile. It's a polite smile, summoning some warmth, but it doesn't truly turn genuine until Adithan mentions his boyfriend. Something about that is endearing to her. Sweet. Maybe because she's holding a list from Amity half-crumpled up in her other hand. He sure is handsome, though. No-- pretty. He's pretty, she decides, and something about standing next to his 6'1 made her 5'4 feel absurdly short.

Mavis skirts a quick glance up at Adithan's face as she plucks the sheet of paper from him, eyes crinkling with amusement.

"Lucky for me, my girlfriend's handwriting is immaculate, bit of a control freak," she shoots to him, conversationally. Her voice is low and dusky, as if almost on the verge of laughter or secret-sharing, but there's an unmistakable fondness in her tone and softness to her features when she talks about the woman with immaculate handwriting and a control freak's tendencies. "And, lucky for you, my handwriting is atrocious so's I can actually read this scrawl. It helps if you unfocus your eyes a little.. oh- I guess you already have that problem."

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The darker-skinned boy laughs with surprise at Mavis' last advice there-- he'd relaxed noticeably when she had mentioned her girlfriend in turn, and now he's laughing, and that's musical too, and is that Leo literally behind his incongruously blue eyes? Does it matter? He's grinning. "Yes-- it did not help either way. I looked in the car before I came in, but the light was poor, and I thought that might be it. So many variables! Good light but no spectacles, now--"

He leans down very slightly, but only to point at one particular letter. "Kelsey, in their defense, was still half-asleep whilst writing. Does it help if I tell you that that line, being longer, is likely to be 'do NOT buy...' a thing?" He shifts his weight, then, and lifts his hand to try his glasses again. Somewhat less foggy. He pulls them down to polish them. "I will admit that my handwriting is spidery, but only when I am very lazy and writing very quickly. I am considering suggesting to Kelsey that we both learn shorthand so we are equally illegible."

The sentence *does* help; it lends a certain perspective. The thing not to buy is apparently 'any more frozen spinach'. The only other things on the list are vitamin d, rechargeable AA batteries, a shower curtain, and orange juice.

s/'any more frozen spinach'/the obnoxiously artificially cinnamon scented fall decor/

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"I'm fairly certain there's a joke here," she murmurs, peering down at the grocery list. Her light-brown eyes flit over the sheet of paper, ripples of emerald green in them. "About the new year and 20/20 vision, but it's early and I'll save 'em to pester the missus." Mavis glances up at Adithan then flicks her gaze back down at the list in her hand, dark lashes lowering. She adds, nosily skimming the paper by now, "She wears specks, too."

The mortal Adithan has enlisted to interpret his shopping list is a pretty thing-- really-- although not quite beautiful. Beauty was for the True Fae, beauty was for the Lost. She had seen what "fair" could truly be and knew that she was no rival to the work of the Good Folk, but Mavis Octavia Baines, nonetheless, is a comely creature. Her hair is thick, glossy black and a little mussy this early in the morning. She has coppery, brown skin that glows with health and youth and she's neither plump nor gaunt: a smidgen on the curvy, softer side, though. Her face is expressive with gentle lines and a dusky-pink mouth prone to smiling. When her full lips thin to stretch across her neat, white teeth, there's a sliver-gap between the two incisors that usually winks out quickly, due to a self-conscious tick about it.

She peers back up again, arm already outstretched to pass the sheet of paper back, but Mavis freezes when she catches a glimpse of something strange in the stranger's eyes. A constellation like stars. The human blinks, lids fluttering in surprise, then continues to extend her arm. 

"Yeah, that does help actually," she says to him, still thinking about what she'd seen. "He's not a fan of spinach, apparently." Mavis pauses, forces some casualness into her voice after dabbing her lips nervously with her tongue. "You need orange juice, rechargable double-As, vitamin D, and..." She re-checks the list held out to Adithan, tilting her head and furrowing brows. "A shower curtain?"

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"Ooh! Yes-- thank you! I had forgotten about the shower curtain--" says Adi, scrabbling in his pocket for a pen while Mavis is holding the list back out, then realizing he's scrabbling with the hand with the glasses in it, puts his glasses on, takes the paper, and digs again, and finally comes up with a pen. He overturns his basket on his knee and stands there with his foot against his other knee to prop it like he's Ian Anderson or Krishna or something, and *his* handwriting... well, no, it's not unreadable if you're a palaeographer. Perfect cursive roundhand Copperplate.

"Curtain no spinach orange juice recharge-AA and what was the last?" he mutters and then rises to conversational for the question, but he falters when he looks at Mavis' expression. Wariness out of nowhere. "I am sorry? I have imposed on too much of your time--"

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Mavis flashes him a brief, bitten down smile that's shyer than the ones before it. The mortal seems a little... more withdrawn, introspective, and contemplative as well. She hitches her smile a touch higher at one corner, peering back at Adithan with her chin tucked and looking up from beneath her lashes with her eyes flicked up to view his face. She's looking at him now, really, really looking, like if she were to glance away then she might miss something. 

"Oh!" goes Mavis, interrupted from her thoughts by that question of forgetfulness. "Uhm- it was, ah, vitamin D. Yeah."

Then, she goes back to scrutinizing Adithan and the way he's preciously poised with the basket upturned and pen scribbling. Mavis peeks at his handwriting, since it had become part of the topic and she's the curious sort. She jerks her chin up when he says that, though, about imposing on her time. 

"What? Oh, no! Not at all," assures Mavis, giggling out a snippet of wary laughter. "My name's Mavis, Mav for short. I need to head over to the juice, myself, if you wanted to head that way with me. It'll save us the awkward expense of an unscheduled run-in later."

It's not a bad suggestion and, from the way she says it, Mavis doesn't sound imposed upon at all. Plus, it would give her more time to puzzle out this tall, pretty boy. If Amity were here, she could just ask her girlfriend if what she suspected were true.

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She's wary now, and shyer, and watching him, and Adi cautiously writes down 'vitamin D' on his rewritten list then pockets his pen as he flips the basket over. "Adithan," he says, and he says it like 'ah-DI-tyan', and then he waves the paper around a little as if to dry the ink, which is ridiculous, that was a ballpoint pen. "Adi. Or Ed, I also answer to that." He's still cautious, not knowing what caused her shift in demeanor, and her strained sort of giggle doesn't help it, but 'awkward expense of an unscheduled run-in' is cleverly funny and catches him off guard, relaxing him again. "Certainly. Juice... ah, no, I must buy only what is on the list and fresh vegetables that I intend to cook this weekend! If I cannot carry it in this basket, I shall have no desire to carry it into the house, and it shall freeze in the car, for I am inherently lazy."

He glances down and to his side, cocking his head slightly; his hair falls into his face and he pushes it away with his list hand. "Have I given you cause to be nervous? Or did you see something strange? It is all right if you did, only, I would rather know, that I might compensate for it in the future."

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Yes, wary and somewhat shyer, but not unfriendly. Not so cautious that Ms. Baines decides it better and wiser to part ways. She would rather keep an eye on him, pick his brain a little more, and, before she'd given him something to mull over, Mavis had been rather quickly endeared by their simular circumstances. She wonders if this Kelsey fellow is a mortal as well. Maybe, her pairing with Amity isn't that strange or as uncommon as she has been led to believe. 

"Ah-DI-han," repeats Mavis, scrunching her nose in concentrate before trying to string the syllables together again. "Ah-DI-tYan. Adithan!" She beams, face lighting up at once, and the sliver-gap between her two front, top tief briefly brandished. The mortal preens to herself then sets off with the buggy, at an easy pace for this tall Lost to keep up. She wants to keep him with his basket next to her, easier for her to glimpse his face and eyes behind his glasses. "It's nice to meet you.. and, haha, that's pretty lazy. I thought -I- was bad about it. 

Mavis looks ahead, steering her cart, but she senses him next to her and gazing down. The mortal can just see him in her peripheal and, so, she tilts her chin up to meet his blue-eyed gaze, half-expecting to see the stars again. She blinks at Adithan, opening her mouth and drawing in a breath to say something. Mavis closes it and pushes her lips together, thinking about the subtext and layers beneath what the Lost is saying. Lost, he must be, if he's asking her this. 

"It was only a little," she confides in a low voice, shrugging with a shoulder and using the excuse of grabbing a head of lettuce to turn away from him. Mavis places it in her buggy and smiles again, this time trying to reassure. "And, no need, really. I'm starting to get used to it. I'm, uh, "woke" and stuff." It felt weird to apply that term to the whole knowing-about-supernatural thing. "I guess?"

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Surely if you were to ask some of the Lost around here, mortals are rare as hens' teeth -- but it's not so. It really is just that when you're very strange, you have a tendency to socialize with other strange people. Also it's nice to not get nice people stolen by the True Fae just by hanging out with them. That's neither here nor there-- Adi's fully delighted when Mavis gets his name, tries and *gets* it, and *that* smile is a slow-blooming thing that lights up his whole face, everpresent stars-in-eyes and all. "Oh well done! Thank you! I went to India with my Kelsey for a year, and I had not been back in-- never mind how long. I used my real name and it was such a relief to hear it that I decided I would use it when we came back here-- and I did not know if it would do... if--" he waves a hand, finally, unsure of how to finish the sentence.

But! It means that when Mavis goes low-voiced in response to his worried question, he's still smiling. "Woke? That is a funny way to put it. You do not see everything, though, or something small would not have startled you. Is it something I can hide easily? Would you tell me?"

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She's a bit more at ease with him. Changelings aren't something Mavis is overly wary of, for better or worse. Probably due to high exposure to them. This Lost is just new to her, but the way Adithan glows when he speaks of -his- Kelsey makes her wonder how could such tenderness ever come to harm her? She had heard there were "bad" Lost, those who might desire to hurt her or dismay Amity through their connection, but, surely, not this tall, pretty boy with stars in his eyes. 

"I dunno," she drawls back, shrugging again about his reflection on her wording. "Mebbe "kosher" is a better way to put it, but-- no, I can't..." Mavis breaks off, taps the side of her temple while slowly guiding the shopping cart in front of her. "See-SEE, you. It's your eyes, though, since you're wondering." Mavis moseys a little further down the line of vegetables, grabbing some carrots to throw into the cart like she and Adithan are just talking about the wintery months and far off spring. With a snort, she adds, "Adithan, that's a pretty name. I dunno how you get ED out of it."

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In this instance, Mavis is quite right: Adi would *never*. Sometimes gut feelings really are right. All the warnings she gets aren't wrong either, but it's highly doubtful anyone here who actually knows Adi would say they apply to him. He puts orange juice in his basket carelessly, already knowing what brand and type they get, and before they get to the vegetables proper he shamelessly snags a little tub of chocolate pudding. *Then* vegetables, and that, he's much more careful and discerning about. He clearly has a lot of experience with vegetable shopping.

"Kosher is also funny," he observes with a quick little grin. "My eyes? Perhaps tinted lenses would help. I do not wish to make the effort to hide everything all the time." He glances at her, eyebrows up. "Thank you! If you go a little further north of where I am from, they say my name as 'EH-dit-an.' But that is not why-- it is because when I first came back, where I ended up, no one would say my name correctly. I was quite self-conscious. I chose the name Edmond to use because I thought it should garner less attention, be easier to recognise. Alas, it was out of fashion, but not so unheard of."

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"Ooooh," goes Mavis, nodding along with his explanation about the origin of his "Ed" moniker. Then, she nods and grins over at him. "I would've never guessed it. One of them cultural things, but ya shouldn't sweat it so much. People who can't be bothered to learn your name aren't really worth knowing, are they?"

It's not said with any maliciousness, indeed, Mavis holds no ill-will against these bullies. She chooses some yellow squash and zuchinni to bag up and set into the cart with the other vegetables. Mavis is half-minding her own list, still bunched up in a hand guiding the shopping cart, and half-improvising in what just sounds good. Humming thoughtfully, Mavis adds, "And you shouldn't hide. That just sounds exhausting and why?" She stops to bilnk up at him, baffled. "For us? We'll be fine, if I wasn't living with three then I'd prob'ly just have dismissed what I thought I glimpsed. What is even the point of," Mavis says, trundling along with her shopping cart, and pausing to examine a head of cauliflower, "even moving here, anyways, if you can't let your hair down a little?"

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"That is true, but there does exist a limit: it is a poor choice indeed to be completely alone because of pride," says Adi with gentle, self-deprecating humor. "I wished to meet people and befriend them, and so I changed to accomodate the social norms of the area rather than-- than--" He tucks the list in his pocket so he can snap his fingers, looking for the right word. Finally he shrugs. "If they were that sort of people, I did not wish to know. I had no one. I have a complicated relationship with pride," he finishes, sliding Amity a quick, crooked little grin. He gets a random bag of potatoes but then is really super careful about the bell peppers.

He listens half-absently, but still paying attention, and his glasses aren't even remotely fogged anymore. Abruptly, in the middle of that 'what's the point' part, he looks up and squints a little bit. His voice lowers, is serious-- is apologetic. "It is partially for you, but it is primarily for us. There are human hunters, and there are some of us who still work for -- or with -- Them and would sell us to Them. When I first came here, a woman who lived in this city had been caught by a group of humans. They had been watching her, and then they managed to acquire some way of seeing what she really looked like, and they kidnapped and tortured and killed her, and left her where we would find her, as a message. She had never done anything wrong, she only kept to herself and tried to live her life."

Adithan chuffs out a breath and adjusts his glasses, then ties off the pepper bag and puts it in his basket. "They were dealt with, but they are not the only ones. Even here." He shifts uncomfortably and gives Mavis a truly sheepish smile. "I am sorry, I did not wish to make for you a breakfast of sadness omelette and anger muffins. Also, I ought to go pick up the other things we need, and then go make for my Kelsey a breakfast that will actually entice them out of bed. Let me give you my number, so that your roommates will be able to find me and tell me that they will throw me down a well if I should even think of dismaying you."