Folk and Kindred

Iron.
Cold, hard, scratchy iron; just being around it made her skin crawl and itch.
Too bad the city was full of it.

The city was buzzing as usual. People walked about chatting, laughing some looked down-trodden and miserable. The majority however was enjoying the slight break from the constant drizzle of rain, and even the sun was beginning to peek out behind its water-clogged clouds.
Splish, sploosh, splash.
Her boots made wonderful noises from being tromped through puddles on the sidewalk. The sounds made her feel like a child again, disobediently splashing in puddles and loving every moment of it.
A slight movement caught her eye – a small boy on a skateboard suddenly whizzed by her, almost knocking her over completely. A mean little laughed followed behind him as he splashed pedestrians with muddy water.

Mean little goblins, they have no respect for anyone anymore. She thought with a snort before walking along.

True, the term ‘goblin’ had been used before to describe nasty little children, this was no mere child. True as its name, the mean little creature was indeed a goblin, glamoured with his magic to portray nothing but a scrappy brown haired, young boy.
The city was chock full of them. Not just goblins but tons of “Folk” as they call themselves.
Trolls, Brownies, Satyrs, Pixies, Halflings, and even the odd Faerie or two had been known to stroll casually through Chestemere Park disguised as normal humans.
Every so often there would be a human who could see through Folk glamour, and saw the world for the magical place it truly was.
Magical yes, but no less dangerous.
The Folk could be just as bad as humans in the way of bad habits and rude attitudes. As portrayed by the little Goblin just earlier.

Despite the ability for Folk to live among humans, it was not preferred.
The Faerie Kingdoms a much more regal and beautiful place to live, not to mention it was far away from any iron.
The folk cannot stand iron, it can be tolerated as long as it does not touch the skin, but the smell and feel of it is enough to make the average Folk sick.
Only those that do not want to live in the Kingdoms live with Humans, or those who have been banished.

Niff was neither of those. She chose to live in the city for her own reasons and that was good enough for her.
Plus being only half-pixie the iron didn’t affect her as much as usual.

With a sigh she pushed open the peeling, red-painted door and entered her favourite haunt, a coffee and dessert café. Small and half hidden between a used clothing store and a tobacco shop it was only visited by those that knew it.

Niff ran a hand through her mannishly-short spiky brown hair, while her dark eyes scanned the room for her favorite cushy chair.
Dressed in ripped jeans a halter top and a black coat didn’t make her stand out from the rest of the coffee sipping customers. The only bright colors on her outfit were her beaded necklaces piled one on top of each other, and her overly large earrings.; making her pointed chin and high cheek-bones even more prominent.

With a happy sigh she shed her coat and settled into her chair.

Too bad it had started raining again.

((PLEASE VISIT OOC THREAD BEFORE POSTING. THANKS))

__________________

Horkvaal trudged through the rain in a dark, crowded alley, appreciating the lack of sunlight. If he was lucky, the storm might grow worse and provide him with more time in the day.

Ah there it is, he thought. I've been looking for you.

Trudging over to a particularly deep pothole filled with water, he reached down into it with his long arms, drawing out a small hunk of rock. In it, there shimmered small amounts of a silver metal. It was a rare find, and he stood for a moment, admiring the beauty before he pocketed it in a bag slung over his shoulder.

The rainfall began to lighten again, and Horkvaal grew apprehensive. He quickly turned about, and began to retreat into the shadow, before the sun could touch his skin.

Niff looked up sharply at the smiling waitress wanting to take her order.

"Am I required to buy something?" She snapped.

This girl was new. All the other waiters and waitress' were used to seeing Niff stroll in and out of the shop, sometimes buying food, but more often than not, just sitting in one of the chairs with a small book in her hands.
After kicking her out for the tenth time, they had finally caved in and let her sit in solitude.

"Well -" The waitress scoffed. "This IS a coffee shop after all. And we do require people to buy something if they're taking up our chairs." Her glued smile still clung to her skinny face as she tried to educate Niff on resturant manners.

"Chair."

"Pardon?"

"Chair. One. Singular. I am not taking up chairS. Just the one....I am tired of listening to your dumb babble. Go away now." Niff waved her hand as if dismissing a servent.
She watched, slightly amused as the waitress' lips pressed together in a thin line before she turned sharply and walked to the counter to have a hurried conversation with a man wearing a name tag. The manager, it seemed.
Niff watched him crane his neck to see the disorderly customer, only to have his shoulders drop and with a shrug turn back to the waitress.

Niff grinned.

They wouldn't try kicking her out. Not again.

Grinning even more widely, she stuck up her hand and snapped her fingers.

"Oh miss! I'd like my hot chocolate now!"

Humans were so fun to mess with.

__________________

Liyasa only carried her umbrella over her head till the end of her street, then she swung it behind her and spun it on her shoulder, singing "Healing Rain" lightly under her breath and skipping through whatever puddles cared to splash up onto her frayed jeans. She tilted her head back and soaked up the rain falling just hard enough to be more than a drizzle as it brushed her face and settled into her hair and her jacket. She glanced down more than once to make sure the bag she carried with her--a squarish thing, which had once been black until Liyasa and her brother had swept color onto it with a paintbrush each--was firmly zipped. Other than that, Liyasa had no care in the world, and showed it to everyone she passed with a little wave. Most just looked at her paint-splashed hands and the writer's pencil behind her right ear and moved on with a "what can you expect" attitude. A few people waved back. A group of girls around her own age gave her looks between strange and disgusted and pointedly turned away.

"That's Liyasa Jaston," one of them whispered, "she hates us because we won't talk to her about stupid things like writing or fairy wings." Liyasa's mouth twisted slightly at the lie, then settled back into a smile as she turned the corner and the small park opened it's arms of tree branches and hedge to welcome her inside.

She crossed the square quickly and folded her umbrella up and in just in time to turn past the main entrance and duck under a few concealing vines to a short tunnel in the encircling hedge, probably made by some dog-sized animal but now only used by Liyasa herself and the occasional venturesome squirrel.

Liyasa unfolded her jacket and sat on it. She looked up past the slight covering of leaves to see the sun deciding whether to poke it's face out from behind the blue-grey clouds. No rain now. That was good.

The bag unzipped easily to reveal two sections, one full of pages smudged and scrawled with writing, the other filled with carefully sealed samples of fushias and oranges and indigoes and every other color there was to think of. Behind those were three or four works-in-progress, all vivid color, all detailed to the finest degree, but at the same time almost vauge. Not quite remembered. Liyasa put a hand in the center of both sides, closed her eyes, and waited for God to show her which to work on today.

Horkvaal's abode was a dark place, the large windows that would originally have allowed in streams of light were covered in a thick material that looked like a cross between a rug and the pelt of a long dead animal, and it smelled like it too. The twilight of the home allowed those with more acute vision to see what little was left to be illuminated, while the rest was cloaked in a miasma of shadow. What little to be seen was often large piles of rocks, although within these piles were often pieces of metal, large and small. There were also small pieces of old, rickety wooden furniture that looked like it had survived the worst of any kind of weather. The only entrance to his home came from a small door in a cramped alleyway.

And this was just the way that Horkvaal liked it. As he came in, escaping the rays of the emerging sun, he dropped his bag full of its treasures onto the floor before he began to rifle through it. Most of it he tossed aside, ascertaining its metals as nothing of value. A few, though, he found quit valuable. One contained trace amounts of gold; another a aluminum-nickel alloy; and another, large amounts of iron. This one made Horkvaal's muscles twitch as he picked up the stone that contained the lethal metal, but it was valuable nonetheless. And the last, was an assortment of metals that Horkvaal desired above all the others.

Going to the piles of stones, he began to sort them into their piles, each assorted by the metals contained within them. He placed them with care into their piles, where they would wait to be made into whatever he chose to use them for. And the last pile he placed his most precious metal in made him smile. Almost ready...

__________________

Liyasa's phone buzzed. She jerked her head up and almost sent the pencil sliding across the page in a deadly diagonal slice. She took a quick breath and tried to reorient herself with the world around her as she checked her phone.

It was a text from mom. "dinners in half an hour "

Already? Liyasa sent back a quick okay and checked the time. 5:30, said the watch on her phone. Liyasa shook her head. She'd been outside for three hours. It only felt like fifteen minutes to her.

Liyasa sighed and stuck her pencil behind her ear again and took a look at what she'd drawn.

It was one of her regulars. Jess, Liyasa called her, because the name just seemed to fit with her small frame and pointed face. And the many reflective silver earrings, plus the nose and the eyebrow, sealed it. Jess was a perfect name for this woman. Liyasa drew her from time to time, especially in the last couple of years. She was usually sitting in some place, maybe a coffehouse, frowning out the window. She was always frowning, at least in Liyasa's sketches of her. "What's up with you, Jess? Why so unhappy all the...time..."

Liyasa's speech fizzled out as her focus turned from the bag she was zipping up to something wedged in the mud about half a foot away from her. She reached out, freed it from the mud's suction and tried to rinse it off in a small puddle on her right. A mismatched mix of rock and something Liyasa couldn't quite place seemed to glow in the brief streak of sunshine that skittered across the clearing, then down the street. She crawled out of her hideout in the bushes and headed home, pocketing the small bit of rock. It looked like it could be pretty when it was clean, and she could see if she wanted to make a necklace out of it.