Axel: Rae & Fen
The gaze was met head on. In some circles of his world this might have been a cue to curl back his upper lip and tense his forward leg, but this was only call for a second sniff at the air. This time he took a longer taste of the scent. He let it roll around and trigger the appropriate memories. Then it was simply a matter of pulling them forward, letting each fragment of barely remembered stories move him a step closer.
It worked in her favor, for all that was worth, that the memories were so difficult to recall. If she had been a scent he'd immediately recognized then it would likely not have been a good thing. Those from Vale that he remembered easily were generally done so with distaste if not outright hostility. Those he did not? At the very least his opinion of them could be neutral, but none of them were the type of things to simply ignore and certainly not with talk of so many of them afoot.
It was enough to bring Fen to close the distance between them to something where talking could be done without shouting and he returned his arms to a fold as he pretended to pay only half a mind to her company. A final tug of the scent was given, sorting hers out from the abundance of chemicals, sweat, and snacks, and with it more memories. He remembered the scent on his sibling, or perhaps he'd seen them talking? It was almost frustrating, how difficult it could be to pull specific memories out from his time there, but so much of it had seen a shadow cast over it ages ago and...
"It is a strange pastime." It was almost like he wasn't talking to her at all, which was probably not the best plan in the world given how noisy the room could be, and it brought a more pointed turn of his face toward her. "But that's true of many things here, don't you think?"