At The Gates

Who: Jennifer oathandshield and Elisabeth keepdreaming
What: Business, dinner; the usual.
Where: Rome
When: Friday evening
Warnings: TBA
( To scale the map, to get us back on track. )

When the Market is busy, no one notices the peripheries, not those focused on doing their jobs. And the Market is busy; Valentine's Day is always an event for those unlucky in love, those who want charms for looks and charms for the heart, those who wish to kill off the unfaithful and those who want to bring him back. No one noticed a small store setting up on the very edge, hung with pink and red bunting and a large handlettered sign proclaiming, 'Madam Venus's Charms and Delights'. No one was there when it (illegal, no permission to operate) went rather wrong at around midnight on Sunday, burst into a very loud, pink and red explosion and left nothing behind but a cloud of livid pink smoke. It was a perfect kind of plight, a warning if you will, to those who set up within the Market without the Market's sanction -- until, by morning, that smoke had spread and diffused and drifted, until it had become rather obvious that perhaps it wasn't just Madam Venus who had a plight at all.

Great swathes of the stuff drifted past the barrier line, blew softly into just a drift of palest pink and caught itself on the ever-helpful breeze meandering through London that morning. Valentine's Day for the residents was clearly going to be a little more unusual than the rest of the year.