an age of wolves (_fimbulvetr_) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2011-04-19 23:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | hati, sköll |
Who: Susannah Ironwood (NPC), Hati & Skoll and Open!
Where: Imagination Playground, Burling Slip - Lower Manhattan
When: Wednesday afternoon
What: Kid needs activities.
Warnings: See who. And depends who happens to be in the area.
"Look, look, no, we should add this," Susannah was saying to a dark haired boy a couple years younger than her. He looked at her warily from his seat on the ground as he maneuvered a blue archway across two oversized blue rectangle blocks, a piece of burlap carefully clutched in one hand as he did. Susannah had tied a piece of rope around the handle of a bucket and was quite proud of herself. The boy wasn't sure about the bucket and what use it would have on his archway. "This will make it better! They can pull water up!"
"Who?"
"The little people." Susannah looked up from the bucket and her own thoughts to stare flatly at the boy. "And then, and then we can get ropes for their magical ponies that fly in the sky!"
"I don't wan' little people in my archway! Ponies don't fly," the boy said matter-of-factedly as he hauled a longer rectangle shape over toward the archway. Maybe he'd build a bridge. He started to pull together things for this.
"Then we should add cages under the bridge!" Susannah said, hopping from foot to foot, suddenly excited by the expansion of this make believe world, not quite getting that the boy had no interest in her ideas and just liked her hair.
"For what?"
"TROLLS!"
"I don't like trolls." He wasn't thinking of the same kind of trolls Susannah was. Susannah was thinking of the trolls from the picture books her auntie Anabel gave her. The boy was thinking of demonic leprechauns his big brother saw on TV once, and gremlins.
Across the park, with attention moving from the bobbing form of Susannah to the other kids and the adults roaming just as aimlessly as the children, Hati smoked a cigarette, leaning against his dusty yellow cab car.
Across the street from Hati, under the overpass, Skoll was picking up some cash from a connection at a food truck. The man owed Stellan Ironwood from years before, from before Susannah was born and from before Stellan Ironwood served his time. He also made sure to pick up some banh mi for Susannah's lunch.
Skoll paused, sensing something different. He glanced at the sky as if it was a shift in weather, then glanced at his brother who was "watching" Susannah - like one would watch a mewling lamb toddling near a precipice, more likely - and then at an approaching car, driving slowly as if the driver were looking at the playground but not enough to draw Hati from his damning thoughts. Skoll scanned the crowd of children and found Susannah, then scanned the people walking around the park, and people in their cars. Assessing, scrutinizing, before turning back to his business. Skoll looked back at the cashier in the food truck, caught in some odd, empty, idle dialogue, speaking primarily in code about whatever it was that was precisely owed to Skoll, besides the money. Once, the food truck owner had been a bicycle messenger - a dangerous job - and had delivered something to the wrong person at the wrong time.
Meanwhile, in the "imagination" park, Susannah was negotiating flying horses and troll politics with the little boy whose only wish was too build an archway, and a make-believe drawbridge, and pretend he was a knight. Exasperated, Susannah whirled on her heel with her bucket and walked away to find water for it, toward the edge of the park. Her father was caught up in negotiations of a different kind, and Hati was too busy looking beyond Susannah to the other lambs that frolicked amok.
From the outside, it might even look as if they were all oblivious of who and what was going on around them, or perhaps unaware of who might have been pulling up alongside Hati's parked cab to double-park.