There was a tell, miniature but glinting between syllables. Elly's also from what would be designated, these days, as the wrong side of the tracks. Of course, in her time, the intense filth and fleshymusk and brimming din of olde Londontown, there were no tracks. Just stygian mud and horse-muck, plucking the shoes. Odors of tamarind and raw meat and people, always people. Always the unwashed scent of people. Sometimes, the floral imported scent of an overpowering perfume, like the bawdy that bought her had, which rarely harbored a relief from the bombardment of all the other smells. Elly remembers, reminisces, notices smells most of all. Even now.
“Wrong side of the fuckin’ tracks, huh? You’n me both.” she said, because she’s candid. She isn’t a secret-hoarding, politically minded parrot. She doesn’t mind people knowing who she is. What’s the point of pretending? She’s too old, too well-known. They’d find out anyway.
In a danse of nuanced kink, the smoke she’d inhaled and exhaled in that mockery of life-breath, ejected from the side of her mouth. Away from the girl she was face-to-face with, politely making it so that it wouldn’t infiltrate the moonglow flesh of the new nightbound friend she was making. Lacking breath, pantomiming it, she laughed. She can’t even fucking remember what it was like to really breathe. Elly skimmed the pulp of her own bottom lip, swiped it to taste the acrid twang the smoke left traces of. “I live here,” she said, her brows jabbing upward and her eyes slingshot toward the complex behind them. “It’s a nest. A nest for mostly Brujah. Without all the crazy shit that usually goes on in a nest, like the insane fuckin monologues about leavin bodies around, or gettin blood on the kitchen counters. They all know I like to be neat.” she beamed.