Her teasing pulled a rare, genuine smile from him. Typically, Elias found teasing of any sort to be pointless and rude. With Cat... With Ms. St. Giles, it was... different. Her gentle jibes were meant to ease and not to raise tensions. It worked. She had a certain sort of magic about her, enchantment lodged in every syllable she spoke, witchcraft in her fingertips. Yes. He smiled.
It was not difficult to imagine her stashed in the back of an Italian cafe, reading and enjoying the ambient sounds of the shop. It was equally easy to see her in a wool peacoat, fur at her throat, with London fog swirling at her ankles. This imagination of his struggled not at all with the fact that he had no good idea about what she actually looked like; it filled in the blank spaces and created for Elias a picture that seemed reasonable enough.
"I'm pleased that you see them every once and a while. Had I so large a family as yours, I would find it difficult to be away from them for long. But as it stands, my parents never had the chance for more than just myself -- and my mother never remarried. You are fortunate, Ms. St... Cat."
As she stretched, he passed a hand over his eyes as if to clear them. It did very little for him, save to confirm that he was beginning to see the difference between light and darkness again. That was encouraging.
"I head the Network Security department at DynTec," he responded. "It is pleasing enough." The truth was that he preferred working with servers and networks more than working with people. He would not say this to her, however. He recognized that his mostly antisocial behavior was frowned upon by most social creatures -- and Cat struck him very much as a social creature.
Occupied as he was with these thoughts, he was rather unprepared for the crashing light that overtook his sight again. More brutal than before, he gasped before he recovered his control. And then again, after the light, the same otherworldly, demonic shape followed. It turned its head toward him before fading away from his view.
Elias found himself, underneath the searing pain, rather unnerved.