Re: Over the Music Shop: Daniel W/Newt P
Few people ventured into Daniel's dominion with so little caution. Even people who didn't know what he was caught the oppressive air of the closed shop's owner, and while he was known to get plenty of packages and make occasional sarcastic comments on the town journals, he had also once thrown a trespasser bodily out of his shop, and the man had not landed until he was a good six feet away. Therefore Daniel was the town definition of unfriendly, and when he did venture out by some hired Capital conveyance, people had the good sense to stay the hell out of his way. The interior, obviously, was not made to be any more friendly, looking as it did as a cross between a warehouse and one of those old suites preserved as a walk-through museum. Daniel's visitors - now numbering an impressive two: Claire and Jude - hardly found the place any more welcoming even when Daniel put the kettle on.
Now, Daniel watched with a sense of fascinated dislocation as Newt disrobed to a indeterminate male standard, which the old vampire realized very late was more in line with a few decades after his own time than the current. The ginger looked like some merchant's son come lately back from school, and only the smile that came very late dispelled the impression with a calm, almost worldly knowledge. It had only been a few hours since he'd spoken to Jude, and Daniel noticed the accent, closer to his own but not quite on the button. Daniel's glassy brown eyes stared intently at Newt's watch chain for so long that it seemed he had frozen in time. He wondered if the man was real.
The vampire turned to look at his cat, and he called to her softly in antique Italian touched with Milan, the way a lover might call through a red velvet curtain between opera boxes. Of course, she did not hear him, and he did not expect her to. Daniel sank a little deeper in his chair, sipping again, and twitched slightly as Newt came into his field of vision once more to greet the cat -- in a very roundabout, catlike way himself. As Newt didn't smell like a bottle of wine and he wasn't throwing things, Mimi was in a slightly better mood about him than she was Daniel, and after readying herself to flee three or four times, she decided to inspect his fingers with delicate taps of pink nose in the air and the tickle of gentle whiskers. Daniel wisely did not interrupt this ceremony for several minutes.
"Where," he asked, eventually, "did you say you were from?"