shiny sabre-tooth benevolence [moth]

[silas]

WE CAN BREAK IT DOWN, WITCHES

When northern Lumiose had ripped itself to shreds, Silas liked to think, Cafe Triste must have survived by playing dead. The city's finest glass lay in shards, and its cleanest concrete had been pockmarked by bullets, but none of the soldiers or looters had thought to mercy kill a place that had seemed, for as long as anyone could remember, to be on its deathbed.

It was around six on a frigid morning. The soldiers were asleep, or elsewhere, or dead - it didn't matter. If he closed his eyes and let the aroma of his hypercaffeinated beverage smother the reek of urban decay, Silas could surround himself with a dreamscape of rural beauty, pretend he'd never been coerced into coming here. The drinks here were acrid and unpleasant, as always, and the owner was perhaps the most decrepit thing in the room - as always - but he somewhat enjoyed the ambiance.

He had covered an entire table with notebooks and stray sheets, some crumpled into balls, such that whenever he shifted his arm and the item of furniture wobbled on its faulty leg, a flurry of vigorously scribbled ideas sloshed onto the floor, raising a small cloud of dust. The proper draft, of course, was written in immaculate handwriting in the least unkempt of the notebooks, lest he do his words any disrespect. Not that Silas didn't have the lingering suspicion that what he was being made to do was inherently disrespectful. There was no denying that one could find political overtones in his previous works, but he had nothing but respect for subtlety. Here, he was forced to suture together the fragmentations of his usual style, summon up a surgical precision his obsessive mind was wholly unused to.

Silas placed his pen - one of four, color-coded - on the table, took a sip of his drink, and stared at the door frame. Maybe if he stared enough at the grain of the wood, in its intricate patterns, he would find some kind of inspiration. It reminded him of fingerprints, of the strange uneven troughs and ridges of magnified skin.

When another customer entered the doorway, minutes later, Silas did not even notice that his glassy stare was now directed at her instead.

©

[agnès fabre]

The Kalosian café has long been considered a symbol of Lumiose's intellectuals. Open into the late hours of the night, its beverages limited not simply to coffee and tea, but encompassing all beverages alcoholic once the sun begins to set, many a table had been toppled from the dueling passions of writers and poets. The yelling matches that resulted from the nocturnal gatherings of Lumiose's intellectual elite could be heard from the streets, their meetings famous among the city's many young academics. Yet for most, that's all a café was, a meeting place.
When war broke out, many of the very cafés that helped give birth to the Boure movement were abandoned as a result of the strife. The infamous Lysandre café, once frequented by free-minded scientists and artists, had been burned to ash by the increasingly restless protesters. Café after café was abandoned, the now-perilous northern boulevard empty in favor of the relative safety of the south. Those establishments that had not simply been abandoned by their owners soon closed their doors, businesses driven to bankruptcy through not only a lack of customers, but by relentless waves of theft and vandalism.
How Café Triste remained in business nobody could be sure. It had been on the verge of closing for over a decade, yet struggled on, seemingly untouched by the riots, perhaps out of some sort of pity towards the place. What reason there might have been to visit beforehand was now all but gone, and only the most loyal of regulars even contemplated the infrequent visit.

But they had the best donuts in all of Lumiose, perhaps all of Kalos. Hot and greasy, free of icing or any other impurity.

A very hungry Agnès made her way through the door with a relieved sigh, her weekly pilgrimage having thankfully been relatively uneventful. Flashing the proprietor a big smile, she started to make her way to her usual spot, before noticing the unfamiliar man sitting in her favorite chair, staring at her with those vacant eyes.

"O-oh. Um, hello there."

[silas]

WE CAN BREAK IT DOWN, WITCHES

Silas could feel the potential energy in his breath, each exhalation on the cusp of visibility, if only the thermostat were to slither down a few degrees. A place like this had never been able to afford the luxury of a high heating bill. The persistent chill, at least, had the advantage of rendering the hottest of beverages drinkable in minutes. Burnt tongues were a rarity among the few clientele.

He sipped his drink. Looking up, he saw another customer. Oh. He had come here for solitude. Silas registered that he had been looking at her. People tended to make all sorts of strange assumptions based on the presence, absence, or direction of a gaze. That was their fault, not his. The fellow customer was neither more or less pleasant to look at than the rest of the scenery. Maybe she would move, and his eyes would fall upon door frame once more.

A rather boring man had once accused him of having a spectral stare. Silas, on the few occasions he had dabbled with mirrors, saw none of the glassiness of the animated corpse in his own eyes. Perhaps people expected too much, a surplus of liveliness to suffuse the face. He had no time for such superfluous efforts, not when there was writing to do.

If anything here was spectral, it was Cafe Triste. It was, after all, the only animate business on a dead street, its continued presence inexplicable. Perhaps it hadn't survived by playing dead; perhaps it was already in a sort of immortal unlife. The proprietor seemed chained to the location - some day he would die in the apartment above the cafe, Silas supposed, and the body would not be found for weeks. He would return as a ghost, but a sad and unspecific ghost, perhaps a Gastly, to haunt the premises. That is, if he was capable of death, rather than trapped like his cafe in this liminal existence. 

This young woman, however, had interrupted the ethereal fantasy. The banalities of urban life had a way of doing so. He felt no obligation to respond to her greeting, but decided it might be entertaining. "Are you a ghost?" he half-murmured, no longer looking at her but out the window at the still-empty street.

"Were you a soldier shot in the streets? Maybe you froze in an alleyway? Is your icy carcass out there somewhere right now, or are you ancient and vengeful?" None of it was serious of course; she was boring and had a pulse. Regardless, he liked to think of what could've been.

He turned away from the outside and looked blankly at the stranger once more. "I could be a ghost, too. You look like you've seen one." A good turn of phrase. Almost a joke, had he bothered to put humor into his tone. He'd write that down; it seemed dumb enough to use in his newer, simpler writing, within some shallow allegory. Silas turned to write it down, tilting the table enough to make a couple of wads of paper and a bright blue pen hit the floor. He didn't bother to pick them up.

©