By Leaps and Bounds

[Fate]

Gotta Skedaddle

Ahh, so that was his last name. She hadn't even given hers, though that really wasn't anything to be concerned about at the moment. It seemed like he was trying to lose the Heartless in a sneakier, yet more polite way, than Lillian was thinking of. Sure, coffee sounded great right about now and she wasn't one to say no to a cup if she was offered one, but she didn't want to stick around too much longer. It was rude, yeah, but she wanted to get out of here; being around a Heartless just made her uneasy and she didn't like it.

"Sounds great... but I gotta get out of here," Lillian said, her tone of voice showing her reluctance. Humor seemed nice, but she didn't trust Heartless as far as she could throw them; since he was in the shape of a dragon thing, she didn't think she could throw him too far, but the metaphor still stood. "I've gotta get back to my ship and figure out where the hell I'm going..." She didn't want to go back to Radiant Garden at the point, not really in the mood to be stuck in one place. Maybe she'd go flying around and see what other worlds came up.

"I'll see you around, 'kay?" She looked at Elrick out of the corner of her eye; it'd be a shame to just leave him here with the Heartless. Maybe he could follow her, though he probably had his own ship and stuff; problem was that she couldn't just ask him to do that right this second. Instead, she turned around and started walking toward where she had her ship, making a discreet beckoning gesture with her hand that was at her side. She felt a little mean she supposed, but how many people would want to hang around a Heartless, even if they were nice?

[/size]

[Lagunamov]

Leaning on the Fourth Wall.

“She caught on quickly enough,” came to mind when Elrick saw Lillian’s reaction. Sure, at first he was actually wondering whether bailing on the coffee offer was sincere or not, since that did provide with a feasible way to bail on whatever Humor was. They were both very uncomfortable around him/her/it, but they still needed to be relatively tactful about it. Confirmation of her intentions came the moment Elrick managed to catch a quick glimpse of her hand gesture, as brief as that was. He was used to tracking people from above, catching as insignificant as that was child’s play.

“Well, in that case, I’m going to get that coffee myself. I’ll be heading there, so if you feel like catching up, you know where to go,” he told Humor, lying about both his destination and the possibility of it knowing the place. He never mentioned exactly where the coffee shop was in the first place. Neither was he specific about whether said coffee shop even existed in the first place. Regardless, He took off in the opposite direction as Lillian, turning around the first corner he could find. Then, once out of the creature’s range of sight, he started running down the street, taking a turn at another corner and into an alleyway, now following the general direction of her new acquaintance.

They alley died after what he estimated as a block or two of distance, but it wasn’t something that ever stopped him from moving around. Not taking notice of it, Elrick climbed the wall and reached the roof of the small building that cut the alley short, now proceeding through the roofs. Now strolling close to the edge of the buildings, with the eventual jumps up and down between the different structures, he continued forward while looking down at the street, trying to find the girl. “Ok, so if I got this right, she might be glad to see I got rid of that thing. If not, she’ll think I’m a stalker,” he thought as he scouted the ground, eventually finding her slightly further down the road than him.

“Eh, stalker still beats having no one to talk to,” he concluded, taking a dash forward down the roofs. When he reached the end of the building, at the corner of the street, his eyes rejoiced at the sight he caught only a few meters away from the corner. Taking a good leap out of the edge of the roof, his body fell in what felt like slow motion into a hay stack. He caught his breath, spit out some of the hay that got into his mouth after falling into it, and jumped out of the stack, Lillian standing close to it, which meant she had either seen him or he timed it better than he thought. “I dunno why they would even need hay in this town, but damn, this just made my day,” he said aloud, a large grin in his face. Probably the biggest one he’d had in years. “Well, maybe second to making a new acquaintance, but you get what I mean… Nah, that's unlikely. You don’t seem like the kind of person to jump out of buildings into things that physics dictate shouldn’t break their fall.”

[Fate]

Well Hello to You Too

She wasn't sure if he caught her little mannerism, not sticking around to listen to what he had to say to Humor and just making her way through town. Fortunately, this was the way she came, making it easier to remember where the heck she was going; otherwise, she would have been lost in this little town's alleyways. She hoped he got her message though since she didn't particularly want to go gallivanting through the galaxy without anyone; it'd be awfully boring that way and she'd probably end up going back to Radiant Garden at that point.

She reached the corner of a street, seeing a random haystack at the end of a building. Okay... and what did these people need hay for exactly? This place didn't exactly fit the farmland look at all, which made her a bit curious. Eh, she wasn't about to question these people's habits or why they had hay in the middle of town. She was just going to walk past it, pay it no heed, and then get to her precious ship so she could fly around space. She was going to ignore what she thought she heard from above as footsteps and just get out of Twilight Town.

Or Elrick could jump into the haystack and startle her; that worked too.

She gave him a sort of dumbfounded look when he emerged from the haystack completely unharmed. "Nah, not really..." she replied, "I usually just jump out of buildings onto things that physics says should break my fall; just to be safe, you know?" She let a smirk sneak up onto her face as she said this. "You found me pretty darn quick, even before I got to my ship... wait you're not a stalker from your world are you? Is that how you got good at climbing walls?" She was, for the most part, kidding around; she did have to be careful though.

[/size]

[Lagunamov]

Sorry, I don't want that on my bill, so I'm leaving. NOW.

“Stalker? Nah, those creeps are lame. They either use disguises or crappy cover,” he played along, though at this point he wasn’t sure whether playing along this line of conversation would be a good thing or not, so, time to change the topic. “It’s military training actually,” he explained, trying to make it as short as possible since raising as little interest in his home world in any stranger was the best course of action. “It was kinda needed due to our topography and city structures,” he finished, remembering the unique architecture from Eurydice, filled with water canals, bridges, arcs and large sky rocketing towers. Being able to explore every creek in the world was an important point.

“Aaaaaaanyways… I don’t think I was followed by Humor… whatever the hell he is supposed to be,” he commented, a chill going down his spine. The whole idea of a sentient shadow was now starting to creep him out, but it did raise the question of exactly how far down the path of darkness one may be able to go without turning into one. Not that he was going to even try and venture that path, he already held back on using Corridors of Darkness on principle alone. “Oh, right, your ship,” he remembered about a minute later after she mentioned it again. So she was actually serious about leaving the planet. “I think I parked mine…” he tried to remember, pretty much taking up the implicit offer of leaving Twilight Town. He didn’t particularly mind; one more hour of a still sunset would probably do something to his head. He already had enough of that as it is.

“Oh, screw it,” he gave up on trying to remember where he left it, instead opting for a more practical approach. He reached into his pocket, taking out a small device twice his thumb’s size. He pressed a button on it, and waited for about ten seconds. A large crashing sound engulfed the area, debris falling everywhere around as a large gummi ship packed with weapons smashed through a wall – luckily, it was only a wall dividing sections of the city and not a building. “Oh, right, they never did fix that…” Elrick sighed at the lack of grace from the ship’s automatic pilot system. He decided to shrug it, simply heading to the ship and starting to climb the ladder on its side to board it. “I’ll wait outside. If you got any good places in mind, lead the way,” he opened the hatch and as he was about to enter, he turned around and said one last thing to Lillian. “By the way, ship’s frequency is O-9573, in case yours has a compatible radio,” once that was out of the way, he entered and closed the hatch behind him.

Back into what had been the closest to home for him in years, Elrick sat in the pilot’s seat and took the ship outside the planet in a matter of minutes, waiting in the sky far above Twilight Town, watching the stars. The mindless, never ending chatter from Orpheus was almost drowned in his mind now, feeling like background noise.

[Administrator]

Not actually missing...

Humor, who had seemingly stayed behind, circled overhead, unnoticed by the other two. Observation would be best for now, yes, and so he merely circled, high enough to be barely visible, but indiscernible to normal vision acuity. Of course, when the man got into a gummi ship, the Heartless immediately snuck down to ground level, turning into a Shadow and sinking into the ground, an imperceptible shadow on the ground...literally.

Humor snuck up on the girl, following her. She was the more interesting, and the more usable, of the two. The other was too much like a fellow scientist to even be considered as a test subject, measured by the looks he had seen the man give him. This one, she was intelligent, yes, but certainly no scientist, no experimenter.

And so he followed, unseen for now, but, perhaps, in some corner of her mind, felt by his distinctly unnatural presence.