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Post by Caitlyn Masters on Jan 5, 2010 21:04:42 GMT -5
The sound of thick soles tapping against the tiled floor of the mall would have been much louder if it hadn't been for the fact that there were a good number of other people around. The one wearing those thick-soled boots was a pretty teenage girl with long black hair that fell rather messily around her face. She wore a simple t-shirt and jeans, with a black belt that had a deck holder on the left and an orange silk bag on the right. She had a Duel Disk on her arm, loaded with a deck. A Duel Monsters deck was loaded into the Disk, and there was a second in the deck case, which lighlty clicked against the walls of it as she walked. In the silk bag, however, was a different kind of cards.
The girl was Caitlyn Masters, well-known throughout her clan for her fortunetelling abilities. The tools of her trade were in that silk bag-a beautifully-illustrated deck of Tarot cards.
At the moment, however, she was not doing a reading or dueling, her two favorite hobbies. She was walking to find a good place to sit down.
To her relief, she did finally find a table and chairs, and she sat down in one of them. A sigh passed her lips as she did. She had been aimlessly wandering the mall for hours, and her feet hurt. It was a major downside to wearing hoes like hers, but the alternative-walking around at only 5' tall-was not an option for her.
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Post by Tekka King on Jan 5, 2010 22:29:01 GMT -5
Not much could be seen of Tekka other than the the occasional tuft of blond hair because the fourteen year old and thief of the Tora clan was surrounded by very tall people. Very OBLIVIOUS tall people.
Thus came Tekka's great idea of pick-pocketing from said tall people and it was going rather well. A little more money and she could buy that necklace she had been wanting and a pack of duel monsters cards.
Her deck of Duel Monsters cards was in its deck case clipped to her belt and her Duel Disk was safe and sound in her backpack. Not that she was looking for a duel, but you never knew in the clans...
Scanning the area she spotted one of her clan members sitting on one of the few semi-available benches and called out to her. "Heya Caitlyn!"
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Post by Caitlyn Masters on Jan 6, 2010 19:21:08 GMT -5
As a self-trained thief herself, it didn't take Caitlyn long to realize what Tekka was doing. A slight smirk crossed her face. Stealing from people like that wasn't even a challenge, but it was certainly worth doing. Teach them to pay a bit more attention.
"Hello, Tekka," she waved, her voice not quite as loud. She wasn't going to call her out on what she was doing, mostly because seeing people being so oblivious amused her to no end. "I would get up, but I have a feeling that I'd lose you in the crowd," she joked. She wasn't meaning to be particularly mean, of course, as she was rather short herself.
She slid her Disk off her arm and set it on the table. The thing was heavy, certainly. A girl could get quite a workout just carrying that thing around.
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Post by Tekka King on Jan 6, 2010 19:58:20 GMT -5
Tekka trotted happily over to her fellow theif's bench and plopped down. "Hoo! I've been at that for awhile now an no one's noticed." She grinned at Caitlyn, the semi-creepy grin that fit so naturally on her face and caused more than a few people to shudder upon looking at it. Very few of the Tora clan were still susceptible to it though, and Caitlyn wasn't part of that unlucky minority. "I think they're getting dumber, if you can believe it."
Counting out her spoils she noticed that she actually did have enough for what she wanted already. But why stop? This was just a small break to keep her sane and to keep her shoulders from falling off. Lugging a duel-disk around was no easy matter after all.
Noticing Caitlyn's bag where she stored her tarot cards Tekka gave another grin, this one decidedly less creepy. "You brought your cards? Are you finally giving out readings to the uncultured masses? For shame!"
Not that Tekka had been expecting the older girl to do anything of the sort, but it was a rather slow week for the clans. All were plotting and planning and so there wasn't much action. This left the members of each clan to their own devices, mostly spending the money they had acquired through missions. It wasn't a huge sum, but enough that they would really need another job.
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Post by Caitlyn Masters on Jan 6, 2010 20:12:01 GMT -5
Caitlyn laughed as Tekka sat down. The grin had bothered her once, but not anymore. "I've been thinking that myself. Then again, I see a few familiar faces in the crowd. I know I've borrowed from some of these people before." Her voice wasn't particularly low, as the noise of the mall really prevented anyone from hearing what they were talking about. "Like sheep, really," she shook her head, expressing her disappointment at humanity.
Her eyebrows flicked up as she saw Tekka counting out her haul. Certainly an impressive amount. "How long did it take to pick that much up?" She asked. Her eyes briefly wandered over the crowd. She had a bit of money herself; perhaps she would actually do some shopping and pick up a bit of extra cash at the same time. Huh.
When Tekka mentioned her Tarot cards, Caitlyn unconsciously reached over and put a hand on the soft bag. She shook her head. "Perish the thought," she said. "These...people wouldn't appreciate it. I carry them out of habit." She said. "However, if someone were to ask me and offere a bit of...compensation, who would I be to deny that person knowledge that he or she seeks?"
She also kept them close out of nerves. It wasn't that she didn't trust her Clanmates, but...well, she didn't trust her Clanmates. She tended not to leave anything valuable to her anywhere where it could be taken, and there was nothing more valuable to her than her Tarot cards and dueling decks. Thus, they were always on her. She lighlty ran her thumb over the silken bag. With few missions, she was especially wary. She was fairly certain that the Tarot deck she had was one-of-a-kind; at least, she had never seen another quite like it. Goodness knew how much it could be sold for.
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Post by Tekka King on Jan 6, 2010 22:35:39 GMT -5
"This?" She gestured to the miniature hoard. "Not too too long. I got lucky and found a guy trying to impress a girl with wads of cash." She chuckled fondly at the memory. "He was so excited when she agreed to go out with him that he left the money on the table! The rest was from that group of guys over there," She gestured to a group of three men that were scratching their heads in bemused silence wondering where their money had gone. "And that mass of tall people you saw me with just moments ago." The giants were as puzzled as the men and one of the group had started a fight with another of his group claiming that he was a 'Girl-stealing bastard who wanted his money now too.'
Tekka laughed at the compensation bit and spoke again, "You would be a very smart person. Their compensation wouldn't be enough to get half a reading." She was silent for a moment and, like a typical teen, allowed her mind to wander over to the gutter for a few moments. Glancing back at her and giving a fairly perverted eye-brow wiggle, Tekka picked up where she had left off. "...Unless of course this compensation is actually..." At the insulted look on Caitlyn's face she broke out into peals of laughter. "I'm just kidding!"
Or at least, she hoped she knew. Caitlyn was known for not taking crap, and Tekka had gotten several lumps on her head due to stupid comments. With any luck this wouldn't result in another whack on the head and thirty more dead braincells.
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Post by Caitlyn Masters on Jan 7, 2010 21:59:19 GMT -5
Caitlyn shook her head, amused. "Brilliant. And he certainly deserved it, being stupid enough to leave all that money just lying around. He was asking to never see it again." She said. Then, she laughed out loud at Tekka's description of her second group of marks. "Aah, tall people. So oblivious to those of us below their height."
The dark-haired teen was about to respond to Tekka's statement as if it were a perfectly normal, clean one...until her mind joined her friend's in that wonderful place called the gutter and she turned bright red. "Tekka!" She gasped, horrifically insulted. The other girl's laughter just made it work. Her hand twitched, and she certainly was itching to give Tekka a good whack over the head.
"You know that if you were anyone else, you would have just earned yourself a head-slap," she informed her. "However, as none of the previous ones have appeared to accomplish anything, I may perhaps just give you up as a lost cause." Her voice had taken on approximately the tone of a Shakespearean actor giving a dramatic soliloquy. "So I will not bother myself with such a base attempt at teaching you." She put a hand over her heart. "However, I am gravely insulted that you would suggest such a thing, even in jest."
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Post by Tekka King on Jan 7, 2010 22:56:47 GMT -5
Tekka closed her eyes and held up a finger in an attempt to seem wise, "Not only are tall people a good source of cash they are an endless source of amusement." She dug through her bag and held up four or five belts. "For instance, pantsings."
As she said this there was a rather girlish scream from some vague area off to the right near a pretzel stand as a rather tall man's pants fell down. She smiled widely and spread her arms, "Ta-Da!" she exclaimed before stashing the belts back into her bag.
Listening to Caitlyn's response to the 'compensation' joke Tekka smiled in relief and then in mirth at her friend's melodrama. She closed her eyes and leaned back on the bench with her fingers laced behind her head. "I might learn something, but you've been killing all of the brains I might have had." She paused, opened her eys, blinked, and then threw up her arms. "See! That didn't even make sense!... much!" Taking into account the attention she was drawing to herself from the wild waving she slowly put her arms back down, scanning the area like a paranoid secret agent before returning to the conversation at hand with a smile.
"But aside from all that, how are things?"
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Post by Caitlyn Masters on Jan 7, 2010 23:23:43 GMT -5
Caitlyn shook her head at the sound of the scream. "Sometimes I think you get less mature by the day," she said, though she was wearing a very amused smile. "And people say the only practical use for quick hands is thievery," then, she paused. "Alright, so that is a form of thievery, but a much more entertaining one."
She rolled her eyes at Tekka's reaction to her melodramatic speech. "Actually, that made perfect sense. I'd be sorry, except, you know...I'm not," she said. Of course, Tekka would know that. Caitlyn rarely felt any sort of regret or guilt for handing down a good solid whack over the head when she knew it was well-deserved.
Caitlyn herself was glancing aorund quickly. Tekka's dramatic behavior was earning the two of them some weird stares. She responded with a quirked eyebrow and a "you-wanna-say-something?" look. A good number of the stares were suddenly directed at other things after that. Oh yes, Caitlyn was very intimidating when she wanted to be.
"They're alright," Caitlyn said. "Though I haven't had a good challenge in a while."
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Post by Tekka King on Jan 8, 2010 12:08:27 GMT -5
Tekka nodded, a bit more serious than before. "Neither have I, no one want's to really do anything." She shrugged and began swinging her legs back and forth. "I guess they want to enjoy all the peace and quiet while it lasts. Can't say I blame them." Her legs stopped their motion and she fiddled with the sleeves of her black zip-up hoodie. "All this free time has given me plenty of time to visit with my brothers and my dad."
She smiled again, a serene sort of smile that rarely happened anymore. Not many families were so lucky to have only one missing member of their family, and even then, most family members had very messed up relationships with each other. Thinking of it that way always made Tekka feel happy that her home life was as good as it was.
"Hey." She piped up, snapping out of her miniature trance. "How about a duel? Loser buys lunch." The familiar spark of competition was back in her eyes and roaring into a flame.
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Post by Caitlyn Masters on Jan 8, 2010 14:59:08 GMT -5
Caitlyn shook her head. "It's so...boring," she said. Not that she wished for all-out war, but a little excitement was never amiss in her opinion. "I don't know how people stand it," she said. A slight smile crossed her face. She liked to make things interesting around her.
For the briefest instant, pain flicked across Caitlyn's face when Tekka mentioned her family. She buried it under a smile. "That's good, I'm sure they're glad to see you," she said. "Actually, there is one good thing about all this downtime," she shrugged. "I've gotten some time to look into what happened to my mom."
As soon as Tekka mentioned a duel, Caityln's eyes lit up. "That depends. How lucky are you feeling today?" She asked, trying to decide which deck to use. Really, the question was: how lucky was Caitlyn feeling?
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Post by Tekka King on Jan 8, 2010 15:36:37 GMT -5
A shrug, she was doing that a lot today and it wasn't helping her shoulders much. "I guess they like the idea of knowing that they're safe. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of a peaceful city as much as anyone but that can get boring really fast." Tekka grabbed a discarded piece of paper and folded it into half of a paper football before loosing her patience, crumpling it up, dousing it with soda, and lobbing over Caitlyn's head. She acted as if nothing had happened when a girl in what was once a perfect pink blouse whipped her head around trying to find the culprit of her now-ruined outfit. A sly smile made its way onto Tekka's face. "Amazing that none of them have realized that a little chaos can be quite fun, isn't it?"
At the word 'mom,' Tekka's ears pricked. "Really? That's great!" She was smiling even wider now. Good news, no matter from whom, always got her going. "So what'd you find out?" Finally she noticed her friend's hidden pain and quickly added, "I mean, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to, but I'm a little curious." Families could be a touchy subject nowadays, Tekka had actually gotten into several scuffles with various people due to prying and didn't want a repeat of that with a girl that could actually kick her ass.
Tekka's eyes glinted at the challenge. "As lucky as them come, but I doubt I'll need any of it." Throwing back a playful verbal barb was one tried and true method of getting people to duel. Now with any luck it would work on Caitlyn...
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Post by Caitlyn Masters on Jan 8, 2010 16:15:54 GMT -5
Caitlyn nodded. "Exactly." She said. Her eyes followed Tekka's actions, and she burst into muffled laughter when she realized what the girl had done. Her eyes followed the flying paper football and she covered her mouth to keep from laughing and attracting attention to herself when she saw the end result of Tekka's little bout of chaos. "No one understands the value of drama."
She sighed as Tekka asked what she'd found out. "I hate to say it, but not much. I've only just started looking, though, and I am digging back almost a decade," she sighed. Her mother had vanished when she was only eight. She still remembered her, of course, especially how warm and kind she had been and how much she had wanted to keep her daughter away from the clan wars. She knew that her mother had done everything she could to raise her...until she vanished. Back then, she had no idea why. She still didn't.
Tekka's challenge was putting the fire back in her and driving away sad thoughts. "Oh, you are definitely going to need it." She slid the deck out of her disk. "Let's see how lucky you really are."
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Post by Tekka King on Jan 8, 2010 16:30:25 GMT -5
"Oh, it is on!" She attempted to whip out her deck dramatically only to topple her chair backwards with her in it, still struggling to get out her deck. She appeared to not notice the change in height or the sound crack that the chair made as it fell until her deck was out of its case, nor did she appear to be hurt from the fall.
After her deck was free she looked around and noticed that she was indeed on the ground, and yes, she was getting stares before rolling off the fallen chair. "Whoops." She muttered, scratching the back of her neck awkwardly and setting the chair up again.
"Now where were we?" Tekka asked as she placed her deck on the table, the fire back in her eyes.
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Post by Caitlyn Masters on Jan 8, 2010 16:35:10 GMT -5
"Indeed it is," Caitlyn said. Then, she gasped and stood up as Tekka fell over, but as it was obvious to her that the other girl was fine, she sat down and laughed softly. She loved how over-dramatic her friend could be. It certainty spiced up life. She waited for Tekka to realize she was fallen and get back up. As she waited, she was shuffling her deck. She shuffled it as one would shuffle a deck of Tarot cards; holding them with her left and shuffling card over card with her right.
When Tekka sat back up, she leaned back in her chair but didn't tip the chair back. "You alright?" She asked casually, knowing that she was.
"Well, I believe I was about to kick your ass." She said. She held the deck over the table, dropping out the bottom, then the middle, and finally setting down a third pile. Then, she stacked the piles in reverse order.
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