Sunshine Secrets [Finished!]

[Bee]

The gentle stroking and positive thinking of both Thalia and Miss Gecko seemed to actually be having a pronounced effect on the manager. The guards were not doing anything while their leader was thus occupied, and for the moment, they were safe. The manager sighed deeply, like he had just gotten a very relaxing massage. Thalia had no idea what was going on, but if this man being a pervert stopped Miss Gecko from getting her head mounted on a pike, she could deal with the trauma.

"I'm sorry," the man muttered. "There's been a terrible misunderstanding. This Lowlander is the girl's nanny. She was just watching the plant while Calliope here got something quaint with which to amuse her child's mind."

Neither Thalia nor Miss Gecko had said--or thought, to her knowledge--anything of the sort, and he had called Thalia by the wrong name. (She had gotten that from him before, though, actually--sometimes it was Erato or Melpomene--so that was not unusual.) His mind seemed to be rationalizing his feelings. How weird.

"Thank you much," said Thalia cheerfully.

[Dark]

The crowd parted, slowly and just a tad reluctantly--they'd been looking forward to a lynching almost as much as Iskra was hoping to avoid one--Iskra was quick to snatch Thalia by the hand and slip through as quickly and quietly as possible, trying to put as much distance between them and the crowd as possible before the shoppe keeper remembered himself. He wasn't likely to be in as much a tissy as before, but his confusion as he came off the euphoric high would stir the crowd up again. It would be best to avoid that.

When they were far enough away Iskra handed the plant over to its rightful owner, sharing a relevied grimace with Thalia, "That was a close one, eh? Thanks for yer help." Even in Thalia had been the one to put her in a spot to begin with.

"You...ever done that before?" She gestured with her hands and hoped the kid knew what she was talking about.

[Bee]

Thalia shook her head; the Hair and ribbon affixed to it waved bouncily. "Nope, never," she said. She let a long, pensive silence float between them. She bit her lip. Then she said, "Um. If you don't mind me asking, Miss Gecko, what exactly did we do?"

The most logical explanation was that the manager of the nursery was a dirty old man and someone about whom she would need to report to Mom so she could kill him, but that wasn't it. She and Miss Gecko had done something.

As well as being a bit befuddled with regards to what had happened, she felt terribly guilty about getting Miss Gecko into this situation, too. If she hadn't wandered off for those beautiful bubbles...curse them. She would have to do something really nice for the Lowlander to make it up to her. She wasn't quite sure what she was going to do yet, but it was going to be amazing.

[Dark]

"It's...a compulsion a'sorts, You touch em and it calms people down," she didn't know if she was explaining it particularly well, and she probably wasn't considering it was Thalia she was talking to, but she pressed on and hoped something made a connection in Thalia's tiny, erratic brain, "Makes em more likely to agree with ya, see?"

She almost suggested they try it out on someone so Thalia could practice, but she wasn't quite certain how comfortable she felt setting Thalia loose on the public with that goal in mind. It could lead to disastrous results.

"Ya understand what I mean, yeah? 's all about concentration. Gotta focus ta make em cool down; petting em seems to help. The pervs," she tried a wink out, and the action didn't feel as horribly out-of-practice as she might have expected. At this rate, next she'd be smiling for all she knew.

[Bee]

This made perfect sense, and opened up many spectacular avenues. She thought about giving Mom a back rub, just to see what Mom would be like if Mom weren't mean all the time. That would be quite a sight. And possibily the harbringer of the apocalypse.

She wondered what could be the root of this odd ability--she had never encountered anyone else who had it--before she noticed what exactly was bandaging the Lowlander's arm. Long, silky white ribbon, exactly the same as the one that fluttered happily amid Thalia's Hair.

She smiled impishly. Her mind was wandering down one of the avenues of possibility. "We should use it to get people to give up their deepest secrets. Who's going to say no to us? We could conquer royalty." Man, Tosiek was going to flip when he found out about this. The next time they visited Queen Rai or perhaps even Tosiek's father, they were going to have an absolute blast.

[Dark]

Iskra blinked, not at all having predicted the course their conversation had suddenly taken, "Ya want to...what?" She thought about it; Thalia's reasoning wasn't flawed, except that it didn't account for the distinct possibility of death and maiming if a face card found out what is was they were up to. "Stealing secrets..." It did hold a certain kind of appeal, though.

And it wasn't like she was doing anything particularly productive with her life; she wasn't doing anything, in fact. Besides the odd job to pay for basic necessities--mainly food--she hadn't done anything since she'd left the Lowlands.

"Who would buy em, though? Ya need connections for that sorta thing." The sort of things they could get, if they were careful. Thalia was just a kid, and the sorts of risks involved were astronomical, and the idea was frightening and thrilling and a million kinds of bad idea.

Iskra loved it.

[Bee]

Thalia's capacity for ordinary strokes of brilliance was quite large--was a Corvie, after all, and that wiring was all messed up-- but her capacity for malicious genius was quite small. It did not normally occur to her to harm people. But she was, against all odds, having a flash of that genius right now.

"I know all sorts of people," said Thalia. "My mom's royalty, in the Diamond Court. She's got some kinda business on the side, too, and I've never, er, heard any details, but I'm lead to believe it entails a lot of selling of things that probably are illegal to sell. I know the Hearts, too, and my mama's kind of in the Clubs but not really because she doesn't seem to care all that much. But Courts have no end to secrets and lies, straight down to the cleaning ladies. We could use the secrets ourselves, too." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "I have another power. I see doors!"

[Dark]

Doors. Iskra couldn't help but wonder if Thalia meant that in a literal or figurative sense, and asked as much. Because everyone saw doors, and if that was what Thalia was talking about it wasn't all that spectacular of an ability as she seemed to think. Iskra hoped she meant something else.

"I have a rather handy ability, myself," Iskra confided, not sure if she felt completely comfortable sharing the sordid details but feeling she probably should it they were going to be entering into business together. "I can look into....the heart....of someone, and see if they're a good person or not. Secrets and what-have-you, ya?"

It was the best way she could think of to explain her rather unusual knack; it was such an invasion of privacy that she didn't usually feel people would approve. In current company, however... it might turn into a valuable tool.

[Bee]

Thalia all but bounced in excitement. "That's fabulous," she said. "Marvellous. Fabvellous, even. And I mean--I don't see doors, usually. It's like they don't exist. I can't hear through them or walk through them at all, which has been really unfortunate because I run into them all the time and break my face, but I see through them."

She took a moment to catch her breath. She had not shared this with anyone, except Tosiek. "And then one night I woke up and there were doors, just all over the place, and I would see them and open them and go all sorts of places. Here and there and everywhere. I went to tomorrow and saw that Monty was going to bite off the finger of one of the kids in the bazaar, but I changed that--Monty took the toe of some dirty crazy man shouting something about the Queen of Hearts being complicit in the apocalypse. Or something."

[Dark]

Iskra stared. She supposed on some level she should have suspected this kind of power, but even if she had noticed Thalia's rank--a face card, and so young--she still hadn't been quite able to wrap her mind around the idea of Thalia of anything besides a child. And children weren't generally privy to such spectacular abilities.

"That's brilliant," and she meant it. Together, they could forcibly coerce information out of targets and if they couldn't risk that kind of exposure they could just jump and get the information they needed that way. Truly brilliant.

What had started off as just a vague, fanciful notion was quickly turning into a viable career path. They really could pull this off. She tested out a smile, the expression foreign on her face; it felt good.

"So, partner...where do we start?" They were going to make a killing.