Foraging [Prosper]

[Elvie Fayette]

Time of Day: Afternoon (daylight)

The bins behind Saks Fifth Avenue always held a great mountain of treasures. Elvie delved into their depths, her dirty little feet waving erratically in the air being only thing visible of the fairy. After half a minute of scrummaging she emerged into the open air, a great prize held in her tiny grip. Clutched in the palms of her hands was the hairless head of a porcelain doll, definitely a keeper. Grinning happily Elvie placed the head on top of her pile of rescued items (which also included a single shoe with a broken heel, a handbag strap, two eye-liner pencils worn down to a nub, and a whole array of buttons.

Elvie never understood why humans were so incredibly wasteful. But in all honesty Elvie rarely understood humans. Suddenly her blue eyes caught sight of something glittering in the bin on her left. She leapt over to it with the agility that pertained to all fairies. It turned out to only be the broken shard of a mirror, shimmering in the light of the sun. Nevertheless Elvie picked it up, bringing it to her face to glance upon her reflection.

She was young today, around ten or eleven. A constellation of ginger freckles dotted her face and when she smiled she could that the majority of her baby teeth still remained. Elvie shrugged and threw the shard aside. It clattered loudly upon the concrete, breaking into little pieces.

"Who's there?" a gruff voice called from the distant, no doubt the lazy security guard hired to watch the back entrance of the department store. Leaping out from the bins, Elvie quickly collected all her findings and sprinted from the scene of the crime and onto the main street, laughing as she did so. She did not mind so much that her treasure hunting at Saks had been cut short, there were plenty of other shops with bins for her to forage in.

"Excuse me," she said as she weaved in between the crowds, a happy jingle in her voice. She could feel the humans' surprised stares as she made her way past them. Elvie relished in their confusion as she skipped, bare feet, down the pavement.

[Prosper Andrews]

Claiming to be a reincarnation of Alexander the Great only got you so far in this city these days. Not very. Of course, it wasn't the money. It would never be the money, not for a long time now. But... the recognition wasn't there. And that was... disappointing. Today would be the shopping, for suitably impressive clothes and the various oddments he might need in his travels. Somehow he'd picked up a bolt of silk (currently being sent back to one of his little boltholes, a loft somewhere, good for draping things, probably?) several impeccably tailored suits (with neckties) and a few amusing architectural bits and pieces. New York really wasn't his ideal biome. Give him somewhere colder, and rainier, with more atmosphere and fewer grubby-faced street urchins.

With a skip in his step, a twinkle in his eye, and a twenty-two-year-old French boy in his apartment, he was very much in fighting form.

Prosper did his best to repress the skip in his step, though, and to look stern and businesslike. Not an easy task. Shopkeepers here didn't see to him as quickly as they might have had he been his old self. Unless they were impressionable shopgirls or stately unmarried men of a certain age. And it was hard to get anything that wouldn't make people stare at him, or make rude comments when he spoke. Rudeness in general, and uncomfortable displays, seemed quite common. And there was the perennial threat of robbery, of course. Once you ventured outside a classy department store and set out on foot. Being of some small talent with a knife, it was something you didn't unlearn.

It was a reflex to sputter and probably swear when a small child barrelled past him, bare feet flashing and hair streaming. But it was cut short at the familiar prickle at the roots of his hair that accompanied the girl's passing, the vague unease in the presence of something supernatural. Well, wouldn't that be it. A guardian angel. Or perhaps not. Dislodged from his hands was that day's prize, a particularly eldritch looking objet d'art. That was now shattered on the pavement, soon to be trampled under thousands of cattle-like plebeian feet.

Reaching out a hand to snag at the girl's collar as she passed. He forced the greatest amount of magisterial contempt into his voice as he could, while managing, rather, to sound more like a surly older sibling.
"You!"

[Elvie Fayette]

The sudden tug at her collar was a quite unwelcome experience. Elvie was yanked to a halt, mid-skip. The stop was so sudden that the treasures in arms arms almost fell to the floor, it was only due to the fairy girl's quick reflexes did they remained clutched tightly to her chest.

The voice that followed the tug, however, was somewhat familiar. Elvie quickly turned, her initial frown shifting into a delighted smile when she saw the man who had pulled her to a stop. It was the strange human occultist fellow, the one with all the marvellous toys. She had met him a number of times before, he was always quick to notice her supernatural presence. But of course, now that she thought about it, the man (Prosper she thought his name was) had not yet seen Elvie in her younger states, such as the state she was in now. Perhaps he didn't recognise her. How terrible!

It was then she noticed the shattered object at Prosper's feet. It was particularly shiny, an aspect of it Elvie quite liked, shame it was all sad and broken.

"Here," she said, shoving her own treasures unceremoniously into Prosper's arms before crouching down to the floor to pick up the object's shards. Once they were all collected Elvie stood back and, checking first to see no one else in the street was watching, blew a soft fairy's breath upon the remains. At first it seemed as if nothing would happen but soon the shards began to move towards each other, sharp edges coalescing to become one.

"Done," she said, holding the object proudly up to Prosper's face. It wasn't the best piece of magic Elvie had done, the joins were still quite wobbly, but it would do. "Do you remember me now?"

[Prosper Andrews]

To be fair, Prosper did let go of her as quick as necessary, preparing to turn on her both barrels of his sternest, most formidable look. A shoeless, mudlarking waif with her arms full of bits of garbage. Itching with some sort of supernatural residue. Ghost? Imp? Vampire? Something that raised the hairs on the back of his neck, and made his mood turn unpleasant. But all it took was a real look into the girl's face, and the mending of his precious idol, to spur the memory. A tide of recognition washed over him, bringing with it the flotsam of annoyance that he hadn't seen it before. "Little girls," he admonished (even as he bent to pick up his now-mended purchase and got a good look at her) "should be more careful."

Her name. She hadn't shared her name, or rather, she'd shared one. Not her true one, of course. Andrews turned over his newly reunited sculpture in his hands, feeling the heft of it, and then dusting his hand off on the skirts of his overcoat, putting it back onto the heap. Feeling like Father Christmas with his arms overloaded with packages. (If he regularly walked home carrying home furnishings and hashish wrapped in brown paper.)

With the bubbling undercurrent of a laugh in his voice, that sounded much less, well, lascivious from an angel-faced boy than a rather coarse-featured man. "You minx, you've shrunk."

[Elvie Fayette]

Elvie blew out her cheeks in a way a child would do when they were offended. She was a child, today at least, so the facial expression fitted incredibly well with her freckled features.

"Shrunk?" she repeated, letting the air retreat from her mouth with an obvious 'huff' sound. "I think the correct term for it is 'grown younger'." How old was she when she had seen Prosper last? Perhaps somewhere in her default age of mid-teens. Fifteen years old was the average age she spent her time as when she wasn't rummaging like a ragamuffin for collectables.

"I'm ten today she," she explained, twirling on the spot as if to accentuate the fact, the many frills that lined her previously white dress (which was now more grey from her time in the bins) swished along with her prettily. "Or perhaps I'm eleven," she murmured once she had twirled the full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees to face Prosper again. "I can never tell. They're both pretty much the same."

Shrugging, Elvie began to arrange her collected items around her body. She tied the handbag strap around her thin neck like a makeshift necklace, placed the buttons in her pockets, stuck the eye-liner pencils in the ginger bird's nest that was her hair and put the heel-less shoe upon her left foot. The dolls head remained held in her grubby hand, for lack of anywhere else to keep it. Content with her achievements, the small fairy linked a skinning arm through Prosper's much larger one and tugged upon it sharply.

"Come play with me," she said in a way that was more like an order than a suggestion.