Halifax.[html]
we prey as wolves among the sheep
and slit the necks of soldiers while they sleep
They were so shiny. And large. What was currently tucked away in the front pocket of his jeans was easily put to shame in here. The shimmering weapons lying beneath the broken glass called to him, and he raised a hand hesitantly above them, admiring. He removed the knife from his pocket, holding out in front of him and comparing it to the others that lay out in the glass case below. Making a quick swap, Apollo ran a finger along the glistening blade of a new kife. Grinning, he slipped it into his pocket like usual, and moved to the front door of the shop. With a dull thud, the door closed behind him. He blinked in the light, looking around critically as if he were a sentinel standing guard.
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Okay, so knitting was impossible. Ember put the needles down with one last frustrated sigh, looking at her creation. It didn't look anything like a scarf...or a sock, or whatever she'd been trying to make. Her hands were too clumsy; she kept dropping stitches and leaving big holes in the middle of it. She had been at it all morning, trying to make use of some of the supplies that she had found in the shop below her. The dark wolf had thought that the roof of the building would be the best place to catch some sunlight, and was sprawled out on her stomach over the warm brown surface.
She had made Ryan a necklace to trade, with help from her seal friend Maurice, but she wanted to give her more than that. Maybe she could give her some supplies for knitting or sewing, though, since she'd found this shop. The female groaned as she rose, her sore arm protesting, and started back down the stairs. Screw knitting, anyway. Winter would be over soon, hopefully, and then she wouldn't be so cold. Ember looked through some of the things on the bottom floor of the place, coming out the front with a nice bagful of string, yarn, and various kinds of needles.
She looked up toward the sun, trying to judge the time of day. Maybe she could just make some more necklaces...perhaps Ryan would want to use them to give to someone else as a gift. But she didn't really have enough time to get all the way back to her favorite beach. She'd have to make due with the beaches on this side of the land mass. So, very much like a happy mall shopper, she started down the street again, swinging her bag back and forth.
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we prey as wolves among the sheep
and slit the necks of soldiers while they sleep
He retied his bandana, running a hand through his silver hair and messing the razored chunks that fell over the material. Though he was unaware, Apollo looked largely like his father had when he was younger, though Pilot hadn’t been able to shift at such a young age. The virus had to be transferred to him, unlike Apollo who was born a Luperci.
He moved through the city, casting his mismatched gaze at store fronts to see if anything else might catch his interest. So far, nothing seemed worthy, and Apollo figured he might just head back towards Crimson Dreams after all. He wanted to practice some knife throwing maybe with his new weapon, but that could always wait. After all, he had learned a lot while he was away, and his skills were already finely tuned.
He rounded a street corner, stepping over broken glass that littered the crumbling concrete. Up ahead of him was a dark colored wolf – female, he assumed from her more slender frame. "Hey, what’s in the bag?" He called out, grinning a mischievous smirk as he began to jog to catch up. He found that interaction could be entertaining with the right people.
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[html]  yayy. I missed Apollo :]]
She had been thinking about looking around the city for some kind of a weapon, too...maybe she'd do that today. Ember wasn't that good of a hunter, and eating just fish got pretty old after a while. Her hunting skills weren't improved by the fact that she was black; she stuck out like a sore thumb in the woods, amongst all of the snow. She wasn't sure how good the other creatures' eyesight was or if they could see in color, but she was sure that they could tell the difference between her and snow.
She frowned at the distraction when she heard someone calling out behind her, turning around. Who was this? She wasn't a very good judge of age, so she couldn't tell if he was older or younger than she was...but she guessed that he was younger. What older wolf would keep that kind of a hairstyle? She didn't really touch her mane much unless it was getting too long or getting in her face. Then she chopped off whatever parts were bugging her. Right now it was winter time, though, so she had been letting it grow out--around mid-back. It kept her a little warmer at night.
"Stuff. Why?" She asked, holding the bag up closer to her chest. Her arm was feeling a lot better, but if he wanted her stuff then she'd probably have to make a run for it. She really needed these needles and thread so that she could give something back to Ryan for the cloak that was being made for her. "You ain't gettin' it from me. I'm a real fast runner."
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we prey as wolves among the sheep
and slit the necks of soldiers while they sleep
"Just wondering," he told her, having increased his pace enough so now he was only trailing by a few meters. He couldn’t help but laugh, the familiar crooked smile finding his features. "I’m not trying to rob you," he told her matter-of-factly. Her assumption made him gleam with ammusement. "I don’t even know what you have in there." Stuff wasn't very inclusive.
He tried to catch a glimpse of her gaze so he could gauge whether or not she was intimidated by him. Not that he wanted her to be, he was just hoping for some friendly interaction. "I’m Apollo," he told her, trying to match his stride with hers so that he could easily walk along side with her. "D’you live around here?" He asked casually, unable to lose the smirk.
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[html] Whee! 
She felt like she'd heard his name somewhere before. Hadn't he been around Twilight Vale? She'd almost joined there, but something about it had made her turn in the opposite direction. It could have been Naniko....or maybe the pups that had been there at the time. There had been a little white one and a little orange one--and really, pups just gave her the creeps now. Everyone was having them; they were all over the place. Being all cute and needy...ugh. "Yeah...well...you're not gonna know what's in here, either." She turned around, continuing to walk down the street. Why was he so interested in her, anyway? The scarred wolf looked back at him again only to find that he was walking beside her, something that she hadn't expected. They hadn't really had a proper introduction, even. She opened her mouth to say so but he was quicker, stating his name. Apollo. Now that definitely sounded familiar. "Isn't an Apollo some kind of sky-bird that the humans made? I saw it in a book." Ember kept walking, going a little bit faster, but he was keeping up with her pretty well. "I'm Ember. But if I told you where I lived, I'd have to shoot you. Or stab you with the contents of this bag." She said, nodding. "Why do you wanna know? You looking for a pack to join up with, Sky-bird?"
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we prey as wolves among the sheep
and slit the necks of soldiers while they sleep
"Who knows. Maybe Dierdre had read that story before." Since he hadn’t ever known his mother, he almost never referred to her as ‘my mother’ or ‘mom’. He had always just called her by her first name. "Or maybe she just liked the name." He shrugged to emphasis his apparent lack of knowledge on the history of his name. But what she had had intrigued him. She had seen it in a book? So she could read… or so he assumed.
Maybe it was just him, but he felt almost as if she was trying to loose him. Maybe even wishing he wouldn’t be able to keep up. Unfortunately for her, Apollo was easily matching her pace, and walked briskly by her side all the while never letting his grin fade. He supposed her spunky edge made her that much more appealing. "Yikes," he joked, finding it ironic since he himself had the new knife sheathed in the fabric of his jeans’ pocket. "Well I guess I’d better watch my back." He tried studying her the best that he could, drawing any conclusions possible. She seemed mysterious, edgy, and he couldn’t deny she was slightly attractive. "No, not exactly. Just curious. I was just wondering if maybe I’d seen you around before."
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"Dierdre saved my life once." The avalanche. Ember hadn't really thought much of her adopted older sibling until then; then she had started to notice the white wolf more, started to emulate some of her behaviour. It felt like a million years ago that all of that had happened, though, the avalanche. Storm in general, even. She tried not to think about life there as much--that life had seemed simple and peaceful through her then-puppy eyes.
"Well, I kind of like your name, Skybird. Sounds better than Ember. I'm just a piece of dead firewood." She'd read many books back when she had been interested in that kind of thing, and had made many trips into the city in search of different kinds. She hadn't been able to identify fiction from nonfiction, though; she hadn't been alive back then. So maybe dragons and princes and princesses really had existed. And sandwiches, too. She had seen something in a magazine about one of those.
"You definitely should." She agreed, grinning. Ember slowly came to a halt, standing in the middle of the black street. She turned to look into a shop window, now assured that Apollo would most likely be sticking around. She could see him in the glass, anyway...at least, in the parts that weren't broken. He was looking at her in the weirdest way, though. Maybe he realized it too, that they had met in the past. She turned back toward him and away from the old bakery that had caught her attention. Nothing of interest in there.
"I've seen you before. But you were real little. I guess you're sort of...family, but not really. I won't hold it against you; it's through adoption. My dad Phoenix adopted your Mom before I was born. If you meant that your mom was...is Dierdre." She didn't know the right word to use. Nobody had seen Dierdre since the fire, so she wasn't sure if the older female was an "is" or a "was".
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we prey as wolves among the sheep
and slit the necks of soldiers while they sleep
Any talk of his mother was almost foreign to Apollo. He hadn’t heard very many stories about her during her life, and had never really taken it upon himself to find out. All he knew was the he shared a similar characteristic with her – the mismatched eyes. Yet, he was alone in the vertical split characterizing his left eye.
"Dead firewood. Like Cinderella. Have you ever heard that story?" He had come across a mother who would recite this tale to her pups. Some ideas were changed – the people were Luperci – but the same principles had remained the same as the human version. The glass slipper. The evil stepsisters. The prince. Happy ending. Yaddah yaddah. "She gets to be a princess in the end," he told her, not sure himself what that meant. Though the little pups had seemed so envious of Cinderella falling in love with the prince in the end. "Little ash girl," he said with a grin.
"So my mother was somehow like your sister? Great," he said, rolling his eyes and looking to the dilapidated buildings surrounding them. It seemed that this place was full of weird connections. But maybe, it wasn’t so bad after all. "Well, I can’t say I remember you for sure. I think I tried to forget most of my childhood. I wasn’t happy being there." As the light touched her fur, he thought he detected a hint of maroon underneath the deep onyx, only making her namesake more appropriate.
"And I don’t know much about my mother. She disappeared right after my brother and I were born." He looked to Ember’s face, searching for a reaction to this. He wasn’t sure of how much of this she might have been aware of. "I don’t think anyone knows whether she’s alive or not." At least, he had never heard any confirmation of her demise. Pilot hadn’t offered much. "So Cinderella, where’re you headed?" She had to realize by now she wasn’t going to get rid of him that easily.
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Either way, he didn't seem to care much about what she said about Dierdre. She tried to keep her face neutral, nodding when he spoke about her. She could still remember Dierdre, but the memories were starting to get fuzzier as time went on. Ember could understand him not wanting to talk about her, though, definitely. Almost the same sort of thing had happened to her, after all...except that she knew for sure that her mother had left by choice. "I was mostly raised by my dad. But I guess they said that he wasn't coming back for a while, if he's comin back at all. But that's ok. I was real different when I was younger...I don't even know if he'd recognize me now."
She shook her head when asked about the story. Cinderella? "I've never heard of it. We could go to the library and look for it, maybe. If you wanted. I don't really have anything else to do for today; I'll bring these things to my friend in Inferni sometime later on."
Family was popping up everywhere. Ember felt like she had enough family, though--she had relations in every pack now except for the new one that was forming. Ani-something. "Maybe we shouldn't be family. We're not related by blood...so we should just be friends." Because she often found excuses to avoid her family. Friends would be easier.
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we prey as wolves among the sheep
and slit the necks of soldiers while they sleep
"Phoenix. He was my dad’s best friend. Pilot told me about him, and about Storm. In fact, I’m kind of hoping I’ll be able to resurrect Storm. Of course, it wouldn’t be the same, since I wasn’t born yet, but Pilot made it seem so perfect. I wrote down everything he told me about it. If I stick around, I hope I just might be able to pull it off." Then he offered his crooked smile, realizing he had let himself ramble. Of course, this resurrection of Storm was also linked with DaVinci and the outlaw band they had talked about. But he couldn’t be sure if any of that would hold true.
"Can you read?" He asked, trying to confirm his earlier suspicions. "I can’t really, but I could tell you the story. Maybe we would still be able to find it. The little girls liked to hear it before bed." He smiled, reminiscing a little. One word Ember said pulled him away from that, however. Inferni. He still held a grudge over that clan, since his brother had been able to slip away so easily to join their ranks. Apollo, on the other hand, had not. Out of spite he knew that any pack he constructed would probably have a similar bias – not allowing of any pure blood coyote to join.
"Family never seems to work out for me," he told her, smirking at his rather jumbled months of life. Sirius was gone now, and Apollo hadn’t really had that strong of a bond with Pilot. He supposed the strongest bond he had was with Savina, his puppy crush and Italian mentor. Coincidentally, she had been the first to discover him upon his return to ‘Souls. "Friends is good."
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"I'm not so good with the whole...being in a pack thing. But I'm joining up with this group...I guess they call themselves a tribe. So it wouldn't be like a pack, maybe. I dunno."She hadn't had much luck with packs, and if this one fell through Ember was considering quitting trying to join a pack permanently.
She had loved Storm a lot--she missed it almost every day. It had been the perfect place to live and grow up, despite her father getting sick. There had been good prey, good lands, good wolves...everything had been so awesome. She didn't know about resurrecting it; it had mostly been the wolves that Ember had enjoyed the most, and those were all gone. It wouldn't be her Storm if those wolves weren't there. Phoenix, Pilot, Dierdre...all her siblings. "Good luck, I guess." She was more opposed to the idea than anything else, but if she plotted things out right maybe she wouldn't be there when it came time anyway. If things didn't get better, anyway. She would find one way or another to complete her goal, eventually. But she was beginning to accept that it could take a while.
In the meanwhile, she had another long and painful recovery on her hands. And Apollo didn't seem so bad...a little strange, but not horrible or anything. And she was starved for company, secretly. "It's a deal, then. Friends. And yes, to your earlier question." She could read, that much was true, but not all that well. Maybe the book wouldn't be that hard, though. "I can read a little."
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we prey as wolves among the sheep
and slit the necks of soldiers while they sleep
"A tribe?" He tested the word on his lips, finding it foreign to him. "Sounds interesting," he responded, and it was one hundred percent the truth. He didn’t really understand what a tribe was and what the difference would be between it and a pack. He wanted to ask, but was afraid it was something he should have known about. Instead, he decided to keep his mouth shut. Anyhow, Ember had turned her attention to Apollo’s idea about Storm. It wasn’t that her voice was entirely condescending, but it did make him feel as if she didn’t entirely embrace his vision. Maybe trying to resurrect something that was long gone was beyond him. After all, with Storm’s death Apollo had been born. Maybe he should leave the past in the past. He would see.
"Well then, where’s this library place? We can go try to decipher some things." He was excited that she could read a little. He knew some words as well, but he silently hoped that maybe he would be able to learn a few things from her.
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[html] pp them finding the library? :]
She tried to remember which direction the library was, frowning. Ember had been to the city before, but she hadn't had much reason to go there before. It was right on the tip of her tongue, the direction, and she turned back to Apollo. Maybe he would know. "It's around here somewhere...pretty close. You want to go right now?"
She looked to the path ahead, then spoke again. "That sounds...fun. I haven't really had any fun lately."
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we prey as wolves among the sheep
and slit the necks of soldiers while they sleep
"Of course, I have nothing better to do," Apollo informed her, easily excited about the prospect of visiting the library. Suddenly a thought struck him; he wondered if he might be able to find any music sheets or even more of that poetry stuff that Savina had introduced him to. He still hadn’t talked to Kansas to know how to read it yet, but he still had every intention to.
When they had first started walking, Apollo wasn’t really sure where they were going. Judging by their slowed pace and the way they had to glance to check out the buildings, he had a feeling that Ember might not be one hundred percent sure either. Anyhow, it wasn’t that hard to find. They only had to go a block or so and the building stood obvious next to the rest. Even though years of abandonment from any human upkeep had taken its toll, the regality it must have presented for the humans still seemed to remain. "Let’s check it out," Apollo grinned, heading for the doors.
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Ember had seen a musical instrument before...but she couldn't remember what it was called. That wolf Pendez had been playing it. She had thought about starting to learn an instrument, but didn't know where to find one or how to begin with it. It was a nice idea, something to save for a rainy day. She also wanted to find a weapon.
"Woo! Let's give those books a good hard readin'." She followed him inside, looking around. The place was very dusty...and it had a peculiar smell to it. A kind of moldy, musty smell. Ember couldn't decide if she liked it or not--but no matter where she went in the building the smell was still there. She began to scan the bookshelves, looking through the titles and authors. "Well, Skybird...I'm not seeing it yet. But maybe I'm in the wrong section. Maybe it'd be in children's books."
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we prey as wolves among the sheep
and slit the necks of soldiers while they sleep
Upon entering, Apollo noticed the lack of light inside; a combination of the gray skies outside and the dirtied windows, more or less. There was still plenty of light to be able to read things easily, and so Apollo began trailing down aisles of books and peering at the spines to try and pick out words and phrases he knew. He picked out some words, but saw nothing of interest right away. Ember’s voice rescued him from his own search. "Children’s books? Do they put them in certain sections?" He moved down the aisle to join her again, curious to see if they would be able to find the story Apollo had told her about. "It’s called Cinderella – the story – but I’m not sure what that looks like." He was still in the beginning stages of learning to read. Simple words were his friends when it came to books.
"Do y’know if they have music in a place like this? Like… the music sheets? I was hoping maybe I could find a couple of those to take home and experiment with." Ember seemed to have a bit better knowledge of the library than he did, so he would leave the bulk of the searching up to her. He wouldn’t know where to begin.
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Then she saw it. The book looked old...but new, at the same time. She pulled it from the shelf and held it in her hands, looking at the front cover. The whole thing was covered in dust...but when she blew on it and dusted it off a little she could see what was really underneath. The illustration was of a human girl holding a broom. Or...at least, that's what she thought it was. She didn't know much about old human tools.
"I don't know about music...but I found our book." Naniko had told her something once, about libraries. Something about a catalog...of cards. A card catalog, maybe? "I would look in the card catalog. Under M? or...maybe under S for sheet music. A big squiggly line--that's what an S looks like." She brought the book over to him, holding it out so he could see. "Cinderella."
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we prey as wolves among the sheep
and slit the necks of soldiers while they sleep
"You found it?" He asked, rhetorically though, since she had already affirmed that she had. He moved towards her as she made her way closer to him, and he peered curiously at the illustration on the cover. He listened to her thoughts on the card catalog, but was more interested in this story now that Ember had found it for them. "Wow," Apollo breathed, shocked that she had actually been able to locate it. "That’s crazy," he commented, shaking his head. "I didn’t think we were actually gonna find it." He looked around the room, noting broken furniture. He motioned towards it, moving in that direction. "Wanna read it?" He asked, sitting down on a wooden bench whose foam padding looked as if it had been gnawed at by some rodent.
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