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text; un: signorvespa

i hate this

the sky has been leaking for DAYs... WEEKS??

it's so cold my eyes are frozen!

i hate this weird white water

i want to go outside...

[ A photo of a colored pencil drawing is attached... depicting Alberto "(in a blanket)" beside his familiar Carlo and his pet compsognathus Sofia, trapped inside his home "(forever?)," labeled "cold, alone... and fed up!" beneath falling snow — AKA "weird white water??? (every day...!!!)" — outside the window... All of them clearly "very unhappy" — the sheer image of misery itself. ]

SO!
let's trade!!!
anyone who can help me find or make something like this, i'll cook you food or something, whatever, we'll talk......
but as soon as possible,
i need one of THESE:

[ Another image is attached of Alberto wearing what... seems to be a diver's suit? Or something??? Holding a "giant umbrella" in one hand and Sofia on a leash in a harness in the other, Carlo floating above, all "dry, safe, warm, and NOT at home..." There's still plenty of ~~snow~~ white water around them, "but not on Alberto!" Most importantly, though, in this drawing, they're all happy! — as... baffling as it is to anyone else, surely... No thanks, no niceties, just complaints and demands, urgent, desperate, and maybe a little, um, bizarre? Un po. The kid's gone mad with cabin fever, possibly? This is... well... th-this is something. Definitely something. Ahem. ]

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[What stranger danger? There's no stranger danger here.]

Fine, don't tell me about your ocean town. I've probably seen a million like it anyway.

I'll be over soon! Also no yelling when I get there, or I'm not making you anything. 😈🤝🙋🤫 🦎🧥🧣👍

yeah yeah yeah...
!!!
a presto!!!!!

[ Brat.

But all the same, he'll be ready for her by the time she comes a-knockin'. Not that he does much to prepare his space for company, anyway... Even if he had, upon entry, she'll find it's so overwhelming that... it wouldn't have made much of a difference if he'd tidied or not.

From the very first glance, the visual impact is immense. His room is wildly overcrowded and over-decorated with no lack of clutter, even just starting with the old wooden barrel beside the front door filled with no less than five myriad umbrellas, plus a couple fishing poles, a hand lift fishing net and a cast fishing net both slung over the barrel's side, with a few cork floaters and large conch shells piled on the ground around it. He's made use of every inch of his small inn room. His bed is shoved in one corner, decorated with miscellaneous crap and way too many pillows, along with a canopy of colorful fairy lights, which are providing the most lighting in the room right now, along with a few candles created by the Candlebloom spell scattered about and an old kerosene lantern on his desk, the flame dancing inside being the only flame that's not open, but all of it contributing to some very nice, warm, ambient mood lighting, despite the grey, dismal weather outside. On the wall above the bed are also his Vespa poster from home, a taped together drawing of his own that's clearly important to him because it's directly above where he lies his head. The other wall is done up with several rows of twine boasting a vast collection of Polaroid photos strung up with clothespins, paperclips, even safety pins. On the floor at the foot of the bed, there's a nest of blankets and extra pillows (how many pillows does he need?!) and if Tsumugi is observant, he'll see a tiny lizard-like snout peeking out from under these blankets, Sofia curled up warm and asleep near an old space heater he found for cheap. Beside the bed, he's nailed some mangled old wire coathangers upside down to the wall, having twisted their hooks out to serve as weird coatracks to hang a brown flat cap and a pair of old-fashioned binoculars. The only window in the room is the main focal point, just beside the bed and coathangers; he's pinned up a ragged old sail as a curtain, plus a fishing net adorned with myriad trinkets. He's stuck a dead tree branch dripping crystals on the well-worn armoire next to it, the hanging gems refracting the colorful fairy lights and flames, faint rainbows dancing in the corner of one's eyes as they idly twirl and shift in the air. A delicate-looking antique alchemy set is perched precariously along the windowsill, with colorful strings hanging beneath it with bells and feathers and balls of tinfoil tied to the ends: homemade cat toys. More are strung up on the doorknob of the bathroom door at the foot of his bed, left closed just for that reason.

The room is drawn together with a circular rainbow woven rug in the center, as the "bedroom" corner bleeds into the "living room" corner of the small space. A chaise longue he dragged home from some passing flea market is shoved in the corner of the room, and a couple paces in front of it sits an open, hard-cover suitcase, equally old-fashioned and well-worn as all these other "found" items he may or may not have literally found in the trash; but the small suitcase is all but overflowing with an ungodly amount of colored pencils, markers, and crayons, every color imaginable, beneath a roll of brown butcher paper hanging from a curtain rod nailed to the wall. The Doodle Center, clearly, with disparate doodles already underway — self-portraits, cats, Vespas, Sofia the dinosaur, what seem to be weird fish people, a funny-looking wizard... A broken bicycle wheel is propped up against the wall with various drawings and notes and whatnot clipped to its spokes like some makeshift bulletin board. An old rusty bucket on the floor between the armoire and the couch boasts not one, not two, nor three, but four different types of swords, though some are sharper or duller than others. And a harpoon. ...Why does he have a harpoon?!

Hanging above this whole space are a fair few repurposed glass sauce jars done up with messy macrame, some full or half-full of beach glass, interesting pebbles, seashells, acorns, bottle caps, who knows what. Just stuff, like everything else in here...! Likewise, there are several repurposed glass olive oil bottles scattered throughout the room, most empty, some with dried reeds or wilted wildflowers stuck in them; one with an unusually wide neck, maybe an old liquor bottle he found, contains a small collection of magic wands, though in all honesty he doesn't know what they are, not unlike the alchemy set... He just thought they were some cool-looking sticks.

Against the central wall is a simple wooden desk, one of its drawers open and overcrowded with hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, spatulas???, an axe, pliers, who knows what else, and whatever doesn't fit in there, has been shoved into the slots of a rusty old toaster on the floor... The rest of his workspace is surprisingly clear and functional, though. Sure, there's a nice tall, vertical stack of comic books shoved to one corner, along with a shoebox (from the one pair of shoes Alberto owns now) brimming with folded sheets of notebook paper, envelopes, and more Polaroids, completely disorganized but at least collected together. But the kerosene lantern shines on a small collection of whittled wooden figurines: a couple Vespas, a little boat with oars, some miniature spoons and forks, a couple cats, a dinosaur clearly meant to be Sofia, a turtle, a fish, etc, some colored, most not, with a knife and curly wood shavings still fresh around a couple rougher-looking ones. There's the original copies of the drawings he posted to the network still on the desktop with some colored pencils strewn about, an abandoned half-empty cup of cold espresso beside the papers. His Polaroid camera is left open and put off to the side, a few peel-away film casings littered around it, a couple fallen on the floor with their final developed copies sitting out on the desktop beside the camera. The desk chair is a simple wooden dining chair with a normal bed pillow tied to its back with a couple frayed pieces of rope, a ratty fleece blanket folded on the seat to serve as a cushion; his winged cat familiar, Carlo, is curled up in a loaf on the chair, his iridescent wings folded against himself, half-asleep like the dinosaur at the foot of his bed.

With mellow pop music drifting through the air along with a faint smell of coffee, there's definitely a certain ambient charm to the room, the general aesthetic not so unlike his room back home — but certainly more functional, sensible, and mature, for all this charming chaos... It's impressive and overwhelming at once. Alberto already comes across as a bit of a weird kid, but that's pretty much confirmed seeing the space he's created for himself (apparently mysteriously trapped in because of the snow? though there are worse places to be trapped!) with so many presumably found items, judging by the worn and torn quality of nearly everything in the room. Still, the question stands: Why does he have so much stuff, but so few clothes...?!

He opens the door loosely wrapped in a green blanket, wearing a faded red T-shirt, worn blue jeans slightly too big for him, held up by another ragged piece of rope as usual, cuffs rolled up a ways past his ankles, revealing a cowrie shell anklet he never takes off ever since being gifted it. He's also wearing a strangely skeptical, dismissive expression as he answers the door, eyes half-lidded and brow cocked, but he at least manages a smug smirk as he welcomes Klaudia in, just... assuming it to be her. ]

Ehi~ Ciao, Signora, benvenuto. Sofia's sleeping— be careful.

[ "Be careful...?" He, uh, kind of needs to warn anyone who comes over about Sofia's unpredictable moods, to avoid any errant nips and bites... He lives with her full-time, and he's not exempt, by any means. She's a very cute liability, this little lizard. ]

[When Alberto opens the door, there's indeed a girl standing on the other side of it. Much in the exact opposite way that Alberto isn't dressed well, Klaudia very much is. She wears a white blouse underneath a brown corset-vest with aged brass clasps, and a full purple skirt with brown boots laced up to her knees. Much more unusual is the red hue of her skin and the horns stretching through the dark ringlets of her hair, which have been tied up in a ponytail with a wide red ribbon. A pair of golden spectacles with wide round lenses sit on the bridge of her nose, and behind them are white eyes--not just in color but in entirety, lacking any distinct iris or pupil--which makes it somewhat difficult to tell in which direction she's looking. But her focus seems to be on the occupant of the room, with her feet tucked together and her hands folded politely behind her back. The extra politesse is purely for strangers, as seeing a tiefling for the first time hasn't always garnered her the best responses.]

I appreciate the warning~

[Though how much of that warning she takes to heart will remain to be seen. Klaudia steps inside the room carefully, moving to the side so that the boy can shut the door--and even as she does so, she's taken in by the number of things to look at in this place. It's... a lot? It's a lot. Her gaze flicks from wall to wall, not sure what to look at first, and there's an impulsive need to touch things as she sees them--the fishing poles and the net hanging on the barrel by the door are met with a curious brush her her fingers that pulls her around the edge of the room. If the clutter here bothers her at all, she doesn't show it in the least. If anything, she looks ...delighted?? And entranced. She's become immediately distracted from her purpose for being here.]

I like this netting, and the shells... And the lights! [She doesn't touch the fairy lights, but she gestures to them with a grin. An arrow-pointed tail swishes excitedly out from the fringe of her skirt.] --ah! And those bottles, we have those at home... [Another excited gesture to the glass jars in the macrame; but there's really just too much for her to comment on here. She barely knows where to start or end, so she turns to look back to Alberto.] Where did you get all of these things?

[This is like her dream room, if she didn't have to share her space with an organized roommate.]

[ Alberto is, indeed, a bit shocked seeing his first tiefling, but after the initial open-faced look of surprise at her appearance, he seems surprisingly unfazed, shrugging slightly as he lets her in. Watching her reaction to his space, though, spreads a wide, smug smirk over his face, eyes fixed on her, but following her gaze, too. He wasn't sure at first if maybe she was blind with her pale, pupil-less eyes, but she can obviously see perfectly fine as she gawks at all his stuff and comments on it all. He's smitten to have someone actually comment on his space, too — usually people just... gawk and leave it at that. So he places his hands on his hips proudly after he shuts the door, standing by it contraposto, a light lilt to his voice as he brags. ]

Heh~ I found it. I've been collecting ever since I got here in August. Those nets, though— [ He gestures at the ones in the barrel she had touched and first remarked on. ] Those aren't decorations. Those are mine.

[ Not that it's not all his, but those are his for use. He seems pretty proud of that, too. ]

[Collecting things... There's a brief exhale; a moment of longing as Klaudia scans the room again. She'd love to collect things like this. A whole room full of interesting things to tinker with, and no one to mind if she doesn't put them out of sight. Living with a roommate is hard--especially with one with militaristic organization habits, but she's been trying so hard to be a courteous roommate like she promised. Her suffering is unknowable.]

[She looks back to the nets, making a second appraisal of them when Alberto mentions that they aren't just decorations. They're definitely fishing nets like ones that she's seen before, so she doesn't need to ask what they're for... though she does sound a little surprised.]

These came with you from your plane, then? Do you know how to fish?

Oh, no, no, no — I found all those here, too. But I use these ones — that one's all busted, so I just hung it up and put stuff in it. These are fine for fishing. I'm a fisherman.

[ He points at the net strung across the window, but picks up the casting net hanging over the barrel to be clear. ]

I worked in a pescheria back home. I don't have a job here, though, so now I just... fish. For food, y'know. For me. And for Carlo and Sofia, heh.

Huh. [She looks in the direction that he points and makes an appreciative sort of noise, though she doesn't elaborate on that. Surprised that someone his age knows how to fish? Was employed? That anyone in general knows how to fish? Who's to say!]

I haven't seen these in a while... We didn't use nets when we needed to fish--on my boat, I mean. One of my crewmates just dove into the water and grabbed them in her mouth and climbed back on board. And my friend here--he catches them with his bare hands. Just snatches them right out of the water, like it's nothing!

[She makes a gesture, like she's grabbing at something with both hands at her feet. Clearly that is some kind of feat of heroism.] He was trying to teach me how, but it's too cold to go wading into rivers right now. Even the bay is frozen over!

Oh, no, I do that stuff, too. I'm great at catching fish like that~ You can just get more fish with a net. And— heh, this thing— [ He raises a fishing rod with a lopsided smile. ]

It's just fun, ha. I don't need any of this stuff to catch fish, I just like it — it's cool, heh~

[ Alberto's not impressed, clearly, but it's a little... odd... the way he speaks about these functional items as if they're foreign, amusing novelties, rather than tools for livelihood... Is it just childishness or is he kinda— weird?

He's not gonna comment on the lake and rivers being too cold. They were getting pretty cold, but he was okay with it, he could stand the temperature, even if it was much colder than his ocean back home even at its coldest, stubborn enough to just brave it so his fun would be uninterrupted... but now with the snow all around and with no appropriate winter wear to protect himself, there's no way for him to really dry off after he goes swimming at night like he usually has been doing here. So it's put a damper on his fishing game, too. Not that he'll own up to that. ]

[Klaudia snorts a little at the boy lifting the fishing rod, but in good humor. This thing, he says, like that's not just a fishing rod. Cute.]

Well, when the weather warms up, you can show me what you can do. Maybe I'll buy them off you if you're as good a fisherman as you say~ I'm going to be making something, and I'll need a lot. [But not right now when resources are so tight for the city. Now's not really the time to be wasting food by experimenting with weird foodstuffs.]

[She turns her attention from the nets, thinking that she should get about to attending to Sofia, but her focus gets drawn to the alchemy set on the windowsil, and she pauses again. After a blink of surprise, she turns back to Alberto curiously:]

Do you have alchemy magic?

Yeah! For sure! You can buy fish from me any time. A talking cat said I should try selling the fish I catch in the market, anyway. I can't open my own pescheria or anything, but, y'know — it's something...

[ He gives a lazy little shrug, stepping further into the room and over to the foot of his bed to check on Sofia. N-No matter that comment about a talking cat telling him what to do with his career path, pay that no mind...? So casual about it, as if it's totally normal.

Likewise, he's pretty offhand in how he shrugs off her question about the alchemy magic, too — literally dismissing it with a wave of his hand over his shoulder as he bends down to peek at Sofia under her blanket. ]

Eh? Nah, I've got light magic...

[ He doesn't even know he owns an alchemy set; he gets this question a lot when people come to his room and no one's ever bothered to tell him why they ask. And he's never bothered to ask, either. He just moves his focus onto Sofia, leaning in closer to her with a soft, singsongy voice, placing a gentle (read: cautious) hand on her back as he stirs her awake. ]

Ehiii, Sofiii~iina... Mia bambiii~iina...~

[ As sweet as he's being with her, there's some subtle apprehension in his voice and posture — sitting in such a way that he isn't getting right up in her face, and can reel backwards quickly if needed. Ahem. That's... telling, if Klaudia reads that right, beneath the doting way he sings the dinosaur's cutesy rhyming little nickname. ]

[A talking cat...? Like a tabaxi? Or like a were-cat? Or like an actual cat that's talking? Someone's familiar, or just something magical?... There's so many things that could be, and Klaudia's thought process just rolls over all of it. A talking cat--sure, why not? She agrees with the cat's expert opinion, so it must be a very sensible cat. Why can't this child open his own fish shop? He can fish and those fish can be sold, and therefore he should be able to sell them in a proper shop. Point her towards anyone who says otherwise.]

[The light magic is a bit more of a surprise--not exactly what she was expecting. What's the point of having an alchemy set if he's not an alchemist? (To hang cat toys from, obviously.) She gives it another curious look, but shrugs her shoulders. Not her business. Her business is apparently this... reptile that is being very gingerly awoken. Is it a tiny dragon? She's never seen anything like it before.]

[And as such, Klaudia hangs around behind Alberto, peering at the creature and assessing the situation. She doesn't know much about animals in the wild, even less about ones she's never read about. Looks sharp. Does it bite? She doesn't want to find out. She's not a healer; she can't reattach fingers.]

...Do you have to wake her up? We could just move her a little while I take the measurements. [She sounds nervous. Dragons have a lot of teeth, and that looks very dragon-y.]

Eheh— Nahhh, it's better if I hold her.

[ Y-Yeahhh, that awkward, sly smile is certainly proof that the creature bites. But that doesn't discourage Alberto, who's clearly so fond of it, as the dinosaur raises its head with a start, sitting up quite quickly and staring at him with intense hazel eyes. Alberto slips the blanket off her back and takes a seat beside her little bed, crossing his legs before leaning in and scooping Sofia up in his arms. He clutches her close to his chest as she wriggles and writhes, her long tail whipping in irritation. He's using a pretty solid pose and firm grip to hold her, obviously well-practiced in restraining her by now... which, again, is not exactly comforting. ]

Ahah, uh– she's just cranky cuz I woke her up... Give her a second...

[Better if he holds her... She's not in agreement with that at all, but it's his pet. His fingers. His loss. ...Mostly. She would (probably?) be obligated to fetch a healer or something. She thinks that would be the most righteous thing to do, which makes her very glad to have one on speed-dial in case of emergencies.]

[All of these contingency plans are coming together in the back of Klaudia's thoughts as she watches Alberto scoop Sofia up and hold her. That tail lashing doesn't foretell good things...]

...Is she always this cranky? Would it help if she was distracted? [Normally she would have attempted one already, but she's being mindful of not making sudden movements or surprise magic that might endanger him.]

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text; un: signorvespa

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action;

this was delightful to read!

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