introductory mingle: CARNIVALE

[riverviewmod]

who: everyone in Riverview!
what: overflow post for the Carnivale celebration
when: July 1st - July 9th
where: Anywhere around the city.
warnings: please put any necessary warnings in the subject lines

This is not the Carnivale post. This is just a tribute.

Optional overflow post, since the Carnivale log has hit Captcha. If you don't mind Captcha, feel free to continue using the previous one, or put up a top-level on this one with links to your previous threads and continue here, free of being put to the robot test with every tag.

Comments

[unmakeme]

The Rudolph look is not great on her, but she doesn't move to wipe it off. No. There's a hint of admitted defeat in that. She won't. Instead, she just foregoes the offered wipes and cleans the remaining bits of paint off of her arm with her own tongue. "Which one next? Mint? Orange?" When someone else comes up beside them, she turns to look at him.

He's not bad looking. Shorter and Illya, taller than herself, and darker than th both of them. "Excuse me. Do I have something on my nose?" There's just enough of a hint of the flirtatious in her voice that he immediately realizes she already knows, and so he plays along, telling her he's not sure, reaching up to tip her head into the light.

"Oh, yeah, I see it now."

Natasha grins, glances back at Illya. "Imagine that. Maybe you could help me with it? I can't lick my own face." Implying that she is inviting this random stranger to lick paint off of her face, instead.

[nikolaievich]

He’s pretty sure he would pay for it dearly if he ever called Natalia cute, but the spot on her nose is honestly making it hard for him not to. He allows himself a little grin her way as a compromise, since she of course must guess what she looks like.

The grin quickly melts away when she starts openly flirting. He’s a very jealous kind of guy, as Gabby will happily tell you so an eyebrow goes up at that .But he’s also rational, so even if he’s jealous he’s aware he has no reason to. He’s honestly not sure why he’s even jealous- Natalia is pretty, of course, and definitely his type just like she’s probably nearly everyone’s type.

But they just met. So he swallows the jealousy down, down, and inside himself until the only sign that something is upsetting him is the way he reaches to tap tap tap on the counter with two fingers.

“Should I leave you alone?”

[unmakeme]

The man she's been... propositioning? That doesn't seem like the right word. Natasha is usually so much more direct when she's going for what she wants. Whatever you want to call him, whoever he is, she turns away from him mid-sentence when Illya asks if she'd like privacy. The look of innocence and surprise in her eyes is belied by the grin curving her lips. "You're the one who painted me. Scarlet woman. I'm just trying to be responsible about it. I can't reach, and wasting edible body paint is kind of like wasting food. A little bit. It's a sin."

Which, all right, she doesn't believe in god and he knows that. So sins do not speak to anything religious in her mind. Still, they both know the Cold War intimately - different stretches of it, but the poverty left scars that ran deep, and ran through the whole painful affair. No one who didn't already know would ever suspect that Natasha's refusal to waste even a mouthful of food is the direct result of a childhood that involved intimate knowledge of what it feels like to starve. Illya might get it, though, might just be able to understand what she means when she says sin.

[nikolaievich]

‘It’s a sin’, she says. And while Illya’s face doesn’t change and his body language doesn’t have any kind of tension in him other than the tap tap tapping that’s still going on, Natalia will probably be able to tell from his eyes that he definitely gets what she means by that. It’s not a religious thing- even though Illya was the one indoctrinated against religion Natalia also doesn’t seem to put much weight into it as far as he knows. So when she mentions a sin, it’s… another kind of sin.

Once again she’s teasing him, and once again he’s falling for it.

“You are here with me, though.” He doesn’t sound petulant. Promise. He really doesn’t.

… Maybe he does, a little bit.

[unmakeme]

"I am, but you don't seem that inclined to do anything about it. Unless I'm wrong? Am I wrong, Alexei?" The man she was talking to doesn't seem all that bothered to clearly be a prop for her conversation. Maybe he's just enjoying the little slice of theater playing out here. She grabs a stick, dips it in a random jar of paint, and swipes it on his nose. "You're telling me you're just going to leave that there?" It's a deep blue, and if she had to guess flavour, she'd probably say some kind of berry? Blackberry or blueberry, but looking at the jar to check will ruin the connection of her scrutiny.