capeandcowllogs | (no subject)

WHO: Rose Tyler and OPEN
WHERE: The city streets
WHEN: August 31st
WARNINGS: None
SUMMARY: Practice
FORMAT: Either.

She had a job now. Not Torchwood, but not a shop, either. It was good enough for a temporary basis, however long this temporary basis would last. It felt like ages, but it'd only been a little over half a year.

Only. She'd only known the Doctor for two years. She'd been here a quarter of the time she'd been actually living her life. And the Darkness was still coming. She counted the stars every night from her window, waiting for the time she was one short. Waiting for the day the Darkness would catch up with her, because she'd gotten stuck here instead of finding the Doctor. Maybe even instead of ever finding him, if Rory Williams could be trusted.

Rose dug her hands into her pockets and leaned against the wall of a nearby business. It helped, actually, the leaning. The sensation of the building grounded her against the emotions swirling around her as people passed. She'd been practicing ever since she realized what was happening. She wasn't any good to anyone, even herself, if she couldn't go for a walk in a crowded city without getting so turned around with other people's emotions that she couldn't even remember which way to walk forward. She was doing better now.

Her fingers clenched slightly at the wave of anger over...something. The man in the building was arguing over something he felt slighted--no, ripped off--by. The woman walking by her was distraught, afraid of something looming over her shoulder. The little boy was bored. The passing cabbie was intensely amused.

She wasn't any of those things. She wasn't.

Rose bit her lip and watched an young couple walk by, hands interlaced and swinging as they skipped along somewhere. Their love and infatuation crackled in the air around them so strongly they probably didn't even realize there was anyone else in the street with them. If they had any worries it was all drowned over those screaming emotions. They were so loud Rose found herself focusing on the couple as they went by, and letting all the other people fade away as they went.

The emotions slowly drained away as they vanished into the crowd, first into silence as her...whatever...recovered, and then back to the chaos of the street.

She frowned down at the sidewalk.

These weren't her emotions. She only got to look at them. Apparently that bit was the hardest to learn.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The ceaseless, unchecked parade of emotion was a thing reserved for a very tiny number of inhabitants - all of which were strangers to the world. Blue knew this well after so long; of the millions and millions of people that went about their lives day to day, so few knew the bustle in the sense of thought and feeling. And though he had lived more than a human lifetime with the sense of it all, the sheer enormity that the City gave by way of all that mental activity was still quite a thing to endure, sometimes as startling as the day he'd been immersed in it all.

He didn't suffer, he adapted.

As for others with the sense...it wasn't so easy as it was back in Ataraxia, where Mu shone as bright as stars in the dark of those muted, groomed human minds. Power had its own nuance to the world it was born in, it seemed, and even psychic energy surfaced as something foreign despite its familiar aspects. That's why he couldn't detect an empath so close so easily. Two blocks away, a block...

Curiosity, foremost. He could see...sense, rather, the notion of power her way. It stopped him amid the flow of sparse traffic, and he instinctively drew closer to the building to keep from hindering those on their way. All the while, he stared ahead, puzzling. He'd never seen her before, had he? He was fairly certain...

She didn't sense him. If she did, she couldn't tell him from the sea of others around her. It took almost all of her concentration to stand there an hold out against the endlessly changing emotions racing through her. It wasn't so bad when she could turn it off, but when she actually listened--when she felt--the emotions crashed over her on every side, tugging her in all directions at once.

It was likely he could walk right up to her and she wouldn't notice unless he came into her field of vision. Even then, it'd mostly be because he looked so different from the others bustling by on the streets.

A wrathful presence interrupted his advancement. Like high-speed storm clouds, the angry, frustrated man pushed through the crowd in a huff, so self-absorbed that it seemed to double his thoughts and agitations. Whatever had him so upset was bound to stick around...but thankfully, the source itself did not. Blue watched him round a corner and vanish out of plain sight, staring at the trail left to him pensively. There was little and less he could do about that, save hope for the best. By then, he only needed a few steps more to draw near to his target.

"Could you feel it?" he asked, his gaze still back where the man left. "All the frustration..."

He felt nothing of who she was, of course. His emotions were, most of the time, a closed book. He had experienced enough that he felt extremes of anything very rarely.

But he did notice a woman, leaning against a building. And years of instincts came to the fore. There was...something. Something in the way she held herself, something in her expression that raised his interest.

He stepped over. It would help that he was not in uniform, but in his usual civilian suit.

"Excuse me, fraulein," he said, in a concerned voice, "are you quite all right?"

She didn't notice him at all until he spoke directly to her. She didn't really jump, given that her own emotions tended to be pushed far into the back of her mind while feeling all of the others around her, but she did have a bit of a wide-eyed expression for a moment when she turned her attention to him.

"Uh...yeah...sorry. I'm just..." She nodded to the crowd. "People watching."

He looked at them for a moment, slowly nodding.

"Ah, I understand. I am terribly sorry to have troubled you."

His english is precise, formal. He bows to her, from the neck, in a sign of respect. Old guard to the very core.