» she saw the pictures and painted them

[thenormalsquint]

Who: Angela and You. YES, YOU!
What: Come be drawn like one of her French girls.
Where: A street corner a few blocks away from the inn.
When: Early Misdi afternoon
Warnings: The warning is... it's Angela.



On this chilly, yet sunny afternoon, Angela Montenegro can be seen walking down on of Baedal’s many streets, dragging behind her is a little red wagon filled to the brim with art supplies. Where she got the wagon isn't important; what is important, however, is what Angela's planning on doing with the equipment.

Setting up is done quickly and easily with the finesse of a pro (this isn't her first rodeo, kids.) One sketchpad is placed on an easel and flipped to a clean page where Angela scribbles in thick black marker:

ART DONE BY PARIS TRAINED ARTIST – 6 SHEKELS EACH PORTRAIT

She stands back and eyes her handiwork before an almost evil grin spreads across her face. And in smaller, but not too small, letters, Angela writes the words:

NUDES ARE WELCOME. 1 MARK.

And in even smaller letters:

PLEASE HELP ME NOT STARVE. SUPPORT THE ARTS!

And in almost illegible letters towards the bottom right corner of the page:

Please? I don't want to do death masks anymore. ):

Comments

what was going on when i wrote this originally /awake now

[caballero]

Bruce glances up, giving her a small smile - genuine, friendly, just reserved. Like he is with most things that he is incapable of doing himself, he's pretty fascinated by art and artists. It seems like such a romantic thing - idealistic, fanciful - to do in this strange place, and if not for the quip about starving (...and the fact that he'd observed her meet with Hasibe over the network, look it's not paranoia when you're in his line of work for real) he might wonder if Angela had been in Baedal for much longer than she has.

"They're not permanent features," he says, and then steps a little closer so it's like he's actually engaging her in conversation versus hovering at the edges of interaction. "Paris?"

[thenormalsquint]

It seems like she has, even to her. That's a thing that happens with these alternate dimensions, right? Spend a few days in one and it feels like a year. And she's nowhere close to starving just yet, but still, she doesn't want to live at the inn forever. That place is too dreary to be possible.

"Shame. I haven't drawn a cap and cup in forever." Angela glances at her sign and then turns back to him with a smile and a nod. "Paris." Don't ask for details, sir. She studied at the many schools of her Paris lovers who just so happened to be artists as well.

[caballero]

"If they inspire you, I'm hardly one to stand in your way." Mild, but still congenial. A little rusty, maybe, like it's been a while since he's been out talking to anyone.

He hides a small smile by taking a sip of coffee at her reaffirmed declaration. The look he gives her says he's assuming all kinds of wild stories, there, but doesn't ask. (Yet.) ... And, all right, he glances around for where he's supposed to sit down for this - fountain edge, railing? He's easy (not like that - okay... like that, but it just means he's fine sitting wherever), and this woman's company is comfortable enough that he doesn't feel like bolting immediately. Might as well.

[thenormalsquint]

Oh, there are wild stories and there are the wild stories that Angela won't even tell. The world must be kept innocent from her shenanigans.

There's a second stool just folded and leaning against the easel and Angela points to it with a chuckle. "Can I interest you in a nude?" Look, she has to try somehow. Might as well do it with a direct approach.

[caballero]

Not that easy.

He sits down, and cracks a smile that's a bit easier, but no less rusty. Someone else might have laughed. "Unfortunately I'm not employed just yet."

[thenormalsquint]

There was a hope. A small one that is now dead. Thanks, cap and coffee dude.

"I should turn you away and make you come back once you do," Angela jokes as she places a tin box on her lap that she opens to reveal various sticks of colored chalk. Her reply is slightly, no, more than slightly flirtatious, but it comes with the girl. If she didn't flirt with an attractive man, her name wouldn't be Angela.

[caballero]

Let's not lie, here: he'd completely hit that. Just not on a streetcorner, and not before knowing whether or not she's going to have a heart attack once he takes his shirt off. (The evidence of his lifestyle is a map on his skin; there's nothing he can do about that besides turn the lights off.)

"So is this really honing your craft, or do you just want my money?" Easy-going; he doesn't quite have the flirtatious edge she does, but he's not not responding, it's just his own sort of soft-spoken way. This is new, too, and though it's a dance he's done a hundred times pretending to be someone else, Bruce isn't totally sure how to go about chatting up women - or how to be on the receiving end, anyway - when he's not faking it.

[thenormalsquint]

Scarring is something that doesn't even faze Angela anymore. She's dated rock climbers, drug addicts, suspected criminals with more than one gunshot to their name, and other sordid types. Whatever scars he has in his history will bring on questions instead of shock.

"Why can't it be both? A girl's gotta eat and pay rent somehow," she pushes back, selecting a dark grey stick to begin a rough outline of him. It's fine that he's the quieter type; Angela can talk enough for at least ten of them. "Don't tell me you're against the earning of money through what you know best."

[caballero]

Questions are worse.

"Point." He doesn't say so, but the still-there amusement in his voice suggests he meant the offer to draw him naked, not her earning grocery money. Bruce watches her hands as she draws - sometimes her face, too, but mostly not. There's a quiet sort of interest, there, but no insight.

[thenormalsquint]

They can't be any worse than the potential answers.

The answers the same for the offer to draw him naked. She likes nudity, but in an drawing sense, all bodies are just bodies. Angela no longer sees a penis just hanging out as something to get excited over, unless it's hanging out between her legs. Not that she wouldn't mind checking out what this guy is packing strictly for curiosity reasons.

"You're staring," she says with a little distraction in her voice, but mostly amusement.

[caballero]

That's the problem.

"Should I look at something else?"

He's never had his portrait drawn before - not while he was awake, anyway, there was a woman in India who liked to do it while he was sleeping, for whatever reason - so he genuinely doesn't know if there's protocol.

[thenormalsquint]

Let her decide what is and isn't a problem. Angela doesn't like people assuming things for her.

"Did I say so?"

There isn't any actual protocol except staying still, but Angela's just teasing this guy if her smirk is any indication. No need to sit in silence while she works on the shadows that the cap casts along the side of his face.

[caballero]

Welcome to Batman.

"No." Which is why he asked, Miss Sassy. Maybe you just have nice hands, and he's interested, did you ever think of that? (He imagines the answer to that would be yes.)

[thenormalsquint]

Perhaps it would be. Perhaps her own retort to that would be that he has a nice face and she's interested. Did he think of that?

Welcome to Angela.

"Then don't look at something else," Angela continues to sass. "Unless I have something growing on the side of my face and you're just too polite to say something."

[caballero]

"I'd let you know." Because he's super polite, see? He sips his coffee, but otherwise doesn't adjust how he's holding himself.

Finally: "I'm Tom."

[thenormalsquint]

"By running and screaming in the opposite direction without paying me for my time? Yep. I know how this works."

This time she's laughing openly as she holds out a clean hand to him.

"Short for Thomas?" A beat. "Angela. Not short for anything." No, just totally different than the name she was given at birth.

[caballero]

"You didn't charge up front, though." Teasing faintly.

He takes her hand, shakes it. His grip is firm, a little bit careful, and his hand's calloused - there's some medical tape over his index and middle finger; nothing that looks scary, but out of the desk-job norm for sure. "Sometimes." Yeah, he took his alter ego name from his dad. Who's counting.

"It's nice to meet you, Angela."

[thenormalsquint]

"I was being nice. Now I see that makes me a fool in front of you." Angela shakes his hand a little more lightly, but she doesn't let go because now she's busy inspecting that tape. "What happened to your fingers?"

And the questions start.

[caballero]

"You're just used to nicer people." ... Which is undoubtedly true; even if he was just some guy, he'd still be just some guy from Gotham City. Fortunately, there's no trace in his voice that might suggest he's saying that to freak her out. Just an observation.

At that, he glances down at his hand, flexes it, settles back into how he was sitting before, wry smile on his face. "Several cinder blocks happened. Be wary of fixer-upper prices for apartments around here, they aren't kidding."

[thenormalsquint]

"Or maybe I just need to be a little meaner." Proof of this horrible mean streak is Angela reaching out to snag Bruce's cup and plucking the lid off to take a sip. Dangerous, but he can't have poisoned it if he was drinking it himself. She grimaces, though, putting the cap back on and handing it back to him. "Needs more milk. And more caffeine. Definitely more."

Because she takes no less than six sugars and more milk than coffee in her own cup. She is also weird and has a limited sense of personal space. People should enjoy that.

"I'm still living at the inn," she says, pointing in the general direction of said place. "Do I have to worry about waking up with a concussion?"

[caballero]

He blinks a bit, not wholly caught off guard (since he could see where she was going with that, just through the way her muscles tensed and aligned before she moved), but almost laughing all the same. It's decaf, yes, the horror, made entirely ineffective in that particular endeavor by the amount of sugar he's dumped into it. All in all, pretty gross, but he's certainly got weirder habits.

"Only if you drop something on your head, maybe. I'd been fixing a wall." Actually, he'd punched somebody, but whatever. Bruce is handy enough that he really will be fixing up wherever he decides to stay in Bonetown.

[thenormalsquint]

"I'll take your advice when I find my own place. And not call you for any home construction." But that doesn't mean she won't call him to come lay some pipe or so. Just saying.

With a few more strokes, Angela drops the chalk back into the tin box, where it clatters loudly as she plucks the pad of the easel and turning it to Bruce. On the paper is a perfect replica, hat included. Sadly, the coffee cup is nowhere to be seen

"Worth six shekels and a tip?"

[caballero]

Bruce is still a little weirded out by things like contemplating his own appearance - for plenty of reasons that go past alternate universes, even - so when he looks at the sketch, he tries not to think too hard about it. Angela's work is good, though. He's impressed, and then smiles a bit at her.

"What kind of tips are you collecting?"

[thenormalsquint]

"A couple extra shekels, where to find the best sushi, what it takes to get the equivalent of your phone number around here. You know, the usual."

The usual, she says, with the most deadpan look ever as she signs her drawing in the lower right corner, APGM.

[caballero]

He smiles in that unpracticed way again, quiet, as he takes out his wallet. There's a pen shoved in his pocket, too - along with a million other things, he's good at not looking like the walking Swiss army knife that he is - and he doesn't say anything as he writes down his CiD number on 1 mark bill.

(The thing he said he couldn't afford, yes.)

It's a little riskier than he usually plays it, but he's feeling a bit cavalier today. A remark from years ago - Maybe if you pretend to have fun, you'll have a little by accident - plays through his head. Maybe Tom likes beautiful women who happen to look like the kind of women Bruce Wayne finds attractive. Maybe he does this kind of thing; hell, maybe he doesn't, and he's just going for it.

He hands it to her.