•Asha•
"What? I-" Asha's face collapsed into a frown. Where in the world was this ultimatum coming from? Somehow the more the wolf seemed to talk, the more their appreciation of danger was being kicked up notches and exponentially alarming. Never had they faced such immediate danger before, and yet it was this precise kind of danger they'd been preparing for by slipping talismans into their girlfriend's pockets the past few months. They'd not been outside for more than five minutes.
Asha looked at the wolf and shaman with a pinching anger, with no more clemency in their eyes for the boy than for the spirit, through their ire gravitated less towards him than her, grabbing their purse from the bike's metal basket, wanting to tell them they didn't like being put into this kind of situation, that they didn't like it even being suggested that they'd leave a partner behind. They inhaled and rested the bike against the hedge, backing against their front gate and into the garden.
The key, of course, was at the bottom of the bag, a small slimy fish in a bottom of water; they struggled to get the key into the lock and upon finally managing, struggled to even turn the key, which blocked against its socket and dug into the bone of their fingers. Last time, they'd been the one on the other side of the door. They could remember its anxious rattling as Mari had tried to escape a switch-bladed group of gang members who'd displayed too much interest in the goods she was carrying a few streets down.
"Mari!" The door swung open. Mari groaned, shifting under the puddle of pillows and blankets where she'd sunken mere minutes ago. "Mari get up, we have to go!" Asha curved around the room, grabbing a pair of shoes, a t-shirt, a fluorescent hiking backpack and throwing them to the girl. "Is... something happenin'?" She towed herself up by her elbows, hair falling in fat disgruntled knots along her neck. She shielded her eyes to examine her partner. "Are- are you ok?" Covers splatted as she shifted out of them, reaching blindly for the T-shirt. "I'm fine, don't worry," Asha looked up from where they were unplugging a pink external hard drive. "We just have to go; I got involved in- ugh, I'll tell you, just, get ready yeah?" Mari nodded vigorously, pulling on what was some kind of oversized vacation giveaway shirt, a smiling starry-eyed mascot now splayed across her breast. Asha, throwing the hard drive into their tote, glanced around the moldy two-room apartment one last time; abandoned, it would be a home like the ones Mari and they elected to steal from, an empty nest still littered with feathers and hot from the goo that held it together.
Mari watched with a heavy head and sticky eyelids as Asha locked the door behind them. The hiking bag clung to one of her shoulders, yawning open, and she could feel her feet being pushed into by the shoes she'd only half put on. It was bright out, in a sharp way, because of the business buildings that speared the rising day back in their direction every morning.
Spinning around with determination, Asha said: "We're ready." Mari had only really seen a shaman team a few times before; she'd spot them from far away in a crowd or something but had never really been this close. They were so otherworldly, for the race currently ruling the world... Looking at that wolf seem to consume itself on the spot was... strange. Wide-eyed still, she sniffed and jumped the bag back onto her back, facing these two tremendous strangers with a small "hi."
-Arisu-
Arisu remained contemplative of some quiet sensory state all while the sword glided out from under her fingers and Ryoshi entered the garden. She half expected the gate to accost them both in a weary oaken voice, and yet it simply stood there as her friend passed beneath it. Did people still live here, in the district? Things were very changed now; she hadn't really explored as much as she'd hoped. What was life like for those on the outskirts of Tokyo, now? She'd never really met many communities... She had this habit of focusing her interest on people only when she found them, sometimes to the point of forgetting that there was more she never wondered about. She blamed the mechanics of her curiosity. Well –and there was another nudge from the bouquet of scents strung across her face – she'd ask Celeste; maybe she'd go see for herself.
A wooden panel scraped open: Ryoshi was just walking into the bathhouse! She hurriedly joined him, taking the first few steps up the porch, hesitating an instant and looking back, ready to take off her boots and walk barefoot on the swollen grey wood. The rot that pervaded the house and inhabited it's very core was nothing short of medicinal, as if age had purified the house, dried it like a flower pressed between the wrinkled brown-inked pages of a botany book. "Man, it's like a smelly lullaby." he said, facing in. The word smelly was strange. "I guess so..." Her hand trailed back on a waterless beam, smothered gradually now in the swelling clementine skin of the sky. "I feel like it's really more of a bathhouse than ever before." The corridor was still submerged in the earlier night, was black and blue in the corners and along the edges.
She glanced up at Ryoshi. "Should we... ask?" She couldn't imagine entering, really. "No, they're here." Bastet was slinking up behind them, wings still melting back into her rib cage. "Celeste and Kohaku, and another shaman–spirit duo I'm not familiar with, but they look peaceful; you can announce yourselves if you want to."
-Arisu-
Arisu peered into the bathhouse an instant more, unsure if it had swollen or shrunk. It looked different, like she was just seeing it from a different angle but that such a minuscule shift in the vectors that pulled her through this place was enough to recreate it as something else entirely. It was the freshness of the air that was the past itself, a film of odors distilled from an old pulp of events, squeezed and flattened, dried then burnt, blooming it's way up to the lines of her brain. She exhaled.
"I'm not sure I want to surprise them..." she whispered, "I'm kinda worried they'd think we're intruders or... just be alarmed or something." She looked up at Ryoshi whose hair was resting on his face, mat now after having so slicingly reflected the light of white fire and rain. Behind her, Bastet's necklace shifted in a gossip of beads as the spirit's wings vanished entirely.
"Well..." she lowered into a crouch and pulled open the double knots of her boots, "shoes first, right?" The first foot popped free, revealing a grey sock, damp and rubbed sore at the soles. Her claws scraped lightly against the porch, interrupted by a muttering coming from inside the building. Both Bastet and Arisu looked up with sharpened eyes and ears until they could recognize the hospitable sweetness of what was a voice, and soon it's owner. Arisu was illuminated through her eyes and mouth. "Celeste?!" she called into the empty hallway, jumping up on her half-open shoe.
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