Welcome to Gaia! ::

The apartment
Barely contained chaos. That's what you encounter as soon as you enter the apartment. There is very little decoration, almost no foliage - even the furniture is the default furniture supplied with the apartment. That's not to say that the apartment is bare, or that it lacks character, though. Scattered all over the apartment are books - both engineering texts and racy romances - magazines - an ecclectic mix, including engineering magazines, National Geographics, Popular Mechanics, Marie Claires, Cosmopolitans and some naughtier titles - clothes, papers, engineering drawings and sketches, tools, computer equipment, and hydraulic components. The only thing approaching decoration is a few abstract sculptures made of computer parts and hydraulic components by Saria out of boredom. It is not filthy, but it is disorganized, at least to the untrained eye. Saria rarely locks the apartment, even when she is out, figuring that if anything gets stolen, it would probably be a blessing - at least the place will be a little neater.

The resident
Saria Mithril, the apartment's sole resident, is 172 cm tall, curvy and well-built - although not in particularly great shape and perhaps just a little overweight. Her skin is olive and her eyes dark brown, and her hair is black and fell down to her waist. She generally has a nervous smile on her face, and a bad habit of perpetually brushing her hair back over her ear. Her clothing is almost uniformly plain - professional and decent, but utilitarian and functional.

After resting for a few minutes, Saria stood up again, restless, and regarded the couch with an unsatisfied expression. "It's going to take some time before that feels just right," she muttered to herself, bending over to run her hand over the cushion, "Oh yes, the contours of this a**-groove are barely formed! This is virgin couch cushion territory. Don't you worry, honey," she pressed her cheek against the couch and stroked it lovingly, "I'll take my time with you. We can take it slow, but I promise you that we'll be spending a lot of time together, getting to know each other." She raised her head to whisper conspiratorily to the couch, "It only hurts the first time, you know."

She stood up straight again and took a quick, business-like breath, clapping her hands together and looking around. "Right then, what needs doing first? So much to do, so much to do. Unpacking. Putting things away. Where to start, where to start? Itemize! Prioritize! What needs doing right away?"

She stood in the center of the living room with her hands on her hips, looking around at the boxes for a moment, then raised a finger. "Ah! Procrastination! Let's start with that. Never put off putting things off 'till tomorrow, when you can start putting them off today. It's all about taking initiative! Siezing that brass ring!"

She looked at her apartment door, chewing on her lip, "Maybe I should meet the neighbours. Maybe I'll get lucky and one of them will be a compulsive interior decorator. Or they'll have a fetish for unpacking and putting things away."

She chuckled at the door as she stooped to slip on her shoes, "Hey, what's the worst that could happen, right? I mean, what are the odds that one of them is a lonely, single engineer with no friends and no prospects for possibly attracting someone special, who is lazy, slobbish and talks to herself in her solitary dementia." She giggled to herself for a second before stopping and sighing miserably, "Doh." Then she stood up and stepped out of her apartment to see if anyone was home.

Saria was shuffling papers and making notes at what passed for her living room table... when it wasn't passing for her desk... which was only when it wasn't apparently being used as a test target for weapons of mass destruction. She heard the knocking and looked up, surprised. Since the first disastrous meeting with her neighbours on her first day, she had had no visitors and made no contact whatsoever with anyone else in the building, if it could at all be helped.

"Knocking?" she murmurred, and rapped her knuckles on her head, "No, sounds different. So it probably didn't come from inside my head."

She opened her eyes wide in surprise. "The door?" she gasped, "Could it be?"

She jumped up quickly and clumsily, over turning the table with a crash and stumbling over it, and ran to the door, her pounding feet heralding her approach. She stopped just at the door and paused for a second, in panicked thought, sure that she was forgetting something.

She snapped her fingers, "Pants. These things are necessary." Then she ran back to the couch, stumbling over the table again, to grab her shorts. She pulled them on haphazardly as she stumbled back, making even more noise.

As she stumbled across the room, she chattered away to herself - one of her many bad habits, "Who could it be? Did I order a pizza? I'm pretty sure I didn't. But... maybe I will? Yes... that must be it. Thirty minutes or it's free? Pish posh. Now the delivery people move so fast that they actually exceed the speed of light and travel into the past! You get your pizza thirty minutes before you order it, or it's free!"

By now she got to the door and undone the deadbolts and actually had her hand on the handle, when she stopped. "Wait a minute... what if when I get it, they've messed up the toppings. Or... they will mess up the toppings. So, when it finally comes time to order, what if I tell them not to make that mistake... and then they don't... but then... GAH! Temporal paradox! Dear god, the universe could unravel at the seams! Because of pizza toppings!"

All of a sudden it occurred to her that she was standing by the door talking to herself, and she wondered why. "Oh. Right. Knocking. Not in my head. The importance of pants. Time travelling pizza. End of the universe. Alright, all caught up."

She opened the door and tried to sound as calm and collected as possible, "Why hello, there."

Saria opened the door wider, and stared at Dante with undisguised wonder on her face.

"A swim........" she repeated breathlessly, "What an enchantingly novel idea....... I go for walks all the time. I even go for jogs and runs, although, unfortunately, not as often as I should. I frequently go for drives. But........ I never go for swims."

She looked off into space and pulled at her lower lip. "There must be some trick to it though," she mused in a distant voice, "Because I imagine it must hurt to drag yourself down the sidewalk doing the backstroke. Hm, or do you swim through the air? Maybe - I've got it! You must use a balloon! You must get a big helium balloon, and tie it to your waist, and it holds you off the ground a meter or two. Then you swim through the air while hanging from the balloon."

"Oh," Saria wailed, looking at Dante miserably, "But I don't have one. I don't suppose you might have a spare."

A moment after she finished speaking, Saria suddenly realized with a sinking feeling that she'd done it again. Dante's calm and easy-going familiarity - and her seemingly imperturbable manner - lowered Saria's guard, and her inner peculiarities slipped out unchecked.

As the realization sunk in that she'd messed up again, she was tempted to mumble an excuse and duck back into her apartment and hide. Any other time, she would have. But just as Dante's unflappable friendliness had lulled her into saying something inappropriate before, again it calmed Saria. Dante gave no sign whatsoever that she thought Saria was odd. Something about that comforted Saria.

But at the same time it made her nervous that she might let her guard slip again. It was a dilemma. Every moment she spent with Dante felt comfortable. She felt like she could be herself. But on the other hand, she was embarrassed to be herself, and every moment with Dante increased the chances that she would slip up.

All this passed through Saria's mind as she stood nervously fidgetting in the doorway for a long time - eyes locked on Dante's but focussed on something far distant. After a moment, she realized she was staring, and looked down, and mumbled impulsively, "That would be nice...."

"Yes," Saria said, stiffly, "Pool in the center. I'll meet you there." She stood in the doorway while Dante left, not watching her, but staring down at her feet. After a moment she shook her head to clear it, and stepped back inside, looking around nervously.

"This is bad," she muttered, "This is very bad." She started pacing in circles, "Oh why did I agree to this. I'm only going to make a fool of myself, like always. I just know I'm going to mess something up."

She stopped and tapped her lower lip with her finger, absently, "Of course, I probably shouldn't have a problem finding the pool. Water will always gather at the lowest point, so all I have to do is follow the slope of the ground and-"

She slapped herself hard in the face. "STOP THAT!" she yelled, and slapped herself again, "KEEP CONTROL OF YOURSELF!" She looked at her reflection in the closet mirror with disgust, "Don't let Dante see you slip up again."

She slapped herself again hard, then stopped with a stunned expression on her face. "................ OW!" she moaned, "That really hurt."

She stood and stared sideways at her reflection for a long time, bitter and angry. Finally she took a deep breath and steeled herself, "OK, you're going to go out there and do nothing weird. You're going to do nothing weird. Nothing weird."

She took another deep breath, then turned on her heel and walked quickly out of the door and down the hall, forgetting to change completely, still wearing the shorts and T-shirt that she had been wearing when Dante first arrived....... and no shoes, just socks.