Klowdi

Optix

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Just south of bustling Downtown Arcadia is a small elven suburb known as Bamboo Park, a cheerful community that is largely self-sufficient, relying on their own trade rather than the business of the Downtown tourists. The massive bamboo shoots that sprout from every building and through the streets give the Park it’s namesake, but the flora of the district is diverse, with towering shade-giving flowers, and homes built into giant cherry blossoms. A long cobblestone street winds throughout, serving as a kind of Main Street for the elven merchants. Among the carpenters and blacksmiths, bars and restaurants, museums and bookstores, is an apothecary marked only with a simple wooden sign marked ‘Klowdis’. Within that apothecary is a Wind Elf.

Klowdi is slender and beautiful, as her race tends to be. Her long sky-blue hair wafts behind her as she wanders throughout her store, singing sweetly to herself and collecting various jars. Her bare feet scurry and dance lightly across the wooden floors, her yellow sundress twirling. The daylight streaming through the windows catches the little clouds of particles that waft the herbs and flora of the shop, and Klowdi grins as the familiar smells tickle her nose. She places the jars onto her counter, then proceeds to grind them into a paste with her mortar and pestal.

The little silver bell above her door chimes.

Klowdi looks up from her work, but nobody is there. Slowly, she puts her tools down and creeps across the floor, her bare feet hardly displacing a mote dust as she moves towards the door. She pulls the handle and sticks her head out of her store front, her brows furrowed suspiciously, but all she sees in the bumbling traffic of Bamboo Park. She is about to close the door, when she sees something out of the corner of her elven eye.

There is a massive piece of graffiti spray-painted onto the side of an apartment building. The big bold letters are masterfully painted in gold and pink, curving and swirling into each other. Klowdi locks the door to her shop behind her, and steps out into the street, her jaw open.

The graffiti says

HEY KLOWDI, COME HERE

***
 
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Optix

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***

The crowd jostles Klowdi on either side, but she does not move. For several long moments the elf simply gapes at her name displayed in six-foot-high letters for the world to see. She takes a few slow, shocked, steps backwards before turning on her heel and beginning to move hurriedly in the opposite direction.

RED SCARF, 6 O’CLOCK

The bloody letters are dripping from an anachronistic billboard across the street, looking as though they were scrawled by a madman.

Klowdi halts again, trying not to stare too obviously this time. She scans the crowd causally, and her elven eyes spot it immediately, a sense of dread washing over her.

The silk scarf is the same bright blood red as the graffiti, covering the mouth of a woman with ink black hair. The woman wears a black kimono with a hood, tied together with a matching blood red sash. She moves through the crowd like water, zen-like, just moving her hips and shoulders as the pedestrians slipped past on either side. Her head she holds still and lowered. Her eyes are fixed, unmoving, on Klowdi’s own.

Klowdi breaks, turning once more and bolting back towards the graffiti mural bearing her name. She can hear the woman’s soft laughter as the elf pushes frantically through the crowd, rushing towards the vandalized apartment building. As Klowdi draws closer, she notices a graffiti arrow pointing her down a narrow ally. She halts beneath her own name, hesitating for a split second, until she starts to hear the gruff commands of men shoving aside the crowd behind her.

“She’s right there!” a deep voice says, and Klowdi ducks down the alleyway.

***
 

Optix

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***

Klowdi slips between urban debris and bamboo shoots as she rockets down the alleyway. Behind her she can hear the sounds of pursuit, of men in clinking armor shoving the trash out of their way. She does not look back, but propels herself through the alley way manically, her bare feet padding on the cobblestone. She bursts through a line of laundry strung up between two windows, and smashes into a brick wall, a blouse wrapped around her head. As she tears the shirt off her face and picks herself up off the ground, she sees another piece of graffiti written on the wall in front of her. The spray-painted message reads

THIS WAY

And is written inside a glittering gold arrow pointing left.

The elf darts left, and finds herself pinched between two red brick buildings. Klowdi pushes forward with a grunt, the lithe humanoid forcing herself inch by inch through the tiny tunnel, just a few feet from the end. She starts to hyperventilate as she hears her hunters approach the opening.

Gunshots ring out as Klowdi bursts through the tunnel, the bullets echoing as they collide harmlessly with a dumpster. The elf takes cover against the wall, realizing she is behind a row of upscale cafe’s and eateries she likes to frequent. She sinks to the ground, paralyzed with fear, and takes deep, rasping breathes as she hears her pursuers try and fail to squeeze through the narrow corridor.

“Go around!” one of them finally barks, and Klowdi’s body shudders in relief. Her elven eyes flicker around nervously, and she sees her next instructions painted in the familiar glittering gold across a nondescript white door.

THROUGH THIS DOOR, OUT THE FRONT, ACROSS THE STREET
GO NOW, KLOWDI

In one motion she is up off her bare feet and propelling herself through the door. The elf girl storms into the back room of a psilocybin tea parlor, startling several pixies and yosei, and causing them to scatter some platters dried mushrooms they were carrying. She sprints through the front, crashing into tables and spilling tea on the psychonautic patrons, and out the front door into the sunlit streets of the Bamboo District.

“I see her!” a voice calls from somewhere off to the left.

A pair of horses neigh as Klowdi jumps into the street in front of them, heedless of the traffic. She hops into a trolley, knocking a bag of oranges out of an old gnome woman’s arms and nearly stopping to help her gather them, before jumping out the other side of the trolley and onto the sidewalk.

The elf hesitates for just a moment before spotting her next instructions, written on the side of a small apartment complex made of bamboo, in the same gold paint

UP HERE, SKY ELF

For a moment, Klowdi is confused, until she sees the fire escape. With her long graceful strides she leaps up and grabs the end of the ladder, made of anachronistic black steel, and pulls herself up. She is nearly four flights up when she feels the ladder tremble, and looks down to see the woman in the red scarf pulling herself onto the first platform.

Klowdi scrambles up to the fifth floor, and sees the dazzling gold paint above an open window.

HERE!

Its reads simply, with an arrow pointing at the open window.

The elf nearly dives through it, falling over herself into bathroom. She picks herself up and sees her next message, scrawled on the mirror in pink lipstick.

OUT THE FRONT, LEFT, ALL THE WAY UP THE STAIRS, THROUGH THE BAMBOO DOOR

Klowdi stumbles out the doorway and into a posh living room. She tenses as she locks eye with two startled male elves with rippling abdominal muscles, until one of them drops his quiche plate and them both scream in the same high pitched warble. Klowdi roles her eyes and hops over their sofa and out their front door, hurrying up a few flights of stairs before smashing through a flimsy bamboo door at the top of their steps.

The elf gasps.

She is atop the roof of a seven story building, the wind blowing whipping her hair.

Twenty feet across from her, on the side of a five-story parking lot, giant gold graffiti letters spell out

JUMP!

***
 

Optix

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***

For as long as Klowdi can remember, she has had the same nightmare.

Behind is is a monster. It howls and roars and tears at itself in it’s fury to destroy her down to every last screaming nerve.

In front of her is a chasm, black and deep and endless, a yawning maw that beckons to her with an ancient hunger.

And as the monster closes in, Klowdi does nothing, but stands paralyzed with fear until she can feel the monsters hot breath on her neck.

Then she wakes up.

***

Down on the street, Klowdi’s head is facing the ground, her hands tied behind her back. The woman in the red scarf holds Klowdi by the back of her neck, pushing her roughly into a black iron carriage.

Sitting on a billboard above her, kicking her feet off the side and watching intently, is a girl in a pink mohawk smoking a cigarette.

A spray-paint can hangs at her waist.

***
 
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