belladonna // Oni&Zada

Part of her mask always falls away inside the shop, as if the woman that she has to be out there suffocates before she makes it over the doorframe. There's no grades, no training scores, just herself and the concoctions that she cooks up, as every Viper woman of a good cut always has.

God, does it make her feel powerful.

She's making a pain salve restock in the backrooms when the shop bell jingles. It will be some fool who realises fast that they're in the wrong place or it's a cherished customer. Either way, they get to wait.

”Oni, you around?”

She smiles a little to herself. Perhaps there are a select few that she has a soft spot for. Zada, for all of her power and skill, has struck her as a lost lamb since the day she first appeared in front of her counter.

Oni turns the heat off and slips out of the back room. "Hello darling." The smile she puts on, the tone, it's not special, everyone gets the full experience when they come through those doors but maybe it's all just a little bit more sincere for Zada. Sometimes strength like that comes from a splintering followed by a rebinding, it's rare to be born with it.

"Been awhile," Oni says, running her nails lightly down the polished surface of the counter and tapping once lightly as she reaches a certain drawer. She makes a fist and hits the drawer, popping it open. Inside is a small brown bottle with a cork, sealed with red wax. "I have last time's order here for you."

Oni smiles sweetly as the other girl's hand falls on her own. There's a poison behind that sweetness, an ice wall that has only ever grown in size over the years. Zada has an edge to her that not many have, a sharpness honed by force over the whet stone that is the world. She makes for a good sparring partner and if there was someone that could cut through that wall, she stands a good chance.

"Readjustment you say," Oni echos thoughtfully. Her relationship with Zada has always been one of pure business, it does not extend past these walls, so it truly is of no concern to her. Except word travels fast in the underworld and the Viper's shop does not trade only in poultices and poisons, information is just a good a currency here as coin.

"The Vipers send their condolences," she says, believability suspended by her lack of solemnity, not that it mattered. In District One everything is for the greater good and the weak are trimmed off like fat on a piece of meat. It takes strength to survive a world like theirs and if you are felled then you deserved it.

Her hand shifts beneath the other girls, she pulls back, fingers gripping the waxen lid of the bottle like a vice. "Do I know that?" she whispers in a teasing tone, "You can't be lucky every time out there Zada, what happens if you don't come back and I'm left with an unpaid for order again?"

And there's danger there too, a rattle in her throat, a predator about to strike.

"New terms are payment up front, darling."

She smiles again, ruby glazed lips glimmering in the lamplight.