Re: Kingdom Hearts: Night of Fate - Trial Run
With just a thought, he pulled the clouds into existence. The simplest, slightest motion was all he needed—a wide upward stroke—and wispy cirrus clouds crept into the scenery. Careless brushstrokes turned his whim into reality, wrapping a fluffy white halo around the mountains.
A simple fix. Nothing too heavy, nothing too bold...
A quick daub of titanium white, and a few more strokes yielded a few more clouds.
The mountain chain still held precedence, drawing the eye before anything else. Now, however, the whitecaps had a nice feathery wreath around them; they didn't want to tear off the canvas anymore.
Nothing, the painter thought,
is quite so jarring as a mountain without something to clothe it—just enough to look decent. Indeed, mountains without mist often had the unnatural sharpness of a postcard, ready to stab the viewer in the eye as he opened his mail.
He smirked.
Not my
mountains. With just a few brushstrokes, the piece had finally come together as Bryant hoped it would. He pushed the easel, with care, off to the side. Its legs tracked new lines in the floor's accumulated dust, which stirred and glittered low in the window-light. The mountains took their place beside tranquil lakes, flowering plains, and quite a few pine forests—in short, everything except the Kismet shoreline which Bryant saw every day. As always, that window view reminded him that he ought to paint the prime-real-estate scenery for which he had paid so much.
Not yet. Sometime, when the sky is just right...
That was his default self-excuse, and it had proven good enough to stall him for ten years. To fifty-eight-year-old Bryant Seyward, present owner of the old house on the hill, it was a luxury to spend time in imaginary places—wherever the spirit of the day took him.
But today, the Kismet sky was just
wrong. It was the darkest Bryant had ever seen it—but more than that, it was churning and twisting upon itself, impatiently. Unnaturally. The clouds, so different from the white puffs on his canvas, promised a return of the storm that first welcomed him to the islands. He thought back to that awful day, so black it could have been night...
His mouth tightened into a hard, flat line.
And I still need to visit the store.
___________________________________________________
Mr. Seyward was a peculiar man, but well regarded by the community. He lived alone in the town's oldest house—no spouse, no children, no pets, and few visitors. But his isolation was not the product of his personality: Bryant Seyward read and wrote, played and listened to music, and painted. He pursued each of these hobbies to its fullest, waking up early and working through the day at his own pace. A month's work produced at least three new additions to his private gallery—or his library, or his music stand.
It kept him mostly indoors, and his company limited to the few who crossed his artistic path. He had made gifts of his paintings, though; he always donated some original compositions to the local music festival. So his presence was felt quietly throughout the community.
Most would have called him a homebody, if they didn't see him walking across town every week. The trim little man would don his wide-brimmed hat, throw a light jacket around his shoulders, and tote his cloth shopping bag to every store on his list. Bryant took a leisurely pace. He never passed a familiar face without a word, and he had the rare ability to maintain a conversation with just about anybody. Even residents of the other side of town—where he bought his paints—occasionally stopped to chat with the grey-bearded man in the brown leather hat.
Today, though Seyward was his same amicable self, there was no conversation to be had. Everyone had already taken note of the storm, and holed up inside their homes. The trip to the paint supply store was a lonely one, for once.
He passed the time by cycling through the list of paints he needed—and all the different nature scenes he had in mind.
Yellow ochre for the trees . . . some phthalo blue, titanium white. Bryant turned another glance back at the clouds.
Perhaps a bottle of charcoal black, too.
___________________________________________________
"—Well, I'll certainly have to bring them around, one of these days! I see a wall that looks awfully bare."
"Sounds like a plan, Mr. S! Can't wait to see it!"
"So long, Samantha. Try not to get caught in this weather—close early, if you can."
Bryant waved farewell to the store clerk, and shouldered his bag full of paints.
He proceeded back down the street, out of the dim little plaza, past a few deserted residences. Given the surrounding area, he was half-convinced that the paint shop got by largely through his patronage. Even now, he could hear the makings of another street brawl, somewhere in the surrounding maze of streets. Voices were raised, and the clash of metal against metal pealed out above the buildings.
Bryant turned the corner to the sight of a gathering crowd—all red-clad youths, huddled together on the far end of the street. One shouted with the grandstanding air of a leader, at a poor boy clutching his face in pain. The Kismet gangs were, to Bryant's mind, little more than a negative outlet for teenage energy...
...but he saw a sliver of green betwixt the red shirts and bandanas: Chizuma, a girl with whom he had chatted on several occasions on the way to the grocer. He knew from those few conversations that she and her friends were far from violent criminals. But seven-to-one odds wouldn't favor even a hardened felon.
No good will come of it . . . but, come evening, we'll all have more important things to worry about. Bryant started off in their direction.
He reached into his bag blindly, and retrieved a tube of paint.
Charcoal black.
With the graceful clumsiness of a stage actor, Bryant let the tube slide out of his hand, across the dry pavement. It landed squarely between the legs of a crimson-clad youth, giving cause for all of them to look back down the street.
"Oh! I'm sorry about that," he called out. "Would you mind tossing that back to me, son? I'd like to stash all this away before the storm hits." His tone was light and chatty, as always. Not once did it verge into anything approaching reprimand—or even an awareness of what was taking place.