South

The southern part of the city has a chic family-oriented sort of charm to it. Here, small locally owned shops run rampant, neighbors often know each other by name, and the monthly socials are an event not to be missed. In the South, children can often be seen safely playing in the park or on sidewalks and in the weekends, families often take to the beach to enjoy the warm waters surrounding the city.

What You'll Find Here

Ascension Center of Equitation
Hyde Park
Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium
The Outskirts
The University of Sacrosanct

every time you smile I can tell you're just showing your teeth [open]


Posted on May 30, 2017 by rian shrike
South
SHRIKE

Six months into the city and it still felt like a cage, skyscrapers rising up like bars. "It's like man-made mountains," a friend told her once from the back of a taxi, but there was nothing of her mountains in this. It smelled, in summer, like piss and trash and baking metal. The only wildlife she saw were pigeons and rats, and she always had shadows like bruises beneath her eyes.

But this was where her prey was.

Still, there were times when she needed to feel grass, not concrete, below her feet. And so she'd meticulously cleaned her guns, painstakingly shined the stocks and barrels, and lovingly put them away and walked to the train station. The ride to the south suburbs was thirty minutes on a train and twenty more on a bus, but Rian hadn't seen the sunset for three weeks. There were always too many buildings in the way. Tonight, the creatures that claimed the shadows could wait.

The bus sighed to a stop and she stepped off, the rubber sole of her trainer sure on the sidewalk that ran alongside Hyde Park. She wore no weapons, but the way she walked, the way her gaze scanned the early evening summer, suggested they would have been redundant, here. And anyway, there was no one of note: only joggers, dog-walkers, pairs of women pushing strollers with ponytails bobbing. These were not her prairies, her buttes, but until her quarry was brought down it was all she had.

Knowing this, she stretched, pulled her red hair into a ponytail, and took off at an easy lope down the packed-dirt path through the trees.

When she heard the scream, she froze like a coyote for the length of a heartbeat before sprinting toward the source.

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