Sales Pitch

Participants:

candy_icon.gif leah_icon.gif

Scene Title Sales Pitch
Synopsis Candy is bored, so Leah tries to sell her some drugs. Like you do.
Date May 13, 2009

Central Park

Central Park has been, and remains, a key attraction in New York City, both for tourists and local residents. Though slightly smaller, approximately 100 acres at its southern end scarred by and still recovering from the explosion, the vast northern regions of the park remain intact.

An array of paths and tracks wind their way through stands of trees and swathes of grass, frequented by joggers, bikers, dog-walkers, and horsemen alike. Flowerbeds, tended gardens, and sheltered conservatories provide a wide array of colorful plants; the sheer size of the park, along with a designated wildlife sanctuary add a wide variety of fauna to the park's visitor list. Several ponds and lakes, as well as the massive Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, break up the expanses of green and growing things. There are roads, for those who prefer to drive through; numerous playgrounds for children dot the landscape.

Many are the people who come to the Park - painters, birdwatchers, musicians, and rock climbers. Others come for the shows; the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theater, the annual outdoor concert of the New York Philharmonic on the Great Lawn, the summer performances of the Metropolitan Opera, and many other smaller performing groups besides. They come to ice-skate on the rink, to ride on the Central Park Carousel, to view the many, many statues scattered about the park.

Some of the southern end of the park remains buried beneath rubble. Some of it still looks worn and torn, struggling to come back from the edge of destruction despite everything the crews of landscapers can do. The Wollman Rink has not been rebuilt; the Central Park Wildlife Center remains very much a work in progress, but is not wholly a loss. Someday, this portion of Central Park just might be restored fully to its prior state.


It is a warm, pleasant evening and the beleaguered park is a bastion of freshness and green, an island of noticeable spring at the heart of dour Manhattan. Leah has claimed a boulder near one of the walking trails that winds through the landscape, a little ways from the resevoir.

One shoe has been pulled off, abandoned on a tuft of overgrown grass beside her boulder seat, so that she can massage the bottom of her foot and let her gaze rove thoughtfully over the park's landscape. The shoes are pretty impressive, spike heels with an open toe and lots of thin black straps going this way and that, and apparently a mistake, from the blisters she's nursing.

Leah's toes flash with bright red nail polish in the dusky light of the sinking sun. "Fuckit," she mutters at them.

Candy is resting on her own boulder, but this one is much closer to the water as she looks into the depths. The woman looking into the depths of the water as she wonders what affect the radiation from the blast had on anything living in there. She eyes the calm surface, looking for mutant tentacled monsters that could be lurking and waiting. She shrugs her shoulders before she stands up, covering her mouth as she yawns.

"Out past your bedtime?" Leah's voice cuts across the quiet idyll of a near-summer evening, dry and blithe without a hint of pensiveness or, really, courtesy. The joke is lame. With the sun still nominally up, its rays glittering across the blue of the water and sparking off this scrap of metal in the strew of rubble that still mars the face of the park — it is probably not past anybody's bedtime.

Candy shakes her head as she looks over towards the woman. "Nope, just bored to hell," she says with a faint grin as she stands there. She stretches, a couple of vertebra in her back popping as she winces faintly. "I swear… more and more as the years go by," she mutters before she shakes her head to look at Leah, "What brings you out," she asks.

The arch of Leah's eyebrows arcs briefly higher, the curve of her mouth pressed in a thin smile as she breathes a snort past her nose. Ladylike. Dignified! "Business," she says, "and pleasure. Fancy that." She knocks her strappy sandal against the side of the boulder a few times, until a tiny pebble is unearthed from somewhere inside it. She picks up the pebble in her other hand, and holds it up to her eye, squinting past it at the much younger woman. "At loose ends, don't know what to do with yourself? School's out, noplace to play?"

Candy shrugs her shoulders as she looks at the older woman and says, "Something like that." She grins faintly before she says, "Pleasure, though? I don't think you'd be getting much pleasure from a long walk in those shoes."

"Pleasure in its many forms." Leah stretches out her leg before her, wiggling her toes. Her nose crinkles at its bridge, lips pursing as she peruses the length of her leg. "Not really from the shoes, though, no. What was I thinking." She draws her leg back in to cross over her knee, slipping the strappy sandal back on her foot. It buckles in a slim black loop around her ankle.

Candy hmms faintly as she stands there and says, "And what thoughts could be pleasurable enough to forgo the blisters on your feet?" She grins as she stands there, watching her as she looks at the heels.

"Feet'll heal," Leah says dismissively, switching the cross of her legs to start unbuckling the strap of her other shoe at her other ankle. She slants a considering glance across at Candy, smile slight and crooked, and fails to venture an answer. "So you out here looking for fun, is that it?"

Candy shrugs her shoulders as she says, "Pretty much, yep." She grins and stands there, watching the other woman as she crosses her arms. "Fun in all of its myriad forms."

Once the remaining shoe is unbuckled, Leah slides her foot out of it, drops the shoe to the earth, and starts rubbing at the pad of her foot with the palm of her hand. "I got a pretty good cure for that particular ailment," she says, lazy good humor glinting in her bright eyes. "Actually. Lack of fun, I mean."

Candy raises an eyebrow as she stands there and says, "Oh? What might that be?" She grins as she looks out towards the lake, before looking back at the woman in front of her, that smirk still playing across her lips.

Tipping her head slightly, Leah affects a look of thoughtful consideration. "Got five bucks?"

Candy tilts her head to look at Leah as she says, "I might. What do you need five bucks for?"

"Well, what, you think I'm going to give it away for free?" Leah laughs, and wiggles her toes. She picks up the shoe again to slide it back onto her foot. She carefully secures its strap, and then rises in a fluid unfolding of limbs, dipping two fingertips into the front pocket of closely fitted navy jeans.

You know those single strips of stamps you can buy from the post office? This is just like that. Except that instead of a patriotic design or an image of someone long dead or of a comic book character, Leah's stamps are stamped with a design off a very fancy set of mah jong tiles. She tears off a single stamp and holds it up between thumb and forefinger. Its image is of a stylized red pagoda.

"Five bucks," she says, humor only a barely perceptible gleam in her eye. "Hours of entertainment. Eight'll buy you two 'cause they tell me it's safer with a friend and I'm responsible like that, but I can't break a twenty."

Candy giggles faintly as she stands there and she shakes her head, "Sorry, I don't do drugs," she says as she shakes her head. She smiles before she says, "I don't like the way they tend to mess with your brain."

"Yeah?" Leah looks surprised, and then looks at the upheld stamp. It doesn't appear any less innocuous to her eyes now that its nature has been brought out into the light. "You doing something in particular with your brain?"

Candy shakes her head as she stands there and says, "Nope, nothing particular, I just don't like taking stuff that messes with my perceptions. Usually ends up with me beg in a rather sticky situation."

"Your loss," Leah says firmly. Although she doesn't put the stamp in her mouth in the middle of Central Park. Possibly she does have a sense of proportion after all. Instead she slides it back into her pocket with the rest of its strip. "No better cure for boredom than paying Lucy a visit. Let me tell you."

Candy shrugs he shouldrs as she says, "Honestly, at the moment, visits to Staton island tend to cure boredom fairly quick as well." She grins and winks as she stands there, watching the other woman still.

Leah gives Candy a look of perfect blankness, as of narrow-eyed puzzlement, and follows it with a slight shake of her head, a light crease touching her brow. "Pick your poison, I guess," she says, and makes a pfft noise, breath hissing past the touch of her teeth to her lower lip. With the drugs safely hidden from view, the dealer kisses her fingertips, and then flicks a broad gesture of her hand, wrist flipped.

Candy mmhmms as she nods her head and says, "And I prefer a poison that leaves me fairly clear headed." She grins as she stands there, before she says, "So what else do you do for fun, might ask?"

"This and that." Leah laces her fingers together and stretches her arms above her head, arching her back as she stretches. There is a crackling noise. "The other thing." Her hands fall, and she bounces back on her heels. Her gaze flicks away, restlessness reflected in the twitch of her expression. "You got the time? I think it's getting late."

Candy shakes her head as she stands there and says, "Afraid not." She shrugs her shoulders a little before she turns, "Take care, I suppose. I wish you luck on your… endeavors." She grins over her shoulders before she begins to walk.

"Thanks," Leah says. Narrowing a glance after the younger woman, she shakes her head slightly, and then starts off at an easy lope — despite the perils of her footwear — in the opposite direction, over the footpath. "Loads."


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