bullet_dance___prologue Mister Brightside A slight fear of fire. Ayden Greene's house conveyed a sense of the institutional over the sense of "home" Tile floors, Furniture made of glass and metal with an absolute minimum of anything that might be flammable, and to some, that meant an absolute minimum of anything that might be comfortable. Greene was not a man without an aesthetic touch and attempted to make up for the lack of softness in his surroundings with an abundance of color. In fact, for reasons he would not make clear to anyone, nor for any reason he could satisfactorily explain to himself, the color-scheme literally encompassed the visible spectrum from the western half of the house to the eastern half. The kitchen ran from red, gradually shifting to orange and then yellow with the guest bathroom and the first guest bedroom being deepening, blueing shades of green as they progressed eastward. The master bath was tiled and painted in a deep indigo blue with the only contrast being the pale blue porcelain of the various fixtures and their chrome accoutrements. The master bedroom and the larger of the two guest bedrooms were a rather decadent shade of purple, which Ayden selected because he considered it to be vaguely erotic. It was also the one place where his phobia did not affect the comfort of the room's appointments. Books lined every available inch of shelf-space. Books that some people might have considered sacreligious or simply strange mixed in with volumes of classic literature and a neatly kept row of dirty magazines. The bed was a cleanly shaped black wooden pedestal with a down mattress, which save for a pillow, the fitted sheet and a folded cotton sheet, was ostensibly bare and looked to have been largely unused. In the backyard, a one-room structure stood unobtrusively by the gate. Roughly the size of the master bedroom, and decorated more for practical matters than aesthetic ones, the cottage had small door on both the west and east sides. While the rest of Ayden's house was open to anyone who came calling, the contents of the back cottage were a closely, if not furiously guarded secret. What friends he had managed to keep in spite of his exceedingly secret and inscrutable personality were prone to cracking jokes about how many bodies he had lying about in there, which he laughed off because, while he was a killer, none of his kills was anything anyone was going to miss or want creeping around, and besides, when he killed something, it didn't tend to leave anything so perceptible as a corpse lying about. Ayden had personally laid the tile on the floor of the room, black tiles of specially cut obsidian and onyx and white marble forming an encircled pentagram. In addition to the tile work, he had tiled the walls with the same white marble, but inlaid into the white marble were onyx glyphs, runes and symbols from Chinese, to Norse runes to symbols which could not be traced to any earthly point of origin. Something was coming. The kind of something that mothers told their children about as cautionary bedtime stories to scare them into obedience, but the reality was that most of these things didn't really give a fuck whether you were a good kiddie or a bad kiddie, a child or an adult. If it meant to eat someone, it was going to eat someone unless it was stopped. Stepping into the back cottage, Ayden opened the teak-wood box that sat at the narrowest point between the two southward points of the pentagram. It was time to talk to The Head. 050126 what's it to you? who go blather from