Aiden didn't normally put much stock in celebrating birthdays, but even he had to admit there was something just plain wrong in having them completely ignored. Especially after being driven out by family or running away or however it was that Persi had come to live at the mansion. The details weren't important.

Fixing the issue for his roommate had been really awkward, though, especially since he'd only found out - entirely by accident - a few days ago that Persi's birthday was even approaching. He had next to no money and knew about as much about the city. That was where the internet came in helpful, and he had finally found a solution. The best part? It only required bus fare. Or, in case of emergency, a rather long walk.

So he dug up everything he needed, including a few more quarters out of the living room's couches cushions and the little bin of assorted change out of the laundry room - it was so easy to forget a few coins in a pocket and never notice until someone else heard them rattling around - and then went to corner his roommate and drag him off. He in no way hid where they were going, but he didn't mention the birthday-specificness of it. And he did actively try to hide his uncertainty over whether or not the crazy statue he'd found was at all interesting. Trying to sort out all the pieces, and just looking at it rather than actually trying to draw it, put enough strain on Ai's head.

Persi had decided that he really didn't like his birthday this year.

Normally, that was the exact opposite of his conclusion. Normally birthdays meant having to deal with lots of annoying relatives and friends from church and school, but it also normally meant cake and presents and people actually paying positive (or, pretend-positive, anyway) attention to Persi and Irri for once. New art supplies especially were nice, and a lot of why Persi looked forward to it.

Except this year there wasn't anyone around that was socially obligated to pretend to care about Persi, and no Irri, so there weren't going to be any new art supplies, or anyone forced to be nice and pretend they liked Persi. Instead, Persi just got to be overwhelmingly conscious of the lack, and especially the lack of Irri and the fact that technically he didn't even know if Irri was alive. It was far too tempting to try sneaking back home to check on Irri now. He could probably just sneak into the area, right? If Irri was still there, there would be a birthday party, and so there would be cars and balloons and everything. Except... if there weren't cars... Persi would rather not know. Irri could have just been stubborn and refused a party, right? Or finally convinced their parents to let him have his birthday at a movie, since they'd only need to pay for him and not Persi this year? So even if there weren't cars that could be a good thing. And Persi didn't have to be recognizable; if he just cut his hair off no one would ever recognize him. Though that might make getting back into the Mansion difficult. And Irri would be able to recognize him, and that would be really bad if he did see Persi....

That was the possibility that managed to prevent Persi from trying to sneak back home over the next few days, but the idea still kept sitting in his head and tempting him. So he wasn't too inclined to question why Aiden wanted to visit a statue on that particular day, or at all. It was a semi-effective distraction, and that was all Persi cared about.

The statue, it turned out, was actually a much more effective distraction than expected. Mostly because it was much stranger than expected, but Persi had no objections to that. Instead he started circling the statue, trying to decide what angles to draw it from, and what to turn the drawings into.

It was a big relief to see Persi's evident interest. Aiden found himself a bench to sit on and pulled out his own sketchbook to pass the time. He had planned ahead for a lack of conversation, after all, so he was hardly going to have to sit around and do nothing.

He didn't really pay attention to the statue as his pencil flicked over a blank page. He did occasionally glance up to make sure Persi wasn't trying to do anything stupid, but mostly he just did his own thing. His own thing just kind of happened to involve a lot of grimacing and erasing the various arrays of failed lines and circles he tried setting out on the page. Two scenes warred in his head, and he really didn't want to focus too much on one of them. The other was infinitely more pleasant and easier on his nerves, and things would probably find a way to get really nasty really fast if both he and his roommate were too much on edge. Hopefully this would at least distract Persi enough for a while.

Isabel wasn't entirely sure how she'd ended up where she had, but it figured that her aggravated, distracted wandering would land her outside of some kind of church. Just another thing to indirectly blame Zephyr for, since he seemed to be the source of all her irritation lately.

She'd meant to head off to Central Park but she seemed to have overshot it a little and wound up among a collection of statues outside of Saint John's Cathedral. She'd have doubled back relatively quickly if the largest statue at the center of the plaza hadn't caught her eye.

It was the ugliest thing she'd ever seen. She could see and understand all the different components that made it up, but they didn't make any kind of sense when mashed together as they were. She could maybe understand pairing an angel with the sun and moon, but the sculptor's apparent fascination with giraffes didn't exactly fit. And to put the figures on top of a large crab and a dead body made no sense at all.

The more she circled it, the uglier it got and the less sense it made.

Okay, so Persi was definitely going to be replacing things in the statue. Normally he liked just editing them more, but giraffes? The crab he could make demonic, but giraffes were just... giraffes. They didn't look scary. What to replace it with, though, was harder. Not much could replace a giraffe's shape without obviously being a giraffe, so it would probably have to be multiple things. Some sort of stone spike maybe could be in the neck's place, and....

...On second thought, actually, Persi could just not draw that statue today. Or ever. Ever would be just fine. He froze, then backed away around the statue to where Aiden was and grabbed for the other boy's arm. "Leaving. Now." He didn't quite dare whisper since that would be kind of suspicious and attention getting, but he also didn't really dare speak loudly. Since his voice was mostly occupied with panic, it didn't make much difference anyway.

His scene started to settle down into something entirely different from either the stressful or neutral themes that had begun the war. Buildings, nice straight lines. Birds, small shadows mostly given shape with a few flicks of the side of his pencil tip. Rain,

giant dark line that tore through the pain and dug into the next.

Aiden looked up at Persi, fully prepared to glare the heck out of him and make him rue his idiocy, but his expression killed that thought. "Leaving? Um.... okay?" He went to put his sketchbook away, was reminded of the damage, and glared at Persi anyway. All right, all right, where was the rest of that bus money...

A mechanical rumble caught his ear, and he looked up after a moment. "Er... I think that was the bus. Might take a bit for the next one to come around." The change was in a pocket somewhere...

Isabel had only made it around the statue two or three times without successfully figuring out a single thing about it when a nearby movement distracted her gaze. She'd been so wrapped up in the train wreck of a statue that she hadn't noticed the pair of boys nearby. They didn't look at all familiar to her, though at least one of them seemed to be rather distraught by something in her general direction. She was pretty sure she knew what was stressing him out.

A smirk worked its way onto her face as she stopped circling the ugly structure and shifted her attention to the odd pair. one was clearly agitated by something, while the other seemed to be rather clueless. That would probably change once he figured out the source of the nervous one's distress.

Crossing her arms, she watched the pair for another moment before deciding that they'd be far more entertaining than trying to figure out the poor excuse of a sculpture that she'd stumbled across. "Aw, this thing's not all that scary, is it?" she called, her smirk widening as she did. Maybe accidentally wandering so far wasn't all that bad after all.

Why was Aiden not hurrying? He wasn't just not hurrying, he was being slow, he should be running. They both should be running, or at least moving away from the mass murderer, not hovering idly in place near her.

...Bus? What did--Persi did not care about the bus, the bus was entirely irrelevant. "I don't care about the bus, we need to get out of here n--"

"Aw, this thing's not all that scary, is it?"

Persi froze for a second, then since he was already standing, turned. Yeah... there really wasn't any good option for what Persi might see with that setup. At least she didn't have weapons yet that Persi could see? Not that that couldn't change in a second, but....

Well, he already knew not answering her wasn't a good idea. "Not unless I start thinking about what was going on in the artist's brain when he made it. We kind of have to go, so, uh, bye?"

Aiden had only heard so many voices in his life. Not very many of them were quite as innocently bone-chilling, so to speak, as the one right now.

He should have listened to Persi and just bolted for it. Even if he technically agreed with what the distressingly infamous woman had just said - the statue really wasn't that scary. Weird, sure, not scary.

Isabel was scary.

Isabel was beyond scary.

Time to repeat his strategy from last time and hope it held up as well with repetition. And... a great deal more recognition of his existence from the extremely valuable criminal. Yeeah time to go. His fingertips brushed against the forgotten coins in his pocket, but he was already on his feet. "Er, yeah. We're going to be - er - late if we hang around any longer." He shot Persi a rather desperate glance, though most of it probably wasn't visible with the sunglasses.

"Didn't I just hear you say you missed your bus? Doesn't that give you some time to kill?" Isabel replied with mock innocence and a brief glance in the general direction of the bus stop. She knew very well what their hurry was, but it wasn't as much fun to acknowledge it quickly.

The pair were rather comical as they grew more agitated and panicky. Neither seemed to really know what to do with themselves or each other. Their goal was obviously to get away, but they seemed to be having trouble with how exactly to do it. She figured she might as well give them a little push and see what happened. Nothing too threatening. She simply separated herself from the statue and strolled a few feet closer to the pair.

"Yes but... there's, um, another bus." That was reasonable, right? There were plenty of buses. There was probably another than went near the Mansion. And she didn't know they were going to the Mansion. Dear God Persi hoped she didn't know they were going to the Mansion. "But it's further away so we need to go now sorry."

And then she moved. Toward them. Only by a few steps, but still! Persi's immediate reaction was to jump back, but there was kind of a person and a bench behind him, so instead he ended up just rocking back on his heels and looking terrified.

"Next bus is a couple blocks away, so we should hurry," Aiden said quickly, tagging onto Persi's train. He'd lie and improvise as stupid an array of stupid ideas as he had to to get them away from Isabel alive. There was actually another bus, though, wasn't there? At least one that would get them a ways away; they could get transfer tickets, so that wouldn't be an issue. They just had to get on a bus without Isabel. Right.

... Approaching Isabel.

Bad. Bad bad bad. Aiden reacted before thinking things through entirely, and was already a few steps away before his brain caught up with things more than to panic about how bad it was that Isabel was moving towards them. Something - Persi's wrist, apparently - was clenched in his fist and his feet were pounding the pavement. AWAY. Now.

It didn't take long at all before Isabel got a reaction to her movement. She thought for sure the boy with the colorful hair was going to flip himself over the bench he backed into. She was rather disappointed to see that he simply swayed, panicked as he was becoming. Falling ass over teakettle would have made him a whole lot easier to approach.

Unfortunately his companion hadn't decided to follow his lead and instead of jumping backward he'd darted off to the side, dragging the first boy along after him. She had to laugh at the sight of them scrambling away, but only for a moment. It had been a while since someone had outright sprinted away from her and while it amused her there was a problem with their retreat. She hadn't given them permission to leave.

With a ghost of a smirk she called up her six spindly, spider-like limbs and moved the chase down and circle around them. It was easy enough to out-pace someone when you had more legs than they did. Getting them to stop required a little more effort.

Well that was unexpected.

Apparently Cafas's training was working a lot better for Aiden than it was for Persi, because there was no way Persi had any chance of getting out of that grip. Unless, possibly, he fell, which might very well happen if his feet didn't manage to catch up to the rest of him soon.

Though on the other hand, trying to run and stumble and be dragged at the same time was keeping his eyes down, and not on the snowflakes forming in front of them and melting on his face....

...Or on Isabel. Who was in front of them. Somehow. And apparently also a spider.

Well, shit.

Persi might be successfully following him - kind of, or at least not falling on his face and dragging Ai down with him, so successfully enough - but that didn't solve the problem entirely.

Why did the crazy stabby murder person have to be able to grow spider legs?

Really. How was that at all fair.

He broke sideways, jerking Persi along behind him hard enough to wrench his own shoulder. The faint glimmerings of white weren't nearly enough to fix it. He'd have to rely on evasive manoeuvres. Basically, run like hell and try to lose the bone spider thing on corners. Getting into some populated building would probably help. He tried to drag Persi to where he could ideally talk to him and not spill the entire plan to Isabel. "Indoors," he hissed.