Divided Attention

Chaper 6: A Concerned Type of Purple

I noticed that she was watching me.

The lady across from me was staring at me very intently, then would look away when I noticed it. But every time I did, she was definitely staring. I wondered why she was so interested in me, and I had an uneasy feeling about her. Just something about her made her made my skin crawl.

Kitty and Maki were still very much asleep. My arm had fallen asleep from Kitty laying on both my arm and my shoulder, but she looked so cute that I didn't do anything to move. I just kept her close, knowing that at some point in time, the moment that we were sharing would soon leave us in the blink of an eye.

I was looking out at the back of the wagon a lot of the time. The road was bumpy with a dirt road leading us to our destination. The bushes and trees along the path seemed to get thicker and thicker. They also kept getting darker and darker, from a lush, bright green at the very beginning to a dark and mysterious green. If I had to say anything, it would probably be the fact that I was getting nervous.

I never knew what the Venom Plains were; all I knew was that it was an unforgiving stretch of land that was not very friendly to those who dared to come between it and another land. It stretched from the Human Kingdom to one of the forests that lead to the Feather Kingdom. I had deduced that the dark spot that I saw when we were trying to escape said Human Kingdom was the Venom Plains. I was not excited to go there.

From what I understood, there was a small village of friendly yet abnormal creatures that would give a longer but alternative route around the plains so that there would be no harm. That was the part that I was relieved about. Maybe we could possibly get to the Feather Kingdom without too much of a trouble. My gut  did back flips though. I had a feeling that it wouldn't exactly go as planned.

Eventually, I turned back to the lady across from me. Her green eyes were piecing and beautiful, but they had a sort of sadness behind them. I had the feeling that she had gone through a lot, and that it wouldn't exactly be the best to pry. They also seemed so fragile, like they might break into tiny pieces at any point in time. Maybe the things she's seen and experienced broke her more than I realized.

But I was still curious as to why she was staring at me, so this time I decided to ask her about it.

"Why do you keep staring at me?" I asked.

She seemed to get flustered and shifted in her seat, playing with the hem of her cloak.

"Oh, uh, I-I'm sorry. I've just... uh... Well I've never seen blue hair like yours and I was fascinated." She seemed uneasy talking to me, like she didn't expect me to notice her. Maybe she had never really had much conversation.

My hand that wasn't around Kitty's waist raised to my strands of hair that would keep Maki's bead in place. I had never really thought about how different my hair was to others, but when I thought about it, I hadn't really seen many people with different colored hair. Only the soyep on board the pirate ship and Kitty had that kind of hair.

"I guess it's just normal to me at this point. I don't exactly mind it. I just don't have the ability like others of my kind to change my hair color unless I dyed it with  different kinds of flower powders."

"Have you tried?" she asked.

I nodded. "Yeah, I've tried. It actually stays for quite a while, even when I'm in the water swimming around. It kind of just stays, but turns back to blue after some time."

The lady tilted her head to the side curiously. "What are the others of your kind? As in what race?"

"I'm a soyep. Water people."

She mouthed the word wow with her eyes wide. "I've never met a soyep before. All I heard was stories of an underwater kingdom that was beautiful, but I had never actually met one."