saw the dark side of the moon {Red}

[Nick Wilde]

It was a nice night, Nick thought. It felt a little weird, going to a party, when he still wasn't entirely sure what the situation was here, or whether he should be rushing back to Zootopia, although as far as he could tell, there was no way for them to be doing that just yet. And to be honest, he'd sort of been hoping he'd see one or two specific people here. People who had made this place make just a little bit more sense so far. He grabbed a pair of beers out of one of the coolers that were sitting around, and started making the rounds, checking through groups of people to see if anybody seemed familiar. Just as he was starting to think he might have to make a brand new friend here tonight, a flash of white hair caught his glance out of the corner of his eye and he adjusted his heading to approach her.

"Hey," he said, holding one beer bottle in each hand. "Was kind of hoping I'd see you here. Been a weird few days here, hasn't it?" Nick wasn't bad at small talk, he was very good at talking his way out of bad situations, but when it came to actually conversing with people he might or might not be trying to impress, things got a little more complicated. He didn't want to confuse her, or talk her in circles so she forgot about some questionable thing he did, he wanted to actually talk to her, and initiating that was a little more delicate than just barging right in.

He realized he hadn't opened the beer, or even offered it to her, which might be kind of rude, so he shifted both bottles into one hand and dug his keys out of his pocket, isolating the bottle opener on one of the keyrings. "Sorry, there we go, want a drink?" He opened the bottle and offered it to her.

[Red Riding Hood]

She'd managed several quite pleasant encounters here so far, and while it wasn't completely enough for her to let her guard down, it was still enough for her to maybe relax just a little bit. This was the real test, though, this was the first time she'd been around this many people all at once.
It was probably the first time she'd been around this many people since... well, just about ever. She'd been to village fairs and carnivals but they were always much smaller than this, and even then she tended to avoid them, knowing she wasn't welcome. She didn't like staying in larger towns, it usually meant more people to potentially turn on her, but she didn't really have much choice here. So here she was, in this crowd of people all laughing and smiling and happy and she hadn't the first clue what to do. The overwhelming wave of sounds and sights and smells almost had her frozen in place.

Then a familiar voice came out of the ground and she focused her senses on it, an anchor in the waves crashing around her, and she turned to Nick feeling oddly grateful. She wasn't used to being so relieved to see someone, but she also wasn't used to somebody wanting to see her, so apparently it was new experiences all round.

"Hi," she said in return, watching him open the bottle and catching the sharp mix of hops and alcohol released as the cap came off. She didn't drink a lot at home, wanting to keep control of herself, but a drink or two wasn't that bad. "Thanks," she took the bottle with a faint smile and took a sip.

"Not bad."

[Nick Wilde]

She looked even more lost and uncomfortable than Nick felt, and that was saying something, because he was still fumbling around in a weird body. But she also looked like she was glad to see him, even if she didn't say much, and that pleased him. He took a sip of his own beer. "Yeah, not too shabby. Pretty fizzy." Of course it was fizzy, it was beer, but the sensation of it on his tongue was yet another thing he wasn't used to in this body.

He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. "So, crazy party, huh? I could be way off base here, but you don't look like you're having all that much fun yet. Maybe it was his own uneasiness that made it a little easier for him to detect hers, but he knew that look, he thought. He knew that look because he was afraid it was the exact same look he'd been walking around with on his own face. Everyone here seemed to be so glad to be here; it was obvious that a lot of them hadn't seen each other in a long time, but so many of them clearly new each other, and that was a little intimidating to somebody who had come through to this place in the middle of a day of work and hadn't known what to expect.

"I don't think I asked you before," he said, trying to at least make conversation with one of the few people here he was acquainted with, "what did you do before? Like, back at home, before you came here?"

[Red Riding Hood]

"Yea," Red agreed, taking another sip, it had more fizz to it than the beer back home, which was darker and heavier and could probably be better described as ale, and she found it was actually quite pleasant in comparison.

"What gave it away?" she asked with a snort of amusement, well aware she probably looked as much like a deer in torchlight as she felt, but she was more relaxed now, with just him to focus on, allowing the rest of what was going on to wash around her a little more easily instead of being swept up in it. She didn't even know where to start having 'fun' here, there were so many options and most of them either involved being sociable - which she was not very good at - or things she'd never even encountered before.

"Odd jobs, mostly. Where I could find them. Hunting and the like... I mostly tried to keep to myself. What about you?"

[Nick Wilde]

Nick tilted his beer back, drinking roughly half of it before wiping one hand across his mouth and looking back at her. "Oh, that's easy," he said, grinning, "I noticed you looked lost because you looked exactly like I was feeling. But don't worry," he added, "totally not obvious to anybody who wasn't also at about a negative five on the fun scale."

He hesitated just slightly when she turned his question back around on him. He should have expected that, honestly, that was the next logical step when somebody asked you a question like that. But now that she'd asked, he suddenly wondered what relationship she had with law enforcement. He imagined that in some places, cops might be pretty rough on werewolves; as a predator, he knew about as well as anybody how rough that kind of thing could be.

"I uh, I actually was...am still, I guess, a cop." He took another sip of his beer. "It still feels weird saying that, and I'm not even new to it anymore. I was the first fox to do it, though, so that's..." It was what? Was he trying to impress a werewolf with the obstacles he'd overcome in his own life? That felt kind of lame just thinking about it. "Anyway, it's a living, and I get to help people, so that's cool."

[Red Riding Hood]

"Good to know," Red found herself smiling a little more, mimicking his action and downing a good chunk of her remaining beer. She'd seen the coolers all over the place, there were plenty of drinks to be had.

"That's impressive," she complimented, because honestly it was. While she didn't really have a frame of reference for the whole 'first fox' thing, it was still enough to indicate there was some kind of prejudice or trait that meant foxes weren't considered good or appropriate for the job, and being someone to overcome something like that was something to be proud of, whatever the situation... well, maybe not whatever, she was the first pre-teen girl in her village to hunt a deer, at the time it hadn't been that exciting.
"Helping people is good." she didn't have much problem with law enforcement in itself, the guards and sheriffs of the kingdom where she lived were not inherently bad people as long as she kept to herself, and she mostly did. Magistrates and the like within individual villages could often cause problems for her, but that was down to people, not jobs, and Nick didn't seem like that type.

"Most people don't really want my help."

[Nick Wilde]

The beer, which was Nick's second, was starting to settle nicely into his bloodstream, allowing him to relax a little. Or maybe that was just the company, who could say, really? Maybe both. And her saying she was impressed, or at least, that his accomplishments were impressive, that didn't hurt either. He glanced around, then took a little step closer to her, not even really thinking about it, just moving on instinct, like being closer to her suddenly felt like a more secure position.

"I wanted your help," he pointed out. He had, although he hadn't really sought out her help and they had mostly just run into each other by accident that first meeting. Still, he had asked her for help and she had given it to him, even after the awkward bit where he didn't realize she was going to be naked. "Or, at least, I definitely didn't mind it, after the whole...clothes, thing. You were very helpful. I'm still not sure what's going on here, but I have a better idea than I did before I met you."

He glanced over at her beer, noticing that she, like him, had made some decent progress on it. "Do you want me to grab you another one, or something different? I was gonna go get myself another one of these, but I think they have a lot of choices."

[Red Riding Hood]

"Oh," Red looked at him, a little startled. It wasn't often that somebody admitted that kind of thing to her, and while she'd met a lot of people who were a lot nicer to her than anybody back home, most of them had been... well... she got the impression they were like that with everybody. There was a familiar guard she sensed in Nick that made her just a little more inclined to trust him when he said things like that.
Or maybe that was the beer. The beer she quickly emptied to hide her surprise, giving her just enough time to regain her composure.

"Well that's good." it wasn't her most thrilling of statements, but then she'd never been that great a talker, and her flat tone probably could have used a little work, but she was trying to be genuine.

"Yea, another would be great," she agreed, figuring she had nothing else to do, and it would be an excuse to spend more time in his company "Do you think they have any mead?"

[Nick Wilde]

Nick was discovering that it was a little harder to guard his facial features in this body. He figured it would be something he'd figure out eventually, but he was used to keeping his fox-face aligned in a number of expressions that were supposed to convey this or that. He was good at that stuff in his fox body, and he was pretty terrible at it in this body. Half the time when he talked he could feel his weird half-furred face twisting itself into the strangest expressions, and he couldn't even seem to stop it.

The beer wasn't helping with that. He gave her what could only be described as a big dumb grin when she agreed to go and get another drink with him. Was that like...a date thing here? Not that they would be on a date just now, because they just happened to be in the same place, but he wondered what the protocol was around asking a girl to get drinks with you. Also, did people care what species you were? Or were originally, now that everyone here was human?

"I did not see any mead," he admitted, "but you know, I did hear a guy yelling about it, I think. Want to come over and check it out with me?" He was not entirely sure he'd know mead if he saw it, if he was honest.

[Red Riding Hood]

Red was a little surprised at the smile on his face, it wasn't that she'd never seen anybody look at her with that kind of expression before, just as with his statement she'd encountered particularly smiley people since coming here, but it was somehow different coming from him, and there was just something about it... the others, like Olaf, had caused her to be guarded, wary and a little annoyed. The light buzz from the beer might have something to do with it, but when he smiled she found herself smiling back, just a little.

"Okay," she nodded, she definitely wanted to spend more time in his company and if he did manage to find her some mead, so much the better. Perhaps letting go a little and having a drink was something she could do here... maybe. And even if it wasn't, just a few drinks wouldn't hurt right? Just to loosen her up a bit, that might make the crowd easier to deal with. "Sounds good."