'Mates'?

Red sighs, his voice drafting about the room. Kloey knows the moment she sees him that he is annoyed. "Why do humans wear colorful dust on the lids of their eyes?!"

She rubs her own eyes, having just woken up from a well-needed rest of three days after two days of being unable to sleep. The Shadows certainly have a way with hypnotism. "Wh... what... what are you talking about, Red?" she mumbles, still staggering.

He huffs. The spikes on the end of his shoulders stand up like hackles. "For a ridiculous reason, humans wear 'sparkly powder' on the lids of their eyes, and they adorn their eyelashes with a dark substance to make them more visible, and they encircle their eyes with some other type of black substance." He gags, and she wonders, weirdly (mostly because of her overactive imagination), whether or not he can vomit, seeing that he hasn't any organs and therefore has no stomach. "It is uncanny and disgusting!"

She walks over to him, socks padding silently on the cold black floor. "The ancient Egyptains wore makeup... or som'un like that..."

The leader of the Shadows sighs, slumping. "You are still half-asleep, aren't you?"

She nods. "I'm trying not to be. You always get angry when I don't give you answers that make sense in perfect English..."

"Wake up." He taps her on the shoulder, and it's just enough to rouse her from her sleeping state. "I do not understand something."

"You don't understand..." Curiously, she peers at the holograms that Red stares at, ones that sit atop the glass table from sometime back in the '40s. "...women wearing makeup?"

He shakes his head. "It makes no sense to me."

"Probably because you have no facial features other than glowing eyes and an invisible mouth," she says.

He looks at her demeaningly. "Our facial features exist for understandable purposes. Eyes for mesmerism and teeth for the injection of Shadew."

She sputters. "You inject Shadew into--?!"

"Hush," he snarls. "Why do humans wear makeup?"

She self-consciously feels her neck, aware that, at one point in her life, she may have been bitten by a Shadow (by Red, she thinks!), but simultaneously focuses on trying to answer Red's question. "It's som'un about looking pretty for other people... like... uh, attraction?"

Red squints. He wonders, for a moment, if the little human knows what the word "attraction" means. "Humans wear makeup for the purpose of attracting mates?" he mutters to himself, with no intention of Kloey hearing.

But she does hear. And when she does hear, she laughs, covering her mouth. "'Mates'? What-- what-- 'Mates'?! What do you mean ‘mates’?!”

Red finds a new sensation, as he stares at the human in front of him: "ignorance." Kloey’s ignorance is what causes her to laugh. She doesn’t know. And this, he finds mildly hilarious.

She watches as he laughs, as he tries to keep his amusement to himself but only succeeds in making it more noticeable. From the frustrated look on her face, she does not know why he is laughing.

"What, seriously?" She squints at him. "What ‘mates’? You mean, like, married couples?"

At this, he begins to laugh at twice the volume, and Red must press a hand against the table to keep himself upright. He manages, underneath his grumbling, somewhat terrifying chuckle, to choke out a few words. "Little one..." he mumbles in his big, "leader-of-the-shadows" voice, "...if the humans have not already told you, then I do not think I am... acquitted to play that part."

She sees him smiling. His sharp teeth glisten in the dark.

Kloey heaves a sigh. Red's snickering about the topic of "attraction" is not exactly what makes her so angry (although, she does wonder what it is that he deems so funny), but rather the fact that Shadows inject the Shadew into children with their teeth, almost like vampires. Perhaps it answers one or two questions-- why Red's breath smells like blood and why the leagues of his army are so fascinated with the thick, crimson substance-- but it only raises more.

Ones that bother her with every fiber of her being.

"Red..." she starts hesitantly, fumbling with her fingers, "did you actually... y'know... um..."

He bites his lip to keep from releasing a frightening laugh. "Did I what?"

She glares at him. His dripping sarcasm is one thing about him that she does not quite appreciate.

"Did you really... bite?!"

Red shrugs his shoulders. She sees him start to lose his happy expression and shrivels when his piercing eyes return to their staring, horrifying state. Of course now is when he decides to feed off her fear.

"Perhaps I did."

She leaves the room, terrified. She has been bitten by a Shadow.

"M-- maybe I'll just go back to sleep for... three days..."