Gilbert settled in, sliding himself into the seat across from his guest as Mr. Jeong began his tale. He studied the other’s handsome features, noticing every twitch and tick of the way he moved, breathed, and spoke. In Gilbert’s many years he had come across quite a lot of humans and he’d taken up a bit of a hobby creating personality profiles for them of all the silly details he noted that were not as obvious to the untrained, or uninterested eye. Mr. Jeong, for all his bluster, seemed like the type of character to want to present an easy-going, carefree facade even in the worst of situations. Gilbert admired this about him to a degree. It was cute, until it wasn’t.
His story made sense… with some gaps. Gilbert wasn’t naive enough to believe that Jeong was telling him the whole truth so easily, and besides— humans had their tells. A flicker of the pulse here, an indeterminate pause there. But the overall arc seemed rather more interesting than he’d anticipated to begin with. “That sounds awfully indecent, collecting boys,” Gil drawled with a chuckle. He collected a great many things himself but he’d never made a habit of keeping people around. He’d never had the patience. If they were all performers though… then: “What do you do?” he asked, interested. “Performance wise, that is?” It was all fine and dandy to call oneself a performer but to a real patron of the arts, who had spent the better part of the last hundred years a sponsor of this theatre or that artist, those words meant something.
The way Jeong said his name however, with his softened accent around the Germanic consonants, was soothing to Gil’s ear. He found he rather liked it in a way that was similarly quite indecent. He huffed a humorless laugh at the suggestion that he’d ever been married and took another sip of his drink. In the end, he merely replied, “I think the word you’re searching for is dowry,” with a grin. “And yes, I do hear that is one way to make one’s fortune.” Not that he needed any more money or had ever thought to acquire it by such banal means. “So in the end, you’re also on the hunt for a wife?” he summed up, tidily. How boring.
His story made sense… with some gaps. Gilbert wasn’t naive enough to believe that Jeong was telling him the whole truth so easily, and besides— humans had their tells. A flicker of the pulse here, an indeterminate pause there. But the overall arc seemed rather more interesting than he’d anticipated to begin with. “That sounds awfully indecent, collecting boys,” Gil drawled with a chuckle. He collected a great many things himself but he’d never made a habit of keeping people around. He’d never had the patience. If they were all performers though… then: “What do you do?” he asked, interested. “Performance wise, that is?” It was all fine and dandy to call oneself a performer but to a real patron of the arts, who had spent the better part of the last hundred years a sponsor of this theatre or that artist, those words meant something.
The way Jeong said his name however, with his softened accent around the Germanic consonants, was soothing to Gil’s ear. He found he rather liked it in a way that was similarly quite indecent. He huffed a humorless laugh at the suggestion that he’d ever been married and took another sip of his drink. In the end, he merely replied, “I think the word you’re searching for is dowry,” with a grin. “And yes, I do hear that is one way to make one’s fortune.” Not that he needed any more money or had ever thought to acquire it by such banal means. “So in the end, you’re also on the hunt for a wife?” he summed up, tidily. How boring.