Private Making the best of a bad date

The banshee look wasn't super flattering, but they could just push past that. Maybe she could dig through her purse in a couple minutes for makeup wipes.

"I came out for a dinner date," Aranea said. "And I'm not going to let some invisible monsters or whatever ruin that. For me or you. So, let's get going. I already have a rooftop in mind."

She'd lead Tilly around the corner of this block, then point to a building about a block away. "It's that one," Aranea said. "They actually had kind of a rooftop bar thing, but I think it either went out of business, or the people who owned the building got into it with them, or something. Either way, they still have a couple of tables and chairs up there, and I don't think anyone would bother us."

Aranea waited for Tilly to assess any invisible landscape that might become a problem.

Aranea smiled back at her. Progress was being made. They could still salvage this evening.

"I could shift and carry you up pretty easily. Or if you don't like that idea we can take the fire escape in the back." There were a lot of reasons she might not like the idea of being carried up. It would probably end up being a princess carry, and that might feel a little too intimate for a first date. Or, Tilly might be arachnophobic. Hopefully she spent more than two seconds reading Aranea's dating profile.

Aranea smiled and climbed up after her. It was a medium sized building for this section of town - maybe 6 floors tall. Not too terrible of a climb.

The roof had seen better days. Just like Aranea said, it had tables and chairs. It even had a couple of booths for them to sit in, by the edge, where they could lean against the usually waist-high wall to get a decent view of the city below. Aranea would set their food down on one of these. The cushioned seats and the table were clean enough that they wouldn't mess up their nice clothes. The table had a hole in the middle of it for an umbrella that was no longer here.

If they looked off to the side, they would see the bar itself, along with the more indoor part of the establishment, locked away behind metal grating. TV screens and other fixtures that used to be here had been removed, leaving screw holes, wiring, and dusty outlines in their wake. It might have been a pretty nice casual place before it was gutted.

The view was still nice, though. That part didn't get gutted.

"So, think we can make this work?" Aranea asked. Then, seeming to remember something, she fished through her purse and found a few makeup wipes, which she offered to Tilly.

Aranea flashed her a smile. "Much better. Besides, scars are sexy. And yours look a lot more striking this way." She winked.

While Matilda was tending to her makeup, Aranea had started setting the table. Plastic silverware, paper napkins that sometimes threatened to blow away in the wind, single-serving salt and pepper packets. They'd be eating out of the to go containers. "The food's still warm," she remarked.

"What were we talking about before we left? I think it was something about either shapeshifting or podcasts."

This was the moment when the date really started going sour for Aranea. Tilly was trying really hard to be polite about the fact that Aranea was a freaky spider lady, but Aranea knew what this was. Tilly thought she was a freaky spider lady. The invisible monsters thing Tilly had going on wasn't ideal, but she could work around it if she felt like Tilly was worth the effort. But, why try so hard for someone who thought your true self was repulsive?

"Well... being able to deal with it is better than being freaked out, for sure." She tried to spin that comment in a more positive light.

"But... yeah. So, I want to be able to look human long enough that I can pass for one in the field. There's a couple ways shifters can learn how to take new forms, and I'm going with a pretty old school technique. The details are pretty dry, but... a lot of it involves just meditating on my connection to the human form. And by 'form,' I mean the magical concept."

But Tilly probably wasn't familiar with that, so that might call for more explanation. "Uh, like how... some magic users, and also Plato I guess, believe that reality is built on these unchanging ideas or concepts called 'forms.' So, for example, every time you see a fire, that's just an expression of the Form of Fire, and every time you see a human, that's an expression of the underlying Form of Humanity. That's the thing I'm trying to connect myself to."

She started to feel like she was going into too much boring detail.