Open A day in the park

[Ozette]

The day was fine, and Ozette sat on a marble bench in a small park she had stumbled across in her wanderings. The park was circular in shape, with a grass lawn and various flowering bushes. Four marble benches surrounded a small fountain, in the middle of which was a statue of a nude woman weeping tears of blood into a red pool. The statue was the spitting image of Ozette, and so she took this as a sign and had sat down.

Ozette took up a pencil and began to write in a notebook made of odd scraps of paper joined together with three ancient brass rings. First she made a careful if inexpert sketch of the fountain, then underneath it wrote 'Blood is ever more abundant than tears.'

She stood suddenly and drew her Jitte, and began to go through a series of postures and moves, none of them overtly hostile, moving over the neatly cut grass. She felt the movements of her muscles and the rightness of the angles of her weapon. Bending deeply at the knees with feet spread wide, she made a series of scooping gestures with the weapon and then lunged forward, thrusting at the belly of the world.