Elora Danan

Elora has experienced Pride exactly once before. Last year, she'd been totally caught off guard by it, thrown for a loop by the whirlwind of color and joy, flags she didn't recognize, clothes she had definitely never seen, at least not in public. Like so much else in Darrow, she hadn't understood it at all. She still isn't sure she understands it, really, at least not beyond the broadest strokes as they were explained to her at the time.

Those broad strokes are just all she needs to throw herself into it wholeheartedly. The how and the why of it don't matter a fraction as much as the result. As she's seen printed on an assortment of merchandise, love is love, and Elora loves love. That she's had only one real brush with it herself, an ill-advised fling-slash-engagement with a prince who was never really right for her in the first place, is beside the point. She loves seeing it, spent last year, once she'd begun to get the sense of it, delightedly taking in the sight of people celebrating who they are and who they love. It's a beautiful, joyous thing, the best possible reason for such an occasion. So, while she may not understand all of the finer points of it, she has every intention of taking part and helping others celebrate, too.

Over the last year and a half and change, she's worked at enough other events that it isn't difficult to reserve herself a booth for the day of the Pride parade. All she really has to take care of is the goods to sell.

Which is what brings her to the kitchen at Shion's place. Since the mansion's arrival, she's come to spend a lot of time here — for him, yes, but also for the kitchen, so much more spacious than the one in her apartment, where she's constantly running out of counter space or knocking things over. It's sufficient for a batch or two, but she needs far more than that for what she has in mind. All sorts of ingredients for cakes and cupcakes and cookies are in front of her now, a couple recently-acquired recipe books propped up as well. Lately, she's been experimenting with concepts she never heard of before Darrow. There seems to be a big market for baked goods that are vegan, gluten free, sugar free, or some combination of those, and she's practiced enough to feel confident while also still wanting to have the recipes as guidelines. If Pride is about people being able to love who they love, there should be no dietary restrictions on that, either.

And, on one stretch of counter, she has icing ingredients and mixtures in progress, an assortment of organic food coloring, and her phone screen pulled up to a page listing different flags associated with different sexual orientations. In the end, there will be cakes decorated to correspond to them. For now, she flits about the kitchen, relieved that fashion here makes it perfectly reasonable for her to wear a tank top and light knee-length skirt, her hair pulled into a messy bun to keep it out of her face and off her neck as the room heats up from oven use. Of course, as a thank you, she's already planning to set one batch of cupcakes aside for Shion and Sophie, both of whom she knows are around here somewhere. Whether they come in to keep her company or not (or just steal cake samples), she's in her element, and it shows.

Leave mail for Elora Danan here.

Somehow, the world keeps getting stranger. Elora hadn't even thought that was possible, but then, she was also having the same thought regularly before she went and found herself here, wherever here is. Darrow, apparently. She still doesn't get it. It wasn't so very long ago that she left Tir Asleen for the first time in her life, at least the first time that she knew of. She's gone so, so very far from home, farther than should even have been possible, and then wound up even farther beyond that, stuck and confused.

It's not just the trappings of all of it, either, though those certainly don't help. She doesn't have the first idea what a phone is, or why there are so many buttons on the oven in her apartment, and the first time she managed to turn her television on, she sat there transfixed, directly in front of the screen, until she wound up with a headache so bad it promptly sent her to bed. There's so much here that seems infinitely more magical than anything she's ever managed to do.

She would be fascinated by that — and she still is, really — except that it's also part of the problem. For so long, she was no one, wanting desperately to be someone; then, she was not only someone, but the someone, practically downright mythical, and wanting nothing more than to be back home in her simple life, where the most she had to worry about was burning baked goods or whether the boy she liked might like someone else. And no sooner did she embrace being that someone then she wound up no one again. She gives her name here, the one that still barely even feels like hers, and no one so much as blinks. It doesn't mean anything, leaving her relieved and desperately sad in equal measure.

At least there's still the one constant in her life: the kitchen. Confusing though her oven might be, the refrigerator is absolutely miraculous, and she knows no better way to shut her brain off when it starts buzzing with thoughts she can't manage to make sense of. This, she knows, and while it may have required some adaptation on her part, it's still the easiest thing to throw herself into. The only problem is knowing when to stop. She's already spent most of the money the city has given her on ingredients, and it's entirely too easy to let that turn into more than any one person can eat on their own. She needs all the stress relief she can get, though, and not long after her arrival, she found a place called a soup kitchen around the corner from her apartment building that feeds people who might not have the resources to feed themselves. She's already offered to go in and cook there, and to bring in anything extra she might wind up with.

There is, in fact, a lot of extra. It won't go to waste, which is the important thing, but still, she feels a little silly when she makes her way out of her building with her arms full of containers — Tupperware, she heard someone call it, which she thinks is a very stupid name — of muffins and other assorted things she's made. Abruptly, she decides that she may as well lighten her load a little. She'll still have more than enough to leave at the kitchen if she gives away some of the rest. "Hi, excuse me, do you want some muffins, by any chance?" she asks the first person she passes by, only to nearly double-take as she looks up, and up, at the man in question. "Whoa. You are... very tall."