It was Mid-November with a slight chill in the air and a 72% chance that it was going to rain. The precipitation hung over the city dwellers like a premonition waiting to manifest into truth; its spectacular glory of thunder and lightning was biding its time and building up slowly before exploding in a loud display of nature’s prowess.

The damp atmosphere made everything a little more sluggish and slow, wrapping and taking a hold of people like chains with a metal ball attached to their ankles. Time seemed to have decelerated noticeably if only a fraction. It was certainly a much needed change in pace to the city.

Yet up in the sky, the stars and planets moved at their regular speed. The heavenly bodies do not move in a perfectly circular orbit. They may be fixed in their path but they go about it in ellipses. It’s an odd way to move through space and carry on their constantly rotating dance around one another but maybe that was why she had such an affinity to them; it kind of made sense in a way.

It was perfectly imperfect.

That one perfect imperfection marred their status in her eyes, eyes that stared up into grey sky not looking for anything in-particular, eyes that were looking for answers. They worked in the wrong just like she did.

It was wrong for her, an attractive young woman, to be out in the dank and danger filled streets of downtown Los Angeles on a Wednesday night. It was even worse that she was in the shadows of an alleyway. The rank smell of garbage, piss, and vomit would have sent any other person running in the opposite direction, but she wasn’t just any person and she was no stranger to shady areas.

She was waiting for someone, checking the time periodically on her cell-phone and fishing into her coat pocket to find her silver cigarette case. Unlike many others she enjoyed her vice; the gradual decay that the tobacco offered, the accelerant to the inevitable, was a welcome friend.

Pulling the case from her pocket, she opened it and took out a fresh Marlboro. Her lips wrapped around the cigarette while she presented an engraved Zippo lighter and flicked it open with the skill of a seasoned pro; her graceful gestures seemed so out of place in the derelict area where she stood.