2019-04-30: Yourself Is Pretty Cool
- Log: Yourself Is Pretty Cool
- Cast: Xantia, Lydia Seren
- Where: Luca - Port District
- Date: April 30, 2019
- Summary: While Xantia works on her Light Training, Lydia appears, having been working on a different sort of training. Several critical failures on Conversation rolls happen and a very unusual word pops up, but in the end..
==========================<* Luca - Port District *>========================== Luca is the largest port and second-largest city in Spira, located the southern tip of the archipelago's largest island. Its location as the central port for Spira's surrounding islands has turned Luca into a thriving economic hub; Besaid, Kilika, and a dozen smaller islands all send their goods to Luca for sale, and even the Al Bhed are known to trade here from time to time. The port district is an immense, bustling area. The largest port in Luca brings in ships from across Spira -- from small fishing ships from Besaid to Al Bhed salvage ships to large sailing vessels from Bevelle -- and a massive market to match. A large seawall keeps the waters at bay, with piers extending out past the seawall into the water. BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CIlRCYnZcg
<Pose Tracker> Xantia has posed.
Sunshine!! ...is probably something most Filgaians are pretty sick of. But Xantia is not most Filgaians. She's come out to the seashore just outside of Luca, all decked out in combat gear as is the norm these days. Stretching out, she takes a nice long whiff of the salty air before declaring, to no one in particular: "Alright! Training begins... now!"
And then she just lets herself fall over backwards into the sand. Eyes closed, limbs splayed out, smile on her face, not about to move from this spot any time soon. Is this really training...?
Perhaps for Xantia it is. It's not like relaxing has ever been a particularly easy thing for her to do, maybe that's what she's training to be better at? Either way, this is her life now, and everyone else will just have to deal with that.
But at the present time, remaining completely still for very long is still a bridge too far. Before long, her right arm comes up to stretch skyward, left hand used to shield her eyes from the sun. Didn't take long for her thoughts to drift towards Filgaia again. Even if she can't see it in the sky right now, she ended up literally reaching for it, slowly closing her fist before dropping the arm down again.
She lets out a soft sigh. It's been a pretty good vacation (she thinks, it's not like she has much of a frame of reference), but in the end, it still feels wrong to be so far away from where it's always felt like she belongs.
"...I'll be back soon. I'll find a way."
Still talking to nobody. Or is she...?
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Find a way to what?" Lydia says WHERE DID SHE COME FROM?
Well it seems she came from down where it's wetter where everything's better under the sea beause she has come up wearing a swimsuit and is kind of hovering in the water where she's at. Has she fenagled some way for her to actually swim?? Well she's mostly wading water right about now.
"Find a way to eat the whole horse?" Lydia asks. "To ride the shoopuf?"
"Riding the shoopuf is good." Lydia says. "I give it an S for shooper."
A moment of pause.
"Hey Xan. Nice digs."
She does not come out of the water.
<Pose Tracker> Xantia has posed.
"To go back to Filgaia, of course," Xantia answers before actually thinking about it. This is why it's risky to share secrets with her, these things happen.
It takes her a moment to realize that she in fact answered an actual person rather than her own thoughts, upon which her eyes fly open and she springs up to a seated position. She blinks a few times while processing the true sequence of events here, then she smiles and raises up a hand. "Oh, Lydia, hi! I wasn't actually trying to dig, I'm trying to figure out Light!"
That presumably makes sense, Xantia doesn't seem to think it needs more explanation than that. Instead, she smoothly moves on to comment on the other suggestions. "Eating a whole horse is easy. And I've already ridden a shoopuf, yeah, that was pretty good!" A pause, before Xantia Logic connects the dots. "Eating a whole shoopuf, though." It's worth considering.
Then she cants her head, only now considering Lydia's current activity. "Are you swimming?" With the follow-up question coming almost immediately: "Can you?"
Wow, rude. There's a reason why she assumed otherwise, though. She didn't need to have actually seen any of Lydia's previous attempts to arrive at that particular assumption.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Oh yeah, I can't wait to get back. Or at least back to Meribia. Man, Meribia was the life! I could sell all sorts of things and make a lot of money and in the span of like a day all my money is wooorthless. Not that it's even in my hands right now." She groans before blinking twice. "Huh? What are you talking about?" Yeah she did not follow Xantia's train of logic and has gotten run over by it. "Maybe you've seen a little too much light, Xan. Also what's to figure out about light? It's the sun's way of saying hi."
She sloshes her way forward so she is standing on the beach rather than wading in the water. "I was tired of like not being able to swim so I have been taking lessons. Hoping to become a great blitzballer! Trying not think about all the weird ass problems I am stuck dealing with."
Xantia then mentions she is thinking of a dire crime that cannot be forgiven but Lydia has an opportunity to preempt this tragedy and she takes it!
"Don't eat the shoopuf! The shoopuf is doing its best! The shoopuf is kind to all people!" Lydia protests.
"No eating shoopufs. They are friends to all." Lydia adds.
She may need a moment to realize Xantia knows she should have trouble with swimming somehow.
<Pose Tracker> Xantia has posed.
Xantia only laughs a bit awkwardly at the subject of Meribia. It was worse for her back there, for various reasons. Nothing to do with Meribia, it was chiefly due to a bad experience upon arrival and just... having a bit of a different perspective at the time. Makes it kind of difficult to agree on it 'being the life' over there. All she can think of to say is, "Well... at least it's easy to make money here." In her experience.
On the matter of too much light, she vehemently shakes her head. "Oh no no, not at all, if anything I haven't gotten enough light yet! I mean, I know what it is, but I don't know what it... is, you know?" Everything's probably already super clear now so it's not like she needed to say anything beyond that, but she does add one more thing anyway. "I don't think I can learn how to do light unless I really understand it."
Xantia's mastered Lightning and Fire, so obviously it's time to work on a new element. That's how anyone would think, right? It makes as much sense as considering eating every animal you see.
Xantia is quick to raise her arms defensively when she gets yelled at for doing that. "Oh, no, I was just thinking out loud, I wasn't really going to!" It's probably not super convincing. Especially after she adds, "You've got to wonder how it tastes, though." Yet she insists, again, "But, not actually going to try to find out!"
Don't worry, Xantia tells no lies, the shoopuf is safe.
Only afterwards does she get back to swimming, casually and not at all meant to smooth over this sudden unexpected talking to she got. "...Anyway, that's good that you're learning how to swim! I could just sort of do it, so I don't know how hard that is. But it's probably not easy for you, you must be pretty heavy."
SUPER RUDE
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Whaaat? How have you been making money?? They won't give me the time of day here unless I go to the Al Bhed and half the time I think they're lookin' at me like I'm a piece of meat. Machina...meat."
She crosses her arms. "I have no idea what you're talking about or what you mean. I was complimenting your outfit and you were like 'I need more light!' and I don't get what you're talking about. Are you saying you're trying to show more skin? You already show a fair amount of skin, Xantia, you can if you want I mean but it's not like you aren't doing that already okay?"
Of course in Xenogears, if you're using Ether, Light and lightning are the same thing so. You know.
Lydia is not convinced.
"No I don't wonder what a shoopuf tastes! It probably tastes terrible! Because you hate to kill a shoopuf to eat it and that's terrible. Like regret. Yeah, I bet it tastes like regret."
Xantia calls her ...
...
...
Heavy.
"...What makes you say that?" Lydia grumbles, crossing her arms.
<Pose Tracker> Xantia has posed.
Xantia doesn't initially get it, scratching her head about how it could possibly be hard to make money around here. "You just... do things for people, and they give you money. I don't even have to ask for it, people are just really generous like that." But once the word 'machina' enters the picture... "...Oh. I guess it's true that they don't like technology. If you look like you have it, or... are it, they probably wouldn't like that very much. Or if you were covered in blood, people don't seem to like that a lot either."
Just shoving those things together as if there's no difference. There isn't really if you ask Xantia, if people react to it the same way it's basically the same thing, right?
With this talk of her outfit showing skin involved, Xantia mentally loses her way also, showing in her sudden blank expression. It seemed like that came right out of nowhere, she doesn't recall her outfit coming up before at all. "Umm... I never said anything about that. But, thanks for the compliment...?" What even is this conversation anymore, Xantia has no idea.
All she knows is that Darkness is an element, so obviously Light is its own separate thing too, and she wants to do that. There's a Seraph of Light and everything!
Xantia looks pretty disappointed when Lydia concludes that a shoopuf must taste terrible, voicing this as "Awww..." If she wasn't convinced to leave them alone before, she must be now. Although, she does add out loud, "...I wonder what regret tastes like." Oh Xantia.
And oh no, now Lydia looks offended by what she said about swimming, too! What is going on?? Frantically, Xantia tries to explain, "I just, I only mean that your body would weigh a lot because of what it's made out of! Like, a single nanomachine barely weighs anything, but when there's so many of them, well, it's still a whole bunch of metal, you know?"
In her panic to smooth things over, she doesn't even realize that she just said a word she's never used before.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Uggh that's drifter money." Lydia says, shaking her head. "I'm a merchant Xantia. I'm talkin' 'bout money made through selling and buying shit." She stares openly for a moment. "Y--yeah, generally I try not to be covered in blood. It tends to not work out well." Not that she has much room to talk having been a merchant with an 'asteroid' for a head for a while so, you know. "Do you normally go around places covered in blood? Whose blood is it? Yours? You should wash up first. Also try to avoid being covered in blood. No matter how you slice it it's not a good look."
She steps out onto the beach.
"What? I did. I said you had nice digs, remember?" She taps the side of her head. What's with Xantia today!!
"You said you weren't going to eat a shoopuf so maybe it's good that it doesn't taste good?? Unless you wanted to imagine eating it." Her cheeks puff out a little. She is starting to wonder if this is how Ivan feels when he's talking to her.
"...How do you know about that?" Lydia asks. "I called 'em tiny robots when I talked to you didn't I?" She tilts her head to the side. "Because I was pretty darn sure you wouldn't know what a 'nanomachine' was. I don't know what a nanomachine is, really. ... Uggh, this is probably about how you can just fix them huh?"
She shakes her head. "Guess you're remembering stuff. Anyway, yeah, that's what makes it hard, but it's not actually about weight. Like--whales can swim and all, I just gotta reshape...shit....in a way...that... Whatever without turning into a puddle."
<Pose Tracker> Xantia has posed.
"Huh. Do you really need to make money that way?"
It's an innocent question, Xantia genuinely doesn't understand. Lydia seems perfectly capable of making Drifter money from where she's sitting. And if you can make money hauling cargo or punching fiends, well... money is money!
Xantia scratches her cheek, seeming a bit embarrassed about the Covered In Blood Incident, which is almost certainly a thing that must have happened if she brought it up. "Well, I didn't know that at the time. I'd just eaten, I figured I could just go to the nearest town and wash up there. But they kind of... chased me away."
Even without the details, one can imagine that must have been a particularly messy dinner.
"'Digs'," Xantia repeats, in a way where you can hear the quotation marks. "That means 'outfit'? No, that can't be right, it has to be plural, so... 'clothes', then! Is that right?" She looks so proud of herself for having figured that out. It may be easy to forget that Xantia is like this sometimes when you're not around her all the time.
Xantia finally decides to get to her feet, stretching herself out before casually batting at the sand remnants on her back. "Well, yes. Imagining eating things is the next best thing when you're not actually eating things." Ivan might explode if he tried to figure out the way Xantia thinks.
She stops mid-cleaning when Lydia points out the unusual word she used, just freezing in the position she was in. These things happen sometimes, but it never gets any less strange when it does. She slowly straightens, to look back to Lydia.
"...I don't know," she can only honestly admit. "It's... probably something I remember. From... somewhere." It's really, really frustrating to just know unusual things, without knowing why or how. It doesn't feel like she'll ever truly get used to that.
She's still a bit in thought when Lydia continues, just nodding a bit when told it's not a matter of weight. "I see, so that's not how it works..." Clearly she doesn't know everything. Funny how simpler things can sometimes be harder for her to understand.
She looks up though, at the mention of turning into a puddle. "...How would you do that? You have a metal skeletal structure that remains even when everything else is burned away, I don't think you can just deconstruct that whenever you want."
It's only due to the earlier misunderstandings that she realizes that might have been a bit insensitive, and she looks away. "...Sorry, you probably didn't want to think about that again."
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"...Dude." Lydia says. "People can't tell the difference between animal blood and human blood and honestly even if it was animal blood it would still be kind of offputting." She gestures forward. "I'm sorry they gave you such a hard time since I'm sure you didn't know any better but yeah I can't entirely blame 'em either. They probably thought you were gonna go around hurting people--and even if they did know differently, they'd probably be disturbed to see someone walking around covered in blood. It's just how it is. Luckily I bet they wouldn't even recognize you if you showed up now as chirpy and friendly and not covered in blood as you usually are."
She must have killed her prey pretty messily if it got all over her like that. She wonders what it was. Then she decides she really doesn't want to know.
"It's slang." Lydia explains. "Anyway, uh." She trails off. "It's not like I always have one. I mean, when I was shot in the head my legs melted the heck away, 'skeleton' included so." She shrugs her arms. "But it's back now. I don't know. I'm not some super smart nanoscientist like you I guess. All I can do is do my best and hope it works out. And I totally saw Emeralda turn into a puddle and I don't want to be a puddle okay. It's just too weird."
She shrugs again when Xantia apologizes. "Ehh. I don't but....well, whatever. Talk about what you want? I'm not your boss."
<Pose Tracker> Xantia has posed.
"It was... just a misunderstanding," Xantia remarks on that incident, with some difficulty in phrasing it so euphemistically. They called her a monster. She had no idea she'd done anything wrong. It was bad. But Lydia ending that on a hopeful note helps. "You think? Then maybe I should go back there sometime! I'd feel better if it really did turn out better this time."
As for what happened... imagine any given Disney princess scene involving woodland creatures that are curiously drawn to her. Now imagine that the Disney princess is really, really hungry.
She nods to the word 'slang', she knows what that is. She just hasn't mastered overly many examples of it. Just as casually, she nods to the notion of Lydia's legs falling apart from being shot in the head. "Well, yes, that can happen, it's just not something that's supposed to happen. It'd be hard to make that happen on purpose. Or by accident."
Being called a super smart nanoscientist is definitely not something that's happened before, and something that basically everybody would agree doesn't fit Xantia's description at all. She even agrees on that herself, looking pretty surprised about that claim, and shaking her head in denial. "I'm not smart at all, I don't even... know what I'm saying, not really. It's just... some things just feel to me like they would make the most sense if they worked a certain way. I don't know why that is. I don't even know why I said the things I did. You should... you should probably just forget I said anything."
She's barely even stopped floundering to put some nuance in those claims before she zeroes in on a name. "Oh... you met Emeralda? And she turned into a puddle, just like that? Huh... that is weird." But not baffling as it would be to most people, evidently. Xantia saw enough to already have her suspicions. "I wonder if she knows why she can do what she can do..."
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Yeah though uh. Bring a friend just in case they front or somethin'." Lydia suggests.
"Yeah well I also grew like seven arms recently or something so maybe I'm not doing what I'm supposed to do or what I'm supposed to do isn't what I am supposed to do." She blinks a few times. "Honestly the more I think about it, the more rough it gets for my thinks so I try not to think too much about it."
"Well I mean you are an amnesiac. Maybe you were a super smart nanoscientist in your past life or whatever. Point is, you clearly know more about this than I do and I'm like decently smart so like--you know--"
Shrug. Shrug shrug. Another shrug.
"You're really a sensitive person huh?" Lydia asks, sitting down on the stand staring out over the sea. "Well I guess I get it. Me too, really. I guess." Shrug again. "But you're not gonna hurt my feelings so easily. You've looked out for me plenty."
She glances towards Xantia. "Oh yeah she's friends with Janey and Mikaia. She can do anything I can do and more, and what's more she makes it look all super casual like. It's as natural to 'er as breathing. It kinda makes it stand out how... how unreal it is to me, even now, even after everything. I can't do it like that."
<Pose Tracker> Xantia has posed.
"Sure! I wouldn't like going by myself, anyway." True for just about anything Xantia does - she'd prefer not doing it by herself.
Not thinking about things too much... that's not exactly Xantia's strong suit. Just now she started to panic just considering she might be somebody who doesn't match her current self-image at all, that was plenty to prompt a fight against a possible identity crisis. As such, she insists, "I just... know things. But just knowing things doesn't make you smart. I don't understand most of what I know, often I can't even do anything at all with it."
She shakes her head. "It was wrong to assume that what makes sense in my head must be true for you, anyway. It's not like I know all the details, right?" ...right? She kind of hopes she doesn't know all the details. What would it say about her if she knew exactly how to recreate the experiments performed on Lydia?
She steps closer to the shoreline as another thing she can't reconcile in her head comes up, but that's not so much out of protest as it is due to not understanding it, a far more common occurance. "Sensitive? Is that what I am?" She looks out over the ocean for a moment before concluding with a shrug of her own, "I just don't want anybody to hate me." She can't imagine anyone else feeling any different.
She smiles faintly, adding in regards to Emeralda, "I know a little about having special powers that feel completely natural. I only started to question them later. So, if she ever has the kinds of questions that we've had to deal with..." She looks to Lydia. "She can count on me. I hope she can count on you, too."
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"You can't make the world like you, Xantia." Lydia tells Xantia. "All you can do is be true to your heart. And then, some people still won't like you. Ever!"
She smiles ruefully. "But if you like yourself, it's not so bad."
She pauses for a moment before giving Xantia a pat on the shoulder.
"But I like you, okay? So you don't have to be so bad about being yourself 'round me at least. I mean sure I think you're weird sometimes, but--" She offers a thumbsup. "It's not a weird I dislike, okay?"
She stands herself back up. "I mean I guess I understand being yourself when you don't really know yourself can sound a bit counterintuitive... But your spirit isn't so easily changed. So, um, a lot of people like you I think. That's what I observed. So. Don't be afraid of yourself! Yourself is pretty cool."
She pauses and adds, "I should get goin', but it was nice seeing you again, Xan. Thanks for the tip, too."