2019-05-10: A Day without a Murder or a Sale

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  • Log: 2019-05-10: A Day without a Murder or a Sale
  • Cast: Lydia Seren, Ivan
  • Where: Guadosalam
  • Date: May 10, 2019
  • Summary: Ivan and Lydia have the closest thing you can have to a chance encounter when you're technically following someone around, and uncomfortable conversations ensue.

================================<* Guadosalam *>================================

Guadosalam is an underground that sits on the path from the north bank of the Moonflow and the southern trail of the Thunder Plains. The city is found inside an underground cavern, where the walls and walkways are composed of the twisted roots of the trees of the Moonflow's north bank, giving the entire area the faint resemblance of an underground swamp.

Guadosalam is the ancient home of the Guado, a race of Beastman-appearing humans who, until recently, lived outside the grace of Yevon. This changed with the coming of Lord Jyscal Guado, who brought his people into Bevelle's fold; following Jyscal's death, his son Seymour - also a Maester of Yevon - now rules the Guado people both temporally and spiritually.

BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmcCd1eCJq4
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

Guadosalam is some weird city that's in a cave and has tree vines everywhere and has furniture directly incorporated with tree trunks and other such fantastic imaginings. Lydia has never been anywhere quite like it, having largely grown up in a desert in the Baskar Colony. Even in her adventures, while she has certainly run into TREES and FORESTS she hasn't really seen any society directly incorporate their living space with trees like this.

As is normal for Lydia while she's trying to work, she drags a long cart behind her with a small collection of low-grade enchanted rings with her in an attempt to sell them to travelers. To avoid too much scrutiny, she has drawn on her poncho that guards most of her features but anybody who knows her can readily recognize her by her horns without having to bother looking at her face.

"C'mere! C'mere!" Lydia says. "Get some lost magical rings for c h e a p!" Lydia shouts. "A special one time offer as part of my 'First Time In Guadosalam' special!"

She is not having much luck, it seems, since even like this there's a distinct sense that Lydia is an outsider from Spira and those that take one look at her face can recognize someone who isn't really from around here.

And after the failure of Operation Mi'ihen? Suspicion of foreigners is greater than it was before, not less.

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

Things that definitely didn't happen today: Ivan spotting Lydia and being unable to decide whether to say hi to her and kind of trailing after her for a stupidly long time and accidentally following her to Guadosalam and finding out Guadosalam is a thing. Yeah, it's good that that isn't how he ended up here, because that would be pretty dumb. But at least he's not here to kill her, either way! He's just scouting around like usual and here he is in an underground cave city. Cool.

Ivan hasn't really seen a place like this either, and so there are plenty of interesting sights to look at while he tries to decide whether or not it would break one of his various draconic and overcomplicated internal codes to say hello. For one thing, she kind of looks like she's hiding from someone, or everyone, although she doesn't seem to be doing anything more questionable than misrepresenting the preciousness of some rings. Maybe she doesn't want to be aknowledged. But also she's shouting at people to come over! Maybe he should just go over. But then she'll know he didn't do everything in his power to avoid her! Life is complicated. Maybe he should just go back and report to the Guard.

But it happens that he's not skulking in the shadows or hanging from a roof or anything this time, just pretending to be on about other things, so eventually his meandering and indecisive path carries him into her line of sight and he realizes he has to say something or it will be obvious how weird he's being.

He raises a hand awkwardly, looking displeased with himself. "Hi. Did my sister ever find you?"

His voice is kind of croaky. He's got another cold.

<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

Lydia hasn't found out about his attempt to kill Catenna otherwise she'd start to feel like maybe Lubov doesn't take her seriously and might demand Ivan to try and kill her because she's worth it dammit which would, admittedly, probably be even dumber than following Lydia to Guadosalam because she wants to sell shit. Lydia is not some kind of ninja warrior either--her power comes almost purely from her mediums and whatever nonsense was done to her body to make her the way she is. She has no slick instinct to catch a decently stealthy assassin following her and her thoughts are pretty much in her own head so she doesn't even end up looking backwards or anything.

She is in fact apparently getting FRUSTRATED that nobody is buying (but to be fair this may be the wrong crowd to peddle to, Lydia). It's hard after creating a guild network in the Glenwood/Meribia area to have to start over from scratch and Lydia is having difficulty getting the gumption going even before failing to make any sales.

She considers Xantia's words about trying to just go out and fight Fiends. It's certainly a job that pays something but if she does that then she might as well just hang up her merchant title and admit full on that she's just an adventurer who can't make money legitimately by robbing mysterious chests and selling them to people who weren't willing to go out and do the work or exploit traderoutes to buy low and sell high.

Ivan's nefarious scheme works... almost too well because she doesn't even look up first as she is muttering about currency exchange rates under her breath. It isn't until Ivan actually speaks that she blinks and turns around (and nearly into) Ivan.

"Ah--?" Lydia says. "Oh!" She smiles. "Hey Ivan! Whatcha doin' in Guadosalam?" Does Lubov want to kill someone in Guadosalam?? "Oh yeah--I ran into Talia. We talked a bit. Did some recovery work around the Mushroom Rock Road with the rest of Wayside."

She does not mention cake so Talia must have failed you. This does not stop Lydia from quirking her head suspiciously and asking, "Did...someone dump you in a river again?"

It's honestly a pretty reasonable guess.

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

"Nobody to kill in Guadosalam. Today's not a killing day."

Maybe it should be. He's got a backlog, now. He never had a backlog before. But his failure with Catenna was, in its own way, more harrowing than the two successive disasters with Jacqueline Barber, and Ivan is stubborn and relentless, but not quite that stubborn and relentless. He needs some time to re-gather his strength, physically and psychologically.

"Yeah, I got thrown into the ocean." He reports this very sullenly, even though he would be the first to admit he deserved it.

It does not escape his notice that Lydia didn't mention cake. He simmers about that a little. Come on, Talia! The entire point was that this is not something he can do himself!

<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

"Nobody to sell to either." Lydia says. "So I guess it's not a business day either."

She snrks a little into her hand as it turns out she guessed right (well sort of but close enough). "I guess being tossed into an ocean for you is like a day without a sale for me. Next time you try to off Jay you should see if she has some cold medicine for you."

She starts closing up her cart which, in practice, is putting a tarp over it and still dragging it around because she does not really have anything that can really lock up the goods besides the honor system.

"Oh." Lydia says, looking back to Ivan. "Do you want to see dead people? Apparently you can see their spirits all floating around in the Farplane. I might go check it out since it's a day off now and I am not sure there is anything else to do in this dump. I don't know how it works but apparently that's the entire reason to go to Guadosalam."

She considers Talia a bit more. She worries a lot about Ivan but she has already determined that pointing out this basic fact doesn't really seem to help so she sets it aside. "Oh, Talia rode the shoopuf with Rebecca. I thought you should be kept notified of the various shoopuf combos going on out there."

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

"It wasn't Jacqueline Barber this time. It was Catenna."

After a beat, he adds, "She's still alive." He figures this might not be necessary to specify since he already admitted he got thrown into the ocean at the end of the encounter, but maybe it doesn't hurt to not leave people hanging about whether you killed their friends while they weren't looking. He assumes they're all friends, anyway.

"She tried to talk me out of it instead of really fighting, too. Are all of you guys just kind of crazy?"

Ivan blinks at her with the invitation to the Farplane, looking a bit disturbed at first before he figures out what she's talking about.

"You can see souls floating around everywhere, supposedly! It's just a place with lots of those firefly things that turn into monsters, right?"

He hasn't been to the Farplane, but he's heard enough about it to dismiss it out of hand.

He furrows his brow at the Shoopuf-related update. This isn't helping his concern that there is some hidden meaning behind Shoopuf rides on Lydia's end.

<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

"I don't know I haven't been in." Lydia tells Ivan. "But yeah my guess is that it has a lot of floaty sparkle things inside. I know it's not the greatest of ideas."

She blinks a few times as her brain rewinds a bit. Wait, what? Catenna? "W--why is he sending you after Catenna now??" Lydia asks. "Oh wait no she was probably at that thing with Red Priestess Mauri too... Does that mean Cyre is next?" She frowns. "I don't know how to feel about being left out here. All my friends are getting murder attempted and I'm not." She crosses her arms. "I guess I should be....glad? I'm...not? Getting murdered? But I can't help but feel a bit disrespected even if, yeah, I didn't punch Leo's sister."

She huffs out a sigh and she looks back to Ivan. "Oh uh."

She shrugs both shoulders. "Nah, I mean. When I tried to kill them all, they did the same thing really. They do that to everybody. Like, even to people who try to murder the planet so like, y'gotta understand, since you're only trying to murder them you're way more reasonable than these would be Filgaia-murderers they try to be nice to. Like it'd honestly be hypocritical if they were jerks to you about it. I think you'd probably like it more if you stopped murdering but I think you think that too already but aren't stopping because you've got your reasons." She frowns. "So uh. When you think about it like that, I guess convincing you you don't want to do it isn't really gonna help you stop anyway so..."

She shakes her head. "Anyway..." She smooths out the tarp and starts pulling the cart around, heading Farplanewards just for the sake of a destination at this point. "When I say I tried to kill them, it wasn't really by my will exactly. I was being controlled into doing it. They knocked off their ability to do that, I uh--I think, but before that happened they could literally make me do what they wanted me to do. So yeah, they tried to save me too. And I guess they did. For now anyway."

Lydia doesn't actually know what Rebecca and Talia did on the shoopuf.

"I uh. I didn't ask what they did on the shoopuf either, okay, so."

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

"Maybe... he'll get to you later?"

Ivan finds himself offering this 'reassuringly,' because that's the weird place the conversation ended up, but definitely does not like the way it sounds coming out of his mouth. He'd better not think about that. It's bad enough to think about the day when he'll finally be telling Lydia he succeeded in killing one of her friends.

But then she reveals that she has also tried to kill everyone he's trying to kill because she was being piloted by sinister experimentors, and he stares blankly at her because he'd genuinely thought he had maxed out on strange and shocking Lydia revelations.

"That's -- what else is there! Every time you tell me something like that, does some other weird horrible thing pop up in your past to replace it??" Ivan, that's not how the linear progression of time works!

"Did Talia give you any cake!? She was supposed to talk about your stuff with you and give you cake."

He is kind of passively following her to wherever she's going, which happens to be the Farplane. He'll figure that out when they get there, or if she mentions it again.

There is also more Shoopuf gossip to unpack. "...Do people do things on Shoopufs?!" Ivan may have literally asked few locals if there was Shoopuf related subtext he was unaware of, which only got him funny looks, but maybe Lydia's circle invented some Shoopuf subtext of their own.

<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

"If he's just going to try and have me killed as an afterthought then I don't even want him to try and have me killed." Lydia says as if she gets to decide these things. Also as if there might be some kind of time she'd want someone to put a hit on her? Honestly she doesn't, but she says strange things when she feels disrespected by a supervillain.

"This is. I." Lydia is at a loss of words to answer Ivan's question. Her face tints heavily silver when she loses control of the conversation to this particularly strange line of questioning.

Eventually she looks at her cart quietly instead of saying anything. Maybe she is aware of how ridiculous her past would seem to anybody she told it to. Maybe that's why she is compelled to share it and get it out of the way so it's out of her life. "It's...It's weird to me too, okay?" She says, looking at the cart still, barely refraining from a Jensen-esque 'I didn't ask for this' because sometimes she wonders if she can even be reasonably sure of that. She can feel it coming, too, the tears, the complaints, the wondering why life wasn't specifically fair for her when it has been fair for so many people? Why she has to be up front about all this weird extra bullshit just in an attempt to be open and honest to someone.

But then the stronger part of her decides 'No, no more sob story bullshit. Keep it cool, Lydia.'

"But maybe, who knows! I think I'm running low on mysterious revelations, though I guess if I consider that you haven't been to Filgaia you might learn a bit about me there too! But the guy who did this to me... He..."

She trails off. "He... I think I..."

She can't say it. She groans and shakes her head. "Nevermind. What's this about cake? Was Talia supposed to bring cake?"

She frowns with sudden EXTRA suspicion. "Hold on, why is Talia supposed to bring me cake? My birthday isn't for like two months." Her eyes widen. "Wait..."

She steps back, eyes wide. "Did you..." She points an index finger towards Ivan.

"Ask her to bring me cake to cheer me up??"

Over at the thunder plains, lightning crashes down from the sky.

This has effectively preempted further shoopuf commentary for the time being.

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

Ivan did not know Lydia turned silver under duress. He watches this wonderingly until it leads to feelings coming close to the surface, and then he panics a little because he doesn't know how to field that and at worst will upset her and at best will dig himself a deeper hole by accidentally saying something helpful and getting her after him about being nice or human or whatever.

While he's worrying about this, the conversation careens dangerously back to cake. He is Accused, with an appropriate bolt of lightning and thunder in the background. Ivan just turns an ordinary red under duress, which Lydia now has the opportunity to learn if she didn't already notice.

"When you say it like that, it sounds really wrong and not like what happened at all," he says.

<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

Sadly, this cake thing seems to come perilously close to calling Ivan a human being. But as it stands, she is kind of stalling out here because despite the obvious RED on Ivan's face, she's not sure she wants to point that out to him as proof of his mis(???)deeds. She lowers her finger as Ivan denies it. If she just pointed out the redness, maybe that's too much? She doesn't want to humiliate the guy by pointing out a blush. That seems kind of too much. And even if he did deserve it, well, sometimes life is about more than just giving people what they deserve. A merchant that does not make more than what they deserve will die a pauper.

"Oh. Well she didn't get me cake." Lydia says. "But to be honest after Operation Mi'ihen, maybe it seemed like maybe she should wait a bit on a cake?"

She pauses before approaching Ivan with a frown. "...You fought in Operation Mi'ihen didn't you? With the Guard? Talia told me you were okay but... How did you bring yourself to fight Sin of all things? Is... Leo okay? He's the guy with the horn and I guess is a commander. He helped me through a jam a while back so uh, he didn't die right? Margaret? She helped me get my start back in Meribia..."

"And uh... thanks for..."

Awkward trailing off because she isn't sure what she can thank Ivan for without him flatly denying that he did the thing so she just kind of lets it hang there.

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

The topic shift isn't a delightful one, but it does take some of the heat off. Ivan exhales a bit lengthily. The Operation Mi'ihen battle. He keeps a lot of his thoughts locked in compartments by necessity, and that day has one of its own, now. He has to kind of open it back up and bring the memory back into the light, and he tenses a bit as he does so, his shoulders tightening and his hands gathering into fists.

He finds her first question surprisingly direct in its own way, but not enough so that he feels the need to concoct another denial.

"I pretty much do all the things my employer says to do, so that was just another thing for me. It was bad, but it didn't matter to me like it did to everybody else."

The queries about who lived are a little easier, because she happens to ask about the ones who did.

"Both of them are alive, Lord Leo and Lady Margaret. ...I don't know how okay they are. It was like -- there was a little barrier, and everyone who made it inside lived, and everybody who didn't make it inside died. The Dragonmaster was outside, and he's uh-- a living legend, so having him be dead is kind of... the world isn't really the same as it was before that happened. I think Lord Leo is freaked out."

<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

Lydia closes her eyes a moment. "Sin scares me." She pushes the cart along again. "Count my lucky stars that it didn't get me back in Azado when we were trying to evacuate townsfolk. But I guess you can count your lucky stars now too. And Leo'n'Margaret too." She's relieved, and sounds it. All of her friends, she thinks, must have made it out. Every time she hears more about one of her friends who didn't DIE HORRIBLY she feels a little bit better about events. Not that it's ever going to, y'know, feel great.

She blinks a few times at reports of Ghaleon's demise. "Well, I'm not happy about it, but uh--I mostly know him as a dick, to be honest. Not that I really knew him. You shipped over here with him, right? What was he like?"

But Lord--But Leo is freaked out about it, Lydia thinks. She doesn't think she can do anything to unfreak him out but maybe he'd appreciate a peptalk and who knows, maybe it would help a little. "I guess he's got a lot more responsibility now, then..." She murmurs thoughtfully. "I guess thinking about it.... What does it mean that a Dragonmaster is dead? Is Althena just going to pick a new one now?"

She thinks about the aforementioned cake that wasn't delivered. It's weird going from that to the cataclysmic battle but honestly she'se still kind of stuck on the cake thing. She's so tired of dwelling on depressing things. Cake is nice and yummy and kind of smiley inducing even if Ivan is denying it.

She's going to give Ivan a cake, Lydia thinks, even if it kills him.

Wait is he lactose intolerant? Would cake kill him?

Probably not, she decides.

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

"I didn't like the Dragonmaster when I met him, but I don't think it really matters if I didn't like him, that's like not liking a star -- it's a lot older and more important than you are, so who cares."

He thinks about it, then adds: "Besides, I don't like anything." His opinion on things isn't very useful if it's always the same opinion.

"Maybe Althena will pick one, I guess, or start auditioning them with trials, or whatever...?"

Ivan isn't one to think much about the world order, but it seems to him like a proper Dragonmaster needs to have gone on some grand adventures. It can't just be some smug noble. Althena's blessings don't really seem to correspond with how good a person is, and his father's magic is quite powerful, so there's a brief cringing thought of Lubov or someone very much like him taking the role. Perhaps Ghaleon wasn't so bad after all.

Throughout this line of thought, Ivan remains mercifully unaware of cake-related schemes.

<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

Lydia does not imagine Lubov as a Dragon Master because even though Ghaleon was a dick at least he seemed like the kind of guy willing to deal with his own problems and that seems like a prerequisite. Needing to use your own children as assassins to do your dirty work feels disqualifying somehow. If Ghaleon wanted someone dead, Lydia imagines he'd at least stab them himself. Or explode them or something.

"Well I like you." Lydia says again as if it has become something she's just going to repeat until it sticks. "So I'm glad you made it out too."

She looks back to Ivan. "So what kind of cake was Talia supposed to get me?"

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

"It... was unspecified," Ivan says. The situation is dire now that the cake has become a refuge topic from being told he is liked, again.

"I think I told her to do 'some kind of friendship thing' and cake was an option so maybe she did a different friendship thing."

He quickens his pace a bit as they walk along to try to get ahead enough to be out of any danger of eye contact.

"I thought if you were kind of projecting onto me like I was likeable then your friends must not be giving you enough friendship lately. That's all."

<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

"Oh so you did tell her to do the cake," Lydia says, having accidentally tricked Ivan into confessing though she plays it off all casual like. Lydia is pulling a cart with her so it's pretty easy to get ahead of her with hard work and guts. Or a decent pace. Whichever Ivan wishes to use.

"I guess I like people pretty easily." Lydia admits. "But yeah, I was feeling a little down on friendship, I guess. I made shit awkward so I wanted to hash things out with peeps and make them...not awkward again. I kinda was in that awkward zone with a lot of 'em come ot think though it sorta snuck up on me."

She shrugs both shoulders. "But that's not why I like you. You were there when I needed someone to be there."

Also the way he gets flustered and sour is pretty adorable and that gets her face to silver again though luckily Ivan moved on ahead so he can't see that. 'I really do fall hard and fast,' Lydia thinks to herself. 'What a wonderful set of characteristics that brings me to no end of trouble.'

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

Ivan didn't realize Lydia might have felt like she had to put some distance between herself and her friends, but it makes sense with what he thinks he remembers from when she was telling him two million things about herself at once. Before the average sadness and horribleness of the things he was learning about her was quite so high.

"Because you... have crushes on lots of them?" It is not exactly a desire for embarrassment revenge that causes him to ask so bluntly -- more of a desire to trade off on who has to be in the hot seat.

And though she attempts to clarify her position on liking him, he chooses to remain skeptical, and doesn't address it directly.

<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

Lydia...

...is totally called out!! Her eyes widen in horror as Ivan reveals the dark truth about Lydia. The dark truth Lydia had been so close to coming to terms with before he said those words. She stops entirely, mouth hanging open. You can practically see the steam pushing out of her ears.

Lydia's EMBARRASMENT LEVEL INCREASES RAPIDLY.

"I, uh." Lydia says.

"Well." Lydia manages. "N...not like at the same time...!" She stammers even though even as she says it, well, there WAS some overlap. "W-well for the most part...! But it's not like I was in...agghh...."
Guardians, she really is such a disaster. "W-well it's not my fault. I can't help it." She slides another foot back. "Everybody is super charming and also in love with other people and I don't want to be a creep. And uhhhh--I mean, I'm really glad you're not dead and hard to kill too I guess and I'm going to leave coincidentally because I totally have to sell this crap, I mean treasure, I mean--"

She literally picks up the cart with her two hands and starts walking backwards. "Uhhh...thanks for uhhh whatever you are ok with admitting I guess I am trying to be respectful of your boundaries and cakes are worth at least like ten percent of boats if they're from you wait that's not how to fuck fuck fuck fuck--"

WARNING: MELTDOWN IN PROGRESS.

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

"But do you want to be with all of them at once, or--oh, okay, you're running away, nevermind."

Ivan realizes he accidentally won at a game he usually loses and wasn't aware he was playing, and isn't sure how to feel about it. He awkwardly waves at her hasty backwards departure, as she carries a cart that seems like it ought to be too big to carry. Goodbye Lydia. Whoops.

...Where were they going? Should he go the rest of the way there and find out...?

<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.

"I AM THEORETICALLY OK WITH POLYAMOROUS RELATIONSHIPS BUT I AM NOT SURE I HAVE THE LEVEL OF MATURITY TO COMMIT TO ONE RIGHT NOW," Lydia shouts loudly in the middle of Guadosalam, causing some heads to turn in confusion in their direction as she runs.

Then she runs back. "Definitely get me cake though!"

She then runs away agian.

TODAY'S VICTORY: Ivan???

Lydia was making her way towards the Farplane room, in theory, but really was just kind of wandering around a bit to hang out with Ivan because she was really really not paying attention to where she was walking.

<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.

Ivan takes it in stride when Lydia shouts her position on polyamorous relationships from afar and then rushes back temporarily to provide additional clarification on her position on cake.

He will have to... think awhile on his own position on cake, and whether he's willing use the debt loophole again. He has a sense that he has been cheating too much already at the laws he is supposed to abide by to hold his identity together, and he isn't sure what the consequence will be if he keeps playing along with someone who obviously has gotten him all wrong.

Nothing good can come of it, that much seems certain.