2019-05-16: Skipping Stones

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  • Log: Skipping Stones
  • Cast: Loren Voss, Lan Lilac
  • Where: Kilika - Town Center
  • Date: May 16, 2019
  • Summary: Two stranded people talk about the next steps. Lan is pragmatic. Loren is sullen.

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    The sun rests low over the horizon, coloring the sea around Spira with brilliant gold; a last gasp before day transitions fully into night.

    Night's different here. More like it was on Glenwood and Meribus, yet still not like either. Far different from Filgaia -- only in the Badlands does it get as close to being so dark.
    Not at all like in Etrenank. There is no need for night in Solaris.

    One sea-smoothed stone skips off a low rolling tide, then splashes into the sea. It's followed by another that does no better.

    Loren paces forward a step, walking the sands of Kilika's beach.

    It wasn't that long ago, or so he's heard, that Sin paid this little town a visit. The marking of its passage is still left in the debris, the broken homes. Wounds that defy even a healer's art.
    And yeah. It's not his specialty, but he knows what a person looks like when they've lost someone. There are people like that all through town.

    He stoops, picking another stone up off the beach and sends it sailing towards the sea. This one doesn't skip at all. It just plunges like a dolphin into the depths below.

    Soon. He's planning on making a break for it soon. He doesn't know where he's going, but he's reaching the end of his ability to endure this indignity any longer.
    And if there's any way out of this place -- out and back to his fate -- he won't find it by sitting around playing prisoner in a cage with its bars already bent wide.
    He almost feels like she's taunting him sometimes.

    He picks another small stone up from the surf and tosses it for the sea.

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

    Lan, on the other hand, is doing much better. This isn't the alien sterility of Solaris, there is no endlessly puttering Mirza. Lan's feet touch terra firma every day, even if it isn't the terra she's used to. She can dig her toes into the sand whenever she likes. The sound of the waves lapping at the shore lulls her to sleep at night.

    Indeed, despite Loren's mounting impatience and displeasure, Lan likes it here. Someone came to perform a ritual called the 'Sending' shortly after they arrived; a dance that stirred the spirits of the recently dead and guided them home. She'd returned to their 'cell' with wet eyes and woofled into her pillow for an hour before she could even begin to try to tell him how beautiful it was, how meaningful it would be for the locals.

    She's sure it didn't mean the same to Loren - after all, these aren't his people. She doesn't know what Solarian death rites are like.

    While Loren skips stones, she's returning from the village proper, a basket of freshly-caught fish and a few other foodstuffs balanced against her hip. Her bare feet scuff quietly in the sand, leaving footprints along the beach. "Looooreeeeeen! I brought home stuff for dinner!" For a girl that had never even seen a fish before her seventeenth birthday, Lan is adapting fairly well to oceanside cuisine. "Do you want steamed tilapia or grilled? And there's pickled vegetables. I think I'll stuff them inside the fish..." That ought to work, right?

    As usual, she seems firly ignorant of his emotional turmoil.

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    He's had the misfortune of being jailed before, but at least that was an actual jail. Here, it's different -- the only thing keeping him (them) here is technically the sea itself, and Kaguya's implicit prohibition. There are no chains, no guards. Even the hut they're living in has a scrap of cloth as a door.

    There are only two things keeping him here (Kaguya's warning ultimately fazes him little). One of them is running afoul of the apparent leader of Althena's Guard and likely seeing a serious curtailing in his personal freedom. The other is the situation they're in. It would be one thing if they were somewhere else on Lunar, but here there's no backup and little information -- only what he's gleaned from the people here and 'purchased' from Margaret.
    So he bided his time, collected supplies on the sly and learned what he could. But soon...

    The people here are different than the rest of Lunar. Lan had come back once soon after their initial arrival; he had still been resting, recovering from his initial ordeal.
    They're strange. She'd cried for long time about something she'd seen and even after she had been able to try to explain it -- between the tears -- he still doesn't understand.

    There's the tradition of dance to guide the recently dead to the afterlife, apparently.
    Everyone's always so strange when it comes to the dead.

    This stone dances on the waves longer than the rest. It would be better on a lake; there's no stopping the sea. But it still skips the incoming tide longer than the rest before succumbing to inevitability.

    Lan calls out his name.

    "...Were you looking for me?" Loosely, he rattles the rest of the stones still held in his left hand. Then he pauses, tilting his head to the right as if to think over the question. "...Grilled."
    Either would be fine. Food is food.

    He turns away from her then, skipping another stone off towards the sea.

    "I'm almost ready," he says, without explaining what he's ready about, expecting her to follow his lead.

    "I just need to get back my sword."

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

  By now, Loren will have an idea of just how much discretion he can expect from Lan. It isn't much, but even she has some notion of 'how not to be a bumbling security liability'. ...Then again, he'll also know she's not at all cut out for the sorts of longterm operations that any Jugend graduate worth their diploma can pull off. So she's done her best - trading her slowly-impriving first aid skills and her talents as a shaman (an as an able-bodied workhorse) for food, medicine, and interesting tidbits. Their stash of money is small, but continues to grow at a slow pace. She has a decent idea of the lay of the land beyond the village's edges. And she can cook a mean fish.

    "Okay! That sounds like the better idea anyhow," she hums, depositing the basket next to the well-used fire pit halfway between the hut and Loren's new Brooding Spot. "I think I can still use the vegetables. Did you get anything done today?" Besides skipping rocks.

    The same thin sticks they've been using to roast and grill food get planted in the sand after every meal; Lan stokes the fire with one of them before setting to work with a knife to gut and clean the fish she brought back. It's not half as bloody as butchering a land creature, though it smells appreciably worse. "Of course I was. I called your name didn't I?"

    On the other hand, it does take her a moment to realize what he's talking about. "Oh. To get out of here? Technically, couldn't we just leave tonight? You can get another sword, can't you?"

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    It's probably (he thinks) enough that they don't talk too openly (hopefully) about their plans -- it doesn't seem (possibly, maybe) that Kaguya is keeping tabs on what he's doing and where he's been, or who he's talking to. Largely, she isn't even here.
    (He's paranoid and he still thinks about it.)
    But, when you don't know what to do, what can you do except try?

    He's been thinking about it a lot lately. What the Commander had said to him.
    Maybe there are better options. Maybe there are other choices. Maybe he needs to bide his time, wait, do nothing. But he's hitting a wall, and if this is the rest of his life...

    He tosses another stone into the surf.

    "More of the same," he answers her, watching as this one hits the surf and sinks.

    By which he probably means practice his magic -- without his glasses it's not a chaotic thing by far but it's like trying to cook without a timer -- and possibly give a short and carefully edited version of elementary Ether theory to Margaret or one of her close cohorts.
    It's the price he's paying for the goods he's been collecting.

    Also, for him to actually have things like 'pillows'.

    Just one stone remains in his hand. He absently tosses it up in the air and catches it, without looking where it rises or falls. "Yeah."

    No one else is out here. Spirans are the friendly type, so he'd know if they were.

    Then she asks why he can't get another, inbetween the work of cleaning the fish.
    He doesn't catch the stone. It drops onto the wet surf with a quiet splat.

    "No." There is vehemence in those words.

    He doesn't look at her. He looks instead at the waves as they lap in and out, as steady as eternity. "I'm not leaving it. I..."

    There have been times when he's wanted to leave it behind. What it symbolizes, what it's done.
    But what would he tell Leah? 'Sorry, I lost it?' The sword he broke and mangled into a new form, as if this could erase what it had once been.

    "...It was my brother's," he says, still not looking at her. Then almost hastily appends, "Sort of. ...It's a long story."

    The waves lap at the shore in the silent gap he leaves here.

    "I'm not leaving without it."

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

    Spirans are friendly and for the most part trusting. Case in point, Lan has a knife to clean the fish with. She's thanking it silently (the fish, not the knife) for providing dinner when she catches the wet splut of the rock hitting the tide. "Hm?" Lan looks up quizzically, the fish in her hands gaping open. He's not so clumsy that he'd just fumble it.

    No, he says. She's mostly used to his weird moods and sulking, but even the cache of stuff back in the Photosphere hadn't alicited such an emotional reaction when she'd suggested abandoning it. She's halfway to opening her mouth to ask about it when he actually volunteers something on his own.

    It was his brother's, he tells her.

    "...Engil," she murmurs quietly, pale eyes going soft in the late-evening dimness. The man she knows so little about, even after his shrine became her only escape from that alien hell. Ever since, she's had a bit of a soft spot for (the idea of) Loren's older brother, despite having never had a chance to meet him alive.

    "If it was his," she says after a few moments, "Then we can't leave it." And that's really all there is to it, isn't there?

    She slides chunks of fish and vegetables onto the skewers and carefully props them up above the fire before adding some sea grass and sticks to the small blaze. "It's the least we can do. The least I can do." Doesn't she owe him that much?

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    Back in the Photosphere it had been more of a question of professionalism, though considering what had happened, perhaps it might not have mattered--
    Except for the part where those supplies might have kept him from bleeding out, that is.

    This is a more emotional matter.

    It's not the shape it had been in when his brother had last held it. The metal had been reshaped and reborn. If it's his brother's sword, it's his brother's sword in the same way that they are -- were -- kin. Related to.
    But still close enough that it matters.

    She agrees, and so quickly that he actually does turn to look over at her now. "...huh," he utters, tilting his head to regard her.

    He stares at her like that for a long moment, then shakes his head.

    Loren comes over to where she threads the skewers and sits, arms resting atop his knees.

    "...You're a pretty weird girl, you know," he says, watching while she works.

    "I think I know where she's keeping it. I'm going to try soon," he says next, looking at the flame.

    Find his fire, huh...

    "And then we just have to find a ship leaving here."

    They come and go often enough. It's just a matter of finding then next transit between islands. And after that...

    No plans. Little information. Leah or Ramses would know what to do, but he's neither of them.
    He'll have to work it out as he goes.