2019-07-01: What Layer Were We On?
- Log: 2019-07-01: What Layer Were We On?
- Cast: Lydia Seren, Ivan
- Where: Mi'ihen Highroad
- Date: July 01, 2019
- Summary: Lydia and Ivan cross paths on the Highroad, which is also where they first met. Lydia tries to apologize for her first impression, and Ivan accidentally(?) tells her more about his family.
===============================<* Mi'ihen Highroad *>=============================== Many years ago, a man named Lord Mi'ihen, commander of a mercenary group known as the Crimson Blades, was summoned by the Grand Measter to Bevelle to answer the challenge that his group was a threat to Yevon. Though his followers suspected he would be executed and begged to follow, Mi'ihen ordered them to stay behind and walked along an old path to Bevelle, without stopping to rest. Moved by the display of piety, the Grand Maester formally adopted Mi'ihen and his soldiers into Yevon as a defensive force, known now as the Crusaders. In recognition of the momentous moment, the path Mi'ihen walked now bears his name. ...except not really, because the original one was wrecked by Sin a few hundred years ago. You can still see bits of it as you pass along the Highroad, on which the Djose Temple can also be found. BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8tfe_H7bzw
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia Seren has NOT been kicked out of Luca but she has felt uncomfortable enough that she figured she'd give it a few days before trying again. She is not exactly OKAY with what they're doing anyway. Maybe there's another way to get ahold of Leo, she thinks, but honestly in her experience yelling at people about this sort of thing doesn't do anything but make them dig in their heels.
And so Lydia is lazing around on the side of the Mi'ihen highroad, laying in some light shade. Unlike some folks here, she doesn't mind the humidity or the temperature--having lived in a desert most of her life anyway in huts so this honestly isn't worse than what she's used to on Filgaia. She holds a reed in her mouth, like coolguy Ronfar, as she watches the passerbys.
Wait.
Did.... Did Her player just copy and paste that from the first log???
IS SHE THAT LAZY???
You bet.
She sighs faintly, thinking about what Ragnell had said. What she said about Ivan is certainly on her mind but the weightier issue of what life IS as a so-called good person who can look themselves in the mirror is like--it honestly doesn't sound very fun but what is she going to do? Not actually believe what she believes for selfish reasons? That sounds, what's the word, completely evil?
Ugh.
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
Ivan, who was walking along the Highroad, pauses in his tracks with a strange sense of deja vu. Although he can't hear the narrator, maybe Lydia is in exactly the same pose as when they first met or something? Whatever it is, it catches him off guard. Also, there's Lydia, who also catches him off guard whenever she pops up in his life just as a general thing.
The other thing that happens, which he wasn't expecting, or at least wasn't expecting to allow himself to notice, is that he finds himself a little glad to see her.
...the... the horror of having such an emotion. He hopes it can't be spotted on his face.
He unfreezes and walks backward a few steps to awkwardly wave at her in as noncommital a fashion as he can muster.
"What are you doing out here, are you waiting for someone?"
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia doesn't seem to notice Ivan having an emotion. Maybe she didn't see it. Maybe she doesn't need to see it on his face because she sees it... IN HER HEART!!
But then again maybe it's hard to tell if Lydia has noticed or not because lately when she sees Ivan she is perfectly happy to have an emotion and smile like the day has improved by approximately one Ivan which is not something Lydia has quantified with a number but is probably significant judging by the horrifying radiance of that beaming face. When she falls she falls hard but the opposite seems to be true when her spirits are lifted.
"Hey dude." She says, waving towards him with a hand. The fight is over and Ivan seems to be in one piece. Now this doesn't mean that hitting him upside the head with a baseball bat (newly dubbed Tiebreaker) saved his life or anything. Maybe he would've been fine otherwise! But it does seem to suggest that it worked out at least so she can stop worrying about it.
"Well I'm not wanted by the Guard or anything yet, but they don't seem to be happy with drifters right now. Almost as if a whole bunch decided to fight them to stop a massacre or something so I figured, uh,maybe not sticking around there for a while."
Of course that's just how it is. Groups are rarely judged by all voices so much as the loudest but in this case Lydia can't even say the loudest were wrong to scream it all out.
"How 'bout you? It's a nice day to not be in Luca, right?"
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
It's true, any ghost of a smile which Ivan might have failed to extinguish is quickly overwhelmed by Lydia's beaming grin. And though he reacts to that smile with what has become a customary grimace, a part of his attention lingers on it curiously, this time.
Quit that, though! That's not really for you.
Ivan frowns a bit at her answer. Not only does that make sense, but he has already been told stuff like that about looking out for Drifters and other enemy and quasi enemy groups in a way that suggests he is encouraged to find excuses to give them trouble.
So, it tracks. But he's not on that kind of duty right now, he's on scouting-ahead-so-they-can-take-over-the-rest-of-the-country-more-easily duty. But at least this kind of duty gets him out from under the noses of the other Guardsmen.
"It is a nice day not to be in Luca. You have another place to be, though, right? You don't just live on the side of the road, now...?"
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Eventually Lydia's smile settles down a bit because she's not a creep (arguably) but it doesn't go away either.
She also seems briefly perplexed by Ivan's question but then seems to understand the situation with an, "Ahh...that's right you wouldn't know." There's maybe a 5 percent increase of grin that lasts for like 5 seconds there. "Living on the road isn't really uncommon for drifters back home." She pauses. "Though they don't all see it as a bad thing. They chose the road and I guess I'm more like that right now...but I do have a place to lay may head down. It's the Fereshte. I helped build it." Kaguya did say she was into ships and that sort of thing. She rubs the bridge of her nose a bit with an index finger before adding, "Mostly I do maintenance these days but being on a ship the whole time can be pretty stifling and right now I don't think I'd be good company for the family. Wanted to think a bit about a bunch of stuff and I know everything just...just affects them more than it affects me if you get my meaning but I see 'em suffering and just want to start smashing shit."
She tilts her head a bit. "You hot? Plenty of shade. It's not much but better than being out in the open."
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"Oh, right, I guess it's in the name, isn't it? Drifter. Not One Specific House-er."
But, she tells him she lives on a boat, sort of! That she helped make.
"Oh. Wow. You can build ships? Is that the one I... nevermind."
Guess it got repaired, if it is the one he burned.
He isn't sure he quite understands what she means about the situation affecting her family more than her -- is that consequence-wise, or emotionally? It seems like maybe she means emotionally. Or maybe both. He thinks he understands the part about it being hard to watch, and he nods.
She invites him into the shade.
"What...like over there? Where you are?"
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia can see where that's going. "Nah, it isn't that ship. That one belongs to the Kinship Alliance. The day you attacked I was trying to convince the captain to NOT try and kill Sin with his already pretty banged up ship. They're looking for a new chef, by the by. The last one skipped out on them and they haven't even been able to give him his pay." She fans her face with a hand and adds, "Anyway the Fereshte was cobbled together from two other ships and flies around though not super well because there's only so much aerodynamics you can get from two halves of a boat melded together."
She seems like she's about to get into a lot of technical detail but before that she adds, "You remember those golems you saw before? Well there's a kind of golem called a gear and we use the engines from those gears to give it the power to lift itself up so it's kind of cheating because gear engines are totally overpowered and kind of hard to reproduce."
Luckily she is diverted from having to engage in technobabble because Ivan hasn't stepped into the shade yet.
"Yeah. In the shade. Where I am." Lydia says. "But if you want to become a sweat elemental I won't stop you."
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"You can make FLYING ships?"
Kaguya did absolutely tell him Lydia wanted to go into space and wanted to build something to get herself there. But he didn't realize she could already get into the air!!
Ivan nods at Lydia's simplified explanation, looking impressed, although he still doesn't understand the explanation at all, please don't ask him to repeat it later.
"I'm not hot, though," Ivan says.
Although that's exactly the kind of thing Ivan would say if he were about to collapse of heat exhaustion, he might be telling the truth for once. His exposed skin doesn't really have that telltale sheen of someone who's been sweating from uncomfortable heat.
He does seem a little doubtful about his response, though.
"I mean... maybe it is a little weird to just stand in the middle of the road, though."
He steps into the shade then, and spends an excessive amount of time picking out where to sit and then looking like he regrets the spot he chose anyway.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Well I mean, it was a joint project, so it's not like it was just me." Lydia says. "Hyadeans know way more stuff about this than the average Filgaian and I ain't Hyadean--But I do a lot of the day to day maintenance on it so I think I've got a good handle on how it works more or less."
Lydia does squint a bit--she wasn't really paying attention to it before because she just ASSUMED but now that she's looking--yeah he isn't actually sweating at all. "Huh... is that because of the Blessing of Althena? I know you know fire magic but didn't figure it gave y'all resilience to it too. If tha'ts how it works, feels pretty similar to Guardian power."
She leans back. "But yeah, there's that too." She watches Ivan quietly as he takes an unforgivably long time to pick a spot but it doesn't seem to bother her at all. And maybe it doesn't really because it's kind of adorable admittedly but she doesn't say anything until he sits down.
She opens her mouth. It's to say 'By the by do you know someone named Ragnell?' but she doesn't actually say it because she realizes that would kind of mortify Ivan wouldn't it? And while maybe Ivan deserves to be mortified every now and then (and who doesn't?), does he really deserve it now?
Nah, she settles. She doesn't need to blab every secret and besides--once she realized what that weird phrase actually meant, she--
"Hey Ivan..."
She wants to say something completely different but that isn't what she ends up saying.
Instead she says, "I'm sorry for making it sound like it's easy to leave your shitty situation. I don't think it's easy. I just... kind of wish it was."
She isn't consciously sure how she got to there from what Ragnell had told her, but maybe 'grumpy, cranky, and likes telling you you're wrong all the time' didn't feel like phrasing that could only point to Ivan.
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"Something like that, I think," Ivan says, regarding the Blessing of Althena and whether it helps him withstand the heat of Spira more easily than non-fire-mages. Either that or summoning flames around himself all the time and just getting used to it over time. Probably one of those. He's never been sure.
Lydia speaks. Lydia... apologizes?
This is the wrong script for them, isn't it? Ivan's brain whirls around in a little panic trying to remember what he's allowed to sound like he thinks about his shitty situation with Lydia in particular.
"I-- it's okay! I don't really want to leave anyway, remember?" ...uh, shoot, no, they're past that lie, aren't they? What layer were they on?
"I mean, you don't need to worry about telling me not to be an assassin wrong, you're pretty much in the right, I'm just not going to do anything with anybody's really good arguments."
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia takes that Ronfar reed out of her mouth and twirls with it between her fingers. Lydia honestly isn't sure that being an assassin is wrong. Right now she kind of wishes an 'assassin' would take out Lubov and maybe solve a whole lot of problems in one fell swoop. Sometimes that assassin is a random meteorite, sometimes that assassin is Lydia herself but maybe that's how it starts. You think 'life sure would be more convenient if Lubov wasn't around and then next thing you know you're telling your kids to go murder merchants because you think it'll make Leo happy.
Maybe it will now. Maybe that tiny little pause--whether it meant anything to Lubov or not--that Ivan had bought himself is about to be over. Leo just has to change his mind and then--either Ivan and Jay are both in trouble.
"Yeah... Probably... but I shouldn't have made it sound easy." Lydia says, looking back over to Ivan. "And it's probably even harder with someone like him."
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"I don't even know if he'd really do anything if I left," Ivan says.
"He always made it sound like he would, but maybe he wouldn't bother. I'm not afraid of him doing something--" He hesitates. That's not exactly true, and for some reason he finds himself wanting to say more.
"...I don't think I really want to know which it is. Whether I'm disposable or whether there was never really a consequence to saying no. Both of those would be pretty bad for different reasons."
He shakes his head. "That's not really a good enough reason to kill people, but I've got plenty more reasons that aren't good enough, and they all add up to enough of a reason for me."
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"...Yeah, I guess I get that." Lydia says. Now she kind of wishes she mentioned Ragnell instead but it's too late to go to that now! Another time perhaps. It doesn't matter whether you actually are disposable or not--
--when they're your bloody parents...And sure, Lydia was able to shrug them off after a while but it still took nearly 20 years.
"So it can't be an argument." Lydia says to herself. What options are there besides well designed words?
That leaves well designed actions and poorly thought out actions, right?
"I'll figure something out, then."
Guess which of those two options she'll pick??
She smiles back at Ivan again despite the direness of the conversation. It's pretty small, but it doesn't seem like it will be leaving her face any time soon.
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"I don't think I should have said that, though," Ivan decides, after sitting with the feeling of having said it for a few seconds. It's especially weird because even though he regarded it as kind of a Dark Secret in terms of confessing a forbidden personal weakness, nothing dramatic really happened with Lydia being horrified at what a coward he is or anything like that.
So, since there wasn't a dramatic rejection, instead it feels like he made a mistake with secret future consequences, like some kind of slow-acting poison.
"I mean I don't want to make it sound like he's just been making lame threats all along and we've been going along with it like total cowards. There's been some, you know."
He sort of mimes punching one hand into the other.
"But he never actually killed us, so maybe he never really could, you know? And if we were just gone, what would be in it for him anymore to follow through on ...dammit, why am I still talking about it?"
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia kind of has to wonder about this mysterious Lubov character. What kind of person raises his kids to be assassins and then, apparently, beats them and thinks 'boy this will never come back to haunt me'. That kind of ridiculous confidence is beyond Lydia's imagining.
Why IS he still talking about it? Is it because of what Ragnell said? Is it her weird way of saying weird things until people surrender?
Lydia has never been good at hiding when she liked someone. It's the sort of thing that leads to a lot of outed crushes rather than just quietly strangling them before so much as a peep is uttered.
Once she was just as zealous as Leo with her own gods.
But then she learned that her gods were maybe doing some pretty shitty things to the Veruni. And maybe a lot of the Veruni deserved it even! Maybe they did some real bad thing, maybe as a people they hate the Guardians so much it's basicallly self defense. But it's still pretty shitty to consign Kaguya to death over it. Maybe after starting a war on the moon she's earned that kind of curse, but that attitude of cursing your enemies with weakness feels like some kind of self fulfilling prophecy. Like something that is just bound to put them on a path to causing more problems.
It isn't practical, Lydia's engineer brain told her, and it isn't fair so what is it but cruel?
She hasn't given up on the Guardians. She still believes in them, but since that time she tries not to worry too much about what the gods will think. And life rewarded her for it. Hell, it could be argued the Guardians rewarded her for it.
"I don't think you're cowards." She says. "I get it. It's hard. They abuse you, beat you down, and expect you to thank 'em for it, do things for 'em." A hacksaw, she thinks.
"And maybe it sounds a little lame to say it's hard and leave it at that, but hard is still hard. Talia looks like she's escaped, made her better life, but there's always that phantom shackle that never quite goes away." Sometimes that's worse than the real thing.
"Anyway the point is, I'm sorry our first meeting didn't go better. I'm going to take some of the blame for that, okay? Because--"
Now obviously she can't say that so easily either. Her smile flickers away at her own weakness. Not hiding it and saying it are two different things.
"--Because happiness doesn't last long," She settles on instead which is still true. "So I want to enjoy it while I've got it."
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
Ivan doesn't mind Lydia simply calling his situation hard and leaving it at that--it's more than he feels like he needs to hear, and he's fine with it even if she hadn't said anything at all. He's not sure why he keeps babbling stupid secrets at her that will be extremely difficult to un-say, but it's not because he wants or expects some magical answer from her. He... hopes he's not expecting such a thing, anyway.
His shoulders slump a bit at Lydia's reference to Talia and a phantom shackle, though. He's been so tied up in feeling alone and judged and left behind that he has been no help at all in helping Talia navigate life after Lubov. He's outsourced it to other people and then resented them for it. That's extremely bad brothering.
The point is, I'm sorry our first meeting didn't go better.
...Wait. That was the point? Ivan tries to think of their first meeting and what she could possibly be apologizing for.
"Wasn't our first meeting mostly mostly me being nasty to you and you telling me a whole lot of confusing personal stories?" He considers. "You did make fun of me for acting like a villain, which I didn't appreciate. I mean, I am a villain, so I ought to be allowed to act like one. And you said I dressed like an assassin, which... didn't bother me at all and I've already pretty much forgotten about."
That went off track. "I mean, I pretty much started it all, though. I can't really imagine anything you could've said or done where it would've gone better."
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia's cheeks silver fiercely. She is here trying to feel nice and guilty and Ivan is telling her she has nothing to really feel guilty about! How is she supposed to feel guilty when someone is saying she didn't even make anything appreciably worse!
"Then I'm sorry for making fun of you! You said you didn't appreciate it so it's a valid thing to apologize for!" Pause. "Right?" Pause. "Right! It makes sense. And for trying to make leaving seem easy. Those are the two things. Okay. Case closed."
She is eager to get off the uncomfortable topic train so she decides to settle on a far more enjoyable topic. "Hey have you ever been to jail?"
Okay Lydia you tried.
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"I guess I accept that apology." Ivan sounds confused about it, but she is so eager to give the apology that he feels bad turning it away twice.
Has he been to jail?
Alas, Ivan has pretty limited life experience and has not even done one of those secret missions where you intentionally go to prison to find someone who's been locked away (and kill them, probably). If Lubov ever needed to kill anyone who was in prison, maybe it was easier for him to just bribe a guard.
That's an awfully specific question, though. Ivan frowns.
"...No, have you?"
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Yeah," Lydia says. "Totally."
"We were kinda caught in a battle between Aveh and Kislev. They're these two countries that have been killing each other since before I was born. Off and on I guess but it heated up recently. Anyway, they caught me trying to flee the battlefield so they arrested me."
She nods a few times. "It wasn't so bad. I got to bite off a dude's finger. They're actually pretty easy to get off if you get a good grip with your mouth. Tastes awful though so I guess I wouldn't recommend it for fun or anything." She pauses. This kind of got away from her. "Anyway I was thinking with a job like that, you'd be bound to have been thrown in a jail at least once."
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
A new and powerful Lydia Fact is obtained. Ivan looks appropriately impressed and concerned by it.
"Was the finger biting part of how you got out or just something that goes on in jail? ...I don't think I would have thought about trying it for fun, but that's good to know," he answers with all seriousness.
She speculates on the tendency of assassins to get thrown into jail. Maybe for some, but Ivan's experience was that such a thing might be a scenario from which there was no return or recovery. Who knew if he'd just be left to rot in there?
"No, it's pretty important not to get caught. If someone caught me I would usually, you know, kill them. Or sometimes other stuff." He shrugs, trying to keep a neutral expression. The few times he managed to escape such situations peacefully are drastically overshadowed by one time that went rather catastrophically too far in the 'kill them' direction.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Nah, they were just being super rude." Lydia says. "I didn't actually escape either. They let me out." AFTER biting someone's finger off?? "Though I did use it to break someone else out so it worked out."
She nods a bit before adding, "I was a little more wild then, I guess, not that I wouldn't do it again under the right circumstances but maybe not because they're kind of a dick. There's plenty of people with all their fingers worse than that guy."
She nods a bit to Ivan's explanation. "Why does he want to do all this mystery politic murder shit anyway? Was he an assassin as a kid too? I'm not really sure how it even benefits him. Like, uh, let's say you did get caught--they'd be like 'oh it's Lubov's kid. He tried to assassinate me', right? I mean, you seem pretty good at the the miscellaneous tools of the trade there, but I figure if he's implicated in assassinating rivals even if he wasn't behind it, he'd get in real trouble right? It feels safer to hire uh-unaffiliated killers. Though I guess if he was like part of the Shadow Dragon Cult or something then I'd probably get why he was doing that stuff since it's a whole philosophy for them."
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"How old are you, again...?" It sometimes sounds like Lydia has had a million different lives. Is she one of the people he knows who's hundreds of years old, and he forgot, or forgot to ask?
Lydia disparagingly contemplates Lubov's tactics.
"We're not his children, though," Ivan says. "Not legally. I don't think we really exist legally. I mean there's still a lot we could tell about him if we were caught, but he thinks he's been pretty generous to us--I mean in some ways he HAS been really generous--so maybe he just thinks we'd be loyal?"
Given recent stubbornness, maybe Ivan actually would.
"He doesn't tell me a lot of what he's thinking but I think mostly he just wants power. He hasn't been able to get as much political power as he wants, so I think knowing people are dead because he wanted them to be dead might be kind of a substitute for that?"
Also, he has a lot of secret research he's always needing buried. But Ivan still works for him and saying so would go a little beyond elaborating on things Lydia already knows.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
SECRET RESEARCH is maybe a bit beyond Lydia's level of understanding here. She hasn't really found much occassion to ask about This Asshole because honestly it seemed like kind of a sore point. But at this point it feels kind of inevitable. Like at a certain point you have to ask about this mysterious guy you never see that has such power over two kids and is also kind of horrifyingly evil about it. Thinking that he's doing them a favor, though? That she can get even if sawing off your own horns is maybe not quite as extreme as asking your kids to repay your 'kindness' through murders even if Lydia acknowledges that the former has a certain kind of shock value to it.
"That's banal as shit." Lydia says eventually. "How are you not legally his kids? Is he an evil stepdad or something?"
It occurs to her that maybe Ivan doesn't know what an evil step-parent is because he's from fantasy world. "They're in our storybooks all the time. You have like your good parents, but then something happens and you have an evil new parent who sends you out in the world to get eaten by witches or gobs or something."
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"He's a noble, and we're illegitimate. So we're not part of his family line. And I guess you're also supposed to register kids somewhere when you have them or at least mention them once or twice so somebody knows they exist? Which I think didn't happen."
Ivan shrugs, seeming more embarrassed of it than miserable about it. Especially with Lydia refusing to believe it's a thing.
Lydia explains about storybooks and evil step-parents.
"Our mother might've been more like a good parent? We think she just ran away because he's a bastard, but we've never met her. If she wanted to step in I think she's a little late now that we're adults and all, though." You probably get disqualified from being a good parent once you're twenty years late. It was always a nice thought, though.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia's immediate thought is Lubovv killing their mom so he can raise his illegitimate kids to be assassins without having to worry about a mom getting in the way but she supposes there's any number of awful things that could have led to this point. Hell, Lubov might even be a hellion and wouldn't that be a nice fantasy? The malevolence made him do it. Nobody was really that much of an asshole.
"True, I guess it's too late to be a parent to someone in their twenties cause normally at that point they're going out on their own and making their own lives."
She thinks a bit more. "Does he have, uh, 'legitimate' children? Yeah I'm not sure what illegitimate and legitimate means exactly." She's not exactly a nob.
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"...Not yet," Ivan says, and it's clear he finds the idea of hypothetical half siblings growing up as actual recognized children of his father's to be a chilling thought, probably on various levels.
"I think he's holding out for a really good political marriage."
Lubov with a wife and kids would probably be a Bad Ending for Ivan, considering it's a scenario where Lubov's ambitions may have been fully realized and maybe he wouldn't want all the work that goes into hiding a secret assassin who looks like himself from the precious new wife and her kids. Ivan has certainly contemplated the possibility that his own recent exile has something to do with Lubov wanting to set up a less secretive home life and having to get rid of some of the secrets.
Maybe being semi exiled and forgotten in the Guard wouldn't be so bad if it turned out to have been the alternative to being violently decomissioned.
"Uh, being illegitimate means your parents weren't married. Making a big deal about that stuff is how nobles make sure marriage alliances benefit the allied families so kids they had with random people aren't inheriting their stuff instead of the spouse's childen if the nobles sleep around."
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Huh." Lydia says thinking that she supposes even nobles have their problems. She's never been particularly fond of them but at least she doesn't have to consider the possible practical benefits of instead going after Lubov's 'legitimate' family to try and lure him out.
Which is nice because she's pretty sure Riesenlied wouldn't do that sort of thing and the fact that she's even approached thinking about that sort of thing means she's still a pretty awful person who thinks in awful practicality, even a kind of awful practicality in which the aim is to hurt rather than necessarily solve the problem.
"Honestly all that stuff sounds pretty stupid."
...
"If you have to come up with all these rules to stop folks from sleeping around, maybe power is more trouble than it's worth. I think money solves a lot of problems but maybe when you have a bunch of money you also need more power to keep that money--"
She frowns seriously.
"Nah, money is probably still okay." She says eventually, hopping back up to her feet. "Want to head down the road and forget about all that shit for a while? And the shit here for that matter?" Spira hasn't been too pleasant as of late either.
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"I guess it is," Ivan admits, regarding the stupidity of nobles and how they operate. Lydia suggests that Ivan run away with her(?) -- no, probably just walk with her up the highroad. But you know. This is Ivan. That's still a big deal. Everything is such a big deal.
"I don't know if I can agree to anything like that," says Ivan, to the idea of walking with Lydia recreationally.
"But I was already going that way." He points up the road. "If you want to go that way too for a while and any problems get literally or metaphorically left behind in the process, that sounds okay."
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Oh." Lydia says, sounding dissapointed.
But as usual Ivan is pretty good at finding workarounds. If Ivan's life were on trial he would probably be pretty good at pointing out how he didn't technically break any weird rules he's got going on because he followed the letter of the rule if not the spirit.
So when Ivan points up the road and says he is thinking of going that way for completely coincidental reasons, she laughs a bit into her hand. It's not sarcastic or cruel in any way, though maybe charmed.
"Well good point. Let's head in the same direction for a while because it hpapens to be where we're going anyway."
She stands up and pauses, thinking about that.
"You know, in 'To Those Who Come And Go'--that's like the big Drifter inspirational guidebook--that kind of thinking is sorta the centerpiece of the book. 'Though our travels may take us on different paths, we'll end up on the same road again!'."
She flashes a sharp-toothed grin back at Ivan. "I guess that makes you a natural for the drifter lifestyle."
And before Ivan can argue, she's already moving down the Mi'ihen Highroad.