2019-08-05: An Ocean of Awkwardness
- Log: 2019-08-05: An Ocean of Awkwardness
- Cast: Ivan, Lydia Seren
- Where: THE OCEAN (exact log location lost to time)
- Date: August 06, 2019
- Summary: Lydia and Ivan both happen to be trying to overcome their swimming difficulties in the same place at the same time.
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
Catenna's advice to Ivan was that the only way to learn to swim properly is to be able to relax in the water, and the only way to be able to relax in the water is to get used to it through repeated exposure. Which is just fine, except for literally everything about all of those requirements. But Ivan is nothing if not relentlessly dedicated to finishing things he starts for no other reason except that he started them, so he has made a point to go wade out into the water every now and then in order to prove to the ocean he isn't afraid of it.
Proving to the ocean he is not afraid of it may not... quite be... what Catenna had in mind in terms of getting comfortable in the water, but it's at least in the same general conceptual zone, right?
And so, Ivan stands in water up to his shoulders, which rises about to his chin as the waves lap, and he glowers out at the peaceful watery beauty around him, waiting for it to try something.
"What's your problem with me, anyway?" Ivan asks the ocean. "Everyody acts like I started it. You started it."
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia was told to practice but honestly she is kind of having some trouble. She isn't really 'built' for it and she's too nervous to try something else after seeing PUDDLE GIRL PUDDLE.
She wonders if she'd get in trouble if she took Emeralda along on a treasure hunt ever so briefly.
But ultimately she has a different problem from Ivan. While Ivan is stuck keeping his chin up above water, Lydia is stuck on the bottom of the ocean, walking on the floor, largely navigating through jumping or 'throwing herself' which is about as close as she gets to swimming that isn't barely keeping afloat she can imagine. Case in painit, as Ivan tells the ocean that it started it...The ocean...strikes back!
In the form of a Lydia jumping up out from the water, hanging in the air briefly and then splooshing back down. She tries wading for a moment before seeing Ivan.
Lydia seems to have forgone her armor to get on a bathing suit, one that seems to be from Filgaia since it isn't a jumpsuit or anything just a normal black suit with a bit of a sash around the waist.
She blinks at Ivan for a few moments before her cheeks silver and she slowly starts sinking back underneath the water.
Like in the Terminator but with water instead of molten slag.
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
A sudden Lydia is a wholly unexpected but not ineffective form of retaliation from the ocean! At first Ivan is duly shocked but not sure it IS Lydia because after all of the strife regarding her armor he sort of assumed the armor wasn't... optional...??? So could a person without armor in a swimsuit be Lydia? But come on who else does he know with ram horns and silver cheek stripes??
So this is a new discovery but one that he's already doubting he's even made as she sinks back under the ocean and conceals the evidence.
For Ivan's part, he is in the Spiran swimsuit he came up with a few weeks ago, but all that's currently out of the water are his shoulders so it's not really obvious what if anything he might be wearing. Scandalous!
"I didn't attack you this time!" he calls to Lydia in greeting, because apparently that's a new bar he can say he cleared now.
Did he even bring knives with him into the ocean??? Probably, I mean what if sea monsters.
"What are you doing in the ocean, though?"
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
*burble burble*
Eventually Lydia pokes back up out of the water, just her head this time, kind of working hard to just sort of stay up and be able to see who she's trying to talk to here. Her eyes look towards Ivan's scandalous shoulders and kind of linger there before saying, "I am practicing swimming!" She says.
Lydia said she made her own 'clothes' as her explanation for what it wasn't her being naked but this is decidedly less made clothes than the armor at least. Of course, she does seem notably embarrassed to be seen in it anyway though there isn't any good reason for her to be. Any reason she'd actually have isn't something she really has to worry about with Ivan but she was kind of caught off guard. How does this keep happening?? Only like half the times she ambushed Ivan were intentional.
This is less chasing and more like repeatedly bumping into them no matter where you go!
Well. That's okay, she reasons. SCANDALOUS SHOULDERS.
"You didn't. But what if I was a sea monster...?" Wait SHOULD he have attacked just to be safe?
But she does add, "I was tired of nearly drowning all the time so I asked Rebecca's advice. And uh. I can stay down there a while but not like forever but like back in Meribia I got dunked by underwater shit a lot so." She nods a few times. "Showing the water I'm uh. Not... Afraid of it? I guess?? It has no power over ahhh one second I can't keep this up."
She sinks again.
...
...
...
Before hse ultimately hops back up and starts flailing her arms up and down again.
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
There were a couple of times in there where Ivan was secretly the one who ambushed Lydia, but mostly the universe is just working in mysterious ways.
"If I attack every time somebody startles me, I'd have to clean up a lot of bodies," Ivan says. "I'd rather only clean up a... regular amount." Don't immediately make things grim by talking about regular amounts of murder, Ivan!
"Wait, so are you just jumping...?" Is jumping out of the water repeatedly a kind of swimming if you teach yourself to do it persistently enough that you don't drown??
"Come over here, it's shallow enough to stand, I think you're just past the shelf right now."
Ivan discovered and was about as dismayed as you might expect by the fact that the ocean floor gradually inclines until it gets to just about human height and then DRASTICALLY DROPS OUT FROM UNDERNEATH YOU in typical sadistic ocean fashion. He'll be thrilled to eventually learn about undertow...
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
It's true. Sometimes Ivan is the chaser. But will he accept the title and catch that golden snitch??
Regardless, Lydia treads water as if her life depended on it. It doesn't. She still does!
"I'm... totally swimming!" Lydia says insistently. "I just have to sort of improvise a bit that's all!"
She splooshes back into the water.
...
...
And she jumps back out. "I could maybe do this all day!" She pauses. "But yeah we probably shouldn't have extra murders since if you threw a knife every time I surprised you I'd be a pincushion!"
She drops back down again. Oh geeze.
...
...
But this time when she comes up she manages to get onto a shallower end and just sort of stand there. She's pretty tall so the water is lower on her than on Ivan.
"This isn't me surrendering, I'm just taking a break." She assures Ivan. "Um..."
Her cheeks silver again. "Should I armor up again? I don't mind either way uh--"
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
Lydia's way of swimming seems very exhausting and Ivan is not sure he believes in it, but he sees no point in discouraging her by pointing that out right away, so he doesn't. She takes a break that isn't a surrender on the shelf with him, revealing... a bit more than her shoulders. And then offering to cover back up again, perhaps because she sees Ivan trying not to look.
"What, no, you don't have to -- I'm not the clothing police!"
Ivan reddens, because now it's kind of top of mind either way that Lydia is in a swimsuit! And the swimsuit is an exoskeleton of some kind!! Also maybe he IS kind of the clothing police after being the one to point out Lydia's state of ambiguous nudity earlier.
"...I didn't... realize you--..." Ivan stops himself from saying '...had so much skin' because he does not actually want to win some kind of award for World's Most Uncomfortable Thing to Say to a Lady in a Swimsuit, and instead comes out with a sheepish, "...could take your armor off," and might end up with second place, instead.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia says, "W..well I'm not a clothing criminal!" Did anybody say you were a clothing criminal Lydia? Sure, you've committed crimes and are as such technically a criminal but not specifically regarding clothing! Unless you are nude all the time and that probably violates a few laws but she decided she wasn't!
She even doublechecked with the Kinship and her parents! It's not nudity if she decides it isn't! That's how it works right??
Lyddia steps back a bit, nearly right back off the shelf.
Ivan thankfully doesn't say 'I didn't know you had so much skin' because that might be a better way of killing Lydias than throwing knives at her. It's almost certain she wouldn't survive an attack like that. Luckily Ivan dodges that fate.
"Oh uh. Well. It's not exactly off it's just... not armor right now? Oh but that's probably what you meant."
She kind of sinks down a little into a crouch so only the top half of her face is visible.
This naturally precludes her from saying anything else so it looks like Lydia has found a way to avoid spouting off something she doesn't want to say. She just has to make it physicaslly impossible for her to speak.
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
It's not exactly off it's just... not armor right now?
"Ah, right, I think I understand, I just... I didn't know you had other options, I thought maybe the only choices were armor... or... goo... or maybe knives sometimes I guess?" Ivan wonders if he should be admitting he made this assumption. Or if it's rude to talk about someone's mysterious robot goo. It's probably super rude to talk about someone's mysterious robot goo. Especially someone with a known, ongoing fear of turning into a puddle of mysterious robot goo.
He is also worried now he's going to make too many assumptions in the other direction and kind of bum her out if maybe her skin isn't actually super skin-like.
"This is... probably not stuff I should be talking about! Sorry! You can ask me about something weird if you want."
Maybe it would be better to pick a neutral topic rather than offering some kind of embarassing question turnabout, but there it is.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia IS kind of speechless as Ivan continues to explain his thought process. His METHOD here. It helps that her mouth is underwater and that readily prevents her from commenting. Her face is practically entirely silvered just from intense embarrassment action.
But then Ivan says she can ask a question too. Even a weird one! Lydia has, like, SO MANY weird questions ivan. She pokes her head back out of the water.
"Um." She says. "A weird question? Okay. Right. um um um..."
Oh no she has too many questions in her head! It's so hard to pick! But if she doesn't pick one she just KNOWS she's going to say all of them all at once and scare Ivan away! She's better off just picking one and being done with it because there's no way she's going to be able to say 'no' to Ivan offering a weird question #ask. Because Lydia has been kind of dying to ask all SORTS of weird question! ugh! She better hurry! Just pick any weird question and get it over with!!!
"Do you want to touch it???" Lydia asks in a kind of wild frenzy.
The background music cuts out for a bit after she says that before she slowly sinks into the water and starts waddling backwards in an attempt to retreat.
"Nevermind it's ok I can also just live at the bottom of the ocean for the rest of my life."
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"...Touch what?!" says Ivan, with wide eyes. They hadn't established a noun!! He-- the's pretty sure there's nothing in the world in general and having to do with Lydia in particular that he can or should admit to wanting to touch. Did he promise to answer the question completely and truthfully or just to listen to it??? He tries to remember!
Wait no, Lydia is fleeing into the ocean.
"Don't drown yourself!!" he says, reaching forward and trying to fish her back out.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"You know!" Lydia says which might not be accurate at all but isn't stopping her from trying to drown herself.
Luckily Ivan reaches out to stop her but in the midst of flailing Lydia arms and ecape attempts ends up grabbing her ARM to pull her back up. The moment Ivan does, Lydia ceases struggling and just kind of allows her to be polled back onto the shallow end of the, uh, of the ocean.
Odds are Lydia didn't mean 'my arm' by 'it' but it has a similar sort of effect anyway. You can practically see the steam blowing out of her ears.
Why did she waste her question on THAT, Lydia is asking herself now. She could have asked 'do you like me?' or any other similarly embarrassing but important questions!
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
You can literally see the gears turning fruitlessly in Ivan's head as he looks with consternation at Lydia metaphorically blowing steam out her ears and looks at the arm he's holding her by and wonders if she really did mean her arm.
He also does kind of pause to notice, himself, what her arm feels like.
Then he remembers that it's not any of his business! He releases her, looking guilty and embarassed about paying any attention to something like that, and watches her cautiously for a moment, uncertain if she'll dunk herself back down. He lets out a sigh.
Was it her skin she was talking about? A specific body part? Her... soul?!
"I think questions are dangerous," he says.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Y--you said I could ask!" Lydia points out. "I wasn't going to but you opened the door!"
But she doesn't dunk back down again. Ivan's probably 'touched' her 'soul' ages ago which is the real problem here. He touched her soul and now Lydia is considering dangerous questions in her life.
"But um. Physical. Um. Physical. Contact. It's nice." But also clearly spooky considering everything. She is trying her darnedest to make it sound like it's no big deal and let's face it probably failing pretty badly.
"We uh. We can avoid questions. Like... It's a nice day out, right?"
Pause.
"Er that's not a question I'm just kind of used to saying statements with a bit of a question at the end so it's a little less terrifying."
<Pose Tracker> Ivan has posed.
"I did say you could ask," Ivan admits, contritely. "I was expecting to understand the question..." But maybe understanding it would have been even worse.
He's... suspecting it was probably about skin, given what she says next about physical contact. He reddens, and uses her invitation about the niceness of the day to focus his attention on the sky.
"I... I guess it is..." he says. He didn't mean to outlaw questions of all kinds! He really is weighing Lydia down with extra rules, isn't he? At this rate he'll have her carrying around a mountain of weird restrictions the way he does -- at least when it comes to dealing with him.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
It's a good guess though Lydia is too embarrassed to actually say it right now so it'll just have to be a mystery. Honestly any other option would probably be worse so let's just assume she meant skin.
"It's..." Lydia says with effort. "It's something I need. It's how I make it feel real." What is 'it'? Honestly it might be a whole slew of things but she can't seem to get any clearer than that and not break down so she leaves it at that. "But I don't need to be in a hurry."
She exhales faintly, calming slightly as she smiles back to Ivan.
"Then we can just enjoy it."
She sets aside her worries and instead uses this opportunity to unleash a
SPLASH ATTACK
towards Ivan. It's a pretty mild one largely because she knows he has a complex here.