2020-08-11: Memories of Snow

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  • Log: Memories of Snow
  • Cast: Loren Voss, Lan Lilac
  • Where: Sielje City
  • Date: August 11, 2020
  • Summary: Did you know that there's a word for the smell of rain?

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    Sielje had been a shock, to say the least. Other than the part where it had a school for Crest users, and the part where it was located in another dimension (it's long been a sticking point among some circles in Solaris high society, but has generally been viewed as 'survey, but not a threat at this time') Loren hadn't known a thing about it.

    The fact that it snowed here had been surprising.
    So had the fact that it had an observatory. An actual observatory... but that hadn't been the reason why they'd come here, and anyway he'd asked someone about it and it's not precisely open to the public, at least as someone like him (e.g. not a resident or student) is concerned.

    It's surprisingly warm and cozy inside -- surprising, at least, until one remembers that this is a mage town.

    The two of them, still awaiting a rendezvous with Major Sadalbari, sit in a small cafe. Class must be in session because there is a distinct lack of students here.

    Loren had been writing in his notebook, but has stopped to stare out the window, watching fat lazy flakes drift vaguely downwards and stick to the growing pile of them on the windowsill.

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

    Lan's travels, in the past, had mainly kept her on Ignas and the occasional surrounding island. In the last couple of years though, she's been to Elru and Aquvy and even the moon (twice!). You'd think that something as normal as an extradimensional snow village by and for Crest Sorcerers wouldn't be that big of a deal anymore.

    But it snows here. Lan doesn't think she's seen snow since... well, the Photosphere.

    It's much nicer to be inside, safe and warm, and not freezing or bleeding to death on the outside of an enormous Metal Demon nest.

    The Photosphere didn't have hot chocolate.

    Lan also has a notebook to write in, partially because she wanted to keep studying and partially because it's boring to watch someone else think, write for a while, think, and repeat. Her carefully-penned script still has the intentional flavor of someone who's paying attention, but she no longer takes an hour to fill a single page either.

    Lan doodles another chicobo in the margin of her paper, complete with 'wark!' speech bubble, before setting her pen down and reaching for her mug. She glances up at Loren, sensing that he's not quite hard at work either. It's easy to get distracted in a place like this.

    "...There's no snow in Solaris," she remarks quietly, watching the flakes drift down with him.

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    Maybe that's one of the reasons why the powers that be, ultimately, leave Sielje alone. In the end, it's just a small town. It may have its sorcerors, but surely, certainly, it would crumble quickly if Solaris ever decided to lay it to waste. Wouldn't it?

    They had spent part of today getting situated and establishing their cover story -- scholars from Guild Galad, Symbology-focused, but here to learn about Crests.

    Indeed, he looks every bit the scholar now, as he writes, pauses, and writes again.
    It just happens that what he writes are his own memories, as he tries to write down what has happened in the last few days and work further to locate the gaps.

    He had found a new one recently.

    But as with all important but tedious tasks, his attention wanders.

    "There's no weather there," he answers, his gaze parting from the snow and turning to her. "That part of the atmosphere has no weather. ...And anyway, it's all enclosed," he adds, shaking his head.

    "...I wonder why it snows here? The sky's the same, but there's nothing at all below the town, they say."

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

    Moving in to a new location is fun, most of the time. She's getting used to needing a cover story - as opposed to back then, when she'd never thought to really question it. And before that, she'd never considered it. Most of her life, Lan has been fundamentally honest.

    The long clothes aren't uncomfortable, just... different. Lan doesn't often wear dresses. But her hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, and Cultural found a plain dress for her that would blend in among the people of Guild Galad just fine. (To her immense gratitude in the snowy climate of Sielje, there are leggings, which are not stockings. Stockings itch.)

    "It was weird," Lan nods, assuming that she's agreeing with him. But it's a little nice - she'd almost assumed he would say something like 'of course there isn't' and then scoff at her ignorance. Oh no, is this the brain damage setting in? Is it making Loren pleasant?!

    ...Maybe, Lan realizes, she could use a real vacation. As if afraid of him realizing what she's thinking, she buries her face in her mug and gulps the rest of her not-quite-so-hot-anymore chocolate. "Glmph."

    "...Maybe it's magic snow," she offers, setting the mug down with a quite 'tap' after a moment to think. "What if it only snows because people decided they liked it?"

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    If she was worried about his brain, perhaps she should worry no more--!

    Since the moment she 'agrees' that it was weird, he kind of squints at her like she just said that she didn't like trees and greenery.

    "No?" he says, still looking at her like he can't really fathom what she's saying. "Water. Falls out of the sky. Do you know how weird that was?" In typical Loren fashion, he grumps and leans back in his seat, his gaze turned over to the window where more snowflakes meet the rest. "...Wonder what happens when too many of these fall and they're buried in them," he mutters, in mostly the same moment that she suggests it's maybe magic snow.

    He appears to consider that.
    It's a weird consideration, sure, by the look on his face. But he sure does consider it.

    "...I guess," he says, shrugging his shoulders.

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

    Oh nevermind, there he goes. For a moment there Lan was a little concerned.

    "It's weird to go someplace where it never rains. Even back home in Little Firelight it rains now and then. How else would we grow any crops? And on the moon it was so beautiful, all because of the rain." She rests her elbows on the table and sighs, thinking about the first time rain had found them back then. How she'd danced in it. Even then, 'Thomas' had been grumpy about it.

    She supposes that in a floating city like Etrenank, if it's just picture perfect all the time... It's no wonder that some of the people there are happy. If everything is like living in a dream...
    Well. For some people, anyway. Lan still thinks about Mirza sometimes.

    She shakes her head slowly, but goes back to gazing out the window. "Yeah, but Filgaia does that all by itself. Solaris had to figure it out at some point, right? ...But I guess that to you, it was really weird." The flakes flutter down, and Lan knows that if they go outside sounds will be muffled. It's never like that in Ignas. "...What was it like, the first time it rained on you? What did you feel?" she can't help but ask, and casts a look at his journal.

    "It piles up in stuff called 'drifts'. Like how sand makes 'dunes'. You can even eat it." She had something called 'snow cream' once!

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    "Well... yeah," he is forced to admit grudgingly, wrapping his hand around his own still-steaming mug. "It's kept appropriately wet in the hydroponics areas, and they water the parks, but... we don't have weather." Lan would know this -- the temperature and humidity are kept even. Every day is comfortable, without variation.

    "I had to get used to the gravity," he sighs. To say nothing of the shock of walking off a shuttle and into Bledavik's heat. He'd been more or less isolated -- a few field training sessions in Jugend aside -- from the world below until that point. But after that...

    He remains quiet for a long moment when she asks what he'd thought or felt the first time he'd seen it rain.

    "...I thought there was a leak somewhere," he admits, looking away from her. "I knew what rain was. I'm not stupid. But I was in Adlehyde and it just started... raining." He pauses. "I didn't know rain had a smell."

    'You can eat it', and it takes Loren a moment to realize she's talking about the snow.

    "...Why would I eat something that fell out of the sky?"

    Like sky cake, perhaps?

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

    She knows it. She'd come to hate it, just as she'd hated every other part of the city in the sky. The gravity was strange - even to Lan with her magic ribbon. The people were strange. The language was strange. Everything was strange and mostly awful.

    No wonder he's so grumpy about the surface. To come to a place without the conveniences he'd grown up with, to be so far from home... although Loren doesn't seem to enjoy his 'home' much more than Lan does.

    "It's not really stupid though," she considers. "Because all your life until then, if it had started raining it would have meant there was a leak somewhere." What a weird, sad life he's lived. To not even know the smell of rain. "I found out that there's a word for the smell of rain. It's called 'petrichor'." Lan writes it down on the open page of her journal, just for something to do. "How do you feel when you smell it? Most people on the surface think it's comforting. But we grew up with it, even if it was rare for a lot of us. How about you? Is it just a human thing to feel like that, or do you need to grow up with it?"

    She's... even more philosophical than usual, it seems.

    "And because if you mix it with milk and sugar and some flavoring, it turns into this kind of a slushy dessert that's amazing. I had it once near Nortune."

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    Is there anywhere that Loren enjoys, though?

    He bristles, even when she assures him it's not stupid, because Loren is Loren. But at least he seems to relax somewhat when she talks about the smell of rain. "Petric... petrichor. Huh. What a weird word," he says, staring down into the steaming mug of cocoa. "When I-- uh," he starts, screwing up his face for a moment. "I never really... I guess, that it's 'weird'. Like water doesn't really have a smell... well. I guess a creek kind of does. And so does the sea..." He hangs his head for a moment. Why is the surface world so dang weird?

    "I guess, just that it's weird. Like weird-curious, not weird-bad. I'm not used to thinking about smells..."

    The surface world has a lot of smells...

    Lan goes on about eating snow of all things.

    "I still don't get why you'd eat something that was on the ground," he sighs, though the face that he pulls shows at least some interest twisted up with the general 'that's just weird' expression he's got on.

    "...What kind of flavoring?"

    In the end the way through for him seems to always be 'via the stomach'.

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

    Surely there's a single, lonely, hard to find place somewhere in the universe that Loren would feel positively about! Like, maybe on another planet!

    "Yeah. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say it, so I might not even be pronouncing it right. It was in a book I read once." No wonder the people of Sielje might like snow enough to create it all the time. It's cozy in the cafe, after all. They could drink hot drinks and chat about nothing important all day if they wanted to!

    Weird-curious, huh...? Lan smiles a bit, risking a glance over at him. It's nice to see Loren... well, not happy, but not feeling sour either. "I love the smell of the sea. It's weird. The sea at Kilika smelled the same as the sea in Aquvy. Did you notice?" He was kind of busy being on island arrest for most of their time in the little village.

    "If it's clean, why not? Vegetables grow out the dirt and we eat those. Snow just sits on top of the dirt. And it's not like you eat the snow that touches the dirty part. It's cleaner than anything but the air itself, right? ...and they had lemon or vanilla, so I got vanilla. I bet if we get some snow here we could make snow cream. You should try it at least once!"

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    Sadly, even Lunar was a disappointment... but it is a big universe out there. Maybe there's somewhere he can feel at home.

    "It smells kind of funny, if you ask me. Like something died," he says, of the sea. But when Lan mentions the smell of the sea in Aquvy compared to the smell of the sea in Kilika, he actually stops dead right there. "I... can't remember," he says, shaking his head. "It was just... the sea, right."

    So, no, apparently he didn't. Or, does his comment mean that he did, if he says 'it was just the sea'...?
    What a pain, this man.

    "Those are different," he tries to protest, shaking his head. "They're vegetables, not... stuff that falls out of the sky. And, anyway, you don't need dirt to grow vegetables--"

    A lemon snow?

    "What about... what if you wanted to mix them together?" Another pause. "...What, you think they'd just let you eat the snow here?"

    His hands shift, and as if finally noticing the mug in his hand, he lifts it to take a sip.

    He blinks, then swallows his mouthful. "This is..."

    "...this is really good, actually."

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

    Lan wrinkles her nose. "That's just the seaweed," she assures him. Probably. For a while in Spira, it... probably had been because something died in it. Maybe it's better if he doesn't remember that part. Lan turns her mug in a slow circle on the tabletop. "That's okay if you can't remember. I'll remember it for you."

    Imagine growing vegetables in anything but dirt! "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should," she frowns. "It isn't better just because it's cleaner. Like, isn't there anything you can think of that tasted better on the surface than back in Etrenank? Because it grew in the sunlight, and absorbed nutrients from the soil. How do you even feed plants if they don't grow in the dirt?" If Solaris has been burying dead fish with their fancy 'hydroponics' systems, Loren wouldn't have complained so much about the sea smelling like dead stuff! ...Well, probably. He can complain about anything.

    Lan lifts her mug and tilts it over her mouth, hoping for a few last drops of chocolate. "Aah-"

    Aaaaaaand gotcha. Now he's interested. Lan's pretty sure snow cream is a foregone conclusion by now - it's just a matter of coaxing Loren through the steps of actually getting the ingredients. She sets the mug down and tries not to look triumphant. "Who's going to stop us? The snow police? Tell you what, if we can find lemons here we'll try mixing them. You can eat all the, the vanillemon you want."

    He finally takes his first sip of hot chocolate and Lan can hardly keep from grinning. "See? Imagine how good that'll taste after walking around in the snow all day, when your feet are cold and wet and you get inside a place like this." They didn't get a chance to get wet feet quite yet, something Lan isn't exactly complaining about.

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    'It's okay if you can't remember. I'll remember it for you'. It's a simple phrase -- more throwaway than anything. But it still serves to stop him dead in his tracks. His gaze turns down to the notebook, to the lines of text on it, to...
    Ever so slightly, he shakes his head. If he can't remember anything anymore, will she--

    But she goes on, talking about the differences in food quality, and so on. "It's not that bad back home," he grumbles, shock trading dance positions with good old irritation. "You're acting like it's..."
    The food is generally better on the surface. He doesn't like being reminded of that.
    "And, anyway, it works through-- well there's water, or, wait, was it like a gel... and..." Loren ends up just gesturing vaguely. "Well, how should I know? I learned medicine, not food production," he sighs, closing his eyes a moment.

    But even that can't last in the face of Lan's promises of something tasty... and a young man who grew up eating standardized processed food in some kind of weird upside-down sky city. "Whoa, whoa, what do you mean, get some lemons? We'd have to get, uh, the sugar and cream, and the vanilla..." he protests, as if this is an obstacle. "Isn't there some place around here that'd just... make it?"

    Do they make snow cream in Sielje? Should they find out?

    He sets the mug down and just looks the side, as if he were straddling some line between being at least somewhat pleased and more than a little embarrassed. "I... guess," he allows, feeling oddly uncomfortable right now. Like he's a snail that's lost his shell. His gaze returns by inches to the notebook before him. "Hey, uh..."

    But he invariably balks and backs down.

    "You know what, nevermind."

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

    "Fine, fine," she waves it off. Even if Loren says otherwise, they both know food tastes better on the surface. It's another comforting thing - though harder to talk about with most people than the smell of rain.

    "Okay, if we can find a place that sells it, we'll buy it. But if we don't, we'll make out own. You can't miss out on it just because we had to make a supply run!" It would definitely be a Snow Crime.

    Even in her moment of almost assured victory over Not Getting to Eat Snow Cream, she's still sensitive enough to see that something's troubling him. Lan quiets down and returns to watching the snow, though a corner of her vision remains on him just in case. He's looking at the notebook - his notebook.

    And he almost asks something, before seeming to lose his nerve. "...What is it?" she finally asks.

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    There are some things he'd argue are pretty good in Etrenank. Some of the smoothies are nice stuff, and you can always find interesting snacks at kiosks.

    But...

    Even he can't deny that there's a world of difference between an apple, as he'd grown up knowing them (kind of sweet, crunchy) and the first apple he'd eaten down here (description cannot do justice the array of flavor but he will try: sweet, but tangy, but earthy, a slight bitter note, something almost floral) and then found to his shock that the next one was not exactly the same.

    It doesn't mean that he'll admit it, though.

    "Alright, alright," he says, as if defeated here and now. "But if they tell us we're breaking some... law or something, we need to stop." Some kind of... Snow Law? "If Sadalbari comes here and we've gotten kicked out over eating snow, I'm never going to hear the end of it."

    But there's something that's bugging him, still.

    He doesn't look at her. He looks out the window.

    "...If," he starts slowly, as if he's touching on something sensitive or forbidden, "if I don't... I mean," he says with a shake of his head, starting over from the beginning.

    This is dumb. This is so dumb. Just tell her you don't want to--

    "...You'll remember this too, right?" he asks, because he can't hold it back anymore.

<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.

    What kind of draconian laws is Solaris made of? It's a rhetorical question, really - Lan has become aware over the last few months of just how harsh life is for anybody but the First Class citizens of Etrenank. But really, just eating snow?

    Who has the kind of time it would take to police that sort of thing?

    "Okay," Lan sighs, a little bit exasperated. She can't imagine anybody on the surface even caring. "If someone tells us to stop, we'll stop. But I'm sure it's gonna be fine!" The hardest part, honestly, is going to be finding lemons without leaving Sielje.

    If, he begins haltingly, and Lan quiets down to pay attention. Will she remember this, even if he forgets?

    "Of course I will," she promises without hesitation. It's not like anybody could forget introducing someone else to something good, right? But it's Loren, who honestly needs all the help he can get, so Lan will make herself remember. "Why not write it down in your journal too? Call it a future memory."

<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.

    In actuality, there aren't any rules against eating snow in Solaris because there is no snow--

    But there are other kinds of rules. There are many other kinds of rules. Most of them are very dangerous to break. Only the First Class is excempt from most of these rules.
    ...But there are things that even the First Class pretends not to see or know about, because not all rules are written.

    So, the way he figures it, he can only assume that it's the same for surface-dweller cities -- when they're not out and out lawless chaos.

    "Fine, fine," Loren relents, sighing.

    Maybe if they can't get lemons, there'll be something else out there, somewhere.

    But there's something else that's been gnawing at him as they've chatted. Especially after that realization in the Feywild. What's he lost so far? How much more is he going to lose? And, will he ever get back what he's lost?

    This is stupid, this is stupid, he tells himself, like a mantra. But he still asks it, because who even knows how far gone he is now?

    Of course she says yes.
    "...Yeah," he says in turn, glancing down at his notebook, at his own handwriting. He feels stupid. He feels small. He feels grateful. He feels lost. He feels...

    Why does everything have to be so complicated?

    At a loss, he opts to do the only logical thing left to him:

    Which is to down the contents of his mug in one go.