2021-01-14: Where Memories Sleep
- Log: Where Memories Sleep
- Cast: Lan Lilac, Loren Voss
- Where: Halmetz - Root Pier
- Date: January 14, 2021
- Summary: While traveling the seas, Lan speaks to Loren about his notebook.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
While Lan has traveled a lot since first leaving Little Firelight, exploring the vast seas by boat is still novel and exciting! It's nice to just... sort of let her mind wander a bit, now that they're on the move again. And with new clothes on, and his glasses safely stowed away in his pack, Loren looks a lot less like the grumpy and increasingly hostile soldier that Gebler's forces will no doubt be looking for.
Lan is harder to disguise, but her long hair is tucked snugly up beneath a floppy straw hat and she's managed to buy a sundress that makes her look less like a desert fugitive and more like a girl who might live a carefree life in an island town. All told, it's not a bad disguise.
Gwen's off doing her own shopping, so Lan and Loren are killing time before they're all supposed to meet up at the inn for dinner and hunkering down in their room.
Because while just holing up as soon as they get into town feels like the safest thing to do, Lan knows by now that they need to have their ears to the ground.
Plus, Loren gets bored as easily as he's entertained, and they should get exercise anyway.
As much as she wanted to take him to see the actual city, the crowds didn't seem to agree with him. The docks are still good, though, and the sea breeze makes her feel a little optimistic again. Yeah. Maybe they can do this. They just have to keep moving until the heat dies down. Solaris will assume he was killed in action. He can have a fresh start.
...So why, every time she thinks about that, does it make her gut twist with unease?
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
It had been overwhelming.
He had been in contact with a few towns before this one, but this had been the largest place that he -- this Loren -- had encountered. He'd asked Lan if they could get away from the crowd before long. It had been too much sound, too much movement. Too many colors, in such close space to one another. Out by the docks, at least, it's quieter. Calmer.
He sits near the edge of one of the docks, an arm encircling one knee and lower leg. His over leg dangles over the side. He's been uncharacteristically quiet even for this 'him', his gaze focused out at the sea, off to the horizon where sky and water meet.
But he's relaxed. The tension that used to be a part of his body is absent. He may be quiet, but he's also found some sort of peace.
A gentle breeze blows in off the sea. Somewhere not far from them, a smaller boat sways and sloshes with the waterline. No one else is in their immediate vicinity right now, unless you count that seagull regarding them with ill intent (as ever with a seagull).
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
It seems that some things do carry over, even if they take a different form. But at least it was just nerves, a discomfort, and not a panic attack. They'd left when he'd asked, and this part of the island seems to be doing him good.
Lan knows better than to let him out of her sight in a new place, especially one as big as this, so she's only stepped far enough away to buy something called 'gelato' before coming back. (It looks like ice cream, and she couldn't begin to figure out the difference.) "What're you thinking about?" she asks him, handing over one of the cones to him before having a seat next to Loren on the edge of the pier, letting her feet dangle over the water below. "You look like you're a thousand miles away."
Is he remembering something? Is he thinking about the future? Lan glances behind them out of lingering, hard-to-kill wariness before daring to try a bite of the not-ice-cream. It's cold and sweet, just like the real thing.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
No, it didn't seem to be one of his fits -- he was more or less fine outside feeling like he was overwhelmed, and that had abated well enough by the time they'd gotten away from the throng. It's probably because everything's new to him, now, he'd guessed, when Lan had expressed concern. He'd be fine. He just needed a way to catch his breath, first.
He hasn't moved from the spot in the time she's been gone -- not that she's been gone long, at that. Indeed, he only looks away from that point on the horizon when she speaks to him.
"Huh? ...I don't know," he answers after a moment, shaking his head. "I guess... maybe that it felt kind of..." He pauses. "Familiar isn't the right word. Welcoming, maybe?" He reaches up to scratch at the back of his head.
"I wonder if it relates to that 'magic' you said I had. ...I tried thinking about it, but nothing happened," he sighs, closing his eyes for a moment. "...But it doesn't bother me. A lot of people can't use magic, right?"
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Not a lot seems to bother him at all anymore. In a way, that ought to be good. It's hard to be stressed and miserable when absolutely nothing stresses you out. But when it's because nothing seems to really be important to him...
Could she really call that good?
"People who live near the ocean, or out on it like the people of this city do, they have a lot of myths and stories about it. I guess because you can't see to the bottom of it, and it goes on forever, and it's so... vast." She almost said 'big', but that just didn't even begin to encompass the size of the sea. "You did use some water magic. Maybe it's that! Or maybe it's just because the ocean is pretty amazing."
She takes another bite of ice cream and thinks about it, following his gaze out to the horizon. "...Well, it's true. Plenty of people can't unless they study and train for it. I think you learned at Jugend, the school you went to. If you want to learn it again, I guess we could go to Sielje? There's a magic school there. Maybe you could enroll once we're able to stop moving around so much!" He'd liked studying, hadn't he? At least, he'd done a lot of it. Maybe that's not exactly the same.
And speaking of studying... he's still got the journals he'd written. "...Hey, can we talk about something really important? It's about your memories. In your backpack, there's a... it's like a book but it works more like a tablet? It was yours-- well I mean it still is! But you were writing in it like a journal. I wanted to talk to you about that."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"They do, huh... I guess that makes sense. It kind of feels like you could jump in and never reach the bottom." He pauses, then smiles, slightly. "I don't really know how to put. Like I've known it before, except not really. Like I've been here, except I don't think I did even before. It's just... strange. But not in a bad way."
Weird had never quite been the insult he'd meant it as, even when the former Loren had slung it about.
"So I used water magic, too. Huh. I'd tried with earth," he says, looking over at her. "I tried thinking about rocks, and sharp stones, and sand, and stuff, but nothing happened..."
His gaze turns back out onto the distant horizon. "Sielje," he repeats, as if testing the name out. "And they teach magic there... or, maybe when I go home I could go back to school."
He couldn't, but he doesn't know that now.
She wants to talk about something important, she says, and he nods, his gaze not on her and makes a noncommital sound--
At which point she says it's about his memories. At that point, his attention is very much on her. "My... memories? A book," he repeats, crinkling his brow in mild confusion. "Oh. Do you mean that... plate thing?" He gestures vaguely, as if to trace out the form of a rectangular shape. "So I wrote in that..." He frowns, looking down. "I wasn't sure what that was."
His attention returns to her. "Yes?"
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
"Maybe! I'm not sure what your school was like. I never saw it, and you didn't talk about it much." She'd gotten the sense that he hadn't really enjoyed it, but that he was still proud of it all the same? ...Or maybe it's the kind of pride a person adopts because anything else would be unbearable.
That got his attention. Lan nods. "Yeah. I want to talk to you about... well. The stuff you wrote in there." How should she say it? It feels like even talking about it will curse him. But not talking about it... not telling him what she knows is wrong. What if she tells him, and it just makes him unhappy to know he'd been that kind of person? What if he reads the journal and gets his memory back, but he's no better off than he'd been in the caves?
"I never read them. They were private, you know? I never peeked." And it goes without saying that she'd never asked to look at them when he was still writing in them. "If you want to, you can read what the old you wrote. Maybe it would help you remember some stuff. But..." she pauses, searching for the words to convey the deep, deep misgivings she has about the whole idea. "Well... you were... not really a happy person. Not even just 'content'. I guess... I'm just worried that if you decide to read them you might be sad. But if you don't read them... it feels like I'm not even trying to help you." Lan takes another bite of her ice cream and sighs before listlessly tossing the rest of her cone into the water below her feet. "And that's..."
That's what a different you did to me, and I don't know if I'm okay with doing it to you.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Loren makes another sound that might be interested, or might simply be an acknowledgement of the subject, neither positively or negatively. School itself is a rather abstract concept to him -- he's gathered what it's for but there's no context in it.
Neither good, nor bad.
"Yes?" he says again, when she says she wants to talk about what's in there. "Did you read it--"
No, she says, and he regards her quizzically. "Private... Okay. I see. So if I were to read them... maybe I might remember? Or, at least I'd know more about who I once was."
Which, as Lan soon says, was a person who wasn't very happy.
"...I wasn't, huh." His gaze turns again off to the sea. He shifts his postion soon after, nearly mimicking her own as he swings his other leg over the edge. "And, you're thinking I might become sad again if I read them."
He has a little more intuition like this, for whatever reason.
"...I think it'll be okay if I read them," he tells her. He looks back at her. He smiles at her. And he shakes his head. "But, I don't feel like looking at them right now. Maybe someday. Or maybe not," he says, looking away from her, tilting his gaze up at the sky.
"It's funny. I think, 'I want to know who I was'. But I also think... I'm fine as I am."
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Lan has seen schools, but never attended one. So much of what she knows was taught to her by aunts and uncles and her mother. And later, she learned from people she met while traveling. But she never sat down in a special building made just for learning, with other children who were there to learn at the same time.
"You might become sad. Or... you might remember everything, and hate it." You might hate me for reminding you, as much as you wanted those memories back before you knew what they were. "...I just want good things to happen for you. And right now..." Lan trails off, looking resolutely toward the sea. "I don't know what I should tell you. I don't know how much you'd even want to know!" Like the so-called 'confusion trap' that made him attack her.
"I just..." I just remember what you didn't do for me. I remember the way the word 'Lamb' fell off your tongue. "I just want you to be okay. Whether that's staying like you are now, or getting all your memories back... I don't know."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"I might," he agrees, looking up at the sky. "Or maybe, nothing will happen at all. That was another 'me', I've been thinking. What I feel now... hearing you talk about it, we're two different people." His hands settle on the edge of a dock and perhaps for a split-second Lan might think he was about to jump into the water.
But he remains right where he is.
"To be honest... I don't either. But I think that's okay."
He looks back over at her.
"Not to know, that is. I'm fine just taking it as it comes. Maybe I'll figure it out someday."
She just wants him to be okay, she says.
He studies her as if he were searching for something hidden in her expression, some secret that's been lost to the ages. "...Then, this is enough. I'm okay as I am. As long as you're watching out for me, I think I'll keep being okay."