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bakerstreet2016-07-21 02:22 pm
socketeer) wrote in bakerstreet2016-07-21 02:22 pm
picture prompt
 the integrated picture prompt meme for all your GEN, AU, AND SHIPPY pic prompt needs I — Comment with your character and include possible preferences.
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no subject
"That's noble," she says slowly, regarding the pacifism. "To be dedicated to peace. Maybe it's the only way there can ever be a true peace, if everyone holds that kind of gentleness higher than his own life. But nobility is a luxury, too. I could make the decision to die for my own principles, but if I die, there are people depending on me who will suffer. So I keep fighting."
She looks quizzical at his addressing the empty air. "...you speak to his spirit?"
Well, it wouldn't be the first time she'd known someone surrounded by ghosts. Max, she has come to realize though he says little about it, is haunted almost constantly. Whether the visions he sees are true spirits or something that's snapped within his own head she can't say, and maybe it doesn't matter. His ghosts are real to him. She has to assume whoever Aurus is speaking to is just as real in his eyes, whether that realness is something she can believe in or not.
"There've been many human deities, gods and goddesses. Demeter is only one name for the same...mm, personification, maybe." Shrug. "But I don't know the name Melandru. I know Brigit. Pachamama. Hathor and Bastet."
The Vuvalini were all about goddesses, of course. They even gave their children Initiate Names of old world goddesses and powerful women still remembered after the fall of civilization. Furiosa bears the name of the Furies, for vengeance.
"...would it be rude to ask why you want to find this dragon?"
no subject
"From Ventari's teachings we learn that 'All things have a right to grow. The blossom is brother to the weed.' But what does that kinship mean? For Ventari, it meant that one must kill nothing, regardless of its way of life. Among my people we have come to understand it somewhat differently: a weed is not an ugly plant, after all. Weeds can be quite beautiful. What makes them weeds is that they are aggressive. Their growth chokes out that which grows around them, taking over and making other blooms impossible. What then is right to do?
"We believe that when weeds impede the growing of other things then it does become right to fight. I know now that this interpretation and its implications make Ventari slightly uncomfortable, but he also accepts it somewhat. I know this because I do speak to...something like his spirit--the echo of his legend, I would say.
"When I came into the Mists, I knew little what I would find, nor even what I searched for. What I found, after a great deal of time, is that there are many legendary heroes who persist here. If you learn to listen in the right ways, you can commune with them, learn from them. Some will willingly lend their aid and others can be compelled to. You might say that I became a sort of medium. And after a good many months, I found Ventari, and I studied with him, and I learned to channel a kind of magic that he lent to me. Here, watch."
From where he sits, Aurus extends on arm out in front of him towards the center of the cave, like he is throwing or shoving something into being there. In front of them, about a meter away, the empty air seems to ripple and suddenly there before them in a sudden rush of golden light is a great stone tablet. Long thick vines wrap around its surface, but it hovers in the air a few feet above the cave floor, pulsing with its soft light and a gentle bright sound like a melodious hum. And across the cave floor quite miraculously a breath of tiny white flowers and grass ghosts into life, sprouting and blooming and vanishing in a steady pulse, and then sprouting and blooming and vanishing all over again.
Ultimately, the flowers and the tablet itself are intangible apparitions, but they look perfectly solid and real nonetheless. In the light, Aurus no longer glows with his foxfire-like phosphorescence, but now his skin the leaves of his skin and the fronds of his hair are more clearly visible.
He anticipates how amazing this may be to Furiosa (though he hopes not frightening), so he keeps his following words minimal:
"This is also why I search for Glint. I could look for anyone--even the human gods I suppose, if I wished to (though as far as I know there are only six). But more than any of them it is the dragon prophetess from whom I want to learn."
no subject
"I think you have a greater sense of philosophy than me," she tells Aurus frankly. She considers these things, herself, but less so than him, evidently. Maybe she's had less peaceful time to ponder.
She's certainly never learned from spirits. There was a time in the worst part of her captivity where she spoke to her mother and initiate mother, but she's not convinced she didn't imagine it out of sheer desperate despair. She doesn't like to think of that now. Whatever it is he does with his Mists and his learning, it doesn't sound much like that.
Her expression changes very little when he casts the glowing illusion, although the light glimmers are reflected in her eyes. She looks less at the tablet than the grass and the flowers, flesh fingers twitching as if she wants to touch them. But she's had so many strange revelations the past hour, she may have run out of the emotional fortitude to react verbally. She blinks a moment, eyes misty with unshed tears, and gives a soft, lost little laugh.
"Never seen anything like it," she says, and shakes her head.
I've added some visuals of the tablet on his journal in case you want them btw! o/
To be sure, there are humans who consider other humans purely on the basis of utility, asking merely how useful they are and what they can get out of them. But that's a rather brutal way to live with other living things. (Though perhaps also a common way to live out in this Wasteland.) At any rate, he nods at her remark about philosophy. "Sylvari have no gods. We're not raised on tales of divinity. But all saplings study the teachings of the old centaur sage. Maybe it makes us all philosophers of a sort."
Actually, this is probably the least true thing that he's told her though, because while all sylvari do indeed study Ventari's teachings, a great many--probably the majority of them--are much more like hippy flower children with their heads in the clouds than they are like philosophers. Aurus is unusual for a sylvari not because his curiosity led him to wander (his race is naturally curious), but because he has a much grittier and more measured outlook on the world, the sort of outlook that's more common among the firstborn and some other secondborn like himself.
But even amongst them, he'd be considered a little...eccentric now. He's been gone so long and he's spent so much time alone with only himself (and, more recently, the legendary heroes he's collected in the Mists) for company that his life of contemplation and years of hermitage have taken a turn towards the weird. He's almost like a shaman now, though without having ever having intended to become one: an accidental shaman.
He's not even wholly aware of it himself. Being alone for so long, a person can't always notice how they've changed or anticipate how the changes in them will be perceived by others. It's the encounters that start to make this clear.
Even in this encounter, though, Aurus isn't thinking in that register. What he's thinking is simply that he likes Furiosa very much, that he feels a sympathy for the life she's living which stretches between her and the world she's living in. He believes that he might offer her some respite, if only temporarily. Because he's fond of her, he wants to do this...and also because he's fond of her he's cautious about the pain he might cause when he, inevitably, leaves and takes the temporary balm away.
And it's also because of this, because he wants to comfort and reassure her, to offer her something grounding amidst the flood of seeming impossibilities, that he reaches out to put a hand on her shoulder. She may not be able to touch the flowers that cascade beneath the tablet, but she can touch him, and he'll allow her to do so if she wishes.
thank you!
"War boys worship the god V8, of engines and the road," she says mildly. "I've never really...believed in that. I think the last warlord made it up himself, or heard it from some other road warrior and adapted the story. But it gives the men hope and structure, and I wouldn't take that from them. We all need whatever we can hold onto, to survive."
She shakes her head. "When I was a child, we told goddess stories, but ultimately they were really stories about ourselves. To make us believe we could be stronger and better than we were."
Resting her chin on her knees, she smiles. "My Initiate Mother told me I would have to learn to walk on the grass without bending a blade or disturbing a drop of dew, to be considered a grown woman. Like Artemis, the hunt goddess. I believed her for the longest time, and damned if I didn't try."
It's not physically possible, of course, for a normal human to do such things. But trying taught her extreme care, and the ability to cover her tracks when walking. "Not sure any of that counts as philosophy, but that's all I've got."
She watches him reach out and touch her, a pensive expression, like she's trying to decide how she feels about it. She doesn't flinch or object, though, and once he's close she can catch the sweet, herbal-forest scent he carries, at last. Soothed, she sighs softly and he can probably feel the tension ease from the shoulder he's touching. Tentatively, she touches her fingertips to his.
"I don't think I have what you're looking for, or know where to find it. Find...her. But if you want a haven or waystation, you're more than welcome at the Green Towers."
no subject
"It would then be less philosophical to have faith in a god of engines or a goddess of the hunt, and more philosophical to observe that people get the hope, the structure, the care that they need by looking to their gods and their stories, whoever it was that made them." Of course this mild approach, as though he is merely making a suggestion, is pure rhetorical strategy.
When talking about metaphysics, Aurus rarely gives anyone a straight answer about anything. He would never say anything so direct as Oh yes, it counts! You see, you have been philosophical there--right there!--and by your own words it stretches back through the whole of your life. Oh no. With topics like this he feels that the only way to say anything is to approach it obliquely, by hints and circumlocutions. One must maintain a light touch and never try to lead anyone by the nose. Everyone grows in their own time. (For some people this all makes him an overwhelmingly frustrating person to talk to.)
At any rate, the tone of profundity is itself transient. He accepts the touch of her hand without moving away, and he does certainly notice the way her tension eases, like an exhale in the body, he thinks. So though he won't directly encourage it as such, he does purposefully let his body language show that she can be closer to him if she wishes it--she might even come and rest her head against his shoulder or even his chest; his extended arm makes it possible, and he has no qualms about physicality.
And if he had been at all uncertain before about what his next course of action might be, he no longer is now: "I may not be in need of a haven, but I'd like to go to your Green Towers with you. From what you say, I might be able to help with what you're trying to achieve there--sylvari do have some influence on the growth of other plants. At any rate, I believe I am now quite a bit 'colder' on my search, so perhaps it would be well to regroup before I start again."
no subject
She used to love poetry, though.
The texture of his skin is smooth, both cool and warm, comforting and exotic. She's taking deeper breaths now, too; of all things, it's the woodsy scent of him that really brings it home that this is real. She's not dreaming, or dying. Her gaze goes toward the raging storm at the cave entrance as lightning flashes, but then swivels back toward him. Tentatively, reading his body language, she turns toward him, moving so her shoulder is against him--her left shoulder, which is in itself a sign of trust growing.
"I'd love to see the peach trees give fruit again in my lifetime," she says quietly, with a lopsided smile. "Some of the people will wonder what you are, if you come, but I don't think anyone will be alarmed or aggressive."
Her people are more accepting these days, under the influence of the Sisters and Vuvalini, and of Furiosa herself. Come to think of it, the remaining Vuvalini will probably look at Aurus with the same awe she does. And the Dag...well, she'll be fascinated. "I'd like that. To have you visit."
That's not the kind of thing she says very often. "It's only about a two-day ride on bike-back, and mine will carry us both easily. Do you even have a vehicle? Have you ridden one?"
no subject
"I've never ridden on any sort of vehicle that wasn't drawn by an ox or a dolyak, so you'll have to teach me. I'll look forward to it," when this storm finally ends. He's interested to meet her people as well, though of course he can't yet guess the reality of what they're like.
When sylvari were still a new race in the world, a wandering secondborn like him often turned into a de facto emissary. There were many people who'd never even heard of sylvari back then, let alone seen one, and later there were many more who knew of them as no more than rumors. People said all kind of things (sometimes they still do). 'Look, a walking fern!' has always been one of his favorites. He imagines this may be a bit like that.
He trusts Furiosa that it won't be like the other experience his race had to endure when the secondborn were young: their encounter with the asura who captured and imprisoned a whole group of saplings, subjecting them to brutal, dehumanizing experiments that scarred the minds of many and claimed the life of at least one. That, in some ways, was what first led to Aurus leaving the Grove, though the history is complicated.
In any case, for the time being, it's clear that they're not going anywhere. The sandstorm has not yet begun to subside. So after a moment of quiet and stillness, Aurus ventures a new question:
"What happened that you lost your arm?"
no subject
"I've been riding motorcycles since I was ten years old," she says. "You won't find many better teachers."
That's a boast, but it's one she believes with perfect honesty. The only people more qualified to show him around a motorcycle would be the remaining two Vuvalini. Or maybe the Rock Riders, but their bikes tend to be lighter and smaller and--in her not so humble opinion--nowhere near as good.
She takes a while to notice he's put his arm around her; it doesn't feel like being pulled close by a man or cradled by a mother. But he's comfortable, and she quickly decides she has no objections to this pose, settling so her head is half against his shoulder. When he asks his question, she gestures vaguely with the foreshortened arm. "What, this?" As if she's lost any other limbs.
"My mother and I were taken in a raid, when I was a small girl. Slave traders. We were on chains in the caravan, when another road gang attacked it. One of the vehicles lost control and spun out, right into the slave lines. I think my mother died instantly. I got trapped between chains and bodies and wrecked vehicle, with my arm pinned. I managed to pull myself loose before the car burned up, but I made a bad break worse in the process. They amputated it when they brought me to the Citadel. My city, only...before it was the Green Towers. There've been a lot of changes since then."
Sometimes, when she's asked about her arm, she lies, refuses to answer, or even makes up a story too wild and silly to be believed by her audience. Occasionally, she even punches people for asking. Not today. For whatever reason, she would rather he know the real story.
no subject
No small part of learning is becoming quiet in oneself, still and steady enough to listen, open and relaxed enough to take things in. Aurus is a very good listener, the sort who listens even to things that aren't being said.
This is also how he listens to Furiosa's words about her past, about her loss--arm and mother together. He hears her talk about how she'd been a fighter even as a child, about the determination of her will to survive, to come to terms with brutality and thereby live in a brutal world.
He had been planning to tell her something about himself in return--to show her a scar on his own arm where his student had once severed his limb just above the elbow in a sparring match. Only for Aurus, the arm had grown back. It is an ability sylvari have, an aspect of their anatomy, just as vines can regrow after they've been trimmed.
Having heard her story, though, he does not feel that the moment is right. The loss of his limb was of so much less consequence than the loss of hers, and just not because of the arm itself. He doesn't need to read too far between the lines to understand that, whatever else happened in her life, in the aftermath of that wreck, she did not simply live the life of a slave. Whatever happened to her at the Citadel once that amputation was complete was clearly a watershed for her, just as the severing of Aurus's arm had perhaps been for his student.
But the loss of his arm had not been a watershed for Aurus himself. It was simply an injury from which he healed like so many other training injuries. In his life it was a far more trivial thing than in hers, so it's out of respect for her that he does not compare them, and instead says simply and frankly, "I'm sorry. That is a brutal way to have learned about the world."
no subject
Now, though, seated comfortably in the warm rock as the wind howls and the storm spends its strength outside, seems like a good time for gentler stories, and her next words are: "My mothers used to tell me fairy tales. Do you want to hear one?"
Like he's some sort of overgrown pup she's tending. She knows better already, but she also knows on some level that the fairy tales she remembers and loves best will tell him more about her and what she values than if she tried to explain directly. So she'll tell him the one about the girl with the silver hands, or the Water of Life, or about the Nanabolele with shining skins. If he has his own tales to share, so much the better. They have the time.
((This can be a wrap-up if you want. Unless you want them to exchange fairy tales.))