rainbowlounge | RP Time? You betcha!

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RP Time? You betcha!

"Lucien? What did I tell you about running off on your own?"

Somewhat unsurprisingly, his son didn't answer him with more than a grin. And a splash, once Claude had drawn closer.

Leave it to any child of his to throw off his nice new boots just to stick his feet in the first likely looking stream that came along.

It wasn't even as if they'd gone that far out of town, but away from the roads, from the other sorcer-sorts and Aethies, even the breeze felt calmer, though it had hardly caught to much all the while they'd been walking. Claude being glad they had any at all, as hot as it had been the past few days.

The storm the night before had left lacy scatters of twigs and leaves and knocked down spider webs. Clean and still damp, the leaves overhead and tangled in the grass, they looked pieces of stained glass. And the trees, when they nodded, they sounded clear as harp strings with nothing else to cut the sound.

Out of farmland use and the whiles of any humans at all, the stream had been left so clear, so delicious looking. Just begging for some little blond imp of a boy to come along and kick his heels in it.

Well, one already had. Claude didn't bother with another sigh. He pulled his shoes off and laid them in the stones at his side, stretching lazy as he reached his own toes towards the glittering surface.

And promptly jerked back with a yelp. "Child of mine? That's /cold/."

"I know," said Lucien. "I think it feels nice."

"Maybe if you're part bear. I've always halfway figured, you know."

They had some teasing hums between them and Claude crossed his legs, feet now on the warm pebbles along the bank where they damnwell belonged.

"I think I got that from your side of the family," his son suggested after a while. "Anyway, why do you think it's like that? I don't hear anybody around."

"That wasn't tagging along?"

"Well..." The boy knitted his fingers in his hair, tugging himself a wingtip curl along his temple. "I think I'd only notice Nene if she was /gone/."

"And as for our new friends?"

"They couldn't have gone far. They know we have candy." To which, he nodded. Ever so sure of himself.

Ah, children. Children had gotten him this far with their self-assured beings. And children had found him what was really a rather strange clearing on closer inspection. The stream wore deeper through some places in the grass than others, showing shifts of rock, glints of moss and tree roots sneaking by. It divided the clearing just about cleanly in half.

Besides, on the edge of the forest easing back into being, a great, old ash stood.

Covered in tiny flowers. Pink and violet and hints of white. All of them, growing in streaks as if the bark had long ago turned to soil, though the tree seemed healthy and strong otherwise.

Besides.

"Papa," said Lucian, voice hushed. "There aren't any birds here, are there?"

"No," Claude answered after a moment. "It's just you and I and /a bunch of stinkers who ran off from us/."

"Oh, so that doesn't include me?"

"Child of mine."

They had a few more hums, there in the quiet of the clearing.

There, before something very strange and very faint began to creep along Claude's Aether lines.

It felt like being tickled almost. Anyway, it made him smile. Lucien too.

And next, there his son darted off again, racing over the grass and into the middle of the clearing, where he stood staring into the sky and whistling. Expecting a giant Gust to come sailing down in the form of a giant bird? It might just be that.

Welcome!

Note that anything your characters do in the clearing may result in posts back of things happening around them, even if these aren't exactly invited. Something's lurking around here, and it wants a snack!

Feel free to bring your own fairies, ghosts, mages and seriously confused regular people.

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He had decided to go for a walk instead of riding and found himself walking next to the stream that would eventually become the river that flowed through the country that he ruled. However, as he continued down the stream, Kostya frowned as he noticed that the landscape had changed somehow.

His feet eventually led him to a clearing and he noticed a man standing by the river watching over a young child playing in the stream. He was tempted to ask one of them where he was, but he was very hesitant to trust any strangers as he was now sure that he was no longer in Vaelan as he could no longer feel the presence of it's resident land-spirit.

Not to say that the meadow was empty- besides the man and the boy, there were others, by and by, appearing as simply as if they'd winked into being. Some of them laughed and others drew off to the protective shade of the forest edge. Some just sort of stood there, looking confused.

It was good people watching if absolutely nothing else.

Besides.

There was definitely something /else/ in the clearing and it read a negative pressure on Vaelen's nerves. Left him attentive. But of what? It was great and formless, seeming to swirl out of time with the air.

Perhaps a little bit likened to being watched by an owl.

Except for the part where it was daylight.

Nervermind the sense of laughter underneath.

Kostya frowned deeply. While he could not sense Vale, he could feel like something else was there. Knowing his luck, it was probably laughing at him.

"Dammit," muttered Kostya under his breath, pretty sure that something was watching him and he looked about him.

"Damnit yerself," replied the grass at Kostya's feet. "Some people're enjoyin' themselves. Relax already."

And laughter. Again. Pointed, this time.

When he looked down towards where the voice had come from, he found himself confronted with firstly lots of be-flowered meadow grass, second a rock, albeit a fairly nice rock, and third a rather large, umber-colored newt.

Kostya laughed bitterly when he heard a voice telling him to relax. He was too used to being toyed with to trust anything that preferred being invisible.

After seeing nothing that he could clearly identify as a spirit, he said, "I have no idea who I am talking to or what I should talk to, but I would rather you not torment me. I get enough of that at home."

"Really now? OK, fine. Lemme make this easy on ya. I, Nene, order you to relax! There, was that better?"

The whole glen seemed to boom on the order part.

But, then again, fading back out towards the end of the sentiment, the newt got up on its back legs, more in the manner of a rabbit or a curious cat than any amphibian.

A quirk of the species perhaps.

Until it also very clearly winked at him.

Oh no, not again, thought Kostya as he tried to fight the compulsion, but he failed. He visibly relaxed and thought that it might be better to not be so worried about what might happen.

"Um, hello, whoever you are. What is this place? I somehow...arrived here though I did not intend on doing so," said Kostya to the newt once he noticed that it had winked at him.

Edited (HTML fix and missing word) 2013-05-17 00:03 (UTC)

"Oh. Nobody told you? I guess The Powers That Be quit doin' that," mused the newt.

Not that it's mouth moved in any way to indicate that it was the one doing that much, but the words came from roughly newt-wise, besides the tail gestures and tongue flickers of the creature seeming to match what would have been a human's inflection.

Would have been.

"Well, the hell with them. This's a very nice meadow 'bout a league anda half outta Sorcer-of-Peace. I'm just yer regular ol Pyre. You smell anything funny, my Person's got some weird friends."

"You're the first being that talked to me here."

Kostya squatted down so he could see the newt without looking down.

"You have a Person...? And what is a Pyre?" Kostya paused for a second and then said, "Oh and I am being a bit rude aren't I? My name is Kostya. I take it that a Pyre is a type of spirit?"

"Realllly now? I tell ya, everybody's fallin' down on their jobs," mused the newt, rubbing its newty little chin as best it could considering it also had newty little forelegs with which to do this. "So! Nice ta meetcha, Kostya. And lemme tell ya, there's only one thing you've said in the past few minutes that's even kinda wrong."

Nene stuck out her tongue. All well and good. Newts did that on occasion.

Nene's manifested as a flash of fire.

"'parently it's not ~correct~ to call Pyres and Gusts and the like spirits 'cause we've got livin' thing logic instead dead thing logic. Or somethin'. But, I was a spirit for a few hundred yonks b'fore that and I'm fine with it. Sooooo..."

Close as Kostya had come, he could now catch the piffles of smoke she gave up when she breathed roughly between drawls, even if her lips didn't move along with her speech. "Dude, the hell're you from you got /spirits/? You're makin' be nostalgic."

(OOC: still posting with the tree icon because there's a chance I'll have a better icon of this character tomorrow. Also, this thread pleases me. Any lag in my replies is purely the result of the fact I'm in the middle of changing jobs.)

Kostya sat down on the grass, fascinated by this Pyre. "Where I come from, calling something a spirit doesn't indicate a lack of being alive. I'm pretty sure that the land-spirit I'm bound to is alive..." His voice trailed off his he frowned, wondering why he was not feeling much in the way of ill-effect like he usually did when he lost his connection to Vale.

"One could make the argument that I'm partly this kind of being as well, though I don't really like to talk about it. I prefer for people to think of me as human because explaining the whole thing is just too much for most people."

Kostya didn't particularly mind the fire and smoke that came from the newt, even if some of his magic was ice-based. After all, that particular power did not come from him, but from the land-spirit he was bound to.

"So maybe that's why I smell odd to you?"

(OOC: Take your time with both things! I might be slow at times too. And I am glad that this pleases you!)

"Woulllllllldn't doubt it," Nene trilled. "See, thing is you smell like you got a serious harem'a Aethies on ya. Notesa most everything, but if I hadda pick, mostly Prim. Almost kinda like- yer a place, but'cher also a People and the cuddly, sparkling woo essence of life-ness. And a martini."

Which might well have been an odd list, woo in itself, but it was given with a certain degree of deliberation and at least one serious puff of smoke.

"Which is all just dandy. I mean, ya smell like whatcha smell like and ya call yerself whatcha do. Me, I was livin' in a volcanoes out in the Barbares when somebody decided spirit meant dead. Get my flamey ass dragged back to civilization and oh, yer technically an Aetherial Being, because /reasons/, apparently."

"Well, I...well, um, a land-spirit - an Aetherial Being, I guess would be what you would call him here...well, I belong to him, in a sense. I rule over the land for him." While Kostya explained this to Nene, he looked away from the Pyre and at the ground, ashamed.

"So, someone...decided that spirit meant one thing and not another?" Kostya frowned. No one person decided these kinds of things where he came from. Most of his magical knowledge came from the people he knew personally and the record books of his ancestors, with a few books from other sources.

Nene mused on this for a long, spark-flashing while, nodding along with what Kostya said, to herself after. "OK, so one," she began, startling sudden again. "Yer land spirit sounds like what everybody callsa Lith 'round here, if it's the kinda land I think it is. Second, you landed somewhere yer arrangement's like /backwards/ to most everybody. Not to say it is..."

The newt half up a foreleg to that, waving it along.

"'cause somebody else here decided 's Aethies b'long to sorcerers. Like semantically. There's a guild. 's some awkward shit, man."

As soon as Nene finished speaking, Kostya laughed, which perhaps bordered on hysterical, at the notion that one could actually own a spirit. To him, they were things usually too large and powerful to belong to a human.

After a while though, he managed to calm down enough to continue the conversation.

"To be honest, I've never heard of a spirit in my world that...belongs to a human. I've heard of ones held captive, but that doesn't really mean that they belonged to them."

Nene waited patiently for Kostya to finish, perhaps snortling along with some of his louder peals. And why not? Something was funny. Even if that something was her or him or some combination of the two.

"Really now?" she found herself snickering in time. "They're all /that hardcore/? I mean, we got some serious bastards floatin' around here, but even they hook up with guild bosses'r whatever now'n then. They keepin' you as slaves in their candy kitchens're somethin'? How does that even *work*?"

"Oh, I'm the only one who I know of who belongs to one. It's...a rulership thing in my case, I think. Most people probably couldn't handle it. Spirits just don't like the idea of being...owned. They'll work with people, but I'm pretty sure that claiming that they belong to you is a bad idea."

"Working with or for spirits is actually...looked down upon by some people. A lot of people from outside the country I rule assume I'm evil. I just...do my job. I protect my people and I just...I get some benefits from it, I guess too."

"What? No! No, that's... what?" Nene fairly sputtered at him.

Which resulted in some ash flickering about the grass.

"That's like lookin' down on somebody for cookin' here. SERIOUSLY? You make funna a cook, you get hair in yer soup. Nobody wins. How does that /work/. I don't..."

Then.

The newt made to grasp its head with its too tiny to quite manage this forelegs, which happened to result in Nene growing at herself in a manner distinctly un-newt-like. Her tongue flicked out of her mouth and from there a cloud of flame washed up before Kostya, short and bright and ruby red, its warmth not more than a flash of sun, but still very much there.

Once it had cleared, there sat a small, freckled red-headed woman, leaning on her knobby knees. She really appeared quite ordinary aside from a faint translucence to her fingers and her toes.

And the fact she was bare-assed naked.

"I'm sorry man," sighed Nene. "That really sounds like it blows."

Kostya frowned.

"What is like making fun of someone for cooking? The fact that people think there's something wrong with me for working for a spirit? I...am used to it I guess. It's mostly propaganda put out by the people who want to take over the land I rule to be honest."

When Nene changed into a humanoid form, he stepped back involuntarily. After all, he didn't want to accidentally get set on fire. Noticing her nakedness, Kostya blushed and looked away.

Nene, despite no longer being a fire-breathing newt and all, snorted at that. "Oh c'mon. I'm not that scary. Spirits or Aethies or whatever you wanna call 'ems aren't scary either. Not more'n People. So what if somebody hangs round with 'em? Should be about cooperation and gettin shit done."

The last, she fairly spit, curling her toes disdainfully in the grass.

All of a sudden, she froze, looked down at herself, and snapped her fingers. A bit of filmy golden material faded in across her freckles, although one of her breasts remained quite bare.

"Speakina which. Anyway. Explain this to me! How does anybody get anythin' done where yer from if people belong to spirits and somehow that's bad? I seriously do not get it."

"Well, my...situation is complicated. I know that the courts of those who rule the countries bordering mine do employ those who work with spirits and do magic, but apparently a ruler who...deals with them and does his own magic is wrong."

"Or they're just looking for an excuse to come and invade Vaelan and make it part of their territory. I cannot tell you the number of times I've had to put up with people trying to assassinate me because I'm supposedly some kind of scary dark lord." Kostya sighed and shook his head. He really was tired of the assassins, especially considering that there was no chance that they could actually kill him.

"It sounds nice to be able to associate with the Aethies in your world and have others people look down on it."

"Yknow," Nene began, swaying where she sat. "I always figured dark lords were /bigger/. And darker. Eviler. Soul eatin'. All that good stuff. Yer just likea sorcerer happens to have his own country. "

She trailed off into a few vaguely nasty sniggers. "Fact is, round here too there's people say- oh! Sorcer owes their loyalty to the guild, right? They shouldn't be in chargea regular people. You see that one in election debates likea lot. Sometimes works. Sometimes doesn't. Thing is, we got so many sorcers, it's kinda a votin' block by now."

To which she rubbed her chin. "'m guessin' yer like pretty elite even without the ruler thing? I mean- assassins! That's parta rulin' stuff, but still. 'm gettin' that impression."

"Well, it /is/ a little bit fun to play along with sometimes, if the person isn't going to be reasonable about it." Kostya laughed a bit.

"I mean, it's better if they didn't see me as one, but sometimes it's not worth trying to convince them otherwise. People are going to believe what they want to believe. Might as well have /some/ fun."

Kostya thought for a bit on what Nene said. "Well, some people are kinda weird about power they don't understand. The residents of Vaelan don't mind that I have magic and they don't. They know that they owe their good-being to the land-spirit, so I guess they see me as another way he protects them."

"It's mostly outsiders who don't understand."

"And yeah, I guess you could say I come from noble blood, though my mother is from a merchant family...my family doesn't really care where people come from if they want to marry in to be honest. Having a reputation as family of dark lords seems to make other nobles less than thrilled to offer their daughters in marriage."

(OOC: I probably should clarify what kind of land-spirit Kostya is bound to. Vale started out as a river-spirit that came to become the spirit in charge of not only his river home - the source of which is in a mountain cave - but also the lands in the valley surrounding the river. Hence why his base powers are ice-based since his source comes from mountain melt-waters.)

Edited (Adding an OOC Note) 2013-05-19 16:24 (UTC)

(OOC: I read you loud and clear, but Nene might be pretty slow on the uptake. That's pretty much on the other side of the room from how Aethies work. LSS- I need to read more of your stuff. That sounds cool and I dig assassination attempts.)

Nene hummed along with most of Kostya's points, nodding and tipping her shoulders about. Definitely listing. Absorbing, perhaps or perhaps not. Her conclusion in the end: "Oh, yer so a noble. You got that noble bearing thing with yer shoulders. I could tell that a miiiiiiiiiile away."

Her attempts at echoing that met with limited success.

"And you gotta get married? On toppa all that. With a spirit kinda person involved too thatcher spouse's gotta be cool with. Your life is complicated! Not boring though, ammirite?"

(OOC: Mostly just letting you know there might be some water in there as well as land. I tend to get a little over-explainy sometimes. I haven't written any assassination attempts yet, but there will be at least two in the course of the story.)

When Nene mentioned him needing to get married, Kostya winced.

"I...would rather not marry if I have to. Though people keep telling me that I have to. And my life isn't that exciting...most of my time is taken up by work. I have a principality to run after all." He shrugged.

"So what are Aethies like in your world and oh, do you have a name yourself?"

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RP Time? You betcha!

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