multiversallogs

Who: Ivy and you!
What: Wandering, irritation, flowers? Come and bother a barefoot green woman wearing a leotard made of plants.
Where: Mostly around Mog Hill, extending into the surrounding districts (Bonetown, Saltbur, Pincod, Echomire, as far as the river to the west and south) - also the forest in Sobek Croix, around the evening.
When: Today (Coardi)
Warnings: Unlikely but will edit as needed.

She had to convince herself to take anything except her seed case. The vouchers and the money were stuffed into an empty compartment she kept for discoveries made on the road; though she had no intention of staying at the Valhalla Inn, or buying clothes for that matter, perhaps they'd have value as currency. Taking the CiD had been the hardest decision to make - she couldn't imagine a more blatantly obvious tracking device - but overall it was better to be informed than not and she'd bound it to her waist with vines for the time being.

Her encounters with the staff at the Inn had been fleeting to say the very least. Now she was outside, feet planted on the earth, and the faintly disturbing pamphlet had been accurate: this wasn't home. The plants spoke to her, mostly, sometimes in tones and languages she didn't yet understand - but they didn't recognize her, didn't love her as they did anywhere on her Earth. It prompted a sense of loneliness she wasn't familiar with; even in Arkham's most secure cells she'd always been aware of the Green just outside its walls, waiting for her to step back into its embrace.

For time time being she was wandering, taking in the lay of the land, sometimes hesitating for passing glances at the shops and business but not straying inside. More often it would be trees or wild flowers that would make her stop, her eyes closing briefly, the act of communication sometimes coaxing a little extra life from the plants she paused to speak with.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Shrieky's moods in Baedal are strangely cyclical. He swings between elation and rage, the desire to be liked and the urge to antagonize. Sometimes he goes between contentment at being somewhere where he's acknowledged - where he's not alone or ignored and it's the best feeling in the world and he'll never let it slip away - to a blistering, panicked state of uncontrollable overstimulation.

Sometimes everything just becomes too much for him. There are too many people in the streets and the city is too large and nothing stops moving and his feet always seem to hurt. Sometimes he accidentally thinks about the vastness of the universe and how small a part of it he is (which was never a problem when the universe seemed constrictingly small). Other times, he'll feel suddenly as if he's not himself anymore. As though losing his loneliness, slowly giving up his rage, takes something else from him as well, something defining and important that he won't get back once it's gone.

When these thoughts come to him, all he wants to do is tear up the streets of the city he loves. He wants to burn down the buildings and fight the militia and the candlelighters and the rioters and the vampires and everything and everyone and fight, and fight, and fight until he tears himself apart just to prove that he can. He wants to hate everyone, and himself, without qualification.

Shrieky doesn't like having to deal with the cognitive dissonance of having those feelings, while being around people he likes, so he can't go home like this. Instead, he flees the city, flees the humans and loses himself in Sobek Croix. It's not the same as it was back home, a different, more bearable kind of isolation, and sometimes he needs that. His target is one of the moon pools, one within walking distance of the main city, if you don't mind a fairly long walk, but as he approaches it, he catches sight of some slight movement in the bush up ahead.

He squints his eyes, trying to pick out a figure beside the pool who could have been responsible for the motion, but all he sees is green, brown and red. Nothing that doesn't belong. He pushes his hesitation aside, and comes closer.

Given that she's been moving without any specific goal in mind, it's taken her a while to get to Sobek Croix; the falling sun has drawn out the shadows. But now she's here she's beset by the sense there's nowhere else she could possibly have been heading, and it's going to take her a long time to leave again. The city was unfamiliar but not oppressive, the air cleaner than in any other she'd visited - but this deep thick wood, this is where she finally feels like she's in good company. The earth is rich beneath her feet, buzzing with chemical communication from root to root; the nervous system of the forest is alive and electric. This place doesn't adore her, doesn't reach for her touch like she's used to, but - if she truly can't return home - that can come in time. She can earn it.

It's a trace amount of optimism, and lost in the deeper pain of having been torn from the Green, but it's there.

She's kneeling at the side of one of the larger moon pools, and experimentally she dips her fingers into the liquid; they're still luminescent when she draws them out, and that faint glow remains when she blows on her fingertips to dry them. There's no chemical cause for it that she can determine, so that's interesting -

She becomes aware of something nearby that doesn't belong, maybe a sound that doesn't seem right, or something chemical that oughtn't be in the forest, and she goes tense but doesn't move. The vines around her arms grow barbs.

As Shrieky comes closer to the water, he forgets about his concern about finding someone else in the forest. There were many things in Baedal which made noises and moved around, but humans tended to cluster together and talk, and they aren't exactly difficult to pick out in the forest, and anyway, he's almost at the pool. He kicks off his shoes in one lazy motion, and without stopping, steps out over the water like he expects it to carry his weight.

It doesn't.

His toes break the surface, and the rest of him is carried down with a whoosh of foam and motion, and he resists the urge to breathe in. After a moment, his feet touch the bottom of the pool, and then he tarts kicking his legs, together, in one smooth motion. It isn't quite how he'd like his body to move, but is as close as he can come, considering how his knees are jointed now.

He breaks the surface again, and takes a breath, putting his hands on the bank quickly, as if he's less confident about all of this than his method of entry into the water may have suggested.

Ivy watches this more in bemusement than anger. Most people who don't know how to get into the water simply don't - but then again, people too stupid to think it through are probably also too stupid to know better.

It's still vaguely annoying when he breaks the surface and seems able to continue breathing unaided; it would have extended her peace and quiet significantly if he'd drowned. Human? She doesn't like to assume. He's not so far away that her voice won't carry but she just observes him, waiting either to be noticed or for him to leave.

It does take him a moment, between treading water and holding the edge of the bank, for that sense of being not alone to return to him. He twists around to look again for somebody there, his expression torn between mild embarrassment for his anxiety, and undeserved anger for anyone who may actually be there.

Then he sees her, and it all sort of... goes.

It's hard to be angry at someone for being in the forest when they look like they're supposed to be a part of it.

"I thought I saw someone moving before, but you're camoflaged!"

He calls across to her, legs still swaying in the water.

She just stares at him for a few moments. Having made herself a household name in Gotham generally means she's managed to avoid these sorts of misconceptions.

"It isn't camoflage," she says archly. "I'm green for the same reason that everything else here is green."

"It still works as camoflage when you come to a place with many trees." He points out, because it does. Plenty of things just have camoflage because they're lucky and it worked out that the way they naturally look blends in with where they live. He assumes.

"You are... botanical, though? Do you have roots?"

He sounds genuinely curious, rather than incredulous about this. He hasn't met a botanical person before, lots of people who love gardening, but no actual plant people.

She's tempted to point out that camoflage is the act of deliberate disguise and not simply resembling one's environment, but she's calm enough to acknowledge that she simply doesn't like being accused of (to all intents and purposes) hiding. She's also not in the mood to deliver a biology lesson and if the conversation continues in that direction she might have to.

"No. I don't have roots."

Not ones that couldn't be torn out and dissolved by the intervention of an inexplicable city, anyway.

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