OPEN :: A golden bird was singing

[baedalites]

Who: Everyone!
What: St Kelley's evening
Where: The Apache and surrounding environs.
When: Veerdi evening.
Notes:
(1) The topic threads are just suggestions; if you've got somewhere else that your characters simply must be, make your own thread.
(2) All mementos will appear overnight in some part of your character's apartment.
(3) Dance!

St Kelley's is one of the more sedate occasions in Baedal, at least as holidays go. It passes more or less unnoticed by the majority of the population as many of them feel it doesn't concern them. It's not their holiday; it's for the others. Those with severed ties and broken hearts. The temple and church preach that it's a time for reflection or for glorifying the generosity of the gods. It's one of the few days on which no one looks askance at first generation Citizens mourning their missing loved ones publicly.

As night rolls around and floating lanterns are set to sea, the Apache in Mog Hill prepares to accept guests from the newer cohorts. It's something that happens every year, making it a practical tradition. The alcohol will be cheaper for first timers, and the music will be kept at a reasonable level.

Comments

[rhinemaid]

Ilde is moving in reflxive response before she's even registered the fact, consciously, that he is sitting down or that she's moving; it is a testament to how far into the bone courtesy can be drilled that even without actually thinking it through, when she crosses her ankles in his lap she's taken care to make sure that the heels of her boots aren't actually on his trousers.

(...so there.)

“Baedal has some odd traditions,” she says, conversationally, as if that's the only odd thing involved in this evening. “But I think most traditions are odd. I don't understand most of them.”

[yeouiju]

Well, that just happened. Sunny's eyebrows go up and he can't help the slightly human twitch of his legs beneath her ankles, but otherwise, he settles and allows it, the corners of his mouth widening into customary smile. "Lanterns are familiar to me," he says. "Thousands of them lit for Buddha in April - sort of a tourist grab, but my mother liked to wish for things. I think they make sense.

"But odd things make sense here, I guess." Like them. The look over his drink when he sips again, dutifully, is only indicative of this if you search for it.

[rhinemaid]

It's only when she catches that look - and she does catch it, as intently as she watches - that her lazy and mostly reflexive smile quirks and shrinks, smaller but more truthful. (Mischievous; unrepentant; sad.)

“I don't understand having traditions,” she says, which is a roundabout way of saying all the things she didn't, when he asked if there's anyone she misses. “But I don't mean that to say that I don't think people should have them.” She'd just participated in this one, after all.

“I like them,” after a moment, though she sounds a little sheepish; she feels like a tourist in sentiment, that way, reaching for something with roots but not quite knowing where she's supposed to hold on.

[yeouiju]

Sunny isn't sure if this is a good time to give his take on why traditions, especially when his attitude is a little bit why not and simply letting them be, and putting a boat in the water. He's been told before that he can sound condescending. It would be good if he could manage not to do that around monsters too.

So he listens and ruminates on her words a bit, dipping his attention to his beer. "I sort of just like the things they do. To connect to one another, or with spirits. The nicer things, unlike the. Shittier things."

That's him, anyway. He likes humans, in a way that is bone deep and written into whatever genetics factored into making him. The golden retriever to the feline who has her feet in his lap.

[rhinemaid]

It's a disconcerting realization of difference that she-- already knew, really, but doesn't like to think about. Sunny talks about they with a conscious separation, but Ilde's distance feels more like isolation on the day to day level; human context is all that she knows, no matter how she hates that or struggles with it. Even the way that she tries to connect with her heritage and ancestry is filtered through the human experience and it...isn't fair.

She doesn't hate them so much as she's afraid, and it makes her angry and upset and tired. She hates the way that they were treated at the facility (it's easier to be angry for the others, easier to stop herself from wondering if she deserved it when the thought makes her a traitor to them, tacitly permissive of what was done to them), and she hates the way that what was done to them colors her every interaction with humanity since then; she hates that it goes so far into her bones that she keeps flinching that way, and she tries not to. But even if she doesn't want to be always hurt, it seems so unfair that she knows no alternatives, not really. That she and her father were abandoned the way they were, that she has to claw her way into something, that they have no roots under them and she wants a connection.

She doesn't want to watch humans be sweet to each other, she wants to feel something, to belong to something, to have a history that she can touch with her hands and feel solid underneath her when she's smallest. She wants to understand traditions from the inside, and all she has is the knowledge that her understanding of her father's language will always be imperfect at best.

“I think they're nice,” she says, vaguely, instead of any of that; she withdraws, because it's easier.

[yeouiju]

Maybe it is easier, for Sunny. Human ritual and tradition is something he is a part of; a beast that walks from the river to the village, soaking wet and smiling, taking gratefully a seat by the fire and eating dinner with the farm wife's children, some several hundred years ago. They prayed for the gifts he bestowed, sent lanterns of the equivalent for him. He wants to watch them dance in a circle and put boats in the water for their loved ones than fight stupid wars and tear a country, his country, in two.

Which doesn't make him different, really. It is just where his thoughts drift.

The answer from the fairy is vague but he doesn't sense dishonesty. It's more like a flash back of reflected sunlight on murkier river, distracting. "So are your shoes," he says, instead.