[Infirmary] Zeltiva Puppet Theatre Part II (Satevis)

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

"Oy, ya blimey bludger!" Tock laughed, wiping her face off on her sleeve. Though it wasn't as if she hadn't already been a mess. She clung to him as he helped lift her up, finding she rather enjoyed it when he helped her. She clung just a little tighter than she really needed to. Once they were back to work, she grabbed the finest tipped brush she could, and dotted some very fine and light stars across the background, away from the constellations. The backgrounds would look weird if they only had the constellations, but with some extra stars off in the distance, and the constellations just dominating the main view, it looked more natural. She listened with interest to Satevis's explanations. She'd never cared much for the stars before, and usually ignored such things as not being worth paying attention to. But she found herself more intrigued now that Satevis was explaining everything. When he mentioned the name of the star she paused in her work, and looked up at him. She bit on the handle of the paint brush, considering something. She wasn't much for religion, but she remembered his stories about dying, and being up in the heavens with his Dad Leth, and falling... "Oy, was ya a star, 'fore ya fell down 'ere?" she asked in complete seriousness. She craned her neck to look up at the sky. They'd been working for hours, and night was approaching. She wanted to see if the star he was pointing out was still in the sky, or if the tip of the scorpion's tail would be missing. Considering he fed on moonlight, and his Dad was the moon God, or whatever it was, it made sense to her.

[Satevis]

"No..." he replied quietly as he worked. "No, I wasn't a star." He finished painting the last few stars of the scorpion and observed Tock's work for a moment, before starting to add smaller dots onto the background of his side of the board. He followed her lead for the most part and tried to keep them as neat as possible, although he knew that the children wouldn't care whether or not the stars were perfect. "Satevis isn't really my name," he explained, looking over at her. "It's a name I chose for myself. My true name is the name I was given before my fall...but I can no longer speak it. My people, though, as a whole, tend to look to the skies. Most Ethaefal name themselves after constellations." He frowned, pausing for a moment to dip his brush in paint and continue the work. "...I suppose it comes from the fact that we were up among the stars for so long. We were bound to learn something about them one way or another...and Ethaefal were usually followers of the sun or moon gods in life." In his Benshira form, his knowledge of the Ukalas was purely academic, nothing more than artificial memorization of things he knew in his Ethaefal form. He knew that once night fell and the moon came out, what little memories he had salvaged would return in full. "Anyway, I got the idea from my brother--the Ethaefal who found me on the beach after my fall. He was named after a constellation, but I chose a star in the end. It's a little unconventional, but..." Satevis shrugged. He had considered using Scorpius as a name when Antares first came to mind, but decided against it. He could use a star name, he decided. He'd been different as Taras--why should he bother to conform to a standard now? Besides, Scorpius as a name was never something he thought suited him. "If you remembered growing up in the desert, would you name yourself after a scorpion?" he asked, gesturing at the constellation in front of him as he finished his side of the board, setting the brush down beside it.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Tock listened carefully to his story, setting aside her brush and pulling over the last backdrop, the one Satevis had said needed a red moon. She dipped a new brush into the red paint and started carefully outlining the moon, her attention on Satevis the whole time. She concentrated better when she was doing something with her hands, so it was actually easier for her to focus on his story while she was continuing to paint, than if she had stopped working. When he finished, she just quietly said, "Tock ain't my real name, neither." Satevis might have heard 'Miss Zipporah' said here and there, such as when he first met her and she was arguing with Jacques, but there was little chance he'd actually learned her real name was 'Minerva'. She hadn't told that name to a single soul since arriving in Zeltiva, and the only people who seemed to know it were her teachers. It was listed on the official school paperwork, so they'd learned her real name whether she liked it or not. But her friends, classmates, and Satevis, all only knew her as 'Tock'. Yet a weird little part of her wanted to tell him. "I'll tell ya mine if'n ya tell me yers..." she said teasingly, smirking at him. "I done named myself after a clock," she said. She raised a finger and ticked it back and forth, "Tick, tock, tick, tock, but ya can't go by 'tick' cause 'at's a blimey wee bug, an oy, I ain't gonna be named fer no bug! So same diff, aye?" she looked up into his eyes. "Scorpions is bugs too. So's as we both didn't wanna be named fer bugs." She let out a soft laugh, then returned her attention to her painting. Part of her wanted to say more. Mention why she'd left her old name, and her old life, behind. But just thinking about it made a dark cloud pass over her features. She didn't want to get into it. She knew it was a bit misbalanced... he had told her about his home, his past, and how he left the skies and came down here, yet she had told him almost nothing about her past. She'd mentioned working with her Granddad, but that was about it. She hadn't mentioned her Da... nor did she want to.

[Satevis]

Satevis looked up, intrigued, when she mentioned that Tock wasn't her real name. He had thought that Tock sounded like a strange name for a girl, but a lot of the normal names girls took on in this part of the world sounded strange to him. He had been familiar with Eyktol, where names were slightly different, so he hadn't thought anything of it. He listened closely to her story, smiling a little when she mentioned that she had named herself after a clock. It suited her, naming herself after something that had been carefully built, coming together under a gadgeteer's hands. It was practical, technical, and slightly whimsical...all things that suited her. He had turned to the stars for his name, to things hundreds of millions of miles away, to the impractical, the abstract, and the almost magical. And maybe that suited him as well. That, and the fact that neither of them had wanted to be named after insects, was another new thing he found that they had in common. And alright, maybe the academic in him knew that scorpions were arachnids, closer to spiders than to insects, but the part of him that was still Benshira knew them as horrible poisonous insects that crawled into your tents in the night. He smiled slightly at her offer, although his smile had a slightly bitter edge to it. Satevis slowly shook his head. "I would tell you my name if I could," he said truthfully. "But I can't. My real name is...it was a word spoken by the gods, for lack of a better explanation. I can't even think of a way to pronounce it in our tongue." The loss of his name was one of the most frustrating things about his fall, because he had never truly lost it. He could still feel it, still hear it in his head when he was in his Ethaefal form. He understood it because it was a part of him. But he couldn't give it a voice. He couldn't speak it, and so he had to go by Satevis. But as the years went by, Satevis started feeling like his name too, and it stopped mattering as much. "But..." he said quietly, looking up at her. "...The man I was, before I was Ethaefal...the Benshira whose form I wear..." "His name was Taras."

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

"Can ya say it in the language of the Gods?" she asked. "Like I mean, not tryin' ta translate 'er inta common. Jus' say 'er 'ow she comes natural." It seemed reasonable to her. Even if she couldn't understand the language spoken, she kinda still wanted to hear it. She smiled when she heard the name 'Taras', rolling it around on her tongue. "Taras, aye?" She thought about it, and decided she liked Satey better. She felt the urge to reciprocate now... but the moment seemed off. She finished putting the last touches on the moon, and started closing up the paints and gathering the brushes. Tomorrow she'd have to bring the extra supplies back to Jacques. She spent a few more minutes gathering up her tools, then turned to Satevis, biting her lower lip and gazing into his eyes. She stepped her crutches up to him and smiled, trailing her fingers down his arm then skipping her hand into his. "Walk a girl 'ome?" she asked with a playful tone to her voice. It was about to get dark. This late in the spring, the sun was up until nearly the twentieth bell, but it was still quite late, even if it was still a bit light out. She would have held his hand as they walked, if she didn't need both hands to pilot her crutches. She kept a close eye on the setting sun, wanting to time this moment right. Right around the time they were getting to her house, she decided it was time. She turned to face him, sliding her fingers down his chest and then gripping his shirt to pull him in. She leaned her face up to his, her warm breath tickling his lips as she kissed him, holding him tight. It was a long, deep, lingering kiss, with just a bit of an ulterior motive. If he made any move to pull away before she was ready, she simply tugged harder on her grip on his shirt, moaning softly against his lips. She didn't want to let him go until she was ready. She wanted to still be kissing him while he changed forms. After she felt him change against her lips and the tickling wind had enveloped them both, she parted from the kiss and slid her face next to his. Her breath tickled his ear and her lips brushed softly against the sensitive skin there as she whispered, "My name's Minerva..."

[Satevis]

OOCThank you for this. XD I've been waiting for a chance to write this particular past-life memory. Satevis shook his head. "This mortal form cannot speak it," he said. "Believe me. I've tried." And he had. He had tried once, when he first tried to introduce himself to Eridanus, and he had tried a few more times in the weeks after that, whispering the syllables of his name to himself in the dark. But no matter what he did, it always came out wrong. "If it helps..." he said as he got up, helping her gather up her things and put them away. "I'm at least fairly certain that the first letter of it would be 'V'. Maybe." Really, it could have been anything. He didn't press her on the subject of her name. He didn't press her to tell him anything. She would tell him when she was ready, and at the moment, he had to admit he was enjoying working out the mystery. Instead, his fingers tightened briefly around hers as she slipped her hand in his and asked him to walk her home, and he nodded once, walking with her down the street. It was late, but the sun was still up, a sign that summer was fast approaching. In a few days, his hair and horns would begin to shift to their summer colors, signifying the approaching change of the Watchtowers, and also reminding him that he had managed to go another season without becoming Forsaken. In a few days, he and Tock would be taking their respective final exams, and then it would be time for him to register for his classes again. In a few days, summer would come to Zeltiva. Satevis wondered what it would bring. If it was more of this, he decided as they reached Tock's house, then he didn't mind. She kissed him then, and he wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her closer and returning the kiss. As the last fading rays of Syna's light swept over them, Satevis felt the familiar stirring begin in his blood. He moved to pull away, realizing it was time, but Tock held fast, just pulling him closer. He sighed inwardly and obliged, holding her close as he felt the wind and the change start coming over him. He knew he should be thinking something about this, but she was making it remarkably hard to think, so he just concentrated on kissing her. The wind left with a rush, leaving behind a sudden flash of insights and memories. In his mind's eye, he was suddenly Taras again, sitting in front of the fireplace of some building somewhere. He was watching a woman. She was sitting in a chair across from him, her fingers gracefully tuning the lute that lay across her lap. Her hair was long and blond, her skin a light tan that seemed to gleam in the flickering firelight... Satevis's eyes snapped open suddenly as Tock pulled away and he stared at a point over her shoulder for a few short moments as the fleeting touches of memory left him, taking the images with them. He had a good portion of Taras's memories, a large chunk of them. Other Ethaefal had called him lucky in the past, for being able to remember so much about one particular past-life. But he had never seen that woman before...or had he...? The memory of his death was still unclear, but the woman he had saved... Who...? he thought to himself. Who was she...? The Ethaefal was suddenly brought back to reality as Tock whispered into his ear, and he looked down at her. He could worry about long-dead women from Taras's memories at another time. He had Tock in front of him right now. "...Minerva," he repeated softly. A small smile appeared on his face. "It's a nice name," he said. "Thank you for sharing it with me." Satevis leaned down and kissed her. It was really nothing more than a light brushing of lips, a quick, chaste kiss, but over the past two days, it was the only kiss that he had initiated. He pulled away, releasing her. "Good night," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow." OOCYou can take the last post if you want. Just go ahead and assume that Satevis leaves after Tock goes inside.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Tock bit her lip and closed her eyes, catching her breath and just savoring the moment. That kiss during his transformation had been hot. She finally opened her eyes, and jabbed a finger in his chest, saying, "'At name's fer private, aye? Don't go spreadin' 'er 'round!" The last thing she needed was the whole city knowing her real name. As he turned to leave, she said, "Oy, ain'tcha fergettin' somethin', mate?" She held out her broken foot to get its nightly healing, then bid him goodnight. She went inside, climbed down out of her crutches, and laid on her bed. Naily, her puppy-hammer, rolled over and squeaked his wheels in a whine. She lifted him up onto the bed with her, and he nuzzled her cheek. She pet him lovingly and said, "Oy, baby, I's gettin' myself in a right fine mess over 'at boy, ain't I?" She closed her eyes and sighed, Naily snuggling up against her, and drifted off to a restless sleep. OOCI'll submit for grading as soon as I get home. Need to double check my notes on skills used. Pm me with what you want me to list for you. Also, I'll start part III soon! I think we said the 87th?

[Cascade]

Adventurer's Loot Minerva's Loot : Minerva Skill XP Reward Astronomy +1 Carpentry +1 Painting +3 Seduction +2 Lore: Satevis: Astronomy Teaching Assistant Satevis: Name's Meaning Satevis: Former Life's Name James's Jealousy Paint Fights with Children Satevis's Loot : Satevis Skill XP Reward Organization +2 Painting +3 Writing +1 Observation +1 Teaching +1 Lore: Public Displays of Affection James's Jealousy Tock: Real Name is Minerva Sate, the organization and writing points are for the list Satevis gave Tock. Seeing that he didn't really learn as much astronomy rather than talked about it, I put the points on Teaching instead. Also, kudos on putting a memory flash in there. That was really interesting, and I really want to know more about what really happened in his past life. Lastly... is there a problem with the url of the background image you use? I am getting so distracted by the frogs in the boxes, hahaha! Or is that just happening to me? *glares at her net* Tock, you are hilarious for putting this on your grade request: "Seduction for kissing Satevis so hard he had flashbacks to his past life". Seriously, Tock must be an excellent kisser if she can get someone to have flashbacks. LOL. Anyway, this was a lot more focused on social development compared to the usual threads you do where Minerva practices her skills intricately, which is why I wasn't able to give as much points in your PC's craft skills. Honestly though, I think character development is just as good a reward as XP, and this thread was full of excellent development for the two of you. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to PM me!