Closed For Want of Direction

[Dust]

Spring 16, 513 AV afternoon "Anyway, we weren't about to let him get away with that." Walking -- almost skipping -- backwards down the street, it was a wonder Dust didn't manage to trip over something as she went. She did have the presence of mind to glance over her shoulder every few steps, though most of her attention was on her companion and the story she was regaling him with from a past journey. Looking kept her from colliding with anything big -- that, and the fact that her most common potential obstacles were self-mobile, and took themselves aside to watch the young woman go by with varying degrees of bemusement to their expressions. "So Cedar had this thought... There were all these plants in the hills, you see, and I've never found something smellier anywhere." Dust gestured hugely with her arms to emphasize the scope of anywhere, still holding tightly to the book in her left hand and the charcoal in her right. "The flowers are this really pretty purple color, but it's not just them that smells -- it's the whole plant." The forgotten book and charcoal, the things she was supposed to be using to draw with on this foray into the back corners of Riverfall, meant to be a venture into the making of maps. But Dust had recruited company at the last minute, and company was a compelling distraction indeed... "So we picked a whole bunch of it that evening when we camped, and stuck it in a pot of water on the coals..." More gestures accompanied Dust's ongoing story, or perhaps just her enthusiasm in telling it, along with the girl's bright eyes and mischievous grin. ledgerbook, blank - 3 gm charcoal, 10 sticks - 5cm total: -3 gm, 5 cm

[Vanator]

The Kelvic girl, for her few years, seemed to have an endless supply of anecdotes acquired over an impressive trek across Mizahar, each one glazed with her enthusiasm and animated manners. Dust's stories did not bother Vanator, in fact, he found a sort of peace in the presence of the cheerful raven girl. Life, his in particular, was full of sadness, hardship and sober matters that had stolen much of the joy in his soul. Dust made him forget about all of that. The vibrant blond certainly had suffered some unpleasant things in her past, but they never seemed to darken her luminance.

The Denusk winced now and then, watching a pedestrian dodge the backward treading woman, though Dust was graceful enough to avoid obstacles, be they structural or living. His grin never wavered though, as he sometimes struggled to follow her tales, keeping track of the many characters that appeared and reappeared in her monologue.

The pair had wandered the streets of Riverfall with the intent of mapping it, or rather, Dust mapping it. It was a tasks she had been determined to undertake, and Vanator, ready for some diversion himself, gladly offered to escort the Kelvic to town. But they had happened upon a section he himself was not familiar with, and with some hesitation, Van decided to draw the chatty girl back to her purpose.

With a laugh, Vanator held up his hand. "Dust..Dust." He grinned, trying to gently interrupt her. He pointed to the book in her hand. "The map? You bring a grasslander into a maze of stone streets and buildings, you better work on a way to get him back out!"

[Dust]

Dust took in a much-needed breath in preparation for continuing her story -- and let it out again as Van held up his hand. She adopted a distinctly disappointed expression, but the moment was fleeting... and exaggerated at that. Her grin bounced back just as quickly, becoming a little more sheepish as she stopped in the middle of the street and looked around them. The buildings in this stretch weren't familiar to her, either. "Oh. Sorry!" Her gaze flicked up to the open sky, which of course was the easy way out; if Dust flew up there, she could orient them on a tower or even the river, or anything else she recognized. But doing that would spoil the fun. Her eyes flicked back to Van; he didn't seem particularly put out by being lost, so the Kelvic figured she'd just carry on. "Well..." Dust opened her book to a very blank page -- it was still a very blank book overall. "I don't know where we are either," she confessed to the Drykas, not actually terribly contrite about that lack. "But as long as we don't do something like go around in circles, we should find something familiar, right?" It seemed a reasonable conclusion. "I can keep track of that!" "If this is where we are..." Dust made two dots in the middle of the page, close-spaced. She looked at the street ahead of them, then twisted around to glance down the stretch behind them. The Kelvic pursed her lips, thinking about lengths, then carefully drew two lines on either side of the dots. She checked back and forth again, comparing the perspective of what she saw with the lengths of space defined around the two dots. She decided it looked okay -- though in truth, any critical analysis would have found her sketch not at all to scale. "Then that's the street we're on," she finally declared, holding it up for Van to see. "Which way do you want to go?"

[Vanator]

Vanator's eyes followed Dust's gaze as she assessed their location. The day was cool and bright, the sun just passing it's Zenith, bringing the residents of Riverfall out into the streets. Akalak and human mostly, and those that wished to pass as human, milled around the pair where they stood, the air filled with Tukant and Common and the cry of seabirds. Their position was beyond the Drykas, who tried to mentally trace their path backwards to the front gates. But the man and Kelvic had become engrossed in conversation, the familiar buildings and street corners long passed by as he became lost in Dust's company.

The once strange architecture of the Akalak city was now more accepted by the grasslander, who had come to appreciate the arches and ornate stone and domes of the Riverian buildings. None of which he recognized at the moment, and from where they stood, he could not see any of the towers. Van watched the raven girl take out her book and begin to plot out a starting point for their map. As he observed the cheery blond make her rough calculations, he wondered how differently she must look at such a task. She could fly. It was a simple, natural feat for Dust, but one the Drykas could never achieve. She could see the world as a map, look down on the streets, see the gate from here. How did that shape what she saw on the ground? Van felt a bit of envy. But the girl had been intent on making her maps without the aid of an aerial view, something Vanator admired.

"Yes, walking in a circle would get us nowhere," Van smiled, "Eventually, we will have to find something we recognize before we hit a wall, or the sea!" He moved closer, looking at the jottings on the page Dust presented to him. The Drykas looked down the street in either direction, orienting himself to the sketching, noting the direction of the sea breeze.

"Well, lets head that way, work our way towards the cliffs." Van pointed the suggested course before turning back to the map. His finger tapped on the two dots. "And if that is supposed to be us...mine should be bigger!" He laughed and gave Dust a twinkling wink.

[Dust]

"Pff." Dust scoffed at Van's assertion, but grinned at him at the same time. "It's a representation," she informed the Drykas. "I could make it anything I want! ...Maybe I'll make mine bigger," she continued, shoulders squared and chin raised as she started off down the street in a mock huff. It lasted all of four strides. "Oh! But I guess I'd better show which way we went," she realized aloud only a few steps later, abandoning all pretense to pause and draw a chevron on the page to indicate direction. That accomplished, Dust resumed walking down the road, studying the buildings she passed on either side. Though not as striking in architecture as many in other areas of the city, they were just as neat and clean, and accentuated with plants in various stages of leafing-out. The buildings on the down-cliff side seemed to present mostly rear entrances or nearly featureless walls, a trend she eventually realized. "I think the next road over is more important," she observed to the Drykas, waving a hand at the structures on her right. "All those buildings look that way, see? So maybe we should try moving over to that one." That, of course, depended on reaching a cross-street, which they hadn't yet. In the meantime... Dust peered sidelong at her companion. "So, I told you lots of stories," she remarked, blatant preface to a demand for exchange in kind. "It's your turn! Tell me a about... oh, Iiii don't know. Something fun!"

[Vanator]

Vanator grinned at Dust's feigned offense, trailing her as she stormed off in mock disgust. Her course of thought angled sharply, as it often did, and she halted in her tracks to make more markings on her paper. Quick observation lead the Kelvic to a keen conclusion, and Vanator found her plan to follow what appeared to be the focus of the architecure and layout of the block very astute.

"Very good, yes, that seems to suggest a flow of..." The Drykas paused, not sure how to describe his thoughts in terms of civil engineering. All he really understood was Endrykas, a place he knew so well, he never stopped to consider why it was laid out as it was. Vanator fell in stride with the enthusiastic raven girl, as they sought a cross street. When Dust requested an anecdote, the Drykas found himself sifting through memories that he had not visited in some time.

The Denusk's face darkened a bit. So many of the memories were bad, some were so good that they made his gut ache for missing the loved ones in those memories. But he would not dare dampen the beautiful tempement of his young friend. He selected a tale that he felt may amuse her.

"I will tell you about the first time I met a Kelvic. She was Cadra and Larik's mother..."

[Dust]

A flow of... Dust glanced over at the Drykas as his words tapered off, brows raising in a wordless prompt for him to finish the thought. But he didn't, and when she tried to reach for some logical conclusion -- a flow of water? a flow of time? -- she couldn't come up with anything that made obvious sense. Oh well. The Kelvic lifted her hands nonchalantly, and grinned at Van, and returned her regard to the street around them. "There's one!" she declared, pointing at a distant gap in the buildings flanking the right side of their street. And promptly stopped walking. She glanced back towards where they had started from, making an entirely arbitrary assessment of the distance already traveled and yet to go. Then she drew two crosswise slashes on her 'map', denoting the cross-street and intersection. "Okay, got it!" Dust said, and resumed walking. "Oh, a Kelvic story!" she remarked, as Vanator began his tale. Clearly, such were automatically welcomed -- of course, to Dust, all stories were welcome. "What kind of Kelvic was she?" That she might be preempting his story with that question didn't occur to her.

[Vanator]

Vanator paused as Dust excitedly pointed out the small cross street. He peered over her shoulder as the woman made more marks on her paper, the scratchings beginning to make sense to the Drykas. Having updated her map, the Kelvic resumed her walk, changing course towards the side street, her pace excited as Vanator strolled along side.

"Well," Vanator began once they were off again, "I will tell you! I was out, way out into the grasslands, two days from Endrykas. Then, out of no where a little goat appeared, I mean little, like the one's people keep as pets." He laughed as he remembered when Pygmy boldly trotted up to him on her short legs. "She looked up at me, then ran over to my cloak laying in the grass and ran off with it. I yelled at her, watched her vanish into the tall grass. Then, I saw it for the first time, The Shift. I had never seen it, and there she was, a woman, naked as a jade jay, wrapped in my cloak. I was so shocked i dropped my ax on my toe!" Van smiled again.

"Not much later she showed up in Endrykas, and she stayed with me for the season, and..." His voice trailed off, the memories coming back in a flood. His smile waned to an almost apologetic grin. "Well, I suppose its not much of a story after all. Should have told you about Mao." Vanator juked to the side, dodging a pair of Akalak carrying a table.

[Dust]

Dust listened avidly to Vanator's story, short though it was, grinning broadly as he described his surprise. "I bet that would've been funny to see!" she remarked. She then took a moment to contemplate goats -- large ones, small ones, ones she had seen in the past. "How big is a little goat? It's bigger than I am, right?" Meaning the Kelvic in her raven form, that was. An obstacle to their progress presented itself, in the form of two dark-skinned Akalak carrying a table between them. Dust considered their approach for the span of a footstep, then ducked under and passed between them, taking advantage of the considerable disparity in their heights. On the other side, the Kelvic turned around a moment to watch them continue back the way she had come from, wondering where they were going with that table. But she didn't wonder for very long. Locating where Van had gone off to, Dust jogged over to rejoin him. She pointed down to the next intersection, where the cross-street ran parallel to their original one. "I think we should go that way next," she offered. And then, because Dust knew a prompt for a straight line when she heard one, she continued, "Okay, so who's Mao? I don't mind listening to one about him, too!" She pursed her lips thoughtfully, considering the name. Was it masculine? "Him? Her?"

[Vanator]

"Oh, bigger than you, smaller than Rhy." Van replied with a smile, trying to pin down Pygmy's size for her. The furniture-laden Akalaks temporarily separated them, and Vanator looked back with a chuckle after watching Dust duck under the passing table, then gaze after them as she walked backwards. The Drykas eased his pace, waiting for the distracted raven girl to catch up. Once she did, the pair resumed their stroll, Dust in her orienteering role, Vanator, the willing accomplice. "That makes sense." Van concurred as Dust pointed to a cross street. Her map had the beginnings of a grid, or as close to one as the city of Riverfall could present.

Whether Van meant to lead the conversation towards Mao, or he simply spoke his thoughts out loud, didn't matter as Dust prompted her companion to share the tale. "Well, Mao was a her, a rather ill-tempered her. A leopard Kelvic who Kavala had taken in at Sanctuary. I encountered her in the Knirin Gardens here in Riverfall. It had been my first visit to see Kavala at Sanctuary, and my first time here." Van pointed to the street, indicating the city itself. [/b]"I was minding my own business when this crazy girl appeared out of nowhere, jumped me and started to bite and choke me, threatening to kill and eat me! I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to kill her, but she was tearing me up! Then Kavala showed up and sedated her. Thats when I saw the collar around the girl's neck."[/b]

"Somehow, Kavala convinced me that I could help her get Mao over her hatred of humans. But she was so angry and violent. When we tried to work with her, this...parasite thing came out of her body and slithered off! We ran after it, out by where the garden was. There, a strange man took up the giant bug thing like it was a pet. He said he had put it in Mao years ago, for some reason or another, though he seemed to enjoy the torment it had caused the poor wretch. Before the stranger disappeared, he summoned out of nowhere three hideous twisted men who attacked us!"

Van became more animated, miming the battle. "Mao, Kav and I fought them until," he pointed at Dust, "the call of a raven stopped them. Then a shadow-clad Cerulean...do you know what they are?...appeared and helped us defeat them, then he too disappeared."

Van paused, looking down at Dust, realizing he was rambling, his tale becoming more bizarre and strange as it went on. "Anyway...that was pretty...weird." He donned an almost sheepish grin. "So, you can say I have had some interesting Kelvic friends."