Completed Tiny and... Fascinating?

[Khida]

Summer 41, 513 AV afternoon A strange view met the falcon's wandering gaze as she floated on the winds above the grasslands. It wasn't so much the sight of a Drykas and his horse -- they were everywhere to be found about the city, and if this one was alone, well, they had that habit too. No, it was the way he sat nonchalant amidst the grasses, his Strider grazing some distance behind him. The man just sat there, chewing idly at some snack, watching... watching something even the falcon's eyes couldn't make out from this height. He seemed utterly engrossed in whatever it was -- as though it were the single most fascinating thing in all of Cyphrus. She simply could not figure out what -- so she descended from the sky, in a steep glide which wasn't quite a dive. Closer to the earth, Khida could make out some tiny white flowers tucked in amongst the stalks... but surely he wasn't staring at those. Flowers didn't do anything. The peregrine's approach diverted the man's attention; she read first appreciation, then surprise, and at last stunned awe from his expression... for she dropped down, landed across from him, and shifted to human right then and there. She was the first to speak, while he scrabbled his own wits back into order, her query straightforward and blunt: "What were you looking at?" He opened his mouth. Closed it again. Moved his hands in sudden excitement, scattering crumbs everywhere, half of a hard biscuit tumbling forgotten to the ground. The startled Kelvic drew back from his vivid energy, hardly able to tell where one gesture left off and another began, so quick and fluid were his signs. She didn't have the first guess at what meaning they might convey -- except that the eagerness of his manner included no obvious menace. "Sorry! Sorry!" he said in Common, with the Drykas accent that was becoming ever less distinctive to her ear. "Only..." He continued speaking, but did so in Pavi, the sounds passing as nonsense through her ears. He belatedly realized the problem and backtracked. "You are Kelvic? I am happy to meet! I do not find talk with Kelvic... mm, often, not often. I greet you," he finished with somewhat more decorum, raising a hand in what wasn't quite a wave. "I am Jaron, of Foxwhisper Pavilion." While he spoke, a veritable torrent of words which did exactly nothing to answer her question, Khida let her gaze wander from him to the patch of earth she thought he had been studying. The grass was unremarkable to her eye; the flowers not much more so. The only other detail she could discern consisted of black dots swarming over the flower stalks -- but little black bugs weren't much more interesting to the falcon Kelvic than the flowers they scuttled over.

[Khida]

Eventually, he realized her attention had drifted, after a lengthy wait which resulted in no response from the woman. "Your name is?" he prompted. "Your... bird, it is what? I do not know in common words." She looked back to him when he actually said something relevant... even if not relevant in the way she wanted. "I am Khida," she answered, as seemed ever required to get useful conversation from humans. "I am a peregrine falcon. How would you say that in Pavi?" It was almost automatic now, the asking for words and signs -- yet there were still so many she didn't know! "Ah, it is 'I am a peregrine falcon'," he supplied happily. With the words, he gestured: hunting bird me. "But any 'falcon', you could use sign; it is not... small of meaning." Khida nodded, noting what she understood of the words; she still didn't understand his purpose. But something else occurred to her... "You know about Kelvics?" She had met only one Kelvic in the city thus far; all the other Drykas she'd spoken to had been unfamiliar with he race... even the hunter. If this one knew Kelvics... perhaps she would want to talk with him even more than she'd first thought. Accordingly, Khida folded down to sit in the grass, arms wrapping about her knees. The man beamed at her as she settled in, interpreting correctly her intent to remain a while. "Of course! Kelvic are bird, horse, dog, other people. You must be very close to Caiyha. I worship, follow like. I think it is much... honor, much good to meet one. To meet you." Bird, horse, dog, other people -- well, that was one way to define Kelvics. But the rest of what he said... "Caiyha?" she echoed, guessing it to be another of the Pavi words he intermingled with his Common. "What does that mean?" That expression of ignorance shocked him as even her shifting hadn't; his jaw all but fell open. He uttered a startled statement in Pavi, then scrambled for a Common analogue. "You play?" The man leaned forward to study her face -- and seemed to believe the nonplussed expression he found there, however much its truth baffled him. "I have surprise," he went on after a momentary silence, shaking his head a bit and leaning back into the grass even as his hands sketched slow, thoughtless signs. "Caiyha is god of animals, plants, all things --" He broke off where spoken words fell short, waving a hand to indicate the Sea of Grass around them.

[Khida]

A god. Khida knew of gods, in a vague sense -- they existed, they had power over things, people prayed to them. She knew best certain gods of the physical world -- sun and moon, earth and rain and storm. There was a god of the sea, and one of healing, though she couldn't now recall their names. But even those, the Kelvic gave thought to only rarely -- all of these were things which existed seemingly on their own rights. They were, and she was, and whatever it was that the gods did never seemed to have obvious bearing on her own small and simple life. But a god -- a goddess, to be precise -- of animals? The city of her childhood had not had nearly so intimate a relationship with wilderness as the Drykas did, and this goddess was outside Khida's familiarity. Of animals, and plants, and... "Of all things... that live?" Khida hazarded, testing the shape of the concept forming in her mind. The man hesitated, then shook his head, frowning as he searched through his lacking vocabulary. "Not lives... things... things that not live in city. Falcon and rabbit and deer and grass and tree, much and more. She make them, make... make all circle. Rabbit eat grass, falcon eat rabbit, and when all die grass live well in good earth. Very important god," he finished, in a way that made of the words an understatement -- a failure of his language, not his respect for the deity in question. His brow creased again. "Really you not know?" Khida shook her head slowly, as much in reply as in bafflement. So much in those words that she found it difficult to fathom -- beginning with the idea that animals and plants all came from somewhere. From one somewhere. And did she...? "It is not just eating, though," he continued, gesturing down towards the foliage before them. The words broke Khida's reverie and made its pieces fall away, half-formed ideas gone beyond recovery. But perhaps they'd come back again later. She blinked at him, then leaned forward towards the indicated place... towards the white flowers, and the little black bugs. And... something else, green but not seeming... quite... plant-ish... Curiosity piqued, the Kelvic leaned forward and nudged one of the green dots with a finger, watching it scuttle halfway around the stalk. "The bugs?" She glanced towards him, not understanding. "They are different kinds..." That much, even Khida could see.

[Khida]

He clapped his hands together, once-twice, as if her words were some spectacular revelation. "Yes! There are two, the... ants, the black, and aphids, the green. The black, most times they fight, kill, eat other... 'bugs'. But not the green." Leaning forward beside Khida, his shoulder absently brushing her own, he extended a finger to point at the ants running up the stalk. It stopped where one of the little black insects did, the bug's whiskers -- if they were whiskers? -- dancing some percussive beat against the round back of a green bug. It did nothing else that Khida could see: stopped, tapped, traveled on. So did a multitude of its friends, running up and down and all around with no readily discernible intent or purpose save to scuttle about on their too-many legs. Khida peered at the plant and its denizens, puzzlement inflecting the tilt of her head. She watched the ant run off, and one of its brothers stop in nearly the same place, to do what seemed like the very same thing. It even seemed, almost... almost a human thing. Like... not pets, there were too many green bugs for pets, but... "They're like the cattle?" she asked, turning towards the man. He beamed at her, cheerful and eager, head bobbingin affirmation. "I think yes. The black will... fight other bugs, if other bugs come to eat the green. What they get from the green, I not know. The green do not have wool, or milk, or leather," the man remarked with a quirk of an amused smile. "But I think... is like Drykas and zibri, a little. It is a different thing from eat plants, eat meat, the circle we think about," he concluded, sitting back on his heels. Khida couldn't argue with that last conclusion. She wasn't sure about the rest... the idea of livestock, of keeping cattle, was something she associated entirely with people and their cities. But that there was something different at work between the ants and the aphids... that was readily evident. She, too, sat back a short time after the man did, leaving the ants to their flowers and their little green bugs. ...little green cattle?

[Khida]

Insects with cattle. Sacred plants, that older conundrum, now brought back to the surface. A creator god which made the plants and animals -- whose existence suggested that once, the world had been without those things otherwise immutable in her understanding. Khida sat and tried to fit these things together with her conception of the world; odd-shaped and angular, they didn't want to fall into place. She sat in silence, the sunlight soaking into her hair and shoulders, the man an unspeaking presence felt past her shoulder but not consciously regarded. Not even when he ultimately got up, recognizing something of the Kelvic's inner quandary and leaving her in peace to contemplate it. His Strider trotted away, hooves beating a rhythmic cadence; after a little while, Khida brought her knees up and wrapped her arms about them, looking at the little white flowers and the even smaller bugs. Predator and prey was a simple relationship: you live, you feed; you die, something else feeds. Before, Khida would have said that people complicate matters -- all the things they needed to have, all the rules they lived by. But if the black bugs herded the green bugs, then farming wasn't just a human thing... and the ways of the wild were not as simple as that view seen through a falcon's blinkered eyes. What was the relationship of the Drykas to their cattle? Khida thought it wasn't as close as that between the Drykas and their horses; no one had ever called cattle family to her. If the ants were like the Drykas, did they see the aphids as family? As livestock? As prey? Did tiny little black ants have the concept of family? Did the god who made them give them one? ... ...Her head hurt. Not quite literally, but the ideas didn't want to go together with anything else in there -- and with as much of a frown as had taken over her expression, her head wasn't very far at all from starting to actually hurt. The thoughts which loomed just out of reach were even worse, and she didn't want to touch them now... so Khida let them all go, imagining the summer breeze to carry them away on a cleansing breath of air. The difficult things would still be there, later, if she wanted to worry at them; the difficult never just went away. For the present, Khida traded human skin for falcon feathers and leapt into the sky, immersing herself in that simple, austere elegance which was a raptor's paradigm.

[Taylani]

XP Award!

Khida:

XP Award:

• +2 socialization
• +2 observation
• +1 wilderness Survival: Cyphrus

Lore:

• The direct approach is usually best.
• Jaron: Foxwhisper Pavilion
• Pavi Phrase: I am a Peregal Falcon
• Caiyha: Goddess of plants and animals
• Wilderness Survival: Ants and Aphids

Notes:

Comments :

Nice little solo. I gave you wilderness survival due to learning about the insects, I couldn’t think of another skill other than Entomology but I felt that learning about the insects in the Cyphrus region could help with wilderness survival since some ants are biting ants etc and so forth. I hemmed and hawed about it, if you prefer Khida to get +1 Entomology let me know . Also don’t forget to edit/delete your grade request.

TAYLANI