Goats are People Too (Pygmy)

[Vanator]

Timestamp: 80th day of Winter, 509 AV Location: Sea of Grass, Two days travel from Endrykas. Tag: Pygmy The breeze caressing the Cyphrus grasslands held the promise of the coming Spring, carrying a warmth from the southern deserts. It stole the chill of the morning and was most welcome by the man sitting cross-legged amid the sturdy blades of winter grass, his cloak spread out beneath him. He had removed the cumbersome hardened leather cuirasse from his chest and laid it aside. His torso remained clothed in a typical Drykas tunic, tan in color and sleeveless. Sharp inky points etched in the skin, the ends of his windmark, could be see reaching out of the garment on across the back of his strong shoulders. Vanator had selected a slight depression in the open plains, limiting his view of the surrounding landscape, but also deterring distractions. Usually, that would be considered most unwise, as glassbeaks or raiders could aproach unseen. But Backlash, the man's Cyphrus Strider, stood near the top of the bowl. The loyal mare was as diligent as the clan's hunting dogs, and nothing would approach with out her notice. Or so he hoped. The horse seemed totally preoccupied with munching the dry grass at her feet. He had intended to practice his Webbing, attempting to identify various members of his pavilion while they were in Endrykas. But he found it difficult to concentrate, the solitude freeing his thoughts to wander. So much had occurred during the Winter. His mind spun with the images of places and faces, The Watchtower, Evarette, Din, Hex and, as always, his sisters Kavala and Akela. He shook out his mane of light brown hair and rose to his feet, scooping up the armor and battle axe that lay nearby. "<Keeping a sharp eye out for danger, I see."> He jibed at his mount in Pavi. The Strider simply raised her head and snorted (Vanator swore it was in sarcasm), then returnedto her grazing. He climbed the gentle slope to where Backlash stood and dropped the leather chestplate, freeing his hand to give the buckskin a gentle pat on her strong neck.

[Dhanya]

((I love that thread title))

The Sea of Grass was something of a delight to Pygmy. When she was travelling on four legs, it became an endless maze. Running through it was almost like swimming, with the grass brushing against her fur like water. She'd left her camp for an entire day, just so she could explore it. Thus far she had found three birds' nests, one dog and a wide variety of beetles. Even better was the fact that she could eat her new playground. The Grass was dry because of the season but flavoursome none the less.

She stuck her head up in the air, craning her neck and sniffing. Wandering was all well and good but she'd been hoping to meet some people while she was out and about. She waited for the wind to change.

Horse! Leather as well... Possibly a man? Yes, a man. Pygmy turned into the wind and trotted in the direction where the scent was strongest. She saw the horse first, peeking her head over the crest of the hill she was standing on. She then saw the man beside her. One of those horse people she'd heard about! He had to be! He had tattoos she hadn't seen before and his clothing was nothing like what she was used to.

She jumped into the air, jinking down the hill until she was in front of the pair. Her legs were braced against the incline, her ears pricked and her tail flicking as she stared them down. Pygmy saw herself as a brave adventurer.

Vanator would have seen a little, entirely unmajestic goat. One that was wearing a necklace.

[Vanator]

Backlash's broad head snapped to attention, a mouthful of grass still protruding from her muzzle. Vanator's gaze was drawn as well to the movement on the slope. The Drykas' hunter's hand instinctively moved from the Strider's winter-furred neck to grip the the battle ax in both hands. The weapon soon dropped to his side, followed by a slight drop in his jaw.

The creature plowing through the brown grass was not readily recognized, but the bouncing plod of the short, hoofed legs certainly did not seem to be propelling the animal towards an attack. It's approach was more akin to a puppy or Zilba calf. Then it halted abruptly, almost boldly, before the man and his mount.

In all appearances, it resembled a goat. Goats were not common among the Drykas, smaller livestock found it difficult to keep up with the fast moving clans. But they were not unheard of, especially in the south, where some goats cropped up among traders coming from Eyktol, where the animals were common.

The beast stood its ground, feet splayed and ears alert, tail flinching excitedly. The sight brought a smile to Vanator's wind-worn face. The buckskin mare stretched her head, as if to catch a whiff of the goat's scent, then blew out a breath, shaking her mane and returning to the incessant grinding of foliage between her strong teeth.

It was definitely some kind of goat, he surmised. This little one was, well, little. Short, squat legs, rotund body and kid-like features lent Vanator to believe this species was more useful as a pet than for milk or meat. The next conundrum to tackle was the presence of the little goat itself. Certainly not native fauna to the grasslands, the domesticated animal must surely belong to someone. The necklace danging from her neck confirmed as much.

That someone must be near. Vanator reached into a pouch at his side and withdrew a sighting lens. Making his way past the goat, he stood on the top of the small depression. Raising the leather cylinder to his eye, he scanned the plains around them, the special glass discs within the cylinder magnifying his vision. The prized artifact was a gift from his father. Eannoch had told him it was made by the Sylirians, who knew how to craft such wonderful gadgets.

A survey of the surrounding landscape revealed no one. Lowering the lens, he looked back at the goat. Curious, how long would such a tasty little treat last out here? Any number of predators would make an easy meal of the kid.

Vanator slipped through the grass to stand next to the goat, kneeling down by its side. < "Where did you come from, little one? This place is much too dangerous for you."> He reached out to scratch the goat between its ears.

[Dhanya]

Pygmy had been very pleased when Vanator put his axe down. It just wasn't polite to go around throwing axes at people and clearly the man knew his manners. She took this as a sign that this would be a good first meeting. She bleated at him in greeting, watching as he pulled the telescope from his pack. She'd seen something similar in Jenon's office, though his had been more expensive and he'd never let her touch it, for fear she'd break it.

She wondered if this man would let her take a look. Possibly not. She reminded herself to ask nicely. Politeness was a virtue, apparently. She'd been told as much.

What on earth could he be looking for? She stepped closer and looked out across the plain, trying to see what he might be interested in. When he knelt down next to her, she didn't move away. She moved her head into the scratch, turning so he was touching her ears. She made a happy, goaty sound. Pygmy liked having her ears scratched.

Then she decided she'd had enough of that. She rose up on her hind legs and bounced away, towards his cloak. She grabbed it between her teeth and scurried off into the grass, legs working fast as a rabbit. As soon as she was covered by the blades, she changed.

"Hello!" She called out, wrapping the thick leather around herself, more to save the man potential embarrassment than for her own comfort. It wasn't soft material. "What's your name?"

She stood up, hands on her hips and blinking in the sun. Changing forms always seemed to mess with her vision, for a minute or so.

"Where is everybody?" She asked, mild annoyance creeping into the question. "You talk funny, anyone ever told you? You talk terribly funny, terribly."

It seemed she was expecting there to be more people on the plains, for some reason that made sense in her own mind.

[Vanator]

The goat appeared to covet the affection of the Drykas man, moving into his touch and canting its head to adjust his attention to its ear. Then suddenly the animal bolted down toward his garment, still laying in the grass.

<"Hey, where are you going?!"> Vanator yelled after the goat, chagrined that the little beast had run off with his cloak. He stood, brows furrowed, watching the goat until it was concealed in the tall grass.

What he witnessed next had no precendence in his life. Stray glimpsed of a white shimmering peeked out around his cloak and through the grass. In a few breathes the glimmering dissipated, and a female voice drifted across the shallow bowl. The words were Common, but intelligible.

Vanator found himself utterly confused, only to progress to profound shock as the owner of the feminine voice stood up, wrapped in his covering. His lips parted, but words failed to materialize. the grip on the battle ax slipped, and the haft slid through his hand until the heavy metal head struck the ground.

It was a woman. Well, more like a girl. Her short form was concealed in his cloak, the hem of the garment pooling around her feet. He stared wide-eyed at her, processing the last few chime's events, until a reasonable explaination presented itself. She was Kelvic.

Kelvics were not unheard of among the Drykas, though far from common. Vanator had never met one, but there were many stories about them, and they occasionally appeared as characters in Drykas theatrical dramas. And of all the Kevlic stories he had heard, not one mentioned Kelvic goats.

Vanator suddenly realize she had addressed him. The woman's heart-shaped face was bright and adorned with a smile that even at a distance appeared almost naive. Her cheerful countenance only compounded the absurdity of the situation.

"Oh, uh, hello," he stammered. "My name is...." He paused, was it wise to give his name? What if she was a sorceress, fishing for some way to entrap him in a spell? After all, the entire encounter was bizarre enough to make such a paranoid assumption plausible. But her innocent smile seemed so harmless.

"I am Vanator." He blurted it out anyway. His father insisted that he was courteous to strangers, for you never knew when you would make an ally. He wasn't sure who the 'everyone' was that the goat-girl was expecting to see, but he offered a reply. "Well, its just me and Backlash here." He gestured at the Strider mare, who studied the young woman with much less apprehension that her human master.

The man regained his composure, Drykas pride demanding that he wipe the dumbfounded look from his face immediately. "And may I ask your name, Kelvic, and what in the wide expanse of the grasslands are you doing out here?"

[Dhanya]

Pygmy turned her head to the side, watching as Vanator paused to gape at her. She seemed to have that effect on people. She arrived and everybody seemed to need to take a minute to adjust to her presence. She assumed this was because she was awesome and awe-inspiring. What other alternatives could there be?

His momentary stammer was endearing and made her smile all the more. It wasn't as though you met a young woman of the world every day of your life. She concluded that she liked this man, Vanator. She rather favoured his tallness. He was a man she could look up to, at least literally.

"I call myself Pygmy, it is a great pleasure to make your acquaintance." Pygmy replied, her voice smoothing and seeming like it had been learned by rote.

She bowed, her left hand moving forward and her right remaining by her side, a servant's movement. She let the hand drop and her affectations were gone just as quickly as they had arrived. Pygmy hiked up the cloak like it was a skirt and crab walked out of the grass. It was much harder to get through on two legs and with clothes on.

"You dropped your axe." She said, pointing at it. "Hey, I like your horse. Are you the only people on the entire grassland? I've been looking all day. I'm exploring, you know."

She stepped closer to Backlash, her nose wiggling a little as she took in the horse's smell. She was a pretty mare and not skittish at all, which Pygmy liked. She had no time at all for flighty horses, more a measure of her own weakeness as a rider than the horses themselves. She could empathise, it was easy to get scared when the world was out to get you. It wasn't as though every animal could be as hardy as a goat or defend themselves with horns.

She bent back to look over her shoulder at the Drykas, puffing out a gust of air to move her hair from her face.

"I've barely seen a soul, why is that? You would know, yes?" She asked, expression turning quizzical and her smile being replaced by something approaching seriousness. As close as she got to it, in any case.

[Vanator]

Vanator barely blinked as the stout little girl trudged closer, observing the oblivious Strider grazing nearby. Pygmy was almost childlike, the Drykas mused, reminding him of his youngest half-sister. She was born late in life to his father's second wife, more that a decade after Vanator. He was not particularly close to her, but he recalled the youngster's incessant questioning, never pausing even to hear an answer. The comparison made him grin as the woman bowed dramatically.

He took a few unassuming steps toward the woman. She appeared in her late teens, maybe, though he had no idea how Kelvics aged. When she turned from Backlash to address him, he was drawn to the young Kelvic's gaze, the goat's eyes glaringly obvious set unexpectedly in her otherwise softly curved face. He tried not to stare, but he found he could not rend his gaze from her curiously slanted pupil's.

He seriously wondered of some god had dropped this poor creature into the grasslands as a cruel form of amusement. "Pygmy", he blinked, tried again to avert his eyes, to no avail. "Only the Drykas roam these plains, and usually only in our family groups. The Sea of Grass is a very, very dangerous place, even for those of us that call it home." He found he was employing tones and inflections that one would use when admonishing a child. "You can't be out here by yourself." It was no small wonder that she was not already an unfortunate victim of the Cyphrus food chain.

He suddenly became aware that the goat girl had nothing on besides his cloak, enormous and quite ill-fitting. Though the girl didn't seem to think twice about the state of her dress, Vanator found it a bit awkward. His spare tunic was long enough to adequately reach Pygmy's thighs, he believed.

"Uh, do you want something else to wear? I mean, I have something that might fit better."

[Dhanya]

Pygmy listened, though her comprehension was marred by her unfamiliarity with the Sea. The message he was trying to relay made less sense than body-language. She was much more familiar with that, her profession tended to hinge upon it and her basic nature as a Kelvic aided her in that regard. She made him uncomfortable, at least a little. He kept glancing away and back.

Vanator didn't seem a bad sort though, from his tone he was trying to stop her from doing something that he thought would hurt her. He sounded like her fath... Well, he sounded an awful lot like Jenon did when she'd climbed trees or wanted to run off on her own. Her mother had never had such worries, it had been her firm opinion that Kelvics should wander wherever they wished to and see what was to be seen. That was their nature. She wasn't sure that a human could understand it, so instead of realising that Van was trying to warn her away from very real dangers, she assumed he was just unaware of what she was.

"But I'm not out here by myself." She replied, her voice reasonable though it was clear she hadn't grasped a word Vanator had said, "I'm with you."

She simply smiled and raised a brow when Vanator asked her if she had something else to wear, in lieu of replying. Her cockiness hadn't annoyed him irrevocably yet and like a human teenager, she was at home with testing her boundaries. It wasn't exactly a conscious decision on her part, in her mind it was clear she didn't have a thing on her. It did not occur to her that Vanator was simply being polite.

She stuck out the thumb and pinky of her right hand and extended her arm. She quickly hopped it from Vanator's left shoulder to his right, counting how many hand spans it took under her breath. She then did the same across her hips.

"Is it something you wear? Lucky you have broad shoulders, your clothes might fit me." She shrugged her shoulders, baring more of them from beneath the cloak. "I don't really mind, I'm just as happy without but whatever suits you best."

Pygmy beamed back at Vanator, teeth white and flashing in the sunlight. Vanator might have recognised her change in tone since his warning. It had grown more flippant and less amiable. She considered herself to be independent and unbonded, and thus accountable to no one. She was playing but she was also testing him, like a puppy tugging on a pants' leg. He kept looking at her eyes as if they made him uncomfortable, that or he just wasn't used to them yet. She wanted to know which was which.

She hadn't yet learned that a reasonable person would have just talked about it.

[Vanator]

Vanator's original impression of the curious Kelvic may have been premature. What he had thought to be childish naivete was quickly revealing itself to be simply a brash confidence and self-awareness. Perhaps that was just the nature of Kelvics.

An honest laugh erupted from the man as Pygmy so poignantly stated that indeed she was not alone. He had to nod his acquiescence, the grin a subtle apology for misjudging her. Though she exhibited child-like simplicity, she was no child.

As she approached him, performing her rough sizing estimates, he remained still. He felt silly, at first wondering if she was weaving some kind of enchantment. The time he had been spending with the mysterious Hex had heightened his awareness of those with supernatural abilities. But who would blame him for wondering? After all, Pygmy was already about as strange a person as the Drykas man had ever met.....ever. Strange, but refreshing. She had captivated his interest.

The Kelvic's apparent apathy regarding clothing surprised him. She flashed him a bright smile, and Vanator wondered if she was flirting. The man not yet able to reconcile the fact that, though quite human in appearance, Pygmy was at heart a goat. Of course, why would a goat worry about being naked?

He considered the alternatives. Though he was old enough now to run the Denusk Pavilion, he still harbored a boy's ornery heart. He considered demanding back his cloak, and testing whether she would truly stand naked in front of him. He had no idea what her shape was, only the glimpses of round shoulders visible as she held his garment loosely around her. He wondered if the goat girl had a tail, or cloven hooves.

In the end, the heir of the pavilion won over the mischievous boy, and he whistled to Backlash. The Strider trotted briskly to his side, and he retrieved a tan sleeveless tunic from a pack hanging on the yvas. He held it out as an offering to Pygmy.

"Here, there is still a winter chill in the air, you might want to put this on." Actually, the morning coolness had dissipated as the sun began its trek across the sky. He smiled sincerely, the tone he adopted less condescending and more lighthearted.

[Dhanya]

Any potential misgivings Pygmy might have had dissipated. She tried her luck too often but today, it had gone well for her. It seemed Vanator was much more of a gentleman than almost any man she'd met before. She decided he wasn't someone she would have to be wary of or have to watch herself around.

"Thanking you." She replied brightly, pulling off the cloak as she reached for the tunic. It was on within seconds, not much time to look unless you were eagle-eyed. Pygmy was aware of cultural standards towards nudity but she was also aware that they seemed to apply less to her own species. She quite liked that fact. It allowed her to dress for comfort no matter what the weather was and have it passed off as Kelvic simple-mindedness. She could do things other people could not and the opportunities that afforded were more enticing to her than having to sit down and actually consider what that meant for her and other Kelvics. She currently seemed to benefit from whatever system was in place without considering that ultimately, it was against her.

She also hadn't put too much thought into Vanator's feelings about it, now that she had decided he was friendly and on her side. She tugged the tunic down so it covered her thighs. It wasn't a bad fit if she considered it a very short dress, though it needed a belt for the look of things. It smelt nice, like grass and grain and feed, like Vanator as well, beneath the soap.

"The weather's not that bad. I do well enough in any kind, when I have fur. Kind of flows over to when I don't, at least I think it does." She told him, still smiling but without the same hint of teeth as before. "Where are the other people? You were all alone until I got here. Aside from the caravan I'm travelling with, I haven't been able to find anyone. Why is that? I don't know how you can hide on a plain, unless you're shorter than the grass."

Worked for Pygmy.