Closed A Winter's Dip (Johanne)

[Alses]

OOCAh, for that I have to thank the inestimable Elysium, who's making one for each season and also did the shiny new post-box . I have no artistic ability whatsoever, so I'm eternally grateful to her for her most generous offer, since she does!

Dark emerald eyes blinked up at Johanne; she'd already surreptitiously drunk in the too-thin body on the approach through the water, seeing the small breasts and nipples hardened by the chill, the scrawny frame of skin stretched tight over bone at the elbows, the hips, all the angular geometric beauty of a half-starved human, and was now much more interested in the expressions which accompanied her words. The girl was much quieter than Alses was and so she had to take her cues more from the body language than anything verbal. Still, there was the occasional direct question or statement she could latch onto.

The question about names, for instance. Alses winced; in hindsight, she'd left herself wide open for that, but an outright lie was sometimes far more difficult than it had any right to be.

“Sometimes, yes,” she settled on as a reply, with a lazy, catlike smile. Lhavit was a separate place from the Kinell Hotsprings in the Misty Peaks, after all, if one wanted to split hairs – and in so many ways the day was a completely different world to the night. 'A more pleasant one,' Alses thought, with a sigh, absently counting the bells until the sun rose again. She recalled herself to the question quickly enough, however, and finished: “But Sela will do, here and now.”

Relative silence reigned, but only for a few chimes – Alses had soaked in glorious silence for a while before Johanne had turned up, after all, and it never occurred to her that the other would find her prolixity, her conversation annoying or distracting; she was used to people finding excuses to pass the time of day with an Ethaefal, not the other way around.

“Lazuli Ink, Lazuli Ink...” she murmured softly, her voice caressing the words. “I confess, I've heard the name, but I thought it was a gallery or something, some adjunct to the Basilika...” she tailed off absently as her eyes slid shut and her head dipped forwards for a moment, curling strands of her hair, a blonde so pale it was almost white, coiling and uncoiling lazily in the heated water.

Her inattention only lasted for a moment or two, though, before Johanne's clipped voice brought her back from the state of semi-somnolence that the Hotsprings always brought on, nearly as effective as kariino.

“I'm an apprentice at the Dusk Tower,” she answered languidly. “I learn to read the hidden mysteries of the world, the manifold beauties obscured and lost to all but the mages. I can see the shifting coronae of...of emotions, desires, hopes, fears, ambitions, feelings...even intents, the fading ripples of events past and present in Tanroa's river...around everyone and everything.” A wry smile, almost invisible in the gloom – but they were surely close enough, now, for that sort of thing to be seen. “Aurists read minds – or we do when we've the djed and the inclination, anyway.”

Alses turned over in a gentle swell of hot water, her hair coiling in medusa's snakes around her head, in continual motion thanks to the churning bubbles of the waterfall's impact and the natural convection of the pool.

“Which reminds me,” she continued, apropos of nothing very much. “What is a tattoo, exactly?” On the face of it, a ridiculous question, but Alses hadn't been all that long in the world, after all, and in Kalea most people wore neck-to-ankle robes most of the time, to ward against the perfidious chill and the high winds of the mountains. Then, too, she'd assumed the occasional face tattoo on display was on the order of the paints and dyes used in many of Lhavit's celebrations, something temporary and easily removed.

Turning to look at Johanne, half her face dipping below the surface of the water as she did so, she nodded to her arm, eyes having picked out the darker lines and puckered whorls of Johanne's scars against her flesh. “Are those tattoos? On your arm there?” 'Scars' were an alien concept to Alses; her skin healed from even the deepest of wounds without a trace, always returning completely blemish-free – given enough time and care, anyway.

[Johanne]

"No, not a gallery," Johanne said quietly, still watching the way the water moved gently around her body, lapping up against her skinny stomach. If Sela looked closely, she would see the gentle concave of her ribcage, each bone caressed by the skin. She was not unhealthy, nor was she purposefully starving herself as punishment - though that judgement had been made before - but rather, her body seemed incorporeal, never quite there. It was as though her flesh had no desire to cling to this world. She was unaware of Sela's intense scrutiny.

The brief moment of quiet, the gushing of the water and the calls of the kingfishers the only sound, was refreshing to Johanne. Perhaps the conversation and all its uncomfortabilities were over; but the blonde woman spoke again. Johanne had been too afraid to look up, too frightened by the exposure of flesh, that she had not seen the webbed hands or the gills that marked her as something more than human. She had never seen a Konti before, and was not yet aware that she was seeing one now: even less aware that it was not a Konti at all, but one of those fabled creatures, the Ethaefal.

And then her body tensed, her movements stilled: Sela was of the Dawn Tower. She knew magic. Johanne lived in a city that thrummed with the stuff at every moment. Every building, it seemed, was infused with a divine touch or a sense of the unknown, but still, those individuals who dabbled in magic frightened her. Her throat tight, she chanced a look upwards at the woman, as she spoke so freely of her strange work she did. "Isn't that ... dangerous?" Johanne's tone was hesitating, unsure. She knew magic was used but she couldn't understand the appeal. Some people really wanted to burn the world down.

Sela's next question took her by surprise, and she looked up directly, her eyebrows high and a skeptical look on her face. "You don't know ... what a tattoo is?" Her voice was incredulous. "Why not? Surely you've seen them everywhere... are they not a practice where you are from?" Still, Johanne's eyes were focused on Sela's expressions. She did not see the strange gills or scales adorning her neck. All the same, Johanne willingly answered her question.

"A tattoo is ink that's been layered under the skin, scarred into us, as it were, and remains there permanently. You can add different colours of ink. People use them as a reminder of something important, or sometimes of faith, or sometimes just because they are bored." She paused for a moment, still unbelieving that Sela had never heard of a tattoo: surely she was just playing her.

"These?" her eyes drifted to the artwork on her skin, a labour of love and searing pain. She swallowed. This was another reason she did not like being nude in front of a stranger. "No, these are not tattoos. They're just scars." In the dark, though Sela could not see, her cheeks were a fiery red of embarrassment: she was awaiting the judgement and scorn.

[Alses]

Alses saw, with no small dismay, the ripple of tension course over Johanne's body as she mentioned magic, an expanding bow wave rushing out from her core and poisoning her already-tremulous aura, setting it all a-shiver with silvery uncertainty and a dash of fear. Even in Lhavit, the city of light and magic, where it was perfectly common to buy scrolls and sorcerous philtres, where students of the arcane declaimed in tea-shops and Morphers had lectures on the flight of birds in the park, it seemed there were still those who feared the manipulation of djed.

Well, the world had been served reminders in the past of the dangers of magic – and sometimes it wasn't even a mage's fault. Take the Djed Storm last spring, for example, and all the chaotic overspill from that. The Towers were still picking up the pieces, staff-wise, even when all the physical damage had been repaired long ago. Mental scars – on behalf of the traumatised mages who survived, those who lost everyone around them, and the damage done to magic's reputation among the common citizen – took longer, far longer, to heal.

“Dangerous?” she asked back, having considered her reply carefully. She kept her tone purposefully light but not flippant; contemplative, instead, almost. “Most worthwhile things are dangerous, and auristics is no exception. Magic is like any other tool; it's wonderful and useful until you're careless with it. Try and use it when you're exhausted or not paying attention and it'll turn on you, which is almost never a pleasant experience.” Alses had to smile at that, an involuntary upcurve of her lips as she remembered a minor episode that had left her sense of taste locked on honeyed candies for three bells. That had probably been the only pleasant example of being careless and pushing too far, however: all the others had been unpleasantly warning in nature.

“Even the mild forms of overgiving – there's a spectrum, you see; it's not a straight switch from 'everything's fine' to 'ravening monster' – rather encourage you to be more careful. In any case, you needn't worry; auristics is such a personal magic that overgiving would only affect me, rather than anyone and everyone around me.” Alses shrugged, sending a small wave of water lapping against the poolside.

“Besides, I'm far too tired to use much more than the passive Sight that makes the world so beautiful, and not fool enough to try and force it. You're in no danger, bathing here.”

No sooner had she answered one tremulous question than another burst forth, much more stridently than the last. It was easy to see that this business of 'tattooing' was close to Johanne's heart.

“This is Kalea,” Alses murmured, in reply to Johanne's astonishment. “Most people wrap up in neck-to-ankle robes three seasons out of four against the cold and the mountain winds.” A stifled yawn, courtesy of the temperature and the warmly buoyant, supporting waters.

“Summer's the exception, I'll grant you, and I've seen people with stained faces and bodies then, but I always assumed they were temporary paints for the festivals or ceremonies, or something you applied again and again.” A mildly embarrassed smile. “If I'm honest, it's not something I really gave much thought to before now. How do you even get the ink under the skin? Does it fade, like old books do?” A pause, as Alses debated a little with herself concerning Johanne's question, but saw nothing, ultimately, harmful in it.

“Tattoos...didn't signify, where I was before. Indeed, it would have been a positive crime to mark my skin. To mark any of my kind's skin; I don't think anyone had them.” She held up an arm, glowing palely in the dim light from the pool and the calias-infused plants, its scales gleaming with a pearly, opalescent shimmer. “But now look at it! Pallid and pale and so very, very...colourless,” she finished, slightly sadly, letting her arm drop back into the water with a dull splash. An abrupt switch of topic, the focus back foursquare on Johanne and her scars, sliced deep into her flesh and her soul both, in intricate patterns that were hard to make out in the gloom.

“When did they all happen?” Alses asked, quietly awed at the damage Johanne's body had to have taken – and so recently, too. In her own meagre experience, a scar was what developed when you managed to damage yourself too seriously to heal it with Tanroa's Blessing in one go and then went away after a few weeks. Less, if you were diligent with Tanroa's gift. “If you don't mind me asking so soon after...well, whatever it was.”

[Johanne]

OOCI took forever again. I'm so sorry.

It was like they were in the Dawn Tower themselves; Johanne and Sela, the webbed and gilled girl, talking with lofty airs and self-important gestures on the nature of djed and the dangers of overgiving. But they weren't. Instead, here they were, two strangers who had started at odds, now pursuing an awkward and unlikely tenure of conversation, naked as the day they were born. Johanne felt a knot collect in her throat as Sela spoke. This was all too strange for the little girl from Denval, still frozen at seventeen with Joseph's kiss: she knew nothing of the ways of magic and had no real desire to learn them.

Sela spoke long and thoroughly, her sentences self-important and self-focused, on the dangers of magic. Johanne had nothing real to contribute. Instead, she only sat there, stiff on the rock despite the warmth of the waters. It was true that Johanne only felt uncomfortable because she knew nothing about the topic - but right now, at this moment, in the dark with a stranger she was trying to tolerate but was too polite to leave, Johanne could do nothing but listen. Another time, and Johanne would have been caught in the story. Still, she stayed silent, and nodded when the woman stopped speaking. Nothing to add and nothing to say.

Until Sela began to speak of tattoos. What magic was to Sela, tattoos and art were to Johanne (and writing, both of them combined). "That is true," Johanne admitted. Kalean peoples did not very often show their skin in the colder months. "But I find it hard to believe you had never seen a parlour - there's one in this city, called Lazuli Ink - where, as I said, I work."

"The ink is injected beneath the skin with needles, pushed beneath the first few layers of skin, to a layer above the muscle. If done right, they shouldn't fade, but if you inject too shallowly, the ink will bleed through the skin and disappear quite quickly. But ultimately, they do fade, yes, but never quite completely. Not if done right." Johanne didn't add that she was on her way to doing them right. Let Sela think she was as skilled at tattooing as she seemed to be at magic.

Johanne gasped when Sela pulled her arm, dripping water, running coolly over scales: it was here that she saw that she truly was not human. Still, though, she could not ask. Taking a moment to stare at the scales that covered pure white flesh, nearly as white as Johanne's herself, she tore her gaze away. "Why not get a tattoo, then, if you think your skin is too pale?"

She swallowed, nervously. "When?" Looking down at the art that stretched from palm to mid-way up her upper arm, she wondered how to tell this to someone who had lowered her voice such: ready for sympathy. Sympathy would not come so easily when they heard Johanne had mutilated herself for beauty's sake. "The very first happened when I was seventeen," she said, turning her left arm over on the water's surface, so that Sela could look closely at the scar of Syna and Leth on her forearm: faded, but Johanne would trace it softly, so that Sela could find it amongst the maze. "I've added more and more since then."

[Alses]

OOC'Tis fine, 'tis fine . I understand there was a lovely holiday with a joyous happening in it, which of course means Mizahar takes a back seat.

The little discourse on magic didn't seem to have had the desired effect; Johanne still sat there, stiff and silent and all-but screaming uncomfortable, so Alses abandoned a more in-depth exploration for safer topics.

“I've probably walked past a - parlour, did you say they were called? - a few times, but I'm not so very good at taking notice of my surroundings as perhaps I should be. Unless someone walked right up to me and dragged me inside I'd not have taken much notice, likely as not.” She gave a little, trilling laugh. “As to your doubtless-esteemed place of work, well...Lazuli Ink's not a cake shop or a bookbinder's or a tea-house, so my interest would probably have been rather limited. Obviously, I shall have to investigate further, now.”

Alses blanched at the mention of needles. “It sounds...painful,” she muttered uneasily, a person decidedly not at home with any form of pain, self-inflicted or otherwise. It was probably part of what made her a sensible and cautious – and therefore alive – mage, that lingering spectre keeping her in check most of the time. Some people might have called it cowardice; Alses thought of it instead as more of a healthy regard for her own eternal skin.

And speaking of skin – who knew it came in layers? - and tattoos, and the prospect of getting one...

Alses shifted slightly uncomfortably at Johanne's question, eyes sliding off her face to the rain-dripped forest all around. “Now I know what it actually is, it's something I'll consider,” she settled on. “'Tis a very...final decision, though, no? I'd have to live with whatever I had put into me for a very, very long time...” her voice trailed off as she contemplated the endless roll of years and centuries, and then another concern made itself manifest in her mind – the Ethaefal were physical expressions of perfection, as ordained by their respective patron deities...

Therefore, would – could – a tattoo improve on divinely-mandated beauty, or did that only stretch as far as her celestial form? Probably, but still...And what would happen when the Change came upon her? Did tattoos count as wounds, and so would they pattern onto her soul and transfer across the gulf between bodies, or would they be restricted to her Konti chain? The latter was heartily to be desired; Alses wasn't at all sure how a tattoo would look on the fire-opal skin of her celestial body, after all, and it could end up as a ghastly mistake she had no way of rectifying. And, most important, what would the Radiant Lady make of it all?

That, perhaps, was more of a question for the Taiyang priesthood than the scrawny tattooist nearby, however. “There are...other considerations, too,” Alses finished weakly, eyes still contemplative, but then she was distracted by the intricate network of scars patterning Johanne's forearm, backlit by the emerald glow from the pool itself.

The raindrops rolling between the ridges and dips caused by some of the long-healed wounds made it somewhat difficult to actually see the detail, but Johanne had evidently thought of that – or something similar – for her finger traced an intricate path across the patterning, drawing Alses' eyes to one particular part of it all.

In much the same way as with those unusual pictures that appeared complete nonsense and then, suddenly, when the focus and the light was right, made coherent sense, Alses realised, as she watched, that the network of delicate scar tissue and depigmented skin was not merely a random collection of wounds but rather deliberate, forming patterns and even images on Johanne's skin.

“Syna above,” she breathed quietly, at the revelation in her own mind. “That's the Radiant Lady and the Lord of the Moon, no? I thought you'd been in some terrible accident, but your scars make images.” Her voice was full of an almost childlike wonder, tempered with some confusion.

“They must be an awful lot of work to keep re-cutting,” she observed with a shudder, and no small amount of respect – whilst Alses would be the first to admit she was dreadful at assessing ages, Johanne did not look seventeen, no; she was undoubtedly somewhat older than that, even with the half-starved appearance confusing things a little. The scars must have been cut and re-cut Syna alone knew how many times, and that couldn't have been pleasant.

“And hideously painful too,” she added. “Are you – that is, are they religious? Some sort of penance?” It was the only reason Alses could think of that anyone would keep cutting into themselves – well, unless she was sharing a pool with a madwoman, of course.

[Johanne]

Johanne smiled and nodded, still stiff. Their conversation seemed forced and awkward, unable to recover from that initial explosion of offence after being intruded upon. Bookbinders, cake shops, too many words on such a dark night, that called for relaxation and warmth. Doubtless esteemed? Talking to Sela made her feel as though she were on trial, or talking to the Anchorite herself. Such pomp and circumstance to make up for the fact that they just didn't ... click.

"It is painful, but people will do all sorts of things for art." She shrugged her shoulders. She would carve into her own skin for art, and she would never stop. The blood and pain were worth it. Perhaps as a magician she should understand that. "And yes. Theoretically they last all your life, if the tattoo is done properly and does not fade." Sela seemed to have trouble grasping the concept. There were other considerations, she said, but Johanne could not in any way imagine what they were. Perhaps gilled and scaled women were not allowed. She did not realise she was seeing a Konti: not a Konti at all, in fact.

She stayed silent while Sela looked in awe at her scars, her eyes following thre patterns and movements of the ridges intently. She was used to this moment of awe, of disbelief, especially when they realised she had not been attacked or abused but that she simply carved them into herself. "I recut them perhaps every two seasons. Sometimes more often, if the scar isn't deep enough. And no, they're not religious. They're moments of feeling and emotion." She wouldn't point them out, she wouldn't explain them. Especially not the one of Leth and Syna.

She was tired. It was late and this was difficult. Abruptly, Johanne hauled herself out of the hotsprings, dashing for her clothes. Alses would see her naked, skinny body, but it was too late and she needed to disappear, to hide her scars from scrutiny, to protect herself. Hurriedly, she started dressing. "I am sorry, it is late and I must work soon," a baldfaced lie, "but it was interesting to talk to you." And it was interesting. It was interesting to meet someone so different and so unable to understand her thought process. But that was that. If Sela said nothing else, she would stand awkwardly for a moment, looking over this place of peace, before smiling stiffly and turning, leaving the Kinelli Springs for the long walk back to Lhavit, and a warm bed.

OOCI am sorry. I just think this thread has reached its time. Feel free to post to close and then submit it. Thank you for threading with me!

[Elysium]

Alses

XP:
Auristics +2
Observation +3
Socialization +3
Rhetoric +1

Lore:
Lhavit: Kinell Hotsprings
Johanne of Lazuli Ink
What is a Tattoo?
What is Scarification?

★

Johanne

XP:
Observation +3
Rhetoric +1
Socialization +2

Lore:
Lhavit: Kinell Hotsprings
Sela of the Dusk Tower
Auristics and it's Dangers

Notes: Well ladies, this was intriguing albeit short-lived. It would have been nice to see this go somewhere! If you have any issues with the grade, please contact me.

and so, the journey continues...