The Park, Monday Afternoon

[notarockharpist]

Yasha had gotten what was probably the best sleep of her life last night; Beau had not been kidding about the beds at the hotel. She might have been tempted to just stay there, except that she didn't want to risk getting too comfortable around here.

She'd taken a long walk around the island this morning, just to take in all the new sights and breathe in the unfamiliar but pleasantly bracing ocean air, and accidentally scared the cashier at JGoB when she'd stopped in to get something to eat. But now she had made her way to the park and was meandering around, looking at all the different plants, the birds in the pond, the trees, everything with a quiet sort of awe.

She probably made an unusual sight, this towering, extremely pale buff woman with a massive sword on her back, walking leisurely through the park, picking flowers here and there and pressing them between the pages of a book in her hand. That was all right, though; Yasha was used to that.

[OOC: Just gonna make grandpoobah yell at me right off the bat. :D Open though!]

Comments

[thishouseishaunted]

Well. She made quite an impression on Mae at least.

"HOLY SHIT!" she cried, arms flung in the air even as she balanced not-at-all-precariously on a branch that looked much too thin for even her tiny frame. "Can I play with your sword?!"

For the love of god, the answer to that question had better be a firm "no".

[notarockharpist]

"Could you even hold it without falling over?" Yasha asked, mildly but with a slight touch of wariness, if only because she was awfully protective of her sword. "Because I'm not entirely sure that would be a good idea."

This was someone who, along with Beau, had tried to argue in favor of letting a four year old bird girl have booze if she wanted to, so she wasn't really motivated by a concern for other people's safety here.

[thishouseishaunted]

"I'm totally stronger than I look!" That was true. "I could handle it just fine!" That was not.

[notarockharpist]

For just a moment, Yasha missed Kiri, speaking of four year old bird girls.

"I'm only asking because it's several times taller than you are," she said, having notably made not a single move to unsheath Magician's Judge.

[thishouseishaunted]

"That's what makes it coooool!" Mae crowed. She looked off into space with a sigh. "I wish I was tall."

[notarockharpist]

"I don't know," Yasha mused, "sometimes it isn't very convenient, you know? Like when the door frame is low and you forget to duck."

Yeah, that didn't really balance out with the fact that you could reach everything on the top shelf, Yasha.

[thishouseishaunted]

"I'm eye-level with most tables," Mae said, sitting down on her branch. "I'd take needing to duck."

[notarockharpist]

"That's true," said Yasha; she closed her book back up and tucked it away in her little travel satchel. "Hello, by the way."

[thishouseishaunted]

"Hi!" Mae waved energetically enough to make the branch she was sitting on wobble up and down. "I'm Mae."

[notarockharpist]

Should she be concerned about the branch maybe breaking? Probably.

"Yasha," she said, nodding up at Mae but keeping eye contact to an absolute minimum. "I arrived here yesterday, so I don't know anyone. I guess that's kind of obvious."

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae shrugged. "I arrived here a year ago and I don't really know anyone either." That wasn't actually very true. It just felt that way. "I go to school here, what's your excuse?"

[notarockharpist]

"I was ... " Yasha hesitated, not sure how much she should say. She hadn't thought to ask Beau how people were about the gods here. Probably not as bad as the Empire, since she hadn't had anything particularly scathing to say about it, but Beau didn't particularly care about the gods, either. "I was sent here, I guess you could put it that way. My -- someone felt that this was the place where I needed to be, so I came."

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae has a somewhat tumultuous relationship with her god, but that was because her god was distant and uncaring and potentially fictitious.

“So . . . your mom sent you here?”

[notarockharpist]

That startled a laugh out of Yasha, albeit a perplexed and very brief one.

"What? No, nothing like that. It's hard to explain."

Not really; she just wasn't sure she should.

[thishouseishaunted]

". . . Okay," Mae said, after just kind of staring at Yasha for a long moment. "Well. Welcome, I guess."

[notarockharpist]

"Thank you, I think," Yasha said with a little nod.

There was a whole lot of certainty going on in this conversation, wasn't there?

"How do you like it at school?" she asked after a few seconds of trying to remember how you were supposed to do conversation. Also curiosity, since school, at least in this sense, hadn't really been a thing in the Xhorhassian marshland.

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae shrugged. "It's alright. Got a really good nap in in class today."

Shunsui's class looked like it would be prime napping time for Mae.

[notarockharpist]

Shunsui's class would probably depress Yasha, honestly. She had a complicated relationship with the topic. Not that she was a student anyway, so the point was moot.

"Is that -- that's not what class is supposed to be for, is it?"

[thishouseishaunted]

“Not traditionally,” Mae admitted. “But the teacher hasn’t yelled at me for it yet.”

[notarockharpist]

Well, Shunsui.

Still, getting yelled at seemed like a pretty mild consequence.

"What is the worst that could happen if you got caught for it?" asked the woman who'd grown up around people who thought a challenge to the death over middling disagreements was normal.

[thishouseishaunted]

". . . I suppose they could dangle me over the pit in that volcano," Mae mused.

Yasha hadn't asked for the worst and also at all likely scenario, here.

[notarockharpist]

"... there's a volcano?"

No, Yasha hadn't thought to make that specification, so that was all her fault.

[thishouseishaunted]

"On that island off the coast," Mae said, nodding and pointing in what was almost certainly not the correct direction. "We rescued a bunch of people from it a couple weeks ago."

[notarockharpist]

Yasha looked. Yasha did not see another island in the direction that Mae had indicated.

"I see," she said, just going for the smile-and-nod approach, except without the smile part. "Does that kind of thing happen often? Beau mentioned that sometimes strange things attack this place."

[thishouseishaunted]

"The volcano part was only the one time," Mae said. "Attacked by toys was twice though. And we had vampires last spring, those were fun! I like it when the island gives me an excuse to beat on things with sticks."