deercountry | Sun rises, night falls, sometimes the sky calls...

She tilted her head to one side, like a small sparrow who had caught sight of something shiny a new. "You want to cultivate plants?" she said. Well, that was exciting. Apart from Fern, she hadn't met a lot of people with interest in plants. Certainly nothing to rival her own, which was considerable.

"What sort of seedlings did you have in mind?" she asked.

Without a thought, she launched herself off of the lip of the roof, landing in a neat squat in front of her own door. She barely made a sound as she touched the ground.

"Well that was cool," he answered without thinking, marveling for a moment at just how easy she made that look. Raleigh wasn't really a parkour kind of guy, more suited to falling and hoping for the best.. which worked to varying degrees of success.

A beat. His brain caught up with the question.

"Vegetables mostly, I want to use the three sisters method this year. I've got some beans (some! HA!????! This is Raleigh The Bean Guy Becket we're talking about) but I need corn and squash and some brassicas if you have them. Marigolds and sunflowers, too."

And anything else he could get into his little goblin hands.

"The...three sisters method?" she said, tilting her head the other way. Ariadne thought she knew quite a lot about plants. But she had no idea what that meant.

An idiom, perhaps.

At the very least, she'd understood that 'cool' was a compliment of sorts.

She opened the door to the show, gesturing for him to follow her inside. The lower level was one enormous great room, ringed with countertops. Across them, spilled out like coins in a treasure, were a variety of dried herbs, picked from the orchard. In the middle of the room, there were a series of tables, with a variety of mismatched vases. Some of them are real vases, others are just jars or pretty containers that Ariadne had encountered.

The whole room smelled of spring time.

"It's a planting method," he answered as he followed her in.

"The beans use the corn for support and the squash keep the ground from drying out. You can plant three times as many crops in the same amount of space and they all support each other- wow.. this is incredible."

He could nerd out about gardening for hours. Never the best student in school, Raleigh made up for it with thirst for knowledge and relentless insomnia. He'd entered Deerington the previous October and was immediately met with persisting food insecurity. Nothing he hadn't known in his life before but in the dream, at least, he could do something about it, and suddenly gardening became incredibly important to him. Trench was no different. Having long gotten bored of mushrooms, and the chickens he farmed bring more important for their eggs than their meat, He needed to be doing more. And wouldn't you know it, there just wasn't an agriculture supply to stroll into.

"You did all this?"

"Well, Deerington helped," she said. "The shop, the apartment above it, the orchard...all of them were part of my home there. A part that somehow came with me to Trench."

But there was no disguising the pride on her face, the absolutely radiant smile. She really loved her orchard and her trees. They were her family and she was so happy that they were with her. Someone she could talk to, someone who would listen; while the rest of her world made almost no sense, half of the time.

And as for the rest? Well, she had big plans for it. Serenity Garden was meant to be a public amenity. Ariadne dreamed of a place where everyone felt warm and welcome.
Where people could pass the time or share their thoughts or fall in love.

All of the best things of humanoid society.

Raleigh would have to agree with her, the idea was a romantic notion and he possessed a poet's heart.

"Ohh.. I thought we had something like this back there. That was you. Right, I'm with you."

A hur dhurr dhurrr

"My partner's house came with us here, too. Amazing, actually."

It was also very helpful, even if it had taken them a week or two to find the place as they searched for somewhere more suitable to live than a gross squat. He'd searched Ache and Feed but apparently not well enough the first time. In Chuck's words, he hadn't been looking with his eyes, he'd been looking with his ass.

"I like to think that that was a final gift to us from Julia," she said, although she had absolutely no way of knowing if that was so.

Perhaps she had a poet's heart too.

Ariadne crossed the room, her bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor, as she made her way over to a table that was littered with dried cuttings and seeds and cups of different soil samples she'd collected from around Trench and from her orchard. She waved him over. "Here's the table where I've been working on native plants. They hardy, but they don't have a lot of nutritional value."

Following behind, Raleigh took the opportunity to really look around as he removed his scarf and shoved it halfway in his coat pocket. The rest, a fine wool dyed blue to match his eyes, hung loose like a rather crestfallen banner.

Which was accurate of himself, as well.

"I see. I thought it might be a long shot. No grains or anything?"

"Aside from mushrooms, not much has managed to thrive," she said. But before he could get downhearted, she held up one finger. "But. Most of these samples were from mostly before we arrived. Which was after the planting season. These seeds had already been sewn in the native soil." She pointed to a small pot of dirt from Cassandra. It was grainy, weak, and sort of gray.

A sharp contrast to the pot of rich, lush soil beside it.

She pointed to that next.

"This is the soil from my orchard. From the roots of my trees from Deerington. By all logic, none of my trees should have survived half of what Deerington threw at us. But they did. And I think it was because of magic. Magic which might be in the soil."

It didn’t solve their lack of seeds but it was something.

“So if we could find the crop seeds then you’d be able to use the soil you have here… that might work at first but we wouldn’t be able to take much before you’d need to put more soil in.”

Hm. That could be a problem long term.

“We could try hydroponics. And I know the ground in Ache and Feed is more viable. Dean Winchester grows all kinds of herbs and flowers.”

Ariadne had no idea what 'hydroponics' were.

She just smiled slightly at the mention of Dean's herbs, but said nothing. Whether he knew the nature of those herbs or not was absolutely none of her business. And since she was still a little mad at Dean, she decided to change the subject.

It was for the best.

"You should speak with Varian," she said. "He took some soil samples a few months ago, in the hopes of isolating whatever it is in my soil that's allowed the trees to thrive." He had a personal interest in the matter. Given that his partner was kind of a plant person.

But once again, that wasn't Ariadne's business to discuss. No matter how fond she was of both Varian and Fern.

“Fern, right?” He’s familiar.

“That’s a good point. I wonder if he’d be able to manifest crop seeds… is that weird?”

It feels weird. Then again, beggars can’t be choosers.

“Are you using any particular fertiliser?”

'Weird' was a word that had lost pretty much all meaning for Ariadne. And she imagined that she wasn't the only one. So all she could really do was shrug at his first question.

The second, at least, was easier.

"I've been setting up some compost," she said. "I didn't have anything when we first got here, but the orchard didn't seem to need it. I'm just sort of assuming that if I want to plant anything beyond my trees, I'm going to need it."

A pause.

"I know that some farmers use animal waste for that sort of thing. But I'm not much of a farmer. More of a gardener, if that makes sense?"

Aha, well that is a problem he can solve.

"It does. But you're in luck, because I am a farmer."

A phrase Raleigh Becket never thought he would say in his life. If you'd told home back home that he would end up farming he would have laughed you out of the damn room. And yet here he is.. and he's happy.

"We raise chickens out in Feed. I've got sacks of chicken manure, you're welcome to have some."

"If you think it would work, I'd be more than happy to give it a try," she said. She'd always admired farmers. Truly. And a part of her thought it would be a wonderful life to make. But the thing about farming was that it was a job that was somewhat repetitive in nature. Tasks followed the seasons. And the seasons cycled over and over again.

That wasn't Ariadne. Ultimately, she was too energetic. Spontaneous. Creative, perhaps. Being stuck in a routine would be confining, eventually.

Or possibly make her think a little too much of the life her parents had carved out for her.

And anyway, with so many plants, it would be hard to name and befriend all of them. Season after season.

"Is that what you did back home?" she asked. "Farming?"

See the kicker is those are all qualities you'd use to describe him, too.

In his defense he hasn't been a farmer for very long. Just since coming here and he wouldn't say he was even particularly good at it. But the hens seem happy and they're laying like they should(?), so he supposes he's doing something right. Time will tell.

Honestly, he just likes being left alone and playing with chickens while tinkering with power tools in his workshop. He's a simple man.

Raleigh snorts softly and shakes his head, shifting his weight and hip checking the table while he fishes out a few pieces of paper wrapped candy from his pocket. They old fashioned, brightly colored boiled sweets, but he thinks they're a classic for a reason and selects a blue one before offering to Ariadne. Go on, take one.

"Not at all," he chuckles.

"I was a soldier for a while and when that didn't work out I went into construction."

He isn't sure if he can count his last stint in the military. After all, it wasn't military anymore. By that point in the war it was humanity's last, desperate stand.

Edited 2022-01-16 02:01 (UTC)

She accepted the offering slowly. It smelled of sugar, which was something she found she missed. There hadn't been any in the forests of Deleo, but growing up in Valeria, she'd taken a shine to sweets. Sugar got rarer and rarer as the siege of the Red Dragon gained strength, but she'd always managed to know a few ways to sneak them.

Never this color before. She turned it over in her fingers, looking intrigued. What could possibly turn anything blue? No fruits that she could think of. Only a few sorts of flowers that, so far, she hadn't seen in Trench.

"A soldier?" she said, her eyes flicking up to him. "I'm surprised. I'd think it would make you inclined to be a hunter around here."

Raleigh chuckled and shook his head again, the candy clacking behind his teeth before he tucked it in his cheek. He's a fidgeter.

"No, I think my fighting days are over. Rode hard and put away wet."

Which was mostly true. He would fight to protect himself, his loved ones and his property, but he didn't feel the need to go out looking for trouble. Trench was full of hunters, they didn't need a busted up old has-been like him.

"I teach, though. Or I did in Deerington, there towards the end."

Rode hard and put away wet? What in the world did that mean? Had he drowned a horse or something? Horses were far from Ariadne's favorite animals, but she couldn't imagine something that awful.

It had to be a figure of speech.

She really, really hoped it was.

"Wh-what do you teach?" she asked, trying to set aside the terrible images of horses in the water.

N-no- Airy. He is the horse.

Raleigh furrowed his brow, watching her try to process something and not understanding what the confusion was.

"Self defense," he answered slowly.

"Sorry, did I say something wrong?"

"I..."

Thirty-five languages, thirty-six if you counted Elven handspeak. And she still struggled with some of the most basic sentences.

It was further proof that the universe--or multiverse--had something of a sense of humor. She could appreciate that, of course. Laughter was important. She just wished that the joke would be on someone else, every now and then.

"'Rode hard and put away wet?' Is...is that an idiom?"

"Oh- it, yeah it is."

His turn to be embarrassed. He forgot himself, sometimes. If it was any consolation Raleigh had several languages as well and yet here he still was struggling with his first.

"It means you haven't been taken care of very well."

A hard ridden horse stabled without care was left exhausted and uncomfortable, but he meant it in an even more abstract way.

"I'm a little beat up from service is what I meant."

But who liked bringing up their disabilities in a first meeting.

"Ooooh."

Her expression immediately turned to one of sympathy. Not pity, of course. Because she knew there was nothing worse in the world than being pitied. She was only sorry to hear that he felt that way.

"Well," she said, "in that case, perhaps you'd also like to sample some of the tea mixes that I've been experimenting with as well?"

Nothing like tea for a weary soul.

Raleigh perks and gives a soft, lopsided smile before nodding.

"I'd like that, thank you. Nothing with caffine, please."

He jiggles his hands to demonstrate being fill of energy, a nice way to say I'm Baby and Very Caffeine Sensitive. He's got a hard enough time sleeping as it is.

"You know.. I bet if we worked together we could start some serious agra-form here in Trench. I think we're here for the long haul and I dunno about you but I'm starting to get sick of mushrooms."

"This way."

With a nod of her head, she led him to a spiral staircase in the corner of the great room. It wound up to the second floor, which was Ariadne's apartment. A small space, with a large canopy bed on one side and a practically-untouched kitchenette on the other. In between was a low, wooden table. Surrounded by an assortment of pillows in various jewel tones. Ariadne had started decorating her home with mobiles of found objects: pieces of glass and metal and ribbon. Casting sparkling colors all over the room in the mid-day sun.

"I'm afraid," she said, walking over to the kitchenette, "that I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'caffeine.' Is that an herb of some kind? I've never heard of it before, so I doubt think it's in any of my teas."

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