deercountry | [OPEN] ARRIVAL

Entry tags:

[OPEN] ARRIVAL

Who: Gilia St. Loe (

seaboard ) & You!
What: Arrival!
When: May 5th-7th
Where: The Beach, The Trench, etc!

out of the sea
It is a mournful thing, to leave the sea, and its quiet peace, that happy drifting nothingness. She is not cold, as she leaves it, the thin robe clinging to her body, damp as she looks back over the water, feeling its tides in her blood and yet now, no longer the peace of it. This body she has been given comes with pain, and scars, and she was bare to them all in leaving. Holding her face in her hands as she looks over the sea she had washed up from, transformed back to living, back to this dreadful coil of breath and limbs.

And this grief-stricken wallowing that grips up her throat.

She buries her face in her hands and weeps. Why ever had she come back to this life? Had she not done enough? It was not fair?

So standing on the shore, wet robes clinging to her, hair moving to float above her head in a great fan of curls, she cries her fill at this agony of being born once more. But it seemed fitting she should have no peace, no respite, she had not lived a kind life, and there would be no mercy for her.

walking the streets
Exhausted as the crying leaves her, she knows that the sea will not take her back, not yet. Instead, she finds her own garments, which she hastily pulls over her body, the bag that washed up with her. Hanging the bag from her belt, she straightens up and heads to the lights she sees of the Trench.

It's done with the pride of a woman who was used to wielding a great deal of authority. Head up, shoulders back, each step purposeful even if she is quite unsure about what it is exactly she is meant to do. Looking about, she tries to find some indication of a local ruler, someone she can talk to, to be received properly and not err on behalf of local customs.

But nothing seems to direct her to one, so she has to eventually just stomp any passerby, looking for guidance.

"Pardon my boldness, but I would ask - where is the local Lord or Magistrate? I should wish to make my introductions to the rulers of the city?"

Her voice is level, with little to no inflection one way or another, a tall woman who kept herself to her full height, made taller with her hair just keeps floating above her head like it was suspended in water, despite being on land and otherwise perfectly dry.

And the scar that cuts up the side of her throat. From clavicle to her jaw, jutting into her cheek. A strange thing, for it seems old, and yet... not healed. Not in the traditional sense. The skin is healthy around it, sure enough, but not joined, like a crack broken open, and inside of it, just on the edge of the light, something churns and swims. Absently, a starfish arm creeps out, as if it were holding the skin together. Latching on like strange adornment.

setting up house
When she finds out that she is simply contributing to the world and the good of the city here, and take an empty house of choosing, there is an... ease, she hasn't felt in years. The lack of expectations, that comfort settles around her. She has no interest in the supposed power in her blood, or power at all.

Settling in a house in Darcmouth, close to the water, no matter how dreadful and dingey the docks are, that it's all men or all the warnings about the sea. She opens up every window and door as she begins to sweep out the empty house, wipe down tables, clear out the chests and cupboards. It's not long until there is the smell of food cooking, a stew broiling over the fireplace, bread baking.

The doors and windows are still open, and inside there can be heard soft singing. The words lamenting a swan who was too slow at the strike of an eagle, and something about lovers being struck down.

It seems that she is not so worried about someone knocking on the door.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Michael tends to carry an air of authority himself. He's tall with a shock of bright white hair, dressed finely in the fashion of Trench, and he's long-since accustomed to being in charge. There's a certain air of composure you get after enough time as Head Architect - plus, even before that, he was great at faking it.

He pauses in his stride, listening to the question with arched eyebrows. "Oh, there isn't one. It's all a little anarchic here. You could introduce yourself to everyone on the network, if you wanted - that can be a little chaotic, but it's the easiest way to get the word out."

The floating hair doesn't get his attention too much, but the rest of it? Gosh, how embarrassing. He should tell her. "Your starfish is showing," he adds in a lower tone, gesturing towards his own cheek.

Edited 2022-05-06 02:48 (UTC)

Her brows knit together a moment, as he talks, trying to parse what he means. Archaic? Network? But she nods. Later, she can figure out what he means later when she is more settled, and try to make peace with it.

His latter statement, she raises her eyebrows a moment. Most would not dare mention the well-known wound, but... she supposed he is not one of her people. Her hand lifts, to the long cut that had come from that fearful night. The pain and the death that followed along with it. She feels the little creature that keeps her safe, its arms lifting to wrap around her fingers, that with a stroke of her fingers, it retreats.

"My apologies, such things ebb and flow to their own whim and I lack my veil, sir...?"

Michael arches an eyebrow at her apparent interaction with the starfish. Is that not her? Maybe he's just making assumptions based on his own...situation. At any rate, it's sure not the reaction he'd have if one of his tentacles happened to be somehow sticking out.

"Michael. Just Michael." He offers her a hand. That's not a universal thing, but you know, worth a shot! "It's fine. We've all got a little sea life in us these days." Him more than most, perhaps, but we don't gotta talk about that!

She seems a little confused at the hand - but assumes her own manners instead, and takes it as she would for a bow, and curtsies in return to him, bobbing her head down.

"Oh, yes, it is mournful to leave the ocean, but I am glad that so many share the connection as I do. So many being rewarded with such a powerful bond..." She sounds genuine... happy and pleased, like someone deeply devout being rewarded.

Oh, cool! She's weird!

Michael just nods in return to the curtsey. He deals with humans from all sorts of time periods; usually he knows when they're from, but whatever, she doesn't seem offended that he didn't bow. "Well, you're taking it better than most people. A lot of folks get weird, about the squid thing. Did you just show up?"

"Why ever should it be 'weird'? Is it not a great blessing to be given such a blissful form?"

She clearly - doesn't see why coming back is all it's cracked up to be. "I have just arrived from the sea, yes." Looking down at herself, and her meager layers of clothing, she feels somewhat underdressed. "I am Gilia St. Loe- " her accent, rich and heavy on her husky voice curves the letters sinlaow, "- Second-Child of St. Loe, She Who Sings the Ocean to Prosperity, Who Echoes With Ceaseless Voice, Daughter-Sea."

Michael flutters his hand for a moment, pressing it briefly to his mouth, before responding: "I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but humans - and other sorts of beings - aren't always the biggest fan of squids. It's the juices, mostly."

And, wow, that's a lot of titles! He nods along to them, vaguely wondering if this is some kind of religion thing. "Nice to meet you, Gilia. Do you need anything? Stuff, a place to stay...?"

That clearly doesn't make much sense to her, as she blinks silently back at him in confusion. More so how candidly he simply addresses her by name. How... informal. So she clears her voice, before moving on.

"Perhaps. Is there mayhap a tavern or such that I may stay at?"

"Uh, yeah, there's a place you can go to temporarily. No street names here, so it's a little difficult to give directions..." Michael glances about for any consistent landmarks, fails to think of any, and shrugs. "I can walk you, if you want. But really, you may as well just find an abandoned house and claim it. There's not much of a system to that, there's plenty of them."

"... What are street names for?"

Yeah, yeah that's how backward she is. Oops.

"That would be lovely, to have your company, for you seem very astute... but truly, just to claim any house? No Lord shall find protest and presumption in that?"

"To...name the streets? So you can tell people where you are, I guess." Michael's not exactly from a culture that has streets or particularly values sense and organization himself. Personally, though, he's always been a bit of a meticulous person. He likes having things organized, and also he thinks the city planning here was not that great maybe!

It's excusable, though. So much of the slipshod way of doing things around here just comes down to how dangerous and unpredictable everything is. Human society, as Michael's most familiar with it, didn't really come up in the same conditions.

"No, there's no local nobility or anything. The Pthumerians are the local immortals, but they're not really in charge - not in the sense of overseeing day-to-day operations, anyway." Really, he doesn't think they're very much in charge of the city at all. Just powerful folks who happen to live nearby and occasionally interfere.

It certainly seems that way, the way he talks about it. That the city was off. Immortals - like spirits? Yet did not care to help. It leaves a bitter taste in her mouth, to say the least.

But it was not her place to interfere. Not now or ever. So she nods, as she goes to follow his lead.

"Then... where is closest to the water? I should like to be there most."

If the starfish did not give it away.

"Oh, yeah, that'd be on the other side of the market. I live over there, actually - my house actually just followed me here."

Michael gestures, and starts to meander in that direction. He was sort of going there anyway. Honestly, he has pretty similar feelings on the Pthumerians - it seems to him that if you're going to be an immortal in proximity with mortals, messing with them on occasion, you ought to take some actual responsibility. But he took his own job willingly, and they were just sort of here, so...well. It's not really his business anyway. Besides, forcing people to work with mortals that don't want to doesn't really end well for anyone.

"I don't really know if there's any vacant ones nearby. Not something I usually look for. But we can check around."

"Thank you..."

She follows with him, and she is tall, her stride long from keeping up with men even taller than she was, and there is a directness to it all. Moving simply, like she expects things to simply get out of her way. A woman exceedingly comfortable in her power.

"Even if you can point me in the right direction, that is simply all I could ask. I may have be all but out in my shift, but I have enough skills that to make a home out of little is no great task for me."

"Out in your...?"

Michael's been around for basically all eras of human terminology, but he's only ever been close with people in the modern day; it takes him a second to catch up. "Oh, you want clothes? I can make you some clothes."

Maul comes down to the shore often when it is the time of month when Sleepers will appear. He will never answer questions from anyone curious as to who he might be waiting for, only staring out at the dark waters with a look of longing upon his face.

He knows firsthand that the process of turning back into a sentient creature can be disorienting and even a bit frightening. When he sees a woman there weeping into her hands, he goes over towards her. Really, it's the hair that draws his attention, he's never seen hair quite like that before on a human being, so thick and floating there in a mass of curls. He comes close, not sitting down next to her, but standing above and watching her crying form for a moment.

Finally, he speaks. "Why so sad?" He asks. His soft, smooth, and low voice is completely at odds with his demonic appearance.

His voice draws her from the depths of her sorrow. If she should have such sense as to be afraid of his red and black markings, it does not occur to her.

Perhaps, because there like black waves, darkness begins to seep in the edges of her eyes, washing in to turn the whites of her eyes to darkness, and her eyes some impossible shade with the tears she sheds.

That sense, for a moment, that something else watches through her.

"I was at peace. Why have they made me come back to this form?"

When Gilia's eyes change color, Maul almost takes a step back before he recovers himself. He initially thought this woman was a human but now he's thinking perhaps not with what he just witnessed. He doesn't mind too much. As his brother pointed out to him not too long ago, Maul seems to gravitate towards those that aren't entirely human when he interacts with other sentient beings.

"Because you have come to a place ruled by cruel beings. They delight in making us miserable," he says, not sparing her the truth. Pthumerians seem to see the Sleepers as little ants that skitter around their feet, something to amuse them when they want entertainment.

It makes sense, though he does not know it, that she knows she deserves such a fate, not the peace she had felt in the cool of the ocean. Not the calming waves that carried her in mindlessness.

"Then their greatest punishment is that they should leave me with such memories of endless depths."

It makes her mourn only deeper, catching her hand against her mouth to stop the deeper wracking sob from creeping out.

"How can one ever find hope again on land, torn apart this way?"

Maul begins to assume she's rather like a Nautolan or Gungan, a member of a species which primarily lives under the water but which can also still survive when on land. It would make sense for one so used to living in the depths of the sea to be unhappy to be brought back to the land.

He considers that. Had this been a couple of years ago, Maul would have had a cold answer. Now, what he can offer is something a little softer in nature, even if it isn't the most hopeful. "It helps to find people here, those who can commiserate with the miseries you have experienced."

She looks at him in brief confusion.

"To say what? I am a Queen and a Mother and full of the screams of all those I have drowned? I am a loving tyrant and an empty creature?"

The laughter that follows is unhinged. Hysterical tears to laughter to tears again.

He hears of what she says and doesn't flinch. So she has wielded great power before, and if her words are any indication, perhaps has grown to regret it. "If you think yourself to be a monster, you will not be alone here. There are many fellow monsters to be found. One stands before you."

Though she is not Force-sensitive, when Maul lets down the shielding around his presence in the Force, something dark and terrible can still be felt around him. It's a miasma of the Dark Side that penetrates him, which has been with him ever since he was born. The Dark Side may not be evil unto itself but Maul very much is.

There is comfort perhaps in what he says, if not entirely what he intends, that yes, yes they are monsters here, then truly, it must be a place of punishment, of purging of the rottenness in their souls.

That his feeling of hatred, evil, the sheer wrongness that she had never felt except the echoes of the stories of their ancestors - it washes over like a final confirmation. Shaking, she begins to drag herself up, curling her legs underneath her as she lurched back to her feet.

"How wretched for us. How lucky for us."

Once she has gotten back to her feet, Maul comes a little closer to the strange humanoid. "Come. This place will not let you return to the ocean save in death and even then only for short periods of time before they bring you back to life. Best to look forward rather than back."

His prosthetic feet sink deep into the sand on the beach, making it a bit of a struggle to keep lifting them up as they make their way up towards the boardwalk. "What is your name?"

She moves like someone drunk, her body still so foreign. Not quick, stumbling one leg after the other after, her body remembering too well how to drift and churn with currents better than she did her own limbs at this moment.

But she does have to pause to answer him. Between remembering that, using her own limbs, and processing to give it all in a way that makes sense.

Granted, it probably doesn't very much. "Daughter-Sea, of pure voice - " She blinks, trips on something, the next she tries to catch herself. Swallowing down briefly. "... Gilia. Gilia St. Loe, of the Isle St. Loe."

He stays close to Gilia as she moves, ready to offer a hand should she start to fall, but he allows her to stumble along as best she can. He doesn't coddle the weak and she'll need to get her footing both metaphorically and literally soon enough.

It sounds very much like titles given and then a name in the middle there. Perhaps that is how things are done among her people. It would not be the first culture Maul has encountered like that. So he gives his own name the same way. "Darth Maul, Dark Lord of the Sith." Such a name certainly does fit his appearance to a T.

His presence at least gives her something to latch onto, then the confusion and grief that hums in her body. A fitting name, certainly, powerful as he surely is in each step. Yes, yes long ago she would have been scared of him. Cowered like a lamb at his words.

But she is too tired for it anymore.

"Where is it we go?"

"To the boardwalk," Maul explains. He gestures with his hand towards where all the buildings stand far above the shoreline on the wooden pier built to accommodate them.

"You shall need food and drink to revive your body. The change back can often leave one feeling a bit weak physically."

It's the clothes that catch Lucius's attention first. Differing fashions abound in Trench, but clothes that look like they're from where and when he himself is from typically don't factor into it. Lucius has abandoned that style in favor of the button-up shirts, vests, and heavy overcoats common here, but reminders lurk in the back of his wardrobe. The sight invokes a bit of yearning, and a lot of suspicion.

But he doesn't recognize this woman at all. Whoever she is, she is at least not connected to his father in any way.

He would likely have moved on, if she hadn't then spoken. The boy shrugs in response to the question. "There aren't any. It's all kind of...makeshift."

His tone implies that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some more structure could be of use, but he imagines that it's hard to maintain amidst the constant change here. And having no one in power does, at least, guarantee that you also have no one who shouldn't be in power.

His eyebrows raise as the starfish reaches out, but he doesn't comment on it (yet). It could be a side effect of a number of things. "You just arrived?"

She turns to the voice, and - a boy. Not for much longer, she supposes, he is heading towards grown as opposed to being an infant.

But she had best not think about it too much. Still... she swallows a moment, to get her bearings. If she is here, then what of her family? Her own children? This boy does not seem to have any family with him, right at this moment.

"I did. I have come just from the sea, where it has so cruelly torn me away..." She does not like this, being back on land. Why would you ever give up the quiet peace of being such a divine form? "... Are you alone here?"

Cruelly torn away? He doesn't show his skepticism, but it's there nonetheless. Certainly, there had been a kind of peace in the ocean. But you couldn't do anything. In the end, such a useless existence seems much more cruel to him.

The question surprises Lucius. It always does - so many adults here (even, apparently, one newly arrived) are concerned about children being left alone or uncared for. It's an easy thing to take advantage of, but always faintly ridiculous. Or more than faintly, when it comes from a stranger who looks to be from a place similar to his own.

The answer always surprises him as well, for all that it's been true for close to half a year.

"Oh, no." He smiles, the picture of a friendly, well-raised boy. "I have a home here. Are you looking for that, too?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[OPEN] ARRIVAL

walking the streets

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Out of The Sea

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

walking the streets

no subject

no subject