Event | Sinbrilee | Bacchanal

[ironwood]

Characters: Any and all!
Date: August 24 - 30th
Location: Sinbrilee
Situation: An ancient festival of an ancient city, all are welcome at the Bacchanal!
Warnings/Rating: Please label threads as appropriate.

Death and destruction cannot curtail the single most important festival celebrated by the denizens of Sinbrilee: The Bacchanal! The ghosts in and about the city have begun to gossip about high fashion and festivities, sending any that inquire to the Amphitheatre -- a grand, circular structure nestled in the west side of the city.

This structure bore the fall of Sinbrilee and the wear of time with dignity, having lost handfuls of archways and one long stretch of wall to crumbling decay. Despite this, it is obvious that the amphitheatre once hosted many a display and every more festivities than the mind can grasp. This was their solace and safety; here is where the people of Sinbrilee came to find the mind's escape from all that threatened them and their great turtle.

Ghosts have been busy throughout the week, clearing paths through debris and hanging great cloth banners of soft blues and greens to disguise the more blatant signs of its decline. Many hundreds of them shimmer and slid through the area, providing for tables upon tables of food, offering drink, and overseeing competition of sport and skill (some even denying death's non-corporeal curse to enter).

Here, well... Here is where the party begins!

Food & Drink | Music, Discussions, & Dancing | Wrestling & Competitions

Comments

[depicted]

Dorian's smile spreads, but it's just amicable and happy. Or at least, it has that appearance. Dorian's expressions do usually have the appearance of purity, whatever he does.

"Then if we are to converse," he answers, "allow me to introduce myself. I'm Dorian—Dorian Gray. And it is a pleasure to meet you."

[seetoomuch_dontseeenough]

Hah, Dorian's smile reminds him somewhat of more easy-going times with Alana. That is simultaneously a nice and depressing thought. "Will Graham," he says with a smile of his own, somewhat nervous as this may be the first casual conversation he's been in for a long time. First that didn't involve Jack or Alana trying to introduce him to someone, anyway, and that was almost always business in the first place.

"Likewise."

[depicted]

It may not be the best smile Dorian has ever gotten, but it means that his partner is engaged. To Dorian, conversation has more in common with a game than an effort to communicate. You want something, and so do they—or they will when you're done with them, anyway. But it can only go forward when the other player agrees to engage.

Whether or not that player realizes what the game really is.

Keeping that easy lightness up in the air, Dorian says, "I know I should ask you where you're from and what you do at about this point in the conversation, but I'd rather ask what you think of this Hellenism we've found ourselves visiting. Not exactly what I expected at the bottom of the ocean."

[seetoomuch_dontseeenough]

Phew, well that's a relief. Will is a little tired of the standard issue introductions. Oh, yeah, my job involved empathically connecting with serial killers, and then hiding that he had been arrested for being one while worrying that the one other person who knows may tell someone anyway. He'd rather not talk about himself right now. Maybe another time.

"I think it's fitting in a way. Burial at sea of an old civilization means that it will be preserved instead of torn down for something newer that people have created to feed their egos."

[depicted]

It wasn't entirely expected. Certainly, it's not a response he usually expects from Americans, who to his experience seem to be surprised that anything over a hundred years old even exists. The people he knows who get angry about the destruction of old artefacts are usually professors on the edge of having a heart attack or young, fashionable members of the upper middle class who think they were born in the wrong century.

Dorian lifts his eyebrows to indicate his curiosity. "Not a fan of cities built on cities?"

[seetoomuch_dontseeenough]

He shakes his head. "It's wrong for someone to look at something and consider it worthless. But that's what goes through people's minds when they tear something down to build something new."

This could apply to anything, really. Cities, relationships, a person's identity. His home was a farmhouse that was built back in the early 1900s. It had never been torn down, just refitted to have things like electricity and plumbing. It had a history and solid construction, not like houses today that were slap-dashed plywood thrown together two months. It was stable, something that Will's life lacked. Something that many people lacked really, tearing down the old for something new.

[depicted]

"You should have met Steve Rogers," Dorian murmurs. Still, his smile only softens a little. "Occasionally, things from the past are worth, well, less than something new. I appreciate what was more than most, but that appreciation has also given me a great deal of love for what people can manage to create anew." Dorian laughs just a little, quietly, thinking about the London he grew up in and the London he lives in now. "It's just rare for anything to be truly new at all."

[encephalicious]

"Fair," he says with a small laugh of his own. "I'm sure I would skip a cell phone altogether if it meant having to carry one from the eighties or none at all." As their back and forth goes on, Will's nervousness lessens. He smiles a little more and his stance is less tense than it might have been before. His body language is more open, whether he notices consciously or not.

"But, that's more a matter of not having big enough pockets."

[depicted]

Dorian notices the shift in body language and takes it as a sign of another step in the game. His own was always relaxed, but he warms to the warmth he is given. Dorian laughs as well. "God, eighties mobiles. We're better off with those long gone. And I don't mourn the passing of the cassette." He pauses and smiles a little. "There is something to be said for records," Dorian notes, knowing that most would assume he means vinyls instead of phonograph cylinders, "but we are well into the age of the mp3 now and the appropriate mourning period is over, even by Victorian standards."

[encephalicious]

Yep, the connection to vinyls is what Will's mind makes, but the history of recorded music was never something he dug too deep into. Or music for that matter. Sometimes he listened to it but most of his time was spent in silence with his dogs.

"I never invested much time in music players, but I've never had much of an ear for it either. Nothing against it, it's just never something I've found myself connecting with." Because, you know, he connects with serial killers, not Mozart or Celine Dion.

[depicted]

"And what do you connect with?" Dorian answers. The smile is light and teasing—flirting, essentially. But even in that, Dorian has a sort of innocence to his expression. "Just history?"

[encephalicious]

And with that he feels like he's sinking, pulled down by an anchor drowning him in all his insecurity and his past. Pasts are important. A foundation of who you are, and yet sometimes he wishes that such things could be let go, at least for a moment. It takes a lot of internalized rationalizing to tell himself that everything about Dorian as he asked was playful, not to be taken seriously. He could make light of it, he didn't necessarily have to be honest about this right now.

Some of his internalized nervousness is clear, but he tries, jokingly, to be smooth in his response. "People. Intimately, sometimes." Maybe he is flirting back as a deflect from what kind of people he connects with.

[depicted]

Dorian would have to be even more self-absorbed than he actually is (than he is now, anyway) to miss that discomfort. He isn't sure what to do with it. He would think that he is pushing the flirting too far, but not with a response like that.

So he answers, still with that light smile, "Ooh, I'm not certain I should ask more in a public space." Flirting back, and also giving Graham an easy way to avoid getting any deeper into it.

[encephalicious]

There's relief in his smile after that. He relaxes again, anchor slipping away somewhere he doesn't have to think about it.

He searches around his mind for something else to move the conversation to. Something accessible. The turtle is accessible, a point in which they both meet, a point because of which they have met actually. His time here has been a relatively simple routine but he wonders what more, well, outgoing people get up to.

"How long have you been a member of turtle society? I've only been here a couple of weeks." He wonders if that sounds stupid, like talking about the weather once it's out of his mouth but it's his attempt at trying to lead into the topic.

[depicted]

To Dorian, it does very much ring of bringing up the weather, but as Will was just discomfited, it is imperative that he be allowed to find balance again. Otherwise, Dorian won't get what he want. So he follows along the path of the weather, laughing. "Ooh, I'm not certain, it must be... nine months now, maybe? Eight or nine. We had a festival for the start of winter just after we arrived, and I suspect it's autumn coming soon. So let's say eight. You've been settling in all right?"

[encephalicious]

"I have," he says with a nod. Eight months? He can't imagine actually being here that long. It still feels like something fleeting, a dream he has yet to wake up from.

"It's very different here, but each color meets the canvas gradually. I imagine your canvas is very colorful after eight months of time here." Will has no idea how funny his painting metaphor is.

[depicted]

Dorian's surprised laugh is loud, long, and bitter. The metaphor is too apt, and he has to turn away from his interlocutor, has to cover his brow in his hand and try to pull the laughter back.

"I'm sorry—I'm sorry, I just—eight months here, it hasn't made a great difference to my canvas. Life carries on in much the same way, wouldn't you say?"

Helpless to the irony, the laugh resumes. "My canvas is very colourful—oh, if only you were right. It's been taken over by greys, browns, and blacks, I'm afraid."

[encephalicious]

Well. That certainly didn't make the top five of reactions he would have expected, but he wasn't really trying to read that deep into anyone's behavior here anyway. That was behind him, in another world, in another time, in another ocean.

Dorian's answer, though, was actually pretty sad, especially with how he laughed about it.

"Different place, different chances... Different life. Optimistically thinking," he starts, which wow, optimistically was a thing that just came out of his mouth, "it's sort of an opportunity. To start over."

[depicted]

Still smiling, Dorian shakes his head. "Second chances are not that hard to come by, and people can start over as often as they like. But if they themselves, in their essential nature, do not change . . . Well, what good is a second chance if you're only repeating the first round?"

Steve asked him not to let his history bind him. But then, Steve left Dorian alone. What value did any of his words have?