tushanshu_logs | and the air was full [April, catchall, OPEN]

Entry tags:

and the air was full [April, catchall, OPEN]

Characters: Raine Sage, OPEN
Date: April, various
Location: Healers' Guild, apartment, sky, other
Situation: a variety! This is definitely your stop for Raine at the Healers' Guild, for sure. Others tba.
Warnings/Rating: None currently; will update as that changes.

A | Healers' Guild | open

Raine, most days of the week, can be found at the Healers' Guild, though rarely at the front desk. Any of the multiple kedan who volunteer or heal here will be happy to point visitors toward Raine's office, however, especially if they have an appointment; even those not strictly looking for Raine will be pointed her way if they express they want to help around the Guild.

Raine can also occasionally be found in the halls, or simply passing through the main entryway, though she will appear somewhat distracted and may take a moment to focus on someone talking to her.

B | errands, out and about -- any sector OR outside Milyn's clinic | open

Basket in one hand, staff in the other, Raine isn't an uncommon sight in markets, or especially in the streets of the Water Sector. She walks quickly, like she's on a mission, but she can't help but turn her steps in Water toward Milyn's clinic.

She doesn't go in, but she stands across the street for a long time, a distantly troubled expression on her face.

C-1 | Hatal, Lorn Level | open

Raine's been spending some more time in Hatal, lately, but this-- this startles her. A group of Kin'nal are experimenting with something she recognizes-- a strange vehicle that looks somewhere between a motorcycle and a butterfly or dragon, and a small pack. "Excuse me," Raine says, hardly able to believe she's saying it. "I-- believe those are mine."

Anyone in the vicinity will shortly thereafter be witness to a peculiar sight, as Raine takes the pack and runs her hands over it. Yes, there are her initials, graven besides the silhouette of a wing. She manipulates it just so, and the entire vehicle vanishes into it, in a curious sliding of matter. Raine lets out a sigh of relief. "Thank you," she tells the Kin'nal, who are more or less happy to let her take it, though she does insist on giving them some recompense.

She doesn't know what her rheaird is doing here, but it's a stroke of luck.

C-2 | skies over Keeliai | open to those with flight capabilities

Raine wastes no time in making sure it works as it should, and anyone in the sky or even looking up at the right time may catch sight of her. It works like a charm, and she handles it with the ease of practice as she skims over the city, mindful of the safe distance. She likes flying, a great deal more than she likes anything to do with swimming, and the rheaird is a small-impact piece of magitechnology, one that doesn't put an undue drain on her environment.

She indulges herself with a loop, when she thinks no one could possibly see.

D | apartment, Earth sector | Solomon

It's one of those days when Raine comes home after Solomon; she announces her return with a quiet "I'm home" from the door, and sets about putting her things away. Her jacket gets hung by the door, since things are warming and she really doesn't need it indoors, her staff leans next to it, and she idly orients on Solomon's mana -- his study, unsurprising -- and heads that way, turning the day over in her head as she does.

"Some days, I wonder about the wisdom of working in the Water sector," she says wryly, half to herself though it's aloud, and she leans in the doorway. Open, so he isn't involved in something he'd mind being interrupted. "How did your day go?"

[ooc: feel free to tag in to any one of these, or, if none suit, shoot me a pm or a pp at

makaricrow and we can work something out! I'd love new CR as well as old.]

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Which did not in the least bit change Solomon's confusion, and he frowned. "You would call him friend, but he doesn't know? Why not?"

That seemed counter-intuitive, given everything Raine had said about depending on one's friends. 'Friends' still weren't high on Solomon's list of possessions, but they apparently were on Raine's. Why wouldn't she tell one about her distaste for water?

She'd confused Solomon. That said that perhaps she needed to step back through her logic, and lay things out more clearly.

"He doesn't need to," Raine began, and held up a hand like that would forestall the inevitable counter she saw coming. "I'm aware that today's exchange would suggest that it would be beneficial, but the matter was handled in any case, without needing to bring up my-- fear. It isn't something I want to bring up, and it isn't overall necessary, so I don't make a habit of telling people." Solomon being the one exception, at the moment.

There were so many logical-emotional holes in there that Solomon wasn't sure where to start. "Of course," he said dryly--about as sarcastic as he got with Raine, which was quite sarcastic but lacking the scathingness. "It makes perfect sense not to tell the people you're close to about a potentially debilitating condition where they can at best make you more comfortable and at worst remove you from situations where you need the help. Silly me."

She recognized the tone, and she frowned. When he put it that way, it did seem like an exercise in foolishness, but he was missing nuance. "It's something I can handle myself," she said, a little remotely. "When there's no option but to be on a boat, I can-- cope." Vaguely. Such occasions always seemed to disappear into a haze of fear in her recollection, but she hadn't yet let anyone down. "When there is, I avoid it. No one else needs to take responsibility for my weakness, so long as I'm not putting anyone else in danger with it."

At first, Solomon meant to rebuff with pure logic, as he knew Raine appreciated. But the more she spoke, the more he felt mirth bubbling, until he couldn't help but lean on his desk with his head in his hand, laughing.

He stopped long enough to say, "You sound like Skulduggery!" Then he decided to laugh a bit more.

"I what," Raine said, flatly, not at all seeing the mirth in this situation. She folded her arms across her chest, fingers tapping against her elbow, and she waited for Solomon to stop laughing and come back to a somewhat more sensible method of argument.

She did not at all sound like Skulduggery. ...Did she? Regardless of the irritation Solomon was currently generating, she reviewed the last exchange with an eye to some of Skulduggery's foolishness.

"I am hardly about to end the world for not informing my friends of a-- a phobia," she said when he had done laughing, and her tone was edging toward tart.

Solomon took a breath, and though the laughing fit was at an end, there was still traces of amusement on his face and in his voice. "Because you're looking at it the wrong way," he said. "You could save someone's life by telling them about a phobia--or even your own--just as Skulduggery could have saved lives by telling people about his addiction."

Somewhere by the end of the sentence, the humour had all but gone. Because it wasn't about the power; it was about the crippling effect on them as individuals.

For a moment Raine stumbled over that one -- how could the confession of a childhood trauma and its consequences save someone's life? -- and she made a wordlessly questioning sort of sound before what he must mean slotted into place. Ah. "You mean that it's possible I may let someone die," she said, evenly if a little woodenly. "If I can't master myself, and other people don't know that they may need to compensate for that."

It was nothing she hadn't told herself before. She had managed; she was managing; she did manage. But the future was uncertain territory.

"There's that," said Solomon, "if you need to guilt yourself into telling someone." Now his tone was serious, all humour gone. "But alternately, there's the hypocrisy issue. You've been telling me about the value of friendship. You've told Skulduggery the same thing. Are you above your own values, now? Too good to rely on your friends?"

Of course she wasn't, and his tone wasn't the least bit mocking, wasn't deriding. But she was holding herself to a different standard, and that was just ... stupid. That was what his words aimed to prod.

"What?" Raine said, and she sounded startled, like that had never actually occurred to her. "Of course not." She bit down on the instinctive followup of this is different, since in her experience when someone had to say that, the situation was not in fact all that different.

"I suppose," she said at length, "that any commentary on the subject of providing an unnecessary burden is also easily dismissed by the same virtues." Friendship, and things she had said on the matter, and things she knew Lloyd would likely say, given half a chance to talk to her. "No; I wouldn't be alive now if not for relying on friends. This is..." Different. No. "Foolishness," she finished quietly, and it would have been difficult to say whether she meant her behavior or the fear itself.

"The fear, or your behaviour?" Solomon asked, because naturally, he would. He went on before she could have a chance to answer, his tone matter-of-fact, but at least not dismissive. At least, trying not to be dismissive--not of the phobia, so much as her reasoning.

"Judging by the way you've been pussy-footing around the issue, I assume you're talking about the fear. And of course it is. But it's still there, and ignoring it isn't making it go away; and in the meantime, you're forcing people who know you into the dark about whether there's anything wrong at all. From everything you've said, I've been under the impression friends don't care much about some foolishness here and there. If that's your reason for not telling a friend when it's relevant for them to know, it seems like a fairly poor one."

Raine grimaced a little at his breakdown of things. It was precise, brisk, and, from an initial thinking-over, right. He might have put it more softly; but then, she had not wanted a partner who would coddle her. She had wanted someone who would match and challenge her, and Solomon did that admirably.

So: all this made perfect sense. As frustrating as it was that she couldn't master herself, her friends would likely understand, if they found out. If she told them. Ignoring the problem in an attempt to push through it did not help so much as she would like. Why, then, did the idea of telling people still make some part of her recoil?

"I hate it," she said aloud, very softly, just loud enough that Solomon would hear and no louder. "Being afraid. The fact that it will likely always be there, in some measure. But you're right: that alone makes hiding it from my friends illogical."

"Look at it this way," Solomon said brightly, holding a hand out toward her. "You could be afraid of something ridiculous and absolute. Like death." His smile was wry. She knew, of course, what really founded the Necromancers' Temple. She knew why they were driven, and that that same fear had driven him.

He was better at controlling that fear, wasn't afraid of confronting it for a worthy cause--like saving the world. But it was still a fear that had driven the logical and cold-blooded research of murdering half a planet's inhabitants.

It broke through the relative solemnity. She couldn't quite laugh, with that reminder, but she did smile at his brightness, and she came away from the doorframe and into the room proper. "The ocean makes up at least fifty percent of Aselia's surface," Raine informed him, taking his hand. She laced their fingers together, and kissed his knuckles lightly, an absently fond gesture almost become habit by now. "And we currently live in a city on the back of a great sea turtle. It cannot be avoided forever."

Nor could death, no matter how they might try. That Raine left unsaid: Solomon would hear it anyway, driven as he had been by those fears. And it looped back, in a way, to what they had been saying about friends, and the support thereof. Neither of them was alone, after all.

"You'd hate Earth," Solomon informed her back. "Seventy percent of it is ocean." By now, he didn't wonder at the habit. It had become ingrained as one of the things Raine did. "But no, it can't."

He did hear it, and that was why the resigned not in his voice on the agreement. The answer wasn't just for what she'd said aloud. It approached something Solomon hadn't figured out, had been almost deliberately avoiding as currently inconsequential--was there anything else he planned to try to stop it?

But that wasn't the topic of conversation, and instead he asked, "So what do you plan to do?"

Raine didn't shudder, but it was a near thing. She'd already known Earth was a much larger planet; surely the landmasses were correspondingly larger, even if thirty percent of the surface was all they occupied.

She let what was unsaid sit between them in silence for a moment, death and oceans and the inevitability of both, and the understanding that she would do everything in her power to keep him from the former; the only concession given to those at the moment was a brief squeeze of his hand. "I don't know," she admitted. "I'm hardly about to seek out everything nautical. I suppose if the matter comes up again -- which I'm aware it's likely to -- I won't hide the problem from a friend, but beyond that..."

It seemed nonsensical to simply inform her friends, one by one, about her trouble. It could be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. "Objectively, there might be some merit to careful exposure, but... frankly, I'd prefer to avoid it." That was a decided understatement.

"I'm hardly a psychiatrist," Solomon said dryly. "I'm not going to tell you to go near water for no reason. I wouldn't even know how that process works. But if it comes up again, yes, I think there's merit to mentioning it--since it seems to be arising with some degree of regularity."

He shrugged. "Though possibly Ravel deserves to be told, outside of that. He seems rather more like a kicked puppy than I remember."

"A kicked puppy," Raine repeated, dry, incredulous. But she couldn't deny there had been something of that air about Erskine when she brushed him off, as inappropriate as the metaphor seemed for a man past four hundred in age. "I... perhaps. If nothing else, it would be a fair exchange."

She shook her head. "It will continue to, yes, so long as I work in the Water sector and live in Keeliai, on Tu Vishan. As I don't plan on changing either of those in the near future..."

Solomon's logic and her own better sense had her backed into a corner. "You're being terribly sensible," she told him, fondly resigned. It had something of the sound of thanks.

"You haven't noticed?" Of course she'd noticed. "Half the time I've spoken to the man, the wrong word makes him crumble like a car in a mechanic's crusher." He'd noticed that most of those times had something to do with Skulduggery, or one of the others, but he hadn't tried overly hard to figure it out.

Solomon smiled up at her brightly. "I am, aren't I?" he agreed, sounding terribly smug. "Fancy that. Would you care for me to be terribly sensible some more?"

"I've noticed. It simply wouldn't have occurred to me to compare him to a puppy." She sighed softly at the consideration of Erskine. She knew better than Solomon exactly why Erskine was that way, but the explanation wasn't hers to give.

Much better, for now, to focus on Solomon's bright smile, which sparked one of her own in turn. "Sensible and smug," she informed him, as if that might have slipped his notice. "By all means, carry on being terribly sensible." It was, after all, part of why she loved him.

"Well, as long as I have your permission," Solomon said innocently, reaching out to put his hands on her hips. "I think it's terribly sensible that you sit down, thereby taking weight off your feet, and use me as a chair, thereby giving me a blanket ..."

The evening was rather more as usual from there.

Raine did not believe that innocence for a moment; but she did rather approve of his suggestions. "Yes," she said, thoughtfully, "that does sound sensible."

And enjoyable, to boot. Raine went with him, settled peaceably into his lap, and things achieved an even keel once more.

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and the air was full [April, catchall, OPEN]

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wrrrrap up here?

o7