Raisins. And nuts.
RL Date: 5/2/09
IC Date: 8/18/19 --Unfinished.
Garden Patio Ledge, High Reaches Weyr(#634RJ)
Partly sheltered by the curving stone overhang, partly exposed to the weather, the wide stone patio serves as a balcony for socializing or just plain drinking on a sizable scale. The repurposed ledge might once have let two large dragons land, but now there's too much furniture for that: two rustic tables with attendant chairs, plus a couple more in particularly good weather, and a wrought iron bench situated to make the most of the view of the western bowl and the lake beyond.
Other changes include rough little niches carved out of the stone walls to hold glows in colored bottles at night, the climbing plant that's being trained to grow up along the overhang, and the blue ceramic pots of flowers that dot the edge of the ledge as a colorful reminder not to fall off.
An archway leads to the Snowasis itself, housed in the ledge's former weyr, while a few wide steps descend along the wall to the bowl.
The sun is high in the sky and there is not a cloud in sight. There's a breeze that tempers the heat with no humidity lingering in the air.
It's summer, it's Carobet's restday, and the sun is hitting the garden patio at just the right angle. Which can only mean one thing: the Healer is lounging at a table, sipping quite contentedly from a condensation-beaded glass of something that looks fruity. And she's-- well, 'modest' is not the best word for her clothing at the moment, skirt and shirt hiked up just so for catching the suns' rays. This former Istan will get a tan, sharditall.
Aleczir has found himself a little traveling bag, unlined leather, very small, more a pouch than a proper bag, and he's coming up the steps from the bowl with his attention very much on its contents. Tentatively, like he's afraid he might lose a finger, he reaches one hand inside it, liberates a handful of nuts-and-raisins, abruptly drops them all over the place in an aborted attempt to put them in his mouth. Aborted because his mouth is too busy gaping. He needs to get his brain to tell that gaping mouth how to speak again, but it's currently overloaded trying to process all that... "Your skin is showing." Success!
Carobet's mouth twists in a smirk as Alex's snack goes scattering across the floor. She nods her head slowly at his words. Yes, it is. "You dropped your food," she says, an equally obvious observation. "Might want to have that hand-eye coordination checked on. Losing it can be a sign of serious illness, you know." Sip, sip from her pretty-colored drink.
Prompt; "Not all of it." The bag has ties, see, and the fumbling that left his nuts-and-raisins going everywhere also let gravity do its job and close the pouch's mouth. To give him time to recover, Alex turns his attention down to using the bottom of his foot to try and make a pile out of his spilled snack, making it that much easier for the ants to attend to it when they have time. "Don't you-- don't people-- how are you?" Lame lame lame lame lame, hey, a raisin got stuck to his shoe, dangit.
"I'm very well, thank you, and you?" Carobet asks pleasantly, swirling the liquid in her drink with one hand, combing fingers through her hair with the other, carefree. "I'm glad there's some left. Those sure look tasty." And by 'those,' she means the pile on the ground, which she eyes as it's created by Aleczir's shoe.
"Someone--" He scrapes, makes a smear out of the raisin guts between his shoe and the ground, blinks at it momentarily before finding the capacity to look back over at Carobet--'s face. Resolutely, Alex comes over toward her table and pulls out a chair and sits down and puts his pouch in between them. "Someone said something about protein and sugar and gave it to me. Why are you doing that?" The vague wave of his finger means to indicate getting-a-tan.
"I'm too pale," Carobet replies, which is perhaps ironic given present company. "And the sun feels so nice. It's my day off. I intend to relax." Without being offered, she reaches over to grab some of those nuts and raisins and munches on them thoughtfully. "Protein and sugar. Both important parts of a well-rounded diet. Sugar, sparingly." Munch. Sip. "What brings /you/ here?"
Sooooo, "You're actually going to burn your skin. On purpose." Clearing his throat, and people say /he's/ an odd one, Alex more delicately liberates a bit of his trail mix stuff, sets it out on the table to separate out the component parts. Of course. "I was supposed to go-- somewhere? This morning. And I forgot. Then I ran out of chalk, and I went to get some, and someone gave me this bag of food. So I thought I'd better find somewhere to eat some of it." It all makes perfect sense to him.
"Yes." Carobet turns her head, giving the other crafter and odd look, watching for a moment as he sorts out his snack. "You've never heard of tanning?" She sets down her drink on the table and begins to assist in the organization, one finger sliding each individual nut to its proper pile. It's an odd pastime, but look, she can help! "What were you using the chalk for?"
Aleczir ahs, explains, "Most of my fellows never minded being pasty so much. Also, I don't think-- you're too pale." He pauses in the sorting, turns over a pale wrist, nods at its lack of exposure to the elements, and goes back to his task. With two people it goes quicker, so he adds some more to the unsorted pile and keeps at it. "What do most people use chalk for?" Honest question.
"Why thank you," Carobet says, seeming pleased by the compliment. "I don't know. Keeping tallies on a chalkboard? Decorating the bowl with pictures of firelizards?" She shrugs. "Sketching out your next brilliant starsmith invention? I don't use chalk very often, myself." Cashew here, almond there, a third nut snuck surreptitiously into her mouth. And then, a random question: "Are you the kind of person who doesn't like their food touching on their plate?"
"I seem to remember eating it sometimes," says Alex in a sudden fit of recollection, looking out of the corner of his eye at the ground for a second in disapproval for the stupidity of youth. "Chalk, I mean. Have you tried it? No, probably not. Now I use it for--" A pantomime scribble, an almond to pretend as chalk and the tabletop to pretend as slate. "I... don't remember the last time I ate off of a plate. Why?" Briefly, looking back across at Carobet, he conveys a wealth of mistrust for random-questions from the mouths of Mindhealers, thank you. Even scantily clad ones.
Carobet shakes her head. "Never tried it. Dirt, though, according to my foster Ma. Although I don't remember that at all." She turns her head once more in an nearly-exasperated, /really?!/ expression. "Then what /do/ you eat off of? The table?" She gives a slight shrug that's accompanied by a little toss of her hair. "Just wondering. Since you seem to like things to stay in their proper place. Is all." No Mindhealer tricks here, really. Another raisin gets eaten off the table.
Aleczir's face twitches and he mumbles, "Minerals." Dirt. Mmmmn. But then there's a point to make and, gesturing to the current outlay of snacks on the table, briefly perturbed by the fact that there are a disproportionately small number of raisins compared to nuts, he answers, "You're eating off of the table, why would it be odd if I did it? You're not very subtle." Whether he means Carobet's questioning or the tossed hair is hard to say, since he watches the latter with a sudden cast of amusement.
"It's raisins, not roast wherry," Carobet points out, as if the distinction between what should and shouldn't be eaten off a table is painfully obvious. For a moment, her entire concentration is taken up by the very complicated task of sort out nuts, bending closely over the table. Finally, she glances up again. "Was I trying to be subtle? I didn't mean to."
"And nuts." It's raisins-- and nuts. Alex points this out very literally somewhere in the middle of that, puts one of each kind of nut all in an equally-spaced row on Carobet's side of the table, nodding toward them. See? Nuts. "Ah, then," he puts his hands together in a little burst of applause at the end. If she wasn't trying to be subtle, she's done a commendable job of it, and he literally applauds her efforts.
Carobet glances up once more, wrinkling her nose at his applause. "But I was eating the raisins," she points out. "Why does everyone seem to take so much pleasure in pointing out nuts? I get the pun, it's old." She reclines once more in her chair, raking fingers through her hair and shaking it out. "Trust me, I can be subtle when I'd like to be. But it rarely seems necessary."
Aleczir, to the eating of raisins, utters a slightly dismayed, "I noticed." He's still bothered by the discrepancy in quantities, and sends a woeful look across to Carobet as if to request she stop making it worse? Only, the woe gets replaced by confusion rather quickly, and he utterly misses the whole reclining-hair-combing appeal because he's so worried about, "The pun? I was just..." Being literal. He taps a skittery index finger over each. Different. Nut. He's lined up there.
Carobet, needlessly defensive. "Oh." She's silent for a moment, then takes a nut from one of the piles, helping even out that discrepancy. "You shouldn't be so literal all the time. It gets so boring." Another almond disappears. "But thanks for refraining from making a joke. It rather makes me dislike eating nuts." She scowls slightly at his preoccupation with the nuts on the table, and for Alex's benefit gives her hair an additional toss. Encore performance; so not subtle.
"Stop flouncing and sunbathing and being testy and girlish." Alex utters these traits of Carobet's without so much as a glimpse of malice, meanwhile hunkering down so his arms fold on the table and his chin disappears behind his wrist and one hand actually takes a nut with the intention of-- get this!-- eating it. "And I'll stop being literal." He smiles briefly, like he's struck a great bargain, and watches the hair-tossing with a laugh behind the horizon of his forearm. "I know a joke-- well, a funny story."
"I can't help it. I'm flouncy and girlish," Carobet protests. "But I guess that's a fair trade." She sits up straight, folding her hands on the table, trying not to-- oh wait, but that's girlish, too. Fail. She tries to slump unlady-like into her chair, but she ends up flouncing, tossing her body backwards dramatically. No good. Wrinkling her nose in frustration, just like always, she gives up. But, "Oh, I like funny stories."
Aleczir is okay with the ultimately surrender, especially since watching everything it took her to reach that point confused the hell out of him. Is she-- does she-- no, just eat your snacks and wait for a moment to tell your funny story, Alex. "When I was first going to harper lessons, very little, the harper said one day, 'Before we start, if anyone has to go and use the necessary, please raise your hand.' And a very dim boy next to me." Him. Totally him. "Said, 'Why? Will that make it easier?'"
Carobet chortles, not even bothering to cover her mouth with her hand, and not laughing in a girlish titter, either-- see, making progress! "And let me guess, that dim boy never got an explanation for 'why' that satisfied him, did it?" She raises an eyebrow; the third-person tick doesn't work on a Mindhealer. Another, um, raisin disappears off the table.
"I... don't recall that part. But it seems silly, doesn't it? Raise your hand to tell the whole class you need to..." Alex trails off, shaking his head, the pains of children who don't care to announce their bodily functions to a room full of peers. For every raisin, he has to eat a nut, it's bothering him so much. "Where do you find a dog with no legs?" God, let's hope that's the beginning of another joke.
Carobet eyes Alex eating a nut for every raisin. And so she takes another, just to see if her hypothesis is correct. And annoy him. "You know, need for symmetry is a symptom of serious mental illness," she comments. "Okay, I give up. Where do you find a dog with no legs?"
"So are insomnia, lack of appetite, and obsessively counting and re-counting things." So at least someone took the time to explain things to Alex at some point in his life, and he lifts his chin from behind his arm to smile benignly toward Carobet. Yes, he eats another nut, dammit. "But I'm told I'm-- mostly. Harmless. Right where you left him." Dog. No legs. Get it? "What did the fish say when it swam in to the wall?"
IC Date: 8/18/19 --Unfinished.
Garden Patio Ledge, High Reaches Weyr(#634RJ)
Partly sheltered by the curving stone overhang, partly exposed to the weather, the wide stone patio serves as a balcony for socializing or just plain drinking on a sizable scale. The repurposed ledge might once have let two large dragons land, but now there's too much furniture for that: two rustic tables with attendant chairs, plus a couple more in particularly good weather, and a wrought iron bench situated to make the most of the view of the western bowl and the lake beyond.
Other changes include rough little niches carved out of the stone walls to hold glows in colored bottles at night, the climbing plant that's being trained to grow up along the overhang, and the blue ceramic pots of flowers that dot the edge of the ledge as a colorful reminder not to fall off.
An archway leads to the Snowasis itself, housed in the ledge's former weyr, while a few wide steps descend along the wall to the bowl.
The sun is high in the sky and there is not a cloud in sight. There's a breeze that tempers the heat with no humidity lingering in the air.
It's summer, it's Carobet's restday, and the sun is hitting the garden patio at just the right angle. Which can only mean one thing: the Healer is lounging at a table, sipping quite contentedly from a condensation-beaded glass of something that looks fruity. And she's-- well, 'modest' is not the best word for her clothing at the moment, skirt and shirt hiked up just so for catching the suns' rays. This former Istan will get a tan, sharditall.
Aleczir has found himself a little traveling bag, unlined leather, very small, more a pouch than a proper bag, and he's coming up the steps from the bowl with his attention very much on its contents. Tentatively, like he's afraid he might lose a finger, he reaches one hand inside it, liberates a handful of nuts-and-raisins, abruptly drops them all over the place in an aborted attempt to put them in his mouth. Aborted because his mouth is too busy gaping. He needs to get his brain to tell that gaping mouth how to speak again, but it's currently overloaded trying to process all that... "Your skin is showing." Success!
Carobet's mouth twists in a smirk as Alex's snack goes scattering across the floor. She nods her head slowly at his words. Yes, it is. "You dropped your food," she says, an equally obvious observation. "Might want to have that hand-eye coordination checked on. Losing it can be a sign of serious illness, you know." Sip, sip from her pretty-colored drink.
Prompt; "Not all of it." The bag has ties, see, and the fumbling that left his nuts-and-raisins going everywhere also let gravity do its job and close the pouch's mouth. To give him time to recover, Alex turns his attention down to using the bottom of his foot to try and make a pile out of his spilled snack, making it that much easier for the ants to attend to it when they have time. "Don't you-- don't people-- how are you?" Lame lame lame lame lame, hey, a raisin got stuck to his shoe, dangit.
"I'm very well, thank you, and you?" Carobet asks pleasantly, swirling the liquid in her drink with one hand, combing fingers through her hair with the other, carefree. "I'm glad there's some left. Those sure look tasty." And by 'those,' she means the pile on the ground, which she eyes as it's created by Aleczir's shoe.
"Someone--" He scrapes, makes a smear out of the raisin guts between his shoe and the ground, blinks at it momentarily before finding the capacity to look back over at Carobet--'s face. Resolutely, Alex comes over toward her table and pulls out a chair and sits down and puts his pouch in between them. "Someone said something about protein and sugar and gave it to me. Why are you doing that?" The vague wave of his finger means to indicate getting-a-tan.
"I'm too pale," Carobet replies, which is perhaps ironic given present company. "And the sun feels so nice. It's my day off. I intend to relax." Without being offered, she reaches over to grab some of those nuts and raisins and munches on them thoughtfully. "Protein and sugar. Both important parts of a well-rounded diet. Sugar, sparingly." Munch. Sip. "What brings /you/ here?"
Sooooo, "You're actually going to burn your skin. On purpose." Clearing his throat, and people say /he's/ an odd one, Alex more delicately liberates a bit of his trail mix stuff, sets it out on the table to separate out the component parts. Of course. "I was supposed to go-- somewhere? This morning. And I forgot. Then I ran out of chalk, and I went to get some, and someone gave me this bag of food. So I thought I'd better find somewhere to eat some of it." It all makes perfect sense to him.
"Yes." Carobet turns her head, giving the other crafter and odd look, watching for a moment as he sorts out his snack. "You've never heard of tanning?" She sets down her drink on the table and begins to assist in the organization, one finger sliding each individual nut to its proper pile. It's an odd pastime, but look, she can help! "What were you using the chalk for?"
Aleczir ahs, explains, "Most of my fellows never minded being pasty so much. Also, I don't think-- you're too pale." He pauses in the sorting, turns over a pale wrist, nods at its lack of exposure to the elements, and goes back to his task. With two people it goes quicker, so he adds some more to the unsorted pile and keeps at it. "What do most people use chalk for?" Honest question.
"Why thank you," Carobet says, seeming pleased by the compliment. "I don't know. Keeping tallies on a chalkboard? Decorating the bowl with pictures of firelizards?" She shrugs. "Sketching out your next brilliant starsmith invention? I don't use chalk very often, myself." Cashew here, almond there, a third nut snuck surreptitiously into her mouth. And then, a random question: "Are you the kind of person who doesn't like their food touching on their plate?"
"I seem to remember eating it sometimes," says Alex in a sudden fit of recollection, looking out of the corner of his eye at the ground for a second in disapproval for the stupidity of youth. "Chalk, I mean. Have you tried it? No, probably not. Now I use it for--" A pantomime scribble, an almond to pretend as chalk and the tabletop to pretend as slate. "I... don't remember the last time I ate off of a plate. Why?" Briefly, looking back across at Carobet, he conveys a wealth of mistrust for random-questions from the mouths of Mindhealers, thank you. Even scantily clad ones.
Carobet shakes her head. "Never tried it. Dirt, though, according to my foster Ma. Although I don't remember that at all." She turns her head once more in an nearly-exasperated, /really?!/ expression. "Then what /do/ you eat off of? The table?" She gives a slight shrug that's accompanied by a little toss of her hair. "Just wondering. Since you seem to like things to stay in their proper place. Is all." No Mindhealer tricks here, really. Another raisin gets eaten off the table.
Aleczir's face twitches and he mumbles, "Minerals." Dirt. Mmmmn. But then there's a point to make and, gesturing to the current outlay of snacks on the table, briefly perturbed by the fact that there are a disproportionately small number of raisins compared to nuts, he answers, "You're eating off of the table, why would it be odd if I did it? You're not very subtle." Whether he means Carobet's questioning or the tossed hair is hard to say, since he watches the latter with a sudden cast of amusement.
"It's raisins, not roast wherry," Carobet points out, as if the distinction between what should and shouldn't be eaten off a table is painfully obvious. For a moment, her entire concentration is taken up by the very complicated task of sort out nuts, bending closely over the table. Finally, she glances up again. "Was I trying to be subtle? I didn't mean to."
"And nuts." It's raisins-- and nuts. Alex points this out very literally somewhere in the middle of that, puts one of each kind of nut all in an equally-spaced row on Carobet's side of the table, nodding toward them. See? Nuts. "Ah, then," he puts his hands together in a little burst of applause at the end. If she wasn't trying to be subtle, she's done a commendable job of it, and he literally applauds her efforts.
Carobet glances up once more, wrinkling her nose at his applause. "But I was eating the raisins," she points out. "Why does everyone seem to take so much pleasure in pointing out nuts? I get the pun, it's old." She reclines once more in her chair, raking fingers through her hair and shaking it out. "Trust me, I can be subtle when I'd like to be. But it rarely seems necessary."
Aleczir, to the eating of raisins, utters a slightly dismayed, "I noticed." He's still bothered by the discrepancy in quantities, and sends a woeful look across to Carobet as if to request she stop making it worse? Only, the woe gets replaced by confusion rather quickly, and he utterly misses the whole reclining-hair-combing appeal because he's so worried about, "The pun? I was just..." Being literal. He taps a skittery index finger over each. Different. Nut. He's lined up there.
Carobet, needlessly defensive. "Oh." She's silent for a moment, then takes a nut from one of the piles, helping even out that discrepancy. "You shouldn't be so literal all the time. It gets so boring." Another almond disappears. "But thanks for refraining from making a joke. It rather makes me dislike eating nuts." She scowls slightly at his preoccupation with the nuts on the table, and for Alex's benefit gives her hair an additional toss. Encore performance; so not subtle.
"Stop flouncing and sunbathing and being testy and girlish." Alex utters these traits of Carobet's without so much as a glimpse of malice, meanwhile hunkering down so his arms fold on the table and his chin disappears behind his wrist and one hand actually takes a nut with the intention of-- get this!-- eating it. "And I'll stop being literal." He smiles briefly, like he's struck a great bargain, and watches the hair-tossing with a laugh behind the horizon of his forearm. "I know a joke-- well, a funny story."
"I can't help it. I'm flouncy and girlish," Carobet protests. "But I guess that's a fair trade." She sits up straight, folding her hands on the table, trying not to-- oh wait, but that's girlish, too. Fail. She tries to slump unlady-like into her chair, but she ends up flouncing, tossing her body backwards dramatically. No good. Wrinkling her nose in frustration, just like always, she gives up. But, "Oh, I like funny stories."
Aleczir is okay with the ultimately surrender, especially since watching everything it took her to reach that point confused the hell out of him. Is she-- does she-- no, just eat your snacks and wait for a moment to tell your funny story, Alex. "When I was first going to harper lessons, very little, the harper said one day, 'Before we start, if anyone has to go and use the necessary, please raise your hand.' And a very dim boy next to me." Him. Totally him. "Said, 'Why? Will that make it easier?'"
Carobet chortles, not even bothering to cover her mouth with her hand, and not laughing in a girlish titter, either-- see, making progress! "And let me guess, that dim boy never got an explanation for 'why' that satisfied him, did it?" She raises an eyebrow; the third-person tick doesn't work on a Mindhealer. Another, um, raisin disappears off the table.
"I... don't recall that part. But it seems silly, doesn't it? Raise your hand to tell the whole class you need to..." Alex trails off, shaking his head, the pains of children who don't care to announce their bodily functions to a room full of peers. For every raisin, he has to eat a nut, it's bothering him so much. "Where do you find a dog with no legs?" God, let's hope that's the beginning of another joke.
Carobet eyes Alex eating a nut for every raisin. And so she takes another, just to see if her hypothesis is correct. And annoy him. "You know, need for symmetry is a symptom of serious mental illness," she comments. "Okay, I give up. Where do you find a dog with no legs?"
"So are insomnia, lack of appetite, and obsessively counting and re-counting things." So at least someone took the time to explain things to Alex at some point in his life, and he lifts his chin from behind his arm to smile benignly toward Carobet. Yes, he eats another nut, dammit. "But I'm told I'm-- mostly. Harmless. Right where you left him." Dog. No legs. Get it? "What did the fish say when it swam in to the wall?"