[Log] Child-Care Experts
Who: Tiriana, Virgil
When: Day 21, Month 2, Turn 16
Where: Steam Baths, Telgar Weyr
What: It's way too early for someone to try to give Tiriana life advice.
Steam Baths, Telgar Weyr
Nestled between many rock outcroppings in this immense ceilingless cavern lie three pools of water and several smoothed, flat rocks angled towards the sky. Immediately, the warmth of geothermal heat reaches you, and you see steam rising from the springs pools.
Two smaller pools with another, much larger pool past them, rest here. A cliff rises over one end of the large pool, with steps to climb up to the top.
A large tunnel works its way back into the innards of the Weyr, eventually leading those without wings to the inner caverns. Those who can may fly up and over the rim to Telgar's southern bowl.
Contents:
Virgil
Obvious exits:
Inner Cavern South Bowl Sky
Virgil
With a sharp little chin, nose, and pronounced cheekbones, Virgil's face appears small, fragile even. Add in the so-pale skin and she seems rather severe. She has a pretty mouth though, and there are freckles dusted across her cheeks; these things take some of the edge off. The way her shoulder-length hair floats around her jawline, permanently static-charged and framing her in white-blonde, softens that part of her too, and her eyes are tempered stone grey. Her neck curves, long and thin, to a small set of shoulders and a frame that follows suit in being thin and modest and lacking in many curves. She's skinny for now, a little bony in places, with little hands and a ragamuffin vibe. At 5'4" she stands well below her peers, and she looks about 16 Turns, 8 months, and 17 days old.
She wears medium-length skirts and dresses paired with too-large sweaters and knee-high boots. Scarves are common too, as are fingerless gloves and crocheted hats with odd ear flaps. Her colors tend towards the mismatched. She's never without the vibrant string of red ribbon around her neck, from which dangles a circle of bronze, a ring that's probably much too big for any of her fingers.
It's early, maybe a half an hour before the morning meal and breakfast crowds, meaning the baths are pretty empty. There are two older women, towel-swathed, chatting quietly with each other with their feet in the water at one edge and there's Virgil, up to her neck, lathering liberally. Her left arm is a poofy stick of suds; her hair's pinned up but it still fuzzes around her face like a frizzy cloud.
With a yawn, Tiriana stumbles into the baths herself, tugging fingers through her bed-tangled hair as she does so. Rubbing her eyes next, she ambles over to the edge of the pools herself. The girl pauses there to shuck off her own shirt and pants, then slide into the water of Virgil's pool; unlike the other girl, she doesn't move to start scrubbing. Instead, she leans her back against the pool wall, pulling her hair up on the stone ledge to keep it dry while she closes her eyes. "Hate getting up before it's daylight," she grumbles.
By now Virgil's got both arms covered in suds, but she pauses in her endeavor to glance up for Tiriana's getting in. Her smile is careful and small because it's early and some people don't want to be bombarded by cheeriness. But when the other girl speaks she calms a little and tests out a new, /brighter/ version. Small-beam. "Me too." Her /voice/ is enough to suggest she's not too long out of bed either, with that raspiness present that mysteriously sets in overnight. "It's worth it, getting in here before it's crowded."
Tiriana peeks open one eye, then the other when Virgil speaks up in reply, glancing over the other girl briefly. With a lift of her shoulders just above the water, she sinks down a little further and wets her face with one hand. "Yeah?" she returns with a snort. "Not /enough/. Didn't have to go feed the runners, /I/ sure wouldn't be here. Need a job that's only afternoons."
"Lemme know if you find one," replies Virgil, her smile twisting for the wry. "Can it also involve not actually working?" Splish, she dunks her arms, rinses good, reaches back with a dripping hand for the pouch of soapy sand off on the edge. "I mean, if we're gonna fantasize."
"Sure," Tiriana agrees, with a half-nod for Virgil in answer to the first request. Her eyes flicker back closed for a moment, a long slow sleepy blink, until the question has her brows furrowing, mouth pulling further downward at its corners. "And then what're we supposed to do with ourselves all day?" she returns, shaking her head--scowling the more so when the motion makes several strands of hair slide off the stone and into the water. "Be like every rest day, fun the first half and boring as Faranth only know what after that."
Tiriana's anti-Virgilness isn't keeping Virgil down, oh no. It's like she's used to this sort of behavior, in fact she warms to it. "I guess it could be like that. If you just gave up on it." She tilts her head while contemplating and scrubbing her shoulder. "If you just did /something/ you wouldn't be doing nothing, so you wouldn't be wasting any time. You could learn how to do something new, just think." Or don't, if it's too scary.
Were Tiriana more awake, it'd probably be a withering look. As it is, it's a rather anemic attempt at one aimed at Virgil, a roll of her eyes thrown in for good measure. "Yeah? Like what?" she challenges, scooting back up again.
"Liiike." Virgil squints her eyes up at the rocky ceiling and quirks her mouth to the side. She continues in a detached tone. "Like how to make a really great pie. Or the best way to get rid of collar ring. Orrr. How about common cures for common ailments? Or how to be nicer to the other naked person in the bath with you." In addition to this Tiriana receives a sly slanted glance. Hee.
And Tiriana, well. Hints are lost on her, apparently, because she just shakes her head, with another eyeroll. "Yeah, right. Why would I want to learn that crap? Any of it," she retorts. "Gotta be better stuff to do, like... Like... Well, hell if I know, but /some/thing." Snort. Beat. "What do /you/ do?"
Which, of course, just lifts Virgil's smile to new levels. It's a grin now, one she's fighting to maintain by pinning it down with a front tooth. When she's sure she has it under control she says, "I'm an expert," pause for dipping her shoulders below the water, "at childcare." And another pause for that to get a response. Whatever that might be, or if it's nonexistent, it doesn't matter because she's going again. "I'm a nanny. What about you?"
There's an insult there somewhere, or so Tiriana seems to think. Her eyes narrow, lips purse, but she can't seem to pin down just what it might be, so eventually she shrugs it off. "Stablehand. S'why I have to feed the runners?" replies the girl, as though that were perfectly obvious. "And of /course/ you don't know anything good to do. Probably entertains the five-year-olds just fine, making pies and washing clothes. Or whatever."
"Actually, they'd rather pretend all day. Y'know, make up stories. Crawl all over the Weyr. When they're not in their lessons. /Learning/." Apparently Virgil comes fully equipped with an invisible force shield, very useful against prickly pear /obviously/ stablehands. There's a lot of silence from her end after she finally puts her head underwater, but there's a little splash when she comes back up with water streaming down her face. She passes her hand over it, reaches for more soap. "You don't have to be like this, you know."
"Learning," says Tiriana. Not something she sounds fond of. She just shakes her head again, straggles more hair into the water, and drags it back out to squeeze it off a little. Smugly, she smirks at the latter question, giving Virgil a broad but not particularly pleasant smile. "/I/ know."
She doesn't respond so much as make a noise. "Mmk." Virgil's hands make quick work of her hair; she shapes it up into a neat little beehive atop her head and clears her throat. Right then. "I mean, if you wanted to you could even talk. Openly. About your feelings. I'm Gil, by the way."
It's such an unexpected response that Tiriana just stares blankly, expression slackening when she's caught off-guard. She blinks. "My--what the /hell/?" she demands a second later, recovering. "What /are/ you going on about?" She doesn't offer her name to that, more interested in getting an answer to her rough question.
That's okay too. Virgil just glances over, the picture of blatant unknowingness, with her headsuds. "I was assuming you had some. Feelings, I mean. You've got to." She holds a hand up, palm out, traditional gesture of surrender. "Unless you don't, and that's perfectly fine too."
"Why," says Tiriana, words very clipped, eyes narrowing; she stiffens her shoulders and straightens up just that much more. "Would you think I want to discuss them with /you/. You think being half-asleep just means I'll spill my life story to the first person who looks at me or something?"
"Nope!" Virgil sinks down to her chin, the better to watch Tiriana through the steam with narrow eyes. "I think you're like this all the time, like you have a reputation. You do, I mean. So I know you've been pretty rotten. But if you /didn't/ wanna do that, for once, you could. Probably not with me, this isn't going very well."
"Y'think?" Tiriana answers Virgil's latter mark bluntly. "So what, you just think you can waltz in here, introduce yourself, and get me to have, like, some kind of personality transplant in five minutes? 'Cause it don't work that way and if it did, /you/ wouldn't be the one doing it." And with that, feathers all ruffled, the stablehand hauls herself out of the bath to make quick work of drying off and getting dressed. "/I/ have work to do," she says at her loftiest, as she turns to stalk out.