Log: Nyssa's Tired And Doesn't Like Peppers
Who: Nyssa, P'draig
When: Afternoon, day 16, month 10, turn 22 of Interval 10.
Where: Garden and Pool, Ista Weyr
What: Paddy and Nyssa talk about hatchings and being a candidate.
Garden and Pool, Ista Weyr(#456RJ)
From bowl to waterfall, the gardens of Ista stretch out across the plateau. Nearest the bowl are the practical plants--the herbs and crops and an orchard of fruit trees--but the closer to the stream one ventures, the more fanciful the foliage becomes. Lush dark leaves, flowers as big as a hand, jungle creepers hanging from old-growth trees--like most of Ista, the plant life grows rampant here, everything outsized and richly green. The streambanks in particular are impressively overgrown, until every rock is moss-covered and pockets of still water in pools on the banks teem with algae.
Only the waterfall itself seems to have escaped the onslaught of flora, cutting a channel through the rock and falling toward the pool below. The craggy cliffs leading downward post a number of places to sit and swing your feet, or to wade in the shallow puddles that collect in dips in rocks and around the edges of the water. For all the cliffs and their outcroppings, however, the best way down is still the steep, slick stairs switchbacking down the rock face.
In the midst of the garden lawn, a large pavillion sits, often a hub of activity in the area.
A hot and sticky day has become a slightly less hot, but no less sticky evening. While there's the vaguest hint of a breeze, it's not enough to be refreshing, and for this reason the water is particularly attractive. The pools and stairs are both popular spots, but back along the stream there's plenty of places away from public view, and it's one of these more secluded spots that Nyssa has come seeking, wading across the stream by the longest possible route towards moss-covered rocks in the shadow of hanging creepers from the bent, gnarled trees.
It's definitely cooler under the trees, but if Nyssa was looking for secluded, she might be disappointed to find P'draig sitting on a rock in one of those curves of the stream, feet dangling into the water and wearing not terribly much at all. The brownrider's still wet-haired from a recent dip it looks like and threads from the cut-off hems of his shorts draggle along his thighs. Gray-blue eyes lift at the sound of a splashing approach and Paddy lifts a hand to wave. "Hey Nyssa."
Nyssa hasn't made much concession to the heat herself in terms of clothing, although her arms, as ever, are bare and her dress is cut relatively low. Both hands busy keeping her skirts hiked out of reach of the stream, she doesn't have the luxury of waving back, nor of being startled, although the light, now beginning to fail, is still strong enough to show - well, a lack of reaction. "Hello," she responds, polite enough, if somewhat short. She does stop, however, dithering for a moment upon finding her intended destination occupied, a pause that's long enough for her to fall victim to a yawn that her hands aren't at liberty to stifle.
"And here I thought it was cooling off," P'draig jokes a little, offers over a little smile. "Had any chance to practice skipping stones?" and he gestures vaguely to another rock tucked into the side of the stream bed if she's looking for a spot to sit. That yawn though tilts his head to the side. "Long day?"
For a moment Nyssa looks slightly incredulous, and then mildly embarrassed, hanging her head slightly and deciding that one piece of rudeness is enough for this moment, and so she makes her away toward the indicated rock. "To be honest," she confesses, "so much has happened since, I'd clean forgotten about that." With her skirts tucked back under her legs and her hands once again free, she puts her hands up to her face, her fingers meeting at the bridge of her nose and the palms of her hands cupped to catch a successive yawn as unobtrusively as possible. "They all feel long lately, although it's not bad," she owns, "being busy."
"Yeah? Lots happening?" P'draig prompts curiously, apparently not in the know. One hand drops down to the water, swirls through it. "What's keeping you so busy you're yawning before sunset?" the brownrider asks with a grin, looking back up at the girl.
"Well," Nyssa doesn't seem surprised that he wouldn't, and mostly still appears slightly embarrassed, "there's this Candidacy thing, you see. Last night I didn't sleep well, either, and it all adds up." And then, with just a flash of resistance, "It's almost sunset."
"Oh! Shells, you were searched?" P'draig looks mildly sheepish but smiles at Nyssa, draws his hand back up with water cupped in his palm, reaches around to splash the back of his neck. "Almost, yes," he looks up at the sky, slowly turning golden and rosy as the sun slides down the horizon. "The barracks can't be comfortable either in this heat."
Nyssa shoots P'draig a slightly surprised sidelong look. "It feels like just about everyone round my age has been." Which is her current method of rationalising, but could be taken any one of a number of ways. "Which is - that is, the heat's not so bad in there, it's the noise which is worse. It's like vtols at all hours."
"Well, congratulations then," Paddy offers up sincerely and he nods. "I remember. Went through it twice. Everyone's excited or edgy and that makes for a lot of talking and the in and out and everything," he gestures with his hand, a few stray drops of water flicking off into the stream. "Are you looking forward to it, or more nervous?"
Nyssa braces herself on her hands and pushes a little further back on the rock until she's sitting upon it and her feet are clear of the water. "I'm not sure," her reply, at least, is edgy enough. "At first I thought it couldn't come soon enough, but now there's so many more people come in, it's not too hard to figure out the way the odds are going." Her lips quirk with the slightest bit of distaste.
"Thing is, with dragons, it's not so much a game of odds, because the dragon has to find just the right person. So there could be hundreds out there, but if you're the right one, your dragon'll find you," P'draig explains in a gentle tone. "But the waiting is hard. Really hard." Pause. "Do you wonder what it's like?"
"But no-one knows," and this is the bit Nyssa can't get her head around, which is part of what makes her speech come out clipped and a little forced, "who the right one is. Else they'd only need eighteen of us. So it doesn't feel so different to odds, not right now." She hesitates. "Part of me wants to know everything, and part of me, it doesn't want to even think about it, any of it."
"No, they don't know for sure, but even if more candidates come in, it doesn't necessarily change your chances. They'd be the same from the moment the eggs were clutched, or really from the moment the flight happened ... though that's kind of mind-bending to think about," Paddy says with a little wry laugh. "Mm. Yeah. There's a lot of it that it's impossible to really explain until afterward anyway."
"But," Nyssa says again, slower this time, "we're asked to stand, not told." Spending time with some of the barracks' more obnoxious occupants probably makes her wish some of them could be told not to. "I went," it's his mention of eggs that sets her off, "to see the eggs, to look at them, but they're just - well, eggs. They're bigger, but even then, I thought they'd be bigger still." There's enough to confuse her just in the here and now. "If you stare at them long enough, they start to seem almost ordinary."
"It's a choice," P'draig agrees, hands settling atop knees, feet finding an angled resting place along stone. "They are just eggs, until they hatch out dragons," the brownrider says with a touch of humor. "It gets pretty crazy out there on the sands come hatching day."
Nyssa walks her feet up the rock a little, the soles of her feet rubbing against the moss and settling, for now, into what doesn't look a comfortable position. "They're eggs with dragons inside." Hatching Day brings another thought to mind, a query made with sudden trepidation, "All those seats - do they fill up?"
"Definitely, growing babies, who'll come out as dog-sized hatchlings," Paddy describes and holds a hand out to roughly show how high they'll be come hatching day. "And for the most part, they do. We go get the families of the candidates for the hatching and other people come in. Sometimes we have guests from other Weyrs, weyrleaders ... lords holder ..."
"All of the families?" Nyssa's expression momentarily lights up, although that one moment is soon forgotten and buried under a heap of apprehension at the rest of that list. She keeps to a more roundabout way of expressing it, however, an an all-too-hopeful, "Perhaps the eggs will hatch in the middle of the night and they won't come."
"Pretty much, sure. The ones who want to come and are able," P'draig amends slightly. "And sometimes it's sudden enough there's no time, unfortunately." His knees butterfly out, elbows hooked around the outide of them, fingers laced loosely together. "It does cut down on the guest list when that happens, though they're still usually pretty well attended."
"I'll just have to not look," Nyssa decides this to herself through an exhale of breath. It's easy enough to both say and think for now, remaining as fodder for another sleepless night or two in the near future. "Or only when I want something else to be scared of." One of her feet slips on the moss, and she lets her heel bump against the edge of the rock. "It'll be dinnertime," she supposes unenthusiastically, after a short period of silence.
"Probably won't really have time to, when the time comes. Hatchings go fast," P'draig notes with a little grin. "And you have to pay attention to the eggs hatching so you don't get run over by an overenthusiastic baby dragon." He nods about dinner, looks down the stream a little ways, back at Nyssa. "You don't sound like you really want to go in for supper," the brownrider notes mildly. "Are you hungry?"
"I thought that was the point?" Nyssa says a little distractedly, treating P'draig to another sidelong glance that's a little short of complete comprehension. For more pressing matters such as sustenance, however, she almost seems blank again, all of a sudden. "I need to study tonight," she takes a different tack, "I'm not sure I've got time, and I know just about everything is going to have peppers in again." It's the latter reason that sounds like it's verging on a complaint.
"Which? Paying attention to the dragons?" P'draig doesn't quite follow. Studying though and tastes that don't involve peppers he gets though. "What do you have to study? And if you want something without peppers, I'd be willing to whip up something for you that doesn't have any of them."
"More them running into you." Nyssa's knowledge of dragons might have increased exponentially since she agreed to Stand, but there are still plenty of glaring holes to be filled. Even away from the subject of dragons those holes exist, although here she's more carefully blase about revealing them. "I'm working on my writing, the Harpers said it wasn't good enough." And as for the offer of pepper-free food, the answer is a longing, "That would be - if you wouldn't mind, that'd be great."
"Not really. You don't want one running over you and knocking you down or knocking you down to get to someone else," P'draig explains calmly. "And if you need to practice, I've got the kids scrap paper and pencils to work with," he offers over genially. "And I don't mind at all, you can test out some of the milder things I've been working on that don't involve Istan spices and do me a favor by saying if they're too bland or not."
Nyssa's last hesitations are cancelled out by that final offer, although she's unlikely to actually criticise any of his food, even when pushed. But at this precise moment she promises only "I'll try," and prepares to spend the evening both trying to practice writing and just as diligently trying to hide her efforts. But there won't be any peppers, so the trade-off will be worthwhile.
"Sounds good," P'draig says agreeably and gets to his feet to wade over to the shore where he left shirt and sandals and leads the way down off the plateau to the beach and the restaurant to whip up that pepper-free meal and lend Nyssa pencils and scrap hide for writing practice.
When: Afternoon, day 16, month 10, turn 22 of Interval 10.
Where: Garden and Pool, Ista Weyr
What: Paddy and Nyssa talk about hatchings and being a candidate.
Garden and Pool, Ista Weyr(#456RJ)
From bowl to waterfall, the gardens of Ista stretch out across the plateau. Nearest the bowl are the practical plants--the herbs and crops and an orchard of fruit trees--but the closer to the stream one ventures, the more fanciful the foliage becomes. Lush dark leaves, flowers as big as a hand, jungle creepers hanging from old-growth trees--like most of Ista, the plant life grows rampant here, everything outsized and richly green. The streambanks in particular are impressively overgrown, until every rock is moss-covered and pockets of still water in pools on the banks teem with algae.
Only the waterfall itself seems to have escaped the onslaught of flora, cutting a channel through the rock and falling toward the pool below. The craggy cliffs leading downward post a number of places to sit and swing your feet, or to wade in the shallow puddles that collect in dips in rocks and around the edges of the water. For all the cliffs and their outcroppings, however, the best way down is still the steep, slick stairs switchbacking down the rock face.
In the midst of the garden lawn, a large pavillion sits, often a hub of activity in the area.
A hot and sticky day has become a slightly less hot, but no less sticky evening. While there's the vaguest hint of a breeze, it's not enough to be refreshing, and for this reason the water is particularly attractive. The pools and stairs are both popular spots, but back along the stream there's plenty of places away from public view, and it's one of these more secluded spots that Nyssa has come seeking, wading across the stream by the longest possible route towards moss-covered rocks in the shadow of hanging creepers from the bent, gnarled trees.
It's definitely cooler under the trees, but if Nyssa was looking for secluded, she might be disappointed to find P'draig sitting on a rock in one of those curves of the stream, feet dangling into the water and wearing not terribly much at all. The brownrider's still wet-haired from a recent dip it looks like and threads from the cut-off hems of his shorts draggle along his thighs. Gray-blue eyes lift at the sound of a splashing approach and Paddy lifts a hand to wave. "Hey Nyssa."
Nyssa hasn't made much concession to the heat herself in terms of clothing, although her arms, as ever, are bare and her dress is cut relatively low. Both hands busy keeping her skirts hiked out of reach of the stream, she doesn't have the luxury of waving back, nor of being startled, although the light, now beginning to fail, is still strong enough to show - well, a lack of reaction. "Hello," she responds, polite enough, if somewhat short. She does stop, however, dithering for a moment upon finding her intended destination occupied, a pause that's long enough for her to fall victim to a yawn that her hands aren't at liberty to stifle.
"And here I thought it was cooling off," P'draig jokes a little, offers over a little smile. "Had any chance to practice skipping stones?" and he gestures vaguely to another rock tucked into the side of the stream bed if she's looking for a spot to sit. That yawn though tilts his head to the side. "Long day?"
For a moment Nyssa looks slightly incredulous, and then mildly embarrassed, hanging her head slightly and deciding that one piece of rudeness is enough for this moment, and so she makes her away toward the indicated rock. "To be honest," she confesses, "so much has happened since, I'd clean forgotten about that." With her skirts tucked back under her legs and her hands once again free, she puts her hands up to her face, her fingers meeting at the bridge of her nose and the palms of her hands cupped to catch a successive yawn as unobtrusively as possible. "They all feel long lately, although it's not bad," she owns, "being busy."
"Yeah? Lots happening?" P'draig prompts curiously, apparently not in the know. One hand drops down to the water, swirls through it. "What's keeping you so busy you're yawning before sunset?" the brownrider asks with a grin, looking back up at the girl.
"Well," Nyssa doesn't seem surprised that he wouldn't, and mostly still appears slightly embarrassed, "there's this Candidacy thing, you see. Last night I didn't sleep well, either, and it all adds up." And then, with just a flash of resistance, "It's almost sunset."
"Oh! Shells, you were searched?" P'draig looks mildly sheepish but smiles at Nyssa, draws his hand back up with water cupped in his palm, reaches around to splash the back of his neck. "Almost, yes," he looks up at the sky, slowly turning golden and rosy as the sun slides down the horizon. "The barracks can't be comfortable either in this heat."
Nyssa shoots P'draig a slightly surprised sidelong look. "It feels like just about everyone round my age has been." Which is her current method of rationalising, but could be taken any one of a number of ways. "Which is - that is, the heat's not so bad in there, it's the noise which is worse. It's like vtols at all hours."
"Well, congratulations then," Paddy offers up sincerely and he nods. "I remember. Went through it twice. Everyone's excited or edgy and that makes for a lot of talking and the in and out and everything," he gestures with his hand, a few stray drops of water flicking off into the stream. "Are you looking forward to it, or more nervous?"
Nyssa braces herself on her hands and pushes a little further back on the rock until she's sitting upon it and her feet are clear of the water. "I'm not sure," her reply, at least, is edgy enough. "At first I thought it couldn't come soon enough, but now there's so many more people come in, it's not too hard to figure out the way the odds are going." Her lips quirk with the slightest bit of distaste.
"Thing is, with dragons, it's not so much a game of odds, because the dragon has to find just the right person. So there could be hundreds out there, but if you're the right one, your dragon'll find you," P'draig explains in a gentle tone. "But the waiting is hard. Really hard." Pause. "Do you wonder what it's like?"
"But no-one knows," and this is the bit Nyssa can't get her head around, which is part of what makes her speech come out clipped and a little forced, "who the right one is. Else they'd only need eighteen of us. So it doesn't feel so different to odds, not right now." She hesitates. "Part of me wants to know everything, and part of me, it doesn't want to even think about it, any of it."
"No, they don't know for sure, but even if more candidates come in, it doesn't necessarily change your chances. They'd be the same from the moment the eggs were clutched, or really from the moment the flight happened ... though that's kind of mind-bending to think about," Paddy says with a little wry laugh. "Mm. Yeah. There's a lot of it that it's impossible to really explain until afterward anyway."
"But," Nyssa says again, slower this time, "we're asked to stand, not told." Spending time with some of the barracks' more obnoxious occupants probably makes her wish some of them could be told not to. "I went," it's his mention of eggs that sets her off, "to see the eggs, to look at them, but they're just - well, eggs. They're bigger, but even then, I thought they'd be bigger still." There's enough to confuse her just in the here and now. "If you stare at them long enough, they start to seem almost ordinary."
"It's a choice," P'draig agrees, hands settling atop knees, feet finding an angled resting place along stone. "They are just eggs, until they hatch out dragons," the brownrider says with a touch of humor. "It gets pretty crazy out there on the sands come hatching day."
Nyssa walks her feet up the rock a little, the soles of her feet rubbing against the moss and settling, for now, into what doesn't look a comfortable position. "They're eggs with dragons inside." Hatching Day brings another thought to mind, a query made with sudden trepidation, "All those seats - do they fill up?"
"Definitely, growing babies, who'll come out as dog-sized hatchlings," Paddy describes and holds a hand out to roughly show how high they'll be come hatching day. "And for the most part, they do. We go get the families of the candidates for the hatching and other people come in. Sometimes we have guests from other Weyrs, weyrleaders ... lords holder ..."
"All of the families?" Nyssa's expression momentarily lights up, although that one moment is soon forgotten and buried under a heap of apprehension at the rest of that list. She keeps to a more roundabout way of expressing it, however, an an all-too-hopeful, "Perhaps the eggs will hatch in the middle of the night and they won't come."
"Pretty much, sure. The ones who want to come and are able," P'draig amends slightly. "And sometimes it's sudden enough there's no time, unfortunately." His knees butterfly out, elbows hooked around the outide of them, fingers laced loosely together. "It does cut down on the guest list when that happens, though they're still usually pretty well attended."
"I'll just have to not look," Nyssa decides this to herself through an exhale of breath. It's easy enough to both say and think for now, remaining as fodder for another sleepless night or two in the near future. "Or only when I want something else to be scared of." One of her feet slips on the moss, and she lets her heel bump against the edge of the rock. "It'll be dinnertime," she supposes unenthusiastically, after a short period of silence.
"Probably won't really have time to, when the time comes. Hatchings go fast," P'draig notes with a little grin. "And you have to pay attention to the eggs hatching so you don't get run over by an overenthusiastic baby dragon." He nods about dinner, looks down the stream a little ways, back at Nyssa. "You don't sound like you really want to go in for supper," the brownrider notes mildly. "Are you hungry?"
"I thought that was the point?" Nyssa says a little distractedly, treating P'draig to another sidelong glance that's a little short of complete comprehension. For more pressing matters such as sustenance, however, she almost seems blank again, all of a sudden. "I need to study tonight," she takes a different tack, "I'm not sure I've got time, and I know just about everything is going to have peppers in again." It's the latter reason that sounds like it's verging on a complaint.
"Which? Paying attention to the dragons?" P'draig doesn't quite follow. Studying though and tastes that don't involve peppers he gets though. "What do you have to study? And if you want something without peppers, I'd be willing to whip up something for you that doesn't have any of them."
"More them running into you." Nyssa's knowledge of dragons might have increased exponentially since she agreed to Stand, but there are still plenty of glaring holes to be filled. Even away from the subject of dragons those holes exist, although here she's more carefully blase about revealing them. "I'm working on my writing, the Harpers said it wasn't good enough." And as for the offer of pepper-free food, the answer is a longing, "That would be - if you wouldn't mind, that'd be great."
"Not really. You don't want one running over you and knocking you down or knocking you down to get to someone else," P'draig explains calmly. "And if you need to practice, I've got the kids scrap paper and pencils to work with," he offers over genially. "And I don't mind at all, you can test out some of the milder things I've been working on that don't involve Istan spices and do me a favor by saying if they're too bland or not."
Nyssa's last hesitations are cancelled out by that final offer, although she's unlikely to actually criticise any of his food, even when pushed. But at this precise moment she promises only "I'll try," and prepares to spend the evening both trying to practice writing and just as diligently trying to hide her efforts. But there won't be any peppers, so the trade-off will be worthwhile.
"Sounds good," P'draig says agreeably and gets to his feet to wade over to the shore where he left shirt and sandals and leads the way down off the plateau to the beach and the restaurant to whip up that pepper-free meal and lend Nyssa pencils and scrap hide for writing practice.