Good Teachers
Location: Gezzah Hold
Time: Day 11, Month 12, Turn 2
Players: Roa, Shaya (NPCed by J'cor), Nessa (NPCed by J'cor)
Scene: One of Roa's dancing lessons at Gezzah, and a little chat about learning and other things.
Many thanks to J'cor's player for indulging me with this scene.
It's a small room that has been set aside for Shaya's dance lessons - understandably so, since she only has two students. Not far from Roa, but decidedly on her own side of the room, seven-turn-old Nessa practices a step her sister just taught her, whirling and whirling with intense seven-turn-old concentration. With Nessa distracted, Shaya is free to concentrate on Roa's steps, and she is a very picky teacher. An ankle must be cocked just so, a toe poised in just such a way for the move to be performed artfully. Whenever these things are not to her satisfaction, she stirs herself from her cross-legged seat on the large trunk at the front of the room to grab Roa's foot - not a trace of her original shyness remains, when she teaches - and fix it.
Save for the actual grabbage, Shaya's need for precision is very similar to another teacher's that Roa has had, and the weyrwoman has been bearing up under the expectation. It's been nearly three months now since the lessons began, and one can at least call Roa a willing pupil. She rarely has to be shown things more than once, and while first attempts are not always correct, she's gaining a good eye and beginning to catch her own mistakes occasionally before Shaya can intercede. She's standing, today, in her black tank top and half-pants, feet bare, hair flopping down her back in a long braid. Her ankle position is corrected and with a wordless nod, Roa tries the step once again.
"Your knee, Nessa!" Sometimes it only seems as though Shaya's not watching her sister. Her eyes hardly need to move off Roa's ankle to catch the error in her sister's turns; Nessa, by some months an older student than Roa, is not at all surprised. The little girl stops tensing her knee and tries the move again, while Shaya refixes on Roa's movements. "Toe, down, turn," she calls the beat. It's a fairly simple move, really: after setting her toe out at the angle prescribed, Roa must bounce her heel down, then lift it as she goes into a quarter turn. Shaya nods upon seeing it performed, but she does not immediately say anything, which is a sign that she's waiting for the approval - her nod - to sink in before she criticizes something else. And when she does, it's, "You still swing your hips too much. It's very sexy, but it's not dancing."
The weyrwoman pauses to glance down at said hips, brows arching. They were swinging? "Sorry," she notes. There is a glance for Nessa and her twirling and her knees, before Roa draws a breath in slowly through her nose and then out her mouth. She nods once and stares off into the middle space. It's a common thing that Roa does after getting critiqued. Stares somewhere else before, suddenly, launching again into the erroneous step. Her toe sets out, heel bounces down, and this time she aims to use the momentum from that motion, rather than a swish of her hips, to carry herself into the quarter turn.
Shaya gives a flit of a smile for the apology, but she has less interest in this than in watching Roa's step. As the student learns the teacher's habits, so the teacher has learned the students, and she waits patiently for Roa to finish her thoughts and execute the turn. When she does, it is yet another question of learned habits: Shaya draws two 'tk, tk,' sounds in with tongue against teeth, but though they sound negative they precede a compliment. "That was /won/derful /dan/cing." Only when she's especially pleased does her voice adopt such cadences, so she must be pleased indeed. "Do it again." She is also, however, not convinced until a step can be repeated, on call, sometimes without warning, exactly as she likes.
A grin parts Roa's otherwise stoic expression at the 'tk, tk', already anticipating what's coming. The request for repetition is met with a nod. She performs the step again, and then a third time. Once nice thing to be said about Roa-as-student: when she gets something once, it does tend to stick. Nevertheless, she pauses after her third repetition to again look to Shaya for her commentary.
Shaya has switched her attention to the other side of the room, calling Nessa out repeatedly on her stiffened knee. Although she has graduated to more complicated moves than Roa's working on, the little girl often gets so hung up on performing things exactly right that she performs them exactly wrong and must repeat them ad nauseum. Without seeming to spare a glance for Roa's paused interest, Shaya responds to it: "Go on, I will comment if I have something to say." She holds up a hand with all five fingers splayed - five more repetitions - and then sucks them all together into a stop sign - and then you may take a break. It's rare that she asks for anything as predictable as ten repeats.
Another nod then, and five more executions of the move. Toe, down, turn. Toe, down, turn. She keeps her gaze ahead or, sometimes, tipped downward to her hips, and after five repetitions Roa tosses off a sixth for her own assurances, before stopping and taking a turn around the small room to calm heated muscles. Only then does she seat herself, cross-legged, against the wall to watch Shaya and Nessa and Nessa's trickier moves.
Shaya has successfully induced Nessa into a minor tantrum, but the girl steams very quietly. The only evidence that she is doing so is that she has started biting her lip between retries and during criticism. Shaya does not seem to notice - her criticisms only grow more nitpicky, winnowing out smaller and smaller errors that can barely be detected. And when Nessa hits critical mass, it's quite obvious: she goes into her turn, and finishes it perfectly, and then does it again and again and again just to prove that she /can/, adding arm motions - a very complex step, one Shaya has not officially taught either of them yet - as she spins. After she's done eleven such, Shaya stops her. "That's good. You should fetch water," she adds, noting how red in the face Nessa's gotten. The girl whirls out of the room with a defiant smile.
Perhaps even better than the learning are the moments in between dancing where she can simply watch. So this interaction between Nessa and Shaya is studied with silent interest. As frustration is used to improve, rather than degrade a lesson. Roa shakes her head slowly as Nessa retreats, and she's clearly impressed if the quirk of her lips has anything to say about it. It may be the move itself has wowed her, or it may be the means Shaya used to get it out of the seven-turn-old. Either way, Roa notes quietly, "A good teacher knows her students."
Shaya's turn to grow a little red in the face, though to a much lesser extent than her sister. With skin as pale as hers, her blushes are easy and obvious - and when she's not being a teacher, traces of her shyness resurface. She casts her eyes down, bare toes wiggling playfully as though to greet her own interest, and tilts on a slip of a smile. "She worries too much. Her body knows the way better than she does sometimes." Looking up again to meet the weyrwoman's gaze, she shifts sideways on the trunk she sits on, creating enough space for Roa to join her, if she pleases; that's as far as the Gezzan ever gets to an invitation.
The weyrwoman heaves herself up and does so, padding over to the offered spot and sinking down again, elbows on her knees. "So you take her to a point where she cannot think, and let her body find its own way." Roa nods a little. Acceptance of this, or approval maybe. "And what do you do to me, that I haven't yet noticed?" She flashes the younger girl a grin as a means of easing the question from a critique to a tease.
Shaya is very intrigued by the simple idea of elbows on knees, copying the gesture her own self. Then she extends it, slipping her elbows outwards and her lower arms down until she's practically bent double, her wrists having replaced her elbows. She turns a grin back up at Roa, her lower lip bit playfully in and her eyes childishly alight. All this buys her time to consider the question internally, as she sometimes does, with a seriousness that perhaps the tease does not warrant. "You are the opposite," she declares. "I wait for you to /start/ thinking."
She laughs, head tilting to the side. "Mmm, I suppose so. Things tend to go from here," one elbow departs Roa's knee so that her index finger can tap at her temple, "to here." Her hand moves away and spreads wide as it gestures to the rest of her person. "Until I've got it down. Then moving and thinking just become the same thing. And you, Shaya? How did you learn, when you were taught?"
Shaya giggles, straightening out of her extreme bend and echoing Roa's gesture at her whole body. "A good way to be," she decides, though with little explanation. The question that follows makes her glance at the ceiling almost as though she could see through it, and she chews her lip into her mouth again. "Grandmama taught me," she says, then lowers her eyes back to Roa. Another grin quirks around her bit lip. "When I used to make a mistake she would drag my foot up on the bed and go 'like this, Shaya, like this!'" Demonstrating, Shaya lifts her leg from the thigh and then, once it's up, grabs her own ankle and flexes it a few times, her lips pouted into an approximation of a stern face.
There's another grin as she listens and nods. "She would show your body for you then," the student chuckles. "You took a bit of that from her, I think. I have a teacher back at the weyr. He teaches me something other than dancing, but he's very demanding as well. He won't let me move on until each part is right." She smirks. "Or he'll let me try it wrong and show me, when I fail, that it was wrong. I turn my toes out when I learn with him, as well. In some ways, you remind me of one another. I think because you both teach something you love."
Shaya bobs a nod of agreement, her grin twitches higher to acknowledge the words before she lets it drop away. Leaning forward again, she presses her elbows to the insides of her knees, pushing them out and down in a butterfly stretch. "Each part has to be right or you just get a lousy end," she says quietly, but the comparison makes her blush red as a beet. "Other people say, practice makes perfect, but Grandmama says, perfect practice. What does your teacher teach? The one at the Caucus." She's a bit stumbling in her shy attempts not to seem embarrassed, and awareness of this makes her only more so.
"My teacher would agree with you," Roa says with a nod of feigned solemnity. "Perfect practice, indeed." She chuckles and bends forward to double herself over and rest her cheek on her knees. "He's not a Caucus instructor. He's a guard. He teaches me...mmm...how to defend myself, I suppose. If someone tried to hurt me."
Shaya's nod this time is more sharp, registering the correction with a bit more tinge to her blush and a smile to help put it off. Finding Roa bent double, she leans further into her stretch, propping her own cheek up against the opposite elbow so she's more on a level with the weyrwoman. "Oh, yeah," she says, something in that last statement causing her to turn her eyes away and start lip-nibbling again. "How is High Reaches?" she dares, darting her glance back to Roa. "It's - okay, now?"
"Yes," and now Roa's smile is very much intentional. Though her expression is sideways, her lips curl and the corner of her eyes crinkle into something warm and comforting. "It's okay, now. Before, I learned to feel safe. Now, I learn because I like learning it. Because it makes me understand my body better, as dancing does. And because," her head tips up and she casts a furtive glance around before lowering her cheek back to her knees to whisper, confidingly, "I like the teacher."
Shaya's eyes widen at this confession, her mouth rounding into a little 'o' of surprise. In on the secret, so she thinks, the girl tucks her neck down and bites her lower lip, eyes sparkling with excitement. "Does he know?" she asks, returning the confiding whisper as though there were any chance her voice might carry all the way back to High Reaches to the ears of this mysterious guard.
"I think he does," Roa whispers back, her lips twitching. "he has a very serious face, but I can make him smile. And I do not think he would take the time to teach me, unless he liked me back just a little."
Shaya muffles her giggle by turning down into her knee, some of her hair spilling forward to cover her face and complete the image of hidden laughter. When she raises from it, she has to fling her hair back before she can settle to her knees comfortably again. "I think so, too," she guesses, still in that secret whisper.
"We have to touch each other, you know. More than just elbows. As part of the training. He has very big hands." Roa sighs wistfully. "They're lovely." She blinks, sitting upright again and then tipping her own head down to study her knees. "And I'm rambling."
The surprised 'o' of Shaya's mouth returns when she mentions touching, pursing further and further as he descriptors go on - big hands? lovely ones? She blushes quite, quite red when Roa catches herself rambling - perhaps she, at the same time, catches herself being caught up in the ramble - and pulls out of her bend. "Oh, that's all right. I hope, you know - you guys have good luck, with that." Her awkwardness only increases as she makes more efforts to speak, but at least she has plenty of blush to draw on for her embarrassment.
"Thank you. I hope so, too," comes the murmured agreement. "Are there any customs or traditions in Gezzah? That are meant to help with that?" If Roa is not blushing, she does look a bit abashed. A man touching her. Very wanton, after all. But she still manages to steal a curious glance over towards her young teacher.
Shaya, caught up in her own world as she reviews her embarrassment, takes a moment or two to understand the connection between that sentence and the topic before it. "Oh!" she exclaims when she does, understanding registered in her eyes at the same moment she lifts a hand to fan over her chest. "You mean-?" Apparently the fanning gesture is meant to symbolize something.
Roa cants her head to the side, studying the gesture. "I mean...to help you be lucky in love. Or to get what you wish in that regard. Is that..." Roa lifts her hand and imitates the fanning gesture, "what this means?"
Shaya glances down at her own hand, and the fanning stops as she curls her fingers in, then releases them. "It's -" she gives her hand another few short waves - "when you see someone, and you get heat right here. I don't know it," she's quick to point out, "but they do it in stories." The hand gets pressed down to her chest, her lips get pressed into her mouth. "Like that?" she asks, returning her eyes to Roa. "What you're looking for?"
Roa's hand follows suit, settling against her chest and she nods slowly. "Yes," the weyrwoman says softly. "Very much like that. Here, too." Her hand lowers to press against her stomach. "Like something is flittering around and trying to get out."
Shaya's teeth emerge from their lipped refuge, biting down over her lip impishly. "That," she presses her hand to her stomach, "would be a baby. But I don't think you want that." She tugs her eyes away, gazing straight ahead across the room. "Uhm." She draws out the syllable as she considers. "I've heard there are things like that. I wouldn't know how to make them, but Polemma, in the kitchen, she might know."
Rather quickly, Roa's hand jerks away from her stomach and curls up into a fist that she tucks against her side. "Ah. No." She nods, but then, after a moment, shakes her head. "I don't think I'll bother Polemma. It'll have to remain a mystery and I will simply have to make due." She stretches, reaching her hands above her head and arching her back until there's a faint *pop*. "Do you think Nessa's had long enough to calm back down?"
Though she tries not to, Shaya looks quietly relieved that she doesn't have to bother Polemma about love potions. She seizes eagerly on the promised distraction of resuming dance lessons, furrowing her brow into a little frown and glancing at the door. "Yes, and she should be back by now. I wanted her to get water. Little - tschk." Plopping her hands down on either side her, she lifts and pushes herself off the chest before plodding barefoot to the door. She stops with her hands braced in the archway, casting a look back over her shoulder. "I should go find her, and then we'll resume lessons, okay?"
A small, curt nod from Roa towards Shaya. "Okay," she replies, pushing herself up into a stand and bending down to stretch and wake up her muscles again. She waits until Shaya's out the door and gone before she chuckles and shakes her head. "Heat, here," she murmurs, half bent over. One hand untwines from around her ankle to repeat that fanning motion. "I suppose that's about right." And then she quiets, stretches, and waits for the lesson to resume.
Time: Day 11, Month 12, Turn 2
Players: Roa, Shaya (NPCed by J'cor), Nessa (NPCed by J'cor)
Scene: One of Roa's dancing lessons at Gezzah, and a little chat about learning and other things.
Many thanks to J'cor's player for indulging me with this scene.
It's a small room that has been set aside for Shaya's dance lessons - understandably so, since she only has two students. Not far from Roa, but decidedly on her own side of the room, seven-turn-old Nessa practices a step her sister just taught her, whirling and whirling with intense seven-turn-old concentration. With Nessa distracted, Shaya is free to concentrate on Roa's steps, and she is a very picky teacher. An ankle must be cocked just so, a toe poised in just such a way for the move to be performed artfully. Whenever these things are not to her satisfaction, she stirs herself from her cross-legged seat on the large trunk at the front of the room to grab Roa's foot - not a trace of her original shyness remains, when she teaches - and fix it.
Save for the actual grabbage, Shaya's need for precision is very similar to another teacher's that Roa has had, and the weyrwoman has been bearing up under the expectation. It's been nearly three months now since the lessons began, and one can at least call Roa a willing pupil. She rarely has to be shown things more than once, and while first attempts are not always correct, she's gaining a good eye and beginning to catch her own mistakes occasionally before Shaya can intercede. She's standing, today, in her black tank top and half-pants, feet bare, hair flopping down her back in a long braid. Her ankle position is corrected and with a wordless nod, Roa tries the step once again.
"Your knee, Nessa!" Sometimes it only seems as though Shaya's not watching her sister. Her eyes hardly need to move off Roa's ankle to catch the error in her sister's turns; Nessa, by some months an older student than Roa, is not at all surprised. The little girl stops tensing her knee and tries the move again, while Shaya refixes on Roa's movements. "Toe, down, turn," she calls the beat. It's a fairly simple move, really: after setting her toe out at the angle prescribed, Roa must bounce her heel down, then lift it as she goes into a quarter turn. Shaya nods upon seeing it performed, but she does not immediately say anything, which is a sign that she's waiting for the approval - her nod - to sink in before she criticizes something else. And when she does, it's, "You still swing your hips too much. It's very sexy, but it's not dancing."
The weyrwoman pauses to glance down at said hips, brows arching. They were swinging? "Sorry," she notes. There is a glance for Nessa and her twirling and her knees, before Roa draws a breath in slowly through her nose and then out her mouth. She nods once and stares off into the middle space. It's a common thing that Roa does after getting critiqued. Stares somewhere else before, suddenly, launching again into the erroneous step. Her toe sets out, heel bounces down, and this time she aims to use the momentum from that motion, rather than a swish of her hips, to carry herself into the quarter turn.
Shaya gives a flit of a smile for the apology, but she has less interest in this than in watching Roa's step. As the student learns the teacher's habits, so the teacher has learned the students, and she waits patiently for Roa to finish her thoughts and execute the turn. When she does, it is yet another question of learned habits: Shaya draws two 'tk, tk,' sounds in with tongue against teeth, but though they sound negative they precede a compliment. "That was /won/derful /dan/cing." Only when she's especially pleased does her voice adopt such cadences, so she must be pleased indeed. "Do it again." She is also, however, not convinced until a step can be repeated, on call, sometimes without warning, exactly as she likes.
A grin parts Roa's otherwise stoic expression at the 'tk, tk', already anticipating what's coming. The request for repetition is met with a nod. She performs the step again, and then a third time. Once nice thing to be said about Roa-as-student: when she gets something once, it does tend to stick. Nevertheless, she pauses after her third repetition to again look to Shaya for her commentary.
Shaya has switched her attention to the other side of the room, calling Nessa out repeatedly on her stiffened knee. Although she has graduated to more complicated moves than Roa's working on, the little girl often gets so hung up on performing things exactly right that she performs them exactly wrong and must repeat them ad nauseum. Without seeming to spare a glance for Roa's paused interest, Shaya responds to it: "Go on, I will comment if I have something to say." She holds up a hand with all five fingers splayed - five more repetitions - and then sucks them all together into a stop sign - and then you may take a break. It's rare that she asks for anything as predictable as ten repeats.
Another nod then, and five more executions of the move. Toe, down, turn. Toe, down, turn. She keeps her gaze ahead or, sometimes, tipped downward to her hips, and after five repetitions Roa tosses off a sixth for her own assurances, before stopping and taking a turn around the small room to calm heated muscles. Only then does she seat herself, cross-legged, against the wall to watch Shaya and Nessa and Nessa's trickier moves.
Shaya has successfully induced Nessa into a minor tantrum, but the girl steams very quietly. The only evidence that she is doing so is that she has started biting her lip between retries and during criticism. Shaya does not seem to notice - her criticisms only grow more nitpicky, winnowing out smaller and smaller errors that can barely be detected. And when Nessa hits critical mass, it's quite obvious: she goes into her turn, and finishes it perfectly, and then does it again and again and again just to prove that she /can/, adding arm motions - a very complex step, one Shaya has not officially taught either of them yet - as she spins. After she's done eleven such, Shaya stops her. "That's good. You should fetch water," she adds, noting how red in the face Nessa's gotten. The girl whirls out of the room with a defiant smile.
Perhaps even better than the learning are the moments in between dancing where she can simply watch. So this interaction between Nessa and Shaya is studied with silent interest. As frustration is used to improve, rather than degrade a lesson. Roa shakes her head slowly as Nessa retreats, and she's clearly impressed if the quirk of her lips has anything to say about it. It may be the move itself has wowed her, or it may be the means Shaya used to get it out of the seven-turn-old. Either way, Roa notes quietly, "A good teacher knows her students."
Shaya's turn to grow a little red in the face, though to a much lesser extent than her sister. With skin as pale as hers, her blushes are easy and obvious - and when she's not being a teacher, traces of her shyness resurface. She casts her eyes down, bare toes wiggling playfully as though to greet her own interest, and tilts on a slip of a smile. "She worries too much. Her body knows the way better than she does sometimes." Looking up again to meet the weyrwoman's gaze, she shifts sideways on the trunk she sits on, creating enough space for Roa to join her, if she pleases; that's as far as the Gezzan ever gets to an invitation.
The weyrwoman heaves herself up and does so, padding over to the offered spot and sinking down again, elbows on her knees. "So you take her to a point where she cannot think, and let her body find its own way." Roa nods a little. Acceptance of this, or approval maybe. "And what do you do to me, that I haven't yet noticed?" She flashes the younger girl a grin as a means of easing the question from a critique to a tease.
Shaya is very intrigued by the simple idea of elbows on knees, copying the gesture her own self. Then she extends it, slipping her elbows outwards and her lower arms down until she's practically bent double, her wrists having replaced her elbows. She turns a grin back up at Roa, her lower lip bit playfully in and her eyes childishly alight. All this buys her time to consider the question internally, as she sometimes does, with a seriousness that perhaps the tease does not warrant. "You are the opposite," she declares. "I wait for you to /start/ thinking."
She laughs, head tilting to the side. "Mmm, I suppose so. Things tend to go from here," one elbow departs Roa's knee so that her index finger can tap at her temple, "to here." Her hand moves away and spreads wide as it gestures to the rest of her person. "Until I've got it down. Then moving and thinking just become the same thing. And you, Shaya? How did you learn, when you were taught?"
Shaya giggles, straightening out of her extreme bend and echoing Roa's gesture at her whole body. "A good way to be," she decides, though with little explanation. The question that follows makes her glance at the ceiling almost as though she could see through it, and she chews her lip into her mouth again. "Grandmama taught me," she says, then lowers her eyes back to Roa. Another grin quirks around her bit lip. "When I used to make a mistake she would drag my foot up on the bed and go 'like this, Shaya, like this!'" Demonstrating, Shaya lifts her leg from the thigh and then, once it's up, grabs her own ankle and flexes it a few times, her lips pouted into an approximation of a stern face.
There's another grin as she listens and nods. "She would show your body for you then," the student chuckles. "You took a bit of that from her, I think. I have a teacher back at the weyr. He teaches me something other than dancing, but he's very demanding as well. He won't let me move on until each part is right." She smirks. "Or he'll let me try it wrong and show me, when I fail, that it was wrong. I turn my toes out when I learn with him, as well. In some ways, you remind me of one another. I think because you both teach something you love."
Shaya bobs a nod of agreement, her grin twitches higher to acknowledge the words before she lets it drop away. Leaning forward again, she presses her elbows to the insides of her knees, pushing them out and down in a butterfly stretch. "Each part has to be right or you just get a lousy end," she says quietly, but the comparison makes her blush red as a beet. "Other people say, practice makes perfect, but Grandmama says, perfect practice. What does your teacher teach? The one at the Caucus." She's a bit stumbling in her shy attempts not to seem embarrassed, and awareness of this makes her only more so.
"My teacher would agree with you," Roa says with a nod of feigned solemnity. "Perfect practice, indeed." She chuckles and bends forward to double herself over and rest her cheek on her knees. "He's not a Caucus instructor. He's a guard. He teaches me...mmm...how to defend myself, I suppose. If someone tried to hurt me."
Shaya's nod this time is more sharp, registering the correction with a bit more tinge to her blush and a smile to help put it off. Finding Roa bent double, she leans further into her stretch, propping her own cheek up against the opposite elbow so she's more on a level with the weyrwoman. "Oh, yeah," she says, something in that last statement causing her to turn her eyes away and start lip-nibbling again. "How is High Reaches?" she dares, darting her glance back to Roa. "It's - okay, now?"
"Yes," and now Roa's smile is very much intentional. Though her expression is sideways, her lips curl and the corner of her eyes crinkle into something warm and comforting. "It's okay, now. Before, I learned to feel safe. Now, I learn because I like learning it. Because it makes me understand my body better, as dancing does. And because," her head tips up and she casts a furtive glance around before lowering her cheek back to her knees to whisper, confidingly, "I like the teacher."
Shaya's eyes widen at this confession, her mouth rounding into a little 'o' of surprise. In on the secret, so she thinks, the girl tucks her neck down and bites her lower lip, eyes sparkling with excitement. "Does he know?" she asks, returning the confiding whisper as though there were any chance her voice might carry all the way back to High Reaches to the ears of this mysterious guard.
"I think he does," Roa whispers back, her lips twitching. "he has a very serious face, but I can make him smile. And I do not think he would take the time to teach me, unless he liked me back just a little."
Shaya muffles her giggle by turning down into her knee, some of her hair spilling forward to cover her face and complete the image of hidden laughter. When she raises from it, she has to fling her hair back before she can settle to her knees comfortably again. "I think so, too," she guesses, still in that secret whisper.
"We have to touch each other, you know. More than just elbows. As part of the training. He has very big hands." Roa sighs wistfully. "They're lovely." She blinks, sitting upright again and then tipping her own head down to study her knees. "And I'm rambling."
The surprised 'o' of Shaya's mouth returns when she mentions touching, pursing further and further as he descriptors go on - big hands? lovely ones? She blushes quite, quite red when Roa catches herself rambling - perhaps she, at the same time, catches herself being caught up in the ramble - and pulls out of her bend. "Oh, that's all right. I hope, you know - you guys have good luck, with that." Her awkwardness only increases as she makes more efforts to speak, but at least she has plenty of blush to draw on for her embarrassment.
"Thank you. I hope so, too," comes the murmured agreement. "Are there any customs or traditions in Gezzah? That are meant to help with that?" If Roa is not blushing, she does look a bit abashed. A man touching her. Very wanton, after all. But she still manages to steal a curious glance over towards her young teacher.
Shaya, caught up in her own world as she reviews her embarrassment, takes a moment or two to understand the connection between that sentence and the topic before it. "Oh!" she exclaims when she does, understanding registered in her eyes at the same moment she lifts a hand to fan over her chest. "You mean-?" Apparently the fanning gesture is meant to symbolize something.
Roa cants her head to the side, studying the gesture. "I mean...to help you be lucky in love. Or to get what you wish in that regard. Is that..." Roa lifts her hand and imitates the fanning gesture, "what this means?"
Shaya glances down at her own hand, and the fanning stops as she curls her fingers in, then releases them. "It's -" she gives her hand another few short waves - "when you see someone, and you get heat right here. I don't know it," she's quick to point out, "but they do it in stories." The hand gets pressed down to her chest, her lips get pressed into her mouth. "Like that?" she asks, returning her eyes to Roa. "What you're looking for?"
Roa's hand follows suit, settling against her chest and she nods slowly. "Yes," the weyrwoman says softly. "Very much like that. Here, too." Her hand lowers to press against her stomach. "Like something is flittering around and trying to get out."
Shaya's teeth emerge from their lipped refuge, biting down over her lip impishly. "That," she presses her hand to her stomach, "would be a baby. But I don't think you want that." She tugs her eyes away, gazing straight ahead across the room. "Uhm." She draws out the syllable as she considers. "I've heard there are things like that. I wouldn't know how to make them, but Polemma, in the kitchen, she might know."
Rather quickly, Roa's hand jerks away from her stomach and curls up into a fist that she tucks against her side. "Ah. No." She nods, but then, after a moment, shakes her head. "I don't think I'll bother Polemma. It'll have to remain a mystery and I will simply have to make due." She stretches, reaching her hands above her head and arching her back until there's a faint *pop*. "Do you think Nessa's had long enough to calm back down?"
Though she tries not to, Shaya looks quietly relieved that she doesn't have to bother Polemma about love potions. She seizes eagerly on the promised distraction of resuming dance lessons, furrowing her brow into a little frown and glancing at the door. "Yes, and she should be back by now. I wanted her to get water. Little - tschk." Plopping her hands down on either side her, she lifts and pushes herself off the chest before plodding barefoot to the door. She stops with her hands braced in the archway, casting a look back over her shoulder. "I should go find her, and then we'll resume lessons, okay?"
A small, curt nod from Roa towards Shaya. "Okay," she replies, pushing herself up into a stand and bending down to stretch and wake up her muscles again. She waits until Shaya's out the door and gone before she chuckles and shakes her head. "Heat, here," she murmurs, half bent over. One hand untwines from around her ankle to repeat that fanning motion. "I suppose that's about right." And then she quiets, stretches, and waits for the lesson to resume.