Application for Renata Leynier (Darkover canon)

[renata_leynier]

A mist swirls in the middle of the Sorting Room. Out of this mist steps a young woman in long woolen skirts, her copper hair held back from her face with a butterfly clasp. She looks uncertain, though not disoriented or distraught, and she answers aloud the questions posed to her. A Dictaquill takes down the answers so that persons who arrive at

Comments

[world_builder]

Slartibartfast read the application carefully. Yet another person who wasn't an Earthman...he was surprised at how many people here weren't. And...

"You, ah, you can read minds?" he asked. "I've, well, I've known many people and, and, and, you know, races, but I've never, uh, never come across a telepath."

[renata_leynier]

Tolerant of verbal quirks, Renata listened patiently until the man finished his question, then nodded. "I can, to an extent; with others so gifted, and I would only do so by consent, or if my duty dictated it. The Leyniers are a minor family of the Altons, but I have not the Alton Gift, to force rapport." She almost shuddered as she described it. "That is a heavy burden, not mine to carry. Like a great many monitors, I am an empath, too, and the emotions and physical feelings of persons even ungifted with laran I can share. But I have had the necessary training to guard myself against an unwanted sharing, and that for my own sanity and well-being."

[world_builder]

Empathic as well...all in all, it's a talent he was glad he didn't possess. "I would, really I'd think you'd have to be good at it. Keeping, ah, keeping people out, I mean. I can't, you know, I can't imagine what it would be like, getting flooded with everybody else's thoughts and feelings."

Ever the enginner, he had to add, "What, ah, what is your world like? Geographically, I mean." Socially it was all the same to him--his company engineered the planets, not the inhabitants.

[renata_leynier]

So this man was not Darkovan. Though she had already suspected as much, Renata had suspended judgement; mayhap he was from the Dry Towns, or some other place, somewhere remote enough from the Seven Domains that he might not know of the Comyn and their ways. His talk of her 'world' decided the matter entirely. This determined the slant of her answer. To a Darkovan, she would not have described the color of the sky ...

"My world we call Darkover," she said. "I know not why it is named so, save that the skies are often clouded; poets term ours 'the bloody sun', from the color of the sky, reddish or even violet in cast. The poets are fond of rhapsodising on the four moons as well," she added. "Shall I enumerate them for you? Liriel, the violet moon; Kyrrdis, which we call 'peacock-blue' though whatever animal or gem is meant by 'peacock' must have been lost to us long ago; Idriel, green with forest; and Mormallor, the smallest moon, a pearl of a moon

[sidney_reilly]

"Madame." Sidney smiles charmingly. "Could you be so kind as to explain a bit further upon this - 'the Overworld is not bound to a single time?'"

[renata_leynier]

Renata, too, smiles. "I begin to understand I am not among my own countrymen. Had I understood this when the questions were posed to me, I would not have spoken so. I will explain gladly, as best I may, though the concepts are not all easily described or perhaps even very comprehensible. The Overworld is --" she grasps for words -- "not a physical place. We can travel there, though not in our physical bodies, and when we return we will return to the physical body in the place we left it. Those of us in the Towers can make use of this to speak with one another though long distances may separate us in the physical world. We can communicate there, with one another, and we appear there not as we are but as we imagine ourselves. If a person has but recently died, and by violence or some other unexpected means, the spirit may linger and wander, and in the Overworld can be addressed, given an explanation --" She stops. Her discourse has carried her headlong into a subject she would sooner leave untouched. Redirection is needed.

[sidney_reilly]

"Thank you. Rather surprisingly for this world, I have an analogue which helps me make sense of that."

He hesitated.

"Is it possible that one with no training, or even knowledge of, the Overworld could traverse it with intention? I - before I found myself here - I was shot to death. It seemed I came here directly - over an 80 year time gap - but I had a satchel with me, with a few belongings from home, which was hundreds of miles from where I died. I vaguely remembered dreaming of going back there - but there were my pictures, and a few other items I hate to be without. I'm told it's not uncommon for the dead to appear in this room directly from their passings, but I've had no explanation for my visit home. Could what you describe..."

[renata_leynier]

Slim narrow fingers (trace of that chieri blood among the Comyn, not so marked among the Leynier kindred as among the Aillard and Ardais, so while Renata's fingers are long and slim, there are only the normal five on each hand) crept again to that unexplained wrapped pendant she wore as Renata listened.

"It is not impossible," she said, finally. "What makes me uncertain is that you retained from that visit a physical object, and travel through the Overworld is not physical. Yet here I am, in the flesh --" the hand not holding the pendant waved uncertainly to indicate the whole of her, inexplicably present and solid -- "and my starstone has come with me. It could be that you wandered, aye. I cannot say more than that, and even that I cannot say of a certainty, but ... it is not impossible."

[joachim_armster]

((Renata may or may not sense that Joachim is also an accomplished telepath; your choice. She'd be able to freely 'read' his surface thoughts, but nothing deeper.))

"Being squibbed is the equivalent of a death sentence in this place. Assuming you've no masochistic tendencies, it is something best avoided," Joachim murmured distractedly. He watched the woman with interest, head tilted slightly, as though listening intently.

[renata_leynier]

(( Thanks for the heads-up -- this could be Interesting! ))

Renata too seemed distracted, almost absent, as though she too were listening to something, something unheard by the others in the room. Then she peered at the uncannily ... pretty? and disturbing? man who, it occurred to her, had been addressing her aloud after all.

"Thank you for the warning, then, vai dom," she said, automatically giving him the honorific, because laran was a gift of the aristocratic caste.

[joachim_armster]

Joachim might have appreciated being addressed so highly, had he any knowledge of the language the woman had used. He could infer only so much from her tone.

"Perhaps now you understand the importance of those 'bribes'," he said, smiling faintly. "May I ask the meaning of that? 'Vai dom.' You've used several terms in your application that did not fully translate. There seems to exist a spell here that actively translates spoken and written words into a common tongue, allowing beings to understand one another despite any language barriers. Things do slip through on occasion."

[renata_leynier]

"To demand gifts from one's guests under threat of violence seems to me nigh sacrilegious," Renata said soberly. "The explanation is appreciated, nonetheless. As for the matter of languages -- it does seem to me I must not be speaking the languages of my country, if I can understand you all, and you can understand me; yet some concepts seem not to permeate what veil or field makes this mutual comprehensibility possible. I will translate for myself as best I may, then," she offered, with a little smile at the apparent absurdity of the offer. "I hope it is not indelicate to say that I am aware you possess laran or a gift like it -- no, something like it, not the same," she clarified to herself. "Among the people of the Seven Domains, it is the Comyn, the noble families, that possess such gifts, and so I have addressed you as one such. Vai dom is a title -- well, how can I explain it? 'Lord,' I suppose. That is dom, and vai is an ... intensifier? No, not that

[hernes_son]

It had been some time since Robin had gone to the Sorting Room, but it seemed churlish to avoid the one task thus far requested of him as a Hogwarts student. And he was tired of his room as well, though the bow he crafted came along nicely. But it was time for the wood to soak for some hours, and so Robin, after a wonderful experience called a 'long, hot shower', made his way to the Sorting Room to see if he could help in some way. His hair was still damp and tied back, his ringmail jerkin and weapons back in his room, and if anyone tried, they could still smell the scent of clean wood on his hands

[renata_leynier]

Feeling decidedly more at home with this mode of address, Renata gave the man her hand. Why she could understand the language these people spoke, when it was neither casta nor cahuenga, she could not yet say, but she knew what he had called her was the equivalent of the vai domna with which she as Lady Aldaran should properly be addressed (though she eschewed such formalities except when function demanded it, and in the Towers was simply Renata as she had been before tragedy required the unlikely marriage she'd made). Her answering smile carried real warmth. "You may call me Renata, if it please you. And whom do I have the honor of addressing?"

[hernes_son]

Robin bent briefly over her hand, ghosting a kiss over her slim fingers. "I am called Robin of Loxley, and I bid you welcome to this place, my lady Renata," he said, and chuckled, shaking his head. "Although it is presumption on my part, for I am but newly arrived myself. I do not know the places of which you speak - will you tell me something of your home?"

[renata_leynier]

"I will, and gladly," she said, chuckling also, "if you will tell me something of the place in which I find myself!"

[328_and_329]

A short ways away, at her own sorting, a small, dirty girl watched the new applicant with some interest.

"Sis, she sounds interesting."
"Yes, why don't we talk to her?"
"Ok"

She looks around for a moment before walking over to Renata.

"Hello. You sound interesting. Though there was a lot of words you said I didn't quiet understand. What's a comynara and what's laran?"

[renata_leynier]

Renata knelt so that she could look the girl in the face. "I begin to understand I am not among my own countrymen. Had I understood this when the questions were posed to me, I would not have spoken so. I will explain gladly, as best I may," she said, using much the same words as she had to Reilly, but her voice this time less didactic, more gentle.

"A comynara is simply a woman of the Comyn, the noble families of the Seven Domains, traditionally held to have blood descent from the gods. I was born into one of the minor families, and have wed into one of the major. Laran is our hereditary gift -- or curse, some might say."

[328_and_329]

"My sister and I are new here also. We only just answered the questions also. So much of this place is strange, so very different from the village we came from." Her features softened slightly.

"What kind of gods have you descended from? I only partially know of one, myself." Her face suddenly went back to the way she was.

"A curse? But then how could it be seen as a gift as well? That doesn't make a lot of sense."

The small, glowing insect that accompanied the girl buzzed ever so cautiously around.

((OOC - The insect is telepathic if you fancy a convo with it. But it isn't the most polite conversationalist.))

[renata_leynier]

"It is a beautiful story and a sad one," said Renata, "mayhap only a story and nothing more. The Lord of Light, Aldones, had a son: Hastur. He fell to earth at the shore of Lake Hali, and there he met with a daughter of mortals: Robardin's daughter, Cassilda. It is the blood of Hastur and Cassilda we carry, or so the poets sing, and the genealogists. There is more to the story, too, how Cassilda's sister Camilla also loved Hastur, and for love of him she wept, and turned the waters of Hali to cloud. I have lived for years at the Tower of Hali, and the waters of that lake are indeed not water at all properly, but a strange mist, which one may breathe when one walks the lake-bottom," she admitted.

"Why, child, it is no mystery how a gift may be called a curse. For few are the gifts that come without a price, however freely they may be given, or however unasked-for they may come."

From the insect Renata felt an awareness. She straightened and regarded it with questioning grey eyes, lowering her barriers to send out a tentative