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+---- Thread: [private] feeling a little bit boulder (/showthread.php?tid=29349)
Anuya had gone up the mountain anxious and walked down it confused. She felt like she was being tricked somehow. She understood what was being asked of her, she wasn’t quite that dumb, but it still seemed…
Well it seemed like too much fun. And Anuya didn’t know when she had become so old that her first instinct was to be suspicious of fun. She loved fun! Usually.
Sure the fairy had said the hard way but, as Anuya considers one of the flat rocks near the bank of the river, she’s not too sure… what’s so hard about moving things. She moved things all the time, technically. When she ate she was moving the plants, right?
The late afternoon sun glistening off the surface of the river is just too tempting and she decides there’s really only one way to figure out if this counts or not - and that’s to do it. So Anuya lowers her dark face and picks up one of the stones in her teeth and flings it into the river. It sinks with a satisfying ‘plop’ but the satisfaction doesn’t last. It can’t really be that easy - can it?
So she tosses a second and a third and she’s just picked up a fourth pebble with her lips when she thinks she hears something nearby. Her long ears twitch and she turns her head to investigate, accidentally flinging the small stone with the motion. Well, it wasn’t like she was a pro at picking up rocks, a mistake here or there is understandable.
oh, I see stars rushing through my mind, colours have no time to fade
oh, I found out there's another side where the sea and sky collide
RE: feeling a little bit boulder - Riptide - 05-09-2021
R I P T I D E
He has always been different, but it only became starkly obvious once he started to leave home. At home, he was simply a perfect melding of his parents—his mother’s sharp teeth and his father’s frosted scales, with siblings that were similar. Though the rattle at the end of his tail and the exceptionally reptilian shape of his head was indeed different from either of them, it was not considered strange.
Once he began to venture out into the common lands, though, he realized just how peculiar he looked in comparison to the rest. Not everyone had fangs and scales, this he already knew. But to see how few of them had oddly shaped heads, or rattles at the ends of their tails was enough to plant the first few seeds of insecurity into his young mind. He looked less equine than anyone he had ever encountered, and he found himself bristling at the way he thinks they—the general population—will react.
It does not stop him from making his way to the river, hoping that perhaps the afternoon sun would be warmer here than it is in Nerine. And without the seemingly incessant seabreeze, it does feel warmer, and he finds himself lazily sprawling across the sun-soaked rocks, letting the warmth of the sun slowly begin to melt the frost of his scales.
He is drawn out of his doze-like state at the sound of something hitting the water nearby, and with a disgruntled sigh he pulls himself up until he is standing, shaking the sleep away just as another rock hits the water. Following the sound he travels along the river bank, and he is rounding a slight bend just as she turns to face him, flinging a rock as she does so. He follows it with his eyes as it arcs through the air, landing in the grass nowhere near the river. “You missed,” he tells her dryly, and he looks to the river, and then back to her. “What are you doing?”
— i slithered here from eden just to sit outside your door —
@[Anuya]
RE: feeling a little bit boulder - Anuya - 05-18-2021
The words ‘too bad’ are right there on the tip of her tongue when she’s told she missed, but she’s distracted. This isn’t some boring old horse who has just come over to see what she’s doing. Of all the things that Anuya finds distracting about his appearance, it’s the lack of ears that makes her brain stall out. She had seen plenty of “strange” creatures, blendings of horse and whatever other animal you could think of. The reptilian features do not bother her (they’re actually pretty cool).
Her long ears twitch, and she tries to imagine what she’d look like without them. And she’d miss so many good sounds!
All her previous experience learning that she does not need to raise her voice to speak to the inhabitants of Beqanna absolutely empties right out of her mind in those few moments between when he asks his question and when she replies.
So when she speaks, her voice is projected - just loud enough to be obnoxious. “I’m tossing rocks of course!! As requested by the fairies on the mountain.” She gestures vaguely back in the direction of where the mountain lies (though she has already forgotten and she gets this wrong, instead gesturing west to the sea and tropical lands). “It’s a very -” But her tongue sticks on the word ‘important’ because that is absolutely a lie. She frowns against the feeling and as she lowers her head to poke at a few pebbles to determine their worth, she continues - her volume rising with each word after she forgets to start off loud. “It’s for a quest. I'm trying to see how many I need to throw until they come down and tell me to stop.” Her turquoise eyes look back in that same (wrong) direction she had motioned in, as if expecting some one to come down and smite her.
When nothing happens, she turns back to the strange and shouts "Wanna try it?"
oh, I see stars rushing through my mind, colours have no time to fade
oh, I found out there's another side where the sea and sky collide
RE: feeling a little bit boulder - Riptide - 05-25-2021
R I P T I D E
Truthfully, he doesn’t really notice her ears. It hadn’t occurred to him that hers might be any different from the other ears he has seen—all he knew is his were different. He is different. Near as he could tell she looked exactly like everyone else; clearly more equine than anything, unlike him, who seemed to display far more reptilian traits. He was different, from the sharpness of his fangs and to the rattle at the end of his tail, and all the frosted scales that lay in between. And so he watches her closely, his snake-eyes seeming to narrow, as if daring her to make a comment. The rattles of his tail vibrate lightly against each other, already defensive for no distinguishable reason.
He almost wishes she would have just said something, instead of yelling.
He sighs, quelling the urge to roll his eyes, before speaking back to her just as loudly, “I can hear you completely fine.” The irritation is there at first, but Riptide was not really one to spend time being angry. It was a strange combination of his parents, much like the rest of him—his mother’s quick temper, flaring fast and hot, but quickly extinguished by the cooler, calmer way of his father.
“Sounds like they’re playing a prank on you,” he says, having already stepped to come alongside her. He shifts a rock into position using his tail, before giving it a swift, firm flick, sending the rock soaring into the water. “You know, just trying to see what ridiculous task they could get you to do,” he follows up with a short, amused laugh, tossing another rock into the water. “I’m Riptide, by the way.”
— i slithered here from eden just to sit outside your door —
@[Anuya]
RE: feeling a little bit boulder - Anuya - 06-04-2021
“Oh.” is Anuya’s very eloquent reply as she feels appropriately admonished for shouting. She tries to reason to herself about how was she supposed to know, even though all the evidence had told her that she should have at least tried to talk in a normal voice first. So far she had succeeded in shouting at three different stallions and earned varying degrees of ire from all of them because of it.
Would it take a fourth for the lesson to sink in? What happened after no visible ears? Inverted ears?
The reptilian stranger isn’t so aggravated that he leaves, though, and instead, he moves to stand beside her at the river’s edge. Someone with a little more sense or experience might have known the rattle of his tail or the shape of his head was a sign that violence was also a possible reaction - but in all her years Anuya had never managed to annoy someone to the point where they had attacked her. Postured, flattened their ears, or even chased her but violence wasn’t something she would ever expect.
She frowns first at his next words - the idea that the fairies of the mountain were pulling a prank on her - but it is a fleeting expression as she watches him flick a rock into the water with his tail. Well, that was very cool.
When she replies to his greeting, she is trying to flick her tail towards some pebbles but only succeeds in brushing some dust off of the surface of the ground. “I'm Anuya.” Her hair being remarkably less successful at rock tossing than his tail, she moves to lower her head again before stopping and looking up at Riptide. “Would they really do that? Pull a prank on me?” She's thoughtful, but there's a spark of a smile in her turquoise eyes that suggests her thoughts are leaning towards mischief. “I bet I can think of more ridiculous ways to complete my quest than they can. They actually just said to move things, which is incredibly vague.”
oh, I see stars rushing through my mind, colours have no time to fade
oh, I found out there's another side where the sea and sky collide
RE: feeling a little bit boulder - Riptide - 06-18-2021
R I P T I D E
He only puts a small amount of effort into disguising his laugh when she tries to use her own tail to flick a rock into the water, but he doesn’t try to stop her, either. When she of course fails he swivels his body just enough to sweep the stone away from her, watching as it curves slowly through the air before landing in the water with an anticlimactic splash. “Yeah I mean, you could move anything, I’m not sure why you picked rocks,” he says, slightly distracted as he scans the surrounding ground for another suitable prospect.
For some reason throwing rocks into the water was far more interesting than he was willing to admit, but when he glances up from scouting for more he catches the spark in her gemstone-colored eyes and he halts his search. “What’s that look for? You have a better plan besides throwing rocks?” His own reptilian mouth lifts into a small, almost impish grin. He had grown up with an older sibling that had a penchant for trouble, so he was no stranger to mischief (or entirely moving kingdoms on said sibling’s whim), and he recognized the look when he saw it.
A thought suddenly strikes him, and he cocks his head to the side, fixing her with a sage-green eye. “What exactly are you trying to accomplish? With going to the mountain, I mean.”
— i slithered here from eden just to sit outside your door —
@[Anuya]
RE: feeling a little bit boulder - Anuya - 07-11-2021
Anuya grins when the rock she had been trying to move with her less-talented tail gets swept away by his again - though she finds the splash significantly smaller than was worth all the trouble. He says he isn’t sure why she picked rocks and yet she doesn’t miss that she’s not the only one looking around for another one to toss into the river.
Her mischievous look is caught and she almost explains what she had been thinking before he tilts his head and asks about her quest. Anuya answers his second question first, not being able to help the light laugh that comes out from her as she explains. “To move rocks…” Her laughter culminates in a snort, turquoise eyes dancing a little before she continues. “But with my mind. I used to be able to do it but since coming here to Beqanna, some of my tricks have disappeared.” Why her inability to lie couldn’t also disappear, she didn’t know, but at least she still had her ears.
“And as for a better plan…” She says, turning to face him fully - abandoning all notion of considering the rocks as she’s the one who now tilts her head to the side and asks as her grin continues to grow “What noise do you think a snake makes when it’s shoved into the river?”
Anuya decides to let him answer before trying - she's benevolent like that.
oh, I see stars rushing through my mind, colours have no time to fade
oh, I found out there's another side where the sea and sky collide
