Looking For Answers [Open]

MIN Tomorrow we'll be far away Tomorrow is the judgement day Over the years, Min had begun to value tradition more and more. As she had become more interested in the history and culture of her people, in the voices of those who had lived here before her (not those who had just arrived, who seemed determined to take hold of the narrative), the culture of the ground under her feet began to matter more and more. She had never been someone prone to faith or sentiment, so things like worship did not come naturally to her. But it came up continuously in books and stories, was something the people around her cared about deeply. So Min had decided to investigate. Since she was looking into tradition, it made sense to go to the Old Gods. Or at least, to go to the spot where it was said the shrine to them was. She wasn't sure if she actually believed in them, that there could be such beings, that such beings would allow all that had happened to the land. As she had learnt was customary, she brought with her a small armful of fruits and a bag of coins. She did wonder what use a God would have for these things, but it was what the books had suggested, so it was what she brought. Laying them down at the foot of the center of the shrine, she traced the stone with her hand and looked out over the landscape, wistful and thoughtless.

There was a part of him that even on four legs had always longed for something indescribable, intangeable, something more. Where he had come from, sometimes he felt it in the way that the tree canopies gently waved, in the scent of first spring on a light, cool breeze, or in the warmth that spread from his fur to inside his very bones when he basked in the morning rising sun. He hadn't realized that he hadn't felt it in this new land, in this place of desolation and unhappiness. But, in his inner instinct, his internal compass that had been so disoriented since he had arrived, he felt it here. Soft as a breeze, gentle as a whisper, and as disorientating as both, as if he walked along the underside of the earth, backwards, thrilling, and chilling.  

He had either annoyed the farmland owners, Dare and Dylan, enough that they had sent him away on his own to explore away from them, or there was truly so little to do that the same had come to past. In the short time he had toiled on their so-called farm, he had never seen a shortage in things that needed doing, so he concluded that he must have done whatever it was so badly that it had annoyed Dylan to sending him away. He wanted to find a place that was green and alive with birdsong, vegetation, and cloudy sky. His human nose sucked so much balls that they had might have been a pair of them for all that he could smell on two feet compared to the four when he had been a wolf before traveling through the portal light tunnel. Sometimes he loathed this form, and loosing his sense of smell felt as disabling as losing a foot - as a human.

He admired some delicate winter flowers, not having a single iota of thought to pluck them for himself, and reached into a thorny bush to retrieve a fist-sized half-frozen fruit that smelled sugary. Upon further sniff, it was pungently sugary, overly so, and bitey - no, those were the ants. He watched the ants attack his hand in dismay for a minute before shaking his hand once, like trying to wring off water. Then he shook his whole body in the manner of a dog, from head to butt. It wasn't effective, but it still had the same effect of wisking away a place of thinking thoughts that he no longer wished to be in and instead focusing in on the present. When Yll discovered meditation, he would be the best at it.

Over-ripe and somewhat frozen, ant-eaten fruit in one hand, he spotted less dense foliage ahead and wandered there, only to discover that he was at the edge of a clearing that made no sense. In the center, a pile of rubbish, stinky candles, rotting food, and a woman.  

He stood there for a while, unmoving, unblinking, until the sun forced him to do the latter. He remembered that humans hated silence and offered his voice. "Neat shrine, huh?"

By now, he had listened to many stories of woe from Dylan on how women frequently misinterpreted the actions of men in the worst possible manner - that blinking only once meant a man intended to buy dinner but to breathe too slowly meant he intended to date her mother - but he thought them too gender-ist to be anything more than the musings of someone so set in their ways that they made excuses for their own condition and didn't try to improve them. Still, he took them into his caution and stepped forwards two steps, still a good distance away, and took care to blink at regular intervals, and to breathe at a manner that was neither too slow nor too fast. When he began to feel a tightness in his chest, a queer look like stomach sickness passed briefly over his face then passed. He shook out his hair, and breathed and blinked with impartiality, uncaring. He was wolf, what would come would come, what would happen would happen. He felt the sticky juices of the fruit in the webs between his fingers. Well, he was man now.

He frowned, a long, wide frown stretching as far as it could go across his face. He said nothing more, having nothing else too say, and beginning to feel uncomfortable with her, with this place, and with himself.

Something stunk.

He looked down and realized it was his overripe fruit. He released his grip, and the fruit dropped where he was, a good twenty feet away from the circle of discarded things. He looked at the pile, at his hand, and then at her. Really looked at her. At the way her hair was not curly or frayed but seemed confident in its splay about her head. In the way that she seemed confident in her feet. At the way her hands and fingernails seemed clean. He did not look much at her face or her clothing or even her body, as none of those things meant anything to him, only her general posture, her being, her self, as if he was trying to look through the air into another dimension and sense her matrix code. Of course, he could not do those things, but to him, his observance of her manner and vibe felt as if he was.

Yll decided then that he hated italics and other emphasis and that he would no longer use them in his thoughts. They were overrated like thoughts. He would no longer use those either. He stood there.

MIN Tomorrow we'll be far away Tomorrow is the judgement day Min felt the presence of another there with her, but didn't turn around to look right away. Other people were often annoyances, and she was trying to concentrate. On what she wasn't quite sure, but she felt if she just stared off into the distance for a while more, she could potentially find an answer to...something. One of the many vague questions about tradition and home inside of her. But of course, as people often apparently just had to, he broke the silence with an asinine observation. Min slowly turned around, every part of her movement an expression of a beleaguered sigh. She was a little surprised to see someone looking quite so dishevelled, with a clear bent nose and what seemed like unclean skin. "It is historical. Grand. Worthy. But not 'neat'." Min chastised, her fingers pressing down onto the stone behind her. "I assume from your choice of word that you do not have much respect for the Gods honoured here. Or you are simply ignorant. Which is it?" The fact that she did not believe herself has irrelevant when there was someone to tell off. In the moment, Yll's potential disbelief was horrendously offensive to her.

The woman seemed exasperated as she turned to look at him, almost with a hesitation, as if she were hoping that he would simply go away. He picked up on that a little, but still a little less than he should have.

He opened his mouth to respond, but shut it again slowly. He was going to say what he had felt, that it did not feel goodness as he normally did back at home but that he had definitely felt a wrongness. But he had moved since then, having gotten closer to the mound of discarded material things. He narrowed his eyes as he looked at the things more, trying to draw some conclusion on the waste. He didn't have one. He then searched his mind and body for the most innate, delicate senses, and at long last, arrived at the conclusion that his sense of wrongness was less.

A few breaths had passed of silence now, and he walked calmly to the outermost circle and sat cross-legged, and was still. He heard the air in the trees, felt the sun weakly as it was winter, and detected the slightest smell of moisture - perhaps it might snow, later.

"My instincts are less wrong here, but they are still not right.", and he reached his hand forwards to hover close to the pile, as if warming his hands on a fire, and touching nothing. He withdrew his hand and they both rested in his lap.

"So what is it?", and he knew on an instinctual level that it was supposed to be something regarding divinity, but what it was felt all clogged up with people, hopes, dreams, footprints, all the traffic congesting whatever it was. He waited to be told which god it was and what they did and what offerings they preffered and when they visited this place and when to beseech them and when one should and shouldn't visit themselves.

The thought that he hadn't answered her question directly never occurred to him. He had thought of her question, pondered it, and even said words, and that was enough.

MIN Tomorrow we'll be far away Tomorrow is the judgement day This man was decidedly strange. Min watched with a frown on her face as he opened his mouth, closed it again, then walked away. While she was truly no expert on politeness, she knew this was not the correct way to end a conversation. She followed him to the circle, looking down at him with her arms folded, about to ask what he thought he was doing when-- What he said was such a non-sequitur that it made her pause and wonder if she had said what she thought she had. The question that followed was equally as bizarre, and she began to worry for his health. Perhaps the man had some kind of mental problem? She wasn't even sure if he was an Outlander, couldn't tell if he was simply someone who had forgotten how to speak. "You are not making any sense." Min looked about for a moment to try and work out what he was talking about. Eventually, following his line of sight, she worked out he was trying to ask about the shrine. "It is a shrine. To the Old Gods. People bring offerings here and pray. ..It used to be covered but now it is not." She had never been one to say more than had to be said about anything.

It was he, now, who regarded her as crazy, following her closer, and her emotions switching from being angry to being confused to being disgusted all in the same space. He supposed it was him who caused all these emotions and him to whom all of them were reacting to. He felt no concern over it. He swept his emotions away and returned to the empty passivity that calmed him.

If there were old gods, then there were new gods, also. But she didn't say which god, she said the plural, as if all of them used the same shrine. "That's absurd. Each god should have their own shrine; are they not all different? This is just a shortcut, a perversity, a convenience for selfish wishing...". He considered that he might be wrong. "Who built it?". He considered what if the shrine was a convenience but for gods so many and minor that they could only be remembered with a human convenience. He sniffed the air, willing his senses as the wolf he once was to tell him more of this structure, but all that happened was his human nose snuffling in a vain, obvious gesture, like it had a cold. He hated the idea of multiple minor gods so minuscule they needed a single shrine, and shooed it out of his mind.

But he held onto the possibility that maybe the memory of this place had been so tarnished that it wasn't remembered for what it was. If age had corrupted its use so badly, whatever the woman knew would likely be of no use; he would need to ask someone centuries or thousands of years old. If there even was such a thing. What if she was that old? He would wait, he words would answer all his questions, or none of them.

After a while, he talked again. "Why did you decide to come here?", she would likely think him ignorant after that one. It was a baited question - sometimes souls did not come on their own decisions, but on the drawing of fate.

MIN Tomorrow we'll be far away Tomorrow is the judgement day Min opened her mouth and took a sharp intake of breath to argue with the first point, but found she couldn't. It made sense to her. While she was glad the man seemed to be in control of some of his faculties, it did make her wonder: why would all the Gods share the same shrine? If she were a God she thought she'd like something special made for her, to not have to rub shoulders with some other being just because they were both Divine. Of course, there was no reason this had to be a shrine for all the Gods; it could have just been the only one found so far. "Well. We do not know who built it. Or if it is for all the Gods. It is just our hope that it is for the Old Gods. ...People want to believe." The last part was said quieter, with more thought behind it - an observation rather than fact. "It was discovered after an earthquake." Whether or not he was mentally sound, the man appeared to be ill; he sniffed several times before continuing to speak. Min kept her distance, not wanting to get a cold. "I came to try and understand. All of the...traditions. Are you from here?" She couldn't hold the question in anymore. Whether or not the man was an Outlander would colour the whole conversation for her.

He thought then to himself that this woman regarded him as the other humans did, as if he were strange and did not quite belong. He wasn't sure if he wanted to, and the reactions of the others around him didn't push him towards wanting to join their society. He remained apart. Perhaps one day he would find others like him, other outcasts and ill-fitting people who did not feel fully comfortable in this place, in this skin, as if he were a visitor in a hotel bed instead of his own, and all of the strange new things , the lumps in odd places that just did not quite feel like home.

He wrinkled his nose, trying to get the distaste of her words out of his airway. It did not seem right, it did not fit right, and it did not sit well in his soul or what he knew of divinity and of existing himself. None of it. That even she didn't know what it was, that society didn't know. And all she knew was the many traditions. If this place was found recently, oral traditions wouldn't help what the humans had never bothered to try to find. He might have asked about them otherwise, but the place being found in an earthquake told him all she had was useless.

He felt no need to answer her question. She already knew he was foreign, and what he would say next, not knowing the human customs enough to ask would further reinforce it. "If you wish to understand what this place is, there are three ways. One is to simply wait and observe and let the place tell you. But few are good at listening or waiting for a task that may take a lifetime of devotion to master the simplest detail of what this place is. ", he looked at her through the corner of his eye. Not the submissive gesture meant to look and not challenge, but rather that it wasn't worth turning his head to casually check what his limited ears and nose had already told him - that she had moved away from him more. "I sense that route is not one that fits you well.", she had not been able to stand still for the span of a few sentences, much less the many years, if not all of them to divine the quiet secrets this place held. "The second is to find a place where the accounting of this place is recorded. The third is to find a one who might tell the oral traditions that have been lost, it's place and purpose among the stories, too, that are absent. ", he remained quiet for a while. "Is there one among you who has lived many more generations than society? Perhaps one who has been outcast for not adapting to modern ways, tales, and traditions.", he said nothing of the species of such a being. If humans lived generations longer than wolves, perhaps there was a being that naturally had already lived generations of humans.

He considered whether he should be silent, now, and try to listen to the trees and birds and snow, but he knew that such a gesture would be futile with her here, rude to her by human custom of much talking, and his demise with The Long Dark approaching. He shook his head with his own hypocrisy, speaking of a thing that he would not do.

Or would he... ?

He looked at her now with a silent, unspoken question written in his eyebrows.

random event "Talking talking little magikzies ones." The voice bright, playful, young. The owner hidden, hiding, watching. "Questionzies they asks each other, but games they should play instead." Laughter, loud and obnoxious, peeling through the glade. "Yes? Or no?"