Random Encounter Story

And I was about to say... he thought when Sylvie caught on to the ambiguity of her words. It merited a grin, that was for certain, and Sebastian wasn't stopping that instinctive reaction. "Seems so, then, and that's good. Awkwardness would have been..." Pause. "More like the past few times," he conceded wryly.

He moved his feet into a patch of warmer sand and took a deep breath. It felt about as warm as the reception, which was also a plus - it was quite out of the ordinary. A part of him wondered if he was suspecting the right Lady this time.

That got another chuckle. "Exactly."

Sylvie fished for her water bottle and drank, considering things Sebastian had mentioned about himself - well, probably himself - the second time they'd met.

Questions occurred, but 'Are you more used to surprisingly meeting unfriendly faces?' and 'What do you do when you're not doing nothing?'... well.

She stretched and settled again comfortably, and would have been at peace with the world, if not for curiosity.

"Would you mind me asking whom you're planning to meet?"

"A priest," Sebastian said automatically and paused just as he inhaled more air. His lips were parted, and for a moment it looked as if he was wondering about something... "I have a message to pass on. I'm not sure if it's important or not." I'm beginning to think so, though.

"Failing that, nobody. I really don't have any plans, and I doubt the priests would have anything for me to do." That's right. They'd be too busy gawking.

Didn't he say before he had nothing to do, and now he's someone's messenger? The thought was quickly surplanted by a more important one, and Sylvie frowned.

"If it could be important, shouldn't we - or you - hurry?"

He opened his mouth to say something but again just shrugged a little. Then he smiled ruefully. "It's just... something I need to tell a priest. Or a few. I don't know yet: it depends on the church and if they have one," he said and studied Sylvie. "It's a message from me. Nothing more. I'm not sure if that's worth hurrying for."

Sylvie considered for a moment what to answer, and with a chuckle and a sigh decided the best would be saying exactly what she was thinking.

"I rather wouldn't, but I don't want to cause you trouble."

"It's no trouble," he smiled, got up and took a sip of water as he walked into the water. Not far, only until it was up to his ankles were . "When are you leaving is a much better question, I think." He would have been damned if he was going to stop enjoying the world of green - if he hadn't bumped into Sylvie, that is.

He turned a quizzical look at her, twitching a half-smile to further accentuate what he had just said.

"I was... hm." She looked blank for a moment before ending decidedly, "tomorrow morning." That had been the idea, yes.

Smiling, she explained, "Today's just too nice not to turn it into a break."

Beautiful. He agreed whole-heartedly as he narrowed his eyes and smiled up at the sky. There was a bit of wind ruffling the foliage: it was enough of a hint to remind him of the cyclical nature of weather. "I think so too," Sebastian replied and felt his stubble with his hand. That would have to go the tomorrow morning, then.

It struck him, though, that spending a day here meant a lot of questions being asked, as well as answers being given. He carefully thought about Sylvie's outward behaviour. Sebastian wasn't sure what to make of it - she was very polite, warm and still seemed to have a curious way of looking at the world. He couldn't put a finger on it. There were some questions he wasn't sure that he would answer directly, and most of them had to do with the fear of being understood... and then being exposed to the entire world.

Sylvie didn't seem like a lady that would do such a thing, though. Sebastian turned his head slightly, appearing to size up the sand running along the bank. The thought that something like that could be in the plans of a certain fickle divinity caused him severe distress. You worry too much, he told himself.

His footsteps brought him back to dry land. "So, tell a tourist, what's there to do here in Camp Sylvie?"

Did I just say that?

That baffled Sylvie, mostly because she understood "camp" only in a military sense. Rather than gawping,she made an answer of the first thing that came to mind.

"You could sweep the river bank." She picked up a handful of sand and let it trickle through her fingers. "It's terribly dusty."

For Sebastian, "camp" meant quite a few things. But what Sylvie said seemed to be the right answer. It had him squinting and smiling amusedly. "Ah," he said and seemed to think for a while. He tugged at a strand of hair. "I only have a mop," he continued a little disappointedly.

"Aw. Well, at least it's a pretty mop." After a minuscle pause, Sylvie changed gears, now smiling instead of grinning, "I think I might remember the rules of one or two simple strategy games, if you're bored."

Don't take things so seriously. "Er. Thank you," he said and blinked at the shift in Sylvie's behaviour. It was so unexpected, he found himself smiling again.

"I'm not that bored, but it seems impolite to just laze away when there's company." His eyes twinkled. "But games are always fun." Especially strategy games. Luck in those games was considerably less useful than pure skill - a fact that appealed to him very much. At least he would be losing or winning due to his own (in)competence.

Gathering enough small pebbles was no problem. Sylvie explained a sowing game with five pits per player, capturing when your turn ended in an empty pit on your side.

She hadn't played in years.

Sebastian was impressed. This was a game he hadn't played - he wasn't sure if he had even seen it before. He looked both mystified and curious as Sylvie explained the rules. "I think I've got it," the half-elf said, fascinated. He looked at the pebbles for a while and tried to think of every way there might be sudden... disturbances. Even outside the box.

He pulled his large messenger bag closer to himself and relaxed even more as he went through its contents. Some of the items it held were a book that looked to be about to fall apart, rope, a familiar looking medallion, a pipe and another flask. Sebastian wasn't interested in any of those and just kept digging. "Where do they play this game?" he finally asked and looked at the 'seeds'.

Sylvie watched him curiously.

"I'm not sure where this exactly comes from; the one who taught me sort of collected those games."

Sebastian's concentrated interest reminded her very much of her 'teacher'.

"He had rule variations from so many different places... Some or other variant is played on all the islands and most of a continent, at least."

And now here. It was an oddly uplifting thought.

"It's the first time I've come across it, certainly," he said and pulled from his messenger bag a much, much smaller bag that sat on his palm for a moment while he undid the string holding it shut.

He poured some of its contents - beads of coloured glass on his palm. They looked to be the kind of beads one would see in a cheap necklace. "I guess these would help?" Sebastian asked and left his messenger bag alone for the time being.

"They show up better against the sand." Sylvie cleared the pits of the pebbles, and wonderd briefly why he was carrying around those beads. It occurred to her that since he was wandering without a base, some more odds and ends than in her gear wouldn't be odd. She'd left a few back in Canyet herself.

Five pits per player, five beads per pit to start with...
"Have you ever been in a place with five moons?"

He replaced the pebbles with the beads and smiled in remembrance as he thought about the question. "No. Two at the most, I think. The thought of five moons... I don't know. Those moons must have benevolent patron deities if they still move peacefully," Sebastian replied, sounding the slightest bit joking, and looked up at her. "You mean you met the man who taught this to you in a world like that?"

He was curious now that it seemed they were past the awkwardness. Stating it had been relieving, but he still wondered if he thought too much about how he was behaving. It brought back an early, early memory of cutting someone out of a bush full of thorns... ah, ancient history. Curiosity, however: he remembered her features from their first two encounters, but he had never stopped to analyse her properly. Sylvie was just a nice, helpful person - much to his surprise, in fact. There was a lot more to her than that, and Sebastian had been watching the signs ever since bumping into her.

It was proving to be an interesting, not particularly easy thing to do.

"We were both born there, as far as I know." Sylvie grinned. The chatter had put her at ease, and noticing Sebastian relax helped, too.

She gestured at Sebastian and the game field for him to take the first move.

In a thoughtful tone she remarked, "As to patron dieties, if there are any, they never said. I'm not sure I understand the concept, really."

"They wouldn't. The deities would, were there any. Just a thought. Some pantheons are purely astronomical, after all," he said and relaxed further as he sowed from the fourth pit and then looked at Sylvie thoughtfully. "I'm sorry if I'm being rude, and I don't mean to be, but..." Sebastian began cautiously and fidgeted his fingers before dropping his crop into his end, "but you've just made me a little curious about your homeworld." It was more of a question, as a matter of fact.

Sylvie couldn't help but chuckle. Seemed they weren't over the "awkward" bit, after all.

"I'd like to tell you, but where do I start?"

She made a habitual move from the first pit, which kept most of the seeds from it on her side.

He smiled in spite of himself. The chuckle reminded him of the save awkwardness. He looked away and then down at the seeds (beads!), surveying the pits thoughtfully. Shrugging to himself, he picked a pit at random and watched to see what Sylvie did on her move - like any beginner who didn't expect to win his or her first game.

Finally: "Tell me about the people," Sebastian said and raised his green eyes momentarily to watch Sylvie's reaction. It was the one thing he was always interested in, out of pure fascination and some professional instinct.

The immediate reaction was a wry smile and one word, "Many." That was barely easier.

She moved a single bead into the next pit to collect for a longer run, gathered her thoughts for a more informative answer, and talked over the next turns.

"I grew up near the harbour of Yrn, one of the greatest cities, the greatest in the islands. You walked around a corner, and couldn't know beforehand if the first person you see would be a beggar you'd seen a hundred times before or a noble from the fringe of the world - though the first was somewhat more likely.

The citizens... loyalties were so complicated. Craftsmen usually paid greatest stock to their guild, others to their species or race, others to what island or country their ancestors came from, others to their neighbourhood or ship, others to their blood family, or friends, or any combination thereof.

The visitors I remember clearly were sometimes exalted seeing people working hand in hand who they thought would be hating each other, others detested the city for the lack of ironclad boundaries.

When I started travelling, particularly outside the islands, it was... odd dealing with people used to less mixed company."

She shrugged and added with a smirk, "I doubt it's much different here - or where you're from, if that's not here."

Sebastian looked almost only at her as she spoke, glancing down at the game every time he needed to make a decision. He made them very quickly, and did not seem to be rushing at all, although naturally his performance in the game wasn't stellar. It wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, either.

The half-elf's lips curled into a wan smile when Sylvie began to talk about visitors and her own travels. The smirk he acknowledged with a nod. He made another move. "It isn't all that different. Strangers and wanderers are a lower social class here and in most places. The home of my youth... I don't think about it too much either. I remember the corpse of a once glorious country that tore itself apart due to cultural and language differences. It was just a constantly warring mass of 'kingdoms', all isolationist, all plotting against each other. There was scarcely anything left of the old culture except a language and scatterings of ruins and lore..." And there was a lot of humility to teach to certain people.

Sebastian smiled a little, mocking himself with the expression. That place meant so little to him anymore. "I wasn't really raised to be a citizen," he shrugged and gave Sylvie a placid, almost drowsy look. "You said islands, not continents. More ocean than land?"

"More ocean than land, but three continents in addition to the islands. I've travelled part of one of them, but know hardly anything about the others."

Sylvie more than once noticed she had missed an opportunity in the game, but figured that was just as well, since on the other hand she wasn't giving Sebastian more pointers.

"I think the islands would have ended like that, or would be working towards it now, if there was not some feeling of belonging together because they have more in common with each other than with the continents. And maybe because some of the seafaring clans that refuse to call one island their home, but link them all."

Sebastian nodded and smiled at the game. It wasn't looking too good for him. For some reason that made him very happy. On the actual topic, he had little to add about his own experiences with the more oceanic worlds - or with strangers and the welcoming parties they sometimes received. "I see. I can't really fault the islands... I'll take unity over disharmony any day." At least until unity stagnates into disharmony...

He pursed his lips for a moment as he looked up again, once more studying Sylvie's more exotic features contemplatively. "You said the island you grew up on was the largest of them. What was the island like?"

That question at least saved her from trying to explain why "unity" was saying too much.

"Most of it is cultivated land, to feed the city."

Her eyes unfocussed as she tried to call up memories of the city, and figure out what it looked like to outsiders.

"The entire island is held together by ruins. Huge walls... There are stories, maybe true, maybe superstitions, either way rarely ever anyone tries to take them down, so things just get built around them. You can build an entire house in something that looks like it used to be the lower half of a room. In a part of the city things are so honeycombed that visitors need guides to find their way.

"Even of the less spectacular structures you can say that the older something is, the longer it's likely to last. Well, that's obvious," she conceded.

"Some things change so quickly that after a few months you don't find your way through a particular quarter, but the old walls don't change, but get hidden at best."

She narrowed her eyes and paused before summing up, "There's a sense of continuity. The surface changes, but the core stays the same."

Trying to imagine an island, mostly cultivated, held together by ruins wasn't easy. Certainly he was used to ruins, but he was also used to plains, forests, even deserts. The few island nations that he had visited so much into fishing, they had never cleared away much of the trees.

The half-elf stared at her for a while and considered. It was fascinating - but he was bored of saying something like that. There were other, better ways to show one's continued interest in a topic. "I always thought it was wise not to bother ruins. Not every nation builds walls as sturdy as the ones you've just described." He inspected a bead momentarily. At the same time he considered what she had just said, wondering if flexibility was a trait valued in more than one sector of life on the island - or if at all.

"Stories," he said absent-mindedly, smiling a little as he put the bead down. "Of giants? How large is the island?"

Fishing was important, but it wasn't enough.

"In the current form, not large enough it could have been the home of giants, if the size of their buildings is any indication."

Sylvie spread out the seeds from a pit that had become too full to be any use.

"No-one knows who built those walls, or if there ever where giants. The stories are about people trying to take down parts of the ruins, or exploring too deep under the surface, and mysteriously dying, or going insane. Poisoned air, curses, wraiths, sirens, demons, sleeping dragons -" she indicated the present specimen with some amusement "- and whatever else one can come up with as reason has been blamed.

"And it's not like anyone had ever seen a dragon outside of stories."