lucetilogs | In ur community housing, using ur kitchen. [CLOSED]

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Current Location: fifth floor kitchen, community housing building 1

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In ur community housing, using ur kitchen. [CLOSED]

Who: Anita/

redhaired_anita, Sheena/

corrinesbell, Lloyd/

kid_in_red
What: her home has flooded, and she's taking refuge in a kitchen
When: midmorning of the flooded river day
Where: the fifth floor kitchen of the community housing
Summary: After her home starts leaking water, Anita decides to go to the next safest place that would keep her dry. Sheena and Lloyd join her.
Rating: G, but it can go up.
A drenched redhead slowly climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. Nothing special about her, except for the soaked wings and small knapsack she was carrying.

When Anita got as high as she could, she took a look and made a beeline to the kitchen. Nobody else was there, her first stroke of good luck.

The first thing Anita did was turn on the stove. After figuring out how to work the rustic oven, Anita added heat and started unloading her bag: seven black metal containers, each holding a thick book's worth of paper. She carefully unloaded the paper, grimacing at the wetness, then set the paper by the oven to dry.

The next thing Anita did was scrawl a quick note in her journal, in case Sheena was worried about where she went.

The last thing Anita did was strip off her shirt, leaving her with only pants and a black bodysuit. The girl went over to the sink and started squeezing the shirt out, appreciating the warmth that was slowly rising from the oven.

((I don't know what type of technology exists in the kitchen, if someone would kindly clarify it, I would most appreciate it.))

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Several minutes later, another wet, frustrated person climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. The 'bag' she carried was really her white smock-dress folded so it could hold the few things that had been left with her regular clothes, and tied with her hair ribbon. That, of course, meant that her black hair fell, dripping, a few inches past her shoulders, making a nuisance of itself.

She headed for the kitchen, seeing light coming from the open doorway. She spotted Anita and gave her a sort of half-wave.

"Thanks for the note."

"No problem." Anita gestured at the stove, making a vague offer at the heat it gave off. She paused in her clothes wringing to face Sheena. "How bad is it now?"

"I don't know if it could get worse...but if it can, then it probably has." She set the makeshift bag down on a small table (or counter?) and opened it, hoping the few things she had inside weren't too wet. A small round object rolled from the bundle onto the floor. Sheena bent and picked it up quickly, putting it back on the table.

Trying in vain to keep her hair out of her face, she joined Anita at the stove.

"...Did Colette really stay with you, too? I haven't seen her."

Anita thought about it for a moment.

"Mmm, for a day or two," she finally said. "We're talking about the same Colette, right? Long blonde hair and blue eyes, something about Sylvarant and Tethe'alla? I think her friend Lloyd's looking for her too."

Seeing that her shirt had stopped dripping and Sheena's hair hadn't, Anita stepped back to makes space at the sink.

Edited 2007-11-10 02:10 (UTC)

As if on cue, the door opened again and a red-garbed boy entered the room. Water dripped from his clothes and feathers to join the pools already present on the floor. His hair was completely soaked and falling into his eyes, the style now very reminiscent of his father's. Hoisting his own bag of belongings, he stepped fully into the room, red boots squelching on the tiled floor.

"Anita, right?" he said, spotting the red-haired girl and Sheena. "Sorry to barge in like this... my house is flooding too."

Sheena did a double-take when she saw him; for a moment, and with those wings, he had almost looked like...

Shaking her head (and sending water flying), she moved her hair out of her face again and did her best to dry it off over the sink. There was a reason she kept it tied back most of the time, though - unmanageability.

"Yeah, that's her," she said to Anita belatedly.

"Hey!" Anita yelped at Sheena's sudden spray of water. She skipped back out of the way. "Watch it!

"Oh, and don't worry about coming here," Anita said to Lloyd. "Nobody's using this place, right? Balthier said this'd be the next best place. Dunno what'll happen if it gets too bad, though..."

Skirting the puddles on the floor, Anita dragged a chair over to the stove and draped her shirt over it

Lloyd set his bundle down on another chair to drip dry and began pulling off his gloves. He was normally just fine wearing lots of layers but in this sort of weather it was annoying to feel so heavy and wet.

"I don't think it could get high enough to flood this, could it?" Lloyd asked, running now ungloved fingers through damp hair. They were pretty high off the ground... It couldn't rain that much, could it? "But it might be a problem to find food soon..."

"...There's something I hadn't thought of."

Sheena was learning something very quickly: wet wings were far more annoying than necessary. She stood with her back to the stove, hoping that would help them dry faster. Unlike Anita, she didn't really have any articles of clothing that were...easily removed, aside from her gloves, and she wasn't wearing those at the moment.

"I doubt it," Anita said, although there was a tinge of worry in her voice. "Even when it rained really badly back home, it never got this high. I hope the store's all right, though...I don't know stuff like how to find food in the forest. Maybe we'll have to go to the mountains or something..."

"With this much rain all the animals would be in hiding, too," Lloyd added. "...Not that we could eat them anyway, since they all talk."

He sat down on another chair and pulled off his boots, pouring the water out of them to collect in one of the larger puddles on the floor.

Sheena sank onto a chair, her wings dry enough to be less annoying, at least. "Hopefully this rain ends soon. Otherwise they won't have anyone left to experiment on."

She stared at Lloyd emptying his boots, rolling her eyes slightly. That was so typical, it almost made her laugh.

"Do you have to do that here?" Anita said as she glared at the boots. Back home she was always cleaning up after her sisters' messes; Anita wasn't keen on repeating the same here. "There's a sink over there, keep your water to yourself!"

Anita sat down on her shirt-drying chair, reversed so she was leaning forward on the chair back and the shirt in front of her and her back to the stove. She absently flicked her wings, sending small droplets flying onto the stove with small hisses.

"They wouldn't kill us," Anita reasoned. "They went through so much trouble to drag us here, why would they do that?"

Edited 2007-11-10 02:49 (UTC)

"...Sorry," Lloyd replied, sounding somewhat chastised. The boots were empty now, but he headed to the sink before beginning to squeeze out the trailing white ribbons attached to his shirt. They were really beginning to get annoying actually... when the wind blew, they'd get caught in his feathers.

"I don't see why they'd kill us either," Lloyd agreed. "They're probably just trying to scare us. If we worry too much we'll just be letting them win."

"I worry more for some of the other people here, actually." She turned her head, staring out the window (because, suddenly, there is one!) at the driving rain, occasionally lit from behind by lightning strikes.

Because even if I somehow can summon to get us out of trouble, there's no way I'd get to everyone.

"Mmm?" Anita perked her head up. She was guessing that Sheena and Lloyd were from the same place by their relation to Colette, but only that. "You guys from a place where...you've got something to deal with problems like this? Magic or something?"

"Only elves and half-elves can use magic," Lloyd replied, while trying to wring out his sleeves while still wearing his shirt. "Well, humans can if they've eaten this really rare kind of rock. But normally we can't. Sheena's special though, 'cause she's a summoner." He grinned over at Sheena, since despite his short attention span he still was impressed with her ability. She didn't summon often enough for him to get bored with it yet, anyway.

She had begun to lose herself in her thoughts, but hearing her name in that connotation brought her right back to the conversation. She stared at Lloyd, unsure whether to enjoy the praise - and consequently deflect it - or snap at him for saying so. Until she knew if it would work, it wasn't something she wanted to share with people.

Because it might be even worse, this time, if she tried and failed again.

"Summoning?" Anita frowned in confusion. She looked at Sheena, then back to Lloyd. "Like...call on gods or something?"

"No, not gods..." Lloyd said, preparing to launch into his own unique brand of explanation. "Summon spirits! They're these really powerful guys. Sheena makes this cool pose and says something dramatic like "Burn to oblivion!!" And then the summon spirits appear and make the bad guys explode and catch fire! Well, only Efreet does that but he's the best one to watch anyway."

Sheena sighed. Loudly.

"That's...uh. Not really it." She fought off the urge to roll her eyes - flushing in embarrassment was bad enough already. "Do you ever pay attention in a fight? All I say is the incantation to call the summon spirit, first off."

She took a breath. Obviously, a better explanation was necessary.

"A summon spirit is..." She stopped. This would require a more in-depth explanation than usual. "A summon spirit is a being representative of mana, the life force of our world. They're like...guardians, I guess. In order to be able to summon, the summoner - that's me - has to make a pact with each spirit, by stating a vow. If I break the vow, my pact with that spirit is ended, and someone else is free to make a new pact with them."

She stopped for a second. Hopefully Anita was following this. "It takes a lot of mana and strength to summon. Usually I can only do it once, and with a lot of preparation beforehand. ...Every once in a while the situation is desperate enough that I can just call them, though."

Anita mulled over Sheena's explanation. It wasn't something from Earth, that was for sure - more like a story from one of Mi-nee's books. It definitely sounded powerful - strong enough to fight the Malnosso, even!

"Can you call them here?" Anita asked. "The...summon spirits?" She remembered something Sheena has said earlier. "Or is there...not enough mana?"

She looked away, silent. When she did speak again, it was quiet, and almost bitter.

"Whatever they did...must have interfered with my summoning ability. Even if there were enough mana, or something like it, here..." Sheena sighed, looking back at Anita steadily. "I don't know if I can. But I would try."

"What do you need to do a summoning?" asked Anita.

"Aside from a lot of mana and concentration?" She thought about this. It wasn't something she'd ever really explained to anyone, how summoning worked for the summoner. "It's...uh, the summoner is basically a channel for the summon spirit's power, which is why it takes so much energy. ...So I'd need to be able to access the summon spirits. And I don't know if that will work here."

"...What happens if it doesn't work?"

Sheena glanced at Lloyd. He was being oddly quiet through all this. Apparently for once he wasn't bored already.

"...I don't know what happens if I try to summon and fail. I've always known if I had enough mana available, before...but here, I have no way to tell."

Lloyd wasn't completely bored yet, but he was getting tired of the technical talk. "You'll be fine, Sheena," he said, trying to alleviate his friend's worries. "Even if the summoning fails what could really happen? There'd just be no spirit. ...It'd probably be better if you tried it when we aren't about to die, though."

"Yeah."

It was easier to just agree. To consider what would happen to the summoner who used all that energy only to find her summoning blocked...wasn't worth it, right then.

"Well...it wouldn't hurt to try, would it?" Anita asked. "At least we know if we've got something like that to help us or not, y'know?"

Anita cocked her head to the side, then got up. She retrieved the paper she had set to dry from the stove and her boxes. Anita girl sat down at the table and started loading the pages back inside; she continued to talk as she did so.

"If you could get killed doing that, yeah, I can understand why you don't want to," Anita reasoned. "But we should be able to figure out how strong everyone is so we have something to rely on and stuff. Like...practicing, or something."

"That's a good plan," Lloyd agreed. "If we're going to fight back, we have to know what we can and can't still do."

He glanced over at the window, rain still pouring past the glass and lightning flickering in the distance. "...That is if the rain ever stops to let us practice."

"I don't have my cards, either. I can use other weapons, but...well, that's what I'm best at."

She looked over at Anita curiously. "Can you...fight?" she asked. Not that she doubted her, or anything, but it didn't seem like the girl was from a world where a lot of fighting occurred.

Anita paused for a moment, then continued loading her paper.

"Yeah."

Edited 2007-11-10 05:44 (UTC)

Lloyd was interested again now that the topic had turned to fighting. "What kind of weapon do you use?" he asked Anita. "I'm a swordsman myself."

"Paper."

"Really? How do you use your paper?" After all, guardian cards were basically paper, too.

"Mmm...it's hard to explain..."

Anita picked up a piece of paper. She glared at it, and a blade formed along the edge. Anita threw it, and it lodged into a chair leg across the room.

"I can do some stuff with it, but since I got here I haven't really been able to do anything," Anita said. She looked at her hand. "All the water's made my paper too weak. But it feels like there's something missing about it."

Sheena watched with interest. "That's still pretty cool, though," she said, smiling just a bit. "And at least you have a weapon with you, if we should need one for some reason."

"Yeah..." Anita looked a little embarassed. "I'm still getting used to it. I'm used to just...using it, but before all the rain came it felt more like...I don't know, like I was missing an arm or something. I can still use it, it's just...changed."

"That is awesome!" Lloyd said, eyes nearly twice their normal size as he admired Anita's paper blade. "Man, I wish I could do that! I tried fighting with paper once before, but it didn't work too well." He was of course referring to a disastrous incident involving the joke weapons they'd acquired in Luin - his own were a pair of paper fans.

"I guess it is..." Anita said, now even more embarassed. She went over and tugged the paper loose. "I never really thought about it."

"Hey, it takes skill to fight with paper." She grinned at Lloyd, her voice taking on a dry tone. "Anyone can tear stuff up with a sword."

"Hey, that isn't true!" Lloyd replied, looking irritated. "It takes a lot of skill to be a swordsman! Especially a dual swordsman! You saw how much effort I put into training, Sheena."

"What, like I didn't put effort into my training?" she shot back, crossing her arms. "...I guess you did work pretty hard at it, though. But that doesn't change the fact that it's easier to do damage in a fight with something that's already sharp."

"She's got a point."

"It might be easier to stab things but it's not any easier to keep yourself from being stabbed..." Lloyd sighed. It was really pointless arguing, especially since a few months ago he'd probably be agreeing that wildly swinging swords were better than paper any day.

"You have a point, too."

Sheena went back to staring out the window. There really wasn't much they could do, now, aside from wait for the rain to finally stop.

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In ur community housing, using ur kitchen. [CLOSED]

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