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Child of the Moon & Water; Nuray ([info]seabrightmoon) wrote in [info]nosuchplace,
@ 2009-01-12 23:26:00

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Entry tags:corisanthias xyllaniasodas, nuray

Sunday; November 4, 2007
Who: Nuray & Corisanthias
When: 3 pm, November 4th
Where: In Van'taurë Lake
What: Nuray is hiding from the world and Corisanthias comes to join her at least for a moment.

Nuray was a strong person. She was adapted to survive the pressure of thousands of tons of water overhead without disorientation. Swimming in the currents of the ocean for miles without tiring. She was built strong to survive. Yet in moments like this, when she considered that all life is transient and even those she cared for deeply, her family and Jay, would eventually fall prey to that, she was weak. Weak and fearful of what tomorrow might bring. Most people, when they are depressed find a spot in which they are comfortable and proceed not to move from it. For Nuray, it wasn't a room in a house, it was the bottom of the saltwater lake where she could lie between the flagging kelp and the rocks, watching the fish go past, and wish that none of it was real. Perhaps if she had never gone ashore, she would have never been faced with this feeling.

As far as she knew, murder was an alien concept among Merpeople. There was no real word for it in her language. Among the largely tribal creations of her area of the water such a thing was unheard of. Who you swam with was often your family. Only the mad attacked their family and that came from tainted fish or bad water, not from the person themselves. There was too much to do with simple survival and then a lack of things truly worth fighting for that kept such things from happening in mer communities. So Nuray surmised as she laid there at the bottom, somewhat certain that she had no real intention of getting out of the water anytime soon. No, instead, she wanted to stay where the world made sense.

Food was never very far away. If she wanted to see the sun, breaking the surface wasn't a problem, but she felt too detached to go back to Jay, back to what could be considered her home. It was just easier not to.

Something slid across her tail and she turned back to look at what it was, just a fish that had thought she was a rock because her colors made her hard to distinguish when she was settled on the bottom like that. With a playful swat, she sent the fish on its way to find another hiding spot. She was not a rock and thus did not qualify, nor did she wish to be caught up in some fishy game of hide and seek.

There were still those caves to explore and she heard tell that there was a merperson community down here in the lake. Perhaps she simply hadn't gone far enough from the nearshore to find it. Maybe there was a possibility of forging a new life here like the one she understood. It would mean leaving Jay behind because he couldn't breathe underwater and she had yet to hear about any advances that would allow him to come down and spend time with her. Nuray would miss him. She'd spent the better part of the past decade with him. Actually, she had spent the past decade with him. He was her best friend. The closest she had ever come to having a lover, though from what she understood of his culture, their ideas of what 'lover' meant were significantly different.

Shifting, she looked up at the afternoon sun which she could still see if she turned her head in the right direction. The day was wearing on. Was she hungry? Not really. Certainly not sleepy. Just despondent. That was a good word.

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[info]beluga_man
2009-01-13 01:17 pm UTC (link)
He had come to the lake to think. Everything was happening very fast and he was surprised to think of how well he was beginning to adapt to his new position in life. His nervousness on land was beginning to ease, though not completely when things surprised him. He was still clumsy, but he was beginning to hold himself prouder on land, having begun to make acquaintances and even friends. He was even having days where he forgot that he was thousands of miles from home.

And now he was in the running to make a difference here. Though he was unfamiliar with the ways of politics and law making, he knew that his understanding of honor and tribal kinship qualified him. He knew the importance of sacrifice and protecting the interests of the many. His main concern was how to spread that now.

Especially with talk of murder in the air. It was a foreign idea to him. Something that had only happened once in the spoken history of his people, and that had been done out of passion, which was one of the reasons his people gave for abandoning it. Some emotions were too strong to be controlled, and so dangerous to trifle with. But if he was given the position of finding the person responsible, what might that mean? How could he find such a person when he could not understand what might make them do such a thing?

As he was running through possibilities in his head, he heard a fish swim by screaming "Not a rock! Not a rock!"

He turned himself in the direction the fish had been swimming from, to find out what could have sent it fleeing. At the very least it would be a bigger fish and he was feeling a little hungry.

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[info]seabrightmoon
2009-01-13 05:28 pm UTC (link)
She didn't think about swatting the fish away. It was the equivalent of making a nosy puppy go somewhere else. Most fish weren't dangerous and those that were she had sense enough to get away from fairly quickly. For the moment however she was simply lying on the bottom looking at nothing, as far as anyone knew she was a heap of rocks and seaweed.

Corisanthias might even pass her right over since she wasn't moving.

Her entire life had been fairly quiet, uneventful if one discounted the usual actions of living and growing up with a family of several siblings. That had been her life. Then there was the addition of Jay who changed her thinking and introduced her to a world she had never been introduced to before. She wasn't doing a very good job of accepting the fact that her world could shrink just as easily as it enlarged.

Unacceptable. Completely unacceptable and that was why she was hiding.

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[info]beluga_man
2009-01-13 05:39 pm UTC (link)
Her camouflage did indeed conceal her, and Corisanthias passed overhead without noticing anything out of the ordinary. He simply assumed the fish had run into something living and scampered off. Such things were not uncommon in water, where light played tricks and masked things.

He let out of a stream of bubbles that would have been a sigh on land and decided to let himself float just beneath the surface, to think some more. He had been almost excited to think that he might run into someone, but today did not seem to be his day. Instead he continued his thought process, mumbling to himself.

"Fish do not murder...sharks do not murder...nothing I have ever encountered murders except for humans. So that is the first clue. Whatever is murdering must be human. Otherwise it would be for food or for territory. But what happened...was neither."

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[info]seabrightmoon
2009-01-13 06:07 pm UTC (link)
Nuray noted his motion and let him go past her, her eyes opening enough to watch him carefully without giving away her position. Was she setting up to spook him? Not really, she was more interested in finding out if he was looking for her. However, if he had been looking for her, he would have been scouring the bottom because she tended to stay near the bottom and let her coloration protect her. He let out a sigh and then headed more toward the top. The sun was still shining up there and she could see his shadow if she moved her head a little.

Well, she had been lonely for a while. At least talking to Corisanthias wouldn't make her have to get out of the water. Nuray wasn't ready to come out of the water yet.

No point in wasting a perfectly good chance to spook him though. A small bit of her normal personality was starting to peek out from under that depressed shroud. Then she was moving her way up from the bottom, darting upward to tag him from beneath.

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[info]beluga_man
2009-01-13 08:41 pm UTC (link)
He never saw her coming, distracted with his thoughts and not paying attention. When she reached him, he snapped back to reality and began panicking. The lake was large after all, and as much time as he'd spent in it, there could always be surprises lurking around. He flailed his arm and beat his tail in fright, trying to escape.

It was only after he came to his senses and actually saw what was going on that he realized how foolish he had been. He tried his best to hide his embarrassment, but felt a tinge of red entering his face for the second time in the recent past. He wasn't acting very hunter like, a consequence of his lack of focus as of late.

"Oh...Nuray. You...startled me" he bubbled out, trying to compose himself.

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[info]seabrightmoon
2009-01-13 09:52 pm UTC (link)
It was hard to keep from laughing at him outright, though she did contain herself to spare his ego. There was nothing quite like being spooked by a girl when you were supposed to be some great hunter. Instead, she popped out of the water and let herself float for a moment.

"Cori," she shortened his name to something that sounded familiar and easy to say. Jay was short for James and Nuray went down to Ray. Corisanthias could become Cori unless he got upset about her saying that. "Thinking hard," she teased, poking at the fact that he wasn't paying attention to the world around him. Jay spooked easier when he was busy trying to figure out something.

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[info]beluga_man
2009-01-13 10:15 pm UTC (link)
He let himself pop out of the water as well, returning to his normal self. He didn't mind the shortened name, the girl he had met at the festival had used it as well. He did have to admit it sped conversation up a bit. Though he still preferred to use other peoples full titles. It was just habit.

"Far more lost in thought than I am used to being. I seem to have found myself running for a seat on the newly formed council though I have no idea how exactly to go about doing such a thing. And on top of that, surely the person elected will have to catch the person responsible for the murders and I have even less of an understanding of what kind of person could do such a thing."

He wondered why she had been hiding, rather than swimming about. Though it could have been her own tribes way he supposed.

"Why were you hiding along the bottom of the lake? Are there predators about or just..." what was the word..."feeling down?"

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[info]seabrightmoon
2009-01-14 07:26 am UTC (link)
The news that he was running for Council election surprised her. Moreso because he was as new if not newer than she, how could he hope to represent the people of a town that he barely knew? Was that wise on the part of those who had nominated? Yet she simply nodded at the thought. The idea that the Vice Council was somehow going to be responsible for catching the killer, however, was one that she shook her head over. "A Council is not a police force," that was one thing she had understood. "Investigations, I think, are the job of the police force. One governs, the other investigates and protects." So it seemed in nearly all the history she had read about non-tribal peoples. Heliachris was certainly a non-tribal place. There seemed to be little kinship between most of its residents.

His question of predators and hiding made her shake her head no again. There were no predators about. If there had been, this conversation would hardly be as lazy in the sun, bobbing on the water like corks as it currently was. "Death is natural, killing is natural, murder is not." Murder was a word she even found it hard to say. Not because the concept was so alien to her now, she'd read many tales of murders, suicides, and war but because now it wasn't reading, it was reality. "I am afraid."

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[info]beluga_man
2009-01-14 02:17 pm UTC (link)
"I have never heard of such a thing as a 'police force.' I have always just assumed that with the responsibility of governing came also the responsibility of protecting."

If he could not grasp such a separation, perhaps he was not suited for the position at all. Or perhaps he would show the people that he was more suited for the position in his desire to do both.

"I really do not know what I hope to do if I somehow get myself elected to this position. I have hardly begun to understand this place and certainly notice that I do not exactly fit in with the other people. I just...feel that I should do my best to try to help in whatever way I can, and I am not exactly a young merman anymore. I may not have experience with people, but with matters of protecting ones homeland I feel I am more than qualified."

He let out a sigh. It sounded more like he was trying to convince himself than he had hoped. The fact that she was afraid did not help matters.

"You are afraid of the murderer? Or of the fact that suddenly we are in a place where murder even occurs? I do not know about your tribe, but in my own...such a thing happened only once and it was never spoken of, except during the time of the dead."

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[info]seabrightmoon
2009-01-14 07:00 pm UTC (link)
Admitting to being scared actually helped some. Maybe what she had really needed was simply to accept and discuss as opposed to hide from. Now whether or not that would help enough to get her out of the water was another idea completely. "My tribe would never have considered such a thing." Murder was certainly not something they would ever even truly think about. Those were stories to read out of the human newspaper, the stories of murder. More often than not, they simply skipped over the top of them in order to read the comics.

"The Council makes the laws, the police uphold them. We do not have police as I understand them here, but there are the Elven guard." So she had learned from floating around a bit. "So I suppose we do have some. There is also a court." If he didn't know about police, he probably didn't know about courts either, but she could try to fill him in on political structures beyond the tribal which was what they were both very familiar with.

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[info]beluga_man
2009-01-14 07:35 pm UTC (link)
He was more used to shrugging off his fear. It was not so much a consuming thing as it was a momentary burst of adrenaline. When he was facing things face on, however, he never really had time to consider being afraid. Fear was more an escape reaction than something to be brooded over.

"The only time it happened in my tribe was out of passion. It is why my people are not as capable of showing intense emotions. We choose to forgo feeling anything which might lead us to act rashly."

He listened to her explain some of the structures of the land. He was glad to know someone who had more experience with the workings of humans.

"Well, whether it is the guard or the council, if the opportunity arises I feel it my responsibility as a member of this...strange and fragmented tribe to do anything I can to catch the person responsible for these acts. I may be a relative newcomer, and I may be unfamiliar with this world, but I have always been a hunter, and always a protector of those who could not protect themselves. It is not right that people should be afraid of someone out there with no respect for life."

He felt a twinge of sadness creeping up on him. Was it not an act of passion that had brought him here. After all, he had hunted down the whale which carried him across the ocean for nothing more than revenge. Perhaps his people had not been so free of passion after all. He knew some creatures would have considered his act just as cruel as what he was professing his hatred for.

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[info]seabrightmoon
2009-01-15 08:27 am UTC (link)
In nearly any court, he would have been acquitted of his crime because of the passion which was its basis. He was too distraught to see reason and that made it impossible for him to see his actions as incorrect, taking the life of a creature that he had no intention of eating. However, now he had time to reflect and that was plenty to cause problems.

"A councilman should see it as his duty to do such," she agreed with his idea of what he should do as a Council member if only because if you did not believe in the law and upholding the law, how could you hope to lead anyone? "I think you shall do well." He had her vote of confidence at least.

If Nuray had thought about it, she might have nominated Jay for the job. He was a good thinker and a council needed to have a man with brains as well as a men with conviction and strong wills. "How will you tell others about you? I know of you because we have met, but much of our new tribe does not know your name or your conviction." He'd probably never heard of elections beyond this point. Nuray had read about them, but never seen one in action. Now maybe if she could rouse herself to get out of the water she would see one.

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[info]beluga_man
2009-01-15 01:05 pm UTC (link)
He was glad to hear her confidence in him. It made him cast his thoughts of his actions to the side, at least for now. That was something to be reflected upon later.

"I am not quite sure yet how I will spread my name. I have seen posters being put up by some of the others, but I have very little experience with the materials they use, and they have probably had more interactions with people in the area than I have. I feel that the best thing for me to do is to go out and meet the people here face to face. I am not sure if it is rude, but I am planning on taking time to go to every persons home and talk to them personally about the qualities that I feel make me fit for the position."

He did not really know what qualities would make someone fit for the position, but he knew which qualities he felt did, and that was what he would try to tell people.

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[info]seabrightmoon
2009-01-15 04:26 pm UTC (link)
He was discussing how he would spread the word about his campaign and she was listening and thinking about how she could be helpful to him. They were friends, that meant she could give her opinion without worrying too much about offending. Though she did also know a thing or two about mer-culture so that she could keep from offending him. It was typical to want to do things face to face, there wasn't much in the way of things you could do to pass messages underwater without being close to the person.

So his way of wanting to do things was good and normal to those who lived in such a culture. A culture that saw facial expressions, body language, and words to be equally important to convey the wants, needs, and ideas of a people.

"Not many people do face to face anymore," humans could be horribly impersonal in some cultures she had learned. They had a bad habit of wanting to do things by email or telephone. It made her very sad. "I hope things will go well."

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[info]beluga_man
2009-01-15 04:34 pm UTC (link)
With every new fact he learned about humans, he grew more and more worried about whether he could ever fit in with them. He knew of creatures that avoided socializing with others, but they were generally predators who would sooner eat each other than share a word. He had not thought of humans as such predators, but perhaps there were some things he had yet to learn.

"I also hope things go well. Perhaps I can remind these humans that their is a world beyond the impersonal shells they seem to have crafted around themselves."

Or maybe he would make a colossal fool of himself. It did not matter to him. Worst came to worst he could always hide out in the lake.

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End?
[info]seabrightmoon
2009-01-15 05:03 pm UTC (link)
"Sounds like you have much work ahead of you," the way she said it made it obvious that she found the idea amusing. The fact that she liked Cori only made it more interesting. If he could win a council seat among those who walked on land, then it would go quite a long way to helping him learn to fit and give him a chance to have an effect on others around him.

All people could use further instruction in how to live with honor and strength. At least, that was how she saw it.

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Yeah. That didn't turn into quite what was expected.
[info]beluga_man
2009-01-15 05:11 pm UTC (link)
"Yes...much work indeed. More than I am used to. This world is so different from the one of catching fish and inherited power. So very different."

He felt that there was something that he was missing, but his mind was a jumble. He floated listlessly among the gentle currents within the lake, staring up into the sky. It was darker than he thought it would be at this hour. He was glad he had no place to go though.

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