zireaelofcintra (zireaelofcintra) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2019-10-10 14:34:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, cirilla fiona elen riannon, jaina proudmoore |
Who: Jaina & Ciri
What: Omelettes!
When: The day after this [backdated]
Where: Jaina's place
Rating: Low
Status: Complete
Jaina hadn’t been kidding when she’d said that she made a good omelette. Though if she was one hundred percent honest eggs were one of the few things she could make without initiating a culinary disaster, outside of conjured items.
Usually when someone suggested breakfast, there was the implied before breakfast but Jaina had managed to avoid embarrassing herself over an initial assumption, though was being socially awkward really something to be proud of?
She’d picked up some extra ingredients, made sure her ward slash roommate was out, and set some magical cleaning supplies to work while she got ready that morning. By ten, her place looked about as clean as it was going to look when Jaina’s usual style was ‘grad student who spent all her time reading and studying’.
There was just no saving the mess that was her desk, after all.
Truthfully, if Ciri was less of a Disaster Human, she’d have probably had breakfast with the woman she’d gone home with, whose apartment she’d woken up in at the crack of dawn to sneak away from before she was caught. She’d have probably remembered her name - though she had been super drunk the night before - and maybe offered to swap numbers. But. Ciri Fiona Ellen Riannon did not do that. Instead, she’d snuck out of someone else’s home, swung by her own place - her apartment, not her huge house - and showered the previous night off of herself.
Dressed comfortably, in fitted jeans and a t-shirt, pale green hoodie and large sunglasses, Ciri called an uber to get her over to the address Jania had given her the day before. She would never say no to people making her breakfast though she should really learn how to do it herself. It was a miracle she was… well funded (let’s say) because she couldn’t cook even grilled cheese. She’d always had people to do it for her, so her main source of food was take out.
Five minutes after ten (the Uber was late, that was not her fault, nor was it the first impression she wanted to make but never mind), she knocked on the door and shifted her weight from foot to foot, pushing her sunglasses up into her hair and thanking every deity that had ever existed that, though she felt like hell, she didn’t look it.
Jaina liked to call such things the Morning After Regret; her luck with lovers was pretty bad, considering the Lich King and all. She had better luck with Neena but that was something that was going to go nowhere fast and she knew it.
Banishing the magical cleaning implements and hoping she'd actually caught them all, Jaina walked to the door and opened it up. She was barefoot, wearing jeans as well as a loose-fitting white blouse with green and blue highlights. Her blonde hair had been pulled back into a braid and she smiled disturbingly chipper for ten am. "Ciri? Come in!"
Jania was very cheerful for ten am. Especially cheerful for someone who was definitely hungover. She rubbed at the side of her face and took in the woman in front of her, wishing - even more powerfully then - that she’d met her on a night out, or on any day where she wasn’t feeling like warmed up roadkill.
“Thanks again for the offer of breakfast,” she said, accent rolling lightly over her words. “I cannae cook for myself.” She’d be fucked if the fast food industry ever collapsed. “I’d be a danger after a night out in my own kitchen.”
Breakfast with very attractive woman, hearing stories about another world… Ciri’s morning definitely could have taken a worse turn.
"I said I could make eggs, I never said I was very good at cooking," Jaina joked. She let Ciri in, quickly glancing around for floating brooms or stray water elementals. She intended to show Ciri some magic but thought it best to ease people into that.
Said the woman that liked to teleport to meet people and shocking the hell out of them in the process. "When I went to MIT I spent more time studying than eating."
Jaina hadn't been sure how Ciri felt about meat so had opted not to bake any sausage or bacon, though she could make a serviceable hashbrown if pressed. "I suppose it's not that bad. I had to learn a few things when I was overseas."
“I went from Fettes boarding school to St Andrews,” Ciri shared with a lift of her shoulder, impressed - though not surprised - at the knowledge that Jania had brains as well as beauty and an interesting set of dreams. “Terrible as it sounds I’ve never had tae cook for myself.” She looked sheepish, “So even being able to make eggs is more than I can do.”
Last time she tried, she’d nearly burned the kitchen down in her student digs, so she’d wisely decided to just become well known in the local take-out and restaurant businesses instead.
Tipping her head, curiosity filling her gaze, she asked, “Overseas?”
"The Admiral---Dad tried his damndest to make me all domestic," Jaina said, bitterly. In her dreams it had been a little different. Born the heir to Kul Tiras, a naval power, it was expected that everyone, man or woman, be capable of at least some basic survival skills, be it cooking, sewing, or sailing. But cooking murlock in a stew pot over a fire wasn't exactly fine cuisine and Jaina would much rather scramble some eggs. Or steer a ship. "So I think I rebelled a little."
Jaina gestured for Ciri to follow as she headed into the kitchen so she could start cooking. Something darted out of sight, cat sized but definitely not a cat.
"I joined the peacecorps before I went to MIT. Another rebellion against the Admiral."
Ciri turned her head, spotting the movement in her peripheral but not quite quickly enough to see what breed the cat was. She figured if it wanted to say hello, it would. She’d ask later, maybe, when her brain was focused less on pleasantries and food.
Chuckling, she leaned against the counter, hands slipping into the pockets of her jeans. “I know a little about rebelling,” she admitted, since a large chunk of her teenage years had been spent doing various activities designed to make her grandmother roll her eyes and threaten to pull her out of Fettes. She wasn’t sure if that had been what she’d wanted or not, but either way, it had never happened.
“Having an Admiral for a father,” she said, assuming that the title was official and not just a nickname, “must have been hard.”
“We have a long Naval tradition in my family which I happily broke, “Jaina said, cracking some eggs into a pan. “Don’t get me wrong, I still love the sea and I’ll always be her daughter, but I wanted that to be my choice, and not something he chose for me.”
It was remarkable how some things paralleled her dreams. Naval family, the Admiralty. The bigotry. It had gotten him killed by the Horde in her dreams, and she thought it would be the ruin of him in the waking world too. She wasn’t particularly put out at the thought.
Ciri thought briefly about Skellige, the island in her dreams, how the people there lived and breathed the sea. Their lives were almost… Nordic, or Viking, their lives focused on battle and the sea. She’d never really understood it, at least, in her dreams. In reality, she didn’t understand it either, the sea was terrifying to say the least. She hardly liked going in it in the summer, much to the amusement of some of her other friends.
She nodded, understanding a little bit about family tradition, too. She wet her lower lip. “There’s something tae be said about forging your own path in the world and such,” she agreed. “Scary and disappointing to your parents as that might be.”
“They deserve it,” Jaina said, mostly as a thought muttered aloud. Her mother had cut all ties to her after her father had gotten himself killed in the dreams, and they weren’t on speaking terms awake either. The bitterness in her own voice surprised her, and she struggled to shake it off.
“In much better news, I present to you, eggs!”
With a flourish, she plated the eggs and brought them over. “Seasoned quite deliciously if I do say so myself.”
Ciri figured it was better not to ask about the dark tone Jania’s voice took and instead grinned at the eggs, tugging the plate closer to herself and adjusting how her sunglasses were perched atop her head.
“They look great,” she praised, feeling her hangover wanting to protest at the idea of food being digested but Ciri had never been bested by a hangover before, she wasn’t about to start now. “If it helps any,” she said after a mouthful of eggs that was accompanied by a pleased sound, “I’m in America to avoid literally all of my family responsibilities.”
Jaina smiled at her new friend, not knowing her well enough to tell if she was just not a morning person, or hungover. Though based on the network, she suspected it was both. "That's sort of how I ended up on the West Coast. About as far away as I can get from Boston and DC without leaving the contiguous United States. It helped I could get work here."
She just hadn’t expected the sun to disappear her first week, nor the magic.
“That’s fair,” Ciri nodded, “I haven’t found work yet but I’m lucky that I don’t really need anything to get away with living here for as long as I want tae.” She swallowed another mouthful of food. Diplomatic immunity was her favourite thing; she’d never used it to commit a crime but when she was a teenager she’d liberally used it to stop her bag from being searched when she went to gigs meaning that she could smuggle alcohol in when she was underage.
She tipped her head, “What do you do? For a job, I mean.”
Her family had never quite cut off the spigot of money, though Jaina had learned how to survive without it, just in case. Her job wouldn’t make her rich, but she lived comfortably. “I’m a theoretical physicist, so I do a lot of research for a couple local universities, as well as a tech firm. It’s mostly research type stuff.”
Hence the theoretical. Jaina found herself blushing as she admitted, “I just really love math.”
Ciri watched Jania, seeing colour catching on her cheeks and she smiled a little. “That’s very neat,” she said, completely sincerely. She wasn’t that smart. “I’m more… rough and tumble,” she admitted, though she had an understanding of political intrigue. There was a lot of back-stabbing and lying that she didn’t like, and the brown-nosing was the worst. She supposed it could be worse.
“Coulda done with a tutor that actually liked the subject tae help me get through my exams at school,” she confessed with a grin, finishing off the eggs and running her thumb along her lower lip. Fuck, they were good. Boarding school food wasn’t a patch on actual food. “‘Scuse the dumb question, but does that involve space?”
“I know a few rough and tumble types, there’s room in the world for all kinds.” Jaina always hated playing politics, even though she was pretty good at it. Just generally aligned with the pacifist side of things up to a point.
“I’ve learned that when it comes to math, it’s as much as how you’re taught as what you’re taught. Never bought into the idea that people are not built for math. They’re just taught to hate it.”
Jaina took a bite out of her own eggs as she thought about it. “Takes math to make rockets work. Math to create trajectories to get into orbit, or beyond. Math is how we determine a planet’s orbit and how to get a probe ten million miles away six years down the road and have it actually make it to the planet or moon we’re sending it to rather than miss it. It’s a universal language, really, especially when you get down to the nitty gritty. On some of our space probes we put… a few things. Math formulas and golden disks with images of molecules, which is the other universal language. But there was also music, and voices, and recorded images of people and things on earth. And music, you could say, is also math.”
“Do you work on anything that goes intae space?” Ciri asked, “Or are your projects more rooted on the ground?” She smiled, head tilted as she watched Jania talk about maths. There was an underlying passion that made her easy to listen to, and meant Ciri didn’t automatically switch off. She wasn’t that much of an intellectual; her degree was definitely more of a ‘for fun’ course, though it had proven to be very useful in starting conversations.
She tilted her head a little, deciding not to talk about her understanding of the Golden Ratio because that was weird, she was just here eating breakfast, after all. She tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled. “Then there’s me, with fencing and horse riding as my two main skills. I’d be useful in a zombie apocalypse.”
“Some formulas I’ve come up with have been useful for calculating flight trajectories,” Jaina replied. “And I once got to reprogram a space telescope, which was a great deal of fun.”
Jaina sat on the counter with her plate, pushing at the eggs with her fork and perked up. “Horses? Gods, I haven’t ridden in ages. You ride often?”
Ciri beamed. “Aye, two or three times a week,” she said, “there’s a riding school that let me just pay for the day to take a horse out and ride it until I’m done.” She tucked her hair behind her ear and leaned her hip against the counter. “You could join me some time, if you’d like?”
“I’m so jealous.” Jaina sighed wistfully. “I had this beautiful chestnut mare growing up. She was a bit too large and tall for me but I never let that stop me. Sometimes a lady needs to let loose now and again.”
Though she hadn’t been as large as some of the admiralty stallions in her dream, she’d still been tall. At least for young Jaina.
The offer made her perk up even more. “I’d love that!”
Ciri beamed, “I’d be happy tae have some company, since my friend isn’t… well, horse riding isn’t his thing.” She tucked her hair behind her ear again. “Might not be your chestnut mare, but I’ll bet we can find you the perfect horse for… a regular riding appointment?”
“Sometimes how it works is the horse finds you,” Jaina assured her, winking. Sometimes it wasn’t even a horse. There’d been a mule at one of her father’s properties when she was a girl who’d been very sweet, if very demanding of apples.
The longer she thought about it, the more excited she felt. “I think you have yourself an appointment.”
Ciri grinned, glancing around for a piece of paper and a pen, scribbling her cell phone number down and sliding it over the counter. She nodded, leaned her elbows on the surface and beamed. “Sweet, when’re you free?”