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+--- Thread: Apricots in Late Autumn (Non-interactive, OOC welcome) (/showthread.php?tid=10017)
Apricots in Late Autumn (Non-interactive, OOC welcome) - Caspar - 02-07-2015
(This is a background story. I was feeling a little antsy, so I decided to get started writing this. You're welcome to comment OOC if you'd like. Please forgive my loose use of the lore, as the location is non-canon, but IMO hypothetically reasonable.)
That season had come. Those days, the seaborne zephyrs mixed their chill vapors with the annual cold. Golden and brass flecks of leaves mixed with sodden dirt, the fertile earth of Llymlaen's Necklace which would receive any foreign greenery with charitable openness. The ground was soft to the touch, giving way to a person's feet in that inviting feeling that didn't give a sense of lost traction the way the beaches did. Most important of course were the apricots themselves, full and radiant orange, as if to spite the sun, which arbitrarily put on airs of bashfulness every fall. A gambler's dream, those apricots were ripest and most lush, like sweet ambrosia, late in the season, yet waiting involved a bit of risk. No one wanted to find a worm had beaten them to the punch. In this grove, the trees grew in a curious shape. Most were healthy, if a bit crooked and small compared to the ones generally seen in the Near East. They were shrunken enough for one to reach up and comfortably pluck a tree's fruit with ease, depending on their height. Yet still, some were bare, almost dead. Their bark was notched and shredded, their trunks bent oddly, though nowhere near the wall of wind-blocking trees and shrubs fostered along the downhill-facing edge of the grove. If it had been near that slope, which trailed down the side of the largest island in Necklace, snaking its way past jagged rocks and precarious cliffs down to a white shoreline, an apricot tree would be subjected to the full, unremitting force of the ocean winds, hardly ideal growing conditions. Yet these seemed worn away all the same. Near the center of the grove, dressed in a plain, ill-fitting white tunic and black silken trousers stood the cause. A tiny girl with haphazardly dyed hair in raven tones, rapping at the trunk of an apricot tree with the persistence of the woodpecker; Virara. Her cheeks flushed with the exertion of the day and the kiss of the freezing breeze, she folded and plied her arms through the autumn air with fluid grace, but the force of a breaking current. With a soft grunt, her forearm, with nothing but wrapped hempen bandages, slapped with a dull thunk into the tree trunk. As soon as she'd struck, Virara withdrew and repeated the motion symmetrically with her other arm, each strike building a tangible elasticity of strength. She did not strike so much as pull, like reeling invisible silk and wrapping it to her waist, striking the trunk with her forearm high, then low, then folding the arm back and stepping away to face with her other side, repeating the motion, then back again. The trees of the grove bore the marks of her work; by the end of the day, Virara's hands were numb and tingling, and two more trees looked remarkably naked under the dim, misted autumn sunlight.
"Judging by your sloppy form, you're getting tired. You've been at this for a while."
Virara exhaled. A soft hiss, white plumes of her visible breath fled her lips, fugitives on the wind. Behind her, she heard the sodden earth shift, the sea of leaves parting to admit her master.
"Almost done? You're looking to try them, aren't you?"
The woman's voice was deep, rough. In her tongue, the manner in which Sensei spoke was more akin to a barfly or professional gambler than someone demanding the respect she did. In recent days, Virara had been forced to communicate with her only in the ways of Eorzea. It seemed only appropriate as someday it would likely be her home. A thousand men, women and children first set out from Othard fleeing the tendrils of Garlean domination years ago, trailing their memories and fears, tacking into the wind. But no Doman who stayed in the Necklace considered it a permanent home, no matter how many suns passed. The rebellion in later years assured someday Garlemald would reach them once more. Across the horizon, one could stare, and recognize only danger, an instinctual sensation of unease overcoming the natural, cloying nostalgia of home. To Virara, the world outside the grove, and the wind-bitten long house behind them, did not exist. It could not exist, for Virara understood only what she saw. Foreign language had no significance; only mere sound, her master demanded she speak it and thus she did. There was no complexity of thought or misgivings to lead her astray. Action was her reason, preceding mind and heart. She was domesticated but not fully tamed. The island's language was her own native tongue. Force.
In heated silence, save her strained exhalations, Virara bowed her head deep enough that her pigtails nearly touched the dirt. She did not look up on the powerful figure of her Sensei, the physique that had harbored countless battles, the knotted hands that wrung the necks and removed the viscera of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Doma's enemies. Mostly in the dark.
"Enough already. I went through the effort of tying that tangled mess you call hair. You'll muss it up. I don't fancy doing those tails again."
Sensei tossed Virara a sedge basket nearly larger than herself. That was not hard, but Virara often found herself adopting ant-like posture to accomplish her master's various demands. Hefting huge sacks of rice, a load of fertilizer, or more often than not, a heavy crate of Othard liquor, was the order of the day, every day, when she wasn't in practice. Labor was still a part of training, so the day her master accepted Virara into the style was by no means an end to her servitude. Sensei merely throttled her as a method of demonstration, not out of wrath, or as punishment, as she had done before. Her back still bore scars from those unspeakable times.
" If you're not too sore to bend down like that, pick up the fallen apricots and get to work."
The woman before Virara, chewing irreverently on an apricot, carried with her a murky air of unscrupulousness, a miasma of bloody promise. Their accord, too, was murky. Virara couldn't discern much more than tolerance for her presence from Sensei. It was that ability to emote without emoting, to speak without speaking, that Virara was too uncouth to truly comprehend. An animal knew little of sarcasm. After being housebroken, she was adopted into the woman's care, but both master and student understood the circumstances of their coming together. Virara was Sensei's enemy, her student, her companion. All of these things were true, and yet Virara lacked nuance. She did not see much point in separating things, was a slow learner when it came to distinguishing personal relationships when taught by Sensei. It was a mess, she felt. An overwhelming myriad aromas came from Sensei. To pick one out, to distinguish it from the amorphous haze was more than she was capable of. Her way of seeing things was simple, by necessity. It had to be simple. And yet Sensei was the one thing that was not. It had been a strange five years.Â
For her part, the master encouraged the student's lack of discrimination. Sensei was a flow of emotions, never consistent, always muted, always smoothly transitioning from one sensation to the next. She said it was her "performer's blood," but Sensei never talked about her family or childhood, so what that meant was dubious to Virara. The small girl gazed up at her master, droopy ears twitching somewhat as she felt herself surrounded by Sensei's teasing grin. Only one thing was consistent within her. The prickly feeling Virara felt when she saw aggression in another being.
Sensing intent and an opponent's emotions was not some aetheric power, of which Virara was ignorant, and not a unique knack of pseudoscience, for Sensei and many others were better at it than her. It was merely honed, sharpened intuition, like any reflex, that functioned automatically when confronted by a being with a face, a head and four limbs. Sensing intent was merely an extension of that, while sensing the intent of a person one didn't confirm with the senses was battle experience and intuition. Virara could feel a pressure coming from someone's watching gaze, feel their stares prodding her flesh. When she locked eyes with a predator, when she lived alone on the islands, when its fur bristled and it salivated, its eyes glazed over with hunger; a threat, of the sort Virara understood, was by its nature plain faced. Fallacious chicanery, like claiming to "feel" the presence of ill-will through the mind alone, no senses used, no instincts tapped, was meaningless to a survivor.
For the longest time, Virara felt her Sensei was intentionally tailoring her body language to set off alarms in her head. Perhaps, she felt, it was a method of keeping Virara aware and on her toes. As she gathered the somewhat muddy apricots, the Lalafell girl glanced up at her master. Still there. The feeling of prickling at the back of the neck, the sinking sensation in the stomach. These were the impressions left behind by a sense of aggression, of rage. The searing heat of an urge toward violence. The desire to cause harm, though not specifically to her. Virara felt it inside Sensei. It was hiding within her when she rested, ate, bathed drank, prayed. Every once in a while, the woman would let her facade slip, but for the most part she grinned. Smiling always. She smiled with a crooked twist of flesh that seemed bitterly amused at some phantom joke. Sensei allowed herself only this as a neutral expression, a false smile filled with sardonic fury, writhing beneath her skin. This is what she was, Virara thought. It never went away.
"Master."
Virara intoned. Her voice was cooler than the breeze, but to her the exhalations burned.
"What do you want?"
"The apricots. Did you grow them, in Doma?"
She tilted her head quizzically.
Her master shook her head. A dark fringe of hair typically kept her face out of full view, giving her an unkempt, stringy look.
"No. I-wait."
Somewhere behind it all, Virara could feel Sensei's single eye gazing upon her in simmering ire.
"Getting cocky, are we? Even an innocent question like that would have been overstepping your station a year ago. Aren't you worried? Afraid I'll should like to pummel you again?"
Virara averted her eyes. Her pigtails tumbled down along her shoulders as she lowered them, to seem smaller, less presumptuous somehow.
"No, don't cower. Not even a bad night with the bottle makes me want to vomit more than that. Look at me. You're Spoken now, Virara, who once was a pig. Conversation is a right you've earned. Or have you forgotten already?"
Their eyes, or in Sensei's case, eye, met. Virara was brimming with energy, intensity of purpose lending a radiance to her gaze that even her master couldn't help but return.
"... You're rather fired up. To think I spoke in jest... Very well. It's not something so significant I'd need to be falling down drunk to tell you. "
Her master circled around by Virara, motioning to her to stop picking up the apricots. She dipped down, prodded Virara's soft side with a hard, calloused finger and shifted her student's hips and shoulders into a rough approximation of the horse posture. When Virara first began to learn from Sensei, though she was undeserving of the title of "student," her initial training was to stand in such a posture for hours at a time. Master would tell Virara to stand, legs spread apart, half-crouched with arms extended forward, as if preparing to impart some new knowledge. Then she would leave Virara to go drink or visit the town for the rest of the day. Upon returning, it would more often than not be sundown and if Virara had shown any signs of moving from that spot, Sensei would cane her viciously with a hollow bamboo stick, split such that it left welts that lasted days. Not even permitted to eat or relieve herself, the training was akin to torture, standing in horse posture until her legs burned like they were two solid masses of hornet stings. Not once had Virara managed to leave the posture, get back before Sensei returned, and not be found out. She suspected it had something to do with her lack of talent for lying, but even when Virara played the mute, the Master knew. Better to endure the suffering than get punished and have latter training rendered almost unbearable.Â
"A moment."
Sensei roughly, which was to say considerably more gentle than normal, shoved Virara into horse posture and gave merely a nonverbal grunt. This was her sign to stay in the posture for a good hour. After her initial phases of horse stance training were done, the hurting stopped and her body had changed. Lifting things felt easier. Her body no longer tired when sprinting or running at her maximum pace for extended durations of time. Once she told her Master of this, she was examined physically, then put to task with dragging a large granite grindstone across the field by rope looped around the waist like a girdle. Satisfied, further horse stance training by Master permitted Virara to leave momentarily to rest if she requested it, though only once per session. She was no longer in need of caning either.
"Good. The source of all your power, your hidden weapon, is the core. Not your fists. They are an intermediary, communicators. Your feet are slaves; they carry you and labor for you. All power comes from your stomach and spine. That energy must be supported and cultivated, so that it might be released into your foe in one instant. There is no other strike but the one that kills. Every blow must be capable of it. For that, you need this."
She gave Virara a solid pat to the stomach, then to the base of her spine. It was an explanation she had heard many times before, so she merely nodded once. Her mind was still occupied primarily by the question of the apricots. Master did not appear taken to domestic pursuits. She was slovenly, lazy, only passingly interested in her looks, her hygene. On any given day she spent most hours of the morning snoring away, unless there was a specific training regimen she'd committed to, and she often was still suffering the effects of the night before throughout, to say the least. Such a hobby as horticulture, that took considerable effort as well as a subtle hand at times, felt off. But this woman, too, had gone through what she did, and Virara wanted to know if some hidden aspect of training lay in hiding beneath the apricot grove's roots.Â
"And your core gives you another thing; what is it?"
"Explosive power."
Virara spoke in muted tones, instantly and without thought.
"Correct. That is where your ilk's prodigious jumping ability comes from. Nobody jumps with their legs alone. They coil their body in preparation. From the stomach, from the spine; this is the core. It is because your body is already heavily laden with muscle around the waist that you're able to do so easily. Even I can't match that sort of jumping height without greater exertion. And with your piggish roundness, laughable limbs and tiny stature, little of that power is wasted."
The master, though still ridiculing her, sounded almost admiring of her unusual physical qualities. Virara had hardly understood why she was so short in comparison to everyone else on the Necklace before Sensei had begun educating her of the many races.
With her one eye, Sensei glanced down at Virara's thigh, and drew her hand into a fist, two long fingers extended. She stabbed her there, hard enough to leave a deep bruise, with a speed so blinding Virara did not even make the effort to attempt to follow it. She did not show any pain nor disrupt her posture. She merely exhaled, caught in a tranquil fuge.
Her master turned away, smirking in that way she always did, then whirled about in a twister of black, striking Virara in the face with a fist like solid cobalt. Like an island tempest she bore down upon her student, her knuckles connecting with Virara's face at nearly full power, a strength that with Sensei could kill in one blow had she not held back. It was akin to staring directly into the barrel of the Garlean gun, as described by her master. Virara did not allow herself to change expression, nor meet the blow with her jaw, as she might have when she was starting out. She merely turned her head sideways and closed one eye, letting the blow slide off her round, pinkish cheek. A welt emerged there, but nothing further. More importantly, her balance remained without flaw.
"Good. That is enough to satisfy me. I'll tell you."