changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes

[dubiouslychthonic]

Who: Jetshard and OPEN
What: General catchall for troll doc
When: ICly April 27-May 4, or thereabouts
Where: Variously around the station.
Warnings: None anticipated.


Every Night, Evening - Open
[Jetshard is a goddamn professional, which is why each evening she can be found in the medbay from around six-thirty or seven, until sometime after midnight. Generally she's either deep in a medical text of some sort or scrolling through something on her tablet - which is of Alternian make, rather than local, and therefore the case is leathery and vaguely bulbous - but she looks up when someone else enters.]

Hey there, do you need something?

Every Night, After Midnight - Open
[Jetshard's not one of the hypercompetent chefs of the station, but she's good enough with food prep that she can be trusted to cook for herself without damaging the facilities. If you happen to be in the kitchen on the low-numbered loop of the residential floor, in the hour or so after midnight, you might run across the troll preparing something for herself... usually brightly colored and as likely as not containing either something visibly arthropoid or coming out of a contain that implies it's a byproduct of such.

Nothing's on fire or foul smelling, but she's definitely planning to eat a weird bug and not even care.]

April 28, early morning - closed to Up
[She's not entirely sure what kind of schedule most of the androids are on - crosses paths with them sporadically enough that she's not quite certain of the patterns - but hopefully if she stops in at the fissure lab before she turns in for the morning she'll be able to track down Up. There's something she's been meaning to ask them about since the end of the last mission.]

May 2-4, late night/early morning - Open
[It's cooler at night than it is during the day, but still, you can tell that the climate control of the station at large has been working overtime all day, and after finishing her time in the medbay and finding something to eat, Jetshard retreats to the deck. She's sitting at the very edge of the platform with her feet dangling off the side. Although she's got a book in her hands, she's as likely to be kind of zoning off and staring off in to the ocean as she is to be actually reading it.]

Comments

deck, near dawn

[founderinglight]

[Jetshard is by now familiar enough with Izunia's routine, and so his arrival on the deck a little while before dawn, when the sky in the east is just starting to get light, probably comes as no surprise.]

Care for some company? I brought a bit of a snack if you'd like the deal sweetened.

[dubiouslychthonic]

[It's not a surprise, except maybe in that she's suddenly made aware that she's been lost in her own thoughts for a bit. She's only a little startled, though, and she covers it well, looking up with a grin.]

Any time, but I'm not exactly going to refuse if you've brought food.

[founderinglight]

I like to be prepared. Do you eat fish?

[Because they have. A lot of fish suddenly and he's blaming Noctis. Don't mind as he just settles into a seat at the edge next to you, Jetshard.]

[dubiouslychthonic]

So long as someone else knows how to prepare the thing. I mean, I know we're not exactly short on it, given... [She gestures kind of vaguely out at the ocean.] But I can't quite shake the feeling that I'm going to fuck it up and waste half a perigee's food budget on a single ruined meal.

[founderinglight]

Don't worry, I'm plenty familiar. It's a significant part of the diet in Lucis, and it was likely Noctis who caught these in the first place.

[His plating's nice, even, as he pulls one out of the Armiger and extends it to her - some kind of lightly grilled whitefish. There's also a kick of rice with only a little bit of a spice kick, and a fork.]

Usually served with lemon as well, but I figured I would let you handle that part yourself if you so desired.

[dubiouslychthonic]

Thanks.

[She tosses her book into her sylladex and takes the plate.]

I didn't grow up anywhere near the coast, and even if I did, poaching's a good way for a midblood kid to end up extremely dead. And it's not much easier to come by on the black market in the fleet.

[founderinglight]

Insomnia's set on - well, it was originally a peninsula, but by Noctis' time it's artificially a very large island, connected to the rest of Lucis by a set of long bridges. We established the capital on the bay, and eventually everyone had to build up rather than out.

[He summons his own plate, which has a small pile of lemon wedges in one corner, and starts squeezing one over his fish.]

In the city, it's usually cheaper to come by than most other kinds of meat.

[dubiouslychthonic]

Makes sense. Our agricultural products are mostly insects, but I suspect we'd depend more on fish if our seadwellers weren't encouraged to be homicidally territorial as a cultural value.

[She pauses a moment to take a bite of the fish, chewing thoughtfully - thoughtful about the food, and also a bit about her own history.]

There was one pirate outfit I was with for a little while, the captain was a violetblood who I think was just playing at outlawry. Most of the rest of us weren't, but the Kingfish didn't make much effort to hide that he expected to step back into politics or whatever the hell he usually did in a few sweeps. I suspect he was waiting for someone to forget they really wanted to kill him. But in the meantime, he was entirely uninterested in lowering his standard of living, and he was pretty generous in keeping the rest of his crew in style, too.

Wasn't generous about much else, but we ate well.

[founderinglight]

...I swear, your society must sustain itself on continuity of leadership alone...

[How the hell is encouraging homicidal cultural values of literally any sort a good thing in the long run?

Whatever, he has delicious fish and a fork to eat it with, he's going to do that.]

[dubiouslychthonic]

The constant mobilization of the adult population in as near a state of total war as can be maintained on an interstellar scale has something to do with it, I'd think. Things got real rocky for a few centuries there after imperial unification but before the age of the adult diaspora. Also there's the psychic death cultists the empress employs as her personal enforcers.

[She is... perhaps a little too matter of fact about all of this. Alternia's fucked up, yo.]

[founderinglight]

... Politely, what the fuck.

[This from a man who themed his country after death as a dirge for his undying immortal brother but, look, he didn't have an actual death cult.]

Our patron god is literally a god of war and we were not that combative.

[dubiouslychthonic]

Honestly I don't know much about the workings of the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs and I like it that way. You couldn't pay enough to get me inside a circus tent. I just know they're mostly indigo and that comes with the nastiest compliment of psychic abilities at that end of the spectrum, and most of them are stark raving mad.

[founderinglight]

Jetshard. I cannot possibly overstate this, our banner is a skull with wings on it and we still don't have -

[Wait a hot fucking second.]

Did you just say circus tent?!

[dubiouslychthonic]

[An arched eyebrow, as she pauses with a fork-full of fish in mid air.] What, your clowns aren't devout worshipers of the cherubic embodiment of Death?

[founderinglight]

The only formal embodiments of Death we have are a massive serpentine sea goddess and Ardyn's previous occupation.

[dubiouslychthonic]

I mean, there's probably folks who worship Gl'bgolyb as well. Not that I have direct experience with, but just knowing how people work, we almost certainly have cultists devoted to the imperial line's giant abyssal squidmonster guardian.

[founderinglight]

...Makes me almost disappointed that I don't have one. Lucis worships the Hexathon for the very good reason that one of them is known to have destroyed the last civilization that didn't, but it would have been nice to have some alternatives

... Also, "what the fuck" still stands.

[dubiouslychthonic]

Honestly? I have no idea why we're so given to shitty mystery cults. There just seems to be something in the troll psychological makeup where an annoyingly common failure mode is just kind of gesturing at something and going "is this an object of veneration?" [Ok, possibly she'd enjoying herself now, just a bit. The fact that she's grinning as she continues, however, does not in the least mean she's being facetious.] I mean, just that I'm aware of, we've got Death cults, cults of the Handmaid of Death, at least a couple of sects fixated on a mutant mystic who claimed to remember a peaceful parallel world, sun-worshipers, a couple of different weird shamanistic things, veneration of an abstracted ideal of the Mother Grub...

[founderinglight]

[He at least remembers that sun worship means a very different thing to a nocturnal species.

Not that half of that makes any sense at all.]

I mean, humanity on Eos would probably have wound up much the same if the Hexathon didn't overtly exist - the Astrals get a wide variety of cults when they're not worshipped as a whole as it is.

[There's a faint flutter of blue glow in the air beside him, and he sets his fork down to pull a set of cards out of his Armiger - just the face cards from the Deck, not the whole of it.]

Here - careful, the edges are sharp.

[dubiouslychthonic]

[She sets down her own plate and takes the cards, careful but not overly gingerly; she doesn't question why the edges would be sharp. She can't think that she knows anyone else who uses weaponized cards exactly, but dice-based weapons are something she's run across in the past.

Also one of these days she should probably either figure out how woodwindkind works or take the damn clarinet out of her strife deck.

As she rifles though them, she continues musing.]

I mean, the Mother Grub-worship is mostly ridiculous in that once you've seen one up close they lose a lot of the mystique.

[Not that that keeps her from swearing by them an awful lot. Whatever. Swearing isn't the same as religion.]

[founderinglight]

[There's just the six, stylized portraits of the gods in a sort of watercolored, minimalist-color style. They're surprisingly bright, given that they're worked into cards made of metal. It's probably magic.]

Isn't that always the case? Obvious family resemblance related issues aside, I daresay that I haven't been anything that Noctis and his generation expect. the reality of things is all too often underwhelming.