skywriting and other things

[actuallyawolf]

Who: Ylva, OTA
What: Shenanigans, as usual.
When: Early January


human't

On the one hand, the hotel had been full of murder. On the other, it was the closest thing to feeling at home she's felt in months. Fake forest or not, it had still looked like a forest. There had been weather. On the ship, Ylva is equally likely to sleep in her cabin as on a deck chair by the pool. Soft beds are nice, but sometimes sleeping indoors is stifling, and she's too aware of the walls around her to settle. At the hotel, well, there had been no one to stop her from digging a hollow in the snow in a sheltered place and curl up as a wolf. It had been familiar, comfortable.

Now back on the ship, Ylva is having trouble adjusting.

While running into her moving around on all fours is not unusual, there is definitely more Wolf Time these days. It's a way of coping.

Someone might run into her in the evenings, up on the deck, howling at the sky.

Someone else might witness a large tawny wolf pad confidently into Windjammers and pull herself up to grab a whole roast cornish hen from the buffet table.

Someone else might just find her in a deck chair or a sofa in the library, snoozing.



watching the clouds go by

But there are those moments where, for a little while, for one reason or another, she has to have thumbs. Here, then, Ylva stretches out on the deck by the pool, staring at the sky with a large strawberry daiquiri at her elbow, and working on making vapour coalesce out into visible shapes. She spends a long time deliberating on each message before putting it into place.





The words will float over the ship for an hour before the wind disperses them, unless she gets bored and blows it away earlier.

You might find her giggling to herself after putting up her latest sky graffiti, or deliberating over what her next message to the Serena Eterna should be.


wildcard

You know where to find me.

Comments

[teethoftherisk]

Siffleur tips his head to the side, confused by her words. He expects the hostility from Ylva but he can't understand why she's hostile about something he didn't say. "I don't believe anything makes me special. I am an animal, just like every other animal, and I hunt for the same reasons they do. I am not the only creature who hunts for fun."

He pauses for a moment, just to let the silence stretch out before he adds- "And I eat my friends too. That is part of the game. I kill them, I eat them. They kill me, they can eat me if they want."

[actuallyawolf]

She pauses; if wolves could make faces of disgust, she would. Instead, Ylva just stares at the chicken she's been chewing at, momentarily put off it. Only momentarily, though.

"I don't get that," she complains. "How do you eat someone you're friends with? How do you stay friends with someone after eating them? That's weird. I don't care that death isn't permanent here, it's weird. It's not even like it's a 'eat me so you can live' type deal." Which she would understand, but no one's starving on this ship. "You don't eat your pack."

[teethoftherisk]

"I don't have a pack. I'm a cougar." He reminds Ylva, not for the first time. "Most people aren't wolves. Most creatures alone or in pairs, and we survive as well as your kind does. And many creatures eat their own, not even because they're starving, but just because food is food. I've seen gophers eat their own on the highways, and chickens eat their own in the coops, and it's simply within their nature. Few things taste as good as your own kind."

He has a sip of water and goes back to eat another chicken wing. "Eating friends is easier than eating enemies here. They give me permission, and nobody's feelings are hurt." Siffleur gives Ylva a smug look. "And some of them like being eaten."

[actuallyawolf]

She snarls, silently. Something about Siffleur aggravates her in a way she has a hard time putting her finger on. He makes her feel stupid, and she's not a stupid person. She's pretty sure she's not a stupid person. He is, she has to admit, better at explaining things than she is.

Why is the dumb cat more eloquent than she is?

"Humans are more like wolves than they're like cougars, usually. Wolves don't eat their own." She crunches through a chicken bone with probably more force than it needs. "Who likes being eaten? On purpose? That's... weird. You're weird."

[teethoftherisk]

"You care too much about normal. We live on a cruise ship in an fake ocean and we never die. Everything here is weird. You would be happier if you were weirder too." Siffleur discards the chicken wing bones on a plate and considers reminding Ylva that eating chicken bones is an easy way to choking and dying. If he says it, she'll probably eat more bones to spite him, and a sharp end could pierce her throat and kill her.

"You shouldn't eat chicken bones."

Heh.

[actuallyawolf]

"I'm fine. I know what I'm doing."

She's sulky when she says it, a growl in her voice. Ylva pauses, though, looks over at him, her expression unreadable through the wolf face. She's already weird, she knows, but in such a different way from him.

"I wonder what you'd do if I turned you into a rabbit and hunted you myself." She's been things other than wolves, after all. She knows the world from many angles, even if she has one that feels true. Never mind that polymorph doesn't work on shapeshifters. It's just theoretical, a passing thought. "I wonder how you'd feel about things if you didn't have your claws and teeth and strength."

[teethoftherisk]

"Then I would be prey, and I would run, and be caught and eaten." He says, simple and to the point. Siffleur could remind her that he's been prey here on the ship, that he told her that Erin won her fight with him... but he doubts she would consider that truly being prey.

Instead, he leans in, eyes glinting with cruel delight. "Do you dream of hunting me, Ylva? Do you want to taste my blood and hear my bones break in your jaws? You complain about my tastes and then dream of turning me into your prey. If you want to eat my hot, steaming guts, then open me up and have a feast. It'll be more satisfying than that dead bird."

[actuallyawolf]

"I already know what your blood tastes like," she reminds him. She does want that. She also has no desire to be like him. She's being goaded, and she knows it, but she shifts, restlessly, and hates him for being able to do this to her.

It's been months since she hunted, really hunted, but it's not the sort of thing she thinks she could ever grow rusty at.

"Like this, it would be a fight between us, not a hunt. We're too similar in size. But if I were something else, something bigger... that would be a hunt. When's the last time you were as powerless as the people you get to play your dumb game with you?"

[teethoftherisk]

"A month and a half ago, when a woman came in and played my game, and she turned into a wolf the size of a horse, hunted me down and killed me. I hear she took my body up to the Captain's door and left it there." Siffleur just smiles. Ylva has so many assumptions about what Siffleur does and doesn't do. It's very fun to cut the legs out from under her. "Or maybe four weeks ago, when Jack and I had a particularly brutal fight. He impaled me on a pile of broken clothing racks and electrocuted me. That was a good time."

[actuallyawolf]

"Right, Valdis. I saw the pictures."

But Valdis had not seemed to feel good about it, because Valdis is not a hunter in the same way the two of them are. And honestly, Siffleur's pleasure at his own death is... unsettling, temporary or not, and that does something to temper the urge to tear out his throat right now.

The idea of being like him is terrifying to her. She doesn't know if she wants to eat him or not.

"Why do you like that?"

[teethoftherisk]

"Would it be better if I was a hypocrite?" He counters, eyebrow raised at Ylva. "I do not expect my prey to love death, but I hunt none the less. I do not love death either, but I am not above it. So I have learned to find joy in the hunt, and to find relief that this is the one place in all the world where death is not the end."

For a moment, he leans forward, his eyes nearly glowing as presses the point. "I have spent my entire life waiting for the final, brutal end to come, to bleed out in the wilderness with a bullet in my side, or to die on city streets when an illness takes me, or any of a number of equally merciless ways. This is the way of life. But not here. Not here. So why shouldn't I find joy where before I found dread?"

[actuallyawolf]

"You really dread it?"

She looks at him hard, for a moment, her face twitching thoughtfully.

"Ugh, I don't know how to put it. I'm not scared of dying because I know it's going to happen, and my being dead will mean other things live. Things will eat me and grow from me and live in things that grow from me and that's... good. I don't want it to happen before I'm ready, but it'll happen some day and that's fine. I guess if you wanna be casual about the whole eating each other thing here, I can't stop you, but I think you're a whole lot more scared of death than I am."

There's actually not a lot of judgement in her voice about that point.

[teethoftherisk]

"I did. I was. But... not the way I did before." It's good that she doesn't fear dying, that she sees herself as part of the cycle. Siffleur doesn't imagine he can make her understand how it felt for him, so he won't waste his breath. Anyway, he's learned time and again that there's some things you can only tell other deeply damaged people. So, he just smiles instead.

"Dying has made me less frightened, but I am never beyond the point of feeling terror. I'm more animal than man, and I am just like any other animal. I eat, I sleep, I dream, I dread." And he shrugs. What else is there to say?