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

[tossmealifeline]

"I wouldn't accept him hurting others either." He wasn't happy about a lot of things but there was only so much he could do about each thing. One thing at a time.

"He doesn't appear to understand life. The trees..." Yato sighed. "On the retreat, the trees were dead. Devoid of life. They looked like trees but it was incredibly wrong and creepy. Trees in the Near Shore are full of life, it's just not sentient life."

[actuallyawolf]

"I know," she agrees grimly. "I mean, I've had conversations with trees. They're slow and not very much like people, but they're alive. Not those ones. They only looked like trees."

Ylva picks up her drink, turning it her hands. "There was a trip where we went to an island where there were animals, and real trees, and it was great. Still a lot of weird shit, but... I liked it. Only the one, though."

[tossmealifeline]

"It's important for us to know where life is, because taking life like that is completely immoral." Gods had rules after all, and while humans were occasionally fair game, depending on the god, the surrounding area was not to be touched.

"That sounds better, but still strange." He agreed. "The lack of life outside of the people around on the ship is really strange and unsettling. A lot of things about this world are unsettling."

[actuallyawolf]

"It's... pretend. It looks real, but it's not. Like, that's all he makes, I guess. I don't know if it's all he can make or all he wants to make."

Ylva glances over at him. "It's. Hm. Do you know about the barrier?"

[tossmealifeline]

"I think it's the latter. If he's so in control of everything, then there's more he could be doing and isn't." That was Yato's personal belief, whether he was right or wrong. He'd have to see how things evolved.

"No?" He'd gotten a package, he could fly now, but he hadn't given it a try.

[actuallyawolf]

"So if you go... I don't know," distances are hard, especially with no landmarks, "far enough out, you hit an invisible wall. And I'm not sure it's so much a barrier so much as it's... well, the edge of the world."

She may have bonked into it, flying.

[tossmealifeline]

"Huh..." Yato looked like he was considering that, frowning a little bit. "I know there's a problem with the afterlife...nevermind the fact we can return from the dead, and how wrong that is." It would be best not to get him started.

"But Ava told me that there are some that have actually passed and are stuck in some sort of torment because the Captain had no faith...which suggested to me he could change these variables. The why of how he can do that is not important. So I thought it might be worth trying to change his mind and get him to warp reality, only he's an asshole and was unwilling to give me the time of day."

It was a bad time sure, but he could've been listened to in his opinion, but the Captain decided to power play.

[actuallyawolf]

"He'll talk if you get him in the right mood," Ylva says. "I dunno. I don't think he likes me very much but he does seem to like some people. A lot of people think maybe, if we can't kill him, we can change his mind. One way or another."

She frowns, thoughtfully. "Look, this isn't the first time I've been in a weird plane of existence. First time I've been so trapped, though."

[tossmealifeline]

"Considering he tried to crush me because I refused to bow down to him and I don't feel like doing that anytime soon." He was a god, thank you, he didn't bow to lesser creatures unless he felt like it and he did not feel like it.

"I don't think he's interested in entertaining a conversation with me." Yato considered that. "I've never left Japan before...outside of Heaven and Hell of course."

[actuallyawolf]

"Ugh. He's very. What's the word? Petty, I think. He's petty. I haven't heard of him trying to make anyone else bow, though. Huh."

It's interesting, but it's not a fact she knows what to do with.

"What's Japan like?" she asks suddenly, intensely curious. "I've travelled a bunch but... I don't know Japan."

[tossmealifeline]

"Definitely petty." Yato agreed. "Probably got a kick out of it." He wouldn't give him the satisfaction without suffering immensely, and he hadn't changed his mind on that one.

"Japan? Hm..." Yato thought about it. "Well now it's very very modern. I tend to linger around Tokyo which is a major city. All kinds of high skyscrapers, fast moving trains and vehicles..." He didn't know what kind of technology she was familiar with. "There's less and less countryside really. There are a lot of people and not a lot of space. Back in time, it was much more sparse, a lot of low wooden houses." Yato had been alive a long time.

"I can't really compare it to anything else because I hadn't left...Gods aren't terribly interested in the world outside of Japan. Everything is very fast paced it seems to me."

[actuallyawolf]

This... actually isn't very useful information. Cities she knows, and loss of countryside she also knows (unfortunately), but the words he's used aren't helpful.

"Okay so, one," Ylva counts on her fingers, "what's a skyscraper, and two, what's a train?"

[tossmealifeline]

"Ah, sorry." Yato offered with a little chuckle, clearly he got ahead of himself. He understood, all of these things happened in his lifetime and he could remember what it was like before those things existed.

"Skyscrapers are very very tall buildings, involving many stories. There's a huge tower in Tokyo over 300 metres high." Yato explained, if that offered context. "But many humans also live in skyscrapers because they build apartment buildings which are like huge buildings with box shaped homes stacked on top of one another. There can be dozens of these apartments in them."

He'd never lived in one, but he's been inside them. "A train is a mode of transportation, kind of like this boat is, only it's..." He paused. "Like boxes on wheels that run on a track. They're not box-shaped exactly, they're usually rounded for better cutting through the air at high speeds. There are a lot of trains in Japan, a lot of people use them to get to work or school."