come_sailaway | Wolves and other interesting carnivores

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original: ylva wolfsdottir

Wolves and other interesting carnivores

Who: Ylva and you!
What: Awoo
Where: Mostly the upper decks
When: Throughout July

A Nap in the Sun

Ylva keeps strange hours, never wholly being comfortable with a fully diurnal lifestyle. Oh, she can force it if she must, but left to her own devices, she sleeps at odd hours and in odd places. The weather, such as it is, is at least very cooperative, and on a lazy afternoon she stretches out by the pool deck to nap in the sun.

And if she happens to stretch out as a large, feathery allosaurus (eyes shut, tail occasionally twitching), or maybe a monstrous snake (asleep but eyes open, tail dangling in the pool), well, these are just shapes that are extra good for soaking up the sun with.

Nighttime

The flip side of this is that at night, she paces the ship when most other people are asleep. She sometimes sits on the railing of the ship, precariously balanced while she eats something scavenged from Windjammers.

If you hear a howl in the night and bother to track it down, you are equally likely to find a wolf or a woman.

Wildcard

Hit me up, you know where and how.

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There's a return howl from somewhere near the pool area of the ship. It doesn't really sound like a wolf, more like a coyote trying it's best wolf impersonation. Someone's lungs aren't really made for howling anymore.

It's rare for someone to howl back on nights like this, and the discovery is a delightful one, as flawed an attempt as it might be. Ylva howls back, and hops down from her perch to go try to track down the culprit.

She has a guess about who it is, but that's all the more reason to go see.

It isn't long before she's walking onto the pool deck, looking around, her eyes flashing in the dark a little.

Yufei is sitting crosslegged on one of the pool loungers. He's holding a Serena Eterna snowglobe in his hands that he just finished shaking to watch the 'snow' fall around a tiny ship encased in glass.

He glances over at her, eyeshine obvious in the dim lighting. "Hello. Look! Found little ship."

And he gives the globe another shake.

She leans down to look, grinning and equally interested in the wonder of a snowglobe. "Oh, that's cool. It looks like it's snowing. Where'd you find that?"

Ylva takes a seat on a nearby lounger, a polite distance away.

"In shop with glasses and shirts. Brick and Brack." He pronounces that carefully after having someone tell him where he was when he asked.

He gives a polite sniff in her direction before turning his attention back to his treasure. "Yes, looks like snow. But inside glass. Is good, do not like snow, but nice to look at in this."

A pause as he has a tiny epiphany. "Like looking through car window. Can see but not touch, don't have to be in it, but can enjoy."

"A lot less cold than real snow."

Not that she minds real snow, but it does tend to get packed between her toes.

"You know, most nights I come up here, no one howls back. It's nice to hear someone else up here." There's a loneliness, sometimes, in being a wolf among humans, no matter how much she loves them.

He grins big, "Used to howl more. Sound different now, not as good. But still feels right."

Looking over at her, he cocks his head to the side, "Why doesn't anyone howl back? Humans sometimes make sound too. They sing. At night around fires. Is how they talk to each other at night when they can't see."

"Well, I think you sound good."

From her perspective, it's more about the intention and the effort than the technique. Ylva considers. "I think humans don't always understand what howling is. Some are scared of it, some of them don't want to join in because they don't understand it. They have their own songs. Humans fear wolves, a lot of them. Silly. Humans and wolves are more alike than they think."

Oh he's pleased with that, practically preening as he sits up. A wolf thinks his howling sounds good, that's pretty great.

"Fear wolves but love dogs. Have many of them in big and small and long and furry and different colors." He tosses the snowglobe from hand to hand as he thinks, "Should be scared of what's in the forest. It will eat them if it can. Humans kill what scares them and what scares them will kill them. They don't speak same language - can't understand each other. Howling is the first step to talking to them. And wolves. And the forest."

"We don't really have a forest here," Ylva says, "but we could give them howling lessons?"

Her smile is faintly crooked. "Humans are as vicious as anything in the forest, or they can be. But I mean.. yeah, you're right. They make themselves separate. They don't see themselves as part of... everything."

"There's a forest somewhere." He says it confidently, not a single doubt in his mind that beyond the barrier around the ship there's a giant forest full of all the trees and shrubs and debris he's used to.

"Because they can talk." He glances over at her, and then away. "Didn't know how important that was. Couldn't understand the sounds. But they can't talk to things that aren't them. They are separate. Different."

Ylva nods. "I was a pup, really, when I started learning to talk like this. Fortunately, he knew how to talk like a wolf, too. I'd never even -- well." She shakes her head. "It was a lot to learn. I'm still learning. Humans are... complicated."

"They are many packs but they don't know it. All different." He pulls his legs up to sit there with his arms around them, setting the snowglobe on the ground beneath the chair. "On this ship have seen they don't understand each other. Is confusing because are all the same thing but are differences can't see or smell. Then they get mad."

"Yeah, humans are like that."

Ylva slouches comfortably, pulling her feet up to rest them on the seat. "Where I come from, there's more than just humans. Elves, tieflings, halflings, orcs. I had a friend who was a lizardfolk, even. All different, and they fight about it, but more like each other than they think. I mean, you want to be technical," she lifts her hair to show off her pointed ear, "the non-wolf part of me is only half human. And that matters a lot to some people."

He tilts his head in confusion, "Why?"

Blinking he tries to see Ylva through human eyes, which he has now, but he's still not processing things like that. "Look human. But smell like wolf and human. Do they fight you? Because you are wolf? Or because not human enough?"

"Not human enough," she says with a shrug. "And back home, it's 'not elf enough' if you ask the right people, or the wrong people. Even if I look right, I don't act right. Even then, though... I did find people who liked me, even before I came here.

Ylva pauses, then adds, "They didn't usually fight me. If they did, I won."

The benefits of being more than one thing.

"They want you to be part of their pack but you are part of own pack. Of many packs. Human. Elf. Wolf. Are all things." He squints at the ground trying to find the words for what he's now thinking. "Makes them scared. Know how to be more things than them. More than me, I can't be wolf and human."

He smiles at her though, "Good. Kill them if they fight you. Then they are wrong people and dead people."

"Yeah. That's the idea." She grins, toothily. "If I don't need to kill someone, I won't, but that doesn't mean I can't, or haven't. Some of it I feel better about than others, but that's how it is, sometimes."

Ylva squints at him. "Why can't you both?"

"Because am a human." Or at least he is now, and he doesn't know how to change back to his normal form, or if he'd want to. "Never was a wolf so can't be one now. Only human. But still can howl."

He grins because he's not gonna stop howling, or chewing on things. Somethings are just built into his nature.

"Feel things when you kill them? Why? They should have left when they were losing battle. Should not have started fights they could not finish. So now they are dead." It seems so simple to him anyway.

Ylva, for a moment, is keenly aware that while she's not very good at being human, sometimes she's also not very good at being a wolf. She really is both, and neither, and there's a frustrating aspect to not fully fitting in either category.

"I dunno," she says. "I think sometimes I just wish they hadn't made me kill them."

He looks at the ground, gears churning away in his new human brain as he tries to process that. "Only kill when necessary? Not for fun?"

Well that's new, he's not used to that at all. But at least he can grasp the concept. "But they force you and then you hunt them. This is...." A long pause as he formulates a sentence in his head, then rearranges the words, tries again, "Where you are from. But here on boat is different? Or still have to kill people who force you?"

"I haven't had to kill anyone here on the boat," Ylva says. "I've been... making friends. And I never did want to hurt my friends. I never wanted to..."

She grimaces. "I can kill. I can kill for food and I can kill for protection and it's glorious," the feeling of a pulse dying under her teeth, it's been an age, "but -- to kill, when I don't need to eat? That's just... wasteful."

"Something will eat it. Even if not you. Bugs. Grass. Flowers. A corpse becomes a smaller world, teaming with life." The world exists in cycles and he's old enough that he's seen so many of them he doesn't even realize how precious life is. A little hard to when he's supernaturally hard to kill.

"Friends. Yes. Have done that here too. Is new and good." He thinks real hard, his whole face scrunching up, "Would not want to kill them either."

Well look at that. That's a new revelation.

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Wolves and other interesting carnivores

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