thecapitol | And I'll blend up that rainbow above you

Entry tags:

And I'll blend up that rainbow above you

Who| Terezi Pyrope, OPEN!
What| Terezi is making it her job to "redecorate" the training area. After that arena, everyone could use a little more color. So she's putting it everywhere.
Where| Training area
When| About a week after the arena ended, timing can vary.
Warnings/Notes| Nothing yet!

Another arena has come and gone, leaving dozens of emotionally-troubled tributes back from the dead--and one no-less-emotionally-troubled Victor, she's sure. Pretty soon, people will start lining up to work on their skills for the next round. It's relatively quiet right now, though, as she stands in the middle of the training area. She's been here for three arenas now--not even the longest running member, and it's not any surprise to her that she's starting to feel run down. It's tiring, throwing so much energy into those death matches, only to be rewarded with yet another and another and another.

What she really needs, and what some of these other tributes need... is color. She remembers smelling the colors that the Initiate had painted on the wall the first time she came in here and how touching that had been. That was what they needed. Something to make them feel like people again, not animals. Primed with the paints from the painting station, pastel chalk from her personal collection, and the best of intentions; Terezi Pyrope gets to work.

At first, she just paints swirling colors, mixing paints and pastels and smelling how they work together. She trails across the wall, stopping by the knot-tying station to spill onto the floor with deep greens and browns. Once the paint dries, she scratches whimsical bits of flora overtop, things she's found on her own forest floor. On the other side of the station, she scribbles a forest of tall blue-trunked trees crested with fuchsia canopies. She stops on that wall and restarts again across the room by a rack of weights, reaching up on her tip-toes to scribble mountains and clouds and fearsome beasts flying across the sky--dragons of every shape and hue, big and small. After spending no small amount of time on that, she stops and moves to a new place. This time, she's not working off of personal memory, but she tries anyway. She haphazardly spreads blue paints across the wall, dripping onto the floor. Overtop, she scribbles every manner of sealife she can think of. There's a lot of empty space when she's done--places for other people to fill in what they want.

Near the center of the area, she leaves some paints and chalk and a scrawled note on the floor in big bright letters.

It reads: "Help yourself."

[OOC note: There's one closed thread in the comments, but the post itself is open to anyone who wants to reply!]

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Kain has just finished a couple of warm-up rounds with his regular spear, and is going to find something new to try when he notices the painting.

Dragons. The sight of them makes him think so much of home, of his place as a dragoon. He's met a dragon here, so far, but it seems that they're not really a common sight in general. What he wouldn't give to be back on a mountainside like the ones depicted, with the wind in his hair, dragons soaring by overhead...

He stands staring at the painting for a long time, as transfixed by it as if really was an image from his world. He hadn't realized until now just how much he misses home.

Terezi pauses in one of her other drawings when she notices someone standing in front of the other one. She tosses her chalk into the pile she has next to her and dusts her hands off on her pants, creating a new set of dusty print to accompany the old ones and the paint splatters.

"Do you like it?" she asks, coming up to stand next to the strange man and just slightly behind him. "You've been standing here a while, so I'm going to assume that you do."

Staring at a good landscape from a high vantage point was one of the things Kain could do for long stretches of time. Even though this wasn't real, it put him in the same state of mind anyway, very lost in thought. So he was a bit surprised that someone had approached by the time she spoke up.

With a glance over, he notices those colorful splatters on her. "Yes... it reminds me of my home world. Did you create it?"

"Yeah! There were a lot of dragons on my world. I collected their colorful scales and put them on my walls. It is a sign of a shitty and terrible civilization that they don't exist at all here."

Seriously, whoever created this world obviously wasn't paying attention to the bare necessities. Colorful dragons? Should have been priority number one.

Kain nods agreement. There's a lot wrong with this world, some very obvious problems that affect their wellbeing. But the lack of things he always assumed to be normal everywhere, like dragons... it's hard to get used to.

"Those scales can make for great armor, as well. It's truly unfortunate for this world..." It's good to know that he's not alone in missing these certain aspects of home. "Dragons are also common in my world. As a dragoon, I have a close connection with them..."

For once, Terezi is glad to have found someone who knows what she's talking about. There's so many people who have no idea what dragons are like or that they even existed at all, it's hard to find someone who can really relate.

"A dragoon?" She tilts her head in a quizzical fashion. She's never heard that word before. "What's a dragoon?"

Ah, right... they might have dragons in other worlds, but even in the last place he was in, not everyone had been familiar with the concept of dragoons. Kain eyes one of the relatively larger dragons, admiring how much it reminds him of one he'd encountered some time ago.

"Dragoons are a specialized type of knight. We train in the use of the spear, and in jumping through the air... our style is overall meant to emulate the dragons. There was once a time when we even rode them into battle."

"Rode them?" Terezi's ears perk up at that, her interest clearly piqued. "My ancestor did that... Rode a dragon into battle." She pauses, hesitating on that particular point. "Well... it wasn't so much battle as chasing down criminals. The result sometimes ended up the same, though." Trolls never went down without a fight, after all.

"Did you ever ride one? Did they have names?"

It seems that their worlds had a lot in common beyond just the existence of dragons. People here, the native people especially, don't seem to understand it at all. They have no concept of the things that were just a regular part of his own world.

"My own ancestors were behind the founding of the dragoons, and began the practice of riding battle dragons, long ago... but when our kingdom turned to airships, dragons began to be used less." He still can't help but feel a little... was it jealousy?... toward the Red Wings and how glorious they'd become. If he could, he would restore the dragoons to how they'd once been. "They all had names, yes... although by my time, we no longer had one of our own to ride. I at least had a chance to ride upon and care for my father's dragon... and I've encountered plenty of wild ones."

Terezi is a rapt listener at this talk of ancestral dragon-riding. It's one thing that she's disappointed at missing out on. She is pretty sure that riding on the back of a dragon was pretty much the best experience ever.

"Why not just tame a wild one, then?" she asks. "If you were back home, I mean. Or did the dragon have to give you permission?" That would make sense, she thinks. That's sort of how dragons worked in her mind. She doubts that Pyralspite would have let anyone else on her back, save for Redglare herself.

"Yes, they would have to agree, and that isn't always likely. Most of the wild ones were too vicious to be tamed." Hence they'd ended up having to fight many along their travels. Just like humans, they all had their individual traits that made them either worth allying with or not. "I suppose it would be easier to tame one who's much younger, though. Young enough not to be set in their way..."

Now more than anything, it's starting to sound worthwhile. Maybe that's the path he should be taking, finding a dragon to raise and restoring the dragoons. Too bad he can't do anything about it here. "I'd consider it now if I could ever return."

Terezi nods. She wishes she could have that option if she went back. But the only thing waiting for her back there is a lonely meteor, a sparse amount of friends, and...not much else. Certainly no dragons.

"You should do it--if you can find one willing. I had a dragon once...for a little while. I wish I could have flown with her, but we didn't get that chance."

"That's too bad that you were never able to fly with her... it's an experience unlike anything else. Perhaps you could when you return?" If there'd be a chance for that, anyway. He doesn't know how the dragons of her world would take to that, after all. They had to be very much in agreement or else there was a great risk to trying.

"...I don't think so." Terezi frowns, her attention averting away from Kain and up towards the dragons she chalked onto the walls.

"She died, just after she hatched. It was kind of inevitable, given the situation. And there aren't any other dragons left anymore. Not that I think I would want another one. It wouldn't be the same."

"I'm sorry to hear that." It made a great deal of sense to him too, though. It could never be the same, especially after that kind of a loss. He knows that all too well. Also, the dragoons haven't been the same since they lost their tradition of raising and riding dragons. "For your sake and the dragon you lost, but for your world's loss as well..."

He doesn't think he should pry, but he wonders what could have caused such a widescale loss of a whole world's dragons.

Her world's loss. That actually makes her laugh a little in that shallow humorless way. Her world's loss, indeed.

"Thanks. I guess." She doesn't know what else to say about that. It feels strangely personal to tell him that her world is dead, too. Normally, that wouldn't bother her, but he's so solemn that she's not sure she could take someone taking it at one hundred percent face value. It'll be a hard day when she can't laugh at the tragedy in her life anymore.

"What's your name?" That seems like a safer topic. "I'm Terezi Pyrope. Legislacerator-in-training."

As a dragoon, it's definitely a very major loss to think about. They might have stopped riding them in battle, but at least the dragons still existed in his world. Even if many of them were dangerous and threatening, he couldn't bear the thought of them all dying off.

"I'm Kain Highwind, dragoon, as I already mentioned. " Though there's something that he's unfamiliar with. "What is a Legislacerator?"

Kain Highwind. Terezi turns that name over in her mind, until finally she decides that she likes it. It has a nice ring to it. There's something thematically appropriate about it, she thinks.

"Legislacerators are like... lawyers, I guess. Or bounty hunters. In my day, they would fight their battles in courtblocks, attempting to ferret the truth out of suspicious evildoers. But back in my ancestor's time, they were more like bounty hunters. Once they had a mark, they would bring back the criminal dead or alive to face judgment for their crimes. My ancestor was... a prodigy for her time." Terezi sounds proud when she says that, like a bit of that honor had rubbed off on her. "It probably helped that she had a dragon, I'm not going to lie about that."

Although the concept of “lawyers” isn’t anything he’s familiar with, Kain definitely appreciates the idea of bounty hunters. And also in general of something law-abiding, that enforced such laws even… that’s a job that sounds worthwhile. After all, keeping the order of things was more or less what he and the other warriors of his world did in their way.

“Many circumstances can be resolved more easily with a dragon on your side. We surely would have been out of this place long ago if we had dragons to fight for us…” If only there were some way to make it happen, though it seems unlikely at this time. “It sounds like you come from an honorable family line, if that was their duty. It takes great strength to carry out tasks like battling criminals.”

"Yeah, it does," she agrees, though with a little more somber of a tone. For all of her pride, she knows well enough how her ancestor's story ends... and she honestly can't say that she has the same strength to walk in her footsteps, regardless. Not with the way that her feelings had leaned.

"She was really great. You could have met her. She could have told you more about what our dragons used to be like." Among other things... But she figures that's the most immediate topic.

"I'm sure I would have liked that. She sounds like someone who I would get along with quite well." Kain turned his gaze again toward the drawing, looking over the various dragons depicted there. "It certainly makes me wish I could return home sooner, to be in a world where they're common. It sounds like the dragons of your world were... magnificent to see..."

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And I'll blend up that rainbow above you

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