Watch Where You Wander [Closed]

[Behn]

Timestamp: Day 32nd of Spring, AV 511

It hadn't even been ten whole days since Behn left the Wilderness, where he felt was truly his home. No, he was in civilization now, finally chased from the doorsteps of Ravok by guilt and self-preservation, driven to start a new life, to forget the old, to fight the pain and replace it with something worthwhile. Behn hadn't lived in civilization for roughly seven years, and even then it was the chaotic streets of Ravok. A place he never understood, and made a mistake in settling in for the sake of his lover giving birth. She wanted to settle, and weak as he was, gave into her impatience that would ultimately lead to her death. Behn was different now, cold, suspicious, bitter. He roamed the streets of Zeltiva, pacing without destination or even a clear mind. He was searching that mess of memory and intelligence for something, a plan perhaps. He wanted to feel some sort of joy in life, not a new family. That would only shatter what was left of the shell of Behn's life. He needed something new, something valuable, worthwhile. A job wouldn't satisfy, despite knowing he would dedicate his life to it and doing it well. He needed something that he would have enjoyed had this tremendous tragedy never happened to him. What was something he always wanted to do? There was a number of things. As a boy, he teased himself with the ideas of training, breeding, and selling canines. He could make warriors, hunters, guards, tackers, who knows what else was available. But it had been so long since that appealed to him. In his early teen years he imagined politics. He knew little of it, but knew he'd enjoy the power, keeping a city stable and strong, doing what he could for everyone he could. Yet, he was a man now, working towards the age of thirty, and never had he spent a day in some form of education. Not a school of any sort (though he was in Zeltiva, should that be his goal). He had always wanted to visit Zeltiva for this early aged dream, but now that he was here, he saw nothing especially scholarly that intrigued him. Education, politics, they were out of the question now. But what about a ship? Behn never gave much thought to roaming the seas, trading goods, selling merchandise, smelling the salty mist of the ocean. He spent plenty of time swimming off the coast of the Suvan, he knew he loved the water. Why not on a ship then? Perhaps, if he could find some way, he would. He heard Zeltiva was as notorious for it's sea-worthy vessels as it was it's university. Perhaps he was meant to come here after all. Behn continued to tease himself with ideas as his legs guided him aimlessly through the Zeltivan streets. He wasn't paying attention to where he was going, not that it would have done good since he knew so little of the town already.

[Tshaka re Hafra]

Tshaka checked her hand again. She unwrapped the bandage and saw the gaping hand wound from a couple of days ago. She wanted to swear to herself to not kill for someone she'd never met again, but knew she would. The more people she could keep from being corrupted the better. She wanted a beer, but would have to wait. She was late getting to the docks, she didn't even know what her duty today would be.

She spotted a man who was clearly lost and out of place. New people always intrigued her so she followed him trying to come up with a way of meeting him. She settled on one and watched him turn a corner onto a oneway street. She ran through an alley to get ahead of him. She got the corner, waited, and then walked right into himself, bouncing off his chest and landing on her butt. "Watch where you are going!!!" she got up and started to storm off to see if he would take the bait.

[Iasc]

Iasc was enjoying his stroll from the university to the docks. He had found the waterfront to his liking since his recent arrival to the city. He had come for the university but stayed due in part, if only a small part, to the docks. He loved to just sit down by the sea and look at the ships, the sailors and anything else he could. On occasion he would bring down his mandolin and listen to the sea, playing along to it’s natural rhythm and getting lost in peace and serenity of the place.

There was something magical and mysterious about the ships which were moored there. Iasc knew that they had been to far off lands many times. They had seen things that he could only dream about. Never before had he considered such sights, back in Syliras. It must have been the city, the university, the docks. It all spoke to him in a profound way and a portion of him wished to travel on the open sea to discover knew lands and to gain new knowledge only to come back to warmth and safety of home again.

“Home”. He took a moment to consider the word. “Do I have a home?” He asked himself. It certainly wasn’t the castle he had left, that much he could be sure of. He wanted to call Zeltiva his home, wanted to embrace the city, but he felt that he couldn’t, not yet anyway. He had only been there for a season and he knew that he hadn’t even scratched the surface of what this majestic city had to offer. He could say one thing for certain though: this last season was one of the happiest that he had had in long time. He had spent many years dwelling all alone, coping with his trouble himself, but at that moment he felt that he was truly happy because he was doing what he loved to do. All he wanted to do was learn new things and seeing the sea everyday made his mind crawl with the amazing things that he could possibly learn in Zeltiva and beyond.

As he rounded a corner on his way to the docks he noticed two people collide with each other. A man who seemed to be lost in his own mind, as Iasc himself regularly was, and a woman with six arms. He was sure that he seen the woman before down beside the ships but he had never really paid attention to her, even though she had four arms more than what he would consider normal. All the people blended together into one he felt.
As they crashed into each other the woman fell to the ground. Iasc did not make a move to help her up. Her six arms seemed to be able to handle the job well enough. She proceeded to shout at the man, leaving Iasc rooted to the spot just a few feet from the two of them. He felt very awkward standing there but he was also unable to move for some reason. All he could do was watch the scene unfold before him.

[Behn]

OOCI assume Tshaka has six arms, if it's four, feel free to correct me. Behn grunted as he and some stranger, probably a normal citizen of Zeltiva, one who understood the streets and better than to wander without sense of direction or with cloudy mind. Behn frowned as he stumbled, though she didn't provide enough of an impact to send him sprawling, as he did her. He stared at her a moment and reached down to help her up, but wasn't too surprised to see her jump up on her own and start storming away. Behn sighed. "Sorry. I'm not from around here." Behn just watched, silently as the six-armed woman began to move away furiously from him. Six arms... Behn wasn't sure what he would have done if she had been human, though it was obvious she was no such thing. Humans scared the hell out of him, but something he didn't even know about, that was a whole new level of mystery, intrigue, and fright. Suspicion was high, and would have been straight up paranoia had she not moved away from him so quickly. That was fine, if she was going to leave him be, he could keep his nerves about him, he could continue his... aimless wanderings. Perhaps he could find something of use for himself. Behn, despite having the logical and acceptable idea of turning and wandering off in the direction he came from, thus away from the already departed six-armed woman (she reminded Behn of a Spider, maybe even a Black Widow, scary thought), he stood there, staring. He was completely awe-stricken. Frozen. It wasn't every day you met a Black Widow-woman. Behn, after a few moments, lifted his hand to scratch his bare chin. His eyes wandered briefly to a young man nearby, who also seemed to be staring at the woman with six arms... or was he staring at Behn? It was difficult to tell, yet either way was uncomfortable. He wasn't used to being stared at or bumped into, shouted at, or even having contact with people. Hell, the last person he could consider a friend he treated no better than a bandit, always eying Reymon like a thief after his life. He was a scholar and a child, yet Behn barely found it in his heart to feed him. Trust never came. Behn tossed a glance at Iasc, which he pulled away from fiercely once they made even the most brief of contact. Behn had to move, he was feeling a panic twisting knots in his stomach.

[Tshaka re Hafra]

Discouraged by the lack of response from the man, Tshaka emboldened herself and decided to do something drastic. She had seen the odd man staring at them as she turned to storm off. He looked vaguely familiar yet, in a passerby Deja vu kind of way. She turned to him, eyes like sabers, giving off a very strong aggression, and stomped over to him. She tried to bore holes through his head with her eyes she did, totally on a whim, the most drastic thing she could think. She placed her top two hands and pushed her lips into a passionate kiss, at least on her end. Her middle hands were laid lightly on his chest, while her lower set were resting on his hips. She then did what she heard in every princess fairy tale and bent her right leg at the knee, lifting the foot upwards.

She pulled away and stormed back to the first man, "We should go! He will be too confused to understand!" Then she decided to lie. "I know who you are, and why you are here. I have a gif..." she dramatically looked off into the distance, "Theres no time, we must go now!" She gestured frantically down an alley trying to look frantic and scared, neither of which came naturally to her.

[Iasc]

Iasc looked quickly from the man to the woman, speechless and utterly confused. The former had acted normally, as if it had been a simple collision with another human, at first but began to look just as dumbfounded as Iasc once he realised that she had six arms. While he was completely scared, paranoid and bewildered by the situation, the youth also found his curiosity piqued by the woman. “What is she?” He wondered to himself. “Clearly not human.” He had little time to follow his train of thought before she began to storm off.

She turned around in her anger, only to come face to face with Iasc. To the young man it looked as if she was going to start shouting at him. Her eyes seemed to made of dagger, ready to stab him. He couldn’t understand why she would do such a thing. What did he do, apart from interrupt this already strange situation. He braced himself for the barrage of words that he thought was going to come from the woman. He didn’t know how to handle angry women, or women in general for that matter, and he found the fact that she was about a foot smaller than him even more terrifying for some reason.

The shouting, however, did not come. He, instead, received a kiss from her with all six arms on him also. Even in the best of times he felt uncomfortable with people touching him so this came as quite a shock. He did not react to the kiss, he couldn’t react, even if he had wanted to. What else could he do? He was completely out his comfort zone, a total and utter invasion of his privacy is what he might have considered it had the circumstances been different. The truth was that he had enjoyed the kiss very much. Such intimacies were unknown to him, having always considered them distractions from his need to gather knowledge.

The kiss was short and sweet, barely lasting a moment. After it the six armed women quickly withdrew and walked back to the other man as if nothing had just happened. She claimed to know the man but it was clear to Iasc that he did not know her. He remained standing in the same position, ready to gauge the man’s reaction.

[Behn]

The city life was already getting to him. Behn felt a twitch in his hand as the woman stopped and turned around. He felt the hairs on his neck rising as a chill infected his spine, crawling up and down his body with a frigid nervousness. He was still breathing slowly, but only because he was forcing himself to do so, inhaling slow and deep, exhaling the same. The woman moved to Iasc, who seemed to be nothing more than a bystander until the spider-woman kissed him, and did it very convincingly. Iasc didn't exactly appear as willing to enjoy it, or perhaps he wasn't human and just standing there was his way of showing his affection. Behn looked down at his hands, his bow was there. He didn't remember drawing it, nor the arrow notched in the string. He wasn't aiming at them, but he had subconsciously prepared for the worst, as if he was in the wild again, playing a lethal game of 'cat and mouse' with a bear or pack of wolves. The woman, after effectively locking the man in some stunned expression with her lips (some sort of magic Behn was not willing to have cast on him, strode over towards Behn. His muscles tightened as he nearly lifted his bow at her, but her words stopped him. She held a message of warning, of something that didn't make sense but sounded strangely believable at the same time. "Who. Who the petch are you? And him? What is this?" Behn was stuttering. He held a similar expression as a dog backed into a corner might have, frightened but about to spring into extreme violence at any moment. Behn, without even being able to wonder if she was leading him on some ridiculous adventure or not (which she was), shot Iasc a dangerous glare. If she was trying to stop him from getting to Iasc, it could only mean that he was an enemy looking to get him. Behn lifted his bow, drew the arrow back, and bit down on his lower lip. He would follow Tshaka, she seemed to frantic to be a liar, but Iasc, he was suspicious, just watching them, plotting something. Behn didn't know what, but he didn't like it. Behn's arm began to tremble as the arrow was eventually released, though several feet off target. The arrow collided into the brick wall on the other side of the street, snapping the wooden shaft in two and falling to the ground. It was obvious what he meant to do, strike Iasc down, but his unstable fear obviously petched with his head, and his body wasn't responding well under this pressure. Behn turned and briskly followed the Spider woman down the alleyway, his breathing was panicky now, loud, painful even. He didn't recall ever feeling this terrible, this frightened. He left Ravok when his family was lost, but he never though civilization was so cruel as to cause this to him. Behn was reliving his loss in Ravok all over again.

It was like Ravok all over again.

[Tshaka re Hafra]

Tshaka turned and looked at the man. "Why is he after you! I may be able to see some things about you, but not everything, what have you done to have a notorious killer after? He stalks newcomers to the city, somehow learns their darkest secret, and then kills or blackmails them. What did you do?!?" she said as she lied, hopefully in a convincing manner. The man appeared close to the brink so she figured he would believe anything.

She wondered what the other man was thinking. Was he confused? Delighted? Scared? She wished he had kissed back so she could at least have enjoyed some too. She hoped he would follow, further assisting her in her evil plan to avoid boredom. She could only imagine what Behn would do. He looked like the easily manipulated kind.

She turned to Behn, awaiting his reply. To add further to his plight she began looking around like someone would be watching them. She wondered why she lied to people like this. Was it just to make her smile? Or did she find it mentally challenging? She shrugged, turned to Behn, "I need to know the secret now so I can keep him from exploiting it."

[Iasc]

Iasc was unable to grasp what was happening. What did this woman have against him. She would talk and the man would grow more and more frightened. He finally drew his bow and aimed it at Iasc. The youth was not expecting that and he immediately went into defensive mode. He didn’t have his own bow with which to counter the man and, so, he was a sitting duck. He watched the man shake as he raised the weapon. Iasc could tell that he was not going to be able to control his shot if he released it which made it all the more dangerous. At least someone who was in the right mind for archery could be somewhat predictable. This man’s shot could go anywhere if he fired. When the arrow was eventually released it was well off the target, not threatening Iasc at all. The man then followed the woman away from Iasc.

This was his chance, he had to get away. This was a very dangerous situation for him and he felt lucky to be alive. He didn’t know what he did to upset these people and didn’t particularly want to find out. So, when they had left down the alleyway, he slipped away, going around a corner but not before he picked up the broken arrow head. He began to make his way back towards the university but then he thought about the man. He had given off a strong feeling of paranoia and fear, and he seemed to in a very vulnerable state. Iasc thought about the lies that woman had uttered and how they had seemed to so easily corrupt the man. He couldn’t just leave. There was no way that his conscience would allow him.

He did not know much about the city but knew the way from the university to the docks pretty well and was familiar with neighbourhood he was in at that moment. Instead of making his way back to the old quarter he took a turn and then another. When they came into view again they were a big enough distance away from him down the alleyway. He quietly followed behind them keeping enough of a gap so as they would not detect him.

[Behn]

Behn stalked after Tshaka hastily, his head continuously peering behind him to see if the man was tracking him or not, and after several minutes of this, found a cooling comfort that he wasn't there. "I don't petching know! I've never been in Zeltiva in my life! A notorious killer?" Behn thought back, Iasc hardly seemed like a killer, hardly considered a grown man, not much about him that looked threatening either. Behn felt a strange feeling of suspicion, not just at Iasc, but now at the spiderwoman. Still, she seemed very certain about what she was saying. "That kid was a notorious killer? Petching gods! I should kill him. We should kill him. I'm sick of having shykeheads chase me out of town." Behn shook his head violently. He was having trouble believing that Zeltiva had issues just as Ravok. Ravok, the place he would love to see engulfed by the sea or burned to ashes. Zeltiva wasn't nearly as bad, but it was still corrupt if men like this existed. Behn pulled his gaze from the path behind them to Tshaka's eyes. His darkest secrets? That was an odd request, or was it more of a demand. Behn clenched his teeth, feeling a tremendous urge to get away from her, get away from the town, to run back into the wild and continue his self-imposed exile of societies everywhere. "I've done nothing wrong. This is all some misunderstanding. I'm leaving." Behn stepped pasted the six-armed woman and stepped out of the alleyway. He was now as lost as could be, not that he ever knew where he was. He needed to find an inn, perhaps a tavern to drink something. Behn wasn't accustomed to cities anymore, but he knew alcohol could calm him. Not even seven years of being alone could make someone forget this. He hesitated a moment, considering asking the woman who she was or where he should go, but he felt like he just wanted to leave all this behind him, pretend it never happened. Tomorrow he could plan his journey back to the Wildlands, back to his little home in the middle of the forest and live out his solitary life as a hermit. It would be easier on him than dealing with corruption and wickedness in men. Was easier better? Behn felt a twinge of pain in his jaws as he continued to clench, his teeth pressing against each other with such strength. He was anxious, he was worried about himself, his own wickedness, wondering if perhaps he could cleanse himself by cleansing others. That man, the Notorious Stalker and Killer, would he be a good start? Could Behn, maybe, clean the streets of Zeltiva a little before he left? He would have to be smart about it. Nobody would understand what he saw, nobody would see him for the hero that he was going to be. Behn, perhaps, was okay with this. A true hero wouldn't need approval to do the right thing. Just the dedication and devotion to see it through.