welcome

[Darastrix]

Zira wandered though the caverns, taking a somewhat roundabout way toward the dining hall. He wasn't especially hungry yet, and he was still getting a feel for the tunnel layout. Besides, it was nice and cool, unlike the weyrbowl. He had to admit, though, he much preferred the climate at Peregrine to that of Southern. He'd never really gotten used to the heat and humidity there. (Zak, naturally, felt the opposite and was already dreading the coming winter).

He peeked into another room, and marked it as "storage" on the mental map he was attempting to create. It was a little difficult; so much of the tunnels looked the same to him. But that's why he was doing it now, rather than closer to mealtime and running the risk of getting turned all around when he was starving.

Bet this one's storage, too, he thought as he poked his head into another room.

[tuathade]

Alex was stuck. Again.

He really needed to stop doing this shit.

His intention had been to visit Taavi and Vityai in the kitchens, and to possibly find that wonderful girl with the cupcakes again. But Alex didn’t patrol the Lower Caverns often enough to know the way by heart, and he’d ended up taking the long way. During his fruitless sojourn, he’d passed by a door that smelled interesting. Alex had long since figured out the trick to opening doorknobs with a foreclaw or teeth, so he’d opened the door and poked his head inside… It was a pantry, full of ingredients packed up neatly for storage. There was another door on the other side. It would only make sense that the back door would be a shortcut to the kitchen, right?

Well, it turned out to be locked. And what’s more, once he was inside, the door behind him swung shut. So he was in a dark, slightly chilly room, with two closed doors, and very little room to maneuver. This was not a good situation.

Granted, he wasn’t technically stuck. He was a thousand pounds of hybrid and the doors were just wood. But people got pissed when you broke their stuff, and Alex had enough people pissed at him already. So he was just trying to figure out the best way to get himself turned around and re-open the not-locked door again… when light flooded back into the room. There was someone standing in the doorway; Alex could only see a silhouette, but he addressed it immediately.

Don’t close the door!

[Darastrix]

Zira gave a startled yelp at the unexpected voice in his head and scrambled backward at the sight of the rather large…dragon? backside in the storage room, smacking the back of his head against the opposite wall. Ow. He placed a hand on his chest and breathed out slowly, rubbing his head with his other hand. Okay, dragon. That was all right. …why was there a dragon in the storage room? How had it gotten in there? Why hadn’t its rider come to let it out? Weyrlings playing hide-and-seek, maybe?

“How did you get stuck in there?” he asked, once he’d calmed enough to remember, oh yeah, he could just ask him. That was a strange-looking dragon from this angle. Bulky. Black…ish? Or was it a very dark garnet? But…those were female, or at least the garnets were. And he thought blacks sounded female. This one had a male mindvoice. And wait, they didn’t have any weyrlings right now. The weyrling barracks were full of…of….

Hybrid!

He went pale, eyes wide as saucers, his mind shrieking in panic, urging him to flee. And he couldn’t for the life of him remember which way led out of the tunnels. He couldn’t even remember how to move. He just pressed himself back against the wall as if he could somehow sink into the stone away from the awful thing.

[tuathade]

Alex backed his way out carefully, wings tucked tight to his sides. It was rather a point of pride for him that he didn't knock down anything from the shelves... Or, well, nearly anything. Towards the end, a wing-thumb caught on a bag of flour and sent it tipping down onto the floor, covering the lower half of the terribling with white powder. Well... crap. He nudged the flour bag back upright with his nose... damage already done, but at least the bag was now upright again. More or less.

I was trying to get through the other door, he explained to his accidental rescuer. Who was... pressed against the wall, rather like one of those weird new chameleon flits while trying to blend in. Except that Alex had thermal vision, so he could see them anyway. (He had already eaten one, but it tasted horrible and made him feel kind of ill.) And even if Alex didn't have thermal vision, this boy couldn't change color. So all the squishing-against-the-wall was doing was making him look very uncomfortable.

Well... Nonetheless, Alex turned himself all the way around to examine the boy more closely. He snuffled a flour-coated muzzle in Zira's direction, but all that accomplished was making him have to sneeze from the flour in his nose - the hybrid did at least remember to turn his head so Zira didn't end up coated in flour and hybrid snot. Thanks. Having to break the door would've been messy. Messier, anyway.

[Darastrix]

Oh Faranth, it was a hybrid. A real live hybrid. And it was backing into the hall with him. Zira made a strangled sound in the back of his throat, bracing himself for…. Well, he wasn’t sure. But something! Probably. He didn’t know, and that was part of the problem (aside from the whole hybrids being creations of offworlder scientists doing things they probably shouldn’t do to create things that probably shouldn’t BE).

And now it (he?) was talking to him. Like a dragon. Very like a dragon, as some detached part of his mind not preoccupied with being properly terrified realized. The hybrid didn’t talk like how he’d heard wher speech described. And it, thankfully, didn’t seem to be the one Missa had mentioned having a face full of “squirmy things.” And it was…covered in flour? When had that happ—oh yes, when he was mostly busy trying to back into the unfortunately solid wall while it backed into the tunnel.

He flinched when Alex snuffled at him, not quite sure what the hybrid’s intention was. Then it turned its head and sneezed, and it was kind of hard to keep up a feeling of sheer terror of something that had just sneezed on a snout full of flour and was still partly covered in said flour. The way it…no, he; that voice was definitely male. The way he kept talking wasn’t really all that fear-inspiring, either (though it’d have been nice if his mindvoice was a bit smoother). And his eyes were blue…that was good, right?

Zira relaxed marginally and swallowed a couple of times—his mouth had gone terribly dry—and gave a little cough as he tried to get his vocal cords functioning again. “Y-you’re welcome,” he stammered, feeling that being polite to sources of fear was likely a very good idea. He was still pressed against the wall; at this point, he thought his knees might give out without the support. “Um.” He reached into his tunic with one trembling hand and pulled out a handkerchief. Come on, Zira. Missa’s met hybrids and nothing bad happened to her, and she’s a lot smaller and non-threatening than you are.

“D-do you need help cleaning that off your face?” he asked, holding up the handkerchief, which conveniently doubled as a white flag.

[tuathade]

Whoever this guy was, he still looked painfully nervous. Privately, Alex wondered whether this was his first time meeting a hybrid… Or if maybe he’d had a bad encounter with one of the younger ones. Small as Nemesis, Nyx, Elizabeth and the others were now, Alex could see how a stray encounter with one of them could leave people with a certain wariness. Especially towards a fully-grown hybrid of unknown abilities. But he was attempting to be polite, which counted for something. More than the jackass up at the lake, anyway.

At the offer of the little white square of cloth, Alex gave Zira a strange, puzzled look, glancing from the Harper to the handkerchief and back. No, I’m fine. I can manage. And, sitting back on his haunches, he lifted a foreclaw and calmly began to brush the flour off, grooming himself rather like a feline. Really, humans. Perhaps they had been conditioned by the relative helplessness of baby dragons to assume that all dragonkin needed human assistance?

…Or maybe the Harper had just been trying to be polite, and the hybrid was just feeling defensive. Alex had needed help with the door, after all. (Although he still maintained he could have sorted himself out, had Zira not come along.)

What were you looking for? he inquired curiously, indicating the storage room he’d just left with a little jerk of his head over one shoulder. I’m assuming, whatever it was, probably wasn’t a hybrid.

[Darastrix]

Zira tucked the handkerchief away, privately relieved that the hybrid was capable of getting the flour off of himself. He didn’t think he was quite ready to put his hands that close to a hybrid’s mouth, even if he was acting as, well, normal as any dragon he’d encountered thus far. And you know what, he’d just about had the life scared out of him, so he was just gonna sliiide down the wall and sit for a few minutes. Yes. Sitting felt much better. The hybrid hadn’t tried to hurt him, and with the way he felt right now, if he did attack, his chances were pretty much equal sitting or standing.


“Ah, no.” Definitely not looking for hybrids. “I wasn’t really looking for anything,” he replied, blinking up at Alex. How did one recognize tunnel vision in an actual tunnel? He swallowed again. “I haven’t been here very long—I’m a new Candidate—so I was just trying to learn my way around, before I actually had to find something down here.” He should have asked Missa to come along.; her bubbly optimism would be very welcome right about now.

[tuathade]

That makes sense, the hybrid agreed gravely. Peregrine Weyr was full of all manner of weirdness, and you never knew when you would need to get somewhere in a hurry – preferably without running into said weirdness along the way. Alex had been in the same position not too long ago. These days he more or less knew his way around, with the exception of the Lower Caverns and other areas where hybrids weren’t really welcome. I was trying to find a better way to the kitchens. Most of the main tunnels get crowded around mealtimes, which… poses a problem for me. Needless to say, when Alex took up most of the hallway all by himself, having a lot of people around would just make it needlessly claustrophobic.

He wasn’t sure why the strange boy was suddenly sitting down, though. Alex bent his head down so that he wouldn’t loom over Zira quite so much…. Which unfortunately had the unintended side effect of bringing his teeth closer to Zira’s face. But he wasn’t really thinking about that. Are you feeling all right?

[Darastrix]

Teeth. Teeeeeeth. Pointy and sharp and close to his noooose. Okay, that wasn’t as funny as when Missa has said it. Still, the thought did almost make Zira want to break into giggles of the hysterical type, but all the conflicting feelings buzzing around his head dampened it down to an anemic smile instead. The hybrid didn’t seem so bad—he was even asking if he felt okay!—and really, he wasn’t any scarier-looking than the dragons or whers. The eyes were strange, though; they didn’t seem to change at all. But all the rumours and his own imagination and the wrongn—his imagination. Exactly. Missa’d met them and seemed to like them (though she liked everyone, it seemed), and people had bonded to them, and this one was right here talking to him, so what did that mean stacked up against rumour? And now that he’d met one, he kind of wanted to try to give this hybrid a chance. Even if he did still feel a little faint.

“No,” he murmured, putting a hand to his forehead. He was going to give himself a headache on top of everything else if he didn’t slow his mind down. “I’m sorry. I’m not very…brave about a lot of the offworlder things here, and I’ve only heard things about hybrids; I’ve never met one of you. The idea scared me, and then there you were out of the blue and I probably would have run if I hadn’t been too scared to move. I’m still a little….” He held out his hand, which was still shaking a bit. Maybe he was oversharing, but he thought he should at least be honest since the hybrid was being decent toward him.

[tuathade]

…I see.

Alex’s muzzle – and, as a result, the teeth – withdrew immediately. He lifted his head, curving it back into the best approximation of a serpentine that his short, wherlike neck could manage. The very tip of his tail twitched back and forth, but the rest of him was quite perfectly still as he eyed that shaking hand with his head slightly tilted to one side, ears canted back. The mindvoice had gone carefully devoid of emotional inflection… Not that Alex was tremendously expressive on that front to begin with, but now more so than before.

Look, I’m just – going to go this way. He flicked a paw in the direction of where he believed the kitchens to be. Or, if they weren’t that way, then at least he would be able to find an exit to the Lower Caverns. One or the other. And you can go the other way. I may be an ‘offworlder thing’, but I’m not exactly interested in eating Candidates. Or terrorizing them.

[Darastrix]

Though he wasn’t sure how to interpret hybrid body language, Alex’s change of inflection wasn’t lost on the Harper. As far as music was concerned, Zira’s only ‘instrument’ voice, and he could pick up on changes in tone and the like easily. He was glad the teeth were a little farther away but…. Oh. Oh no. He’d hurt his feelings, hadn’t he? Alex hadn’t done anything to deserve that, and he’d just rambled without thinking. And he was supposed to be learning to be good with words.

“Wait!” he blurted, flushing with shame. “I didn’t mean it like that; I wasn’t saying you were a thing. Just—“ He gestured helplessly for a moment, as he kept rejecting explanations that involved the words ‘everything’ and ‘anything.’ ‘Things’ was Right Out. “I’m sorry,” he finally murmured. “I should’ve thought how to phrase it better. And I'm very sorry if I upset you.”