a single flame can spark an inferno [greentruth open log]

[dragon_rider]

WHO: Any Pleroma!
WHAT: Multipurpose Log for Pleroma! Preparation and training happening alongside the Firaseri festival
WHERE: Greentruth
WHEN: Firaseri, after the newbie introduction throughout the Firebrand festival
WARNINGS: none at the moment

🐉 WELCOME TO GREENTRUTH 🦕 While the first of the Aions to arrive in this generation had to traverse the misty, dangerous forests of Lohkimareen with little more than the clothes on their backs, the Aions after have seen a kinder arrival. After they've attuned to the Pleroma they are granted access to the largest settlement in the forest, Greentruth - a village where man has made its own peace with the wilderness and live freely despite the Regent's reign. Bolstered ever by the presence of their oldest Aion and guiding Visionary, Tehri, Greentruth acts as the main source of resistance agaisnt the Regent and is the safe have to all Pleroma Aions. As the new Aions find their way in Greentruth for the first time they may find an air they wouldn't suspect given the heavy conversation their seniors have brought to the table. The villagers of Greentruth are having a celebration of the Firebrand . And as wild as they prepare for the hunt, painted up and jovially amongst their fires... Perhaps for some it's not nearly as wild as the dinosaurs and flora that act between wanting to eat them or steal scraps from their trashcan. Rest assured - While the people of Greentruth take this time to celebrate and their celebrations may be infectious, there are still preparations being made for the upcoming days. (You may find in the links above all relevant information to Lohkimareen/Greentruth for easy reference!) I. CAMPFIRE STORIES The many communities of Lohkimareen are uproarous the night of the First Kill. While the various communities are often seen coming and going between each other, much of them gather at the central fire the celebration. A largescale feast is held in its owner that all are invited to - And if you're worried about what kind of meat it is it might be best not to ask (after all, eating dinosaurs while in Greentruth is very, very common). The night is long and the participants are energetic. They take the time regaling each other in stories, both fanciful and historic of ancient times. Fire is a keyword that is most frequent in all of them. Perhaps it's time to listen and learn of Greentruth's history? Or perhaps you - yes, you - think you can regale them better with something more. II. THE HUNT The First Kill's feast comes to a close and the villagers of Greentruth do not simply cease. They continue to go out and into the forest, decorated in paint from the firebrand, bringing back their kills - the meat, bones, and leather from each intended to last them through the months to come. For those hunters within the Pleroma Aions, perhaps it's time to get out some pent up aggression - No one will fault you for taking out a kill if it's the intended process, right? Or, perhaps, wanting to test your mettle and train in your own way you join a group of fellow Pleroma into the wilderness to find your own hunt - It's a test of survival and skill. Just... Don't eat the plans or get eaten by a plant while you're out there. III. PREPARATIONS The Firebrand festival is a time for mobilization and while some members of the Pleroma may be drawn to the hunt and the campfire, some may yet have concerns of the dawn yet approaching them. While some may make their own preparations in Godsblood, Hiccup Haddock keeps his promise of preparations in Greentruth as do any others who offer their support in preparing for the days ahead. If you're in need of armor or weapons, simply seek one of them out. Or go to the armory itself and see if Greentruth can outfit you with something for the moment - but know they usually request you bring it back as they're scarce on supplies themselves. Or perhaps you want to find ways to help yourself! In the lower area of Greentruth, in a gathering spot, any Pleroma Aion is welcome to come and help - Be it to discuss exit strategies, inquire on armor, help to make survival packs or anything in between. If you're lost in need of want to do, Hiccup will gladly put someone to task or you can ask someone to assist in what they're doing. IV. TRAINING You would think that growing up on an island where waking up to your house being on fire every day from dragons would teach Hiccup not to put the obstacle course on the ground floor of anywhere - but, again, dragons destroying everything? He's not so worried about dinosaurs either. As promised, near the roughly built and still in progress obstacle course he's been making for Rand, Hiccup can be found to help with weapons training (or any other teacher who wishes!). Characters will find swords, axes, bows and arrows, shields, and lances to be practiced with. While they're clearly ones that aren't in the best quality that Greentruth can part with for the moment they're still sharp - so be careful (no one taught him with a blunt sword and he's not about to change that). Characters will also find many targets from wood-shaped people, circle targets with increasing difficulty, and so on. The real prize of their training area is the practically set up obstacle course - Using both the land and created obstacles, the plan of the course is simple: get through the course with limited injury while "killing" kenomas and not civilians. Essentially, two different kind of targets pop up from time-to-time throughout the course. Some of them are kenoma-shaped darkness blobs and the others are gloomy-looking civilians! To "pass" you got to get through without harming a single civilian - while also getting through all the booby traps with very little injury. Some of them act as a rope trap tying you up, others like a bear trap... And then others swing logs at you or shoot an arrow at you from various directions. Occasionally, if you're acting like it's too easy, someone (Hiccup) may be encouraging some tiny dragons to flit in and out of the range of your vision to confuse you. Be careful! While you're free to test your mettle against the obstacle course as much as you want - please don't break it - you may also find a teacher to help you! Hiccup himself will be around in the mornings and afternoons for a couple of hours, but there may be just as many people around to teach you whatever you may wish to know.

Comments

[dragon_rider]

[ Hiccup makes quick work of jotting down the rest of the measurements. If he sensed any of her discomfort, he doesn't show it - Perhaps feels his own in it. While he's approaching this meeting with Hayame as a person there's a distinct difference in the usual. Using the frame of how he'd handle helping dragons feels awkward with someone who isn't a dragon and communicates as a human. The part of him that would usually geek out wants to ask questions and while some may be helpful to their needs, the more polite (sensible) part of him presses it aside for their current needs.

Which are just as important and keeps those seem gears running as he hands over the notebook - He leans forward at first to try to glance over her shoulder at them, but his leg creaks and he shifts back to a more neutral stance. When she pauses he's almost certain he's going to fairly snap at her for it, but she doesn't. The question is only a slight surprise, not strange in the means, and he nods with a wave of his hand: ]

Skilled enough. I've been making my own supplies since I was a kid.

[ Not at all a lie - though mostly in the beginning the stuff was made because he couldn't tell anyone about riding a dragon or the like. So he shrugs, ] We Berkians are skilled at most household things, kind of have to be with the whole village burning down all the time thing...

[ Not that Hayame really cares about that, but it's still a point Hiccup chooses to make: ] Give me your best shot, I like a good challenge.

[ He says as if the village burning down wasn't usually a challenge. Which. Maybe it wasn't. ]

[warmare]

[Hayame was at the very least very familiar with the concept of villages burning down all the time... even if hers were from lightning strikes, kitchen fires, and the civil wars that had long plagued the nation. Not quite... dragons.]

... I do not know if it is a challenge.

[She's never interacted directly with leather workers, she does not know what sort of embossing would be the more difficult to do, but... Anything that means something to her. She had very little. She had been a possession, not a possessor, but... even though it was given to her by humans, nothing she had chosen...]

Then, this... if it could be embossed somewhere upon the leather...

[She "writes" something... no, even though it is text, the way she puts it on the paper is more like drawing, something she knew and was replicating by shape rather than actual knowledge of which strokes formed the characters. Either way, it ends up with "Hayame" (速魚) in the corner of the page.]

This is my name.

[Maybe that's all she had left. It was still something.]

[dragon_rider]

[ She doesn't know if it's a challenge. Hiccup's hands find his hips, a neutral stance for him as he listens and waits. He's not sure what about her reminds him some of Astrid, but the old Astrid. Before the war ended and before Stormfly. Something in the seriousness... Like only seeing what was right before her? He remembered Astrid well; the stoic warrior wanting to defend Berk and prove herself.

...Not that she wasn't still any of that. Or was (he won't think in was especially about Astrid and Toothless). But there is something there he can appreciate about the nameless woman he can't quite place.

So when she shows him something - A name that's as much strokes as it is picturesque. Not something they'd use on Berk. They were a symbol of people on the Barbaric Archipelago, finding dragons that symbolized their village's strength. But he thinks he can understand some in this matter even if he doesn't fully understand it. He nods, quietly before decisively, helpfully deciding to ask:]

... So, what is your name? Does it have a meaning?

[ Because even if he does know it's far better introduction wise to let the other say what it is. ]

[warmare]

[Now that she has drawn the characters that shape her name, memorized from the wooden plaque upon her stall door rather than any actual understanding of letters, Hayame makes to hand back his book of paper pages, now with the rough sketch of the armor she was accustomed to alongside it.

Part of the reason that she has become such a local legend, of sorts, amongst the rebels of Greentruth, is precisely because they didn't know her name. She has been stingy with sharing it to those she does not respect, and stingier still with respecting. A part of her didn't want to be known, to know anyone else, because to do so would be to accept that this is truly her fate...

But he is doing her a service, and even asks... He understands names should have meaning.]

... It is read "Hayame".

[Finally, she answers, as if she knew what she were talking about. Her groom had explained the meaning to her at her naming when she had turned three, and she still remembered.]

It means "quick fish".

[And, added quickly, as if sure she will be misunderstood or mocked, if the meaning was taken literally,]

That I might be as fast and skilled as a fish is when moving through the water.

[dragon_rider]

[ Hiccup half expects the woman not to give her the meaning or her name - She seems the private sort, but if her name is something that means something to her... He wants to do that justice. Especially as someone who hated his name and learned later that there was no name better for him. Even if outsiders mocked him for it.

He's thus pleased when she does grace him with it, grateful even. Turns it in his mind. Haddock is also a kind of fish, so in that sense it's really not that weird of a name for him - He has no place to judge in names, afterall. Which he thinks, minutely, that she might think he will when she tacks on. So he feels obligated to say: ]

It's a good name. Way better than Hiccup, for sure. But my people aren't exactly known for their good naming conventions.

[ Given their tribe is also called the Hairy Hooligans, why ever would it be. At least it's half an introduction in its own right - a willingness to let Hayame find his own name stupid or silly. Because it's still, rightfully, he pretty stupid name even to him. He thinks about it and moves to grab the pencil. Sketches a simplified version of a river and a fish jumping over it: ]

You can say no, but if you ever want something more, you know symbol-wise - What about something like this?

[warmare]

[... It's a good name, he says. Maybe it is. Hayame only knows that... Even though the armless broodmare that had borne her had not given it to her, as most were given their names, even though it had been chosen for her by a stablemaster... It was hers now. Names were just...

She looks down at the sketch on the paper that he shows to her, her lips thinning into a displeased line.]

I do not have a crest. ... And I would not choose a fish if I did.

[She'd thought her understanding made that clear... It was a metaphor, nothing else! (And only nobility and great warriors bore kamon.) She doesn't want to actually be associated with things people ate, just... how quick they were in water. Her brother's name would make a far more poetic image, "the spread of the evening", so many others... "the wind in the pines", "little plum", "sacred fields", "small skylark"...

Which brings her to... the far more important question.]

... Why is your name "Hiccup"?

[That was. Uniquely unfortunate.]

[dragon_rider]

Okay - Okay. [ Hiccup's quick to reply - First in a quick 'okay, got it' measure and then softer, more gently. Half coaxing that he understood, but continuing on without missing a beat: ] But say you did, what would it be? What would you want it to be - You know, theoretically speaking.

[ It doesn't sound like she cares so much, but he's... Very much a symbolic person as it were. Everything always had more meanings to him, and in a way he wants her to find something for herself. Truly hers? He wonders about the name, if it's simply because it's something that she's made her own - Or maybe he projects some there, in that way.

But he's distracted from her question - A fair one from the people here. Heck, maybe even on the archipelago where there are so many far more normal names. Or maybe not. He laughs, sheepish and more to himself as he grips the journal and pulls it back - using it as a means to turn away. ]

Well, you know... By our traditions parents name their children in a way that's supposed to scare off the gnomes and trolls. [ A breath: ] And then sometimes they choose to name you because you're the runt of the litter. So you know, two very extreme measures and all. Opposite sides of the coin, but I'm still pretty sure Hiccup is better than Snotlout.

[ He realizes it makes it sound like a bad name and maybe once it was - It's still a name that people make fun of if they don't know it and well... It still has its own meaning: ] But you know, it's not all bad.

We've always been known for what a Viking is - stubborn, strong, angry, larger than mountains. [ Metaphorically and clearly he's well... Not. ] I struggled a long time to be the perfect Viking for my father but then I learned - hiccups don't have to be a bad thing. We're strong in our own ways. There are things we can do others can't because we look at things in ways no one had before.

And just because the world sees us one way doesn't mean we have to see ourselves that way. Why, I'd say, because people would look down on us that pushed us even more to show them they were wrong.

[ He shifts at some point, from speaking of all hiccups in the present to in the past. Choosing and knowing that the boy who hated his name had learned better of it. Even if it doesn't really change anything at all.

But Hayame probably doesn't really care about all, he rambled, so he's quick to add with a flourish of his hands: ] Anyway, that's what it means to be a hiccup.

[warmare]

[What would she want it to be, if she did have a crest of her own? Perhaps it seems to this man that she does not care, but that is...not quite it. If she does not care... it is because she has never been able to waste time thinking of things that were not possible. Family crests were for those born into nobility or illustrious warrior bloodlines, not commoners... or even lower, creatures born into servitude to another race. She had never heard of a jinba being granted one, even for meritorious service.

... She also might not be an intrinsically creative person, but. Her lips thin, she struggles for a response that isn't simply another rejection of the idea, but. Thankfully he answers her question.

And thankfully he wasn't named Snotlout? What misfortune...

Though it is not her culture, Hayame doesn't... not understand what he says. So he was named not with a name to frighten monsters and beasts that might steal children from their beds, but for being stunted or small at birth. Another misfortune, for a child to be marked so for life. She thinks of Hiruko, the legendary "leech child" of the tales they tell of the beginning of the world...

She also understands at some point that this man is no longer talking about just his name, but his philosophy. He is doing her a service, and so she listens as respectfully as she was capable, her tail swishing slightly behind her dun rump and a thumb rubbing into her wrist, wondering how scholars wrote like that. (By not writing like she had, that was how.) But even when he has finished, concluded his speech...

Hayame is not exactly comfortable with emotion, with knowing others in a way that opened them up to knowing her. She could say something meaningful, perhaps sympathetic, but what she goes with is--]

I would be shocked to see the men of your village, if you are a runt.

[Perhaps the silence and pause before she spoke would at least indicate she had understood well enough, even if she did not pursue it further, instead holding up a hand to the level of where her breasts might be if she did not bind them so hatefully tight.]

The two-legged men of my world are rarely so tall.

[5'5" was considered tall amongst humans, though she'd met one or two who hulked larger. This man had nearly two heads on the average man.]