thenashira | Verse 1: The Stone-faced Flower In Ice

In the month leading up to May, and now on into it, Natalia Koutolika has had her entire life upended.

Gone are the vicious tutors of home, smaller dictators following behind a larger one! Vanished, the spectre of being turned out, starving in snow. All of the familiar things from home are gone, to be reconstructed as best they can in this new place, this... Chalra City.

Everyone else flourishes. Sergey, especially, has taken to his new home like an ermine changing his coat. Her father and mother find work and joy in the immediate.

Her mother takes to making home-made knits and clothes to sell; this little cottage industry has its word spread immediately, and people come for custom orders of good, strong clothes, ones that can be mended and re-mended and carefully taken care of for a lifetime. And if the people she makes them for need advice or special fitting or have peculiar requests, she does not complain. What would be the point? They asked for custom clothes. She gives them custom clothes. What they do with others is none of her concern.

Her father captains a fishing vessel, on which her cousins, Vanya and Aleksey, turn tidy profits out of trawling with a net. Perhaps he transports other things. If he does, he does not speak of them to Natalia or Sergey, at least, not where he thinks they can hear.

And Natalia... Natalia... Struggles. While so many of the things she was told of her own country turned out to be lies, so many of the things she was told of places outside it seem true. The mercenary nature of everyone. The strange, passing styles that address nothing. The willing blindness of people around her.

And yet-- somehow-- it works. It continues working.

Her heart, were it not already frozen, would be troubled. Instead, she is visited by how nonsensical everything is in the city, and seeks to find out more about the country she has come to. Where does the food come from? How does everyone get by somehow? How did they find such a windfall of technology? Do her fellow students really have problems with basic set theory, or is that all an act?

I: Pins
There is one thing she's familiar with, here or anywhere else: getting around limits on personal expression. As such, she did take a bit of mother's ribbon, and carefully sewed it on to the strap of her approved satchel. Now, of late, she has found that pins are allowed, so long as they do not, in fact, appear on the outside of it.

As such, she has a few pins she's affixed to the inner flap.

They're almost certainly knockoffs. She can't afford to spit in the general direction of Fancy Dan's, or whatever the place is called. But she has a shop and a button maker and has seen the designs around. Why not make knockoffs?

Besides, Mother made the ones with the especially cold stare, and Aleksey had patterned the skull one off a bit of graffiti he'd seen once. She... Couldn't bring herself not to wear them, really, though it likely marked her as a bit of a poser.

II: Rime Scene Investigation (Neos)
Neos has been laying low, as ordered, and yet, something about this particular disappearance had rankled her. And so, she knelt, trying to figure out what bare concrete could tell of this vanishing.

Another minor monster? Already? This was getting troublesome, wasn't it...? She gathered herself up and extended her senses. There must be something more here...

Including, it seemed, a friend. She waves, once.

III: Library Time.
In the immediate wake of learning what she was-- who, arguably, she was-- Natalia retreated to what she had hoped would remain her sanctuary-- Everwave's library, where she had plenty of references to look up whatever she needed. She'd hoped to look into Nautis's story-- surely something that drastic, which happened mere centuries ago, would have been recorded?

Alas, it looked like she'd have to go looking for proper archives and primary sources for that, and she wasn't entirely sure where to begin, being new and therefore unfamiliar to Chalra City.

Still, she wasn't sure she trusted Nautis. Laying low was good sense, but...

She crosses her arms and twitches her lip slightly and draws up several game incentives, trying to figure out Nautis's angle if it wasn't true, or wasn't the whole truth.

But... The problem with this being her preferred hiding spot is that everyone already knows where she hides, and so now, she is having to defend against random students who saw how well she did on the mock exams at the end of April, looking for tutoring.

Among which might be you! or you might be there to rescue her. The choices are yours, and yours alone!

IV: Wildcard
Feel free to use any of the other bits I posted for flavor to jump off for a thread!

Threaded | Flat

Ms. Carassia doesn't exactly exercise the same amount of authority as most teachers around here, but that badge of theirs (with a set of genuine Dan Flashes pins stuck in the lanyard, of course) still means that people afford them some level of respect. And so, firm but quiet, they approach the table that one of their newly-decreed favorite students has set up at and begin ushering away the other students.

"Okay, everyone, I'm sure Natalia would be eager to help you all with whatever you need to learn, but let's just let her study on her own for now, all right?" And they bring themself closer to Natalia's chair and smile as the throngs slowly begin to disperse.

Once the two of them are alone, they look down, the feel of their smile switching from something in their worksona to something more genuine. "So this is what suffering from success looks like. May I sit with you?"

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