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Snippet #2727918

located in Aires, a part of Birthstone Spirits: The Second Revival, one of the many universes on RPG.

Aires

None

Setting

Characters Present

Character Portrait: Tallyho Abel Character Portrait: Heather Devereaux Character Portrait: Ron Muller Character Portrait: Haru Sinwood
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A couple of people stepped in to help mediate the argument, but the most confusing “savior” was one of the strangely dressed young men who threatened the old farmer with a “BAM BAM” before sauntering into the house. The blonde looked on questionably as he walked off, not totally sure of what he meant. And if she were being honest, the farmer didn’t look so keen on what was going on either. Nonetheless, he took a step back, mostly out of a dazed confusion, as the young man breezed through.

Tallyho still felt reluctant to go. The scar-faced woman looked trustworthy enough and Tallyho would be more apt to trust another free person than any other type of person, but for some reason she had trouble surrendering herself to this moment, even after all the unbelievable decisions she was forced to make today. Sure, yeah she was totally fine with running on a path of stars and into a big pillar of light, but this completely normal farm house? Well, she’d have some thinking to do, certainly! Tallyho was a pretty self-aware person (almost painfully so) so she recognized the ridiculousness of her relative skepticism, but something about this particular experience felt like it was going to last with her forever. And at this point, it would be a kick in the shin to die on the farm in the middle of nowhere after surviving an actual cyclopean attack.

The woman with the intricate hair, who Tallyho dubbed her consequential companion for the day, announced her entrance into the house. Her intentions seemed good so far, Tallyho felt, and the blonde would have felt pretty bad if she left this perfect stranger alone in what could become a peculiar situation. Many of the others began making a similar decision, and one by one they marched. She scanned the area for other forms of civilization: There were miles of wheat fields, a few wooden houses scattered in the distance (most likely reserved for the farm hands) a mountain range to the north, and a wide expanse of sky. She wasn’t sure if this place was going to be a safe haven, but there was really nothing left for her to do. At least, Tallyho figured, their host seemed to be the quiet type—a personal quality that she wouldn’t mind enduring after such a hectic day.

The woman held the door open for Tallyho as she did for all of the others. Once everyone entered, their hostess, who as about as petite as Tallyho if not slightly taller, shimmied toward the front of the group and cleared her throat for their attention.

“We have three guest rooms in this house with 4 beds in each. You may take whichever room you like,” she announced. She looked down at the dog, nodding and offering a tight line of a smile to Emerson. “If you don’t mind, we can set up a nice haystack for your friend in one of the sheds in the back? I manage the house and I have the illness to dogs,” she said, gesturing toward her nose. She nodded toward another house keeper in the dining room who curiously peered at the unusually large influx of people entering her domain. “If this is fine, Nan over there can take care of your friend, yes?”

Once that was settled, she turned to hike the stairs, the skirt of her plain cotton dress knotted up in her tightly clutched fist. “Follow me please,” she hummed. And the group was lead up what Tallyho felt like was a surprisingly steep flight of stairs. She heaved quietly, trying hard not to betray her slobbish wheezing. She definitely wasn’t the athletic type.

The woman led them down a narrow hallway and gestured toward the three doors at the end of the hall. “Choose any room you like, I will be bringing you fresh clothes. You might want to visit one of the bath houses nearby before dinner. They are separated man and woman. To find them go downstairs to the back of the house. There will be two sheds—left for ladies, right for men. Dinner will be at the turn of light in a couple of hours, please make yourself comfortable.”

And with that, she left.

Well that all seemed easy enough, although it was a little off-putting to Tallyho that there were exactly enough beds in the house available for each of them.

The blonde retreated into the room at the very end of the hall. It was a simple set up: Wooden floors and walls with a pair of parallel beds on each side of the room. But to someone who spent their entire life sleeping in the back of wagons and in tents, it all felt a bit extravagant. She was drawn to one of the beds near the window, and her slender hands traced the wood finish of the bed frame with care. Then she pressed a hand into the mattress, shifting all of her weight into the mass of packed sheep’s wool. The fabric of the sheets were light and airy, perfect for hot summer nights. This
 This was nice, Tallyho thought, and her expression showed it. She smirked slyly, lips curling tight as she held back a flash of her teeth. And in one very sudden motion, she thrust herself onto the bed, limbs spread carelessly and unaware of whoever might have been watching.

It didn’t take long for the woman to come to the room with a bundle of folded clothes. She slapped them down onto each bed haphazardly, only pausing to differentiate men’s trousers from women’s dresses, depending on who occupied the other beds. “I will bring shoes later,” she announced.

Tallyho gathered the dress into her arms: a peasant’s garb, light and airy, perfect for the heat of a summer in solace. It looked a bit too Solacian for her tastes but it was a free thing and that was enough to get her at least a little giddy. Plus she could move around in it if she had to make any mad dashes. One could have called Tallyho a material girl of sorts, not in the classic, I have a white horse and the latest fashion sense, but in the sense that any sort of food, cloth or knick knack she happened upon really got her kind of excited. And if TLC ever produced a Hoarders: Aires edition, Tallyho would have easily been the pilot episode's star if given the chance to collect all the things she wanted. And it was kind of a curse (or blessing) that she lived in a community that frowned upon personal ownership, squashing any opportunities for the blonde to act on any of her hoarder-esque predispositions.

The dress was muddled with crisp wrinkles and seemed to have been folded for some time. She hugged the wrinkled ball of fabric, already stoked at the idea of claiming something so simple as her own. Then she made an immediate break for the bath house.

She took a deep breath as she entered the women’s shed. The air was thick and moist and hard to breathe through, but it was no different than any other public bath houses in western Aires. She was greeted by the attendant, an older woman, who sat hunchback between a large caldron of boiling water and another filled with cooler water.

When she saw the blonde enter, the old woman carefully submerged a wooden bucket in the pot of boiling water before hobbling over to one of 4 separated stalls. She dumped the water into the small wooden tub and repeated the process (mixing the boiling water with the cold water) until the tub was filled and at an acceptable temperature.

“Ye lot are very lucky to have this man taking care of ye,” she hummed in her thick, outdated common. “I was near m’sixties when m’son died. The only person taking care of me.”

The woman dumped another bucket.

“When ye don’t have nowhere to go ye come ‘ere
 Y’know?”

In the tub, Tallyho thought long and hard about what the woman said. She sat comfortably in her bath stable, white knees pulled up to her chest. She thought that they looked like the two moons of Aires, small crescents of light rocking above the water.

Why were they here in this space for people with nowhere to go?

When Tallyho finished her bath and draped herself in her new cotton dress, she perched on a bench nearby the pump well next to the bath houses, hoping to dry her head with what little light the setting sun could muster before the moons took their shift. Though it was warm outside, the relatively cooler air made her scalp tingle and her pores gasp. She always got to bathe regularly, but that was the best bath she had in a long while. She sat alone, unsuccessfully smoothing out the wrinkles in a dress far too big for her. It swallowed her boyish figure unforgivingly, but seeing as she got it for free, it didn’t seem very reasonable for Tallyho to ask for a different dress. As she peeled back the damp hairs that curled and clung to the back of her neck and the sides of her face, she wondered what they would have for dinner.