Logs:By Myself
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| RL Date: 28 July, 2008 |
| Who: Milani, N'thei |
| Involves: High Reaches Weyr |
| Type: Log |
| When: Day 6, Month 4, Turn 17 (Interval 10) |
| Nice night, what with spring coming on and the evening just starting to get chilly and everything settling down into the quiet at the end of the day. N'thei doesn't quite fit the complacency of the scene, alas, with a bowling-pin arrangement of a half-dozen beer barrels waiting for him at the edge of the tunnel to the Snowasis. He just comes out of said tunnel pushing a rickety-looking wooden dollie in front of him, causing a lad from the lower caverns who'd decided to relax on the patio to start, stammer, and scurry off hurriedly. Milani is loitering. From the way she's dressed, she had the day off. Trousers. Tunic. Big oversized sweater that is probably a man's. She eyes this little bit of moving stuff around with unveiled curiosity and a brief sympathetic grin for the scurrying lad. "Restocking is usually my job," she calls over to him, head tilted a little to the side. The skittering footsteps don't even have N'thei batting a lash; if he stopped to take notice every time someone ran away in his presence, he'd never get anything done. So he's just loading up the next barrel, crouched down next to it to fit a bit of rope around the bulge and keep it from tilting loose on the way down the tunnel when Milani chimes in. "Is it." He straightens up, uses the dollie to help pull his posture erect. And he steps aside, one hand opened invitingly toward the barrels; "Lift with your back." Milani just laughs and steps forward. "Well, I usually get big strong men to do the lifting part for me, but I can try," she says and bends to try to shift one barrel. Fails utterly. "Seriously, do you need a hand though, N'thei?" N'thei watches Milani's efforts with the expectation of failure written all over his face, tolerant of her attempts but certainly not expecting her to get anywhere with them. Then, no big surprise, he answers, "No." The dollie tilted back, cradling the weight of the barrel on its two wheels, he deigns to clarify the blank syllable-- "If I did, think I'd be smart enough to get someone who wasn't outweighed by the barrels two-to-one, neh?" "I think you're plenty smart, but maybe sometimes too independent for your own good. So if you'd like me to /get/ you some help, you know, I'm helpful. I can help with that." Can we /say/ 'help' one more time?" And she leans against the barrel she failed to lift, both elbows propped and chin on hands. "This has to be good beer, yeah?" And she peeks sidelong down the sides of the barrels for the stamp. "Stole it from L'vae's cousin myself, so damn sure better be." N'thei ignores the help-talk, doesn't even glance at Milani while she rattles on about her helpfulness. Once the barrel's tipped up and the weight's mostly on the wheels, there's not much more than guiding it down the uneven slope to the tunnel; gravity does most of the work for him from that point. Bound for the backroom of the bar. Non-chalant as she pads after him: "Oh is that what happened to Dolpho's ale? Hm. And here it is heading for the Snowasis. Or was that a really bad joke?" Her hands dive into her pockets and she slips ahead a little to hold the door open for him. Helpful. Yes. Very helpful. N'thei essays a droll smile at her to acknowledge receipt of the comedy in her assistance there, pushes on past her and into the bar-- more crowded, louder, cheerier, one of the few places where his entrance doesn't have much affect on things. "Thought it was a really good joke myself. Have to work on my sense of humor. --That too." He nods to indicate the hinged portion of the bar, a place that can be flipped up to allow access behind the bar. Milani waits until he's cleared the door so it doesn't hit him in the ass when she slides to the hinge-flip-thing and flips it up obligingly. "Make another one and I'll see about laughing this time. You know. To be supportive and everything," the assistant says cheerily. "I guess it's a certain /kind/ of funny," she muses after a moment and then waves to one of the barkeeps with a sunny smile. The back-room already has quite a few of these barrels, so N'thei must have been at this for a while. It's easy, mindless work, exactly the kind of thing to keep his hands from being idle without boring him to tears. Wheeled over, parked near the corner, he adds this latest to the collection, far more focused on his task than on conversation. As usual. "A Weyrleader and a headwoman walk into a bar..." But no follow-up. "Only one walks out ... which?" Milani provides a follow-up, doing a quick count on the barrels in here though he might not catch it. She doesn't move fingers, only eyes over the lot. "N'thei ... don't you have other stuff to do than move barrels around? Or does this pass for fun these days?" Might not catch it. Might not care. It's not actually stolen ale, looks to be very much on the up-and-up, stamped with a little local brewhold a stone's throw from the Weyr-- good but not great. "What other stuff." N'thei pauses from unstrapping the barrel, crouched again, and peers dubiously up at Milani for one brief, apparently good-humored moment. "Don't you?" Might be that's not why she was counting too. Habit maybe, to just count everything. "Weyrleader stuff. N'thei-fun stuff?" Milani hazards both guesses and looks down into his face. "End of a rest day," she explains. "But I do have a good book for a little later." She nods towards the barrel he's unstrapping. "There's only a few more of these. Maybe you could teach me a lesson or two at cards?" "Maybe I could pull my teeth out one-by-one with my fingers too, that would be almost as fun." With a golly-gee-excitement in his voice, N'thei lights right up with a smile that looks ridiculously out of place amid the pantheon of his usual expressions. He tosses the rope-thing back over the dollie and wheels it about, heads back the way he came for another load. "Ale, isn't it? Your drink of choice?" That's more his usual tone, more like a casual question that everyone knows has nothing to do with a casual purpose. "Wow. I'm not sure which is scarier, you saying that, how you said it, or that smile," Milani states a little wide-eyed but not non-plussed as she holds the hinge-thing open again and then the door. "Cider, actually," she corrects and falls into step with him back towards where the ale kegs wait. N'thei smiles that manic smile one more time, happy enough to snap any minute now, then snorts and resumes a more suitable expression. Serious business. "Cider. Right." Up the ramp, to the kegs, time to repeat the process. "Just beer with fruit in it." "Well actually that'd be fruit beer. Cider's just apples. No hops." Milani ambles along hands clasped behind back. "I like the hard stuff. But I don't really drink much. It goes to my head fast, even though I'm tall, so I try to mostly keep my head clear." N'thei looks at Milani somewhere in the middle of her discourse on the affects of alcohol on her person, and his eyes glaze over visibly, very much on purpose; he waits a while after she's finished, while he's just loading up another barrel, getting the strap in place, straightening back up again. "Why do you talk so much about the most useless crap." "I can't help myself," Milani replies non-chalantly again, leaning against the wall while he loads up, since she can't physically help with that part. "And maybe too because my brain just kind of fires through all these ideas. It's like a flood in my head sometimes. All the thoughts." "Wouldn't it be easier sometimes just to--" N'thei's eye twitches at the corner, a little twinge that ends with the forced smile. Probably, he was about to say "drown in them," but he presses on without going there, tilts the dollie back, resumes his pack-muling down the tunnel. "Write them down then." "Would you be totally surprised if I say I do? And that it doesn't actually stop the word vomit?" Milani's matter-of-fact about all this. "Though I have gotten a bit better about holding back some things. Just not everything." She trots ahead again to open the door for him, apparently determined to play junior hostess or something. N'thei exhales through his nose, briefly peeved; yes, he would be surprised, and he frowns for that reason alone. Right when he ought to say thank-you for holding the door, he adds a subdued glare instead-- "What might help? Take all those pages where you wrote stuff down. Then shove them all in your mouth all at once." And he passes Milani, behind the bar again. "That would work temporarily. But I'd spit them all out eventually. But if you're saying you want me to shut up right now, a simple, 'Shut up, Milani' will do" Millie informs him blandly. Does the hinge-lift again. Because apparently this is the way it's going to be. "Trying to be more approachable." Is it working? One of Milani's hands lifts, slowly waggles back and forth. "Good effort. The follow-through is still a little shaky. You'd have to stop glaring, glowering and so on too. But I'll cut you some slack on those because I know you." Also, N'thei should work on things like not sounding annoyed as crap with people. "Charitable." He leaves the barrel along with the other ones, dragging the dollie back the same way once more. It really is that mindless. "Really have this under control here." Trying. So. Hard. "I try," Milani replies to that and follows him back out again. This time though, she doesn't yammer at him, just goes along with. "Okay, so I guess I'm a little bored." She finally blurts out. Helpful in turn; "Take up knitting. Heard it's a great way to kill time." N'thei had found himself a lovely solitary activity, one that no one else would want to do and most people weren't really built for. And now here's Milani~! "Don't you have friends or something." "I suck at needlework of any kind," Milani says with an easy shrug. Back down the tunnel again and she's just not /leaving/. "I do. Even with how things were. Have been. I still count you among them." And there's a little lift of her chin at the end of that, as if daring him to say something. "Here's the thing." N'thei stops in that little back room, with the keg still attached to the dollie, and he turns around abruptly to face Milani. His steps intend to herd her back out the door between the bar and the room, to shoo her out of the way. "I? Have things on my mind, would like to sort them out by myself. Like to work by myself, to be by myself. By myself, see? That's the trend. --So you?" He flicks his hands in a shoo-shoo way, indicating her, the door, the exit, the big-wide-world that he's quite sequestered from right now. "Should go play with your other friends now." Intent winds up backfiring and Milani backs into the wall instead, sighs and rolls her eyes at herself, starts to sidestep into the doorway. "Okay. You just have fun working things out with the barrels then," she says simply and regards him for a moment. "But if you get tired of working things out all by your lonesome self -- " she breaks off, lifts her shoulders. Helpfully holds the door for him again and fingerwaves as he passes. "See you, N'thei." N'thei, cursed; "Undoubtedly." He actually has to go back and get his dollie, so he does that first, then wheels it off to collect his barrels and enjoy-- yes, enjoy; he enjoys it, and not even just stubborn-enjoys it but actually-enjoys it-- his time alone. With beer. That he won't drink. The neuroses multiply exponentially. |
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