Sea Lion Shores Sister’s in the drive in movies, brother’s at the old high school.

AW but keeping timeline vaguey

Rain fell in soft sheets along the coast, sent here and there by a persistent but puffy wind. Raleska combed the beach, nosing along the high stranded patches of kelp for any tidbits to settle her stomach. 

She’d not stayed in Rusalka very long. Every time she came across @Wintersbane’s scent a fit of rage sunk in her belly, followed by confusing thoughts of feebleness. Deciding she’d use the bulk of the week to scout, Raleska found herself along old shores she knew well, yet hardly loved.

Curtains of vapor and rain drift back to reveal a pewter shore. It was staying-inside weather, planes-grounded-and-delayed weather. Even so, seagulls volplane along the water.

Miranda narrowing his eyes, facing leeward. His feet crush the kelp, sprawled out in dense knots and spirals straight out of Kekulé's dreaming. Erzulie had mentioned that the orange ones were good for healing. He takes a mouthful on a whim, and it's with this mouthful of orange kelp he sees a dark wolf higher up inland. A Rusalkan maybe ... but their walk was hawkish, frustrated, if he had ever smelt bitterness, this was it. Rusalkan? he asks, shouting through the wind and rain and the seaweed in his mouth, which he promptly drops.

The sharpness of the brine did Raleska no favors when it came to allowing her to detect another scent on the wind, but luckily the battered shore was wide and open, and Raleska possessed a keen pair of eyes. 

She watched the cobbish man as he prowled close. Her observation was that he was made more for windswept ranges than seatrawling — but he possessed exactly the sandbitten type of pelt that afforded him good camouflage here. 

Standing to attention, Raleska cast an ear towards the man as he shouted over the wind. Much of what he said was muffled by the fireweed in his jaws, but she got the gist. Yes — who are you?

Her eyes gleam from a dark face, sharp as ammonia. First, her ear sweeps towards him, the rest of her head following in a lovely display of inertia. Miranda, he supplies. The new guy. Among others, he reflects, remembering the elephantine man who had been watching the ocean as if it was about to leave forever. 

He's unsure of how she will react to him. He knows so far that in Rusalka, 'new' is a euphemism for an object of great distrust. There's a great deal to be skeptical of in this world, and he finds it hard to keep accusation out of his face more often than not -- as the gray condensation in the sky thickens, he draws closer. The seagulls from before are gone. Who are you?

Miranda. Almost immediately, Raleska responded "That's a girl's name." The comment slipped unashamed between her sharp teeth, an observation equally as pointed. How had he come by that name?

He was not far off that in Rusalka, new recruits were often looked at with something akin to coldness. Particularly if they were male. A passing glance over Miranda's boxy frame had Raleska pondering if he too would throw his spear into the ring -- only time would tell. "Raleska." She answered unflinchingly. Now came his turn to comment on her name, but he likely wasn't anywhere near as negative in mindset as Raleska. "Are you following me?"

A sharp hiss of surprised laughter escapes him as though he hasn't heard it a million times before, yeah yeah, it is a girl's name old sport, yeah, my mom was shit-faced, locker room banter along those lines, etc.

And what about it? He challenges. It was much preferable, he thinks, to being called Mister Day. It's a shame, he wonders how different his life would be if his name had been, say, Enzo, for instance. Any name that didn't almost unanimously trigger a double-take.

At first he thinks that she's said Alaska and his internal organs swing in a sensation parallel to vertigo, he'd be surprised if there wasn't an audible rush as his heart beats once, hard, he's a giant vein that swells and slumps with water pressure, capillaries flooding with dye in a real-time angiogram -- no, not Alaska, idiot. Raleska. 

Cool name, he manages, mouth dry. I was looking for some herbs. Erzulie told me that the kelp is good for wounds, is all.

You're used to people following you around, or something?

She'd hit a nerve. Raleska apprised him dryly. Almost approvingly at that, as Miranda immediately issued a soft-fisted and challenging rebuke. Fair play, Raleska thought -- and how often had he heard that his entire life? Surely she couldn't be the first.

A faint ghost of a smirk came and went along the twist of her muzzle. She was intuitive enough to pick up some sort of discomfiture, but the depth of it was unknown to the dark-headed girl. Explaining he was here on Erzulie's behest, Raleska's tension ebbed ever so slightly. "She likes the orange ones." Raleska offered unhelpfully. She didn't know the name, but she remembered Erzulie had used them as a balm on Raleska's injuries on more than one occasion. "I think those are right." Motioning to what hed managed to secure, Raleska kept an ear towards him as she looked up the coastline. Maybe she was used to being followed. Once you'd lived through a war or two, it had a way of sticking -- haunting you, even. "Just used to enemies, is all."

His heartbeat slows back to resting pace. He looks up to her then down to the kelp strewn about his feet like old clothing, then reaches down to nose through it so that the strands drape over his neck. Grains of wet sand streak his chin and he rubs it off futilely with one hand. And whose fault is that? 

The noise of rain, shhshhshh, was moving away from them and before long the clouds had thinned out just enough so that he could see the sun shining, muted through a layer of quivering white vapor. He shivers in the damp chill, thankful for the thick winter coat, sniffs once or twice. 

Must be a reason, right? For you all to be living on the edge of the world.

Distant howling. Wind or wolf, it did not matter.

Raleska watched as Miranda bent to the assembled kelp, draping them along his neck like ugly garland. She did not bother hiding the bristling of her pelt as his reply met her -- was he insinuating it was her fault?

A show of glittering teeth, clenched. Her muzzle wrinkled in unkind, withered lines. "Not my fault, if that's what you're getting at." Who the fuck was he, to accuse her like that? "We live on the edge of the world because people -- outsiders like you -- cannot let us live our lives in peace. Outsiders like you come, infiltrate our pack, overthrow everything -- and if its not from within its from without -- assholes on the beach who think we aren't deserving of our tiny plot of land. But thanks for suggesting there must be a reason and that reason must be me. I'm sure you make a lot of friends that way."

Man, had she done a 180. Blame the Caiaphas in her for that.

Before the last syllable leaves his mouth he already knows he's kicked a hornet's nest.

She gathers herself up like a swarm of them. Her searing eyes like wasp venom, alkaline -- he cringes under the onslaught, her humped and fur-splayed outrage. 

He's tempted to say but I wasn't suggesting anything -- he knows full well his subtext, the soft and evasive underbelly of his every word. Right now he feels too cowed, too ashamed to play pedant. But when he finally decides on saying I just wanted to know what happened, I guess, he can't help but let some defensive heat rise up into his voice, the sort of masculine refusal to self-efface that Raleska probably had seen enough of to last several lifetimes.

However experienced he was, however easy he found it to camouflage himself in a socialite herd or to find the tantalizing ridge of trapezius muscle which when twisted, would cause immense pain, all of that, 

it still took a great deal of effort to follow up with God, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to come off that way.

No sooner had her last syllable faded into furious silence had Raleska realized she might have overreacted. It was too late to take it back, so she would proudly own it -- sickened just a little bit by the twist of sick delight that came to life in her breast as she saw a flicker of shame darken his eyes. Good. Raleska was too proud to take anything back, and she stood with her fur on edge and needle-point teeth ready and waspy -- waiting for him to retaliate in that self-serving way men only knew how to.

Only he backtracked, offering an apology that instantly spoiled what little justified rage she'd held. Turns out for Raleska, it's kind of hard to be a dick when the person you're being a dick to isn't being a dick back. That crumbled the rest of her indignant rage like a house of cards. "It's fine." She said in the way women (and men) did, indicating things were not fine but we were gonna move past this, goddamnit. A heartbeat second later: "I shouldn't have assumed." That was as close to an apology as Miranda would get. "If you're gonna be Rusalkan long term --" Hah, was that a subtle jab aimed at him for being a male given men's track records in Rusalka? Who knows? "It's probably best you know the history anyway."

So yeah, you're welcome I'm being a dick.

Just like how those little altar candles were extinguished by those little brass candle snuffers and just like how scientists had proved over and over again that something couldn't be made from nothing, Raleska's anger is spirited away to god knows where -- all Miranda knows is that he doesn't want to be acquainted with that place.

Even fury fell under the laws of thermodynamics. But she was probably the closest thing to a perpetual motion machine he'd ever seen.

What happened, exactly? Erzulie told me there was nobody else around 'cept for the Firebirds.

The hermit kingdom of Rusalka: testing ground for dynamo after dynamo running on strife, turncoater and turncoated, memories of sieges, a country calloused with the criss-cross chicken scratch chaos of a battleground. 

Like old photographs of coal miners. Boiled down into something intense and concentrated, whittled and drawn.

Miranda's question provoked a laugh; smoky and bitter like the last chestnut left in a fire far too long. "It happened before that." Her gaze swept the misty sea, wondering if it was even worth telling this story again. Every time she reincarnated the tale, she breathed life into it anew;

life into her nightmares anew;

"My mother lived by the sea before I was born." Her gaze flickered lazily from stormy beach to Miranda, wondering if he had such a legacy. "She lived north, a brackish cliff forested by giant trees called Ankyra Sound. That was her home. " How alien the word felt on her mouth when she was but a vagrant: "First came a bear to chase her off, then wolves who took up the cliff besides her -- and then a bear again. I was but a few months old at the time when the bear came the second time."

And how that memory was seared into her, cruel and everlasting as a brand.

"We were forced uphill by the water. We went to a place with beautiful stones, and a beautiful queen met us -- but her heart was cold, and she turned us away. We were starving, and rain swept across the hinterlands in furious droves.

My father died during the move. Wouldn't you know, I don't think I ever saw rain until we were on the road. A flash flood; it stole him and my brothers away as if they had never existed." A slow blink accompanied by a soft exhale. What she wouldn't give to be held by her father again, scolded, even carried back to the den between his jaws..

"We made it to a plateau. They took us in, but did not love us. Eventually, it became apparent their leaders were soft -- my mother challenged their rule, and we were outcast." Raleska paused, inspecting Miranda with eyes too clinical to be called warm. "That is but the first part of the story."

"Have you ever starved, Miranda?" She allowed him a moment to answer, before she turned her cheek and peered at some distant thing in the rolling fog. "We did. My mother. Me. We went west, back to the shore -- and it was there my mother found Rosalyn and Erzulie.

Funny thing, that. Did you know, my mother and Rosalyn had been packmates well before I was born? No love lost there, between those two -- my mother would sooner sink a tooth into Rosalyn's spine than feed her, and I suspect Rosalyn held her fair share of embitterment." Yet it had never spilled over to Raleska. "We swung north again; my mother had an obsession with that place, you know. Ankyra. She held it in her bones, and now it holds her bones in it -- but we went home. Only, wolves had come to the cliff -- wolves of an order called Drageda. They harassed us, attacked us -- even stole Rosalyn from us. That is how her face came to be like that. Enemies right outside our home who would sooner kill us than let us live in peace." She grit her teeth. "We went one day to rescue Rosalyn - an invasion.

I watched my first death that night. Strange thing they don't tell you - I relive it every day. He died at sunset -- and not a sunset since have I closed my eyes and not seen the throat of my packmate ripped from him by wolves better called monsters than kin.

We prevailed, though." Raleska's muzzle lit in a rare smile which curved ugly and unkind around a thin snout: "Their leader committed suicide -- and like that, it was as if they'd never been there at all."

There was so much more -- but for now, Raleska stopped and waited for any questions.

She shared what little else she was comfortable sharing - Miranda was a decent listener, but after a time Raleska grew tired of talking. She closed her story with a bitter shrug of a shoulder and pointed back to Rusalka. It was nearing dusk, and she suggested they head home.

I tacked on an ending since I noticed Miranda was inactive, but if you'd like to continue this thread let me know <3