REEVE: I Miss The Mountains

[Anya Deila]

Anya had only been here for two days and already she wanted to run back home to her little place in the forest and hole herself up for days. She didn’t like being inside for so long. There were too many people, too much noise, too much conversation. So she gathered her paint supplies and bundled herself up in all the layers she had and headed outside.

It was dusk and the sun had just started to go down, leaving the light quality golden and soft. She smiled at the sky when the cold air caressed her cheeks. Opening her easel, she set it on the flattest piece of ground she could find, about twenty paces from the front of the building, facing the hills that were colored by sunset. A flat board of wood she had brought to paint. Paper was too flimsy. The weather seemed to agree, as small flakes of snow started lazily floating down, melting on her jacket and settling in her hair. Paper would have been soaked through. But wood; wood was strong.

The cold rush of air, the silence of outside, the lack of any other person in sight was just what she needed. The heavy fist of stress and doubt and nostalgia that had sunk down into the pit of her stomach throughout the day was washed away. She felt cleansed and pure.

For a few minutes, she didn’t touch a brush. She stood still, staring at the mountains, letting their beauty soak through her, saturate her until she could pour them out onto the wood and they would look true. A smile rose on her slowly-numbing cheeks as she stared. Vermont was so much more vast and open than her woods at home. But she didn’t mind the difference. Nature here and nature there was still the same amount of alive.

Soon, she noticed the sun sinking swiftly beneath the horizon. She had to start painting or the light would be lost. As she opened her paints, her hands shook involuntarily from the cold. It would make the actual process of painting harder. But it made her feel so much more alive.

Biting her lip in concentration, she took a blue glob of paint on her brush and started smearing it on the page.

[/blockquote]

[Reeve Rzeznik]

Cold.

It was cold.

It was too cold.

Clutching the handle of a cardboard box, Reeve used his free hand to pull up the grey hoodie he wore underneath his faux-leather coat. He exhaled, and the look on his face as his breath condensed into fog right before his eyes matched the agitated sound on his lips as he exhaled in the first place. Before his hand could leave the perimeter of his head, he scratched an itchy spot on his forehead. Whether it was truly itching, or just a reaction to the cold, Reeve neither knew nor cared to know.

As could be expected, the technopath wasn't a particular fan of the cold, or truly of any kind of nature. He had always been the type of kid to prefer to the indoors to the out, and today was certainly no exception. He needed something to keep his mind off of the cold. The first idea that came to him was to work on his new laptop.

The fact that the laptop was yet to be opened and still inside the box in his hand was hardly a hurdle for the young technopath.

Reeve took one last glance around the courtyard, to make sure there was no one in the immediate vicinity. Somehow, he managed to miss the blue-haired girl about to lay paint to canvas, because if he had seen her, he likely would not have began what he was about to do.

"01001100 01100001 01110000 01110100 01101111 01110000 00101100 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00101110" he muttered under his breath, and felt the resonance come back in his mind as the laptop obeyed his command, coming to life inside the packaging.

"01000110 01101111 01110010 01101101 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100111 01101001 01101110 00100000 01001111 01010011 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110000 01100101 00101110" he continued to mumble, closing his eyes as he did so. With his eyes closed, Reeve could actually watch what would have normally been appearing on his laptop's screen. The screen whirled with alphanumeric digits as he began to clear everything that Best Buy had packaged with it out, even the operating system. When he took it back to his room and opened the box, he would be given a completely blank slate, not at all unlike what he was just about to trip over.

"01010011 01110100 01100001 01110100 01110101 01110011 00100000 01110101-" he was halfway through his command when his trailing foot caught the bottom of the easel, sending it toppling forwards and snapping him out of his daze.

"Oh no," he spoke, sounding rather dispassionate about the whole thing, but reaching out to grab the falling easel, regardless.

[Anya Deila]

Anya was halfway through the mountains. She traced the outlines of their dips and curves with the tip of her brush, their shadows bringing the page to life. Their color drew from every tube of paint she'd brought, forcing her to look harder and blend until her page shined with the setting lights of the sun.

Her smile grew as she slowly covered the wood with paint, even as her cheeks started to burn from the cold. She knew, if she could see herself, that the roses blooming on her face would match the color of her red red lips. But she didn't care. The tips of her fingers after her fingerless gloves ended were turning slowly blue. But they worked well enough.

Her brow became furrowed as, again, she began to stare at the sky. Not at it, into it. The smile faded, and the left half of her bottom lip disappeared as she bit it in thought.

But, suddenly, she yelped with surprise as somebody clattered into her easel and it started to fall towards the ground. A hand grabbed it and righted it, but the force from the start of the fall caused all her tubes of paint to slide to the ground, driving into the snow in little self-made graves.

She didn't stop to meet the eyes of the guilty. She bent down, grumbling softly to herself, and wincing at the cold snow on her bare hands with every tube of paint she dug up from its hole. Honestly, she was more peeved with the interruption of her inspirational flow than with the fact that her paints had been knocked into the snow. But it would be alright. Whoever it was would leave, and she would be alone again with her paints and her mountains and her sky. And everything would be like it was before this little accident. There was nothing to get upset about, she reasoned with herself as she took some deep breaths of scaldingly cold air to calm her flustered emotions.

[/blockquote]

[Reeve Rzeznik]

While he had managed to save the easel, it would seem the paints wouldn't fare so well. Whether from the force of the trip, or from the counter-motion of Reeve pulling back the easel, the paints all clattered into the snow beneath them. Reeve quietly fixed the easel so it was placed back the way it had been originally, stable and unlikely to fall (outside of external forces, of course.) As he did so, the girl bent down to pick up her paints. Reeve watched her for a moment, unsure of how to react. In normal situations, the offended would have reacted a little more strongly, and Reeve would have had something to work off of. If she had been angry, he could have played the placating role. If she had been upset, he could have played the role of the appeaser. If she had been happy for the interruption, he could have played the conversation starter, or at least attempted. With nothing to play on, Reeve struggled to decide on the appropriate emotional response.

After watching her pick up the paints in silence for another few moments, no doubt ramping up the 'awkward' meter to all-new heights, Reeve tried to continue along the route of the apologist. "I didn't really, uh, see where I was going. I must have been distracted." He leaned down as well, grabbing a nearby paint tube and holding it up to her.

It occurred to him that, perhaps, it would be good to ask about her well-being, as well, and so he did just that. "Are you... all right?" Even as he asked, he looked at her, to see if she looked hurt or if any of the paint had splattered onto her during the fracas.

[Anya Deila]

Anya had just finished extracting all her paints from the snow. She placed them carefully back onto the ledge of the easel as the were before. But then the boy spoke. She turned around, catching a glimpse of his face for the first time. She hadn't expected him to stay, let alone try to carry on a conversation. He probably did so out of guilt, she reasoned. He had knocked over her paints so he felt the way to repay her was to start up a conversation. Clearly the boy did not know her at all. But she had been taught manners, and knew it would be rude to refuse his conversational attempts.

"It's... alright," Anya replied hesitantly. "All fixed," she added, motioning rather jerkily towards the paints she had reassembled on the easel. She pulled the corners of her lips up in a slightly forced-looking smile for added effect. She wasn't actually mad at the boy. He did look truly apologetic. But she still couldn't kick a lingering sense of anticipation to start up painting again, after this whole social nonsense was over and done with. She rarely enjoyed social interactions with anyone. They were all small talk and meaningless chatter.

His next question was one that earned a second of surprised silence from Anya. Was she alright? Why wouldn't she be? She looked herself up and down in response to the question, and found that her teeth were chattering and the tips of her fingers were indeed purple by now. That must have been why he asked. "I'm quite alright. No one's ever died of the cold," she said. Then she looked away, thought that over and realized that, in fact, many people had died of the cold. But it was already said, and would be awkward to take back. So she shoved her hands in the pockets of her army jacket and smiled again, this time a little apologetically on account of her awkward social blunder.

This conversation was going nowhere soon, and she found smalltalk horribly boring. So, following in the wake of her last social blunder, she raised her head to look the boy full in the face and said, almost as if she were reciting the questions, "Why are you at Hammel and why are you walking outside in the freezing cold?"

After she'd asked the questions, the eye contact felt awkward to maintain, so she looked at the ground and shuffled her feet a little as she waited for his answer.

ooc| I've been playing up Anya's socially awkward side a lot more than her emotionally unstable side. But I'll start writing in some strong emotional responses for her to make this thread more interesting. Sorry about the lag.

You know, if you'd like, we could redo the posts after your second one to start Anya's strong responses there. Tell me what you think.
-Ze'eva

[Reeve Rzeznik]

((ooc: I'm digging the flow here, they're both weird and socially awkward and I love it, I wouldn't rewrite it for the world.))

Reeve bit his lip and nodded as she pointed to the easel, indicating that everything was alright, after all. She smiled, but it seemed to be that the girl was forcing out the socially correct milieu much in the same way Reeve himself was doing. It was just that Reeve had that much more practice, he supposed.

When she replied to his second question, and told him she was alright, Reeve nodded slightly, scratching the back of his head with his free hand. He wanted to correct her fact, and explain that, yes, people not only have died of the cold, they've likely died from cold around this temperature, as well; however, it simply didn't seem like a great idea. Instead, Reeve just shook his head, allowing a little chuckle. "Oops, yeah, guess so."

This time, much to Reeve's surprise, it was the girl's turn to ask questions of him. Unsure of how to answer, Reeve took a moment to just stare at her oddly for a moment.

"Because I was just in the city purchasing a computer, and I wanted to go home and play with it?" Reeve answered both of her questions with one of his own, biting his upper lip this time as he tilted his head slightly to regard the girl.

[Anya Deila]

Anya mulled over his words for a few seconds. He... played with computers? What was he, some kind of technologically gifted boy? "Oh," she said. "Computers are confusing. And stressful. I hate things that are stressful." Her words, spoken in a high, almost child-like voice, tumbled out in a rather irregular rhythm. She stopped talking, but the string of thought continued in her head.

She'd never much cared for computers, or really any sort of technology. They were so firmly rooted in rules and codes and other such nonsense that Anya just found boring and restrictive. She preferred her paints. They could do anything Anya wished them to do, and they didn't need to conform to any sets of rules or boundaries. Although, Anya thought, maybe that's what computers were like for this boy. If, in fact, her assumption was correct that is. This thought suddenly made the boy much more interesting. She felt a smile grow on her face as she regarded the boy with a piqued curiosity that was plain to see.

"I like painting. Do you like computers like I like painting?" Anya questioned in an effort to figure out whether her assumption was true. Then she thought about her question and realized that he probably had no idea why she liked painting. But she couldn't really describe it herself, so she figured she'd let the question hang in the air and let him make of it what he will.

The boy probably thought her a lunatic by now, thought Anya. But this fact made her oddly happy instead of worried. For, after all, she was a lunatic. And she was used to people regarding her as weird. But the conversation with this boy seemed promising and intriguing, as few conversations were. It was an amazing concept for Anya to fathom that there were other people like her, not exactly the same, but similarly abnormal. Maybe they'd felt the same when they'd figured out their difference. Maybe their stories were a little bit like Anya's. With this train of thought, Anya suddenly felt a small connection to this boy, even though she didn't know him at all. They were both different and, in that way, they were the same. A happy, hopeful feeling started to grow in Anya's gut.

[Reeve Rzeznik]

Reeve's eyes narrowed somewhat, more out of confusion than anger, as the girl complained about computers. Being who he was, and generally not prone to caring much about anything that wasn't a computer virus or another attempt to hack Brains, Comrade, his main computer, it didn't actually bother him that she didn't like computers. It was more the fact that she'd said it right to him, immediately after he had basically stated that he was a fan of them. Once again, the girl acted incredibly out of the normal social milieu. It caused him to wonder silently for a moment how she would have reacted if Reeve had walked up to her, looked at her easel, and proclaimed how much he considered painting to be simple and unskillful, and a waste of time, and how he hated things that were a waste of time.

He didn't actually feel that way, of course. Reeve couldn't particularly be bothered to form much of an opinion on painting in either direction. It made some people happy, and he supposed that was an acceptable enough position for him. There were obvious similarities between painting and music, and Reeve understood why he enjoyed music, so he could, in a more abstract fashion, see how people liked to paint.

Almost as if on cue with his inner mental ramblings, the girl asked him if he liked computers in the same way that she liked to paint. Reeve's first thought was to respond in the same vein as he had just been thinking, and to tell her that he probably enjoyed music in the same way she liked to paint, and that computers were not the same at all. However, instead of answering, Reeve suddenly found himself smiling. Much to his surprise (and dismay), the smile was not one of his usual well-crafted fakes he usually wore when people said things he knew he was supposed to be happy about hearing. No, no, for some reason, Reeve felt a sort of connection to the girl, and it made him happy. They were both out here, in the cold, and instead of the usual grouchiness that accompanied the kind of accident he'd had, they were instead striking up some sort of conversation. Reeve had rarely, if ever, managed to find a sort of common ground with another human being, much less so quickly, and so he quickly set out trying to make the connection that she was trying to imply with her question.

"Well, I mean..." Reeve started, ambling around to look at the easel from her perspective, nodding at the mountainous scene being played out brush stroke by brush stroke, "Painting is your portal to worlds you can't quite visit on your own, isn't it? Maybe not physical worlds, but ideas, beliefs and what-have-you..."

Internally, Reeve was wondering just what the hell was going on. No one had ever managed to get him this talkative so quickly, but being here made him happy, it made him actually feel happy, and while his brain was raging pure logic and trying to understand why he was feeling and acting like this, the rest of him was just rolling along for the ride. "Because that's kind of what it's like for me and machines. With my power, I don't have to play by the rules. Computers aren't confusing because they speak to me, and I speak to them. In plain terms, I get what they want me to know, and I let them know what I want to know from them. You know? I can make a computer do nearly anything I want, so, really, I guess, computers are like a sort of freedom for me. It's actually the opposite of stressful!"

Reeve let out a little contented sigh, grinning a bit and scratching the back of his head with his free hand. It had probably been more words than he'd ever said at one time to anyone else, and certainly the first time he'd ever found himself punctuating his sentence with an exclamation point. In the back of his mind, he knew that something wasn't quite right here, but that mildly euphoric feeling that was taking him over, as simple as it was, was still closer to true emotion than he'd thought he could achieve, and so, just feeling a little happy made him actually feel much more happy because of it.

[Anya Deila]

Anya stared off at nothing in particular as she thought, without turning to check on any reaction of the boy's to her words. She had never had much exposure to computers. The cabin that she'd spent most of her time in when she lived in NY didn't have really any electronics in it at all. Tv, computer, anything. Anya had grown up amusing herself with only what she could carry to the cabin and store there. As a result, technology was unfamiliar, foreign, and just plain confusing to her. And confusion could quickly become frustration in Anya's mind, so she tended to avoid things that could spiral into strong emotion. Such was Anya's relationship to technology.

But the boy's words made it seem like he really cared about computers and gadgets of the like. They weren't the confusing mess of buttons and complicated applications that they were to her. She considered his words for a second, staring just to the left of his head, but far, as if the words she was searching for were just out of sight. "Hmmmm..." she hummed for a second before snapping back to attention with a succinct, "yes!" spoken again in her chirpy, high-pitched voice. "I paint what I feel," she said with a shrug, looking deep into the boy's eyes without her characteristically associated awkwardness, a small smile on her face.

As the boy started talking again, Anya maintained eye contact without processing the lack of uncomfortability that made this interaction different than most others, and tipped her head to one side, studying his face as he spoke. His obvious happiness was feeding her own and she'd forgotten her initial longing to end this conversation and continue painting. Even once the boy had stopped talking, Anya stayed silent for a few seconds, still studying his face her eyes narrowed in curiosity her mouth slightly open in a small smile. "You should teach me!" she exclaimed, her face suddenly full of bright excitement. "Would you? Would you teach me?", she questioned, unconsciously bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet with enthusiasm. Her words fell out quickly, her smile growing into a grin as she looked up at him expectantly.

[Reeve Rzeznik]

Normally, eye contact was not particularly high on Reeve's list of things he liked to maintain with people. Granted, Reeve's list of things he maintained with other human beings was a pretty short list to begin with. Even so, as he spoke to the girl, and she looked up at him brightly, her eyes meeting his, he made no motion to turn away as he finished explaining himself, and even let the gaze linger as he finished, his eyes shining with joy over the concept of playing with computers. To Reeve, there was no secret: He loved computers, and technology, and all the things that could be done with them. They made him happy, plain and simple, but he never really knew how to express that, or even bothered to try. With her, it seemed just to flow naturally. Reeve couldn't decide if he was terrified by the fact, or excited about it.

In the end, it would seem that excitement won out, at exactly the same moment that Anya jumped up in her own burst of exuberance, and proclaimed that he should 'teach' her, whatever that meant. Reeve's eyes lit up and he nodded in agreement, forcefully and happily, as his smile brightened.

"What? Teach you? Of course! That could be awesome!"

Inside, Reeve's brain decided, at that point to force itself back into control. Reeve had never been one to teach anyone anything. For one, he didn't have the patience to deal with people, and for two, his power only really worked for him, to even begin to explain it to anyone who didn't have a similar power would most likely leave them lost. Under no circumstances ever would Reeve be particularly willing to teach someone how to work a computer, much less be this excited to do so. Something had to be wrong here, and Reeve took a deep breath suddenly, shaking his head and looking back up at the girl with a nervous look.

It was difficult, trying to change his mind when he still felt so excited about the idea. It was like he knew teaching her was the right thing to do, and yet he still had to force himself away from it, anyway. "Actually, uh... on second thought... maybe I shouldn't..." he eked out with a big grimace on his face, shaking his head slightly to each side.