[SRP] Comparing Notes (Taibbi & Tonori)

[Princess_Feylin]

So, that was a touching. Taibbi had been present for the last hatching, but she’d been searched too late to attend the touching for that clutch. Memories of how fraught the hatching was reconciled themselves with the emotional overload which was the touching. The young candidate wondered if they were all like that. Thoughts of the touching occupied her mind all morning until - finally! - it was lunch and she could seek out conversation about the goings-on.

She found a spot easily in the dining cavern and brought her thick-sliced sandwich over so that she was seated on the bench across from a tall, dark-skinned candidate. There, she placed her sandwich directly on the table’s surface and began to pick it into its component pieces, using the separated bread halves as plates to hold the individual ingredients: meat, cheese, wilted greens. With one hand, she began to munch on the meat first, holding it between three fingers. Simultaneously, she looked across the table at the other candidate, forcing eye contact, and smiled.

“So. That was interesting,” she said. Obviously, she was talking about the touching. Lessons and chores hadn’t been that exciting, although everyone had clearly been distracted by thoughts of the eggs they had touched. “That’s the closest I’ve been to an adult dragon since I was searched. I didn’t realize they’d be so...involved.”  

[Princess_Feylin]

Tonori glanced up at the younger candidate who sat herself down across from him and started talking to him. After a few seconds' review, he recalled her name: Taibbi. She was one of the ones for whom writing came easily. After several turns at the Weyr, Tonori was no longer illiterate, but writing was still not an easy task for him, and it showed in the large, slowly-drawn letters he produced. He'd seen the slates she took notes on, densely-packed with small, precise letters and neat diagrams.

"Touchings? They can be," he agreed upon realizing that she was going to hold a conversation with him whether he willed it or not. He couldn't remember if she was one of the people who lingered after finishing her meal. Tonori wasn't, but he had barely begun to eat, and had taken for himself a large lunch, so he was unlikely to finish before she did, despite the steady, methodical pace at which he shoveled food into his mouth.  

[Princess_Feylin]

Taibbi was about halfway through her slice of meat, still holding it with three fingers. She was a young woman who could really put food away, and it showed in the way her hips and thighs held onto a layer of cushion despite all the exercise required of candidates. She didn't mind the padding, usually, though at the end of the day she sometimes had angry red lines around the soft curve of her stomach from where her breeches bit in.

"You've been here for a while, right? You seem very comfortable with everything here, so I'm guessing you have."

Taibbi's supposition was based on the fact that in lessons Tonori always seemed to be concentrating very hard, even though he had been here longer than she had, and she'd already reached the point where she felt she could relax a little bit about lessons. Not like when she first came and she'd tried to remember everything. If he'd been born here, she reasoned, he wouldn't act like it was so important to cram every word the candidatemaster said into his head. On the other hand, she had also seen the laborious way he wrote, so maybe he paid attention like that because taking notes wasn't a viable strategy for him.

"How many hatchings have you been to?" she pressed on, finishing up the meat portion of her sandwich.  

[Princess_Feylin]

So far Taibbi hadn't asked Tonori anything he couldn't answer with a nod, and so he made do with that. At the same time he raised a wherry wing to his lips and began to gnaw all of the meat from the bones, paying no mind to any gristle or sinew he also happened to encounter. He had grown up hungry, and although he had basically reached his full height, a candidate's active lifestyle kept him always open to eating. It had taken him some time to grow out of feeling bad for needing more food to function, but it was something he'd managed while working as a guard, where his appetite had been the subject of good-humored jests rather than complaints or criticism

"Several," he replied, swallowing a mouthful of slightly-too-dry meat that he didn't notice was over-cooked, though he did reach for his earthenware mug and wash it down with some frigid water.

Then, not so much to keep the conversation going as to give Taibbi a reason to talk more and afford him more time to get food into his mouth, he asked, "Which eggs surprised you?"  

[Princess_Feylin]

Now this was where Taibbi had hoped the conversation would end up! She wasn't uncurious about Tonori's experiences as a candidate, but when it came down to it, she really wanted to talk about those eggs!

"I think the ones that seemed angry were the most surprising," she said after a moment's reflection. "I just don't see what they would have to be angry about. Right now they're basically the most important things on Pern, everyone wants to win them over, and nothing's happened to them to make them angry."

She began to roll her wilted greens and her cheese slice around each other, using her bread slices as a surface. It also allowed her to flatten the bread out a bit, which was how she preferred to eat it. Dense bread, even if it was thinner, was always preferable to air-filled bread. When there was too much air in her food, Taibbi tended to get hiccoughs.

"I guess maybe someone thought things that might make them angry. But what I want to know is how they even know what ought to make them angry? I mean, they have no life experience. I know they have personalities, but how does something that's not even born yet have any concept of odds?" She was thinking of the dementor egg's dismal predictions for the hatching, and her odds of Impression.

"Doesn't that strike you as, well, odd?"  

[Princess_Feylin]

Tonori was pinching the edges of his two bread slices together around some more thinly sliced greens and tubers, forming something resembling a pocket. It was unlikely to hold its shape after being bitten into more than once or twice, but it was a more efficient way of conveying his vegetables from trencher to stomach, and messiness in eating didn't much bother him. Just wasting food, which he never did.

He listened to Taibbi talk about the oddity of eggs having opinions on things they had yet to experience and as she mentioned it Tonori did have to admit that it seemed a little unusual, but dragons were all natural mindreaders, so he guessed they picked up on the concepts from the minds of actually born people around them. He didn't really question it. This was just the way dragons were. By all reports, they were pretty knowledgeable right out of the egg, at least about dragon things, which made sense to him.

So in response to all of Taibbi's chatter, when she asked him to confirm that it was weird, he offered a noncommittal grunt around a mouthful of sandwich and hoped she would be able to continue to carry the conversation without his input. This was a really nice sandwich and he wanted to enjoy it without trying to hurry to swallow so that he could talk. Particularly since it seemed obvious to him that Taibbi was more in a mood to talk than to listen.  

[Princess_Feylin]

If Taibbi was bothered by Tonori's taciturn reactions to her conversation, she gave no sign. In point of fact, she wasn't bothered. She'd been at the Weyr long enough to be at least passingly familiar with the faces in her lessons, and she knew Tonori was a quiet one. She assumed he was probably a deep thinker with more going on behind his impassive expression than he chose to say.

"Anyway," she said, beginning to munch on her cheese-and-greens rolls. "It's an enormous number of eggs to be on the sands at one time. And they're supposed to hatch around the same time. I kind of hope they don't all hatch at once. I mean, that's scores of eggs out there. It will be complete chaos."

She shuddered a little, recalling the violence done at the first hatching she'd attended. She could only imagine that it would be exponentially worse at a hatching that was so much larger. Even one of the clutches hatching at once would have so many more dragons. If both clutches hatched at once...she would be surprised if no one was grievously injured, or even killed.

"I'm a little worried people are going to get hurt," she confessed. She didn't say she was worried she would get hurt, though that was true, too.  

[Princess_Feylin]

Tonori used the remainder of his bread to gather up the tubers and greens that had escaped his makeshift pocket while Taibbi reflected on the size of the upcoming hatching. She wasn't wrong. It would be chaotic and dangerous to have so many dragons hatching all at once, but a smaller clutch in no way guaranteed a tamer hatching.

"Some people probably will," he remarked after swallowing the last bit of bread and tuber. "We agree to the risk when we come to the Weyr as candidates though. And following instructions lowers the risk. The procedures are in place for a reason, after all. They're not just the candidatemaster's whims."

Well, the procedures might be the candidatemaster's whims, and following them didn't guarantee that a candidate would come through a hatching unscathed, any more than doing so guaranteed Impression. But as a veteran of several hatchings Tonori had watched candidates who followed instructions and candidates who didn't. Generally, those who complied with the instructions didn't spend as much time in the infirmary. This led him to believe that the rules were best practices, rather than preferences.

He looked down at his trencher and was pleased to note that he'd thought to take an extra helping of vegetables for himself. Growing up in a mining community, vegetables and fruits had been more of a treat than meat, since they required cultivation time and land on which to do it, which were always in short supply, and even if a person managed to find them, someone else who was bigger and stronger - or at least meaner - would probably take the food before the grower got to harvest it. As a guard his diet had been more varied, but he was not taking the culinary riches of the Weyr for granted.  

[Princess_Feylin]

There was a part of Taibbi that derived a smidgen of comfort from the matter-of-fact way Tonori acknowledged the likelihood people would get hurt at the hatching. The candidatemaster had said as much, too, but for whatever reason Taibbi found it sank in more easily and with less cause for alarm coming from another, more experienced candidate.

"I saw people at the last hatching who didn't do anything wrong and they still got hurt," she pointed out. She wasn't trying to be contrary, but she couldn't place all her faith in the rules like Tonori.

"So...did you have any favorite eggs?" she asked after a second when Tonori's only response to the previous hatching's injury statistics was a shrug without further elaboration.  

[Princess_Feylin]

Tonori wasn't going to argue with Taibbi about the efficacy of the rules. Of course people got hurt, even when they did everything right. Everything about the situation for a hatching invited violence and chaos. The rules were there to help minimize the possibility, not to eradicate it. Obviously it would be great to find a procedure which would ensure zero casualties, but that was just not realistic.

"Not really," he answered. "I bore dragons. It's probably what's kept me safe so far."

For Tonori, this passed for humor. It was the truth though. In general, he did not provoke strong reactions from the unhatched dragons at touchings and at hatchings he didn't tend to draw the hatchlings' attention. It was a little disappointing, since he was supposed to be here Impressing a dragon, not just eating up the Weyr's stores of food, but that was outside of his control. He was the person he was, and if he wasn't what a dragon wanted then he wasn't.

He finished the last bit of food on his trencher and swallowed the last of his very cold water.

"Enjoy the rest of your lunch," he bid Taibbi as he unfolded himself from the bench and picked up his trencher.  

[Princess_Feylin]

Taibbi was a little surprised to hear Tonori describe himself as boring to dragons. Not that she had ever taken too much interest in him, but there were heaps of human reasons for that. He was so much older than she was, for one thing, and not especially chatty. She appreciated his work ethic, since it mirrored her own, and there had been times when the two of them had both elected to linger over chores to make sure they were done exactly right when others might have said things were good enough, but they had not really spoken during those times. This was probably the longest conversation they had had that wasn't required as part of their lessons.

And then he was clearing his place and leaving, without even giving her the opportunity to protest his self-characterization. He'd said it while her mouth was full of bread and she was still chewing furiously in an attempt to at least be able to bid him farewell, but his long legs had already carried him away by the time she swallowed. The haste with which she'd attacked her bread had resulted in an imperfectly chewed mouthful and air trapped in the bread she swallowed. She hiccoughed.