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Feb. 15th, 2021 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silentscout[Maybe Lalli is spending too much time sleeping. Quarantine is long and boring, and he's not really interested in talking to people he can barely understand. It's hard to have a thoughtful conversation with someone when you only get maybe 1 or 2 words out of everything they say.
Maybe he should have tried to study another language, back before all of this. Even talking to Reynir right now would be better than a month of what sounds like buzzing bees. bouncing around him everywhere.
That's why he sleeps. At least in the dream world everyone can understand each other, and he can tell Reynir exactly how stupid his hair looks. Even Emil's blabbering is better when Lalli can understand what nonsense he's saying.
...he needs to find Onni too. Onni would know they're okay by now, the message about their (relatively) successful recovery was sent by short-wave radio as soon as they were all on board. But he wants to actually talk to Onni too.
That's why he follows the winding stone path sticking out of the waters during one dream of many in a month-long quarantine on a large boat. Normally stone paths like that lead to Onni's dream. But as Lalli follows it the stones start to change shape, gradually shifting from irregularly shaped stepping stones to something much more uniform and cut. It's more like what he would expect from a path in a city, and something Lalli doesn't associate with Onni at all.
Curious, Lalli continues down the path, using the strangely-cut stones to keep himself out of the waters. He's getting closer to someone else's dream, and he is alert, looking for any sign of who this might be or where they might be from. Maybe it's one of the Icelandic mages on the boat? He won't know until he gets into the dream and sees just who it is, though.]
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Date: 2021-07-14 07:40 pm (UTC)Trolls, which come from humans, never look convincingly human. But some Beasts, which come from other animals, can. There's some kinds of dog Beasts that look like a normal dog to lure you in to check on it, but then they shift and eat you.
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Date: 2021-07-14 08:56 pm (UTC)So you've never encountered a friendly or non-hostile Troll.
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Date: 2021-07-18 05:10 pm (UTC)[A friendly troll...perish the thought.
(Ironically those DO exist. Lalli has just never met one himself.)]
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Date: 2021-07-18 05:33 pm (UTC)...no, it's still hard to imagine. It's either these Trolls have a different sense of morality compared to humans, or something else is at work. Doumeki has a hard time accepting that spiritual entities who've gained this much rationality can be so one-sided.]
Are your encounters with them confined to only one region, or have you gone around the whole of Finland?
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Date: 2021-07-30 03:22 am (UTC)[It paints a grim picture of just how death-centric Lalli's world actually is. Everyone dies, it's true, but Lalli has been raised among it. It's so commonplace that he can talk about it this easily.]
...but it's not the same where you're from, is it?
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Date: 2021-07-30 03:52 am (UTC)No. [Then, he allows:] Not in the modern era. There are stories of ayakashi who can curse villages wholesale centuries ago, but those are rare these days.
Is there a known epicenter of the Rash when it broke out?
[What he wants to know is if there's a correlation between the two. If the Trolls are this powerful, it's possible a curse or enchantment has spurned on their evolution. Either that, or there was a grudge that built over a long period of time that began infecting animals, and it snowballed from there.]
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Date: 2021-08-09 10:59 pm (UTC)Lalli does give it a good try, taking time to think on it. Where had it started? What had happened back then?]
...don't know. Iceland closed its borders first so the Rash never spread there. More countries tried to do the same, but by then the Rash was already spreading so it was too late. I think it came from just south of Scandinavia? That continent.
[Europe. He means Europe.]
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Date: 2021-08-10 02:05 pm (UTC)Right. The guy's not familiar with Russia. Makes sense the rest of the Eurasian continent's also a huge question mark. On the other hand, that's as good as a confirmation that the Rash didn't start in Scandinavia, and thus the curse's origin is inaccessible. Unless its container is somehow mobile.
...would the Japan of Lalli's world and other island nations be similarly fortunate? He can only hope.]
Got it.
I gather no one's succeeded in heading off the island and reporting back.
Do the Trolls have an established hierarchy? Or do they all just act on their own without having to care for something like a monarch or a parent?