trans_9 | at end of day, we find ourselves

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at end of day, we find ourselves

The cave entrance was warm, slightly cinnamon scented, and rolled back into a long corridor lined with phosphorescent lichen clustered in groups that lit the murky surroundings with a soft blue illumination. The atmosphere was damp, but not uncomfortably so, and Arha had padded its winding corridors for the few minutes it took to find the warm swirl of mineral infused water. Water. And not cool water, either. She blinked as she crouched at the edge of the pool and tentatively dipped her fingertips into it.

It was hot.

Not hot enough to burn, but definitely hot enough to soak tension from a body. Her eyebrows arched slightly. Something like this was an interesting interpretation of the phrase I should like a place to ease sore muscles. She had been training hard recently and it showed, of that she was sure. Her calves and her back ached, but it was a pleasant thing that told her she was doing well and she reveled in each day's training session be they mind or body or both. And now, she regarded the pool with curiosity.

"And just how," she murmured, her voice echoing, "shall I go about this, hmm?"

Was she supposed to relax in the vapors or actually disrobe and soak within the water itself? Such things did not have directions, after all. The air was thick with the scent of minerals--she could pick them out if she cared to do so--so, it was always a possibility that one was supposed to inhale them. Truly, this was a curious thing and required thought.

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"You get in it," Luly says from behind Arha, her eyes half-lidded. She was drawn by the smell, by the soft glimmer of the cave light—though her self-assuredness in navigating in the dim light and only half-worked stone suggests some senses beyond the merely human. "The natural salts are supposed to be healthy for you."

"Are they?" Arha asked peering at the woman for a long moment. "Does one take off their garments and just...sit in the water?"

The concept was foreign in itself and for all the knowledge she possessed thanks to Other Memory, it still remained a strange thing. She only had a few ancestors who were waterfat enough to have been vaguely knowledgeable about such matters, but the bulk of her memories she could access were decidedly desert oriented.

Arha glanced down at the water, which was now rippling as she wiggled her fingers, and made a soft hmm sound that was more hum than anything else.

Katara had been looking for a place to relax after some heavy training that day. When she wandered into the Sensorium, she hadn't expected to see a spa like this one, much less one occupied by several women already. She definitely knew one of them: Meluly, the only woman she knew that could actually make her blush-and the other looked like she might know Sheena.

"Hey guys!" She said eagerly, smiling. 'Would anyone mind if I tested it first? If its a little uncomfortable, I'm willing to lower the temperature!"

With that, and far too achy to wait for the answer she threw her clothing off and jumped in, and a moment later steam floated from the pool.

"Oh, that's good," Katara sighed. "You guys should get in too!"

Meluly bites her lip a moment. It looks so inviting...

She sides up to the water and shimmies out of her makeshift red dress-wrap. In the long moment that she's bare, before she starts to slide into the water (and stops, and starts, and stops, and starts again, face twinging somewhere between pain and happiness at the wet heat), the white tracework tattoos that wrap around and across her whole body are visible. If they were done the traditional way, it must have taken quite a long time—and probably a whole lot of long-lasting, dull pain.

Katara notices Meluly's cringing and is there in a minute, ignoring the rising heat for being so next to the woman. Why was she in pain? She really had to start trying to understand every one's physiology as soon as she could...

"Meluly? Are you alright?" She asked, looking concerned. "Is the water too hot for you?"

"Ah," Arha said, watching with interest as Katara and then Meluly sank into the water. It seemed pleasing to them, even if Meluly seemed to have issues with it in a cyclical fashion. The positive side was that it harmed neither of them.

With a grave expression, she peeled her plantsuit from her and folded it as neatly as possible before sliding into the water herself. The heat was great, but not so much so that it was painful. If that had been the case, Arha would have adjusted her own body temperature...or asked Katara to fix it. Her gift was a handy thing to have, it seemed.

"Are you both well?" she inquired after she had cautiously submerged up to her neck. So far it was true that she had not been drowned by this water, of this she was grateful.

"I'm fine," Luly objects, and her eyes close as she slides into the water to her neck, and then to her chin. "I just haven't had a good soak in a while. I'm all stiff." Her tense face starts to slowly relax.

"Oh...all right," Katara said, looking down and feeling a little silly. Of course Meluly was okay. She really needed to stop overreacting.

As if to make up for this, Katara breathed out and more steam was added to their water: it was slight hotter, but Katara had also made sure not to increase it by much.

"That should be good," she said. "So, uh, did you guys just decide to do this randomly, or have you been building up sore muscles like I have?"

Because really, training was pretty thorough.

"For myself, I have been training fairly hard with Obi-Wan Kenobi Jed-Eye. I wish to become Jed-Eye, so in this I refuse to slack. However, it means soreness. I do not feel that it is a bad thing, for it means I am training correctly. I suppose I have been...building up to it, as you say."

Arha peered through the steam, blinking for a moment.

"Is this activity common for you, this water-soaking?" This was a question to both and she inclined her head slightly, curious. They were both more waterfat than she, of course. It stood that it might be more common among those like them.

More, perhaps, but not by much, for Meluly. Most of her weight is lithe, durable muscle, with what padding she has coming from an unwillingness to push herself far enough for it to become an obsession instead of simply a focus in her life.

"When I get the chance, it can be pretty nice," she says, head tilting to look over lazily at Arha. "It's not the kind of thing you get the time for much in the military."

She had to admit that she was still adjusting to Sheena and now Ahra's curiosity with water. She had always been used to having it in abundance, and it was her element. She worked through it and it helped her.

"Same here," Katara said. "Where I'm from is covered with ice, so I actually didn't get to do anything like this until I actually started traveling. Even then though, we were still a part of a war, so we only got to indulge when we could. Most of it was just bitter work."

Katara vaguely remembered Obi-wan as the man injured by Bella.

"Though it is nice to do it with company too."

"Water such as this," Arha said, cupping her hand to let the hot water trickle from it, "does not happen on the world I am from. I has a bit of water for my own, enough to water myself possibly for life, but it was not like this thing. It was cool, fed from the depths of a world covered in sand. At least it was in my time upon Arrakis. My Sister, Sheeana, comes from a time in which the desert was small and still when the world itself was no more."

She was silent a moment, musing.

"I find that company in any situation is a pleasant thing. Thus, I am pleased to share this place with both of you. It was most fortuitous that you came, even if this was an unexpected side effect of a wish for something to undo stressors."

"Nice to hang out with you too," Luly says, grinning at Arha's vocabulary. Hers isn't quite so fancy—she gets the gist, sure, and she can work out individual words if she thinks about it, but most of the complicated English she knows well relates directly to military duty.

"My people have never really dealt with deserts much. We come from the tropics." Or they would if they hadn't had an imaginary history, anyway.

Sheeana's feet felt the slip of the stone. She wondered if today's sensorium excursion was going to have an unexpectedly archetypal element to it. This entering into caves...It was a very old symbol. Her ancestors had lived in such caves not too long ago. But they were never this moist.

Something cinnamony too. Ah, there they were in the hot pool. "It smells like Spice in here." She said to the three girls, two of which she knew.

Even Katara had to double take at what Arha said, It wasn't so much the how she said it but what she said in the first place: after all, Katara could certainly rememeber the last time she'd been in a desert.

"Your people must have adaoted fairly well," Katara said. "I know that the last time I was in a desert, we were in a very rough set of circumstances. We had almost no water and no means of travel. To be able to survuve in those means, well, you have to be a very skilled person."

And she meant that. Even Toph, whose element was earth, could not deal with the sand too much.

Katara, just to be impertinent, splashed Meluly. "Nice to see YOU again too! How are you?"

But then she turned and saw the other woman approaching them. She stood up in the water and gave a polite bow.

"It's good to see you again...er, Sheena."

What was a good word for someone like her clan anyway?

"Will you, too, come sit in the waters?" Arha asked Sheeana, her tone amused. "I have been told it shall help with stressors, so this ship seems to think. But it is doing well with the various knots at the moment. it does smell like Spice. I suppose that is because it is not something one may easily get away from, no?"

The curl of her smile was slight, but there, and amusement washed over her.

To Katara, she gave a tug of a smile.

"We are Fremen, creatures of the desert. Adaptation is something we are oft good at, especially in the desert."

Luly reaches a hand out of the water to offer Sheeana a little bit of a wave, before it slinks back down. Not shyness, no—rather, she doesn't want to give up the lazy warmth. If it weren't for wanting to continue in the conversation, she'd already have sunk up to her nose instead of her chin. She gives Katara a little bit of an absent splash back, smiling at her.

In the dim light, her red eyes are brightly reflective.

"I'm fine, I'm fine." She's leaving out her unbalanced retreats into locked Media Library pods, trying to record down everything she possibly can about her species.

"Go about what?"

Kazuya realized that most would see this as intrusion, but quite frankly, he had stopped caring about that sort of thing long ago. Now, he was only interested in one thing. Not what most men would be interested in either. Kazuya could sense... something but he couldn't quite place.

This warranted investigation.

"I wish to relieve soreness, thus this place was created," Arha said quietly, turning her blue-within-blue eyes on a man she had not yet met. She blinked at him for a moment, then flashed a smile. "I am uncertain if I should be outside the water or get in. It could be the vapor that is replenishing or the water itself. I do not know. Such a thing is not of the world I am am from."

Luke had wandered in, wondering if this was another simulation like Obi-Wan's cave, but soon realized his folly. He'd followed Arha's presence here, wanting to see how his friend was doing after their emotional talk on the ziggurat.

"Hey Arha," he called out, his voice echoing a little--then stopped. Of course he would find her quite obviously preparing to take a bath. Turning pink, Luke turned round quickly.

"Sorry, I'll come back when you're done!"

"I have not taken anything off," Arha grumbled in his direction before sitting cross-legged beside the pool of hot water. "And it is not as if I am naked, though these suits certainly leave next to nothing to one's imagination. I accept no apology for there was no offense."

She mentally nudged him gently.

"I am...unsure of how this is to work anyway."

"What, the hot spring?" Luke wandered back over, still fading back to his normal skin color from embarrassed pink, and sat beside her. "Nothing to it, just, um, take off your clothes and get in. Not when I'm here, I mean. Unless you want me to, I mean." He put his toes in and felt the warmth through the plantsuit, smiling a bit. "It does feel nice though."

Kazuya simply arched an eyebrow and leaned on a wall, taking note of those odd eyes. Not that he had much room to talk, given his single faintly glowing crimson eye.

"Most would get in," he said rather matter-of-factly. The idea that he was implying that she should disrobe and enter the water wasn't even close to making the top 100 things on his mind.

"I would not mind the company if you wish to stay," Arha said, her smile soft. Truth be told, his company was always welcome, no matter the situation, that was as evident as the nose on her face. "There is much effort in getting oneself out of this suit, but I would not like to bake it. From what I can infer, the process seems to indicate that one ought to soak the minerals in with one's skin, though it sounds a bit dubious to me."

She leaned to poke a forefinger at the water once more and watched it slide in droplets down into her palm.

"The heat is good," she said after a moment. "I suppose it is more than decent for unknotting tight muscles."

Edited 2009-12-01 05:25 (UTC)

"It's supposed to be good for your skin. I haven't had much time for more than a quick spin through the refresher for years." Luke kept his mind studiously off the thought of bathing naked with Arha. She wasn't his, and he wasn't hers, and he didn't want to cause tension for his friends and for Mara.

"Has Obi-Wan been training you hard, then?"

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