Forums » Sci-Fi Roleplay » Travellers (Semi-Open RP between Tara and Catrin)

Catrin watched the movie rather solemnly, occasionally sipping her drink, and didn't get a refill.

She looked a little taken aback when the movie ended without revealing the actual ending of the romance, and turned to Tara to listen to the explanation. She gave Tara a little wry smirk. "Or maybe they view tragedy as a part of romance, something they don't usually take romance without." She smiled a bit. "But, thank you for letting me see this. It has been very culturally educational. I wonder, how does watching a thing like this make you feel?" she asked inquisitively.

Tara smiled, "Well, maybe that is so; all of our greatest tales of romance are often born of tragedies; houses destroyed or overs separated, but reuniting, rebuilding, restoring. What greater love is there than one forged in the fires of adversity? A love hardened against eve the coldness of isolation or loneliness, a thing to comfort you even in the darkest times?" Tara smiled and shook her head, "Maybe it is even because that love, love for your friends, family, mate, that more than anything is the thing that has saved our people, bound them together in times of terrible loss and strife, allowed them to endure, survive and, eventually, thrive again."

Tara paused for a moment and then said, "As for how the movie made me feel... well, it was heart-warming, but sad... a glimmer of hope amongst losses... of course, I know how the tale ends, all Terelains do, that's why it wasn't shown. It leaves you wondering a moment, but then the memory returns and.. and it reminds you of your own story." She said, looking kind of embarrassed, "Or it's supposed to. The tale was written down a few years after the War of the Exile Returned... It isn't just the story of two lovers... it's the story of my people's struggle to keep alive our hope, our love for each other... and how we triumphed in the end. A great deal of it was allegory; the poem, the child losing his hand and almost dying, the goddess and the mortal... everything." She smiled, "But it was allegory rooted in truth, that's what makes it so powerful."

Catrin smiled a bit, sadly. "Your people carry so much pain inside them. More short-lived races are blessed with forgetfulness. One hundred, two hundred years, and it's as if it hasn't happened. Still, do you wish to carry these themes into your own relationship?"

Tara shrugged, "We don't seek tragedy or heartbreak, but if you live long enough then it is unavoidable. We know it, we understand and accept it. Pain and sorrow go hand in hand with happiness and joy... You can't have one without the other. When there is pain and grief it hurts, and it hurts for a very long time, but we long ago learned to embrace the pain of the world and endure it, and learn to accept joy as it comes, to allow sorrow to sharpen our senses and make us feel the joys all the fiercer."

She went quiet for a short time and then said, "If there is one thing that Terelains have learned over the Ages it is that all things fade. During our training in youth, we are told to recite a verse from the Book of Terel during our meditations every day for three hours for three years, and it goes like this; 'Thou shalt know joy and happiness, but this shall fade and pass away, thou shalt know fear and grief, but this too shall fade and pass away, thou shalt have a time of peace and prosperity, but this too shall fade and pass away, thou shalt have a time of war and famine, but this too shall pass and fade away.'" She looked over at Catrin and smiled wryly, "The wisdom of fifty thousand years of history and seeking is that nothing endures... and that even we, Terelian the Great, Terelian the Ancient, shall one day be no more. So we seek to leave our mark, seek out those who love us, try to live life and find joy in it... but we must always remind ourselves that tragedy and pain is always close to hand and to live our long lives as best we can. In this way, at least, we are no different from those who live shorter lives."

Catrin smiled and got up to get a new drink, something fruity and cheery. Once she had it, she sat back and turned to Tara. "They are always unavoidable, one way or the other. Life is generally very difficult to avoid as long as one is alive, and pain and sorrow and happiness and joy are all parts of it. It just all seems to be so... unbalanced, from the little I've heard. You learned to embrace the pain of the world, but are you also able to let it go and embrace the joy of the world, too?"

After a long sip of her fruity drink, she gave Tara a rather inquisitive look. "How about you, though? You study cultures. Surely you've met fatalistic ones and hedonistic ones, shorter-lived versions of your own culture and its very opposites. Have you never been tempted to drop all the seriousness and glum outlook on life and just wait for the tragedy and pain to arrive, rather than live it out even in times of joy by constantly reminding yourself about it?"

Tara grimaced, "I'm not explaining this very well... hm, let me get another drink and I'll try and be clearer." She stood up and set her glass aside in one fluid motion, walked over to the processor and returned with a fresh glass of wine. Once she was settled back in her chair she took a sip of it and frowned slightly, "Terelains don't wallow in their pain and grief and sorrow. We embrace it as another aspect of life, the mirror-image of pleasure, happiness, love. It is our understanding that if there was no sorrow and pain then pleasure and happiness would have no meaning; with nothing to contrast against it, with no other reality but happiness, it would lose all meaning and become empty." She nodded to herself, "That's what I meant earlier. We embrace and endure pain, for without it our joys and happinesses would have no true meaning."

Tara took another sip of wine and said, "Terelains don't wallow in sorrow and pain their entire lives, to do so would invite madness, but we understand its importance, and so it is embraced as another facet of life, it is endured, and it passes and fades, but the memory remains and it is the memory of pain, past sorrow, that allows us to appreciate our happiness." She frowned, "But you've hit the nail on the head in some respects. Terelian has a long memory... too long, perhaps."

"Twenty thousand years have passed since the First Great War, the Purge, the Second Scattering and the War of The Exile Returned... it has been eleven thousand since the Second Great War... and yet despite all this time the shadows of those conflicts remain. The First Great War broke us, almost destroyed us, and we never truly recovered it... Our shame and revulsion from the Second Great War caused our retreat from the wider galaxy, and our present isolation and slow decline."

She then frowned slightly, "As for myself... well, I've seen a wide range of different civlisations, from apathetic hedonists to those that glory in pain and suffering and everything in between... but whilst I've found myself enamoured of various facets of these different cultures... well... there's no place like home, and as solemn and slow as Terelian is... I wouldn't live anywhere else. In my nation I am among my own kind, and I am free to be as I am, in my entirety. I can live and study and enjoy myself and not have to watch my friends wither and die, nor watch as the things I love most about a culture are changed, twisted and forgotten."

Catrin smiled. "Oh, sorry, I did undertand that. Yes, joy can't exist without sorrow, as anyone who ever tried to eradicate sorrow knows. It is possible that I got the wrong impression, but this insistence on embracing sorrow..." She 'shrugged' and took a sip of the drink before going on. "It is equally important to embrace joy as long as it is available, I think," she said with a wink.

"It seems automatic, but it isn't. We can only feel as much joy as we allow ourselves to feel. I've found that taking life seriously tends to kill the joy." A slow grin spread on Catrin's features, although she was careful not to show her teeth. "And you, Tara, are so serious about relationships that you give me a little lecture about how things fade and what your civilization has learned over the past fifty thousand years when I ask you if you want to carry themes of tragedy into your relationships. Come on. Tragedy is a big thing that appears spontaneously. There's nothing to be gained by meditating on it in certain situations in advance. What can be trained is acceptance of what is, whether it makes us happy or not."

Tara nodded, "I guess so... But we do embrace joy you know. As I said, we don't try to dwell on the sorrows of the past... but they are important to us, if only because so much of our past was shaped by them. We accept what was, what is and what will be... but we try very hard to learn from our mistakes, to try and avoid tragedy as much as we can." She smirked, "I guess that attitude has made a few of us from the old worlds a bit more cautious than we should be, perhaps. The colonies further from Aerin are a bit more... free spirited. I suppose the further you get from the homeworld, the responsibilities and the weight of the past lessen. It's hard not to dwell on what was, when you are surrounded by the past."

Tara snorted, "Look at the facilities for the Royal Institute. They haven't done anything to the buildings in ten centuries! And no one's touched the Royal Palace for almost twenty thousand years."

Catrin laughed. "Well, that does make sense. Have you ever considered spending some time in the farther colonies, then? Experience your own culture, but less constrained?"

Tara giggled, "I spent a few wild years just after my graduation on 'cultural retreat' touring the far colonies. Most of them were under the indirect rule of House Adhar of the Aedrimar, so there were quite a lot of Aedrimar Terelains there. There was a lot of dancing and music and all sorts of things. Oh we have a lot of things over at New Amra and Aerin and the coreworld, of course, but there was just a general sense of... of... being far away from anywhere really important and being free to enjoy yourself." She sipped more of her wine, "I mean, I was still the quiet little scholar girl, but I came out of my shell a little during those years, met some... interesting people, saw a few aliens even. I loved it, but after a while I started to miss the quiet restraint of the core. Partying and singing and dancing are all well and good, but you need a good long rest afterwards."

Catrin chuckled. "I'm not even all that into partying and I'm lecturing you on having fun, right? Still, did you happen to meet some interesting males, or were you uninterested at the time?" She drank some more of her colourful drink.

Tara looked embarrassed and glanced away, 2Well, a few were certainly interested in me... and maybe I was interested in a few of them... but it never really went anywhere. Even back then I was travelling around a lot, the old wanderlust, you know? And besides I was still young and naive and I wasn't all that great around attractive males." She smiled slightly, "I guess I'm still not. Looking back, I missed a few pretty obvious signals, and a lot of chances... but well, as I said it never led anywhere."

Catrin smiled. "What I was thinking about is maybe with the more relaxed atmospehere, it would be easier for you to maybe try out dating, if you wanted to. Withut feeling the weight of history, tradition and your relatives on your shoulders. But maybe they weren't even the type you'd be interested in?"

Tara 'shrugged', "I was a recently graduated scholar, barely out of her first century and I still had a lot to learn about the ways of the world. It wasn't that I wasn't interested in dating, or that I was particularly worried about what my relatives would think... I just totally missed the whole dating scene. I wasn't all that great at reading people when I was younger." She smiled, "A few of them were pretty handsome though... ah well, it's been a few centuries now. They probably wouldn't even recognise me. The Tara of today is quite different from the Tara they knew... but then, not so different either."

Catrin laughed at this, quite amused. "Not so different would be my guess, too. You don't seem like someone who changed very much since they were young. What I was really trying to find out, though, is what sort of males are you even interested in?" she explained, winking from behind her glass as she drank a little.

Tara looked even more embarrassed than before, "Um...well...uh... I don't know... I've never really thought about it, to be honest. I guess... a handsome one. Maybe one with some muscle. Um... he'd have to be smart too. I couldn't put up with someone who couldn't hold his own in an argument with me." she looked thoughtful, "And he'd have to like to travel, of course, and seeing new worlds, new people..."

Catrin smiled. "Well, the smart bit was an obvious part, I think. And handsome, hmm? Traveling is a must, to be sure. Have you thought of maybe trying out a handsome a colleague, someone who could legitimately travel with you and perform his own research or work?"

Tara shook her head, "Not really. Most of my peers are already mated and married, or too involved in their work for such things. Besides, I've not met a fellow Professor yet who was attractive enough to turn my head." She smirked, "Although some of the students think otherwise. You wouldn't believe how many times I've caught some of my female students mooning after one of my colleagues."

Catrin finished drinking her beverage while Tara was speaking and now she had to laugh again. "Oh, but being a teacher is always sexy," she said with a wink. "Have no male students ever tried giving you their attentions?"

She shook her head, "Oh, I'm very rarely back at the Institute these days, and I'm far too old for them anyway." She snorted, "I think I'm the last person they'd have in their little 'sexy teacher' fantasies." She looked thoughtful, "Although, there was an unusually large percentage of males in my last series of classes on practical anthropology."