RP:Noble Collision

Beach

Seriis came here for some air after spending the entire day cooped up in the library. Standing near hissing wet sand, the waves sweeping up the beach but falling short of engulfing his ankles, the young drow squints up at a twilit sky unfolding in all its multi-hued glory above his head, breathes in the quiet, and silently takes note of the positioning of the brightening stars. He glances up and down the beach, scuffing a foot in the sand while trying not to look too out of place (he fails abysmally). Once he's determined his surroundings to be deserted enough to his likings, Seriis begins to walk, then jog, and soon enough he's running, racing along by the surf with a refreshing breeze whipping his hair back out of his face and rippling across his trailing robes. His lungs are full of ocean air and his eyes are bright with childish delight, and he sprints at full speed along the length of the beach before skidding to a stop, turning, and running all the way back again. This he repeats a few times until at last Seriis slows, panting heavily. Doubled over, hands bracing him just above the knees, he shakes the sweat off his brow and inhales a shaky lungful of air, a rare and genuinely elated smile on his face.

Madigan drags a hand-crafted kayak across the sand, her feet stepping backward quickly as she half-runs, half-marches the boat out of who-the-hell-knows-where. The sides had been carved and painted in an unusual, intricate pattern, the likes of which Hollow may have never seen before. She had assumed she was alone until she glances up and spots a drow some feet away, panting and grinning. She pauses -- maybe in the darkness he won't see her if she stays still. Eyes had a way of ignoring things sometimes, and it was that that she was hoping for as she stared at the drow wide-eyed and scantily clad in just a handmade collar that covered her breasts, leaving the rest of her upper body exposed, and a hem-tail skirt that happily danced with the wind whenever graced with its caress.

Seriis, caught in this momentary exhilaration and sense of freedom, and winding down from antics he derives simple but much-needed pleasure from, takes a good few seconds longer than usual to notice the dryad and her boat. When at last his head does snap up in startled recognition of another presence, he finds her staring straight at him and can't quite help but stare back. An owlish blink of realisation follows the young drow straightening abruptly and lifting his gaze, which had strayed downward from the woman's face for a moment. "W-What," he asks, his attempted snapping half-hearted, his voice tinged with embarrassment.

Madigan turns her attention forward, toward the city as she considers how to respond or if she should. She opts to not respond, glancing down at her boat and continuing her journey toward the lapping waves of the beach. A wave rolls toward her just as she's placing the boat down onto the sand and wets her ankles. She shrieks in fright, jumping away from the salt water between hops on her tippy toes to avoid the water as much as possible. Unaware of her distress, the wave rolls back out to sea with a loud hiss as it bubbled at the edges of the shore. She sighs heavily, clearly annoyed and stalks toward the back of the kayak, pushing slightly against the back until the boat rests far enough on shore that the waves lift is slightly and carry it closer to the waters. Bending over the side of the kayak, giving Seriis a fantastic view of her backside, Madigan reaches into the kayak to retrieve an oar and steps a single foot cautiously into the kayak when the waves recede and leave the kayak resting upon the wet sand.

Seriis' mouth twitches into a tight line. Entitled as he is, he is not used to being ignored and the lack of response sparks a tiny, angry flame within the drow's chest; a fire that only intensifies when the dryad returns her attentions to the boat and appears to erase his entire existence from her own reality. He's about to call her out on it when she shrieks and leaps back, and Seriis has to smother a spluttering laugh in the sleeves of his robe - his initial reaction to the ocean was very much the same, in fact, so a part of his mind brands him a hypocrite, but he shoves that aside. She still hasn't acknowledged him, bar her staring before, so he grinds out, "I asked you a question, surface dweller!" and advances huffily, ready to set her straight because obviously she has no idea who he is at -all-. However, due to visual distractions, Seriis forgets to watch his footing and trips, all semblance of grace lost as he stumbles; unfortunately crashing right into Madigan's shapely behind. Fingers dig into her skin as he pulls his face back, a little gasp catching in his throat, before he shoves away and ends up slipping on the bottom of the boat, hitting the back of his head against the side when he tumbles to the other end of the kayak. There he promptly curls up, humiliated and red-faced (though the latter's not so obvious in the dark, at least).

Madigan shoots up in surprise when she gets a bump on her butt and stumbles over with him, her arm scraping against the opposite side of the kayak as she crashes onto the sand. A sharp hiss cuts through her clenched teeth as she rises to her feet, grabbing the drow by the back of his robes to stand him onto his feet. She's surprisingly strong, managing to pull his body weight up as she did. She spoke as she released him, "Questions are asked for the sake of knowledge and clarity. Your question didn't seek knowledge or clarity, but to mask your insecurities. That is why you didn't get an answer." Her voice was delicate and soothing, even with her heavy African accent. She made no comment on his stumbling nor did she stare at him in his time of embarrassment. Instead, she turned away from him and stared for a long moment at the oar that had fallen into the clutches of the waves. Deciding to act now before it was too late, she marches forward, hands fisted against her thighs as she approaches the waves reluctantly, cringing when the waves lap up her ankles. With the waves hitting her mid-thigh and her arms spread out to avoid the water, she trudges until she's close enough to reach out and get a hold of her oar. Her fingers dance in the air just out of reach until a wave comes and pushes the oar right into her hand. Swiftly, she snatches it up, turns, and runs as quickly as she can through the waves and out of the water. Back on land, her white - well, now transparent - hem-tail skirt clings against her legs, drawing a rather... revealing outline of her lower body in the darkness, but such a thing was lost to the dryad, lacking the biomechanisms that would make her aware of her own body in the way that men were very aware of hers. She heaved another heavy sigh, this one less annoyed than the first as she, once again, slipped a foot into her boat.

Seriis protests in a soft voice from behind the shield of his raised arms, "I have no insecurities." He paints a pretty conflicted picture, and his words are about as believable as the sea is dry. He is faintly surprised when he receives no reprimand for his tumble and accidental groping, not even a slap - if he'd stumbled into a drow woman he'd have been whipped despite his status as a noble, and this is something the scholar knows all too well. Rubbing the back of his head, he lowers his other arm slowly, peeking at her and watching her wade through the water to retrieve the almost-lost oar. In the darkness even he cannot guess what might lurk beneath the surface, so he honestly thinks her quite mad. Waves hiss and gurgling eddies swirl against the sides of the boat, but just as Seriis is contemplating getting out of the kayak before it can carry him off to god knows where, Madigan returns and he instinctively ducks down again. Though it's no fault of her own, his pride is sorely bruised by all of this. "You were staring," he mutters a little meekly, frowning down at his knees, which are drawn against up his chest as if he feels they serve as a good barrier to place between the rest of him and Madigan. He doesn't care that she saw him running - what he cares about is that she saw him -smile-, that she witnessed a more vulnerable moment when the cold walls of his personality were peeled back, that she now knows that he, Seriis Al'Reim, a noble son of a drow house, can act as childish as any young boy would when faced with miles of empty surf and sand.

Madigan finally sits inside the boat, grabbing the oar by both hands and positioning it at an angle against the wet sand, readying herself to push off the sand when the tide sweeps in and lifts the small vessel. She makes no move to remove the drow from her boat but decides to take him along for the ride. "Maybe I thought you had an endearing smile," she smirks over her shoulder, her eyes barely on him as she looks back. She chuckles softly then and pushes hard against the ground when the wave pulls in and drags the boat closer to sea. They suddenly stop, the boat hitting against the shore floor when the wave pulls away faster than the boat could follow. She waits again, oar at the ready, for the next wave. Another push with a grunt and the boat starts rocking unsettlingly, the tail end tilting outward as they start drifting over the waters sideways and then backwards. Madigan holds the oar before her, the shaft resting against the sides of the boat as she sits motionless, wordlessly staring out into the black of sea.

Seriis swallows thickly as another wave rolls in, jostling the boat beneath him slightly. Wide ruby eyes blink up at the strange dryad and her near-indecent clothing, and he wonders briefly if she's even aware of the effect her form has on...most people. Him very much included, much to his embarrassment. The drow's sharp mind quickly gathers the information on dryads he's acquired over his years of study and he determines-- wait, what was that? Endearing? Seriis' throat constricts on his words and he exhales a strangled little squeak instead, which does nothing to repair his injured dignity. He makes the mistake of jumping to his feet just as the swell of the ocean plucks the boat up, and falls back over with enough force to knock the breath from his lungs, before the kayak grinds to a stop once again in the sand. Taking his chance, Seriis leaps over the side and into the surf, turning awkwardly after a second to Madigan. "Sorry," he says, though what aspect of all this he's apologising for is uncertain. "I don't...like the ocean. Um. Don't get caught by mermaids or anything and have a...good night?" The words taste strange on his tongue but he doesn't take the time to mull them over, and swiftly splashes away along the beach before he has time to regret those as well as everything else. Seriis is going to go and cry to Reyik. Yeah.

Madigan smiles after the drow and shakes her head, taking a moment of silence before dipping the oar into the ocean to straighten the kayak out. Just a spec on the ocean's surface at this dark hour, a spec that soon disappears into the line that divides ocean from sky.