A morning stroll (open)

[Sablerose]

Despite her confessed and honest tiredness the previous evening, Calla found that old habits were hard to break. She was an early riser, more times than not. She was a Crown Princess of Laurelmoon, yes, but she was still a Druid, and she found morning to be one of the best times to commune with Nature when she was home. Before the bustle of activity from the major of the castle's residents -outside of the servants, of course, who had been up and active even early than Calla- she would be out, often in the gardens or strolling the forest around the castle.

Greystreak much preferred that his Ward sleep in. She was a Princess, and it would be good to take some advantage of that position. In truth, he was the one who would rather sleep in than her.

And today, she let him do just that. She could feel his sleeping mind just behind her own. Calla knew that if she needed to rouse him, she could. Grumbling, he would speak up as needed. And if she were in danger, he would be instantly awake and, if needed, barreling through the halls of the Castle to her aid.

For now, though, she let him rest; he had earned it.

Calla was dressed more less casually, more in her role as a Druid than as Princess. She had gone down to the stables to check on Nightwind. The horse had been drowsing when she had come in, but perked up quickly when he smelled her. After she did a quick examination to make sure that he had been treated well (the stablehands had been a little surprised to see just how much knowledge she had), Calla felt certain that he was in very good hands. Then, not quite hungry enough to see about breakfast, she decided that she might as well become a bit more acquainted with the castle and its environs. And the Gardens seemed to be a good spot.

And as Calla strolled among the controlled riot of colors that bloomed around her and inhaled the almost heady scent of the flowers, she was glad that she had come, especially now that the sun was just starting to warm the Gardens.

[Lita]

So much mud. Lita thought glumly. She was almost coated in the stuff. Not too mention the assortment of brambles and twigs stuck to it and her clothes. And all for naught it would seem, the strange furry thing had escaped her grasp into a burrow, and the burrow had been far too small for her to reach her arm inside. She wished she had remembered the shovel. So here she was, covered in muck without achieving her objective. It shouldn't have been so hard.

She had wanted to find a small creature to practice her tricks. The scalpel gets rusty if let alone as the old saying went. It would also be a chance to try out the help. Lita had decided that it would probably be better if she started the girl on something a little less sudden then a human corpse, though most of the pieces were bigger. She sighed, everything had to be so complicated. She wasn't even sure where she would find a steady supply of corpses, let alone a place to store the pieces so they wouldn't go bad. It was a conundrum.

She kept her eyes peeled for another little creature she might capture. It was a slim chance, but she didn't want to miss anything. Of course being focused on the ground she completely missed the other woman walking down the same path.

[Sablerose]

Calla's ears were not as sharp as her Familiar's; however, she was fairly certain that she had heard rustling in some nearby brush. Curious, she tried to locate the source of the sound. It took her a few moments to sort the direction of the sounds from the path she needed to take to find them.

The sight of a mud-smeared woman, covered in debris from various bushes and the like made Calla open her eyes wide. At first, she thought that she might have been a gardener, but no self-respecting Royal gardener would have let themselves get that filthy. And a quick look at where the woman stood was a pretty good indication that she was not a gardener. The bushes near her looked as if they had been rifled through near the base.

Calla cleared her throat loudly and then said "Excuse me. Are you all right?"

[Lita]

Lita's head jerked up toward the voice. "No." She froze for a moment, mentally doing a checklist in case she had missed some terrible injury that she hadn't noticed. "No, I'm quite healthy." She briefly wondered why so many people assumed she was in trouble when they approached her. It was better that the alternative of them trying to kill her which happened slightly more often so she let the slight annoyance pass right on through. She squinted a bit having suddenly entertained the thought that this might be a clever ruse of some angry villager to get close and cut off her arm. She hated such inconveniences.

She pulled her glasses from a pocket and put them on. They were slightly smudged but she was still able to make out the lack of severing tools in the other woman's hands. Lita smiled at her and took off the glasses, wiping them on her shirt and putting them back on. Thanks to the mud and dirt, this had the opposite effect on the glasses. She took them off and glared at them before returning the glasses into her pocket. Unbelievable, even when I remember them they do nothing. She thought, quite annoyed with the rather expensive glassware.

Suddenly aware that the woman was still looking at her, she stiffened. "Hello, can I help you with anything?"

[Sablerose]

The woman's antics, especially the dirtying -rather than the expected cleaning- of her glasses- brought a half-smile to the Druid's lips. Nevertheless, she had to wonder about her state of mind. Calla's impression was, well, scatterbrained, if one was not particularly polite. The woman's muddy state was not necessarily unusual if one was a gardener (though none of the ones Calla had ever seen back in Laurelmoon ever got near the same level of coverage, unless they had fallen down in the mud), but something about her made Calla think that she was not a gardener.

"Actually, I was going to ask you the same thing," she replied as she looked the figure over. "If you don't mind my asking, are you a gardener here?"

[Lita]

Lita stared at her, slightly stunned. "No. Most definitely not. No. I don't even like plants all that much." Despite the elvish upbringing this was true and it was always a point of disagreement in her family back home. "Do I look like a gardener?" She suddenly asked, her mind pulled from the sudden thoughts of home. "Because I am not one, I do my work on living things, and sometimes dead things, but plants shouldn't count as living things even if they aren't dead." She paused again. "Like rocks."

"Oh, and I don't think you can help me." She added quickly. "The little furry things are probably too fast to capture by hands. Unless you have a few large traps in that outfit of yours." Lita paused and examined the woman again. Maybe the woman was really good at hiding them she conceded to herself. It wasn't as if she hadn't been covered in all sorts of strange little things herself so the idea was not entirely improbable. "May I see them?"

[Sablerose]

She's brain-addled, Calla reasoned with a mental sigh. She has to be. "I don't trap small animals," she said patiently. "So I don't have any traps on me. However, if I offended you by assuming that you might have been a gardener, I do apologize. Given the amount of dirt on you, I wasn't certain."

Calla raised an eyebrow, thinking on something the woman said. "What do you mean that you do your work on living things, as well as sometimes dead ones? Are you some sort of physician or taxidermist?"

[Lita]

"No offense taken." She said with a smile as the subject of what she did was given a chance to be revealed. "I'm not a doctor, though if you lose a few digits or limbs I can probably put them back on without much trouble. I'm an inventor. I make all sorts of things, but most turn out badly and try to eat me." Lita took a breath having failed to do so while giving out this slight explanation before she walked over to Callaand began to circle her, looking her up and down.

"I've invented life you know. Well not technically but I just added life back into stuff which is almost as good." Finishing her examination and circling she stopped in front of Calla. "I'm Lita, last name Triat. Maybe you recognize my name." She held out her hand without realizing it was rather dirty.

[Sablerose]

Lita's circling made Calla uneasy, if only because she wasn't sure she was being admired...or measured. And it was the latter that had her concerned. Still, it wasn't something to wake Grey for.

When Lita extended her hand, Calla hesitated only briefly. "Princess Calla of Laurelmoon. I'm also known by my Druidical name Sablerose. Unfortunately, Lita, I can't claim to know of you or your work." She shook the hand firmly and only clapped off the excess dirt when she let go. Being a Druid, getting dirty was often part of the job, though also being a Princess lessened just how much dirt was allowed, not to mention how fast it was required to be washed off.

[Lita]

"Ooh, a princess. I don't know of your country I'm sad to say but to be honest the fact that you have not heard of me could be considered a good thing." Her expression dimmed. "Most places I've been tend to be as friendly as my creations. Always with the torches and the pitchforks. But they haven't got me yet, and nobody is going to stop me from creating the best companion anyone ever had. Not them, not dad, not even those damned little furry things running around." This triumphant exclamation had quickly turned into a mutter of extreme annoyance.

[Sablerose]

"Why would you need to create a companion?" Calla asked cautiously. "Companionship is a thing that grows and is nurtured between beings, not something that is manufactured in the way one makes a horseshoe."

[Lita]

"Well I suppose you could say that, but you don't expect a horseshoe to give a decent conversation or pull switches or stand in front of pitchforks. Good help is not cheap, I know that for a fact, it's so much easier to build someone to do the work. At least it would be if they didn't try and eat me so often." She sighed. "Besides, people don't trust me for some reason. I've been kicked out and exiled from more places than most people have ever seen. For some reason people seem to think I can't be trusted and should be driven out of town with sharp farming implements."

[Sablerose]

"Maybe it has to do something with your approach to dealing with things," Calla said with a half-smile. "You seem to be a bit...headstrong. That can put some people off. As for why they would chase after you with the proverbial pitchfork and torches, exactly how were you doing these experiments."

She frowned and the Druid inside her came to the forefront. "You were not harming these peoples' animals or livestock, were you?"

[Lita]

"No, no, no. I don't experiment on living things without their consent. Only dead ones. There's much less complaining and arguing from the experimentee that way. Still, people seem to complain. And those pitchforks weren't proverbial. I have the scars to prove it." Lita smiled and her hand tapped her thigh. "Not pretty."

"As for the how, I can't tell you that or else you might steal my ideas. I've got to be on guard for any jealous inventors. And angry townsfolk. And old experiments." She sighed and looked to the side. She thought she may have spotted movement. "But mostly it involves taking dead things apart and putting them back together more efficiently then they were. Extra arms, legs, heads, whatever they were lacking when they died."

[Sablerose]

Calla could not hide her blanch at the mention of her experimentation on the dead. Though as a Druid, she was not above taking lives, she considered it very bad form to make use of the dead in 'unnatural' ways. However, she was not back in Laurelmoon, and she had to accept that people's views on such a matter would differ considerably from her own.

"I can see where people would be...uncomfortable with what you do, yes." She swallowed hard. "I won't debate the ethics of what you do in these lands. That is for Princess Anactoria and her family to rule on. I will say that if you had been caught doing such actions in my land, chances are you would have been arrested or exiled. It is one thing to try to save someone or an animal that maybe dying. It is another thing to attempt to bring them back in a way that made them different than they were alive. In a culture that revers Nature, such as mine, something like that would likely be considered sacrilegious at the least."