xp_logs | Maya and Topaz || Meeting

Topaz accidentally co-inhabits the same tree Maya has claimed. Amazingly the meeting isn't horrible.

It was a nice day - hell, any day was a nice day really as long as it wasn't India-like temperatures - so Topaz decided to take advantage of it and drag a blanket and pillow aside, laying back under a tree and reading. She might've gone a little overboard with the amount of books she'd brought out - they were currently scattered around the blanket. But in her defense she'd read most of them already so it was more speed-reading than actual reading. Mostly she was just enjoying the fresh air and being home.

Home. That part was still a little weird to her.

Maya had been sitting in the tree above the older girl for what seemed like forever, waiting for her to go away. She'd come out here wanting to get away from people, not find more of them. It was only after she'd pulled out the books that Maya had realized she might be stuck for awhile. Still, she'd managed to amuse herself by attempting to tune into the 'spirit' of the forest like her Grandfather had started teaching her.

It wasn't going very well, and Maya could feel herself getting restless.

Topaz had been attempting to ignore the strange vibes in the air for the better part of the last hour - whatever it was, she didn't want to know. Especially not if it was one of Amanda's new students. If they were causing trouble again she wanted nothing to do with that. They were Amanda's problem.

But it got to be too much to ignore and finally she (regretfully) tore her attention away from Frankenstein to look around, her attention finally drawn to the tree she was sitting under, and she looked up to see another girl sitting above her.

"Hullo," she called.

Damn. She'd been seen.

She could see that the girl had said something but she was too far away for Maya to read her lips. Maya made a frustrated sound and started to climb down.

"Hi," she signed when she reached the bottom.

Topaz didn't know much about signing, but she knew how to recognize it. She'd known the British sign alphabet at one point - school thing - and could probably make herself remember it but she was pretty sure American sign would be different. "Ah. Sorry, didn't mean to bother you. You can read lips?"

Maya almost rolled her eyes before she remembered Marie-Ange's admonitions against being a brat.

"I can," she replied verbally but she also fished the outer parts of her cochlear implants from her pocket and slotted them in. "And now I can hear you...sorta. I'm Maya."

"Topaz," she returned the introduction, marking her place in her book and sitting up. She could sense Maya's annoyance but of course ignored it. "Nice to meet you. You new around here?"

"No, I've just been invisible the entire time and you're only now able to see me," Maya replied, actually rolling her eyes this time before shaking her head. "Sorry, that was...kinda rude. I'm new, yeah. Just got here two months ago."

"Well I've been gone for two months," Topaz told her, completely unphased by the rude. "There's a lot of new people running around, it's getting hard to keep track."

"You don't read the journals?" Maya asked, not sure if the older girl just wasn't good with faces or didn't keep up much. She'd heard somewhere that you could access your journal from anywhere, even space supposedly. "Or just bad at remembering faces?"

"I didn't read them while I was gone." Topaz shrugged. "Didn't really see the point of trying to keep up, I wasn't coming back. And back-reading two and a half months seems like more trouble than it's worth."

"So why did you?" Maya asked, plopping herself down in the leaf litter in front of Topaz, taking a moment to greet the murmur of the land under her hands. There were patches of hurting that Maya would need to check out later but for now the woods seemed content to wait. "Come back I mean."

Another shrug. It took Topaz a moment to answer. "I got in a little over my head with something. Thought I was ready to handle it on my own, turned out I wasn't. Luckily I had someone here who was willing to bail me out."

"That must have been hard, having to ask for help like that," Maya replied, reaching forward to stop a small spider from landing on Topaz's shoulder before letting it crawl down her fingers and onwards into the woods. "I'm not much good at doing that part of things."

"Yeah I'm not either," Topaz admitted with a small frown, watching the spider as it crawled away. "Never really understood those people who could easily go to someone and say they need somethin'."

"Most of time I think it's because they've never had anything worth actually asking for help with - it's easier when all you're asking for is someone to paint your nails, or help you move house," Maya opinioned - not that she would really know, she rarely asked anyone for anything - which usually was a pre-requisite for having trouble doing it. Or was that the point? The whole not asking in the first place. Surely you'd have to want to ask for help and then not do that; then just never really think about asking in the first place. Either way - she figured that she wasn't good at it, and that was that. "So... What happened to you that made someone have to bail you out?"

Topaz supposed she should've expected that question - she'd put it out there after all. Still, she hesitated for a long moment, trying to figure out the most PG-ish way to put it. "It's...a bit of a long story but basically I got on the wrong side of a group that thought burning witches is still a good idea," was what she finally settled for.

Leaves rustled over-head and a few dropped around them, communicating Maya's sudden unease - native magic was different to witchy magic - at least as far as she knew. There were less books involved anyhow - and the rituals were different entirely; but magic was magic - people who tried to burn others for it rarely made a distinction around what sort of magic you were using.

"What did you do to them?"

Topaz shrugged, picking absently at her shirt as she looked up at the trees, watching the leaves for a long moment. "Nothin' really, in the end. I'm a witch. That's all the reason they needed."

"Dumbass, I didn't mean why they attacked you, people like that are just looking for a reason," Maya said - giving Topaz an exasperated look - why were people so quick to assign blame to themselves when evil assholes decided to make it 'attack the different person' day? "I meant - what did you do to them to teach them a lesson about what happens when you try to hurt someone who can fight back?"

A small smile pulled at Topaz's lips at that. "I didn't do much, honestly. Amanda and her mates did all the work. The bloke responsible won't be hurtin' anyone else any time soon. He was an empath, he was just manipulatin' the rest."

"Good," Maya responded - pondering Topaz for a moment before making a quick decision. "Want me to show you what I do? There's a place close to here that the forest says is hurting it, we could go take care of that."

"Sure." Topaz marked her place in her book, pushing herself up. "Let's go."