houseofcards_rp | [ota] sleeping under strange skies

He's ready for this. Of course he's ready for this.

He wouldn't be here if he weren't ready. Holló wouldn't have sent him through without being prepared. This isn't, after all, the sort of place a person gets sent without it being purposeful. Even the people who wander here 'by chance' are the people who need to be here, he's been told.

So it's the right time for Aleksei Volkov to be stepping out into the cold sunlight barely warming the walls of the Castle Spades, newly minted and processed and told he'll have to start working his way up from Two now.

The few things he'd brought with him have been settled into the cramped quarters he'll be sharing with a few other recent arrivals. What's stuck from his grandmother means he'll be starting off under the apparently quite severe Spade kitchen staff.

Hopefully it isn't the end of the world that he needs to pause when he's sent out to Town to pick up a few extra bottles of truffle oil and vanilla extract. Hopefully being 'ready for this' doesn't mean he can't take a moment--take a deep breath--as he lets settle into his bones the fact that he's here.

{ooc; He can be bumped into at the castle or being lost in Town. Also tag plz?}

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"Well...no." She'd wanted to go to college, of course. She had her degree, even, though she'd earned it through distance learning. But actually leaving for four years had been frowned on. Those were four years she could have spent challenging her way up, after all.

In reality they'd been four years of a rollercoaster. She had challenged up, from Five to Six to Seven. Then she'd challenged down to Four, and back to Five and Six in another Suit. She'd gotten disowned, stabbed, engaged, and married.

"I'm afraid some of us are a little provincial here," she says with a slight shrug. "Not all of us, I don't think, but a lot." Which might be the reason behind the current troubles, honestly. Maybe they should leave the Deck for more than a few weeks at a time.

"It just-- seems so easy to move, here."

There weren't borders to cross here. There weren't ID cards to be checking and tracking and worrying after. There's a bit of disbelief in his expression.

"I would have thought... people would move more."

"It is." Because it is. How many times has she disappeared off to Paris to shop, to London, to Venice and Athens? And yet, at the same time, there's something other about the Outside. It's worse for others; she, at least, grew up with her papa. Georgios had often taken her when he'd had work.

"But, I don't know. I think people are afraid of it. It's bigger, and more complicated."

"More complicated?"

He gets the arched expression of disapproving disbelief from his father. He doesn't actually know it yet. Some things are apparently genetic.

There's going to have to be a bit more digging before his genetic love of firm structures like this one kicks in, apparently.

She doesn't recognize it. Maybe because the expression is a little more...expressive than Julien's version.

"Well, don't you think so?" She says, smiling a little. "Maybe we're a little archaic. But we are hundreds of countries, hundreds of different governments and sets of laws, or millions of people."

And maybe that's true. Maybe the world, as a whole, is infinitely more complicated than a closed system.

But.

"It still... seems easier to live very-- small. Back out there."

She frowns a little. "Perhaps it seems that way." And she's not the best example of this. She's never lived small. She's been ambitious and she's been around the kind of people, in both of her Suits, who rise high. "But not everyone lives...dramatically. Especially the people who live in Town, or the countryside. Even those of us in the castle don't necessarily..."

She pauses a little, and shrugs. "Life isn't the Castle isn't really straight out of Camelot. You know?"

"...no."

And a piece of him knows that 'you know' is just a bit of colloquial English nonsense. Every language has these little unnecessary additives.

But, at the same time? He doesn't know. Not much at all.

"Er." She makes a bit of a face, laughs a little at herself. "I'll lend you the book," she finally says after a moment. "I've got it in my apartment, and it's lovely."

That aside: "I mostly mean that it's not all duels and swords and challenges all the time, or even most of the time. Most of the time we're just...people. Living lives."

And it's briefly distracting to think about her apartment. Focus is necessary.

"Then why don't you-- live them beyond the borders?"

Since they're just living lives.

"Well, this is home." Also, she suspected that her husband was probably wanted by the authorities in several countries, which put a crimp in emigrating. "It can be hard to leave home. Was it hard to leave yours?"

This would be the perfect opportunity to puff up and make a show of not being a little boy anymore. If it had been the next day, with the world more settled, he might have managed.

But it's today. And he's off-kilter enough that his nose wrinkles unhappily for a moment.

"The first time. Not-- this time so much."

[ota] sleeping under strange skies

FREKI IS THE MOST PRECIOUS EVER CAN THALIA KEEP HIM.

But will there be bellyrubs this is his one question and qualification it is important :|a

Naturally there will be bellyrubs and all manner of spoiling. Odin will be like WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU

FOREVER RUINED as a harbinger of slaughter. o9

HE'LL SURVIVE.

RUIN THE SAVAGE BEASTS IN YOUR OWN PANTHEON, WOMAN.

SHE DID THAT ALREADY. THEY'RE HER LAPDOGS. SHE BRINGS THE MINOTAUR TREATS.

BEST PUPPY-MOMMY EVAR. \o/

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