Riga

There are two worlds: the surface, and underwater. They are linked, of course, inextricably intertwined - and yet they so rarely interact. Along the shore of the great Sea, where it borders the Lightlands, there are tide pools and sandy beaches. Sand, rocks; scraggly, hardy grasses farther uphill. Driftwood, and the remains of a ship, the wreck encrusted with barnacles and sand; the only indicators that there is civilization somewhere. A small crab trundles across the sand, searching for its next meal. It is quiet, here at this meeting point of two worlds. Peaceful.

A lone centaur stumbles onto the beach. She was separated from her herd hours ago. A tribe of longnecks is at war with her people, and she is an unfortunate casualty. She does not carry a bow, nor a quiver; she was not a combatant. Her clothes are torn, there are pine needles in her hair; she fell in the woods as she fled her pursuers, and her leg is damaged. A centaur is nothing without her legs - and one of her forelegs is broken. (A root, caught on her hoof; she was already exhausted, and she tripped -) She is pregnant, heavily so, and so she struggles onward, down to the waterline to confuse her scent. She does not think she will survive - but she thinks she might be able to survive long enough to see her foal born.

The centaur does not see the shape in the sea. Something long, sinuous, graceful - powerful. One of the Water dragons, come to shore to sate his curiosity about the surface world. He was about to dive again, to return home, but the driftwood of the shipwreck caught his attention. He has never left the sea, and has never quite considered doing so. Wood in and of itself is fascinating to him. His eyes are not adapted to see things out of the water, and so he does not see the centaur. Not at first.

She struggles into the edge of the surf, panting, exhausted to near-collapse. Some of the shipwreck is intact. She thinks she might rest a while, in that husk - regain her strength. Perhaps she can bind her leg with the remains of her tunic.

The sea-dragon notices the shape of her, above the surface. Sees her struggle. Sees her fall, her strength spent -

and he -

leaps

and catches her.

---

The scene on the shore of the Sea was a decade and a half ago now, and neither sea-dragon nor injured centaur have seen the ocean for quite a long while. Ordinarily a mountaintop is not a particularly homey place for a sea-dragon or a centaur, but with a little effort you can make it work.

"Riga!" Mia calls, leaning out of the aquaponics doorway. The room is far too small to allow an Imperial to enter, or many of the dragons that call this place home, and so it falls to the beastfolk to keep the food production going. She quite likes it, even if it took some getting used to. It helps that her herd took quite a lot of their sustenance from the sea.

Riga sticks his head out of an intersecting hall, farther down. There's construction going on down there, the kind that mostly involves shifting and carrying tons of rock. He's the largest dragon here - he always gets roped into these things, whether he wants to or not. A lot has changed since their meeting on the shore long ago. Back then, he was used to the buoyancy water gave him; he could hardly support his own weight, and never mind carrying tons of debris.

"Have you seen Ekki around, love?" she calls down to him.

Riga thinks about that for a moment, and then he - of course - makes a face. "Not since breakfast," he calls back. He's switched into his native tongue on accident again, on account of the distance. Clicks and whistles carry quite a ways, even above the water. "Probably with the archers again." 'Archers' is said in the dialect of Mia's old herd. Undersea warriors have no need for archery, after all, whereas for centaurs it is as important as breathing.

Mia hums. Ekki's nearly an adult now, she can do what she likes for the most part. And clearly she wanted to be an archer as all her foremothers save Mia herself had been; Mia was not about to deny her that birthright. Still. If left to her own devices that girl liked to try and be a mountain goat, centaur inability be damned. She would mellow out properly once she was a full adult, Mia's sure, but until then parental supervision was an unfortunate necessity.

"Want me to go find her?" More of Riga's body appears past the junction of the hallway, all of his neck and the very top of his shoulder. He's gone into Common Draconic now - the injection of non-Kie words tends to remind him to stick with something everyone can understand.

"No, it's alright," she calls back. "I can go, I need a break anyway." She raises her hand in what most dragons would interpret as a wave, and what most centaurs would interpret as hold fire. Both meanings are equally correct here. Riga click-whistles a word that does not have a direct translation, but means roughly meet-later-love-you. Mia click-whistles it back on autopilot, much quieter. Her pronunciation of this is better than her ability to speak Common Draconic, but a centaur can't exactly reach the volumes that an Imperial can.

Mia closes up the aquaponics farm, setting the lights to low and double checking the filtration system. The mussels should be ready to harvest in another week or so, she thinks. Her task finished and basket of drying seaweed under one arm, she sets off into Acadia's halls to find her wayward daughter.

Eunomia =============================== When it looks like Hell on Earth, we'll find our paradise.

A centaur from the Sandstride herd, whose lands were in the Sunbeam Ruins where it borders the Sea of a Thousand Currents. The beastfolk are considered united by their general avoidance - and war with - dragons, but that does not mean they don't fight amongst themselves. A tribe of Longnecks had long cohabited the same grassland that the Sandstride herd lived upon, but that cohabitation was not always peaceful. It erupted into war once more, and Mia barely escaped with her life. Certainly she would have died if Riga hadn't found her.

Nowadays, Mia is in charge of all of Acadia's farms. They're not really all that large, considering how little dragons eat, but it's still more than she was responsible for with her herd. She has risen to the challenge and then some, making easy friends with dragon, beastfolk, and thinking machine alike, and becoming the most subtle of Acadia's subleaders. Visitors always look to the dragons to lead them, but it is Mia who truly has her thumb on Acadia's metaphorical pulse. Philosophy is all well and good, but one cannot philosophize on an empty stomach.

Character Notes ♫ We All • Mia is a calm, studious, and hardworking sort, although not really what you'd call serious (she has an infamous love of practical jokes). She can shoot a bow, like any centaur, but she's very much not a warrior. Instead she's a farmer and a seamstress/weaver; she has enough experience and skill and the right sort of personality that she often ends up in leadership positions without quite trying. • Mia's mother tongue is a regional variant of Mezair, one of the two centaur languages. Even before she met Riga she had some proficiency in a variety of others, as she had a hand in many trade agreements among the other beastfolk and even a few dragon clans. She has trouble producing the sounds of Common Draconic, but by this point understands it fluently and can carry on a conversation well enough. She, Riga, and Ekki communicate in a pidgin of all the languages Mia and Riga know, frequently jumping from language to language. It's extremely confusing to listen to. • Mia is polyamorous, and open about it. Riga is her primary partner, and currently she is also dating one of Acadia's harpies, a woman named Bel. Riga himself is monogamous, but has no issue with Mia dating others. OOC Notes • FR version of an OC!

========================== behold, the 3 hour recolor

Riga =============================== Family is more than blood.

Born and raised in a small nondescript clan in the Fishspine Reef, Riga had never gone above the surface of the Sea until the day he met his future mate. It was quite the learning curve - learning to use lungs, in and of itself, was difficult. It was more than worth it, though, and these days Riga lives on land like he was born to it.

In general Riga is a studious and hardworking sort, and quite willing to get his hands dirty if the situation calls for it. His size makes him a bit of a pack mule for Acadia, but he doesn't mind it. He's just as friendly and kind as his mate - but he's also a lot more suspicious of people than she is. It's certainly saved them a time or two in the past - their survival of Mizar's coup comes to mind. Acadia is considerably more friendly to beastfolk than Goldwood ever was, though, even Goldwood as it was under Valewind's rule, and so for the time being that natural suspicion is going nowhere.

Character Notes ♥ Stutter • Riga's birth clan is called Siren's Breach. It's small enough that it's not usually put on maps, and they don't trade directly with surface dwellers. His hatchclan is well aware that Riga found a centaur for a mate - they'd helped him nurse her back to health. Once the two of them decided to travel together, his clanmates even prepared supplies and gifts. Riga fully intends on returning home someday, but wants to spend as much time with his mate and daughter as he can, considering their much shorter lifespan. • It took Riga a while to dredge up enough Common to be considered fluent. Even now he tends to fall back to his first language on accident. Said first language is Kie, or at least that's the Common approximation of the name. It's a language of clicks and whistles, designed to carry long distances underwater. • Has very little magical ability, not enough to be useful in either battle or at home. He does, however, have very mild predictive abilities - not enough to do something like scry the future, but enough to get feelings every now and again. He's unaware of this ability, seeing it instead as getting a gut feeling. • Riga is loyal to his mate and daughter above all else and won't hesitate to fight or even kill for their sake. He can be somewhat overbearing at times, but nobody really blames him; it saved his and his girls' lives at Goldwood, after all.

• Riga has very noticeable ocean-dwelling adaptations, which are the result of his family line living exclusively underwater for several generations. He has decorative fins and webbed paws, which restrict his movements on land somewhat. He's also scalier than the average Imperial, and has bioluminescence-tipped barbels rather than whiskers. Most importantly is the set of gills on either side of his upper neck. They're his preferred method of respiration, and connect to the same set of lungs he uses for terrestrial breathing. It took quite a while for him to stop automatically trying to breathe through them and subsequently accidentally half-suffocating.
His balance is to this day not the greatest, causing him to stumble around more often than not. It winds up looking like drunk swaying, though he's a lot more in control than he appears. When he first came to land, he was even more helpless than Mia had been.


OOC Notes
• FR version of what was originally a Jet Force Gemini OC. (There are so many. So many.)

Ekki =============================== Family is more than blood.

The centaur daughter of Mia and Riga, Ekki is basically nothing like either of her parents. Where they're practical, studious, and above all calm, Ekki is instead an impulsive daydreamer with a little bit of a mean streak. Some of that is due to her youth of course, she's a subadult still by centaur standards, but it hasn't seemed to change much as she ages. Mia at least assumes she'll mellow out a bit more, but doesn't have much hope that she'll actually become calm.

While her parents are content to be builders and farmers, Ekki instead has her sights set on becoming a warrior, at least for now. There's enough warriors and former warriors around Acadia that she's gotten a decent amount of training - though a centaur would probably be appalled at her archery forms. As far as Ekki's concerned, if it ain't broke no need to fix it.

Ekki's energy means she'll probably end up leaving Acadia once she's an adult, at least for a while. Thankfully she's got plenty of training in wilderness survival, and odds are some of her peers will wind up going with her. That's a ways off still though, and so for now Ekki mostly helps with odd jobs and continually tries to convince both her parents and the militia leader that she should be allowed to join.

Character Notes • Ekki speaks a lot of languages with varying levels of proficiency. She learned Common Draconic, the centaur language Mezair, and Riga's mother tongue Kie all at the same time as she was growing, and still speaks all three fluently. Unlike her mother she has no issue pronouncing Common, or any other draconic language for that matter. At Acadia she's swiftly picked up even more languages - or at least how to swear in them. • For some reason that neither of her parents can figure out, Ekki has a great love of climbing things. As a foal she could occasionally be found in the most bizarre locations - such as up a tree. More recently she broke her arm in a fall, but this hasn't seemed to deter her whatsoever. OOC Notes • FR version of an OC! • Probably has some longneck/harpy friends? Names etc tba Zephyr/Pangaea?