2022-04-01 - Barnacling is a Verb Because Reasons

At one point or another, the break is over. Una is left to her book and perhaps another beer while Ariadne and Ravn depart to deal with the Vagabond and her crusties.

No, not dried eye-sleep. Barnacles. Those seditious, skin-slicing, phallic-recording-holding little bastards.

Granted, the barista dressed to deal with them. Her moss-green cargo pants have enough pockets for tools and the fabric is tough stuff. Her sneakers look older, not meant for public work but for yardwork instead. Her grey sweatshirt is meant to take a beating, a new stain or two, and her ballcap, sporting the Avalanche hockey team logo, keeps the sun as well as her hair out of her face. This is pulled back into a messy-bun twisted on itself for extra grip as she stands on the dock and eyes the waterline sloshing against the boat's hull.

"I'm going to be that person who asks if you've got all the tools to do this," she says to Ravn with a glance towards him, hands now rested on her hips.

"If by all the tools you mean knives that ought to be called machetes, and those triangular things you scrape with or build bricks with that I don't know the English name of, a hose, and plenty chemistry, the answer is yes." Ravn is in matching gear (though black): Cargo pants, old sweatshirt, bare feet in flip-flops so that it's easy to hose his legs down as well. There's probably a change of clothing up there on the boat because it'd be a chilly walk back to Oak Avenue otherwise, once the sun sinks behind the trees and mountains and the weather is in fact not summery.

"If there's a smarter way to do it, feel very free to enlighten me," he adds with a grin. "I learned how from, well, watching folks on the marina when I was a kid. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody has a better way. Yachters are a stubborn tribe."

"Nope. No more clever idea," the barista shrugs as she meanders over to consider the tool kit. A sigh and she then laughs to herself, shaking her head. "This used to be a form of hazing, I swear to god, back at the university. The undergrads, they'd be made to do it if the grad students could get away with it. Otherwise, the profs made the grad students do it. Pecking orders, what'd'ya know."

She glances up as a seagull circles overhead and then moves on. It might be that same fry-frisking gull from earlier. One can never tell with these birds.

"I don't think you need to pressure wash it," she adds, frowning at the hull of the Vagabond. Ravn then gets a questioning look.

"What I usually do is just scrape the suckers off the hard way, then wash it all down with the cleaning agent. It doesn't matter if the hull isn't mirror blank when we're done. They don't eat through. They just end up slowing maneuverability if we let entire populations build underwater cities." Ravn nods and rolls up his proverbial sleeves; stiff brush, scraping knife-thingy. "And then I remind myself that they're already dead, so yes, I'm smashing their little homes but they're already dead. And dried out all winter too, for that matter."

He laughs softly. "It's funny, really. This is one of these things my old man would actually have thought manly enough as a sports activity, sailing. And he'd have paid someone else to do this job."

Ariadne chooses to fold her sleeve-cuffs a few times, not over-many; no need to scrape or cut up her forearms and then need to go to work looking like she lost a fight to Kitty Pryde. She too takes up a stiff-bristled brush and one of the plastic scraps and twists her nose at her starting point.

"Your old man sounds like an asshole, Ravn, to be a blunt American," the redhead replies as she starts in at the outer edge of a clumping of barnacles. "No small wonder you're not in contact with him anymore." Scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape. Bits and chunks of barnacle come off the hull of the boat and patter to the ground, some bouncing off of her sneakers. Thank god they've all dried out like Ravn said; otherwise, the smell might be raunchy. "This isn't so difficult to do anyways." The statement has the lilt of a question to it regardless and accompanies a glance down the boat towards Ravn.

"We didn't get along." Ravn settles into an easy scraping rhythm; the work is not so much difficult as it's dull and patience consuming. "He meant well in his own way but it's another world entirely. I can see the logic of it after a fashion -- there's people enough who want to do the work for money, so why should you? I just feel that you miss out on the value of things if you pay your way out of all the inconveniences associated with them."

He pauses a second to toss Ariadne a grin. "Funny thing is, he'd have understood that if I'd been talking about, say, mountain climbing. You don't helicopter to the top of Mount Whatever for a photo -- the bragging rights are in getting there on foot, oxygen mask and backpack and all. But I guess the hard work needs to be prestigious for it to work. No one brags about cleaning dirt and moss off the garden path. Maybe they should."

"It's not an easy task, cleaning dirt and moss off the garden paths. That hurts your back after a while...and this would give you the equivalent of 'tennis elbow' if you did it for enough years. But it keeps the boat whole and operational, so...yeah, if there's any laud to it, maybe it's a private kind of laud. You fixed a problem. Cookie for you. But it's definitely not as complicated as sequencing a genome or hiking to the top of K2 or wherever the mountain is, so the bragging rights are really just...material, I guess."

Ariadne knocks knuckles on the hull of the wood, knock-knock. "This thing doesn't sink and nobody does their own private rendition of Titanic." Back to scraping. "But you're not wrong. Paying for someone else to do work cheapens the value of the task or object at hand. Seems like common sense to me, but hey, there's an especial irony to be it being called 'common'."

"I like doing this," Ravn says with a soft laugh; scraaaaape, scraaaaape. "Not the work itself. It's smelly and gritty and I feel like I should jump into the laundry machine with my clothes on when we're done. But it's part of the whole experience. It's like a spring ritual. Do this, and you earn those lazy summer nights when the sea is calm and you just sit there on the ocean with a cold one, under the stars. Those nights wouldn't be such a big deal if you didn't earn them."

He glances down at the redhead and then shakes his head. "So, I mentioned I'm an overthinker, yes? Because there's also the obvious counterpoint that by doing it all myself I am not paying someone who might need that money, and I'm trying to prove my independence to a dead man. But you know -- can't win all the fights. I am guessing boat and gear maintenance is also part of the curriculum for a marine biologist? Never heard of a university that could afford hiring a paid crew to look after everything."

"Right, spring cleaning," aforementioned redhead agrees easily. She's not bothered by scraping barnacles, by the appearance of things, though she admits to herself that a long, hot shower will be greatly pleasing when she gets back to the motel room. Samwise might still roll on her clothing no matter what. Dogs.

Ravn accuses himself of being an overthinker and earns himself a side-glance complete with faint smile. Indeed. She still replies to his query, "It's part of the curriculum for a marine biologist under the premise of dealing with an issue when it happens, yeah. If something breaks, like a line, or the motor suddenly stops, you'll at least have an idea of what went wrong while the Coast Guard comes to fetch you. Otherwise, it's actually on a maintenance crew, yes, and some of the college kids who get hired on this time of year to help out that small crew with the boats. There's also the rowing team, since the university is on Lake Washington. I never figured out whether or not they chip in because it's a good workout, but hey -- maybe they did."

"Makes sense. Not much point in teaching the marine biologists of the future to be so helpless they need to call the Coast Guard at the sight of a dark cloud." Ravn nods his agreement. "You hire professionals to deal with the things that require expertise. I wouldn't try to repair the Vagabond's engine myself if she breaks down -- because I don't know the first damn thing about diesel engines. I don't think I am qualified to repair her short wave radio, either."

It's no wonder the usual soft kidskin gloves have been exchanged for proper work gloves today; without them, the hard edges of barnacle shells tear flesh. "What are the odds of you finding work in your field in a place like this? I mean, I'm sure barista work is fun but in the longer term? Seasonal, maybe, stay here in the winter months and go up to Puget Sound in summer?"

A flick of the plastic scraper sends a stubborn barnacle shell clinging to the material away with a gratifying arc and crackle against the rocky beach. A nod from the barista: so there.

"Hmm. Well..." Ariadne lets her thought peter off into silence -- er, not silence, scraping. Scraaaape. Scraaaaape. Monotonous, the work, but she can feel it'll be proper exercise for her upper torso and arms as a whole. "I mean, the odds aren't terrible, but it's not going to be as easy as walking into Espresso Yourself and introducing myself along with the addendum of my last name." A glance over at Ravn with a faint smirk before she goes back to working at a stubborn cluster. Last name what. "I'm still planning on talking to Parks and Rec, maybe the local Fish and Wildlife office. I've got connections still back at U-Dub, it wouldn't be difficult to drop a name and see what it nets me. I don't know about traveling back to the Puget Sound in the summer. I just rented a unit here," she then says with a sigh-laugh. "All my stuff needs to be moved in. I can't think that far ahead."

Well, she can, she just doesn't want to. Not just yet.

"Fish & Wildlife sounds like a good bet." Ravn doesn't say it out loud but the thought is there: It wouldn't hurt to have people there with the gift, either, because the news that filter back to Gray Harbor are often useless: Howler monkeys indeed, and now Ava Brennon is on about, what was it, nightshade bears.

Prying this little bastard loose; what are you hanging on with here, your legendary oversized dick? C'mon. "I don't have any useful connections, I'm sorry to say. The world of academia is small but historians and marine biologists kind of only speak the same language when it comes to exploring shipwrecks. Also, I haven't really kept up with things this side of the pond since I'm not affiliated with any of the American institutions."

He hates barnacles already. Again. Barnacles are a seasonal love affair; every spring, you love falling in hate with them all over again. "Part of me wishes some of all the things we've seen here existed in the normal world. Then you'd have work for a lifetime. Spanish galleons, selkies, mermaids, kelp that burns, great whites, orcas -- well, the last two exist, obviously, but they're probably not everyday sights."

The barista's scraper pauses while she watches Ravn wrestle with the particularly stubborn behemoth of a barnacle shell. Her lips twist in memory of earlier conversation's bent. A biggun, that one, so...

Ahem.

"No, orcas and great whites shouldn't be everyday sights around the harbor here. It's not the right habitat. Something's very wrong if they become regulars around here, some big ecosystem shift the harbor isn't prepared to handle. I think I'll go pester Fish and Wildlife regardless. I bet you have a recommendation there, at least? You've been a local longer than me," Ariadne notes while she puts her shoulder into a grunting effort to remove her own little patch of stubborn little barnicular bastards.

"And I dunno about the other stuff existing in the real world. Sirens?" She frowns, thinking back to the boomerang of a Dream they'd shared; one minute, trying to save the other young aide, the next sipping sangria on the deck like all was well with the world. "No thank you. No sirens or burning kelp, good lord, definitely not that. Those things can all stay where they are."

"I actually don't have a name on Fish & Wildlife," Ravn returns, with a hint of regret. "Closest I have is Garrett -- Perdita Leontes' boyfriend, and I don't even recall his last name. Nice enough fellow from the couple of times I've met him. He's a Park Ranger. I'd love to have more contacts there who see things like we do. Kind of hoping that Jules -- Una Irving's lodger -- may end up leading me to a few indigenous contacts too, she's Quinault. There has to be a lot going on here that we don't hear about because we assume it's all something fairly new, and we're stuck in our own little town dwelling, largely white and anglocentric echo chamber."

Because things that go bump in the night have echo chambers. Of course they do. Cthulhu probably doubles as an Instagram influencer (and why not, he was a web comic lead for a decade).

He pauses and looks back at Ariadne. "The mermaids, unfortunately, are very real and very local. The burning kelp I've only heard of that one time and the Spanish galleon hasn't been back, either. But the mermaids -- stick around. I am trying to work out how it works but Denny is not the easiest person to get to spill the beans, and definitely not in any kind of logical order."

Drat -- no recommendation for Fish and Wildlife. Ariadne nods nonetheless. It had been worth a shot! She does, however, recognize the name 'Garrett' and the association with Perdita, better known to her as 'Dita' now. She isn't certain if she knows Jules by the subtle frown she sports and the split concentration, half on gritting off barnacle and half on Ravn speaking. Her hand drops dramatically as a large chunk gives way and she hisses.

Ouch. Managed to scrape the back of her hand. That's what she gets for not wearing gloves.

Shaking out that hand, she then eyes the deep scratch while she mutters, "No, I've heard Denny is difficult to discuss anything with. I don't mean that unkindly. My coworkers talk, is all. I'm not sure what I would do if I saw one of those mermaids in real life. Screech? Maybe screech. I've met Garrett though, so I do know him. I don't know Jules. I'll check with Dita too; maybe she knows somebody through Garrett since he's her boy-toy."

"I think he's been elevated to exclusive," Ravn returns with obvious amusement. "Which, for Perdita, is apparently a very big deal. She wasn't thrilled with herself for going and getting Emotions in there. We had a long talk about it on New Years' Eve, just her and me and a substantial amounts of Black Russians. I don't have much of an impression of him, but he makes my friend happy so that gets him brownie points with me."

He glances at Ariadne's naked hands. "There's an extra pair of work gloves in the tool box. Don't ruin your hands, woman. These little dicks are dicks about that too. Jules is the one of Irving's lodgers who's Quinault. Our talks have been a bit of a mine field but I can't really blame her; here's a very much white guy like me researching her people's stories like it's so much academia to be examined. I do think we've dramatically overestimated white people's influence on this whole area -- the thin spot, I mean. I don't think the settlers created it, and I think that it's about damn time we start asking the indigenous people about their take on it all."

"Eeeeee, not emotions." Her teeth flash in a grin while she stoops to find those extra gloves. Not too proud to try and spare her knuckles, this one, especially knowing her hands will be in soapy water at work soon enough. One word: ow.

"You're not wrong though. It's...not only stupid, but haughty as hell to ignore a respectable source of information with lifetimes' worth of experience in dealing with the Veil. Anyone would be mad not to try and ask for their take. I hope Jules stops by the coffee shop one time. I'd love to meet her. What has she told you so far?" Gloved up now and relieved for it, even if they're one size too big, Ariadne takes up the scraper and brush again. Fuck you, barnacles, it's on now.

Ravn's hands move rhythmically, scrape, scrape, scrape. "Not a lot. She doesn't trust me. She thinks I'm trying to milk her for stories and tales -- it's not that she's trying to keep it all secret, it's about me. I'm a white guy academic who wrote a PhD on this stuff. So if I am going to learn a whole lot from Jules and the Quinault, I need to convince her first that I'm not white guy academic number whatever, collecting stories and then writing what white people think about them, for white people, making money for white people. She did suggest I might go along on a trip to see her grandparents, to talk about these things. I consider that a very large olive branch, and I'm sure as hell going to leave anything like cameras, recording devices, and even note pads at home."

He smiles, a little wryly. "But you're right. People have asked -- I know that because there are folks in town who say the indigenous people have legends about shadows and things in the dark. But they obviously didn't ask enough questions, so about damned time. So far, all she's told me is that her grandparents know about spirits and the old beliefs."

About him. Ariadne nods understanding as she works, glancing over again between chunks of hollowed sea-hull.

"I think that's very respectable of you, leaving all of those items behind. It's about the connection with the old stories. I remember learning about this when I was young here, in elementary school. You listen and you have respect for the words shared because they're formulated from someone else and their life experiences. Someone older and very likely wiser than you in many, many ways. You listen and you ask questions. I dunno how much slack you get cut once you're an adult, but when you're young, questions are good things." Grunt. Fwhip -- there goes more barnacles. She makes a small face. Yetch; that chunk had some tepid rainwater pooled in it. "When are you going to go talk to her grandparents?"

"When she tells me to get in the car." Ravn laughs softly, again. "I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. No idea whether this is a cultural 'when the stars are right' thing or a 'when there's nothing on Netflix' thing. Not going to compromise goodwill by asking."

He pauses a moment in scraping. "Thing is, I probably do know what they're going to tell us. That reality is fluid, that we shape it with our stories. That that's what folklore is -- the oral tradition that passes instructions on from one generation to another. We tell stories because stories teach us how the world works. What the rules are, how to think, how to function. The big questions and the small, from who made the mountains to how to get along with your neighbours."

Ravn's gaze glides towards the water a moment. "Every culture has an origin myth. Whether it's in the beginning there was nothing but God and the waters, or it's the Greek titans bringing order to chaos, or it's the Egyptian creator god Atum masturbating order into chaos. The one thing every single culture on Earth ever has agreed on? Chaos is bad. There has to be rules to how nature works, how life works, because when there is not, there are things in the darkness that prey upon us and crush us. Sound familiar?"

"Fair," opines the barista of not asking just yet. Time will tell all. She's mentioned she's the patient sort before. Ravn pauses and looks towards the water. After another few jarring scrapes, Ariadne does the same, wondering if he's spotted something. Oh, no, just a detour of attention while he thinks aloud.

A soft snort. "Pandora's Box. Eris. Jormungandr. Yeah, chaos is a crucial element to the old, old stories we still know. Now...I'm going to get a little philosophical here. In my experiences, stories were and still are a way to frame reality to make it understandable. Nothing's scarier than not being able to reassure your kid that what's out there, beyond the fire, is a thing with weaknesses and form instead of some nebulous terror. I...wonder sometimes if humanity itself, telling these stories and asserting again and again that chaos has form... I wonder if we've accidentally screwed ourselves over with the power of believing what we've said is real. That what's beyond the Veil is rather than is just a figment of imagination. That it took as long as it has -- or maybe not even as long as anyone likes to think -- for our own imagination to give those bastards form."

"I think so. After a year and a half, here? I think the other worlds bleed in, and they take shapes and forms from what we imagine. Our rituals and stories give them form -- but they also bind them. You knock on wood because that is the rule -- the evil spirits cannot make your ill-spoken wish come true if you bind it in the wood. Is the wood of your random chair sacred? No. But the story is, because it is persistent, because it is a truth your people has always known. Just like a good Catholic knows very well that he's eating a wafer and drinking some wine, but it is also the blood and body of Christ. It is both, and both are real. Because that's the form our stories have given to this reality."

Ravn glances back at Ariadne, and then smiles a little lopsidedly. "We have lost most of those stories in Europe, or we think we have. We know the myths of the Norsemen, but only as they were passed on and written down in the 12th century -- not as they were spoken when they were still believed. We know very little about what came before -- the sun disc, pulled across the skies by horses. Horned priests, acrobats, dancers with very elaborate braided hairdos. We have the stone etchings but we do not remember the stories."

Meeting his grey-blue eyes for a few seconds, her own hands gone idle as they've mused aloud, Ariadne lets her own golden-hazel regard drift off towards the water again. She watches the distant mildest of breakers form and smooth by the time the waves reach the rocky pebble beach of the marina, broken more by the wave-break peninsula built to further shield the boats.

"I'm sorry those stories have been lost," she decides after a solemn silence. "I shouldn't talk as an American... We've got some stories here, but not like Jules' grandparents might, and the Wampus Cat is now a college mascot, not that something scary eating your chickens after dark. Fine by me, if the Veil vomited up that one," comes the tart opinion. "But...it makes me wonder if it's belief that's the strongest thing against this Veil bullshit now." Her brows meet and lightly divot above her nose. Looking back at Ravn again, she continues. "I knock on wood and don't think twice about it. I had to...believe I could move things. What's stopping us from simply looking at an instance of Veil bullshit and firmly telling it that it just isn't real...?"

"It might work. I'm not going to say it won't." Ravn cracks a small smile. "But I think that if I'm face to face with Cthulhu I'm going to have a hard time not believing that he's there. And maybe that's the problem -- you'd have to convince your senses that it's all not there, and then have faith. Maybe that's why priests have been the bulwark against the dark in so many cultures -- they're already trained to believe something else than what their eyes are telling them."

He hitches a shoulder and then resumes scraping. "I think it may be too late to just refuse to believe. The things in the dark already bleed through. But we may have some influence over what form they take -- they pick up stories from us, right? That's how they can do a Zorro re-run, that's a story they got from us. And we can try to negotiate in the form of acting along when it's fun, and working against them when it's not."

Such a sigh from Ariadne. It has the elements of rueful acceptance to it, as if she'd already known her postulation didn't really have a leg to stand on, not in the current era of humanity. She too goes back to scraping and grunting when it takes a bit more effort to prise away the barnacles.

"You're not wrong. We're too...the idea of believing in something with a concept like faith, that's a dying concept. But maybe...yeah, maybe it's more something like imagination combatting imagination. A proper wizard's duel." She then laughs and shakes her head, an escaped lock of hair swinging at her cheek. "Reminds me of the Disney take on 'Sword in the Stone'. Word play. Man...nice and young, Disney taught me about word play. Mim, crazy witch, she says to Merlin something like, 'alright, no pink dragons or anything of the like' -- and then she goes and turns into a dragon, but she says, 'did I say no purple dragons?' And she's totally right, which means poor Merlin's running around like a lunatic dodging dragon-fire. I admit, I was impressed."

"This was a staple of Norse culture," Ravn says with a small grin. "The specific naming of things. So many sagas and stories follow this pattern. Knowing a thing's true name has power. The Norse skalds often spoke in allegory. They believed that there is power in a thing's true name -- but there is also power in naming a thing, much as you suggest. To speak of ploughing Aegir's field rather than to sail -- you do not invoke ill fortune by tempting the sea god or the fates. So many names -- sea-stallion, wave-rider, worm-of-the-waters. It is all magic, all ritual to bind the power of the sea. What you are suggesting, and what Disney suggested there, it is a tradition that goes back to before viking became a trade. Viking, to go a-viking, to go pirating and sea trading, to land in the viks, the shallow bays, it all came to be because of these rules. Man tamed the sea. And man learned to build boats."

"Woman tamed the sea and helped build those boats too," the redhead notes with a significant side-glance at the Dane. She continues regardless. "But yes, names have power. You have a name. I have a name. Call me Scullin? I might respond. Call me 'Carrot-Top?' Probably going to flip you off. Call me Ari? I might respond to it. Call me Ariadne, the name given to me by my parents and the word which signifies me-myself-and-I in all aspects of society?" The shrug almost answers in itself. "I'm going to respond. No small wonder anybody who thought to give a god a name didn't necessarily want to have the god glancing up from whatever the god was up to at the time."

A grunt. "Now, if I'd been thinking, I would have brought a sacrifice for the god of barnacles and been like, yo, can you not have these fuckers glued like cement?" Grunt. Grunnnnt SKRICK. Flying shell. She brushes at the hull with her gloved fingers. "We're good, no scratch," comes the report.

"There were women sailors in Norse stories, yes." Ravn nods his agreement as a historian. "And very likely a substantial portion of them were transgender, too, or at least that's the current theory about a number of the shield maiden stories. They have found warrior skeletons that are female, so the whole concept of man and woman seems to have been a bit more opt-in. Women -- as in, the role of woman -- was largely tied to the land, though. Which is not to say a woman could not become a viking and a sailor, but in doing so, she took a man's mantle."

Ravn smiles at Ariadne, slightly. "Norse women -- as in, the role of woman -- had rights that were lost over time. Even in medieval times, a free woman had rights that were lost in industrial times. But before we put Norse society up on a piedestal as a role model culture for women's liberation, let's not forget that all of those rights only applied if you were a free woman of a certain caste. Poor women had few rights. Thralls had none whatsoever."

"So, long story short, it doesn't matter what era you're in, people still mostly suck." Ariadne shoots the historian another dry side-glance and then returns to gritting away sea growth. "It makes me tired. But at the same time, that there's this representation in the warrior caste -- the shield maidens and skeletons, that heartens me. It drives the point home that anybody can fight if they want. Take a stand. It didn't matter the era, though some cultures were more accepting than others, I get that."

A swipe of her wrist across her brow and she takes a step back to eye her work. "Alright, this isn't terrible, you can probably do the chemicals here now. I'll go around to the back and see what I can do." Side-shifting, she makes to move to the stern of the sailboat unless otherwise delayed. There are more barnacles to chip off, pernicious little bastards.

"That is also a point, at least. I think the one was I trying to make was more of a vague protest against a couple of modern agendas. The alt-right really wants the vikings to be these buff, growly, manly men, and the LGBT+ people really want their society to be sexually liberated and diverse, and neither is true except for a privileged few. I guess the real point is that if it's fun and liberating and powerful, it's the upper class or caste that gets to do it." Ravn smiles a little. "But yeah, take a stand is a good point, too."

And take a stand he does. Die, every little dick-mollusc. Well, technically, they're already dead, but get off his damned boat, then. So much scraping. And then, so much chemical reagents to clean off dirt, salt, and residue. And then, the water, to prevent chemical agents from doing a number on the paint job about to happen next. Whoever said yachting is not hard work paid people to do their spring prepping.