| A Calligraphy Leson |
| Summary: | Ryuunosuke shows Kaylee some of his art. |
| Date: | 2017-01-30 |
| Related: | None |
| NPCs: | None |
| Scene Runner: | NA |
| Players: |
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Arts Room Coral Springs
More to come, multi-media abound. From a corner of stone blocks for printing and racks for paintings or paper art, to light tables, and cutting tables.
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…Odd. That's really all Ryuunosuke can think. It's just after dinner. Ordinarily he'd be in his room, doing… well, not much, admittedly. But instead he's in the Arts Room — reluctantly. This is where Besa is seen often, so Ryuunosuke's been avoiding it like the plague, to avoid running into him. Schuyler did say that Besa was coming back, despite seemingly being gone now.
Though Ryuunosuke's not here not without reason. His reason is Kaylee. He's not sure why, but she asked him to meet her here about this time. He doesn't see any reason not to, since aside from her being incredibly talkative he doesn't find her any sort of threat. So, near the specified time, Ryuunosuke walks into the Arts Room, to sit down and wait. He's dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, having changed out of his school uniform.
Fashionably late- just long enough to probably make most people wonder if she's actually coming, Kaylee comes blustering into the art room with her arms full of arts supplies. It would probably behoove her to get, like, a bag or something to carry them in. But, she hasn't thought that much into it, obviously. "Ryu! Hi! You're early!" she says … which would only be true if he'd been able to predict her tardiness. She makes her way over to the table he's sitting and and then unceremoniously dumps the supplies onto the table, reaching out to snag a jar of paint and then a couple brushes that try to roll onto the floor. Once she's got them placed back on the table and the pile somewhat stabilized, she grins. "So since you took me to a movie the other night, and I really appreciate it," she asides briefly. "I thought I could pay you back by painting something for you! And I figured, if I was going to be painting, maybe you'd like to, too, so I brought some more stuff so you can paint too! It'll be awesome!"
Ryuunosuke blinks as Kaylee comes in with supplies. Once she puts them all down, he stands, and assists in catching falling things. "Eeto… Calligraphy is… not exactly painting," he offers. "It's just… I guess you'd call it 'fancy writing'." A pause. And then he notes, "…I suppose I could show you."
"That's why I brought you stuff!" Kaylee chirps in response to Ryu's offer to demonstrate. She sets about organizing things a little better on the table- spreading a canvas out in front of the boy before setting the paint pots up in a better position to be used. Then, she turns and skips over to one of the walls, grabbing an apron for herself. "Do you want an apron, Ryuunosuke?" she calls over, reaching to take one off a peg, anyway.
Ryuunosuke nods at the question; he doesn't want to get his clothes dirty. He accepts the apron when handed in his direction, and dons it. And then he realizes something. "…I haven't done this in a while." He looks at the assorted paints. "It's usually a… formal affair. A ceremony, a little."
Kaylee is all smiles as she brings the apron over. She ties her own on over her clothes as well, then pulls her hair back into a pony tail. She's just getting settled into her seat when Ryu explains that she's not doing it right. "… really? You have to have a ceremony, just to write stuff?" she asks, her face scrunching up quizzically. "… you guys must have loved when they invented instant messaging, huh?" And no, she's not being silly at all when she asks the question.
Ryuunosuke huffs a quiet laugh. "Not exactly," he tries to explain. "'Just writing stuff' doesn't need to happen on ceremony. Calligraphy is… not 'just' writing. Like a tea ceremony isn't 'just having tea'. Eeto… when you go to a fancy restaurant, you dress up, ne? It's 'having dinner', but it's not 'just' having dinner."
Kaylee listens intently but then blinks in confusion a little, obviously not understanding. "So …," she thinks, the wheels in her mind visibly turning. And then her hand flies to her mouth to cover the small O her lips form and she gasps, turning pink. "You mean … it's like, your guys version of a date!?" she squeaks, obviously embarassed. "I didn't know! I'm sorry! I wasn't trying to make you go on another date with me! I'm totally not trying to hit on you or anything or make you date me because I don't like you like that but not because I don't like you but …." And her nervous chitter will probably start approaching lightspeed if nobody stops her while she fumbles over herself.
Ryuunosuke shakes his head quickly. This situation is getting out of control! "Iya! Not… a date. More like… meditation," he tries to explain. "Something you do to better yourself. Meditation. Yoga. Katas. Exercise. But an exercise for your mind. Does that make more sense?"
"Ohhhhh!" Phew! Kaylee visibly relaxes and settles down, her pink blush slowly starting to fade away. She settles back in her chair, tucking her left leg underneath her, and fishing her glasses out of her hoodie, under the apron. She slides them on and settles them into place, then smiles and reaches for the blue paint jar. "Well, that still doesn't make much sense, but at least we cleared it up," she says, smiling. "I mean, I kinda get painting to relax and stuff, but … painting to BETTER yourself? I mean, unless it makes you all happy and cool like Bob Ross, I don't really get it."
Whew. Crisis averted. For now. Ryuunosuke also pulls a chair up, and looks at the assortment of brushes. His selection is clearly a careful one. Probably putting a little more thought into it than might be understandable. He does also reply, "The control of the brush, the control of your hand, the control of your arm — these are things which must be practiced to create beautiful calligraphy. Control in calligraphy translates to control in battle. As you learn to control yourself with the brush, so too will you learn to control yourself with a weapon."
Blink. Blink blink blink. … snickering! "Painting is SO far away from fighting," Kaylee responds, grinning as she gets out a brush and dabs some blue paint onto the end of it. "I mean, sure, maybe you could make an argument about hand-eye coordination and stuff, and maybe muscle controle. But, completely different use of the muscles!" she says. And then she's painting. Her brush is moving swiftly over the paper, the blue spread out here and there in what might almost be a random pattern if she didn't seem to know exactly what she's doing. Her face focuses, though there is still a smile on her lips, as she works at painting SOMETHING. However, she's only using the blue for a few moments before she reaches for the black pot and unscrews it.
"Less about the muscles and more about the mind," Ryuunosuke replies. "Mental control is the more important factor." But he doesn't explain in more detail. Sometimes cultures just don't understand each other, and he has a feeling this is one of those times. So instead he looks for a paint jar. There's a dark, velvetty green there. Let's start with that. He uncaps it, dips the brush in, and swipes the excess off on the side carefully.
Then he moves the brush to the canvas in front of him and starts to… well, it's lines. But he varies the pressure he presses the brush to the canvas with, making the lines thicker or thinner by doing this. He draws a small box, then bisects that with a vertical line, then adds a horiztonal line to the end of the vertical one, with a 'tail' on one end. Next to that he draws what might look like a sideways angle bracket with the points pointing down, crowns it with a 'stem', then draws what looks like a backwards 'J' with a 'tail' on the middle.
In a short amount of time, Kaylee has managed to blend and brush the colors on her canvas into what looks like a very stylish leather jacket- though … it's fairly 'fuzzy' around the edges. Whatever could SHE be painting? As Ryu's brush moves, Kaylee's eyebrow quirks up a little, but her eyes don't move away from her painting. And while Ryu's painting may not take quite as long, being a single color and stuff, Kaylee's picture comes along quite quickly. After doing quite a bit of work on the jacket, long black streaks start forming what will probably be hair when she is finished. "What did you write?" she asks when Ryu is finished, not taking her eyes from her work.
"It's the character 'hebi'," Ryuunosuke replies. There's a bit of a smirk there. "It's the word for 'snake' or 'serpent'. Perhaps a… no-brainer." A word he's picked up in his time here. He looks over to what Kaylee's doing then, and tilts his head. "What are you painting?" he asks, curious.
Once Kaylee has finished with the hair, it is probably rather obvious that she's painting a picture of Ryu. Except … it's a lot more abstract than average. "You really like snakes, huh?" Kaylee quips at the explanation of what Ryu painted. She offers him a brief smile while she reaches out for another paint pot. This time, she takes both yellow and white and pours them out on a plastic tray, then mixes them together. When Ryu asks what she's painting, she just grins. "You!" she responds. "Or … at least … kind of the way I see you. I've been working on it- painting what I see with both parts of my vision. That's why your edges are all fuzzy. My eyes see the lines, but my head only sees the differences."
Ryuunosuke blinks a little at the mention of liking snakes. "That shouldn't be surprising. I am one," he notes. He does have those weird lines on his face, and his eyes are serpent-like. Though he tilts his head when Kaylee mentions that's how she sees him. "I didn't realize you had a way to see others differently. How does it… work? What does it show you?"
Kaylee giggles when Ryu claims to be a snake, wrinkling her nose up though she still doesn't turn away from her painting. "Suuuuure," she patronizes. But, to his question, she seems a little surprised. "Oh! … haven't you heard me explain it before?" she asks, since of course everybody should already know things she's already said before. Or something. "My body absorbs photons. I can kinda 'see' them anywhere around me, all the time. So, I kinda have this three-hundred sixty degree vision thing that lets me pretty much see everything around me. Except, I can't really see details because there's just soooo much information out there. It's kinda like putting your nose up against a TV- makes it really hard to see the whole picture, especially since it's moving around. But, since everything reflects or absorbs colors differently, I can tell a lot. It's a liiiiittle hard to paint, since I can't paint in three-d. Plus, it's almost impossible to get the colors exactly right. But!" she says, leaning back as she completes the fairly artistic looking portrait of Ryuunosuke standing in his leather jacket from Saturday night. "I'm getting a lot better at getting the feel right!"
Ryuunosuke raises an eyebrow at the tone. But he doesn't comment just yet. Because she's answering his question, and he did ask. While he does have an ancient mind, the knowledge of the Boy that the Demon was merged with knows enough to know what 'photons' are. "Sou," he notes, in response. Had he said 'I see' in English there would have been an opportunity for a pun, but that's the problem with multilingual conversations. He considers the picture. "It does bear resemblance."
Suddenly he gets an idea. And he smiles a bit evilly. "How do your powers show… this?" As he says the last word, his shadow moves oddly, and from the space behind him, a tendril seems to grow. It swallows up the light that gets near it, leaving it a literal tendril of shadow. And as it grows forward, towards Kaylee, a head forms on the tendril, shaped like a cross between a snake and a crocodilian of some kind. The whole thing looks like a serpent made of a three-dimensional shadow. But its tail end terminates behind Ryuunosuke in a way that makes it difficult to tell if it even HAS a tail.
Kaylee blinks a little as Ryu decides on an experiment. "Okay …?" She settles back a little, waiting. However, it's her eyes that catch sight of the shadow snake thingy and her eyebrows shoot up. As it coalesces, she cringes and clasps her hands in front of her, squeaming away. "Ewww! What is it? … is it real?" she asks, squinting at it. "… I can only see it with my eyes," she adds.
To his credit, Ryuunosuke doesn't make the shadowy serpent get closer when Kaylee moves away. The dragon/snake thing sits relatively quietly, copying Ryuunosuke's movements. It blinks when he does, and when he tilts his head, so does the shadow serpent. "One of my heads," he answers. "I have seven of them like this. The eighth is this body."
"You have … eight heads?" Kaylee boggles, her eyes blinking rapidly. "Doesn't that get … noisy?" she asks. Because, if Kaylee had 8 heads …. Well, she struggles enough just having one. "Why do you need eight heads? And what are you doing with the rest of them? And how come I can't sense this thing? It's not bouncing off any light or anything. It's just … I dunno. Like, dark or something?"
"They're… all me," Ryuunosuke replies. "They think as I do, what I do. Eight heads, but one mine." As he speaks, seven more of those crocodile/serpents appear from behind him, some on his left and some on his right. They all seven mimic him, blinking when he does, looking in the same directions he does when he looks that way. And all seven of them swallow up the light, which he explains. "They're made of shadow. I no longer have all eight of my heads physically, so they manifest from shadow."
"… oh." Kaylee's brow furrows as she considers the shadow-thingies. She reaches one index finger up to tap her lips thoughtfully while she thinks. Finally, she concludes, "… huh." Then, she shrugs and goes back to her painting. It's time for the finishing touches, as she adds little decorative swatches of color around the outside of the painting- reds, blues, blends … she doesn't bother cleaning her brush off as she goes, which is probably horrid for her paint pots, but maybe she knows what she's doing? "Well, that's pretty interesting, I guess," she says while she paints. "But I can't imagine trying to get by with eight heads. Anyway! Since you were so nice to take me to a movie on Saturday, I thought I'd paint you this picture to repay you. I figured, with you being a boy and everything, you'd never let me actually PAY you back," she assumes, regardless of how wrong she may be. "then you at LEAST couldn't say no to a picture I painted, just for you."
When the shadow serpents are explained and Kaylee returns to her painting, Ryuunosuke mentally dismisses the serpents. As one they seem to withdraw back behind him and their presence disappears. While she goes back to her painting, Ryuunosuke writes something else on the canvas he had been working on. Five characters, arranged vertically down the page next to the word for 'snake'.
Hachi
Qi (a Chinese character)
No
Dai
Hebi
He looks up then, as Kaylee offers him the painting. He seems surprised, and blinks. "…Thank you." It sounds a little like 'san-kyuu'. The tone, though, is quiet. Almost reverent?
Kaylee just beams at Ryu when she's finished with the painting. "Of course! It's like, literally, almost the least I could do without doing NOTHING," she says, lifting the painting off the table and carrying it over towards a string that runs the length of the room with lots of other art projects hanging from it. "You'll need to let all the paint dry and stuff, especially the blended parts. But it should be ready for you to take it tomorrow after school! You can totally hang it up in your room or something!" Kaylee turns back, then, wiping her hands off on her apron. "Thanks for coming to paint with me, Ryuunosuke. And thanks again for the movie. Don't bother cleaning up, I'll take care of it. And your calligraphy stuff is really neat. Maybe I'll ask you to show me some other characters, some time, and maybe I'll make a painting out of them!"
Ryuunosuke nods slightly at the mention of letting the paint dry. And affirmative sound at the thanks. He's kind of quiet now, as if thoughtful. As for cleaning up, though… "Are you sure?" he asks. "I did help make the mess." Yes, he does take the calligraphy he painted to the drying line too. It's pretty nice, at least he thinks so, and he wants to make sure it stays that way.
"I'm positive. I'm used to it. I didn't even really go all out or anything, since you're mostly dark colors and stuff. You should see the mess I make when I paint LANDSCAPES," Kaylee responds, grinning. She holds her hand out, waiting for Ryu to turn over his apron so she can go and hang it back up. And then she'll set about making sure all of her paints are closed fully before gathering up the brushes and heading for the sink.
"Thank you," Ryuunosuke replies. He removes the apron and hands it to Kaylee. Then he offers a bow of his head. "Oyasumi," he offers quietly, and then heads for the door. There's things for him to think about…
"BAIIIII~~~~" Kaylee calls after Ryu, waving frenetically as he exits. And then she starts cleaning up.