Welcome to Gaia! ::

The suite was small but well-appointed, wood-paneled and furnished with comfortable, utilitarian fixtures, and kept meticulously tidy and clean. The inhabitant of these rooms had been here long enough to place a few personal items on display, a fine glass paperweight visible on the desk and a delicately elaborate etching hung on the wall, but her belongings and work were organized with a military precision, no item to be seen out of its prescribed place unless in use. Xanir sat straight at the desk, comparing letters and receipts to a ledger and taking notes in small, clean letters in a separate book. When the servant announced her visitor, she set her pen down and rose in a rustle of skirts, inclining from the waist in a careful and respectful bow. "Honored Lord Deity, I welcome you," she said, her English still markedly accented but smooth.

The shimmer and shift of Endiovar's form startled her, and the sound of his voice even more so; he had not spoken as the others did, but his meaning slid sidewise into her mind, familiar and comfortable, and the accompanying physical change gave him the features that would allow him a true, full depth of gesture. Had the servant not announced him by title, she would still have known by the relaxed and upright set of his ears as he spoke Lord Yu's name as an equal in standing. But it was the brief lift and fluff of the point of his mane that floored her, most highly spoken in the familiar tense and accompanied by the second degree of superlative. Her heat-sensors lidded briefly in pleased pride. She had known Lord Yu approved of her and spoke well of her, but to be accorded the precise degree of praise surprised and satisfied her, soothed a faint ache of frustration deep within. She allowed herself to slip from the strain of thinking in English into Gallic, and said, "I am honored by your visit, and I shall strive to merit the praise accorded me." She chose the formal tense, but spoke warmly, and she held her whiskers back and her ears angled in the friendly greeting of a ranked servant to her lord's contemporary.

"May I offer you wine or water, Venerated One?" she asked as she straightened from her bow and moved to open a cabinet in which a decanter and glasses sat. Her ears remained focused on her guest even as she turned, politely attentive. Though it had been months since she spoke her native language, its cadences still felt easy and graceful on her tongue. Its precise, defined nuance of etiquette was more of a relief than she had expected. English was so sloppy with its vague qualifiers and uncertain honorifics, and she had not expected the interpretation to be as stressful as it sometimes proved.

Silence's approach was a courtesy, and a well-measured one; Xanir poured a glass of dark wine three-quarters full, a gesture of respect and generosity that marked a silent statement of her master's wealth and kindness, the guest not expected to drink the full amount but to show reciprocal respect by leaving a measure of waste, affording the amount unused. She turned and brought the glass across the remaining distance, offering it to Silence with a respectful dip of her muzzle, ears angling in the seventh degree of submission, recognition of status above hers but not directly commanding her.

She took in Silence's appearance with a single quick glance; a noble's dress, ornate and full-skirted, soft expanses of fabric that spoke of wealth and status, trim and embroidery and jewelry that marked their bearer as only two degrees below her Empress, mane caught up with gold and jewels in a rich spill of long fur that would require servants to maintain in proper style. Power, both inherited and earned. A position assigned by hatching, but earned by knowledge, by training, by devotion. She bowed, holding the wine glass in a steady, outstretched hand. "My lady. I thank you -- I thank you in all the ways in which I am capable and permitted for your understanding and your sympathy. I hope that I may assist you in the specific understanding, in the knowledge and nuance that you and I (not we, but only because I am not your equal, and I submit willingly and with grace) may share. I must refuse your offer, though I regret it deeply. To understand, to function, to share -- I am an exile from my world and knowledge, by circumstance and necessity. To live in this world, to perform allegiance to the Lord to whom I am chosen and sworn, I choose, as I must, to become a citizen of Gaia and a scion of Lord Yu. I thank you. I appreciate you and the comprehension and honor that you offer; I submit to the mastery and dominance of my chosen lord, to whom I owe my life, my position, my being."

Her speech, and the motions and obesiances that accompanied it, concluded in a formal stance with bowed head and a one-knee position of formal and respectful submission and second degree disagreement, informal, from servant to master. "I hope that you will accept my invitation to speech, to relaxation," she answered, "but in my position and my proud and willing service, I feel that I must and should conduct my business and my service in the language and gesture in which those who answer to me speak and comprehend." Her whiskers tucked back, and her tail settled against her leg in honorable formal submission. "I must speak and understand in the manner that those I command comprehend and feel. Please accept my honorable and appreciative refusal, with all the happiness and sympathy that I feel for your offer and your understanding, with the beloved and knowing obedience that I offer in the manner that I may offer it under the obligation and submission to the master I have gladly taken."

She smiled at Endiovar, a gentle, sweet, pleased expression, even as she maintained the proper positions of submission and respect. "I offer you the finest refreshment I own, kind Venerated One. I hope you will accept my offer, my respect, my appreciation."