Knot So Bad, Is It?

Mythra doesn't envy hardly anything about her brother - his edginess, his cockiness, his apparent lack of an intellect that he'd sooner destroy the world than even once sit down with the people making it so crappy in the first place to voice his complaints...none of that. But if there's one thing she wishes she had that he carries so proudly, it's easier-to-manage hair.

Her hair, golden and glowing and flowing so much that it's just as never-ceasing as her own lifetime will be, since she won't die when Addam does, gets sand in it, among other things, and the glints of sunlight off of it get in everyone else's eyes, if not just her own, and it's really heavy sometimes, and overall it's just a pain in the neck. Er, scalp.

Now, the cycle of their everyday routine is a real charmer for facilitating tête-à-têtes. You want to talk to someone, you sit down next to them at the campfire, and everyone knows that there's no point in squabbling over customary seats, because the Titan will still be there tomorrow and we can all play musical chairs just as well then.

Mythra, however, is on the offensive here (where here, conveniently, is the Outrider's Forest Trail, or nearabouts). Whatever she's going to ask, it's probably going to end up being supplicative, and she hates to be on the bargaining end of things, especially with people she knows, so she doesn't sit down just yet, instead opting to set and level her gaze from a standing position at her target.

Three, two, one, and...her voice cracks. Great. Better luck next time. But, on with the show:

"How do you deal with it?"

There's a lot of conversations a question like that could open, but this one isn't half so heavy as most. Minoth meets Mythra's eye contact, tilts his head slightly back and his chin slightly up, and makes a minute gesture with the upturned belly of his wrist to ask, "Deal with...what, exactly?"

"Your hair," amends Mythra. "Because obviously you have long hair too." She could ask anyone else just as easily, because Lora and Jin and Haze all have it, and Brighid and even Aegaeon do too, but it's...not the same. Not quite. (Not really just as easily, no.)

Minoths nods evenly. "That I do. I'd like to say something inspirational about how I wouldn't quite call it 'dealing with it' because it's very important to me, but, if I may say so, you came to the right man."

Rolling her eyes and hugging her arms to her chest, Mythra does just about all she can to speed up the monologue. "So I'm inspired, great. But that doesn't help me...?"

"You came to the playwright and you want a short answer?" He doesn't even have to say it; his face is all mock offense. Mythra stares blankly at him (not up, not down, just across), unsure of how to deal with a response so inordinately useless, and she stares and she stares - and Minoth stares back - for another minute more, and then the Flesh Eater lets his face break.

"Obviously I don't have anything but short answers. I put it up, that's about it." In other words, he could simply have pointed a blunt finger to the back of his head, accompanied by a raised eyebrow of quasi-amusement quasi-confoundment, and stowed the whole inspiration bit, but...well. We came to the playwright, and all.

Mythra bites her lip, clears her throat. Minoth watches her, scratches at the corner of his jaw, kicks a cicada carcass into the fire. It hisses flatly, and Brighid's blank eyelids give a telltale flutter. It's the only indication, thus far, that anyone else is paying any attention to their idiotic cosmetic pantomime.

"Do you have any extra?" She tries to school the sassiness out of her tone, and Minoth's answering gentle smile isn't really all that much of an indicator of whether she succeeded or not. Oh well. At least he's getting used to me. (And tell me, Mythra, are you getting used to him?)

Maybe he was pretending obliviousness before, because now everything flows with the utmost grace: Minoth stands, offers Mythra his erstwhile seat, and digs into a pocket on his chaps for a handful of hair ties in assorted colors.

Mythra doesn't sit. "Wow. The whole rainbow, huh?"

"Addam gave them to me," Minoth replies, somehow completely unflapped by the possible implications of that comment. Uh-huh. The whole rainbow. Regardless, he picks among the pile for a green color almost bright enough to match the gems scattered over her pauldrons, diadem, and miscellaneous buckles, and holds it out to check. "Fitting?"

"Like a glove," deadpans Mythra. Minoth's expression still carries something all too fond as she takes the piece of elastic from him, and it stays there as her first attempt strays low and mopey, her second sticks out like a horsetail, and her third only stays up for a matter of seconds before wayward strands fling out in five or six directions.

"Need help?" comes the exact same inflection as his last entrance. Mythra nods, sheepish, and finally concedes to sitting, watching as Minoth drags a log from a little ways back so he can settle down behind her.

There's an awkward silence, and Mythra tries to ignore Addam's encouraging smile as he's caught a snatch of whatever it is they're doing from where he's sat conversing just as awkwardly with Aegaeon, but despite her best efforts she does indeed end up stewing into a little bit of introspection. There goes my self-sufficience. I can't even do my own ponytail. And some model of femininity I am, that I didn't even ask Haze, or Lora, or even Brighid. Great. Just great.

The silence ends, then, just as Mythra's started to wonder if she's ever even seen Minoth's bare hands - no way he's going to do a better job than she did with his gloves on, even though she was wearing hers. Something again about femininity, probably, and the thought that maybe she doesn't care, actually. But, we'll leave the preponderance of that for another time. For now...

"Are you ready?" His nose, bumpy and hooked, pokes over her shoulder next to her cheek. Interestingly enough, for all she might have expected that she would be (and one supposes that that defeats the point, even), Mythra isn't startled. Take a point for the narrator.

She ducks her head down in response, and Minoth sets to work gathering up her hair, from the bulk of it at the base of her scalp to the shorter strands from the sides of her face. This is when Mythra feels that he's taken off his gloves, and though her instinct, just as with the startling, would be to squirm away, she doesn't - doesn't even feel the need to.

Whatever it is, it's...allowably nice. After all, Minoth is the only one who'd neither baby her nor snark at her for asking for help with something like this. The more Mythra thinks about it, the gladder she is that it's him she has to interface with, second to Addam; she can, really, more or less ignore the others, which is...awesome.

"Hey, do you ever-- OW!"

"Sorry," says Minoth, as shortly as he ever says anything, which means that he doesn't roll out all the roundness of the vowel. In fact, however, he's not very sorry at all, and continues to tug upwards on Mythra's hair.

"Do you have to do that?" she gripes, chin in palm from elbow on knee.

"Don't have to," Minoth allows. "If you want to turn your head upside down and stick your butt up in the air to get it right instead."

Leggings or not, she definitely doesn't want to do that. "...fine. But can you hurry up?"

"No," says Minoth, this time even more shortly but really more pointed, dropped like piquant staccato.

"How come I've never seen you do this?"

"Early riser?" It's not a question, but it's also not an answer. Mythra spends so long trying to puzzle out how he managed to get away with that - how he manages, over and over, really - that she doesn't even notice as Minoth pulls the tie off of his right wrist, works his left to get it shimmied all the way down to the base of the ponytail, and wraps it once, twice, but not quite a third time.

Then he sits back, and then she notices.

She's not usually one to loll her head from side to side as a motor tic (that, in fact, is more Malos's thing, and maybe this is why), but she stands up and does it now to test out the new distribution of weight on her head, and finds the experience sorely...lacking. Not lacking in soreness, however.

"This hurts. Are you sure you did it right?"

"It's a ponytail, Mythra." Minoth has stood up as well. "Apart from lack of experience, which is what you have, I don't see how I could have done it wrong."

"Wait...are you, like, offended?" Laughter spills out of her throat faster than her hair from the tie as she pulls it out.

Minoth seems stony as he watches all his hard work quite literally come undone, but something in the vague region of his eye sockets definitely twitches.

"You're mad - you're so mad!" Mythra's full-on cackling now, as - completely without thinking - she slips the hair tie onto her wrist and begins to gather up her hair again, flipping her head down towards the ground and thus her bottom half up towards the sky.

When she surfaces, Minoth's arms are crossed, but the fond smile is back. "What? What did I do?"

"Nothing." Still, no one else is watching.

"Did you say something to them?"

"Not with my words," is the airy reply, but this time Mythra dismisses the cryptic orator to try out the flopping weight again, and finds that once again, she doesn't like it. It's overly tight, but she can sense that if it doesn't stay that way it'll fall straight down, and the bump of the crest also threatens to cast her diadem and feather headband loose.

"Huh. So it wasn't just you."

"Not just me," Minoth agrees. "Okay, so a high ponytail is out of the question. Take it from me that a low ponytail looks stupid - how about braids?"

Braids? Visually, they've always looked like they'd be fun to do, to play with, but as Mythra tries to imagine her hair constricted into those overlapping segments, she's not so sure.

"I'll try it," she ventures tepidly at last, also giving the implicit admission that it's nothing to do with either of their respective skill levels as she sits back down on her log, and Minoth upon his.

He's no gentler this time around, and indeed doesn't even bother being particularly fastidious, letting his legs lurch out to either side and his own neck roll slightly sidewards. Mythra, no longer dead set on getting the dirty deed done and dusted, hums something not quite musical but not quite tuneless, minding the occasional rhythmic taps on her pauldrons. The final two come in unisioned tandem, one on either side, signaling the end of the line, and she processes what's just gone on as similar to her expectation, but also a little nuanced. Probably, that's down to Minoth himself.

"Better?" he calls forward.

Mythra rolls her shoulders to test it out. "Not really. They're all stuck up to my head, all fuzzy at the roots, and my shoulders feel weird."

"Fair enough." He claps a hand on each and scoots forward once more. "I've got one more trick left up my sleeves, don't you worry."

"Oh, sure. I was just dying over here before you came and saved my bacon."

Bluntly enough, she literally was. "Your point?"

"...just do it already."

Out come the braids and the quintuply-twisted ties, and Minoth begins to whistle as his latest semi-annoying time-passer. Mythra's about to copy him so as to join in, but finds out just in time, thanks to Foresight, that that...probably wouldn't go too well. Then, she's about to sit on her hands when Minoth passes a lock of hair (far more than just a lock, more a chunk, in fact) forward, clearly indicating that she should take it.

She takes it. What? She's no idiot. Or at least, that's what she would have said, but Minoth's whistling takes a turnabout, and Mythra proceeds to toss it back to where it came from.

Finally, he stops whistling. "Hold it." The first denotation Mythra takes is to stop what she's doing entirely, and freeze in place, but then she moves to the second: hold the hair itself in place. Confusing, but whatever. She holds it. She's no idiot.

Before continuing his busywork, Minoth silently adjusts her grip on the hair to the right height, then sets back in to whistling and whatever else. Though she can't feel anything as clearly because of the clamp halfway down, Mythra can tell that he's braiding again. By the time she's figured out exactly what he's going for, Minoth has completed the right side and handed her the left, so she takes each with the corresponding hand and has a chance to look the finished braid over.

It's loose, but not too loose (might we more accurately say tight, but not too tight? we might), and hangs at the perfect height to accompany her shoulder without cluttering the area and getting tangled in her armor. Smart. Minoth's not the first person she would've pegged as smart, but...

No, actually. She would have. She does now, anyway.

"Thanks," she murmurs softly.

"De nada," Minoth says just as gently (the quietness of it conveys the meaning more surely than the words do), and ties off the second braid with finality. "There. You're free of me, now." With that said, he stands up, backs away with hands held gamely up, and then, almost as an afterthought but definitely not really as one, he offers Mythra a hand up.

For a moment, she considers trying to pull some tricks of the light with an ether shield so she can see what she actually looks like before they truck back into Auresco, but once she reviews her estimation of the funky cowboy, who's just now tightening his own ponytail's hold, she decides to table it.

Everyone else is milling closer to the fire now, where Jin's almost done cooking. So the world hasn't been shaken off its axes by a little...whatever this is, whatever that was. Mythra still hangs back, though, and Minoth, who'd been about to move in himself, stands with her.

"Not so bad, is it?" he says, because of course he can never stand not to break the silence.

"Was that a pun?"

Minoth glances down at her from the bottom third of his eyes, barely peeking over his eyelids. "I'm allowed."

"You are so not." Amidst her trademark huffing, Mythra notes the sway of the plaits, and decides that this style is very suitable indeed. Yeah, maybe it's a little bit prissy-princess, but if they're gonna bug her about acting too snappish, then maybe she can overcompensate this way. Maybe? (Not the soundest of logic, Mythra, but you're not the Blade instantiation of Logos, after all.)

In an instant, however, Minoth's tone is not half so measured, and he replies coolly, "Okay, so take them out if you don't like them."

"I didn't say that."

"I didn't say you did."

"I hate you."

"No you don't."

Mythra chews on that, just a bit. Then: "Can I do yours after dinner?"

"Sure. Anytime."