Mingle - Emergency Potluck

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WELCOME POTLUCK

Greetings, residents! Those more observant sorts among you may have noticed a large influx of very crowded ferries. In order to welcome our new residents en masse, Town Hall is holding a potluck in Town Square. Please bring a dish if you are able and make a new friend!

All of our newest arrivals need only bring themselves. We look forward to welcoming you all into our community, and may your lanterns always be lit.

This event is open to all! In light of our new influx of prospective players following the Great Sail Migration, we've decided to offer a small public event to tide everyone over until the TDM this weekend.

Comments

[amourtician]

Anzu smiles back, with the same delight and relief, happy that this gambit of his is paying off.

"Hello," he says, and inclines his head in greeting. "Shake'st thou hands? Or not. Either's fine by me."

He does hop off the table, out of a feeling it's more polite to talk when not sitting on a trestle table swinging one's legs.

"I'm called Anzu. Doctor Menelikov, really, but ... ah, it doesn't always do to stand on ceremony, nu? What do I call thee?"

He's so excited that the question of the correct blessing on turnips has been entirely forgotten, at least for now.

[tehilim127_1]

She clasps her hands together and makes a little semi-formal bob of the head. "I shake hands where it would be insulting to refuse," she says, "but it seems it wouldn't be by you. I'm Zivia. Birnbaum. Where are you from? -- Sorry, should that be 'thou'?"

And by the sound of her voice, she's equally excited.

[amourtician]

Anzu bows, this time from the waist.

"A pleasure to meet thee, Zivia," he says. "Thou'rt may call me Nyura, or, if thou prefer'st, Motke. That's, ah, from Dovyd Mordekhay—by mine hometown, we had so many Dovyds, we saw it as impractical. And, no, thou need'st not use the informal second person if that's not thine habit already."

He leans back against the table, perching on it so he's still technically standing up, but not unsupported. He's not tired yet, and his stamina has been excellent as of late (which is part of how he ended up in Pumpkin Hollow in the first place, the consistent wellness leading to some poor decisions involving the more rugged terrain on the outskirts of Vyuta), but he still tries to be careful.

"I'm from ..." he pauses, and mock-frowns. "Well, darling. It's no easy question. I was born in Vilna; I live in the Talons commune, which was, until the Revolution, theoretically part of the old city of Svet-Dmitrin, but is now its own thing. I still consider myself Litvish, and I lay tefillin the day after second night seder, instead of waiting until Pesakh's over. And my sister and I are the only ones to do that in the whole of the commune." He spreads his hands in a what can one do sort of gesture, then shrugs, and adds, "And thee? From where do you hail from?"

He doesn't mention, not yet, his suspicions and conjectures about the prior lack of Jews on Marrow Isle, and what his husband's told him about whether or not Jews exist outside of Mir. There's no real evidence that Cecil's not from Mir, after all.

[tehilim127_1]

Vilna, Talons, Svet-Dmitrin, Litvish; it's an odd combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and she can't be sure that the unfamiliar bits aren't just unknown to her, rather than unknown to her world. Oh, but the familiar parts are intensely sweet to hear in this strange place, like the smell of the honey-roasted nuts they sell out of street-corner carts in her own city.

(All she knows of those nuts is their smell. No one has yet worked out a reliable way to make kashrut supervision workable for street vendors.)

"I'm from New York, if that's a name you know. My family's Ashkenaz both sides, but I don't think any of my people ever lived in Vilna, at least not the four or five generations back we've got records."

[amourtician]

... four or five generations back we've got records.

"Нью-Йорк," Anzu echoes, and it's clear the mere sound of English is unknown to him. And he, who can easily trace his family back to at least Dovyd HaReuveni's doomed bid to bring about the time of the Third Temple, is briefly rendered speechless. Oh yes, Zivia did just say she's Ashkenazi, but the combination of an unknown place-name and four or five ...

Nu, he's not stupid. But this is not the time to interrogate each other about oy, now what and which petty prince got embarrassed over his debts this time.

"I know not the name, dearest," he says, and bites his lip. "Which nu, really, means little. There's long been a suspicion that there's a couple of plena aware of us, that we have no idea exist. The consequences of a shattered world, nu?" He shrugs.

"I say I'm from Vilna," he goes on; he's looking past Zivia's shoulder, concentrating on his expression, on his tone of voice—hoping that she's likely met others like him and minds not the lack of eye-contact, "my family is too, though ah, taking the medium view, we're from wherever it is Dovyd HaReuveni came from. He took a retinue with him, including a family of Levites, and that is my mama's yikhus," he's gesturing now, as if drawing the words from the surrounding air, "and my papa's ancestress married a Warsaw Levite, one Horowitz." He pauses, cocks his head to one side, smiling.

"But I do go on, darling," he says. "It's hardly interesting, really. Tell me ... what's thy city like?"

Of course she comes from a city. It's an assumption he makes almost unconsciously—she would've said, if she were from the wilderness like his husband.

[tehilim127_1]

"I'd love to ask you about plena sometime, but it can be later. Levi both sides, huh? My dad's family is Levi, my mom's a bas Kohen."

Her smile suggests that there's no question he could have asked that she would like better. "My city," she says, with deep affection, with satisfaction. "By all tradition, I should tell you it's the greatest city in the world. It's big and dirty and crowded and layered. It's a center of art and culture, especially theatre. It's been a center of immigration from everywhere for a couple hundred years, so it's got a very mixed population. Including a lot of us," with enough of an emphasis on the pronoun to give an idea what she means. "It's ... honestly, it could take a while to really describe. It's not like anything."

[amourtician]

"Mine husband's mother is a bas Kohen, but ah, I don't believe anyone in my family is," Anzu says, conversationally. He decides not to get into the whole matter of Lev/Lyubov's two mothers just yet. There'll be time.

As for the city ... Anzu smiles in understanding.

"All cities are indescribable, and all are mirrors of each other," he says, cocking his head to one side. "But no city is ever like another. Vilna is nothing like the Talons, but yet both have that city-nature, nu? But ah, capitol cities, regardless of the size, they have a certain quality unseen in other cities."

He assumes that of course, New York is a capitol—a city of immigrants, with enough Jews to make Zivia mention it as a point of pride, it sounds like Prague, or even Londinium, lone stable city-state in the midst of the whole mess in that part of the Winter Isles.

[tehilim127_1]

"Technically it's not the capitol," she admits, "it's not where the state legislature lives, but culturally it kind of functions as one. The country's got a kind of complicated political structure, but we don't have to go into that unless you're really curious about representative democracy."

It hasn't escaped her awareness that he pronounced New York without recognition of the syllables or the language they fit into; she's not going to assume he knows anything about the United States of America, in any part.

"But yeah, cities like that ... they're complicated. They show different faces depending on who's looking. The New York I know isn't always the same as the New York someone else knows, even if we're close neighbors."

[amourtician]

Anzu laughs, and says, "would'st thou believe it, darling, if I said I'd be fascinated to hear about representative democracy? I've been on the Talons Ghetto Commune committee ... ah, nu, we call it the Gecko, since calling it anything dignified takes too much time. Feh! I suppose it's rather like the Great Assembly of old, except secular and mostly concerned with the rubbish bins being emptied on time and the trams not running people over."

He grins; he's clearly proud of how his city's faring these days.

"Cities are complicated, yes," he says, and his gaze grows wistful. "Cities are alive, and they all have their own habit, and each is different from her sister. And sometimes, a city has not various faces, but many heads, like a zmey. Our Talons, across the river from her is the old capitol of the Empire. But 'til the commune rose up, they were held to be one and the same city. Well, feh!" he snorts, "by the ones on the other side. But even our Talons, the Talons I see is not the Talons of my neighbour. Even if I be an extreme case, since most of what I see is sickrooms and hospitals and the good place."

[tehilim127_1]

Civic pride, that's a feeling she recognizes deep in her bones; where she lives, one might say.

(The good place takes her a moment; the euphemisms she's more used to are house of honor, house of rest, house of (eternal) life. The cemetery.)

"Many heads," she says with appreciation, "that's about the size of it. You could say New York has five, one for each of the boroughs." Plus the mostly-invisible sixth, but that's a whole other story and actually encompasses all five of the mostly-material ones regardless. "Some of them used to be towns of their own, and then they sort of merged. Kind of like London -- does your world have a London?"

[amourtician]

"We have Londinium," Anzu says, thoughtfully. "I've been told that London had that name, in places where there is a London. By us back home, it's a great city-state, wedged between whatever the Frankish lot are doing these days, and the Eastern half of the Holy Empire. It's likened to Venezia, though I'm told the weather's much less pleasant there."

He has not traveled much, though once he'd thought he would.

"I know such things only by hearsay, nu? I thought once I might make it to the far Western plena, one day, or back to Vilna ... but it seems I've put my roots down in the Talons."

He smiles, a little wistfully.

"A charming place, really. I do love it. For all that we have to bury the dead in niches in catacombs, as in times of old."

[tehilim127_1]

Well, if she needed any further indication that their worlds aren't the same ... "By us it's the capital of an island country. Used to be a massive empire of its own, but it's come down in the world a little bit."

At the last, she cocks her head. "Catacombs, why? Is the water table too high for burial? That's a problem in some cities way to the south of us, they get terrible floods ..."

[amourtician]

"Well, nu, it's either the catacombs under the city or, feh, the marshes past the outskirts," Anzu says, with a shrug.

"The catacombs are more convenient, I suppose? I believe the water table's not so much a concern as, nu, the lack of soil past a certain depth. Makes a feld easy to avoid, should one need to, too. Makes my job rather harder on occasion, but it'd be hard regardless, and mercifully, I rarely have to deal with those what can't pass on because they were buried not in the proper manner."