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(forked from 2019-09-23)
Back outside, Yarver had brought one hand up to scratch at his right brow.
“That's a complex question,” he said. “It's hard to have proper empathy for something that doesn't share your neurological quirks. It's possible if you don't–” He paused. “This sounds patronising, I'm sorry, I don't mean it that way: It's possible if you don't make assumptions.
“But no one is asking people to understand that bonding often doesn't work the way we think. That realisation makes it easier not to do battle unless you're coerced, but at the end of the day, it's the battles and the associated… 'training'… that we condemn.” 'We', not 'Jagdish'. From the tone of his voice, at least, he wasn't doing a lot of condemning. An intellectual exercise, perhaps. Just one with high stakes.
At least Yarver had gone back to having a calm air. It wasn't quite outright soothing in the current situation, but it certainly prevented it from spiralling into a worse state.
“But let me circle back, before we lose ourselves in the tangle of this,” Yarver suggested, pinching the bridge of his nose briefly. “Bluntly said, Jagdish is used to judging people. It's part of what the Legendaries expect him to do. It doesn't typically happen that he sees someone and then doesn't get to judge them.
“Yet that's what's happened here. You came to Taqnateh before, but you declined his challenge. It's good that you did and Jagdish wouldn't think otherwise, but it's still deeply strange to him, and it's hard for him to shake the scepticism, so he pokes and probes, trying to understand the anomaly.”
With Adelaide pressing her back to a rock, Yarver had moved to sit down on a nearby boulder, looking deceptively harmless. He'd brought her here, knowing at least to some degree what it entailed, but his body language almost seemed to pretend as though he were uninvolved in her fate. A fate that would likely be worse if Farsight whisked her away at a moment's notice, sealing some grisly outcome.
By now, Yarver had leant forward to rest his elbows on his thighs, hands dangling between his knees, in the curve of his dress's droop. He really should have grown a beard to match to his long white hair, lean more into the wisened sage aesthetic, but instead he just looked a little like an aged hippie. Maybe that was part of his shtick - look harmless.