L.A. [The corner of his mouth tugs as he echoes the name. It's not a question though, just an association--familiarity. He's not suggesting that they compare and contrast the places they each know to go under that name.
As far as Ebonhawke goes, he's not rushing to defend it as some hub of novelty and innovation either. To him, stagnant isn't the right word though. Stagnant is stillness and quiet. It's not the daily engine of living through war, the omnipresent risk that the charr would fire a lucky shot with a trebuchet and hurl a missile over the wall so that you woke up to screams and rubble and the death of a family you'd known since before you could walk. It's not the iron-stomached determination that it took people collectively just to go on living, generation after generation, as a force of will.
People from Ebonhawke have steel in their veins, the saying goes--at least the ones born before the truce. Two and a half centuries is a long time to endure a siege. And survive.
He doesn't expect Ash to know these things, though. And he's not going to get into some who had it worse one-upsmanship, "my city could beat up your city" style.
Ironically, it's the place where he feels Ash's youth and freshness: this certainty he seems to have, a sense that his answers to how the world is (how his own world is) give him surety, enough even to apply to worlds he's never been. It's not naivety though. Something else--a pillar of security upon stepping from what had been a pretty big pond into something even larger that dwarfs it by comparison. That's not something Vrenille is going to try and knock out from under him though. People need what they need.
He takes a long pull on his drink.] C'mon man, we gotta lot more city to see.
[If Ash wants to ask him about Ebonhawke sometime, Vrenille will tell him, but he'll leave it be until the questions come.]
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As far as Ebonhawke goes, he's not rushing to defend it as some hub of novelty and innovation either. To him, stagnant isn't the right word though. Stagnant is stillness and quiet. It's not the daily engine of living through war, the omnipresent risk that the charr would fire a lucky shot with a trebuchet and hurl a missile over the wall so that you woke up to screams and rubble and the death of a family you'd known since before you could walk. It's not the iron-stomached determination that it took people collectively just to go on living, generation after generation, as a force of will.
People from Ebonhawke have steel in their veins, the saying goes--at least the ones born before the truce. Two and a half centuries is a long time to endure a siege. And survive.
He doesn't expect Ash to know these things, though. And he's not going to get into some who had it worse one-upsmanship, "my city could beat up your city" style.
Ironically, it's the place where he feels Ash's youth and freshness: this certainty he seems to have, a sense that his answers to how the world is (how his own world is) give him surety, enough even to apply to worlds he's never been. It's not naivety though. Something else--a pillar of security upon stepping from what had been a pretty big pond into something even larger that dwarfs it by comparison. That's not something Vrenille is going to try and knock out from under him though. People need what they need.
He takes a long pull on his drink.] C'mon man, we gotta lot more city to see.
[If Ash wants to ask him about Ebonhawke sometime, Vrenille will tell him, but he'll leave it be until the questions come.]