sixthiterationlogs | they lost their former dye

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they lost their former dye - autumn equinox [Mark, OTA]

WHO: Kira Nerys
WHERE: The garden
WHEN: 22 September
OPEN TO: OTA, with locked log for Watney
STATUS: open (OTA)

It's clear to nearly everybody (and that's despite everything that's come up to divert the attention of the group, particularly of late) that the change of seasons is upon them. Even though Nerys doesn't have any solid sense of Earth astronomy at all, and has no clue that autumn is nigh, she's not completely oblivious to the shift herself, even if the weather's been veering frantically over the course of the last month. Apparently staying firmly put in the 'cooling down' column isn't really how this works.

Either that or the observers roll the damn dice every day to see what the weather's going to be. Today it is absolutely frigid, to the point where Nerys had to pull out a couple of layers of sweater this morning just to steel herself up to the notion of working outside. She's wrapped her hands firmly as well, as much for the warmth as to protect them from her tools.

If there's anything that Nerys is good at, it's getting on with the business of surviving--while the village and the other finds intrigue her somewhat, they unsettle her even more. These days, the chill in the night air (and now the day too) means it's nearly harvest time, and if they don't start canning up what they've got right now, it's going to be a lean winter again. Not to mention that there are more people around to feed, and she has no intention of anyone starving on their watch.

It's not like the garden hasn't been through enough this year, the plants hanging on to their lives with a sheer tenacity that rivals the sentient beings of the village. Hell, rivals the damned foxes. The latter have, over the last few weeks, been making a mess out of what's still left to be harvested. Sure, using blood- and bone-meal for fertilizer probably attracts them, but that doesn't really account for the sheer maliciousness of what's been done--vegetables left in neat piles with a single large bite taken out of them, mounds of chewed up berries, holes dug in very precise locations. It's enough to piss a hungry Bajoran the hell off.

[kind sir, be civil, my company forsake - OTA
So that's why Nerys is out hoeing up potatoes on a freezing cold afternoon. If they can get these down into the cellar space at the inn, they'll last a few months, though not as long as if they could leave them in the ground a while yet. She's already cut an armload of late zucchini and squash without much incident, but word gets around both among the humanoid and vulpine populations, it would seem.

A pack of three foxes have spent the last ten minutes slinking up to and around the potato patch, circling Nerys in slowly narrowing concentric arcs. She could swear that they keep looking at her, with the kind of expression that indicates they want her to know they're looking. Despite herself (come on, the Cardassians have played this game with much higher stakes), the frustration's built up to the point of snapping in two. One fox tries to move a little too close, pushes the envelope, and Nerys finds herself snarling, brandishing the hoe like a pike at him.

"Get!" she shouts, voice cracking. "Damn it...all of you, get!"

The fox doesn't, though all of them freeze; instead, they seem to give her a look that asks her who exactly the animal is meant to be in this situation. It's not lost on Nerys, who bites her lip hard enough to draw blood.

"Fuck, come on," she says, almost pleading. "We just want to eat."

The foxes are, unsurprisingly, unmoved.

[sly, bold Reynardine - for Mark]
The potatoes are in, or at least as many as Nerys dares to harvest right now today. Midday's long gone and it's not gotten much warmer, and all she can think of is frost on the vines. So, despite herself, she's kept on working, switching over to the remaining beans. The goal with these is to can them in the containers from one of the earlier feasts, cap them with beeswax, and call it a day, hoping it won't kill them all.

It seems like a worthwhile thing to try, at least.

Nerys' got a half a bag full already when she realizes there's a fox watching her from over by the wastewater tub. Five minutes later, it hasn't ventured much closer, so she's pretty sure it's just a scout. She makes a silent snarling face at it, before shifting up to her feet to ease the strain on her hamstrings for a second--and in the process, ends up snarling at Mark across the plot of beans. The color of her face after she figures that out probably rivals the turning leaves across the field.

[refs are to the British/Irish were-fox folk song 'Reynardine'; Rhiannon Giddens does it well.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Oh, that's good," I say, a smile struggling to break out across my face. "Very effective." Casting a quick look to the field's edge, I see that the fox is indeed gone, but it's difficult to say whether that's to do with Nerys' fiercesome display or simple disinterest. Last I checked, foxes didn't eat squash or chard.

Nerys is clearly embarrassed, though, if the color of her cheeks is anything to go by, and I reach gloved hands to heft up her bag of beans; I got in a jab, I can carry this in for her.

"Shit...sorry, Mark," Nerys says, before he makes his comment and her embarrassment turns into a scowl. "You weren't here earlier," she adds, as a rebuttal. "They were...toying with me." Somewhere in her consciousness, she recognizes just how utterly ridiculous this sounds, but a lot of things that would have sounded pretty much insane in her normal life have become normalized.

Anyway, the fox is gone, or hiding, and so Nerys lifts the bag into Mark's hands. "I was going to try my hand at canning, though I know that can be risky, right?"

Food preservation has moved on, both on Bajor and in the Federation, but some of the elder camp internees in her childhood did it when they were hard up for energy credits.

"They're actually good to have out here," I say of the foxes with a jerk of my chin in the general direction she'd been growling. "Keeps away the rabbits." Not that that's much comfort when they're watching every move you make.

"And... Yeah, sure, it can be. You risk botulism depending on what you're canning, but the process is pretty straight-forward. I've never done it personally, but theoretically I know how it goes if you were wanting some help," I say, and glance down to the beans. "My grandmother actually used to grow peppers and can them. If she could do it, I think we can manage."

"They've been chewing up the carrots and turnips," Nerys notes, somewhat defensively. "The bite marks I've seen can't possibly be from rabbits, they're far too big. Unless we suddenly have giant rabbits running around." This isn't actually all that implausible, now that it's come out of her mouth, but she trusts Mark knows what she means.

"What's...botulism?" she asks, turning the word around in her mouth a little in the process. It doesn't sound pleasant, whatever it is, but at the same time, they might have to roll the dice if it gets people fed. "And what level of risk are we talking about?"

Even in a place like this where I can't rule out the very real possibility that everything is an illusion, I find it unlikely that a fox has been gnawing on the vegetables. "Maybe we've got a gopher," I say, despite knowing that we probably don't; it's obvious enough that Nerys is still embarassed about being caught growling at the wildlife and I'm not looking to make her feel worse.

"Botulism's a disease caused by bacteria, usually in food that hasn't been prepared or stored correctly. It's not pretty, can cause paralysis, respiratory failure, and we're not in the best position to counter it here." With the equipment Ravi's got, he might be able to come up with an antitoxin, but it's hard to say. "It's less of a concern with something that's got a high acid content— And I do realize I probably just made canning seem terrifying," I add with a laugh.

In all honesty, Nerys isn't entirely certain what a 'gopher' is, save (from context) something that likes to chew on vegetables. "Mmm," she says, noncommittally, recomposing her expression a little, now that the foxes are easing up on her.

As for other scary things--well, this 'botulism' idea is putting her on edge a little bit. She gives Mark a worried frown as she heaves up the big bag of vegetables onto her knee, along with his help. "It's...a little terrifying," she agrees, "considering the symptoms you've just described. But I've seen starving and that's terrifying too. So maybe we'll avoid canning tomatoes and just stick to stuff that's less acidic, I guess." She extends the bag outwards. "You think this will work okay?"

"No, acid is good," I explain with a slight shake of my head. "Tomatoes, peppers, things like that. The bacteria can't survive in a highly acidic environment, so foods with those sort of ingredients tend to be canning staples — Salsa, relish, kimchi." Which I realize as I speak Nerys might never have heard of.

"I think it's a great idea," I add. "Although the beans we might be better off drying to preserve them. We didn't have any kind of jars to even try canning last year. I assume you got the ones from the last mystery party?"

"Oh, okay," Nerys says, absentmindedly, as she picks up a few beans that had fallen from the edge of the bag as she'd moved it. Her mind's clearly not quite caught up with what Mark is telling her until she realizes he's mentioned a few apparently food items that she's not aware of, and she lifts a brow. Sisko may have made some of them at some point, though she's not entirely clear on how 'relish' is a food rather than doing something with enjoyment. Fed Standard is a weird language sometimes.

"Don't know if I can master any of those," she says, "but drying beans is something I can do. And yeah, I grabbed the party ones--not a lot of them, but enough that we'll at least have some kind of vegetable or fruit in the wintertime. I was thinking of sealing them with wax? Most didn't have tops. Does that work?"

"It's not ideal for long-term storage, but since we're really just looking to get through the winter, if we're careful about how we do it, I think wax will work, yeah."

Apparently it was too much to ask that our jailers provide lids, but I'm not wanting to look the gift horse in the mouth, either. Jars and wax is better than nothing at all.

"I can start trying to put together a pressure cooker. It shouldn't be that hard." Hell, it's possible we have one knocking around the kitchen somewhere already.

To Nerys, a 'pressure cooker' doesn't sound like something you just pull together from spare parts, but her only experience of the term is from human idiom, and even that is divorced from any reality as regards cooking. For most people, anyway; it wouldn't shock her if Sisko had actually used one in the process of his cooking experiments.

"Good," she says. "We're probably going to eat it all too fast to need anything to last more than a few months, anyway. There's probably more food than jars, so if we can stick to drying the stuff that can be dried..."

Shaking her head a little, she lets out a quiet huff of exasperation at herself. "Watney, I still feel like I've been hamstrung. I've always known how to survive where I am, but here I'm still just a student. There's always more to learn, and never enough time or energy. Have you ever felt that way?"

"This place makes me feel like it constantly," I reply, and jerk my chin toward the town hall so we can carry these beans inside, maybe start getting them prepped to dry.

"After I spent that year on Mars, some new problem everyday I had to fix just to make it to the next, I thought I'd never feel that way again, but this place doesn't always operate by the rules. I've got days I feel like the bottom's dropped out from under me. I try not to show it, I don't want to frighten anybody, but I've got days when it's a real challenge just getting out of bed, yeah."

I pause as I lean into the back door, holding it open for her. "But I do get up— We get up. And we figure it out."

Nodding in response to Watney's gesture, Nerys draws together the corners of the bag she's been using to hold the beans--well, really, it's more like a large cloth she's sort of made into a sack. She scans the garden once more for foxes, then shakes her head and starts to head carefully towards the town hall, not wanting to spill the load of vegetables.

"Most days, it's getting out of bed so that you know you can get out of bed the next day," she agrees, smiling a thank you for Mark as he holds the door. "So that there's even the possibility of getting out of bed the next day. That's what I learned, growing up."

There hadn't exactly been much room for anything else, unless you wanted to just die. Nerys has never wanted to give the Cardassians the satisfaction of that outcome.

"Yeah. One foot in front of the other. Honestly, that's why I focus so much taking care of things. It's not just the psychological benefits of focusing on the things you can control, although that's part of it. You just gotta break things down into solvable problems. You just start."

We keep a lot of tools in here for use in the field, and I grab a couple of buckets someone's left stacked near the door.

"We can go ahead and shell those, if you want," I say, lifting the buckets.

It really is less about hope and more about just getting shit done for the sake of carrying on--though, perhaps in some ways, that is what hope looks like. At least, it has for Nerys--she's never heard 'if you keep living for any reason at all, do it for spite', but she certainly might recognize the sentiment.

"I haven't shelled beans in ages," she says, laughing a little as she sets down the sack near a small table and chairs, then slouches into a seat. "Other than here, I think the last time I did it was when I was ten."

This crop looks considerably healthier than the one that she remembered from her youth, though that could just be that it's a completely different species. The Bajoran equivalent is always sort of pale, even when it's raised in healthy ground rather than whatever patch of scrub is easily hidden.

"Before I came here, it had been awhile for me, too," I reply as I settle down in the adjacent seat. "I kept a vegetable garden on my patio for several years, but eventually I had to donate the plants to the local community college. I didn't have the time to keep up with them the way I needed to, and then I was in space."

I reach for a handful of pods and begin working them open and dropping the beans into one of the buckets. "It's easy to forget the simple pleasures, I think. Sitting down with a friend and shelling some beans — You get to help provide, and you get good company. Can't really beat that," I add with a smile.

"And then you had plants in space," Nerys notes, laughing softly at the idea. "But I guess that's what you get in your line of work. The wife of one of my colleagues was a botanist, did I ever tell you that? There just isn't much call for your kind of science on our station, but having been here, I think that's probably a mistake."

It's probably a little sad that she finds it impossible--particularly now, having lived hand to mouth again for over a terrestrial year--to stop her mind working through worst case scenarios for DS9. The replicators all going offline, if they were under siege or couldn't get ships from Bajor...

She clears her throat and looks back up. "Good help and good company, I can live with that. And then it gets done, on top of it all." Gesturing with a long bean, she adds, "Do you know how long it takes to dry these things?"

"Hey, without my line of work, I would have died out there," I point out, motioning Nerys' way. "So obviously I'm inclined to agree with you on the value of botany in space."

I glance down to the bean pod in my own hand and falter. "Honestly, I have no idea. It isn't like we can put them in the oven on exactly 350 for 40 minutes even if I did know, but I figure that's probably going to be our best bet, at least in terms of time. We could spread them out on pans and just let them air dry, but it would take a heck of a lot longer. We'll have to keep a close watch on them if we use the oven, though." I hold up the pod, twirling it in my fingers. "Maybe we could use both methods, just to be safe. Use the oven to get them most of the way there and then air dry for the rest?"

"Wouldn't there be a higher risk of bacteria if we just leave them out?" asks Nerys, considering this. She shakes her head at herself and snorts. "Though, you know, it's not as if millions of people on thousands of worlds didn't do that for aeons and survived it all, long before there was the technology."

Admittedly, there had likely been some missteps along the way, when it came to the history of all the planets out there. She chews a little on her lower lip, then nods, thumbing open another pod and pushing the beans down into the bowl. "As long as we make sure we don't bake them, I think it'll be fine," she agrees. "This would all be so much easier if we had better equipment, but I guess that wouldn't be..."

Nerys means about to say 'as much fun', sardonically, but she changes her mind at the last moment. "Guess that would miss the point."

I can't help but laugh, because yeah, to anybody paying attention in this place, the point really does seem to be to make things more difficult most days. "Yeah," I agree with a knowing arch of my eyebrows.

"And we'll presumably be boiling the beans before eating them, so I'm not too worried about bacteria. Bugs getting into them might be an issue, though. Covering them might help with that." I smile again. "Honestly, I think this whole process is just going to be us playing by ear and trying to not screw it up too badly."

Edited 2017-10-30 20:02 (UTC)

"Gotta all pull together somehow. Courage, self-reliance, determination, all those kinds of things," Nerys says, voice drenched in sardonicism, and shakes her head as she flicks a few more beans into the bowl, tossing the empty pod onto the discard pile next to her. It'll make good animal feed, if it's anything like the stuff they have on Bajor.

"Good point about the beans. I guess I'd rather eat than starve, if I'm given the option. Considering the outcome for the latter is pretty obvious, it's worth a gamble on the former, isn't it." Not that she's particularly good at gambling, but risk analysis, that's something that's her lifeblood. "We're lucky to have scientists like you, you know. So that we know what's acceptable risk."

She could very well have eaten some awful plant long before now, otherwise, though she knows better than to eat any unclear fungi.

Taako doesn't care for involving himself in other people's problems as a rule, and he loathes problem solving that doesn't involve the currently unavailable magic option. Potatoes, however, he respects. And the foxes, from his limited observations, feel like worthy opponents. Being a source of arcane chaos is his whole deal, too, after all.

If putting together his cool entrance requires leaving the stranger fighting with fixes for a little longer, he's not bothered.

Taako's been fishing, which is often the case, and he tends to gut and clean on the spot. Saves fuss later. This has put him in possession of a nice little bundle of fish guts, originally intended as bait once he loops back around to do some more of it. But this is a pretty good cause, too. Ranged throws aren't his forte, but the foxes are such a bright color and right out in the open. He wings his packet of pungent fish innards at one at random. Could go either way, really, once the improvised leaf wrapping bursts and spatters the unfortunate target. If these little guys are more animal than spirit, they'll get excited over the bits of dead fish and hopefully chase the unfortunate target around a bit. If they're more spirit than animal, well, at least he's over here if they decide to chase him instead, and he can get up a tree pretty easily knowing there are probably gratitude-potatoes in his future. There's not a lot of angling to do for advantage here. He'll take what he can.

He can't resist yelling, "Hey, jerks!" as he lets the missile fly. Just for funsies.

Of all the outcomes Nerys was anticipating when she started shouting at her unwelcome company, flying offal was not one of them. As a result, she stops and stares for a moment at the foxes, who look equally bewildered, until she realizes just what they've been hit with, considering that the impact has caused some...er...rupturing.

Prophets, she can smell it from here, even in the cool of the day. Her nose wrinkles involuntarily as she looks back over her shoulder towards the trajectory the projectile and shouting had come from a few seconds earlier.

The foxes...well, they do a little of both Taako's anticipated reactions--one sits down firmly in the middle of the garden patch and starts licking its fur, another gobbles up all the bits it can find. The third, though, gives the man a you've got to be shitting me look, and starts heading towards him. Slowly.

"Knock it off," Nerys hisses at it, poking her hoe in its direction. She figures it's only fair for her to try to help the person who's helped her out.

Taako may not enjoy anything as undignified as physical combat (throwing rotten fish bits may not be dignified but it's hilarious, which is just as good), but he's up to it if need be. These little bastards don't seem to have any very dangerous enhancements, no electrical powers or mental attacks or anything that'd make them more than a nuisance. He raises a finger to the stranger in a universal I-got-this gesture and pulls the heavy, straight branch he's been refreshing himself with since he landed in this disgracefully boring world. He's not a great swordsman, and this is a stick, not a sword, but come on, it's a fox.

"Come at me, fucko," he says playfully, not looking the least bit concerned. This'd be better with his magic, but hell, he could stand to get out some aggression if that's what the critter wants.

Nerys watches, somewhat warily, because it goddamn stinks now and she's not sure about the guy's tactics (though the fish guts that the foxes aren't eating will fertilize the garden just fine). She nods, slowly, at him, and waits, one brow cocked.

The fox, meanwhile, looks at her, then looks at him with an expression that would probably be classed as 'no seriously, what the fuck' in a hominid, but may just actually be a normal fox face, it's hard to tell. It feints towards him, and for a brief moment, Nerys is convinced it's going to attack. But then, as though it's playing a game of chicken, it swerves to the right at the next-to-last moment, trotting off into the woods as if it totally meant to do that the whole time. Not quickly, either, as if to indicate it's not afraid, just not in the mood for a fight.

After a moment, it looks back at the other two, who almost seem to sense it from where they're eating, and jog along after it. This is, to the sentient observer, pretty damn creepy. Nerys mutters something after them in Bajoran.

((no worries!))

Edited 2017-10-08 19:00 (UTC)

Ha. He's demonstrated he's... maybe smarter than a very small carnivore. Or at least weirder than one, which has often been his most reliable modus operendi. Well, he'll take it. Haven't been a lot of victories since he climbed out of that fountain. Weasel Man strikes again!

Since he seems to have at least temporarily inconvenienced the foxes, he turns his attention to the stranger he helped, even if he also confused her nearly as much as the critters. He shoves his helpful stick back in his belt and looks over. "Well, even odds they'll be back with something fucked up to do, but hey, breathing space." Catfish gut scented, but even so.

"Breathing space," Nerys echoes, then laughs a little, shaking her head. "I guess that's one way to put it." She pauses, awkwardly, for a moment, because she's never been fully equipped for this kind of social situation...and to be completely honest, not for many social situations at all, until recently.

"Thank you," she says, because that at least is relevant, and true. "They kind of flustered me, I don't know why." The foxes unnerve her in a way that she can't articulate, as though they are both sentient and utterly...much as the word irritates Nerys...alien.

Being awkward in social situations, in Taako's observations, comes of caring about the outcome of those situations and how social norms work. If you just barrel through, it may not exactly come out to your advantage, but people usually don't quite know how to stop you, and that's almost as good. "Those little bastards? Some kinda spirity... thingus... Okay, not my area, Ahuno, but if they were the lethal kind of dangerous we'd prolly know by now. Which is not to say they aren't the annoying kind of dangerous." He could very well pay for this move down the line, but it was really fucking funny.

Nerys is not entirely certain that the guy is speaking Federation Standard (or, uh, English, as they call it here), most of the time. At least, she's finding some of his words a bit difficult to parse out, and so she listens very attentively with furrowed brow as he speaks.

"Spirity thingus," she murmurs, then has a moment of sudden realization. "Oh, you mean so they're some kind of sentient magical being. I see. Or at least somewhat sentient." Not that she's one to judge much, but any sentient who eats fish guts is going to get a skeptical eyebrow. "And I think you're right, they'd definitely have hurt us more by now if they wanted to."

She pauses, then gives him a tentative smile. "I'm Nerys. Nice to meet you."

"Taako. Y'know, from TV." The phrase is automatic and he generally doesn't really expect a response. "There're a lotta ways to interpret 'hurt,' but mostly, yeah. And if you give something with some limited magical brainpower a directive like be a pain in the ass interpretations go south more often than not. But we probably won't die of fox bullshit." He wonders faintly if he has to worry about dying here. It'd be permanent back in his adopted home, probably, but Kravitz would be there to pick him up, and, besides, he's already done it nineteen times. Here, what would happen? Best not to think about that. "Hail and well met and crap like that. How's the vegetable situation?" Welcome to conversations with Taako.

In perfect honesty, Nerys doesn't know (though she thinks she's heard of this 'tea-vea' before), but she's not going to push the point right now. "They've been chewing on the food, I guess that counts as hurt," she says, mouth twisting wryly in agreement with this Taako's statement. "Or at least, it'll count as hurt when we could use it, a few months down the line. But not direct, immediate harm."

She looks over the basket and satchel she's pulled together, does a quick mental count of what vegetables are there and what's still in the ground (and yes, what's too covered in half-eaten fish guts). "We're doing okay, I think, for now. I want to get these potatoes inside before I start finding them with single, asshole fox bitemarks in them, but we could be doing a lot worse. You've been fishing, I'm guessing?"

It's not exactly a far-fetched notion.

"No, these jerks promised me three wishes if I delivered their mortal remains to the family plot but I think I got ripped off." Taako lets his own absurdity carry itself. There's absolutely no shift in tone. "Too bad about the potatoes. They got a good shelf life. You could try and pickle what's left?" His culinary inclinations will never be silenced, no matter how little sense they make in the conversation.

It's incredibly difficult for Nerys to tell if Taako is kidding or not about the fish, because around here a whole shitload of things are possible. She decides he's being ironic, and smirks a little. "Well, they served a useful purpose in their afterlife, so that counts for something," she replies with a bit of a drawl, and gathers the rest of the fallen vegetables into her basket.

"We could pickle it," she agrees as she tidies up the remaining crop, "or can it. Though it might be better for people who know more about cooking to do that, I'm kinda useless and might end up poisoning everyone."

Prophets, she knows some doctors who'd never let her live that one down, if it happened that way.

Taako winces a little internally. When your cooking has a body count (even if it's not actually your fault), offhand remarks about poison get a little touchy. But from a stranger--a stranger with no way of knowing a thing about him, which is the one silver lining this place occasionally has--he can recover easily. Meaningless. Whatever. Poison happens. "I wouldn't try fermenting your first round out, but brining's pretty easy as long as you watch your ingredients and boil your shit right." It's not that hard, or all the cold ass ends of nowhere that make it through winter on pickled bullshit alone would screwed.

"Mostly I'm worried about bacteria and that kind of thing. We've got plenty of people not from Earth here," herself included, "even if this place has just Earth bugs and not creepy engineered nightmares." Then again, the number of infections people have had have been pretty limited, from what Nerys can tell, which is something that continues to disturb her.

Meanwhile, she lifts an eyebrow at 'boil your shit right', but Taako's not exactly wrong, at least from what she understands scientifically. A bit crude, sure, but correct. "Do you cook?" she asks, then realises that sounds a little blunt and clears her throat. "I mean, not that I can't get people to help, but any tips you might have would be great. That line about 'too many chefs' hasn't ever been true in my experience."

Yes, it's 'too many cooks', but Nerys' grasp of human idiom and aphorism is still a little shaky.

Coming from a world where illness is generally magicked away or sucked up, depending on one's location and resources, he's not great at concepts like bacteria. He is, however, a food safety fanatic, without needing any concrete understanding of the ways arsenic specifically makes people die. As a totally random example. "I've worked four-star restaurants and caravan bean pots and everything in between. Not that I've really done a lot of pickling and canning since I was a kid." That's farm shit, and since he and Lup were left alone for the last time after Auntie died, he hasn't set foot on one that he could help.

"Yeah," says Nerys with a sigh and a wry quirk of her lips. "Me either. I mean, we weren't farmers, but if you were smart, and you didn't want to die from lack of vitamins, you had a patch of land in the woods to grow stuff. But it's been a while, and all the plants here are different anyway."

Sometimes, she forgets that her people's entire recent history isn't written on her face and ear, here; that only a few people even know what Bajoran means. Sometimes it's a relief to not have to fight people's expectations, but usually it's a little frustrating to have to tell the same story over and over, and to deal with people's reactions. If she never hears 'I'm sorry' about this again, it'll be too damn soon.

Edited 2017-10-29 21:01 (UTC)

That'd be common sense in most parts of the worlds Taako's known best, so to him, the story doesn't call for any further explanation. No one likes scurvy. "What we got here'll make for some pretty dull eating, but I guess people prefer that to dying, so, y'know, we should probably start getting that lined up. I... guess I volunteer my services on the logistics end." He hates to volunteer for anything. The fact that there doesn't seem to be any such thing as money here only barely takes the edge off feeling some kind of selfless and responsible.

"It'll be better than last winter," replies Nerys with a faint shudder. "It was getting pretty bleak there near to the end. Nothing grows here in the winter at all, everything just dies back. I haven't lived anywhere so harsh in a while."

She lifts an eyebrow at Taako's reluctance to commit, seeing as the part of the multiverse she hails from is pretty keen on cooperative sufficiency, but doesn't push it. It's not her responsibility to wheedle people into the Bajoran and Federation types of work ethic. "You ever go ice fishing?" she asks instead. "That'd probably be as useful."

Edited 2017-10-31 00:14 (UTC)

"Gimicky. No, I mean, you do wanna preserve what you can, no one likes the midwinter tooth loss festival." He just hates to do things, and the whole adulthood with resources goal was supposed to be not having to do shit like try not to succumb to malnutrition in the woods. "Specially since I don't think anybody's been around long enough to say it'll be better than last one. Unless you got a druid squirreled away somewhere."

It takes a second for Nerys to figure out what Taako means by 'midwinter tooth loss festival', until she realises it's a reference to vitamin deficiencies. She shivers a little in disgust and shakes her head. "Don't lose things you can't grow back, if you can't help it, that's my rule," she says. "I was here last winter, it wasn't great, though we...managed."

Would the Observers stop them before they got to the point of near death? Probably not, she figures.

Thedas has more than its share of wild creatures, many of them violent and dangerous. Anyone travelling in the wilds, or even along the roads, ran the risk of death by wild beast if they didn't know how to defend themself. Fenris, who'd run from Seheron all the way to Kirkwall, avoiding slavers and mercenaries by outsmarting and outrunning them, had fought his share of them, often with his bare hands. But he'd rarely been attacked by foxes.

Not that attacking is really what the foxes are doing. More making nuisances of themselves than anything. There's a woman working in the fields, in a standoff with three of them, the same creatures that had been harassing the young woman in the other village.

"What are they doing?" he asks as he approaches up the path.

Currently, they just look like they're staring.

Perhaps it's plausible deniability that makes the foxes settle in place just as the man starts up the path, instead of the stalking pattern they've been making around Nerys. Maybe Nerys is just projecting a little, when it comes to their intent, but seeing as the foxes have been causing a mess throughout the village lately, she's fairly certain they're not just being standard animals.

She clears her throat, straightens up a little bit, as she responds. "They were...uh, harassing me," she says, and can feel her face heat up in the process, because it sounds absolutely ludicrous.

"They've been here this whole time, and then they started circling, a few minutes ago. Which they've stopped. Now."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

they lost their former dye - autumn equinox [Mark, OTA]

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<<just some rake

Re: <<just some rake

I don't know how I lost this tag so long I'm sorry.

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