sixthiterationlogs | i've got thick skin and an elastic heart (open)

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i've got thick skin and an elastic heart (open)

WHO: Kylo Ren
WHERE: Fountain, river, 6I Inn
WHEN: 15 December
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: ~~Emo Boy ca. 2003.~~ TBD.
NOTES: I only want one person on the fountain prompt; the others are wide open! I know The Last Jedi just came out so there will be NO SPOILERS for that movie in this post.

Fountain

The first sensation he's aware of before anything else is the cold. Throughout his training, throughout his life, really, Ren's always been aware of the push and pull of the Force and how it affects the living beings around him. This feels devoid of life, empty of the warmth that humanity brings and is ice-cold instead. It's the sort of cold that makes his legs and feet feel leaden and his attempts to augment his upward progress with the Force fail somehow.

He's been conflicted, yes, but how can the Force simply leave him? He has no time to ponder that particular conundrum before he's pushed up and out and the source of the cold is made known to him: he's in a fountain, of some sort, and there's ice along the stone rim of it. Such architecture isn't common on former Empire worlds and had often been destroyed. The Order has destroyed such things in former Rebellion planets in order to put up their own architecture, sleek and black, so this is something he cannot identify. What planet is this?

He does a quick assessment of his body and finds himself in possession of his limbs, his faculties, but one very important thing is missing. He cannot feel the Force, he cannot seek it out, and what he'd thought was simply shock from being underwater is now shown to be some sort of active suppression. He exhales noisily, his breath turned visible in the frosty air, and slams his hand down against the lip of the fountain with all the strength he can manage. The fountain looks no worse for the wear. His right hand may well be fractured.

He struggles to pull himself from the fountain and collapses on the ground, wondering how he'd wound up on this planet and how he can remove himself from it as quickly as possible. He needs the Force and he needs the advantages it gives him if he has no access to a weapon or warm clothes.

Inn

Eventually, he finds himself to the Inn. It's a central location in this village and while he has no more answers than he did inside the fountain he is, at least, warmer. He's currently wrapped in a blanket before the fire and there's a cup of herbal tea in his hand but he's not drinking it. He'd tried it, briefly, but it'd been too bitter for his tastes and his requests for sugar had been met with blank stares. Apparently that is something too precious to be wasted on something so mundane as tea.

He rolls his neck a bit, feeling the muscles and joints expand and contract, and wishes yet again he had access to the Force if only so he could ease the tightness there and assess the injury in his hand. He has rotated it some so if there is a break, it's not in the joint itself, but it hurts and he thinks it's already begun to swell.

When someone walks by, he gruffly offers to get up and offer them his chair but he doesn't want to vacate it. Instead, he wants to sit and watch the fire for a while and see if he can divine anything from it since his normal divination tools are lost to him.

River

It takes him a few days but eventually someone tells him that he has to work to be fed. Ren has never worked in his life for anything; during training, naturally, he'd done some physical labor but his master had gone easy on him since he'd been his nephew. He's never done any physical labor without the Force to augment his strength so when someone suggests he fish, he decides that's the task he'll take on.

He has a fishing pole made of a long, springy branch and he's got a hook attached to it which looks like it had been something else in a former life and has now been repurposed. There's bait only in the sense that someone's told him to dig for it and that had only netted him with two grubs and much frustration.

The only fish he manages to catch is smaller than his hand and when he tries to get it off the hook, he ends up dragging it across his palm in a jagged, surprisingly-deep laceration.

He seethes in his pain, instead of crying out. (Lies. He cries out loudly.)

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Ren immediately bristles at the familiarity of being called "buddy," because it reeks of that Rebellion pilot, Dameron, but he does need a fire and he is going to have to accept help if he's going to get to it. He grits his teeth and uses the lip of the fountain to push himself up to standing, needing to do this on his own to maintain some semblance of dignity.

His cloak is gone, along with his boots and warmer clothes, and he's been left with the sort of generic uniform issued to hospital patients and prisoners. "Bring me to a fire and then tell me who has captured me. I'll need to know where I am if I intend to get out of here."

Jude hovers without broadcasting it, arms dropped to his sides. If the guy falls, he'll step up to help, but if he wants to get up on his own, Jude can understand that. Months in, it's still hard to ask for help.

The tone is a little odd, but everyone reacts to frozen water a little differently. "It's not really as simple as all that, but alright." Shrugging, he looks back into the trees, then turns and looks down a path. Something in that tone has him biting his lip once, rolled in, rolled out, a puff of steam into the air. "This way," he decides, leading the man through the backwoods, around the Town Hall to his own house.

"It's exactly as simple as that," Ren bites out. It's cold but it's not so cold that he'll die in a few moments of exposure so he has the luxury of being flippant as he follows the man through the woods toward the settlements. It looks like a colony, of sorts, and one of the colonies that deliberately tries to keep to the old ways of doing things. Ren's heard of these but he's never lived in one aside from his Jedi training and he finds them to be antiquated and useless relics of a lost era.

Why wouldn't a person want the sleek technology of the Order, the crisp lines and the organization of predictable architecture? This is madness.

"What system am I in? Outer rim, isn't it?"

Oh, well, if the guy says so. Jude carries on ahead, pushing aside and holding branches, burrowed into his coats and his hair and not rolling his eyes. Staring at people for long enough usually worked better, didn't give them much to snap off at if they even got it. Simple isn't something he hasn't wished for, so he keeps his mouth shut.

Until they're on the sagging back porch of the little red house, and he catches the name of something he's heard Bodhi mention more than a few times. He wonders idly if Bodhi might come knocking tonight; maybe they can both practice their welcome speeches.

"I'm still not really sure what that is," he admits. "What's the Inner rim like?" Holding the door open with his weight, he nods the man inside. This part of the house isn't much warmer, but it's out of the wind, and the fireplace is waiting in the front room.

"The Inner Rim is controlled by the First Order," Ren says, stepping inside the house. This man is offering him hospitality, so he'll be cordial to a certain degree. It's advantageous at this moment considering he has no idea where he is and if he's in a friendly system.

"None of this antiquated architecture would be present on an Inner Rim planet. That's why I presume we're in the Outer Rim. What system is this?" He doesn't know if this man truly is unaware of what system this is (which is possible, if he's never left it) or if he's deliberately being vague.

"Uh, like, a closed one?" He's not sure what kind of system he's meant to name, but it sounds like it's supposed to have one. For a moment, First Order sounds like maybe--the people here pulling the strings? But he just said it wouldn't look like this, on the ground. Maybe they really are on the outskirts, left in old buildings and messed with. Sounds about right, considering the state of things back home, out on the fringe of industry.

Fire's more important: Jude carries on through the house, through the dining room plastered over with charcoal drawings, under the curtain that holds the heat in the living room. It's a mess of cushions in there, life strewn around and radiating out from the fire. In the corner: the pillows Aurora likes to lay and chew on, that he's abandoned for just that purpose.

Whatever, he picks up fresh logs, pokes them into the embers, then gets down to blow them back to life. "Let me get this going, I'll try to explain. There should be dry clothing in your pack, if you want to change."

As primitive as it is to have an actual fire burning, Ren is familiar with it. Jedi training often involves heading into the wilderness with nothing but your wits about you and a flint striker if your master is kind and he knows a bit about stoking a fire. His master hadn't allowed him the striker; he'd lit his fire by alternative means.

There seem to be a few rooms in this house so he takes the pack and steps into one, strips down and dresses in another set of identical black clothing. It's serviceable, even if it's not what he wants, and Ren has no true complaints about it. When he enters the main room again, he's in something of a better mood.

"A closed system? I arrived here in a fountain of all things. If there are clearance codes required to land in your system, that security breach needs to be addressed."

By the time the man comes back through, radiating--something. He has a presence, even in scrubs, that energy of a dog that's being quiet but wants to bark. He seems to bark with his questions. Not the sound, just--it isn't Jude's thing, but he's seen enough people ask a thing over and over, trying to get a handle on it all. Usually they're really trying to get a handle on themselves.

He has that. Usually by the skin of his teeth, but he has it.

It lets him shrug another log into the fire, hackles kept down. "That's the way in," he explains. "It's not a way out. We haven't found one. The only thing that seems to open up anywhere is a body of water, and no one's been able to cross it. Especially now that it's so cold."

"So there's a sea that leads nowhere and a fountain that comes in and not out?" It all seems absurd to Ren, one of the endless Jedi puzzles that seemed essential to commit to memory so long ago and now don't seem to matter at all.

Except - except that now, he's trapped in one of those same-said puzzles.

"Why? Who has us here?"

Jude speaks an entire dialect of shrugs, this one managing to imply a lack of knowledge and a lack of pursuing it. Jude is good at: fires, shrugging, and visual aids. "Smarter people than me have tried to figure out, and haven't gotten much of anywhere."

When he's satisfied with the fire, he toes out of his boots and finds the stranger a blanket, holding it out at enough of a distance to be reached if the stranger meets him halfway.

"Some people call them observers. We know they keep tabs, make changes to the place sometimes. But they haven't really dropped us a list of whys and hows about the place."

"Observers?" That is a useful bit of information. They could well be spies from either side of the war and while the Resistance might do something underhanded occasionally in order to get the better of the First Order, it seems more like the First Order would hold people captive in order to observe them and their habits.

"What species are present here? Simply human? Or are there other species here that I haven't seen yet?"

A brow disappears under hair for the fact of calling humans a species, which is weird enough to break a little of Jude's all-accepting shell. Is it that weird of a question, considering the room full of samples? Has he not heard it before?

"There was uh, someone here before, thought it was weird that he was human? I kind of assume everyone just is, but you might have to ask around about it." If someone isn't human, Jude isn't sure he wants to know.

He drops the offered blanket over a chair before he holds it out any longer, finding another to wrap around his own shoulders. "When you're warm enough, we can go get you something to eat."

This sort of altruistic behavior is something he's not entirely familiar with. In the Order, there's a hierarchy of things to be done but there's no altruism - if it doesn't fall in line or isn't efficient, it isn't allowed.

"Thank you." The words come out slowly, scraped like rusted metal, and he wonders how long it's been since he's used them out of genuine thanks. Ren doesn't entirely remember but he suspects it must have been when he was last with his uncle.

Jude looks up, if only briefly. It doesn't feel like a moment to treat with too much eye contact. "You're welcome," he grates back, voice just naturally low and rough. He doesn't use it much for anything at all.

"I don't know what kind of place you're from," and he's not really asking. "But here, we don't really let anybody freeze to death or starve. Everyone does what they can, especially now that it's cold. If you ask questions, people will try to answer. If you need something, we'll try to get it, there's just--not a lot. Of stuff or of people."

"That's an inefficient way to run a settlement," Ren says. It's inefficient in his eyes because the Order takes and redistributes according to rank - there's no such thing as true equality among members of the rank and file. As one proves his worth, one earns more rights and privileges.

Ren's always had some manner of rights because of his nature. He's a Jedi, even if only partially drained, and his gifts allow him to simply take what he needs instead of asking for it or following the rules. Still, he respects the Order when it suits him and without the Force, he'll have to respect the laws of this place.

"You never run out? Even when things are short?"

From under his hair, Jude rather blinks his lack of opinion on the man's opinion. The village is what it is--he hasn't seen anyone not putting forth some effort to keep it going, and they've come together in emergencies. With little to no technology to aid them, Jude can't imagine how to make it more efficient. It wouldn't occur to him that anyone deserved more or better than anyone else.

Maybe the science types, but they never asked for it.

"We haven't yet, even over winter. We lose people, sometimes. They disappear, if they come back it's with no memory of being here. I just mean--the group never seems to get too big for us to feed and house."

"Disappear? The same way we appear here, then?"

The fountain seems to be the source of everything that happens here and when it isn't so cold that he's risking hypothermia, he's going to dive into it and see if he can get back out. If he came in through the water, it makes sense he ought to be able to go back through that way and return to the same place and time. None of this place makes any real sense but it could, somehow, be some illusion of the Force.

"How do you know they haven't just found another settlement? The ones that don't return, I mean."

Edited 2018-01-10 06:32 (UTC)

Jude shakes his head; he's explaining poorly, though it isn't his fault there are only poor explanations for everything at-hand. "The fountain's just water," he says. Jude's explanations, when he bothers to give them, seem to take to heart the idea of building a thing from scratch by first inventing the universe: perhaps if he spoke at enough length, or someone had the patience to listen, he would very thoroughly make the point.

"If you get back in, there isn't a way out. No one's seen anyone go back through it. One day you go to see someone and they aren't there, and only some of them come back."

"It makes no sense that there's only one way in. It must be some kind of illusion," Ren scoffs. Still, it doesn't seem to be the fault of this man that he's stuck in this infuriating place; he tries not to take out too much of his ire on him.

"So what do you do here, then? If you cannot leave and you cannot use the fountain to go back through to home, what do you do all day?"

What seems obvious now wasn't obvious to him at the start; he'd run through the fields--he'd actually picked up a rock, the first time he saw Bodhi, ready to crack him across the head if he had to.

They're doing a lot better, this time.

"There's game to hunt, if you know how. A river to fish in, caves to explore, though I don't recommend doing that alone. Most of us just try to be useful. There's a field when it's warmer, where we grow what we can." He nods at the fire. "I chop a lot of wood, honestly."

A farmer. He's going to have to become a farmer. While his uncle had been a farmer in a former life, Kylo Ren has never farmed for anything. He has hunted before but only with the help of a lightsaber and the Force so without those tools, he doesn't know what he's going to do. That's not for the moment, though. He needs to watch these villagers and see what they do, how they act - he needs to know what he's getting into before exposing any obvious weaknesses.

"I think chopping wood is...likely necessary on this planet. It seems like there's little here other than snow and forest." He can do this. Whatever misgivings he has about being here, he's here and he has to endure it.

"It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult."

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i've got thick skin and an elastic heart (open)

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