sixthiterationlogs | Hypothermia and You: A Guide No One Ever Reads

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Hypothermia and You: A Guide No One Ever Reads

WHO: Kylo Ren
WHERE: Near the fountain
WHEN: Evening, November 15th
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Incoming angry wet former Jedi with family issues
STATUS: Closed

It took almost no time at all for Kylo Ren to realize he had been submerged. The unfamiliar clothes that clung to his skin were heavy with the weight and chill of the water, and stuck uncomfortably to his skin while he fought to find the right orientation to kick and push himself upward. Everything on his body fought against his upward movement from the thing strapped to his back to the heavy and unfamiliar boots on his feet. When he breached the surface, both hands gripped tightly to the edge of the fountain and he hoisted himself out of its watery depths, rolling over the edge to the hard ground on the other side with deep, gasping breaths for air.

His thoughts were spinning wildly, and a chill clung as tightly to his skin as the over-saturated cotton pressing against him so uncomfortably. His mask and uniform were gone, and although he could feel the weight of the pack resting against his back, he could not sense his weapon. The air was frigid. His wet hair, skin and the drenched cotton and fabric clinging to his body did nothing to hold back the below freezing chill in the air. Rather than sit and gather his thoughts, Ren immediately began to remove his shoes and socks and set them to the side with his backpack. The scrub shirt followed, until Ren was left barefoot with only a tank top and the trousers.

Anyone out in the cold could come across Ren carrying a dripping backpack and bundle of foreign clothes as he deliberately makes his way barefoot into the town. His primary mission: find shelter before losing any of his digits or limbs to the cold. If not encountered in that state, Ren can be found eventually breaking or pushing his way into the first building he comes across in search of shelter from the elements. Especially if the building is giving off smoke or light.

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"Only what you told me last time," Peggy says cautiously, because she doesn't entirely know what this man is like. After all, she'd had only a few conversations with the man before he'd vanished and now he's here again. She knows that his personality is certainly not the easy-going sort that would take to this easily. "I don't know any of those terms, not in the way you mean, I think. The only Empire I've known are the ones I fought against in the war and Republics are countries," she says.

She doubts that any of this is the right answer, which is hard and frustrating. She wants to give him answers, but she still wants answers herself, at this point.

Ren makes a noise in the back of his throat, like he's trying to swallow down his own frustration. For a moment he just stares into the fire, his hand clenches into a fist at his side.

It's not a great start to hear she fought against an Empire in a war. It puts Ren on edge and makes him choose his next words carefully. He can't bark about the republic being traitorous murders and thieves, and not having an immediate source to direct his frustration and anger at makes things difficult.

He would love to dig inside her mind for his answers, but he doubts she has them. It's not worth exposing himself if he had any form of cover before. He can't imagine he would have, but her willingness to help suggests she did not previously wish to murder him, herself.

He slams his hand on the ground, digging his nails into the floor for a moment. After a deep, unsteady breath he sits at last, his back to the warmth of the fire and his eyes trained back on her.

"If you're correct about knowing me, and speaking to me before, then someone took the liberty of removing memories from my mind." Ren says in a waivering voice, losing his hold on a calmer tone for a moment. What else had he lost, and how much time? What had Skywalker taken from him that he felt confident enough to leave Ren alive with hatred only burning stronger in his mind?

"What's your name." He could pull it from her mind, but he could feel how weak the flow of the Force was through him. He refrains for his own sake, avoiding the inevitable of finding out just how weak he has become.

Peggy merely regards him calmly, her brow arched up primly as she waits for him to weather out whatever emotional little tempest in a teacup that he seems to be so intent on having. She doesn't like hearing that his memories aren't there, because it bodes poorly as far as what happens if a person does vanish, but at the same time, perhaps the memories will return with time.

"Peggy Carter," is her response with a nod of her head. "Of Earth, in a galaxy I don't think you've ever heard of." Which makes for a rather difficult meeting of the minds, but she's determined to keep trying. It's not like she has much else to do here.

"Kylo Ren, leader of the Knights of Ren." There's no point in hiding his identity. Not the one he made for himself at least. No one needs to know about his dead past, murdered even more efficiently not too long ago.

"From a planet and system I doubt you know the names of, either. They're not important right now." He pulls himself together, his head cocking slightly to the side. His turmoil seems to have sunk back down below the surface, though there is a fierce intensity to his eyes still.

"Have you ever heard of, or met, a man by the name of Luke Skywalker?"

While she'd spoken to him before, she doesn't recall him ever saying that name before, which means that she's left slightly wary about what the right answer is. "I can't say that I've ever heard that name before," Peggy admits, though it does sound general enough that she might have run into him and forgotten it, but she also feels that given the disparity of their worlds, she also doubts that's actually ever happened.

"What did the Knights of Ren do?" she asks, keeping a close eye on him, lest he suddenly take a turn for the worse when it comes to his body temperature.

"Maintained order in the galaxy where we were needed." Among other things, but those were not things he felt the need to divulge. Ren's work went above even the First Order's military force, and he considered his own agenda a bit more important than theirs.

"Luke Skywalker is a wanted criminal and a dangerous threat." The distate and scorn for the man practically drips from Ren's words. His former teacher and mentor, another of the many traitors. Snoke worried about the threat Luke posed to the First Order, but Ren had other reasons for seeking him out.

"If my memories have been tampered with, he's behind it." He says with a surety he feels, even if it is not the case. It would be foolish for Luke to leave him alive, but the man was a fool of a Jedi with a weak will.

He shifts closer to the fire, pressing his back into the warmth of the bricks around it and draws his limbs in close for warmth. It's a vulnerable and weak position and he loathes that, but he knows the necessity of getting the warmth back into his blood.

"You're not sure this is your planet. How did you get here?"

"The same as you. The same as anyone," is Peggy's response, tucking aside his emphatic insistence that this Luke Skywalker is a criminal. Peggy's not entirely sure, but has a good feeling that perhaps she needs to see both sides to this story before she can actually make any decisions. Besides, who is she to judge someone else's life and world like that?

She eyes him and thinks about when they arrived the first time and how he had behaved, but doesn't recall him getting quite so...well, mad. Peggy settles in a seat near, keeping her back straight and drawn up as tall as she can manage. "It's hardly like anyone has given us any information on where we are. We don't know its name or location or anything else helpful."

Unfortunately for all involved, Ren had previously had someone else to direct his anger at the first time around. Someone who was used to dealing with Ren when his plans went awry.

He listens to her, at least, his anger largely internalized for now. He rests his hands on the floor and endures being watched the way he watches others for a change.

"Wonderful." The sarcasm is there, but his tone has dulled some. "You've been here a while? What sort of organization is there to this place?"

"I've been here for several months," she agrees, "and there's plenty of organization to go around to ensure that we all survive and can live here together peacefully." She strains that word with a pointed look at him, given his bitterness and anger both times around. She feels like it wouldn't hurt to drive home that reminder just a little more. "We've people hunting and gathering, as well as working on a food source to keep us alive."

She nods to the curtains around the walls. "We keep track of things here," she says. "It's a central hub, so to speak."

Months. That wasn't promising at all. Ren took the pointed look. He could read well enough the undercurrent of a warning or threat in her words. A cautionary note that maybe he should play nice with the strangers he didn't trust or know. He would avoid starting any fights for the moment, but he would make no promises or assurances that he would continue to follow their peaceful organization if he found it counter to his own objectives.

He got up and moved to the curtains covered in writing after she drew his attention to them, and studied them a bit closer. One set seemed to have a map, and a particular area near both the river and the canyon walls drew his attention closest, his hand raising to trace the writing faintly without touching it.

It was his hand writing.

"And the natives?"

"We are the natives, as far as any of us can tell," she replies, knowing that with every question, they're just going further down a road that she doubts he's going to appreciate the answers. She eyes him warily and breathes out for a long moment, staring at the map before them. "I've tried to map the canyons as best as I can, but it seems like the horizon always keeps changing on me, without any hint of why or how," she says, tapping her fingers against the outer edges.

"As far as the people who lived here, we don't know what happened to them, but they're not here now. They left behind homes, though, one of them being the one we're currently in."

His train of questions are not helping him and he stares at his writing with an uncomfortably unsettling feeling creeping up his spine. He didn't like not knowing what or how much he had lost.

He sighs and drops his hand, turning to look at the other notes and curtains around the room. He didn't know how to approach the issue of memory loss but he needed to get his head straight.

"My writing is on some of these." He knew his own hand writing well enough to know that. "I was part of this." He gestures around the room, fighting th urge to cross his arms. He would not appear vulnerable. This was fine. He would sort this out.

"This is what there is to show, after months of being here?" It's not intentionally judgmental. He's frustrated and it shows, but he's intentionally shutting that off and slowly forcing himself to process this logically and detached. "I assume the walls aren't ordinary walls. Has anyone kept an eye on the sky? Any ships or streaks of light going by?"

"Yes, you were," Peggy agrees calmly, given that she'd been here the first time when the first Ren had been writing all over these curtains with the information that he had been willing to share with the rest of them. At least it seems that he's coming around to this, at least slightly.

As to his questions, he doesn't seem to understand yet that where they are doesn't have the technology that the future does (and beyond the future, space). "Nothing in the sky but clouds," she says. "No ships, nothing apart from stars. And no way out," she adds. "I'm sorry to say."

Ren takes a slow, deep breath. Anger and panic were not going to get him in any forward direction. For the moment, it was too cold and he was too unprepared to attempt to prove those claims wrong. He knew little about the village, planet, system or people he was trapped with and even less about how he had come to be there, not just once but twice.

"We shall see." It's not a challenge to Peggy but to himself. Ren would not allow himself to be banished to the edge of the known galaxy or further without a fight. This woman, though, wasn't the one he needed to be directing that fight towards. She had been helpful and while not overly knowledgeable, knew more than he did about the planet he was stranded on.

"I assume there's no communication, either, beyond this mapped area?"

"None," she agrees, glad that they're sticking to the objective facts of their situation. "I've received some messenger pigeons, but I'm currently still training them. We've no manner of electronic capabilities of reaching out and there seems to be no escape by foot," she says, which is roughly the shape of the situation.

"Beyond that, we seem to be stuck in a village that pre-dates most radio," she says. "It leaves us with little in the way of existing technology to work with."

"So whatever organization, species, or individuals stranded us here wanted to make sure we were truly stranded." His observation is far from revolutionary. It's an obvious conclusion they are sure to have drawn by now, but at this point Ren just needs to think out loud to work through it in some fashion.

"I would not be surprised to find the planet beyond the canyon empty or at least as cut off as the containment area within. This planet can't be an outpost or trading planet of any kind if no ships are seen or heard. Likely one of the underdeveloped outer rim planets." He could only guess and he had nothing but her word and the map to go on, but talking it out was distracting him from the chill and the wet.

"Here's the only tricky thing," Peggy says, "When we arrived here for the first time, it was as if someone had been here before. Someone had been living here and whether it was the people who set this up for us or simply another group of unfortunate people, it wasn't empty. "There's another alternative, of course," she points out.

"We're not in a place that has any ships or anything of the like," she says, which is just as likely as any of the other possibilities, isn't it? "If all the evidence around us suggests we're in the 19th century, wouldn't it stand to reason there would be no starships or space travel, because it hadn't existed at that point?"

Ren stares at her long and hard for a moment. Her dates make little sense but the general idea gets through the barrier of timelines enough for him to understand.

"Are you suggesting we're in a different time?" He sounds incredulous, but he keeps his tone mostly in check. Everything about the village seemed some version of tricky. Space Travel was as commonplace for him as walking. It was just a fact of existence. The idea of being in a time before that seemed so distant and insane it was difficult to wrap his head around.

"The distance into the past that would require this to be-" He trails off with a frown, raking his mind for instances or rumors of any such event occurring. "It seems much more likely we have been banished to the far reaches of the Outer Rim or beyond than to travel back ancient ages to a time when no race has yet managed to travel beyond their planet."

"I honestly can't see how we're not," is Peggy's blunt response, given that every piece of evidence goes to the fact that they're not in the future that so many people here are from. If they were, then someone has done an excellent job to rid the world of every last vestige of modernity, to the lights that ought to be in the sky, and all evidence of a population that the current day would boast.

"If we were on a planet, somewhere, wouldn't there still be ships?" she reminds him. "If someone brought us here, wouldn't we see something in the sky?" Strangely, to Peggy, time travel seems far more plausible than space travel.

Ren doesn't take well to the response, a frown deepening on his face. Of course it hardly makes sense to deposit their prisoners in a fountain, but for the moment he's running on the assumption that whoever stranded him on the planet was a coward unwilling to kill him themselves and left him there in the hopes he would drown without having to get their hands dirty or deal with having his blood on their hands.

"Space is endless. We could easily be in wild space or the Unknown Regions. Even the Outer Rim can't be ruled out. Technology levels vary all across the galaxy and density of travel does as well. The lack of visible evidence shouldn't lead to wild theories of unproven technologies like time travel." For Ren space travel was far too common to dismiss and time travel nothing more than a myth and a legend. No one had ever actually managed it and until he had proof the notion seemed even farther into the unknown than wherever they were.

"The civilization of this planet hasn't even reached an industrial level if what you're telling me is accurate. How do you propose they would have come about something as inconceivable as time travel?"

She's nearly a full foot shorter than him, but that doesn't stop her from puffing out her chest and raising her chin up when she's accused of being next to mad for suggesting time travel, as though it's somehow 'inconceivable'. She's taken on men twice as stubborn as this one with words and twice as wide with her fists and she's not about to back down now.

"Space may be endless and technologically more feasible, but then we would have evidence, such as your streaks in the sky," she points out. "I have the evidence of the surroundings, not to mention actual people I've known who can vouch as to the fact that they're from the future while I'm from sixty years in the past. So if that's possible along with any manner of strange things with undiscovered elements and alien technology, then why not time travel?" she snaps.

"There are plenty of ways to conceal those traces. Including cloaking or restricting travel to the far side." He isn't impressed by her posturing, and he stares her right back down, raised chin and all. Evidently still unconvinced.

Whatever her friends might say, time travel makes far less sense, and Ren has no intention of taking a stranger's word for anything in this place that he can't find his own evidence for. Trust isn't something he easily gives.

"You and your friends can chase your wild theories. I intend to look for answers of my own." His own tone is nearly as sharp as hers. He hardly intends to take the word of others over his own experiences and knowledge. He knew nothing about them or their worlds, other than already glaring contrasts presenting themselves.

"Your wild theories," she corrects him. "If mine are wild, then yours are in the very same stream," she says, overly polite and sweet as she gives him a charged look that begs him to take action and start a fight. "And you can look for all the answers you like, just the same as I've been. Perhaps one of us will be able to prove the other wrong." And stubbornly, blindly, Peggy is convinced that she'll be the one to get to do that.

Rather than angry, her challenge is exactly the sort of thing Ren needs, and it makes a small smirk cross his expression where incredulous irritation had been before.

"Perhaps one of us will." He agrees, just as blindly and stubbornly convinced as she is that it will be him.

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Hypothermia and You: A Guide No One Ever Reads

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I'm so sorry Peggy.

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