sixthiterationlogs | [CLOSED] a grave it is

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[CLOSED] a grave it is

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: The bee hives, behind the Town Hall
WHEN: December 27th, well after the storm
OPEN TO: Kylo Ren
WARNINGS: Possible violence, certainly threats of it
STATUS: N/A

The other clues hung from the bottles of beer had taken some of the surprise out of the gift Kira had found in the old schoolhouse. Follow the cards hadn't seemed much a priority without a deck to follow, unless the place was trying to send him back into the fountain for another round of aching limbs and needles stitching his skin to his bones. Not exactly the afternoon he was after when the snow finally cleared a bit, so he'd asked after clues to the other--a library, archive, and finally been pointed south along the trail to the building. It had been as strange and antiquated as the rest of the village, wooden desks and chairs, the slate of the blackboard as cold to the touch as the rocks and earth outside.

Credence's gift had been balanced on its edge, seeming old and new at once--old fashioned, but glossy to the touch. His hands had been fidgeting for days without his deck, and somehow Credence had willed into existence a replacement.

Smaller than the deck from home, and just a standard deck of 52 playing cards, but beggars couldn't choose, and they were charming--far less inexplicably than the giver.

Once he'd found them, he'd spent an hour in the dark schoolhouse, shuffling them between his hands, getting used to the feel of them. Sensing the weight, asking them basic questions, testing if they'd respond. That extra sense was still weak, and they were hardly made for this purpose, but eventually they'd rolled over like the sharp-eyed cats on the jokers, and stretched, and fallen into a kind of shape he understood. He'd halved the deck, taking top and bottom cards from each pile, and made himself a compass: spades in the north, hearts to the south, clubs and diamonds for the east and the west. Shuffle, halve, do it again: after four, the cards slipped in his fingers and scattered on the desk as he shuffled, defying another test of what they both already understood.

Interesting, that the deck wasn't near as polite as the person who had conceived it. Kira had smiled, and picked them up, and set out to see where they wanted him to go. He still couldn't travel far, especially in this weather, but a five of clubs seemed a reasonable distance to walk from the schoolhouse door. It took him around the large building opposite, into a large field of white snow, until he was standing at a low wall, a chorus of odd stumps with boards laid over their tops standing along it. Everything appeared untouched, blanketed in the new snow falling gently from the grey sky, and he was about to pull another card to see where he might now turn, when an unnatural black caught his eye.

Ice formed on its side, as if it had been caught in a thaw before another freeze, a small black shovel stood unfolded and struck into the roots of a tree. Kira brushed new snow from the top of the handle, and a tag dangled free, its nondescript text and final message strangling a laugh in his throat. He still had the strange toy from the piles of gifts in his room, still unable to remember how he'd dreamed up such a creature, and he wondered if Kylo Ren had thought up his own gift in that tense moment of their first real meeting.

"Time to dig a way out," he read, "or a grave." His first tug of the handle didn't free the shovel from the frozen ground, and he considered just leaving it. Who had time to be this dramatic, he wondered, before brushing his thumb over the cards he'd spent an hour shuffling in a dark schoolhouse. "What an absolute piece of work."

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Ren had eventually taken the boxes back to the house he shared with Jean and unwrapped them in private. Anything of use had been stored away and anything not of use had been stacked back up.

Ren had left the boxes at the inn earlier that morning before setting off on a search of his own. He had a pair of gloves keeping his fingers protected from the bite of the cold air, now, and a far more sensible pair of steel toed boots on his feet.

For all his uncertainty and discomfort over the idea and existence of the 'gifts', the majority of them had been useful with only two others causing any sort of discomfort for Ren. One being nothing more than a name no one should have known on the boxes between he and Kate. The other being the knife now tucked at his side, fished out of the fountain following one of the coded messages on the note in his pocket. Arya at least had sensible taste in weapons.

He paused near the edge of one of the buildings when he caught sight of Kira's form. His hand drifted to the handle of the knife hidden beneath the new and nicely elongated frock coat covering most of his clothing. He considered his options for a long moment before he dropped his hand, letting the snow crunch beneath his boots as he approached.

"It might come free easier, if you had any upper body strength to speak of." He looked like a toothpick. Kira needed some training and a far more physical regime, but Ren had no intention of offering that.

A second meeting was inevitable, and after the strange power Ren had gripped Kira with over a toy, he isn't surprised the end of his search finds them both in the empty field. In his pocket, their presence muffled by more than thick wool, Kira imagines this is what he gets for taking the extra time to be sure of the cards.

It's a good deck, rather like it's owner. The thought lets him smile as he turns to greet the crunching snow and familiar voice. There isn't anyone to intervene this time, and Ren is stronger than the invisible force he exhibited at the inn--but Kira doesn't want to get on his knees and beg anyone for passage, ever again. "Maybe I'm just not the one true king of crazytown," he says, gesturing toward the handle with his hands back in his pockets.

"Why don't you give it a try: your name is on it as much as mine."

More of that, then. Ren wasn't surprised to find the shovel was another gift. Like the knife and the list of things Ren had yet to track down. Presumably they would also be gifts, though welcome if they followed the same vein as Arya's.

He approached, drawing closer only after the invitation. As hostile as he had felt toward Kira when his suspicions were raw and fresh, he had quickly realized everyone in the village was as baffled and confused by the gifts as those they 'gave' them to. Ren didn't like one bit of it, though, or what it implied when the gifts were items stolen from their minds.

The shovel had been a passing thought on a particularly heavily snow filled day, but it seemed even more on point after their conversation. He had not looked at the tag, nor did he know about the message, but the thought of digging an escape or graves passed though his mind for a second time on seeing it lodged. He didn't feel threatened by Kira's presence, and he had shown his hand to Ren when he didn't know what the Wookiee was.

"Step aside."

He placed both hands on the handle, set his feet perpendicular to one another in the snow and wrenched the shovel to one side, repeating the action to the other side shortly aftr. Both the ice and the roots seemed none too keen on letting go of the tool. Ren was nothing if not persistent, and he strained his muscles and called on the force for help. Weak as it was he could still feel it answer his call and curl around the shovel, like the assistance of a much weaker invisible hand.

Watching even wide-shouldered Ren clench his jaw and strain against the hold widens Kira's smile. "So much for upper body strength." There's a brush of movement counter to the air--it doesn't swirl the snow on a new breeze, or lift the folds of Ren's clothes to Kira's eye--but his already imposing physical presence seems to grow. Like he could reach out and touch it, and still be hovering his hand inches from Ren's arm.

Not that he would, for all that the murderous and invasive intent seems to be missing from the invisible force, this time.

Maybe the murderous intent is required: after another moment of strain, the shovel is still shifting in place, able to be tilted but not pulled free. They could abandon it, leave it for the thaw, but there's no telling when the next storm will come through, trapping people in their homes. It would be stupid to leave any sort of tool out here for the duration.

Kira gives it another moment, in part to see if Ren will turn an interesting shade of purple, before he slips around both he and the surrounding force to get a grip lower on the handle. Biting the gloves from his fingers, he hisses for the chill of the metal biting into his palms, gloves dangling from his teeth, and takes over shifting the shovel back and forth against the trapping earth so that Ren might put all of his efforts into dragging it out.

Ren doesn't fight the extra assistance despite the reflex that tickles up his spine. He knows when he needs help well enough to ask for it now and then and not always fight it when it's offered.

"Left." He puts everything into the Force. The shovel is well wedged into the roots in a way he hadn't expected and he braces his feet better, straining his muscles and his connection to the force. He clenches his jaw and tightens his grip on both his hands and his power.

Before he had been funneling all his frustration and anger into the Force, and that was a powel fuel, but the Dark side was fickle at times, and he eased off, closing his eyes and letting meditation and balance take over.

"Right." He gives it a solid steady pull and the shovel comes free with a crack and splitting of wood. The roots bent outward and slightly twisted. It had taken remembering some of his old teachings about acting on the forces in his way rather than the specific items or people, but the shovel is free and that is a small victory at least.

He doesn't immediately let go of it until he's sure Kira has a proper grip on it, and then he releases his, staring Kira down momentarily and looking away.

"What are you doing out here." Kira didn't look like he had enough body on him not to freeze and Ren isn't concerned so much as judging his lack of self preservation.

It's faint, almost overshadowed by the ripple of power in the air, but Kira feels a pain in his legs and hands that warns him to move. There's no grace in it, but he rolls away just before the roots break, the splinters and frozen earth coming out with the metal head.

He doesn't watch to see if Ren might stumble, confident he'll keep his feet, and ignores the question a moment as he looks around for his gloves. His thin, bare hands brush snow from his hair and coat, and he stows the gloves with his hands in his pockets when he's found them and righted himself.

"I'm looking for the gifts they scattered around, this is almost the last one." Perhaps the search could wait for warmer weather, but if he hadn't been here he would have set along the river again. Every day he has to wake up and decide to move, to do more than lay paralyzed by his new reality, and what it could mean for the people he left behind. He can't find the will if all it would amount to is haunting the inn. "What about you?"

Ren hesitates a moment to respond, not eager to admit that he had been doing the same. The knife was the most useful and lasting item he had received, and while he had eventually opened the other gifts, he didn't like to admit just how helpful many of them were. It was still disconcerting they existed at all.

Eventually he pulls the crumpled paper from his pocket, glancing at it and back to Kira. So others had received coded messages as well. Or at least some form of message.

He rolls his shoulders, trying to shake off the weariness and ache that using the Force in this village left in his bones and core.

"I am as well." And waiting for each one to reveal itself a trap or a clue. "One is meant to be at a great vantage. I am looking to find one of the taller points in the village." He didn't need help with that and yet he found himself sharing the solution he had come to.

Their first meeting hadn't endeared Ren to him very much, though it had left an impression. He was interested in the power Ren might possess, not necessarily as a tool, but perhaps a point of comparison. Offering help would require a display of his own, and he wasn't keen to try reading fortunes for an entire village with a pack of playing cards and weakened senses, but he'd managed directions so far.

And Ren had helped him with the shovel, and thought of giving it to him at all. "If you still don't want the toy, you can keep that instead," he says, nodding at the shovel. "And I could find your vantage point, though I won't promise I can climb it."

The offer is weighted heavily in Ren's favor, and he folds the shovel back in half when Kira makes it, slipping it through a loop of rope at his waist to keep his hands free. He gives Kira a look of uncertainty, but straightens all the same and offers him a nod.

"I'm not sure how you plan to do that, but I will not turn down an extra set of eyes." Two of his clues had been identical, and still left him confused. He had looked all over the fountain for Back where it all began, but had only found the knife in a watertight package at the bottom. The third clue had seemed easier to tackle because he was always looking for vantage points as it was, but he had been looking at buildings and considering the cliffs.

"I can climb up for it myself."

It isn't his eyes that will find it, and the second corner of his mouth joins the first, turning up and almost warming for him. Rude as he could be, Kira can't blame him for the shock of it all, and he hadn't exactly stuck around for the usual conversation--how long have you been here, which ways have you tried to get out, where and when did you come from.

Not that he wants to have it now, but if empathy is somewhere among his gifts, he might as well extend it. "I'm not sure if it will seem silly to you or not, considering what you just did with that," he says, nodding again at the shovel. "But the only clue I had to lead me to this place was follow the cards."

Pulling the deck from his pocket, he doesn't fan them into view: he isn't in the shop, putting on a show for his mother's clients. Ren doesn't strike him as someone who would be impressed with it--a darker and more violent display of dramatics, perhaps, but not a card trick. "I used to have a different deck, at home, but I can still read these. The suits follow the compass, you just have to hold the question in your mind and pull from the deck."

If he knew the question, he could do it himself, but it might do to let Ren play his own cards closer to his vest. Kira shuffles the deck once, trying to project an intent of play nice, and holds them out to him. "Just think of the clue, or the giver if you know them, pull a card, and it will tell me which direction we should go."

This trick isn't as foreign to Ren as Kira might expect. It's presented differently, of course, but like with Jean there are elements to the suggestion that remind him of Force users. Had he a clear mind and full access to the force he could try to communicate with it to learn things about the past and future. He had neither, however, and it seemed there was a chance that Kira did.

So it's with far more interest in what Kira can do than in the actual hunt that has Ren stepping forward. He forms the question in the same way he would to try and draw it from the Force, but his eyes linger on the deck. He has no idea who the gift is from or what it is, but he does have a good idea of possible vantage points, and he thinks about those when he 'asks', following old teachings not to demand his answers the way he would from a person. Whether Kira is using the force or some other energy, it is likely bigger than both of them.

He pulls a card, studying it with a frown. The face isn't one he recognizes from Sabacc. He turns the Heart toward Kira with an arched brow.

He'll need to thank Credence later for the deck: he's missed this, as much as the surety of having them at his side, something to slip his hand over in his pocket and worry the edge of with his thumb. They're a way to connect with the world, and a way to connect with people, no matter who they are. There's real warmth in his smile when he breaks it to touch his tongue to an incisor, laugh softly as he takes the card back from Ren.

"Aren't you a charmer," he says, staring at the Jack of Hearts. Perhaps Ren is burying his charismatic nature the way Kira's buried everything but, and the shovel is a shitty metaphor for digging it all out.

It could just as easily be a clue about the giver, but Kira doesn't trust his skills to read that deeply into it. For now, all it means for sure is: "We need to head south, for a decent length--about double what it is from the schoolhouse to here."

"Very well." It could lead to nothing and Ren accepts that. It isn't as if he has better things to be doing than going on a wild rathar chase in search of a mystery gift left by his captors in the name of another captive. Really. What else would he be doing?

He gestures toward the South in an 'after you' fashion but starts walking as well, studying the cards in his hand with interest.

"Have you ever heard of the Force?"

"Sure," he says, the answer automatic, a rock at the top of a pile that means to tumble into a story, an explanation--but when Kira opens his mouth to elaborate, the pile has already slid into the dark. Like the wookiee, he knows the shape and purpose of the thing, but he can't name it, can't push beyond something that doesn't want it named. "It's...the dark and the light, and lightsaber battles? People wearing a lot of brown?"

His fingers tighten around the deck, he runs his thumbnail along the corner, all of them in a row, a precise texture to ground him. He doesn't know why this is a thing he half-knows. Ren with his strange power and questions that Kira knows the answers to, until he goes to speak them. Credence with his talk of witches.

"I've heard of it," he admits, letting Ren walk ahead with his longer stride. "And before I came here, I swear I knew what it really was, and why I knew--but now I couldn't tell you. I'm not sure why I thought of the toy either, now that I'm trying to put it into words."

Lightsaber battles. Ren doesn't let his step falter, but Kira is the first to seem to know anything about his world, and that paired with his unusual card trick has Ren's interests cemented.

"They took memories from me, too." He offers it as a possible explanation. Perhaps Kira was force sensitive. He didn't think the other was a Force user, but he had not sensed it in Jean either, until her voice had touched his mind.

"It's the energy that connects all living things." It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together. The words come to his mind unwanted in a voice he doesn't want to listen to, but he finds himself repeating part of it out loud all the same.

"Maybe they did more than that."

"Like ki," he thinks aloud, still holding tight to his cards, the dissonance in his mind no less for having Ren validate it. If their minds could be read, and manifested, and changed--what good did it do him to grin and bear it? What point was there to smiling when he wanted to sob, what purpose did it serve to shove Ty as deep down as he could and look for gifts in the snow with a stranger?

At the very least, it stopped that stranger seeing him flinch. For all he knew, Ren was in on it, with his Force and his invisible touch at his mind.

"There was a Reiki healer back home, she used something like that." He isn't sure it saved her when the virus swept through, but perhaps she had been even more ahead of he and his, perhaps she'd already left the city. "I remember her, I remember that--and my cards. What's the point in taking just a piece of what we know, and leaving the rest?"

"Maybe that piece is something we need. Something that could help us escape or know our captors. I was here before and escaped with another. Months later I was back in the fountain, with no memory of ever being here or the time after." He doesn't offer that lightly. It still unsettles him that people in the village had known of him before he knew them. He still doesn't know what it means or who to trust, if anyone.

He doesn't give that trust easily, and the people of the village were too odd of a mix and none of them familiar. He isn't sure any of them should be trusted, himself included.

"The man I escaped with did not come back. Apparently I did."

His next question tumbles into the same dark place, not due to any trick of the mind, but the sideways tilt of Ren's circumstance. All Kira has wanted to know since he arrived was what happened to the people who disappeared--if they went home, if they resumed their lives. If things stood still, and waited for their return, and went on from that same point.

If there was any hope, more than a week later, of Ty still being alive. If there was still time. He'd given Ravi oranges, and if they went to mold, if Kira could somehow take them back with him, if Ty wasn't already in a bag under a mound of snow to keep him fresh for the hope of a burial--

If, if--and the question wouldn't be answered, because Ren had gone home, and returned, and remembers nothing of it. The weight of it is enough to stop Kira in his tracks, boots sunk into the snow and, for the moment, without the strength to lift from it. The edge of the new deck bites into the meat of his hand, and he spares them a glance. He has the tools to ask, even if he can't be sure of the answers. Instead of prying into something Ren claims to have forgotten, Kira goes back, picks up the question, and does his best to neatly change the subject.

"Before, when you were angry with me. The force you used, it startled me, but it wasn't very effective. Is that normal, or did they take something of that too?"

Ren stops. The crunching in the snow behind him had stopped following, and he looks over his shoulder before turning around to watch the still young man questioning him. There's an unease in the force within him he can feel twisting beneath the surface, and he frowns slightly when the question sinks in. He works hard not to show too much of his power, and even harder not to let on that he is weaker than he should be by an uncomfortably large amount.

He hesitates to admit it even now. It's hard to say if Kira is a force user or is tapping into some unknown energy Ren has never encountered. He assumes the former, usually, but even with Jean whose powers were so similar to his own he could sense there was a difference.

"I have not had access to the full use of my power since arriving on this planet." And the tone he says it with heavily suggests his discomfort over the matter. He isn't used to this weakness in his connection and it drives him mad to know he has no way of knowing how to fix this, or how to become stronger again.

Up to that point, Kira'd had a silly theory, another glimmer of hope--that he'd been too physically weak to use his senses fully, that the lack of a conduit was fucking with him. But he has the conduit in his hand, and Ren didn't look near as bad off as he felt. It was terrifying, the extent to what the fountain seemed capable of--and why he'd abandoned the idea of taking its water back home with him for Ty. The very idea of getting home, much less in any kind of time, was thawing with the snows, giving way to a spring growth of abject grief--but he wouldn't keep it frozen any longer with a cure that held so many unknown side effects.

Credence and Ren did both serve as arguments for the loss, though. Whatever had followed Credence through, it seemed like it could stand to be weakened, and Kira appreciates that Ren can't actually choke him out without using his own hands.

But he hasn't tried that yet, so Kira lifts his feet, and continues south toward the point his deck suggested. It would keep them moving, and it would tell him just how weak he really was, if they came upon nothing. "I suppose I asked because it's the same, for me. The cards help, but, they're more difficult to work with. Before I came here, I had a sense of the future, and now there's nothing." His sense of people was confined to the present, their moods, their gifts. He was trapped in a mundane sense of time, and it made the days drag, each slower than the one before.

Ren moves back into step when Kira does. He does have power, then, not just a whim and a strange choice of use of cards. At the very least he believes he can sense the future. It's useful, even if muted or inaccessible for now. When he manages to destroy or kill whatever is suppressing his powers, he might have a use for Kira's ability. If nothing else he sounds force-sensitive. Seeing possible futures through the energies of living things. Perhaps, then, the cards are a trick, and he only believes or wants others to believe that he needs them.

Cards were inorganic. The energy of the force could be wrapped around them but it did not move through them.

"I can't imagine our captors would want you to be able to see them coming." It's an explanation he uses to remind himself never to let down his guard. If their powers are weakened it is to the benefit of their captors, and he's more than certain now, since learning others were affected, that that is something planned and controlled.

Kira shrugs: the thought hadn't escaped him. "I can't say I'm in a hurry to get it back, though I might like to be able to ask some other questions." Perhaps he could try, if the search for the gifts proved the deck useful.

It might be worthwhile to ask after the intentions of the place, though he imagines if it can steal power and knowledge, it could censor a reading. "I've had readings altered before, or at least, my mother did. There are forces and beings that can shield themselves, or lie through it. Maybe they exist here."

Recalling his first night in the inn, he thinks of the question just as his feet come to another halt. He couldn't explain why he knows, but it's time to draw another card. He holds out the deck, cards gently fanned: "Pull another, we'll turn here.

"What do you know about the woman who died, and the thing that killed her?"

That's good information for Ren to know. He stores it away, reminding himself to make use of it if he ever knows Kira is trying to read him or something about him. He doesn't need anyone in this village digging into his past or future without interference to keep them from finding things he didn't want them to.

Ren stops a few feet ahead and glances back at Kira. He lets out a breath, close to a sigh of a mix of disbelief and frustration but it's barely there.

He thinks of the question, the riddle and the gift again, disregarding Kira's question as he pulls a card and hands a diamond suited one back to Kira. Only then does he process the earlier question.

"Nothing. I didn't know her. I saw the creature after they killed it. Some species I've not met. It looked like it could have been a sentient race."

Raleigh had likened it to a yeti, furred and humanoid, and Kira was disappointed that the body had gone with the passing of the heavy snows. His mother and her mother before that hadn't kept to their own, had always been part of a circle of curanderas and healers, made themselves up to date on the spirits and creatures of the Americas--they weren't living in Japan or England, anymore.

For all his resistance to the place, he's undeniably curious about the creature. If he can put a name to it, it could be a clue about where they were, what kind of other threats might exist in the canyon.

Maybe hell is a real place after all, and soon he'll be carrying rocks up to the top of the canyon, to lay at its lord's feet. Using the line they cut through the snow as a marker, he turned right: they didn't have very far to go this time, the point just west of where they stood. "Could you describe it? Raleigh said it was furred, but a bit like a person. Did it have horns or claws? Hooves?"

"It was a large beast. Thick-furred, taller than a man by a head or three. It was hard to tell with it on the ground. Smelled like rotting death." He turned when Kira did, making a new path of tracks in the snow. This time they were closer together, and it made the conversation easier, not having to glance over his shoulder.

In his mind it had seemed just another of many beasts he did not know, scattered throughout the galaxy. Not a wookiee, but in many ways reminded him of one and made him wonder if it could speak, and the others had just failed to attempt communication. Not that he cared. It was dead, and now gone.

"Looked like it was rotting itself, too, what I saw of it." It had been half buried in snow already by the time he got a good look. "I didn't see the feet. Long limbs, though and the upper ones had claws that looked made for ripping other creatures apart."

Tall, furred--not a yeti, or Raleigh would have just described it as a yeti. The climate lends itself to the guess, but Kira and his family hadn't dealt in urban legend, though the city was full of them. The real things, the real dangers, were usually human or spirit, usually started as one or the other.

He recalls Credence, with his ugly shadow. What were the creatures that started as men, which one had lived up north?

Ask a card, he thinks, now that the deck is in his hands. It seems too important a thing to leave to his own guesswork, so many years out from his mother's lessons, from adjusting the html of her geocities upgrade website on the subjects. Shuffling the deck between his hands, he lets a card catch between his fingers, slip sideways and fall to the snow.

Face down: perhaps the only clue he has for the position, in a deck of reversible images. When he plucks up the four of diamonds, the smell Ren described almost washes over him on the breeze. As faint as if it were across the village, the cold air cutting its stench. Greed, selfishness, rotting apart.

Snow melts against his fingers, running off the gloss of the card. Maybe they were north even of the border, maybe it was a clue to the place or just a symptom: "It sounds like a Wendigo. They're--" he seethes a breath through his teeth, trying to decide if everything he's seen and felt, if the existence of this place, won't let him slip comfortably into doubt of their existence. "They're people who resort to greed and cannibalism, possessed by evil spirits. They eat human flesh, and it makes them grow larger, so they have to keep eating more."

The word means nothing to Ren, but the way Kira speaks of it and the description he gives does. Even if not a race he knows, he knows of plenty who could also fit into those descriptors, albeit most without the 'evil spirits' additive. He makes a barely there sound of acknowledgement, watching the world around them for movement in the trees.

"You know something of them, do they often crawl off from their graves? Do they travel alone or in groups?" Two questions, simple but deeply informative if Kira has something to offer on the matter. In the meantime, Ren lets Kira do the leading. For all he may not put stock in the cards, he firmly believes in the force, and there's a chance Kira has tapped into it.

Ren's deep voice doesn't exactly brighten for the conversation, but Kira feels that steady thrum of frustration reduce to a murmur, hears a tightness leave his voice. Like he's relaxing into the urgency of it, or the gathering of information is infinitely easier and more enjoyable to him than more colorful kinds of interaction.

Maybe he's on the spectrum--either way, it's a key to him. Kira might find a way to be useful to him, and in turn make use of his brawn and overall concern for order and security.

It's unfortunate then, that his knowledge is word of mouth. "If you had more than one person resorting to eating people, yeah, you could get more than one; but I think they're territorial, they'd wind up competing for food once they got big enough."

The other question competes with his attention for the tree they've come up to, and he stops in front of Ren, looking up and up the dark trunk until he can see the top of it scraping the grey sky, several body lengths above the rest. "You have to burn the bodies after you put them down, though you can do that with weapons. Does that look like a vantage point to you?"

"Then it's likely the missing body means we could be looking at it back on the prowl, if it is what you think?" His question could wait, however. He stops when Kira does, squinting up to the top of the fir. Of course it would be a tree, and one of many near the village, but also one of the tallest trees around. It's very likely Kira is fucking with him, but if it's anywhere near as useful as the knife, it's worth it. He eyes the tree quietly, scanning it up and down before squinting hard toward the top again.

"Enough so to be a possibility." He admits finally. It isn't ideal, in fact it's rather an annoying turn from what he's been hoping for, but it is worth the shot and the risk. He loosens the rope and slings it over his shoulder, pulling his gloves off one at a time and shoving them in his pockets.

"Don't suppose you found an ax before the shovel?"

He shakes his head, the brown knit of his hat darkened by melting snow and the tassels swinging. "No, though I think I gifted a few that day. I could ask around if you need one? Didn't seem like the gifts had a time limit."

He isn't quite goading him, in that he doesn't say aloud if you don't want to climb it, but there's a smile threatening from the corners of his mouth despite the serious topic.

It helps to suppress it: "That or another one dragged it away. They aren't stupid, they do try to avoid letting anyone who discovers them live. Might be why the stories vary. But it's a spirit, so yeah, I think it wise to assume it's out there."

Ren stares up the tree, considering his options while Kira speaks. Climbing the tree would likely be a foolish endeavor, and there is little to no guarantee that Kira has led him anywhere productive. A few cards and a feeling aren't exactly concrete evidence, and he isn't even sure what he is looking for with the fracking boxes.

He sighs and shrugs off his coat, slipping the knife out of his belt to wrap up in the coat with the shovel and setting both aside in the snow. He rolls his shoulders and glances over one to Kira.

"Makes wandering around the woods more or less alone seem like a great idea, doesn't it?" He reaches up to grab a branch, giving it a strong yank and causing several branches of the tree to shake and drop their snow to the ground below.

"There's a knife in my coat if it comes running for you." He smirks slightly, grabbing a higher branch and focusing on finding a good footing as he starts his attempt to climb it. The snow was still deep enough it could probably cushion his fall.

"You say it's a spirit, but it has a physical form. They injured it and thought they had killed it, I saw the body. I thought spirits weren't meant to by physical."

Edited 2017-01-23 02:37 (UTC)

The smirk is met with a dull frown before Kira gives in to the impulse to roll his eyes. Hopefully the gesture is universal to Ren's home planet, and the frown remains a moment while Kira wonders where the thought comes from. Had Ren really told him anything about that? It didn't feel like just a joke, or the joke Kira would usually make. Considering Ren's social skills, it was rather unkind, even for him.

"I think you're likelier to fall out of that tree onto your own knife than I am to put it in anything. And unless you heard or saw something the contrary, they aren't really supposed to be an issue in daylight."

Which comforts very little, when he thinks they aren't supposed to be much confused by doors either. "You're a spirit in a physical form. Some spirits just get warped, and the form follows. Evil shit changes you, it's why they smell like they're rotting."

And thank god: the air around the is clear and cold, no ugly stench on the wind. It doesn't stop Kira from glancing around at the other trees, and back at their trail filling in with the gentle snowfall, but it lets him visibly shrug before looking back to the tree.

"Good to know. It is really unwise to go around advertising your inability to stab things, though." Ren responds as he finds his footing properly, making his way up the sturdier branches with the ease of someone who has both climbed trees before, and possesses the upper body strength to pull himself up where necessary. He makes it about a third of the way up before the tree starts to shake with his movements, dumping snow periodically from its boughs and showering them both in white powder.

Evil shit changes you. Ren wants to laugh, but he resists the urge. There's an old echo there in a more familiar voice, and he can just hear Luke again. The dark side changes you. Old tales of how it twisted and warped those who allowed themselves to be taken by it. Physically as well as mentally.

The dark side hadn't given him his scar. A girl with a lightsaber had.

"Don't get buried. I don't want to have to dig you out when I get back down."

"At least you have the shovel for it," he calls, a single hand lifted to his mouth to guide the sound. It's otherwise quiet: the wuft and crunch of snow falling from branches onto more snow; the wind dragging between thick branches; the groan of wood tightening and bending in the winter air and under Ren's weight.

The tree is large enough to support him. It might be a welcome diversion to follow, but there are diversions and there's idiocy: if he fell, if he were truly hurt, there was no real structure to deal with it.

"I don't think I have to advertise my inability to do anything," he calls after, the silence starting to swallow him and prickle at his spine. It had been even stranger in Manhattan, streets gone dark and empty, lit by flares or road blocks and shrouded in fog. The city that never slept had been bashed into a coma. "I do notice your thinly veiled astonishment every time I manage to breathe and walk at the same time."

"Or your ability to walk at all." He calls down after, with a hint of amusement. The snow proved difficult for some. Ren had grown use to the deep sink of his feet into it, but he had seen a few people struggle, and repeatedly fall, trip, or put too much weight into strides and steps that moved too far for the terrain. He reaches a point where he can actually see the box, wrapped in neatly black paper and tied to the unsteady tip of the too tall tree. He frowns, studying the branches and doing the math in his head.

Whatever it was likely wasn't worth the risk, but he had come this far, and one of the hidden boxes had been a knife. He looped his arm tightly around the trunk, hugging the tree as he cracked one of the longer branches off from it with much bending, shaking, and a sickeningly loud Crack that echoed in the still air.

"You might want to move further back." He yells, twisting the branch in his hand to try and knock the two foot long box loose from its thin twine binding.

Kira of all people had to believe in the sometimes perfect alignment of the universe: he took two large steps back, obedient but still looking up, watching the branches move and the tree sway under whatever the fuck Ren was doing--when he tripped on the high snow and his own momentum.

Attempting to correct could only make it worse, so he tipped flat into it, a greater whumpf of snow swallowing his silhouette, elbows out and his body trying to fold up despite the soft landing.

This is exactly why he hadn't bothered with the tree. Hopefully this was far back enough, the wind not quite knocked from him and a moment of just--quiet. A moment of being a kid in a snow drift, the world blocked out, muffled, not yet freezing. It's actually warmer down and out of the wind, waiting for the snow to soak through his layers.

Ren knocked the box down, looking after it as it fell just in time to watch Kira disappear into a snow bank. He was lucky enough the box, containing as it happened, a rather study and sharp machete, landed a fair distance away from the dip in the snow in the form of Kira's body. Ren makes his way down a bit faster than his climb up, his footing still remembered clearly, and backtracking his steps only reaching a mild hitch near the bottom when his boots slip on a frozen branch. He drops down into the snow from a few feet into the tree, sinking in with his legs, but keeping his balance.

Ren doesn't bother with the shovel or the box as he makes his way to the depression in the snow, peering down at Kira with his head cocked to the side.

"If you wanted time to play in the snow, you didn't have to wait for me to climb a tree. I wouldn't have buried you." And yet his tone seems to almost jokingly imply he would have. His humor slipped into the conversation for just a moment, brows arched as if Kira had intended to take a spill into the snow.

"Do I need to dig you out?"

"And risk the very high possibility you just want to hit me with a shovel," he asks, staring up at the grey sky beyond the edge of his silhouette. "I think I'll get myself up, thanks."

He's in no hurry, having heard the sound of the box hitting the snow, knowing there's time yet to collect it before heading back. "The cards worked," he says aloud, as much to himself as Ren. "I guess that's good to know."

Muted as they are, he still has his abilities. They're still a functional thing, still part of the world around him. It isn't a clue of what the world is, so much as assurance that some of the old logic still applies.

Raising a hand out of the hole, he wonders if Ren will do him the favor of taking it, in exchange for his psychic services. "You don't have anything else to look for, do you?"

"I have better weapons for that then a shovel." He offers, as he picks his coat up and shakes the snow off it, pulling it back on over his shoulders. As Kira reaches a hand up, Ren grabs him by his wrist, letting Kira grab onto his arm for a sturdier hold before easily pulling him to his feet, the faint curl of the Force pushing at Kira's back with a surprisingly gentle push in addition to Ren's help with his arm.

"I do, but I think they can wait for another day." He says as he leaves Kira standing in the snow to collect the box. He doesn't open it, tucking it under his arm. If it ends up being something that's a token of his past again, he doesn't want Kira around for it.

He eyes the young man, considering his earlier comment. The cards, or something, had worked. For all he didn't seem it, Kira might be useful. He was a thin, frail, form of a man, but then, so had Hux been. He considered both equally useless in combat, though he knew Hux was far more useful than he let on. But Kira knew things about the creature here, about Ren's world, and he had a connection to the Force, or something like it. One that could be put to use even here in the canyon that seemed to dull and mute everything.

"I know where to find you." He comments, not intending it as a threat, as he picks the knife and shovel back up to prepare to head back to his own living space. Kira was someone he was going to have to keep an eye on in the future.

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[CLOSED] a grave it is

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