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sixthiterationlogs2016-12-30 03:35 pm
3ofswords) wrote in sixthiterationlogs2016-12-30 03:35 pm
Entry tags:
[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."
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."
no subject
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?"
no subject
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?"
no subject
"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.