sixthiterationlogs

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01 🌠

WHO: Rey
WHERE: The fountain and the forest
WHEN: January 30th
OPEN TO: Anyone and everyone!
WARNINGS: Near-drowning on arrival, but otherwise none inherent
STATUS: Open!

a) The fountain
Rey had always dreamed of the ocean, and it was only when she finally arrived on Ahch-To that the island and the sea became real to her, the smell of the salt and the sound of the waves crashing around her the second she stepped out of the Falcon bringing the water to vivid life. The one thing she'd never anticipated, however, was the feeling of being under that water, as there hadn't been enough on Jakku to even paddle in. As she flails around now, her body feeling light but sluggish, her chest tightening with her panic, she assumes she must have somehow fallen, perhaps having lost her footing from the steep incline of the island to the waters below. But she doesn't remember falling: one moment she'd been stood there, hand outstretched, offering Luke the saber he'd lost so long ago, and as quick as blinking she was underwater, thrashing and kicking and hoping that some survival instinct would help her propel herself the surface.

When she manages to grip the rim of the fountain she pulls herself up, rolling her body over until she's safely on the ground, coughing and sputtering as she tries to clear the water from her lungs. As she gathers herself together she stares around her in bewilderment, taking in the trees and the buildings and the strange white stuff that covers the ground. It's only when she gets her breath back that she realises she's shivering with the cold, her teeth chattering, and it's with difficulty that she manages to pull herself to her feet.

b) The forest
At any other time she'd stop and marvel at the trees, but right now Rey needs to think practically. She'd seen a number of buildings on her way into the woods, but many of them looked like private residences and she didn't feel right assuming that she could stay in one - just for the night, just until she's figured out a way out of here, she tells herself. Her priorities are finding a weapon, starting a fire, and getting some sort of shelter, and the forest seems like a good answer to all of those. She figures she can probably trade something from her pack - the strange looking hat with the flame embroidered on it, perhaps - for something to light a fire with, but before that she needs to make sure she's not wandering around with no means of defending herself.

It takes a few minutes for her to find a branch of the right length, and when she does find one that she thinks will do, she leans her whole weight against it to snap it from the tree. Leaning against the trunk, she begins to strip the branch of smaller twigs and leaves to make herself a rudimentary staff.

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He breaks the treeline as she's rising.

Not for the first time—nor probably the last—the sound of splashing and coughing had sent him sprinting to this place.

The anger at himself never diminished that he always feels disappointed. Because it meant he'd let his hopes rise.

(For something he shouldn't hope for.

…Or maybe…

No.)

But he's getting better at swallowing that disappointment and anger and moving forward without pause. As ever, he's ripped off his own jacket as he ran, and now approaches more slowly, holding one hand out toward her, empty, to show he means peace.

"Hey… You're all right."

With the other hand, he holds out his dry coat. "Put this on?" (It's not exactly a question but making sure it sounds like an offer, not an order.)

Typically, walking in one's backyard forest, Peggy doesn't often find strangers putting things together in a rather determined manner. Then again, since when is this any sort of normal situation? Case in point, Peggy had been outside trying to see if she could find Barnes in the woods like the last time, but he'd evaded her. Perhaps he'd gone to the canyons with Steve or Natasha. It wasn't cause for alarm just yet, but there was a bad feeling Peggy had.

Clearing her throat, she tried to get the young woman's attention, hoping not to startle her, but wanting her to be aware that she now had company. "I hope you're not preparing that to eat," she remarks, seeing as it wouldn't yield much taste.

Walks are nice. Credence isn't sure he could ever get used to how expansively beautiful this place is. New York has always been crowded, full of life and people and Credence had found aspects of that beautiful, sure, but skyscrapers weren't tall trees, and with all the light, he could barely see the stars. Here he can, and here he likes to walk.

It soothes his mind, and it stops the strange scratching sensation at the base of his skull that happens sometimes. He thinks he needs a small amount of time away from the inn, solely because of everything that's happened: the arrival of the man who is and isn't Mr. Graves, his confession to Kira, the gift the observers have given him. Clearing his mind felt necessary at this point.

Credence has learned, though, since his first walk long ago. He has a knife now, a gift from Christmas, and that's safely in his peacoat's pocket. His black scarf is wrapped around his neck and his fur hat squarely on his head ashe dares to go further and further towards the forest. It's a sort of game he plays by himself, despite being a grown man: how far before he turns back? An exercise in courage. He always turns back just at the treeline, and this time he--

He squints, peering towards it. There is, unmistakably, a girl. She is, unmistakably, leaning on a tree branch until--Credence winces and jumps despite himself as it snaps, fully expecting the girl to go careening to the ground. She doesn't, and he takes in the colour of scrubs before softly calling out.

He never raises his voice, but he at least hopes it will carry on the wind as he approaches.

"Aren't you cold?"

At first she recoils, suspicious of everything in this new place and uncertain whether he's been sent to harm her. She leans back on the edge of the fountain, trying to regain her breath and still occasionally coughing, the water dripping from the unfamiliar clothes she's clad in and from the ends of her hair onto the snowy ground.

Tentatively she reaches for the coat, wrapping it around her shoulders and resisting the urge to dry herself off into it, feeling instantly a little warmer.

"Where am I? Who are you?"

The thought hadn't even crossed Rey's mind - while she was used to scavenging most other things, she'd always been reliant on rationed food rather than finding her own. She turns the branch over in her hands, grimacing a little as she imagined trying to digest it.

She regards Peggy a little warily, but only in as much as she's wary about everything in this place.

"I was more hoping it would help me catch something to eat."

Rey picks at the leaves and twigs one by one, feeling bad for just discarding them onto the forest floor but not really knowing what else to do with them. She feels bad for damaging the tree too, especially as they're still something quite foreign to her, but she didn't know what else to do to find something with which to defend herself - though against what, she still isn't sure.

"Freezing," she confirms, keeping her hands working to stop them from shivering. "As soon as I'm finished with this, I want to find a way to make a fire."

"You're in a park, near a village, in a forest, in a canyon," he said. "I'm sorry I don't know names for any of them. Everyone here arrived the same way you just did—by means we can't explain, against our will. Though no one appears to mean us harm, we are for the time being stuck here. My name is Cassian. I arrived about a month ago. I was disoriented and cold, too, and other people here helped me. I'd like to help you in turn, if you wish… I can show you to a private house or the public inn, if you want to dry off and get warm and be fed. …And I also came with a pack on my back, just like the one you'll find on yours. We think they're a welcome kit from our unknown 'hosts'. There are dry clothes inside if you want to change into any of them for the walk. It's not far enough to be dangerous but, while the weather's still like this, it could be a bit uncomfortable."

Since the snow had cleared, Helen had taken to going to the woods once again in search of medicinal herbs. She had a nice little store from before the snows had gotten heavy but she feared that if any injuries arose, she'd need more. The winter had been hard on the herbs, though, and Helen frowned at how poor the selection was.

She had a little knife in hand to help aid in cutting and when she heard a snap of a limb, she turned, knife gripped tightly. If it were an animal, hopefully it was much smaller than she was and docile. Otherwise, Helen would be quite outnumbered.

It turned out that it wasn't an animal after all but a person and Helen didn't recognize the girl. Was she new?

"Hello?" Helen called out cautiously. "Who's there?"

To say Rey is a little overwhelmed by that barrage of information is an understatement. She stares at Cassian, blinking a couple of times as she tries to let it all sink in, but it's no good. What she immediately cottons onto, though, is that she's been brought here against her will by forces unknown, and she's not the only one.

"Wait, whoever did this brought you here too and you're not trying to escape?"

Rey turns in the direction of the voice, peering through the trees and tensing up a little as she sees the knife in Helen's hand. She holds her makeshift staff across her body defensively, hoping that the other woman was just wary about finding a stranger in the woods rather than truly meaning her any harm.

"It's all right. I'm not looking to hurt anyone."

"I'd be interested in your ideas on how to do that, after you've had a chance to get to know the place yourself," said Cassian. No sarcasm there; he was completely sincere. As an intelligence agent, he wasn't inclined to color the perceptions of others with his own interpretations. And there was too little hard data to work from. "We can compare notes. But first…" He nodded, again, to the pack on her back. "Do you want to dry off and get someplace warm? There are some skilled people here but not a lot of equipment, including medical, so probably want to avoid frostbite or such."

"Neither am I," Helen said, relaxing her posture and tucking the knife into the basket she used to gather herbs. Thus unarmed, she spread her hands wide to show the other woman she meant no harm.

"I just didn't realize there was anyone else out here. I apologize if I gave you a fright."

"With a sharp enough end, it could certainly do that," she agrees, trying to muster up enough of a smile to continue on with small talk, but she does feel like before she can do that and ask more pointed questions about the young woman, there's the more pressing matter to deal with. "Have you happened to see two young men and a young woman pass this way? She's red-haired, the men are quite tall, filled out? American, all of them," she says, hope in the minute flickers of expression on her face.

Ren had no shortage of weapons thanks to the 'generosity' of the village. He was familiar with the woods, and cut through them at least once a day with the ax looped through the rope at his side. A number of trees in the forest had been felled and turned into wood for the village by Ren, and that was where he had been headed when he spots her. The garb is only familiar in that the clothing is the same everyone arrives from the fountain with. It isn't the familiarity of her clothes or even her face that catches him and stops him in his path. It's the tug of something else entirely. The call and familiarity of the Force, even weak as it was in the canyon, was still there and present, flaring up as much as it could as their paths cross once again.

He's still dressed all in black, though his clothing is no longer anything like the clothes other captives arrive in. He holds a four foot metal rod at his side with the comfort and familiarity of a staff, and an unmistakable scar cuts down his face and disappears under the collar of his coat. His hair is longer but pulled back, and he watches her a moment before setting one end of the makeshift staff on the ground firmly, standing straight and fixing her with an intent stare.

"Smart." Is all he says, no confrontation or rage. No condescension or antagonism. A single word of near praise at the fact that she so quickly had set to arming herself. Few seemed to have as much sense about them, and her resourcefulness only works in both their favors right now. A few months earlier and he might have let his anger redirect to her, but Ren was tired and frustrated. Rey's appearance seemed less like sand thrown into his face and more like a new thread of possibility to pull at.

She's never heard of frostbite before, but she can make an educated guess with that name, and she throws a distrustful glance down at the snow. Throwing a distrustful glance down at the snow. Pushing herself up from the ground, she pulls Cassian's jacket closer around her shoulders as she shivers into it. "Somewhere warm sounds like a good idea."

Rey shakes her head, looking a little apologetic and imagining how easy it must be to get lost amongst the trees. "I haven't seen anyone pass through. And I'm not sure what an American would look like." She assumes it's some alien species, though so many had passed through Jakku they could look like almost anything.

She relaxes in turn, dropping her arms to her side and resting the branch against the tree from which she'd snapped it. "It's always a good idea to be wary." She had no idea what might be lurking in the trees, after all.

Rey doesn't sense him until he's close, and she's not sure whether that's due to her own inexperience with using the Force or how much weaker her connection to it seems to be here. As Ren approaches she feels a surge of anxiety, one she quickly tempers as she reminds herself that she's faced him and beaten him before, and that she was able to get inside his head just as he'd forced his way into hers. Her staff looks almost comical as she holds it defensively, leaves and twigs still hanging from the branch, though she loosens her grip just a little as it becomes clear that he's not going to attack, at least not right off the bat.

Had she not already been told that none of the captives there had seen the ones who'd abducted them, she'd assume that Ren was behind it, that he'd come over to gloat at her. But as she regards him now, she realises that he's as much a prisoner here as she is herself. That doesn't make her feel any sort of sympathy for him; on the contrary, her eyes flash with pain and contempt as she sees him shoving his saber through Han, a scene which continues to play over and over in her memory, as she'd never really known what it was to lose someone until then.

She glances at her weapon, then back at him, finding it difficult to take even the most pragmatic praise from him. "You never know what's hiding in the trees."

"Mainly like you or I, but more brash and rude at times," is Peggy's comment, feeling well able to make that remark when there isn't a single American around to be seen. She gestures to the stick in her hand. "Do you have anything that you can sharpen the end of it with?" she asks, knowing that if she keeps searching, she's bound to end up disappointed.

Better for Peggy to take her mind off it with something else, and this proves to be an excellent use of 'else'.

Emma was not a cook at all..... she could hunt she supposed, at least she had on Neverland, but it wasn't something that she was at all used to. She figured on the days that Killian didn't catch their dinner, she could at least provide somethings for Kate at the Inn.

This is what brought her out to the forest today.

She stopped a little ways off from where Rey stood making her staff, just watching. Emma was by no means quiet in coming upon the girl.

"That's impressive,"

He holds out an arm—indicating the way to go, and if she wanted additional warmth, but not requiring active rejection—could seamlessly be ignored—if that was too much too soon. It's hard to tell yet if she'd feel better talking things through or not… reading body language gets shot to hell when adding reactions to physical extremes like cold. But something about her suggests she might prefer to keep details closer to her chest. (Not something he can relate to, of course not…)

He gives it a try, though. If only because talking as they walk generates a little more warmth and makes the walk go faster. "Where did you just come from? And what's your name?"

Well, he hadn't expected that. He blinks, looking more like a startled owl than an actual person for a few moments, and he actually doesn't respond right away. He's getting used to other people's bluntness, but the casual way she says it is both slightly alarming and somewhat fascinating.

Why is she hellbent on doing whatever it is she's doing first? Why here? Credence's questions all fold in on themselves before he settles on what he was originally going to say.

"Miss? If you don't have gloves, or a hat, I have an extra pair, maybe you'd like them, and..." He trails off, very briefly, voice small and polite. He's gotten better about his volume since arriving. "Have you been to the inn yet?"

"It is, though it is relatively safe here people-wise. There are animals in the woods, though."

This young woman appeared to be new (at least to Helen) and she didn't want to frighten her straight away about monsters and the like. It would serve just to make sure the girl was on her guard.

"Do you hunt?"

Even though she still feels pretty shaky, she doesn't take his arm, though she feels grateful that he offered it instead of just grabbing her hand. Folding her arms over her chest, she falls into step next to him, her gaze quickly darting between the buildings and trees and people as she tries to take in everything about the strange place she's been brought to.

"I'm Rey. I was on Ahch-To, in the Unknown Regions."

"Human, then." She can't help but look amused at Peggy's description, though she's still not sure she'd be able to spot them in a crowd. At least she'll have a word for anyone she encounters here who comes across as particularly rude.

Rey shakes her head, running her finger over the end of the staff. "My own one is blunt at both ends, but it's made for defense, not hunting. Something with a point might be more helpful."

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01 🌠

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Forest

forest;

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/just throws all the exposition at Rey in a great big wadge

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B

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Forrest

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