sixthiterationlogs | racing through canyons of angels ♙ closed

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racing through canyons of angels ♙ closed

WHO: Jess Brightwell.
WHERE: The inn, then into the wild unknown.
WHEN: Aug. 9th.
OPEN TO: Raven Reyes.
WARNINGS: Children at play?
STATUS: Closed.

The morning was lightening into butter-yellow sunrise when Jess started getting ready to head out into the canyon.

Water, a makeshift knife, and an extra pair of socks went into his pack along with his other gear. Every couple of days now he'd taken his bag with a day's worth of supplies and picked a direction, hiking as deep into the canyon as time and circumstances allowed.

Towering rock walls in every direction made an excellent place to disappear a town, Jess scathingly had to admit, and the rough terrain and thick foliage in the forested areas didn't make it easy to scout. More than once these two weeks past, he'd been willing to trade an arm if it'd get him a proper knife to clear the way. But setbacks or no setbacks, someone had brought them here, and someone was providing them supply boxes. Jess had every intention of finding them, or barring that, a road out of this bloody primeval village.

And he knew he wasn't the only one who felt that way.

Before stopping by the storeroom to grab the rations he'd need, Jess' first stop was Raven's room. "You ready to go?" he asked, rapping on her door.

She wasn't a friend he'd trust at his back like Glain, but she was just as hungry for answers. Shared interests made them allies in this, at least.

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He was as frustrating as Finn and Wick combined, except where the latter pushed and pushed, Jess seemed to do so then let go. Either he read something in her body language she didn't know was there, or he was the type of person to leap forward then take several paces back and decide to go another way.

She still hadn't figured out what type of person he was, other than someone who was just as overly unhappy to be here as she was.

Rather than bite back at him, she thought better of it. She didn't know where she came from, other than space and the Ark and a spit of earth where Tondc could be found. But Jess knew where he hailed from, and Raven wanted to know everything about the home she should've had if some asshole with a trigger happy finger hadn't pressed a button.

"Where are you from again?"

"Originally London, England. Part of Great Britain. In Europe," he said while scanning the path ahead for anything worth making a mental note of. 'Path' was a bit of a misnomer as it was all thick brush and no discernible way through it, but this trip made a good opportunity to map any potential food or water sources, or more importantly, any sign of their shy hosts.

A bird twittered overhead, disappearing into the canopy in a flutter of wings.

"That's where the accent comes from. If you've heard it before, they might have been British. Yours-- I'd guess you were American, judging by yours."

Raven nodded, although her expression showed she was completely lost. His accent wasn't completely new to her, as there'd been people on the Ark who spoke with that kind of lilt. She'd always liked listening to one man in her sector, speaking of his wife, of the stars, of anything she could trick him into saying.

Jess' accent wasn't as much of a comfort as his had been, but she still liked it all the same. It made him sound different, and Raven sought for the differences in this town and Arkadia.

She looked at him with a furrow to her brow. "American? As in the United States? I remember the stories of Unity Day, where all of us were united on the Ark as one. I don't know all that much about Great Britain or Europe, probably because there was nothing to really know anymore."

He nodded to the first part--yes, that was what he meant. America. The United States. Raven wasn't as hopeless at geography as she talked herself up to be.

But then it was his turn to run up against another gap between his knowledge and hers, of which there were many, littering their conversations to date like landmines waiting to be discovered. Ignoring the part about their not being anything to know about Europe (that hurt like the historically-minded part of him in a deeply painful way), he said, "Unity Day?"

"The day all the space stations came together as one," she recalled in a dull tone. She sighed then, as though the mere mention of it aggravated her.

To a point it did. Raven never quite understood the original division between the stations, of why they were split and not quite working together in tandem as they did now.

"When the bombs went off, I guess each country had their own station sent to space." She looked at him with a small shrug. "To save some of their people, I guess. There were twelve of them. Twelve nations had managed to save some of their people, and they were up in space, not quite living together. One of the stations floated toward another, and I guess a light bulb popped into their heads," she said, her fingers curling into the palm of her right hand then bursting like a flower opening, "that working together was better than working apart.

"Boom, Unity Day."

Wait, wait. Jess started to shake his head in bemusement from the very first mention of there being more than one space stations; they needed to backtrack already if there was to be any hope of him keeping up. Confusion was becoming a familiar feeling with Raven.

"There was more than one of your Ark at one time?"

Twelve spaceships in the sky was probably the start of a sci-fi invasion novel. Listed next to it in the Codex there'd probably be a novel about dimension-hopping and inescapable towns, too. Surviving above the atmosphere was still a nebulous concept in Jess' mind, and humoring the idea of one manmade space vessel strained his imagination--let alone an entire fleet. And that was to say nothing of her use of the word bombs.

"Or, assuming I'm getting this right, they became the Ark you mentioned at lunch?" he amended. To the best of his ability, he was giving this 'learn about each other' thing a shot. It was only fair he try to grasp the nuances of this... unification between space stations after he'd pressed her into trying to account for her geographical region.

"They became the Ark," she said, brow cocked as she noted how he seemed to take to this with a little more flair in his step. Maybe he really was one who liked all that boring stuff like history. Though Raven enjoyed the stories about people who once were, she didn't like to dwell on the past. It made her feel much smaller than it should, especially powerless given her past had been filled with a mirth she'll never quite reach again.

She didn't let that particular thought linger for long. Learning from her past, she was quick to move — and she did so with a giant step, as if to prove to the ghost beside her that her left leg could do it.

"Nations had a station. There were about thirteen. I don't know why they never thought to work together, but after someone helped another one out, that's when they united. Stronger together than apart." She shrugged her shoulder. "Isn't that something you learn from history?"

Another tree met the business end of Jess' knife, bearing the symbol that would help lead them in the right direction should need call for it. In this thick bush, he couldn't rule it out. Couldn't rule much of anything out.

"Thirteen's not a lot of nations." Out of nearly two hundred? It was infinitesimal.

The more he heard about others' backgrounds, the less sure he was he saw history--not to mention the present day--remotely the same way, because he sure didn't recall there being a historical precedent for Noah's Ark above the clouds. But he was starting to understand it was just better not to argue some points.

"Something like that, I'd wager. It's why we're out here. Stuck together, survive together."

"Except it kind of seemed like common sense."

Raven looked around, noticing how the trees weren't quite as clustered together to the left as they had been a few minutes ago. She wouldn't be too much help in navigating back, but she sometimes knew her very natural landmarks. She wasn't an artist like Clarke, who could draw a proper map that was of more use than the one Bellamy had used when trying to find her so many months ago, but she was a mechanic, and as a part of her job, she had to be able to put the pieces together.

She let out a sigh, looking up at the sky and squinting. "Wherever you're from, you've got a lot of people around you, right? You're able to walk around, travel ... Being up in space, you were isolated. You only knew what you were told, or what you found. Thirteen nations was a lot for space." If the culling was anything to go by, it was almost too much. But that wasn't a topic to bring up to anyone, acquaintance or newfound friend alike. Jess might show himself to be a good ally, but he didn't need to know of that. Raven didn't want to remember it. "They survived the bombs. That's a lot."

The hundred had dwindled into half their number, if less by now. Though Raven often let it weigh her down, she also knew they had to see the good in it. Hundred kids had dropped to the ground, some dying in transit. Perhaps a quarter still breathed. It was a success. So was the thirteen nations that existed, even though Raven didn't have the context Jess possessed to understand that that was an incredibly depressing number.

"Everybody joining together to create your Ark, you mean?" he clarified.

Space and sci-fi stories, those weren't his area, but he knew a little bit about a whole being stronger than its individual parts. He had to admit that he, Glain, Dario, and Khalila had been like that--capable in their own right, but infinitely more effective together. Even Dario, despite the boy's piss poor self-preservation skills some days.

Thinking about it made him miss the ease of that cooperation and companionship. Of course, the prisoners in this town were working with each other, but it wasn't quite the same. Mistrust and unfamiliarity created own sense of isolation.

Jess mulled over what Raven had confided, eyes forward. It didn't make much sense to him, but then he hadn't expected it to. "I'll have to take your word on that front," he said. "So what happened to number thirteen? You said there were only twelve at first."

She shrugged her shoulders. "Alpha destroyed it."

She spoke with detachment; she hadn't been involved, it happening to the world she was born into long before she even understood she wanted to walk in space. It wasn't something that felt like it was real to her. A story passed down from parent to child as a warning that cooperation was oftentimes the best choice, and refusing to could lead to incredibly dire ramifications. It wasn't a good bedtime story, but Raven had always taken its core to heart.

Keeping her gaze forward, she continued to speak with ease, "It didn't want to merge with the rest of the stations when they wanted to unify. I don't really know why. Mrs Collins could never give me an answer, and my mom never really cared."

Ah, finally something he knew a little bit about. "So it wasn't a voluntary agreement. They were forced to join. Alpha's a person? One of these stations?"

A part of Jess thought it likely said something about him that a holiday celebration covering up a bloody history could give him a point of reference, make her world feel more real to him, more believable. Human history was littered with the bodies of people sacrificed for the greater good or for superficial agendas, and every other reason in between. That was the same in his world, and in hers.

It didn't make contemplating Egypt and Great Britain's destruction any more comfortable, though. He tried not to think about an Earth turned into an unrecognizable graveyard of bomb craters and forgotten cities. For as selfish and destructive as the human race could be, they were also capable of great beauty and feats of ingenuity: the pyramids, Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, Michelangelo's Pieta. And books--so many original books that took the reader into the mind of another person in a way no other medium could. Worlds within pages.

A world where all of that had turned to dust... Jess frowned into the distance, finding he didn't have anything else to say about it.

"Main station," she answered. A part of her wanted to sit down near a plain canvas of earth and draw it for him. Circles to represent the stations, their names written beside them. But Raven didn't know all the facts, despite being within influential circles now. She sometimes wondered if Sinclair knew the true story of how Unity Day came to be himself.

She kept walking, inhaling deeply through her nose to only release it in a long sigh. She'd never get over the air and how it didn't taste so recycled, but she missed space. Tilting her head up at the sky, she narrowed her eyes against the dull brightness of the day. "You know how wolves have an alpha? They were the leader of the pack. Are, I guess. I don't know if that's true anymore."

Looking ahead, she continued, "Alpha's all the important people, I guess. You've got those in your world, right?"

Jess pushed through a thicket of long grass and let one of the loops on his bag slip off his arm, allowing him to pull it around him and pull out his water. "Makes sense." In whatever way any of this made sense. "The name kind of gives it away."

He took a drink and put the container away again, not really keen on digging into the situation at home, or the plurality of worlds. It wasn't out of any discomfort over talking about home, per se; he didn't mind answering the basics, like what country he hailed from, though there were certainly things he had no choice but to leave out of conversations, like the inner workings of the Library. What people didn't know wouldn't hurt them. But helping Raven put together a map of the constellations would probably be enough of a challenge without complicating matters with details on his end.

"I'm willing to bet we all have those in some form or another. There's a leader for every pack," he said vaguely. His eye caught on something to his right that saved him from saying anything more, something that made him slow for a second, long enough to confirm he wasn't merely looking at an insect or colorful stone.

"Hey, look." Coming to a full stop, he pointed at the leaf that had drawn his attention. Namely, what was on it. "Check it out. A snail."

Raven's grateful for the interruption. As much as she wanted to talk about home, she much preferred to peer down at a tiny, little creature in minor confusion. She stood beside Jess, standing at her full height, before took a tiny step forward so she could focus on it before her. She didn't reach out to brush her fingers against the shell, unsure of what she was truly looking at at first.

She'd seen some snails back at camp. Whenever it rained, they seemed to appear, as if summoned by the claps of thunder and the water saturating the dirt. Glancing up at Jess with her eyebrow arched, she did her best to hide her smile. She hadn't had much time to appreciate the world around her once she'd landed. The rain had been something that had hugged her, and she won't ever forget it.

"It's weird looking," she said. Her gaze returned to the snail. "I like it's shell. Isn't he going to get knocked off if he stays there?"

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racing through canyons of angels ♙ closed

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i can't believe you found a picture of a snail.