sixthiterationlogs | keep that fury deep inside you: primitive weapons plot

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keep that fury deep inside you: primitive weapons plot

WHO: Kira Nerys
WHERE: the Inn
WHEN: Saturday,
OPEN TO: All (August Plot, part 2)
WARNINGS: none at present
STATUS: Open

When Nerys heard about the boxes that Jo and Killian Jones had found, she was surprised. When she heard what was in them, that they were all marked with intent, the surprise lessened, and now was turning into sinking overwhelming tunnel vision in her head, her gut. The physical sensation of knowing, knowing that someone had plans for you, and those plans were likely ugly--oh yes, she knows it. Just because it's familiar, though, doesn't make it something she enjoys by any stretch of the imagination.

No, it's the kind of feeling that Nerys had learned at a very young age to transmute into anger. The kind of anger that fed her family, then the kind of anger that blew up Cardassian weapons depots, then the kind of anger that kept her focused on her job and kept her people safe.

She knows that if she's feeling this way, things are just as bad or worse for others. While she hasn't been entirely candid with everyone about her past, though she certainly hasn't lied, she's pretty sure she's seen complexity (let's be frank, darkness) in some of the people she's met, and like fuck did they need a full-scale civil war on their hands here.

It's a good way for them all, in the not-so-long run, to die.

Clearly, they all needed to have a gods damned talk before this boiled over, and as Nerys sees no one else volunteering, she steps up, roaming through the village like an old-fashioned crier. "Hey," she shouts at the people in the field, around the town, using the rather powerful pipes the Prophets had seen fit to give her. "Hey. Meeting at the Inn, fifteen minutes. We need to talk."

She gets to the inn in a few minutes' time, then clambers up onto one of the tables in front of Jo's lists, and sits, cross-legged, to wait. Folks filter in, a few at a time, and Nerys taps her jaw with her fingertips, counting out the seconds (she'd like a chronometer, but that'd be like asking for latinum dust). Once enough time's passed, she clears her throat. It doesn't really do much, so she rolls her eyes, then turns up the volume a little--not aggressive, but enough to catch people's attention. She's accustomed to walking the fine line between too much and too little leadership, because unlike her Starfleet colleagues, she doesn't expect the hierarchy of rank and linked formality of sometimes-grudging respect. Makes it easier to actually talk to people.

"Hey. My name's Nerys, for those of you who I haven't met properly yet. You've probably heard what was found out in the forest," she starts. "I figure we should all sit down and discuss it, because the last thing that's going to be any good for anyone is us starting to distrust each other and get into fights. So...let's hash it out, right?"

If she has to scream the 'this is what they fucking want, they want us to hurt each other, fuck them' message into people's heads, she's willing to do that. Eventually. Hopefully someone else will agree.

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She's been thinking about the clothing since she arrived. Not the colour, the colours seemed before now to be random, unimportant. But that her nightdress was gone. That she'd been placed in strange clothes, strange undergarments, that fit. She's thought on it, and what it all means and what it implies, because she can't not think about it. They don't live in a fairytale, where clothes can be changed with a click of their fingers. They aren't captured by the Aos Sí, and their clothes aren't illusions.

It's one reason - the main one, besides practicality - as to why she's been making her clothes. It's the main reason why she's been making clothes not unlike what she'd wear at home, as close as she can. One of the reasons why she's making a corset.

All so she can put herself together.

She doesn't say that. Not any of it. She just sits there, in her red scrubs blouse because her others are drying, and in a brown tablecloth skirt, with her hands folded in her lap. Dirty hands. She'd been scrubbing the floor of this room before the meeting. She knows scrubbing floors. And it doesn't make her shriek with the violation of what's been done to her, to them all.

Instead, she clears her throat.

"Divide and conquer. It's fairly straight-forward, innit? But the colours might not actually mean anythin'. Our captors just might think they do. Don't mean it's true."

She's thinking of the men with rulers and scales, measuring skulls and calling her brother a monster because of the shape of his head.

Learned men can be cruel. It doesn't make their conclusions or assumptions right, and she doesn't want people here starting to assume that their captors are right about anything.

Though she can see how it'd be a reason for whoever's in charge to assign them random colours, Raven can't quite believe it's the purpose behind Kate wearing red and her donning grey. The Ark had limited supplies, and so it made use of everything it had in its arsenal: sections were divided and people were given responsibilities, and they were expected to contribute to the way the Ark functioned.

Lacking a reasoning behind the scrub colours contributes too little for Raven to believe it's simply a minor, insignificant thing.

"What would they get out of assigning us a bunch of random colours?"

No one in power does anything without reason. Raven had been blinded to it for a good while. Nygel had used her position to her advantage, much to Raven's chagrin, but she hadn't had it horribly bad with the Council in power. After all, the youngest Zero-G in fifty-two years had some sway, even if it wasn't much at all at the end of the day.

She almost leans her head against the wall, but opts to shrug her shoulders instead. "Let's say they did it for no reason at all except to screw with us. How long's that paranoia going to last? It doesn't seem like a very smart long-term strategy to me unless it's meant to really mean something."

Control. A game. Maybe pointless, random, but maybe specific, for a reason. Theories already swirling, making the air thicker as his skin crawls and it takes restraint only granted to someone who, in his crueler ways preferred to play the long game and draw out the suffering of his victims. He's changed a lot in the over year long play of the multiverse's game, but he's still was who he'd always been under it all. He redirected the things he felt into something favorable to that world and it was advantageous for him there. But this place is different and his suspicions are on fire as slowly it sinks in, down to his bones, just how everything about this was worse than what he'd known before.

Sam's point about how long they were in the fountain makes something in his stomach twist. Oh. No, he doesn't like that line of thought at all, and he hadn't considered it until now. The dark-haired one leaned against the wall is agreeable, and the Australian bird wasn't necessarily wrong.

He's scanning the room, eyes on all their faces, ears as tuned as possible to opinions that come with crowds faced with questions in a group this wide, varied.

Then they land on her. The huntress. Jo. "What do you think?" She knew the way these places were, how they operate, what makes them tick. The games, the experiments, the chance, the loss. Everything that gets twisted up in the whole of it all. "You were one of the one's who found it, yeah?"

"But maybe that's just it," Veronica says as she looks to Raven. "Maybe all of this—" She motions with both hands to the knot of them arguing. "Maybe that's the point. They're just colors, it's just clothes. None of it actually means anything. There's nobody here with any answers, so any meaning is something we assign to them."

She wants to say she understands this, that she's been in the middle of this sort of thing before, but bites back the urge to explain. From the outside, suggesting that her high school experiences make her an expert on anything are pretty laughable, but none of these people ever felt the fury of Heather Chandler, either.

She doesn't expect to be picked out, and not by Kol. But maybe she should have. Even if she and the vampire aren't what she would call friends, while being too alike now to be entirely enemies either, they are the only ones with long term experience being thrown into these shitstorms, with Thorfinn's few months tagged right behind them. It puts him, and his opinion, and his thoughts, and even him speaking to her, on a different level than everyone else in the room.

Jo really doesn't want to have an opinion. Her opinion is the same as when Killian asked what she thought the colored flame insignia's on the crate meant -- trouble.

"Trouble," she says it, again. With a shake of her head. "Whether it was meant as their classification of us, or our classifications of ourselves, we've managed to utterly ignore the fuck out of their rules on the colors or focus of them for weeks now. Half of us are living in houses next to other colors, or have houses with other colors living with us, and work, hunt, trade with everyone as though the colors don't matter," Jo herself, sitting there, was half black clothes and half white.

"It's more like someone is trying to demand we think about them now."
Beat. "Which makes me think we should keep ignoring the fuck out of it still."

No one get to tell her how to think, or who to choose as allies or get handed as enemies.

No one got to manipulate her into having the exact reactions and responses they wanted these people to have.

Sam wants to believe that and they can spout it all they want. At the end of the day though, people can be pretty messed up. Terrible things can happen when you start labeling and dividing people into groups like this. That might be what this unknown "they" wants. Their captors, the people behind this. And they can try not to play into it. But for how long? If this is the first attempt to divide them by colored scrubs, won't more attempts come.

"That would be good. Except it's already too late since we're already thinking about the possibilities of what they could mean." He sighs, this is crossing into territory he doesn't like real fast. "Not to mention the fact that even if we decide they have no meaning, that doesn't stop our captors or whoever from utilizing the colors as some kind of system for marking us or keeping tabs on us."

Raven arches her brow.

"Ignoring it won't make the problem go away. It'll only make whoever assigned us specific colours want to point it out even more. No one likes it when something they've done is ignored. And I don't really want to tempt fate right now."

Playing ignorant was dangerous. The delinquents hadn't had a chance to choose whether or not to ignore the Grounders before they'd thrown a spear hard and dangerously close to Jasper Jordan's heart.

She knows a thing or two about playing oblivious herself. Pretending the explosion from Mount Weather hadn't elicited a blinding pain to travel up her leg and nest there for three long months had left her in agony. And Raven knows not informing Abby of it had left her wading in dangerous territory.

She looks to Veronica, and wishes she could believe they're simply clothes. But she's stopped believing the good in everything that's come her way. From Grounders who are keen to pin someone from Arkadia was the bad guy in a pathetic situation to how returning to Earth had been propped as the best damn plan the Ark had, she's stopped believing there's nothing more sinister lurking in the shadows.

Conversationally, she continues, "We can make the colours mean something to ourselves, but that doesn't change the fact these colours have a reason to whoever owns this town." She shrugs her shoulder. "We should try and figure it out. Make some sort of contingency plan." She waves a hand, sweeping it toward Veronica. "Let us making the colours mean something else one of those steps. But we have to figure out why we're doing that in the first place. Be one step ahead instead of ten steps behind."

He wishes he could believe that it was nothing like the younger bird was suggesting, that it all meant nothing, that the clothes were just clothes, crates just crates, but that's too much coincidence in his book to be nothing.

Jo has a point about the demand to think about it, and not falling into that particular trap, and Sam with the fact they've already done it. But he can't help it. He's certain it means something and he just wants to know what. He definitely agrees about the 'trouble' that they all are, though.

The words 'contingency plan' make him obviously tense, suddenly and out of nowhere, and his eyes cut toward the girl that had brought it up. Those were, in another place, another town, another world, words that would have had him in a fighting mode instantly. And still do, here, now, in this room with these people and their incredible lack of knowledge of everything he is, who his family is, and everything that comes right along with both of those things.

"They're talking contingencies, throwing us in boxes with cement into the ocean so we aren't their problem any more." Kol had been less than impressed at the Gilbert child and his tantrums about he and his family and this really topped it off.

"Frankly," Nik had said, "it would be stupid of them not to have plans in place. Honestly, Kol."

Elijah had raged and Rebekah and ranted and taken Kol's side.

And it was never the fact they had plans in place that bothered him. It was that they just put it out in the open, toward people that would get it back to them, that it had been spoken of in front of a child that saw a few of his family members as friends and saw fit to warn them of it all.

They were afraid of them and the damage they could do if they turned against them, which Kol considered smart. But the solution being pitched was too much something he'd already suffered too much of at home, at the hand of his own brother. The plan was cruel, more so than he feels they'd have done to any of the other lot in Lawrence, regardless of their histories or damages, and that burned him hard and deep because of everything he'd done in his time there, changes he'd made, battles and wars that weren't his own that he fought for them.

"What kind of contingencies?" He asks, voice unintentionally tight because he's fighting the part of him that wants to actively lash out about her word choice. She can't possibly mean it the way it translates in his own mind, but the bone-deep meaning of them to him is something he can't shake.

She shrugs her shoulders. A contingency plan for the clothing seems a little on the weaker side, given all the war she's been involved in during her short stay on the ground. It feels a little childish to even propose and think up one on clothes, but she can see, from her own experiences, why it's important.

The clothing colours represent a divide. Raven knows it all too well from her time on the Ark and how some of those old traditions and rules have followed them to Arkadia.

If she's proposing a contingency plan, she supposes it's one to ensure the way they perceive one another isn't based on coloured cloth.

"We give them our own meaning and we stick to it, just like Veronica suggested. But we go a little further than that. Make our own clothes to wear, colour them up, make them like the damn rainbow dropped out of the sky and onto you. We mix and match the clothes. We dye them a colour we choose. You want to stick it to the man in charge? Change it up a little. Maybe I could wear a red shirt instead of grey."

She unfolds her arms then, and lets her fingers of one crawl up the other in a bid to keep any nervous energy she has under control. She's not one for plans when it comes to this sort of strategy. She doesn't do well at the table, too bored with the conversation and too restless to return to tinkering with the bits and pieces at her workstation.

"The colours are meant to divide us. We do what happened at my home — we share, we disregard the rules, we stick together and show that we're not easily torn apart.

"And if that fails, we just parade around naked."

Kate is very, very aware that she's the only one here who has started that. Making her own clothes. Ignoring the colours. She's sitting here in this room with a blue skirt, over a neutral petticoat, and the only reason her blouse is red is because her others are in a wash cycle.

There are red tablecloths around. She'd ignored them, on purpose.

"Some of us require clothing, Miss Raven," Kate says, but deliberately lightly. Sometimes, the best defence is to laugh. "If only because we start to resemble the red rose a bit more realistically."

Sunburn is, as they say, one of the worst things.

"But I like that idea. Dyeing shouldn't be that hard. Or staining, or paining. We have a river, we have mud. There are berries. It is not even that hard to sew, you can simply unravel things for the thread."

She smiles at Kate. Her comment on nudity had meant to be flippant and a joke, at best, and she's glad that her own suggestion has been taken as such. Suspecting the appearance of these mysterious boxes filled with crap that they've been craving — or Raven's been looking for, though it lacks the specific weapon she wants — will heighten emotions, she wants to keep her head screwed on straight for this.

The colours have to mean something greater than any of them can think of. Dividing them into groups, it has to have a deeper meaning than who looks good in what shade. Raven knows, for one, red's more her style than grey. But planning and agreeing and even stating the obvious may put them on the right track mindset wise.

"If we work together instead of letting this divide us up," she shrugs her shoulders, "maybe that's a better contingency plan than blowing this place to hell. We can form a better one when we have more information." She drops her hand away from her arm, letting her fingers tap against her hip instead. "But … let's stick together. It's not rocket science."

The concept of sticking together is a mixed bag for Kol. His family had always stuck together, but he'd often been an outlier. Mostly of his own choice and his own design, because Nik's incessant need for control and attempts to force his siblings to live under his thumb had never meshed well for Kol. But also because he didn't have the same sort of connections to the others they all had with each other. His closest relationship was with Rebekah, but he always knew she'd choose Klaus over him at the end of the day.

His time in Lawrence, fighting an Apocalypse, a war not at all his own, facing horrors of magical design with the other displaced residents of the city? It had brought a sense of community in some ways. He'd probably always look out for he and his above all else, it's hard-wired into his brain to operate that way, but the idea made enough sense on the surface.

And it was probably the opposite of what their captors wanted, which only made it all the better.

"Yeah, that much I agree on." Well enough, at least.

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keep that fury deep inside you: primitive weapons plot

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