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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"Sorry, I didn't realize jokes have gone out of fashion in the future."

Frivolous. Not many people have applied that word to him in his lifetime. His smile turns insular, amused by the inside joke.

"You say that as if I can't do both. We nerds are quite good at multitasking. Our project is escape, but theirs is keeping us right where we are. The more we know about why we were chosen and why our memories don't line up, the better we'll understand who we're dealing with. Besides, aren't you curious?"

About 'other worlds'? What it all means?

The intensity of her curiosity is chewing her up inside, but Raven doesn't let it consume her. It doesn't become one of her projects, tangible between her fingers as she investigates until they're bleeding. Her interest lies in her leg, and how she can feel everything, from the cold wooden floor of the inn when she kneels to when she sits on her leg for too long and summons pins and needles to take hold of her.

"I am," she admits. "But I have to stay focused. This isn't something you can multitask, even if you're a big nerd." She looks at him pointedly, a joke, if you will, before she shakes her head and sighs. "I'm pretty sure where we're from is important, but there has to be a common link between what we all know. I doubt there's much in common with our worlds. Considering yours thinks a library is important and mine doesn't, I can't see a common denominator yet."

Far be it for this big nerd to contradict her approach, though inwardly Jess disagrees. The larger puzzle at work isn't one he's able to turn away from; until he can figure it out, no clue is too frivolous.

Them. This place. The scrubs, the boxes... It's all too well-planned. Until he understands the game in motion, he'll keep asking questions. If his friends were here, Jess thinks--no, he knows--they'd help tackle the issue as they'd been doing with the matter of Thomas, and a pang of homesickness constricts his chest at the thought. He'd take their help right about now. Even Dario's. Even Glain's, if just to see her smash a crate and yell at everyone to get back to the matter at hand.

But they're not here. He is. And Raven's right about one thing--the debates raging about the scrub colors and what to do with the weapons are leading them around in circles.

"For now we'll have to wait and see," he says. "Eventually they'll make a move. Then we'll have our chance to learn more."

But he hopes they can make their own move before that happens.

She exhales deeply, but her shoulders don't sag. It's what Raven's been afraid of. She doesn't want to wait for whoever's out there to make a move. It's what's struck so many of her friends down to their knees and the reason why she's had to pick up a shovel and bury too many of them.

But it's all they have. With the conversation circling down the drain, evoking paranoia and unhelpful suggestions that seem to be piling up in a corner of being spoken but not quite discussed, it's what needs to happen. Something needs to explode, and Raven's fearful of how far the shrapnel will fly.

Arms against her chest, she leans the elbow of one against the back of her hand and presses her fingers against her chin. "I just hope it's not a big move. There has to be a way to prepare for it."

Feelings tucked back behind the screen of casualness that usually comprises his demeanor, Jess watches her think, his sidelong glance lingering on her longer this time. They share the same concern. Everyone in this room shares the same concern--it's a heady feeling of anticipation.

"I don't think we'll have to worry about nuclear attack or acid fog just yet." If Raven's expecting the worse, she hides it well.

With the last crate checked, he sets it back in its row alongside the other five. Nothing unusual to speak of there... if one ignored the fact that everything about the crates is unusual. He'd had low expectations about finding evidence leading back to their captors to begin with. They're too efficient to leave behind something obvious like a fingerprint, and too mysterious already to need hidden compartments to add to their mystique.

"As much as I hate to say it, any way we choose to respond now that we have these weapons is playing into their hands. But spears and a new axe only help us. We're better equipped than we were two days ago."

She's not worried about either, because Raven Reyes can stop it.

If she has to believe in anything, it's herself. She's only ever had herself to depend on. When Mom had turned her back on her, Raven had learned to become self-sufficient. She knows where her talents lie, and she knows, despite his tease, if there was a threat of acid fog, there were steps that needed to be taken, and she possessed that knowledge.

A part of her wonders if the best way to plan for a possible attack was to keep their heads screwed on, but she doesn't so much as say it.

Glancing at him, her gaze settles on the box he stands closest to. "They're shit," she says, and glances over her shoulder to look at the weapons that aren't in top shape. The Grounders had better versions than what they'd been provided here, but they were also handmade and stronger for it. "I'll have to fix them."

She's sure not shy about telling it how she sees it. "Short and to the point," he observes, and the words have a trace of approval in them. He doesn't think he's quite as aggressively blunt as Raven or even Glain, but outspokenness is a quality in himself he can appreciate in others, particularly today when there's been plenty of talk but little action. "You should be leading these discussions. They'd be shorter, if nothing else."

Nothing against the efforts of those here, trying to find answers for questions they don't even know how to ask yet. If Jess sounds glib, it's his personal impatience talking--impatience with his own shortcomings and the obtuse motives of those who seem to want him bound and gagged and living domestically in a pioneer village like a good little farm hand.

His eye catches on the sling with the frayed rope. "It's a bit outside your wheelhouse as a mechanic. Do you know how?" Honest curiosity.

If Raven was the one supervising the current discussion, she doubts it'd be very fruitful. It'd probably prove more frustrating for her friend, if anything. She's not necessarily the most detached person in the room, and she's often a hothead, letting her own opinions step forth like a blast from a bomb.

She's not the type to sit around in diplomatic situations and discuss. Raven's often at the end of that particular process, enacting upon the decision. She's not the brains and the mouth of a diplomatic discussion, but she knows she's the hands.

"If I don't, I'll learn," she says, shrugging her shoulder. He may doubt her capabilities, and she may join him in such an action, but she knows she can do anything she sets her mind to. The stakes are high; she doesn't hear anyone else offering to try and fix a fraying rope or find an alternative. "If I can make a bomb out of the wreckage of a dropship, I think I can handle a simple bow and arrow."

She smiles, "Maybe even give it a little boom of an upgrade."

Jess isn't keen to grab the reins and try to bring everyone to heel, either. The people need an outlet; talking over top of each other is the healthiest and least violent way Jess could see this going. It's why he's here, out of the fray, considering their options without trying to intervene.

Raven's response is another bit of information he files away--so that's a no on having had practice with this kind of repair work, then.

"You haven't had enough of bombs yet?" If it involves radiation, he'd prefer to leave that up to his imagination.

What destroyed her world has become her own weapon, and Raven plans on harnessing it over being afraid of it.

"It's effective, isn't it?" She knows that it leaves behind a footprint, one that'd be dangerous to anyone unfortunate enough not to grow up on a space station or even dance with the stars. Jess wouldn't survive her world. She doesn't know if she envies him just yet.

He must think her to be crazy, or perhaps one of those people who simply doesn't learn. But the people who'd lived one hundred years ago weren't Raven Reyes.

She looks at him, and shrugs her shoulders. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Learn from the past. The enemy of your enemy is your friend. Isn't this found in one of your books?"

They're all philosophies Callum Brightwell has employed at one time or another, too. "And in plenty of war propaganda," is what Jess says out loud, his eyebrows flicking upward in a noncommittal look. It's not hard to see that his memories of explosives don't exactly fill him with comfort, less so now that he's heard about her brand of bombs.

He thinks they have enough problems without following Nietzsche's advice, but there's still some truth to the idea that they need to up their game if they hope to ever escape. Explosives are better in their hands than the enemy's.

"Let me know when you bust open the canyon wall and then we'll talk. I wouldn't mind blasting our way out of here."

War propaganda is a strange concept to her, despite having participated and even created her own while on the ground. There was nothing to fight on the Ark besides the rules and regulations, and no one but the Council had the gumption or the ability to hit back against those laws. But what isn't strange to her is a challenge, albeit one that's sarcastically suggested instead of seriously proposed.

Her brow furrows for a second as she mulls it over. Can she really blow a hole in the canyon wall? Will that lead them to somewhere familiar? Perhaps back to Arkadia?

She doesn't look at him. Her gaze is somewhat distant, as though she's somewhere else — and a part of Raven is. "Aren't you lucky you know a girl who's good at making bombs?"

"You're actually thinking about it?"

He hadn't actually meant it. Forgetting the sling entirely, Jess studies her face as she makes a thoughtful expression. How had they gotten from talking about nuclear bombs eradicating her people to thinking about building them?

The gaps in Raven's experience continue to be a surprising learning process. She has got to be the only person he's ever met who can talk seriously about making explosives and not be able to tell a rose from a weed.

"Do they teach that in Earth Skills, too?" Or is that an extracurricular activity?

Looking at Jess, she rolls her eyes.

"Earth Skills? Pfft." She shakes her head. Earth Skills had given them the very basic of tools, but it hadn't prepared them for a life of war. She hates how the Council hadn't thought of it. How had their ascendents loaded themselves up onto the Ark without providing the strategies of the possibility their own had survived the nuclear apocalypse? It was ignorant and it was stupid, and Raven's not the type to rule any solution out.

"You learn that in Raven Skills. Great class. Not sure you'd make the cut." She pulls back her shoulders, inhaling deeply through her nose, then looks down at the crates that provide her with nothing. "I'm not about to rule out the option." Looking up at him, she arches her brow challengingly, issuing Jess his own test. "Are you?"

Edited (:|) 2016-09-30 11:21 (UTC)

"Well, professor, I suppose that'd depend. If radiation immunity is a prerequisite for enrollment, I might be out on a technicality."

It sounds as though that's something he's missing out on in a big way, like a vaccination skipped in childhood, but Jess frames it as a joke, evident by his amusement and the flicker of a smile. A morbid thing to joke about, but the need for bombs and the idea of sending a group of young people into an environment already annihilated by them is almost too dispiriting to think about without trying to take the sting out of it somehow.

"But I'm always up for a challenge if the choice to audit is available," he continues easily. Tests don't scare him. Maybe Raven should consider signing their captors up for this course of hers and really putting them through their paces.

Raven looks at him slightly confused. Some of the concepts that come out of his mouth are confusing, and she knows that they must've gotten lost in time and space and when the dust had finally settled. Sometimes she's envious; most of the time, she wonders if they'd been lost for a reason.

It feels nice to not focus on the crates in the room, even though Raven knows her mind will return to them when she's alone in her room upstairs.

"Don't be annoying, challenge number one. Too bad you've already failed that." She glances down at the crates, like she's searching for the terms of the Raven Skills class. "Challenge number two, think outside the box. Guess I have to give you credit for that." She looks up at him. "Were you looking for a note?"

The accusation that he makes a regular habit of tap dancing on her nerves earns an offhand shrug that seems to say you win some, you lose some. Raven seems to get annoyed when he knocks on her door in the middle of her thinking process, or reminds her to balance out her meals with vitamin-rich plants, or breathes, so it's not that hard to do.

"I'll take what I can get. Does that mean I'm in?" On the other hand, he knows how hard it is for Raven to admit he's right about anything. Giving him some credit must have been a painful concession on her part.

Now he's exhausted each crate and each weapon, the collection looks small and sad, a poor consolation prize measured against the cost to their sanity. Just like their scrub colors, the crates could mean something, they could mean nothing--the danger is in thinking themselves in circles. Jess has to be careful of that. He hadn't been kidding about being able to multitask, but he's susceptible to burning himself out, the same as anyone.

"A hidden compartment. An insignia. A sign of where these were packed up and how they were moved. Something. But they're careful, these people. What you see is what you get."

"Where would an insignia get us?" She takes a step back to peer at the crates, as if she expects a symbol to appear on its side. She doesn't bend down to take a look. From her height, she thinks she can see there's nothing to even spy. No faded ink. No real chinks that'll give away what may have brought them to where they'd been found.

"We don't have books. We have nothing to go on. The houses around here are as rundown as the inn." She crosses her arms and lets her right arm bend at the elbow, resting it on her left as she thinks. "Did you check the weapons?"

"Some leave a personal mark behind, like a calling card or a numbering system to keep track of shipments. Something like that could help us get in their head, understand how they organize."

Like he'd said, any chance to learn more was a step in the right direction in Jess' perspective. At this point, he'd take any clue no matter how small--and their opponents had to know that, which is all part of the game, he thinks.

But books. Books. What he wouldn't give for a crate full of original books instead of old hunting weapons. The smell of leather doesn't come close to the smell of paper and ink. Absently, he nods and reaches up to rub his neck. "Nothing untoward about them that I can see. Then again, I'm not one of these magic people."

"Or knowledgeable with weapons."

The "magic people" he speaks of almost causes Raven to look at him as though he's grown an extra head. She doesn't want to start shuffling people into boxes. Non-magical people, magical people. Magic was simply a child's concept that belonged in the stories about a boy who never wanted to grow up and a man who had tried to outdo a rather stupid king with twelve challenges.

She doesn't want to believe in magic. The impossible isn't attainable, as Raven's come to learn on the ground.

"I think they've already given us all we need to know to get into their head," she shrugs. Glancing at the crates that have nothing descriptive or telling about them, she thinks it's right there. These people don't want them to know who they are, and Raven thinks there could be power found in that. She just needs to find its power source.

"Rest assured, I know more than I ever wanted to know about weapons of mass destruction. I just took a different skills course to get there."

(What doesn't he know about weapons, really, after the kind of company he's kept. He is a weapon. Bombs that burn the flesh off people's bones is just one more sad story to add to the list.)

"You think so?" he prompts, eyebrows raised challengingly. "All right, what's your theory?"

She's beginning to learn every road leads to the same destination. Jess' fingertips don't seem as rough as her own, or as scarred, but she's beginning to realise the boy she thought to be a little soft around the edges may not be at all.

People taking her by surprise isn't something she often likes. The last time someone surprised her, she'd lost her entire family to her own knife.

Uncertain of her own theory, Raven thinks back on the Mountain Men. They'd remained in the shadows, unseen, unheard, merely a whisper of some story Lincoln liked to speak of from time to time. They hadn't made themselves known when they'd first landed on the ground, but had bided their time. The delinquents hadn't been prepared for them, and she's beginning to understand why.

"They're afraid of us knowing who they are," she says, gesturing to the boxes with a shrug of one shoulder. "If we know who they are, they lose some sort of power. If one of us knows who they are, everything begins to unravel. That's why there's nothing on the crates or weapons. We can't prepare a plan for someone we don't know. We're going to waste our time preparing for all these possibilities instead."

Jess leans his hip against the table. "Exactly. That's the power of anonymity." Their captors are doing a bang up job of profiting off the fear of the unknown.

The sudden appearance of the ruins and the crates hit that point home disturbingly well--they had no means of predicting where or when an attack, or a message, or even something as simple and random shoe box with a gift inside could come. There were too many blanks. Jess hates blanks, and he'll continue to hate them until he can fill them.

"What do you think our play should be?" He already knows what he intends to do--and he has a good idea of what the majority of the townsfolk will decide based on the snatches of conversation he's been listening to since he arrived. Now he's asking Raven.

This isn't the type of question Raven's used to being on the receiving end of. She's not the brains, but the hands. The hands, though, are as important, if not more so, than the mind that comes up with strategy after strategy to build and implement.

"We don't let this get to our heads," she says after a moment. She wants to shrug her shoulders, but instead she keeps her arms folded to prevent herself from feeling as useless as she never wants herself to feel again. "We use the weapons. We take all we can get from whoever these people are. If they're really narcissistic and want a thank you, they'll let us know."

Raven would prefer a more narcissistic captor; the Grounders had been easier to fight after they'd grown angry at the Sky People, while the Mountain Men were scarier with how patient they had been.

"We don't know who we're fighting, and I think it's pretty important we strengthen ourselves before we start trying to pick a battle we're going to lose. I'm tired of losing."

Jess tries to picture what that 'thank you' note would look like. Hope you're enjoying the accommodations, thanks for playing.

The thought gets more painful when he imagines the Artifex's voice dictating it.

"If we have to be chimpanzees, we might as well be the opportunistic kind," he agrees, running a hand down his face. It's been a trying day already, and it's not even over yet. When he drops his hand, his expression is set. "Losing's not an option. I might lack this radiation immunity and be from what you consider the past, but we Earthlings have some tricks up our sleeves when push comes to shove."

Fighting words, but then that's what Jess is: a fighter. It's abundantly clear not everyone is; he can see by watching that some are more rattled by these discoveries than others. Still, he can't fault them. For a ragtag group of this size, they're keeping it together as best as circumstances allow.

There haven't been any brawls or out-and-out arguments yet. Could be worse.

keep that fury deep inside you: primitive weapons plot

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