keep that fury deep inside you: primitive weapons plot

[thenewways]

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.

Comments

{ Main Discussion }

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo's sitting on another table. Again. This one not too far from Nerys. Or Thorfinn.

She's good at this, and it happens often enough. She'll choose a chair on her own, and while working in the mornings, but she likes to be a little higher in a group. It has to do with her height, and it has to do with vantage, but today especially it has to do with being fucked with, and being fucking pissed about that. With how this is the last place she wants to be, and this is the last thing she wants to explode, and it's exactly why she'll be right here, watching exactly what every person in this room says and does now.

Because it's going to tell so much about who they really are, and what kind of people they are.

More than any week and any interaction they've had before now. Because this is where the real game begins.

{ Colors: What do they mean? }

[itchtokill]

Kol has heard the buzz about boxes being found floating around and he's not happy about it. The first, immediate thought he'd had was of the less than fun packages that Lucifer had sent around. Elijah had gotten one personally. He even remembers a kid getting a copy of his own death certificate, just to let him know what awaited him back home. There were cursed items in some of them, nightmare fuel in others. So boxes? Not high on Kol's list of things he needed showing up suddenly.

But once Nerys calls the group meeting, he makes damn sure to be one of the first few trickling inside the Inn. He wants to hear what other people have to say about it before he speaks up, but he certainly will put in his two bloody cents before anyone starts doing anything stupid.

The initial chatter has died down a bit, and the contents are being viewed and discussed and there's one thing that keeps bothering him. "The colors, though. There's got to be something to that." he squints in the direction of the box nearest him. "The bloody hell are they trying to put us in groups for?"

And who are they, what do they want, where the hell are they? Or is it something less physical, but still sentient, magic like the Seal back in Lawrence? He has so many questions and no one to actually get answers from, and it's frustrating beyond belief. At least this is something they can focus on, theories can be formed, even if it means nothing in the end, it feels like progress in the meantime until proper progress can be made.

{ Weapons, and what to do with them }

[lastofthekellys]

Kate's been agitated the whole bloody time.

This isn't nothing what she knows, and she knows being fucked with. She knows twistings of laws and petty pedantry, she knows insults and rough hands and smiling judges in business deals with the bobbies. She knows being held for weeks without trial, without a charge. She knows blacklists and the spoken black marks that follow you into the grave and beyond.

She doesn't know this. She doesn't know kidnappings to strange areas with stranger people. She doesn't know magically appearing boxes. She doesn't know about crates of tools. Weapons.

Thinking of them as weapons makes her feel sick.

(She knows this, too, horrified whispers of a Dutch shipwreck on the western coast, of murder and wholesale slaughter.)

As the talk about the colours gets heated, more conspiratorial with each breath, Kate gets up and starts to move around the room. Opening windows, doors, to let in the cooling afternoon breeze. Kneel by the fireplace and get that lit because the talk is going on and on, and they are all going to bloody well need to see, aren't they? Particularly if people insist on carrying on worse than a collection of bitter ex-Chartists and Irish agitators on a Saturday night just before lock-up.

Walking back to her seat - she's trying so, so hard not to limp, and she's grateful that she finished this skirt, it makes her movements easier to hide - and she doesn't sit. Not yet. Height can be useful.

"We still have the items," Kate says, loudly. Clearly. Stage-presence turned on like a bright gas-lamp to get people's attentions. "We can ignore the crates and colours horseshit all we want. But we still have this collection of... Tools."

She refuses to say weapons.

"Which begs the question, what do we with them?"

Re: { Colors: What do they mean? }

[tobeclosetohim]

Division. Strife. Separation. The doubts. The pondering. Grouping up. Talents. Tribes. It was easy to jump to a hundred assumptions, but it was as equally obvious, if one had just watched since they arrived, that so far no one had formed up groups along those colored lines. Which made it easier to question if this was a rod prodding them harder, seeing if subconsciously anyone had, or would, or wanted to. A demand to pay those colors mind.

She knew who the others in her color were -- Killian, Nerys, Kylo, Jon -- but she felt no stirring of possession or greater loyalty to them. She felt no particular loyalty to anyone here, in specific, save Thorfinn. who was, himself, in Gray. Really, though. The whole lot of them were so green it made her teeth ache in a daily way, but it pounded in her head today. When they weren't aware of the million things this might be.

(When she didn't know what it was yet either, and had instead of 'too few' all the too many bad options it might be.)


It's quietly that she watches this next start, though, uncertain if she wants to voice her thoughts yet.

[notabirdcostume]

It's funny how even in a small community like this there are still opportunities for rumors and gossip. At first when he heard someone mention boxes being found he assumed they were more of the small packages that had been delivered sporadically to people around the village. However, as more news started to spread, he came to the understanding that it was a little bigger than that. The final straw was Nerys shouting for them to come in and talk at the inn. Sam had been taking his turn at the garden and knew he wasn't going to have time to get cleaned up before joining the group. He wiped his face off as best he could on a dirty towel and headed in.

The atmosphere is certainly serious enough and Sam pulls his hat off as he enters the inn, eyes darting across the faces that have already gathered. He gets the feeling that whatever is talked about and decided here is going to change how a lot of things are done around here. "Quick question...what happened exactly and how are these different from the weird packages we were already getting with our names on them?" He wants to make sure he understands perfectly what they've found and what's going on.

Re: { Colors: What do they mean? }

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"It's a form of control," Veronica says before she's quite aware of speaking. It surprises her a little to realize that she does, in fact, know a little bit about this type of social separation.

"Maybe there's more to it than that," she hastily adds, surveying the group. "But this?" She motions to the boxes with their varicolored emblems. "This is somebody fucking with us." It's Heather being made to wear green to put her in her place.

Re: { Weapons, and what to do with them }

[tobeclosetohim]

"Who says we have to play their game and do anything with them?" That's Jo.

Jo who helped find the boxes. Jo who said they had to bring them back.

Jo who has been sitting on that table, taking more mental notes of the goings-on in the room, the actions, reactions, fidgeting, and talking, more than doing any of it herself. Her anger is present. The way dark clouds are, but it's a cold anger. Quiet and still. Absolution that is more logic than emotion, because there are too many people who have too many emotions in this. There are too many pieces and they are all being pulled at among the edges now.

"Our kidnappers give us nothing in the way of weapons for defense, or for feeding ourselves, for fifty-two days," Jo says the number, because it's drilled into her head daily. She carves a sliced mark into her closet back every day, as well as records it in the logbook by the map now. "--and when they do, they put them in various conditions, in color-coded boxes, in a decrepit, overgrown, village that appeared overnight, and happens to be far too like our own."

"If these are the powers our jailers have, pulling us up through fountains, and granting us helpful little boxes from the sky like pets, and making whole settlements appear where nothing was, without a single rumble through this place, what makes you think these weapons, inside their boxes, inside their earlier village, left specifically for us to find, and be driven to this--" There's a gesture with a finger to the room. "--are somehow free of the taint of all that?"

[notabirdcostume]

"Isn't it like everything else? Just more questions and no real answers." Sam knows it sounds extremely negative as soon as he says it and continues. "We have no clues to go off of here," but that's not right, obviously the clothes, crates, and everything else are a clue. They are just clues to a puzzle way too big that you can't even begin to guess what the picture will be, "or we do but we don't know what they mean. There's no context for them."

Sam's mostly just thinking aloud at this point. He wants to see if anyone has come to the same conclusions or had the same thoughts. If this meeting is for brainstorming then he's going to put his two cents in. He may not have multiverse experience like some of them, but he's not going to let that stop him either. He continues, "Sure, the colors could mean something, but they could just as easily be randomly decided on and slapped on us before we get here."

He shudders, thinking about the implications of being stripped, having his clothes replaced with these scrubs, slipped a pack with a bare minimum of supplies before sending him on his way, and all while unconscious. "Or they could know stuff about us that determined our scrub colors. We don't know how long we may have been out before waking up in that fountain."

Sam tips his head towards the girl, "Either way it does boil down to what she just said. It's another way of fucking with us."

[specialise]

Raven stands against the wall, leaning her back against it. Left leg lifted up to press her foot to it, she relishes in how she doesn't need to sit. It's a quiet sort of enjoyment, given how meek the atmosphere is in the room.

Her expression's pensive, arms crossed against her chest. "The colours probably mean something," she says. Considering the nature of how the Ark had been split into stations, the people born in them believed to be skilled in that specific talent, Raven doubts whoever's in charge has a completely different mindset to that.

"No one does anything without reason. Either it's to mess with us, or it's to divide us up. It's not a completely new concept it could be both. Two birds, one stone."

[notabirdcostume]

Midway through one discussion Sam catches movement out of the corner of his eye. It distracts him and he finds himself watching Kate move around the inn to open windows instead of listening to what is being said. He thinks about her injury and frowns a little. He's admitted often enough that he has no medical experience, but he's pretty sure she hasn't healed enough yet to just be wandering around the inn. However, it's also due to his medical inexperience that he doesn't say anything. He just keeps an eye on her while the conversation continues...at least until Kate derails that too.

It's a valid question, but he's a little surprised when the first person to answer is Jo. Of course, it's not her speaking that is surprising but her answer. She's passionate about this, perhaps more passionate about this than about anything else he'd heard from her. Weren't they all wanting weapons? He remembers that being one of the first things he'd looked for upon arriving, but had also talked Kylo out of taking a broken stool leg out as a weapon on the first day. Since then he knows he and several others have shaped crude tools out of what they could find. It seems odd that someone would want to immediately dismiss a gift like this.

But then Sam thinks about it again. Weapons in crates, boxes divided and labeled by color, and left on their doorstep. Not literally, but just about. They'd been desperate for weapons and tools and now there is a gift of them...too good to be true.

Sam thought he had something to say, but after considering Jo's response he's at a loss. There's a part of him that wants to utilize the tools to somehow prove the people sending them the boxes wrong. But how do you do that when you don't even know what they want?

So, instead, Sam crosses his arms and decides to move closer towards Kate to keep a better eye on her. Also to get a better idea for where this conversation is going to go.

[lastofthekellys]

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.

[specialise]

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."

[thekittenqueen]

"Perhaps it is grouping us into particular factions?" Margaery suggested. The idea of color coding everyone wasn't too surprising. Given the different sets of scrubs colors around, some of them shared by a number of individuals, it had seemed evident that they were being paired into different groups.

"It might not be relevant, but in my world, certain households had particular colors that were theirs. There was a family that had red and gold as their defining colors. My home had blue and gold, as well green."

She looked around the room, "Those of us with grays or greens or reds, perhaps whomever brought us here wants those groups to band together?"

[thekittenqueen]

She doesn't want to argue with Jo, especially when she is upset, but it seems a bit foolish to dismiss what could be a helpful means to survive. It was natural for others to be angry and upset with whatever brought them here, but there was something more at stake than grudges and anger. They couldn't let something like that risk their own safety and survival.

"Are we so certain it's a game they wish us to play? We shouldn't be rash about this and throw away some luxuries that might be useful for us. We have in these crates a form of protection against the creatures of this world. We have tools to help us hunt, a skill not all of us can possess. I know nothing about snares or tracking, but I know at least how to fire a bow. It wouldn't be wise to simply ignore these weapons because we don't trust the powers that brought us here. Sometimes we must use the tools they give us until we find a better advantage to turn the tables against them."

She gave an apologetic look to Jo, "I want to be able to eat and not worry about how to manage."

[itchtokill]

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?"

[markwatney]

"Here's the thing," I begin, stepping forward and leveling Jo with a careful look, "I don't care about what is or isn't tainted. I care about making sure that we all survive."

The whole situation has everyone's hackles raised, and I can't help but wonder whether that was intentional. Even operating under what I feel is pretty ironclad logic, I can still feel the irritation like a bit of grit in the heel of my shoe. I'm trying to ignore it, but it's making me a little sharper than good-buddy Mark that all these people here know.

"We are, quite literally, on the brink of starvation on a daily basis. We can barely feed ourselves as it is, and more and more people are climbing out of that fountain. Most of the people here are on a steep learning curve when it comes to fending for themselves. We're pushing a damn boulder up a hill here. And does it suck that our asshole overlords waited this long to give us a break? Yeah. But you know what? I can't afford to be emotionally tied up in all that. I'm trying to make sure people are fed."

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"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.

[specialise]

Though Raven's one to speak up when she's riled into anger, or in a desire to uncover the truth someone's deliberately hiding in front of her, she'd been content to lean against the wall and let everyone else's mouth do the walking. Steer the conversation to where she needed it to go to get her answers, but nonetheless observe, take it all in, and decide who was worth shadowing and who wasn't.

The weapons debate is one she hates most. On the ground, with those damn kids, and now here.

"A weapon's a weapon," Raven shrugs from her place against the wall. Her arms remain crossed against her chest. It's Mark's words that give her the confidence to speak up, believing her story is one that's worth providing, if only for the context it provides for her own perspective. The ground had been toxic, and Raven had eaten up everything it had to offer.

"My people dropped one hundred kids onto Earth to test whether or not it was survivable after one hundred years of being soaked in radiation." The way she recounts it lacks any emotion. It's a professional recitation of something Raven stands against, and will, always, despite how returning to the ground had lead them to surviving without needing to cull people to ensure oxygen would last a few extra weeks. "You think they cared whether or not it was tainted? Those berries they ate, the animals they killed — they were putting that taint in themselves in order to survive."

She shrugs her shoulder, and her response turns more flippant, "So I say we take them, and we tell these overlords to go float themselves."

{ Disappearances }

[teen_angst_bullshit]

If the goal was to get everyone arguing, then Veronica has to hand it to the folks in charge: Mission accomplished. Her own desire to be part of the discourse surprises her, too long playing second fiddle and forced to watch the people around her do and say terrible things. She knows she's not wise, but she's a smart girl, an observant girl, and it's satisfying to use her voice.

She's been so caught up in the debate that it takes her awhile to pinpoint the source of thin, niggling worry at the back of her mind.

Frowning, she holds up a hand in an effort to try and quiet the room and is only partially successful. "Hey," she says, and then louder, "Hey. When was the last time any of you saw the guys from across the river? You know, the moody one with the dark hair and the redhead."

She'd never caught their names, and has a sinking feeling she's about to be sorry for that.

[lastofthekellys]

"Not since before I buggered up me ankle," Kate allows, after running her memory back. "But it'd been a couple days of neither comin' to eat dinner."

Which, in of itself, isn't odd. The midday meals are hardly compulsory, either to work, to supply, or to eat, and it's not unusual for people to skip a day or two here or there. Particularly loners, particularly if they can handle themselves.

"General Hux is the redheaded gentleman, with the red clothes." Like mine. "I didn't catch the name of his companion. Kyle somethin'?"

The names are important, suddenly.

If they have just upped and vanished.

[itchtokill]

Kol's observing more than anything. There's a pointed glance at Jo as she spouts off a lot of suspicious questioning of this supposedly "innocent" gift. He's pretty sure she's saying negative things to get reactions, observe and decide who's worth their salt. But there's truth to it, that burns somewhere down deep.

Tensions are high, the air buzzes with it, fear, anger, curiosity, it all tangles together in a knot that's sharp and crackles like lightning.

"I agree with Jo. I don't see why we should trust it. Why this? Why now?"

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"I didn't even think about it, but... Yeah, it's been days," Veronica agrees with a small, slow nod. Every, single day she gets out. She doesn't wander too far -- She's got too many people who would give her a load of shit if she did -- but Mark's taught her a little about what plants to look for, and she likes the excuse to skirt the edges of the village, to take note of what new there is to see.

Except, it's been what wasn't there that should have stood out.

"Maybe they're out hunting or something?" she tries, ignoring the way her stomach wants to twist with anxiety.

[lastofthekellys]

Kate's staring at the lot of them, incredulous and faintly appalled and more than a little frustrated, all at once. Miss Margaery's talking sense. Watney's talking sense. The rest of them?

This is the kind of attitude that leads to plots to blow up Parliament. Or everyone winding in a long, painful, but probably self-righteous death.

"I wasn't exactly callin' for a public holiday," she protests. "More how to store them. We need the axes. I'm with Watney and Miss Margaery. But more than that - how many of us here know how to farm? I do. Mr Thorfinn does. Watney. Anyone else here?

Because we can't gather and hunt forever, we're gonna clean this land up real quick. Then firewood, we need far more of that. Which isn't just about stayin' warm, it's about preservin' food.

Then repairs..."

But mostly, she's thinking of clearing land. And how even what they have, now, in the crate, would make it easier.

[king_in_the_north]

These last weeks, Robb had kept largely to himself. Small steps had allowed him to leave the safety of Jon's cozy little home, to toil long hours in the field beneath the clean sky, to quietly visit with Margaery and allow his broken mind to begin to knit itself back together again. He'd arrived to this meeting with no small measure of trepidation and had sat away from most of the others, beside the open window, a silent observer to the increasing discord.

He arched a brow at Margaery and cleared his throat. "But what is the connection?" he asked. "Not family, clearly, since Jon wears black and I green. You're wearing my house colors and I yours."

[thekittenqueen]

The urge to flirt was there, especially upon the comment that she and Robb were wearing the colors of each other's houses. Forcing down her coy smile, she focused instead on the matter of hand. She would tease him about this later once they were alone where such things could be discussed properly.

She met his eyes instead with a level of seriousness that she didn't otherwise display. "I think the colors that we are in here aren't related to home, but a system put in place by these. I don't know why certain people are assigned to one group and not to another, but with these separate crates by the colors we wear, it's rather obvious they are placing us in different factions."