bullet with butterfly wings

[tagartist]

WHO: Chloe Price and YOOOOOOOU.
WHAT: Catch all! One hyperactive, definitely ill teenage brat with way too much time on her hands is trying to do research and explore shit. Please stop her before someone gets hurt.
WHEN: From ~17/18 and onwards (I'll update prompts for Phase II when it comes about)
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: I got nothing, I'll update if somethin' crops up

[ A ] One Through Three

Despite all her anger at arriving here, Chloe's starting to kind of sort of feel a little bit more at ease with the place. Maybe it's the sleep she got from the sleep aid that cut through the restlessness she was feeling from the withdrawal of cigarettes and drugs. She doesn't feel as shaky as she did before - the headaches still there, the restlessness definitely, but she doesn't feel bad, so it only makes sense she's on the mend.

Maybe she's a little more hyper than usual, but maybe she's just finally figuring out how to be happy drug free. Maybe she's been doing the opposite of what she thought was all this time - not numbing pain, but numbing joy, and now she can feel it again and there's something nice about it, something great, something addicting, because she hasn't remembered what it's like to feel happy and excited in ages.

It gets her ready to help out, to find some tasks, to research some shit, to figure this place out from the ground up. She can be found in various areas, trying to get to know the ways of Kirkwall, sticking out like a sore thumb most likely, and definitely getting horribly lost every which way, but hey! If you need some help carrying bags, or if you need someone to fix a wheel on your cart that's come loose, or if there's something you can teach her, she's more than happy to rush over, smile on her face, give you a hand because helping each other is what people are supposed to do, right?

And if she's not helping out with those, she's found herself in a library, or anywhere with books, anywhere she can sit down and start to read the history of this place - all of it she can get her hands on - about the science and the magic and every bit of knowledge she can find. It's the first time in years she's wanted to know things, wanted to learn, and it almost makes her feel like her old self, which is something that should have struck her as odd, but doesn't.

[ B ] Four Through Six

At some point, the energy starts to feel out of hand though. Way out of hand. Maybe this is withdrawal after all, she doesn't know. She's jittery and she can't sleep without help in the slightest and the fucking energy she was feeling is obnoxious now, but she just can't stop moving. She tries to tie herself down to the library, to focus on those studies, but the words blur and her mind can't focus, so she's up and running before she can even get through a single page. She's getting frustrated that the technology here isn't what she's used to because she'd fucking kill to play some video games or fucking sit down and marathon her favorite movies, but instead she's got to figure out how to make her own entertainment or bust. She wants to fix a car, she wants to feel oil on her hands, and she's got nothing for herself.

So she does the next best thing she can think of; she's drinking (probably stolen) booze in an attempt to knock herself out if she just gets enough, but it's doing nothing and now she's just hyper AND drunk and maybe stumbling about trying to find something to do, but not having too much luck on the latter. The stumbling's going real well, though. Better than expected, even, and she actually ends up steadying herself with the arm of a passing person, stranger or not, because it's the only way to keep herself upright for a second.

This might have been a bad idea.

[ C ] Seven Through Ten

"So if I begged you, would you kill me, because I'm pretty sure I'm already dying."

That's the best thing to say to whoever's listening, right? Totally normal. She's got a fever and she can tell, she's pretty sure her hands won't stop shaking anymore and the sleep aids are so much less effective than they were before; she always wakes up feeling ten times worse and she's just stopped using them because of it.

She was supposed to be dead anyway. Just bring it full circle. She doesn't want to deal with this anymore. She's still convinced it's just withdrawal, but fuck, was it supposed to last this long? Or was this the Zoloft and not the cigarettes? When did that stop? She doesn't know, and she can't exactly Google it.

So she's been settling on keeping up the drinking (because it was such a smart plan) and now it's at least gotten her to be sluggish enough to sort of curl up somewhere not entirely comfy and clearly way too public if she's talking to other people, but that doesn't matter to her anymore. "I don't want to feel this way anymore."

Comments

[tagartist]

"Thanks for the comfort," she said with a slightly amused tone. She hadn't actually expected to ever get used to living without a computer or a phone to get easier if she were honest, so Rey's words didn't come as too much of a surprise.

'Ships' makes her think of watercrafts, given the lack of space travel, but who is she to judge on where someone gets their parts? "Trucks were always more my speed, but - tomato, tomahto I guess." A pause because there's still at least one word in all that that she doesn't recognize at all, and -- "What's a lightsaber?"

[provenforce]

"I've stripped trucks too, pieces of my own speeder came from a speeder truck," Rey comments, though her idea of a truck and Chloe's are probably quite different. Chloe's question more or less confirmed that, as even those who have never seen a lightsaber in their lives in her galaxy knew what one was.

"It's a weapon. Here, I'll show you." Normally she wouldn't ignite her blades inside, but it's easier to show off a lightsaber than to explain exactly what it does. She picks up the hilt that's sitting on her desk next to her, standing and kicking her chair back, before hitting the switch to light up the brilliant blue blade, humming with energy.

[tagartist]

Any idea that they could have been talking about the same kind of trucks certainly went out of her mind when she saw that. Her eyes widened a fraction and she definitely went to take a step closer to get a better look at the light and -- okay, she knows enough about physics to get that you don't touch light that's moving fast enough to make that kind of noise, it's just so hard to fight off the urge to.

"Fucking sweet, dude. How does it work?" Because that's clearly an easy explanation. "Are these super common where you're from? Does everyone have one?"

[provenforce]

Rey extinguishes the blade as Chloe steps closer, both because she doesn't want the other girl to get hurt and she doesn't really have any reason to keep it on beyond showing off. Even lighting it up in general was kind of showy.

"They aren't common. Only Jedi use them, and the Jedi have been all but extinct for a long time," she puts the hilt back on her desk, biting her lip while looking at it, before looking up at Chloe. "The power is in the kyber crystal inside, it's what makes the blade, more or less. The electronics inside direct the blade and help contain the size of it... I had to make a few adjustments here, to get it working again, but I think because of the crystal it was possible." There's a lot of power in a kyber crystal.

[tagartist]

She wants to ask what a kyber crystal looks like, how it works on a more than just a basic level, if she can see the wiring but -- alright, look, she might be a nerd, but she has some pride in not fully looking like one, and she's more than aware that too many questions about something can get annoying real fast. Plus, there's always a possibility that different worlds meant different science and she wouldn't understand a word that was coming out of her mouth anyway.

"Jedi?" That seems like maybe it's a little easier to ask about. She also wants to ask if they're extinct, then why do lightsabers even still exist, but man that sounds like it would take a lot longer to explain than she would want to sit still for.

"At least you've got something familiar. Must be nice. All my weapons didn't even arrive with me." All of being one and it wasn't even actually hers, but that's not the point. "Guess they must've gotten lost along the way."

[provenforce]

"I don't know how it works, things showing up with us. I arrived with everything I had on me at the time, though my blaster no longer works." She indicates the weapon, which is sitting on a shelf nearby, carefully displayed. It had been a gift from Han Solo, and even if it no longer worked, she still treasured it. She couldn't even bear to break it down to see if she could use the parts for something else.

Exhaling she answers Chloe's first question, her head tilting slightly to the side.

"Jedi were warriors who were capable of using the Force--a sort of... cosmic energy, you could say? They were once a large organization, but now there's only one left, that I know of." She's simplifying a lot, but there's also a lot she really just doesn't know. Obi-Wan had taught her some, but there are still gaps in her knowledge.

[tagartist]

Chloe looked over at the blaster curiously while she listened to her explain Jedis. One Jedi after having been more powerful; that seems... depressing. Like a long story, too. She frowns a bit, looking back to Rey with her own head tilt. "That sounds... intense. You only hear about stuff like that in movies back where I'm from."

She's never been very good with the whole... serious conversation thing, apparently, and hasn't chosen to get any better since arriving her.

"Home sounds kinda boring in comparison." Not that that was necessarily a bad thing.

[provenforce]

"A lot of it has sort of become myth where I'm from, too." Rey smiles a little, remembering how she used to think the stories about Luke Skywalker weren't true. Oh, how wrong she had been. "Though the proof in them being real I've seen with my own eyes."

She tilts her head, turning a little in her chair to look at Chloe. She's always interested in hearing about other realities, because there's so little she's really seen in her own galaxy.

"What's home like, for you?"

[tagartist]

She wondered whether or not any of the things that were considered myths at home may have had a grain of truth to them. Or maybe full truth that everyone had simply forgot was once real. Most people who thought like that would've been told they were just believing in nonsense or conspiracy theories, but being here had made her look at that all a little differently now.

There's a snort at the question, a head shake. "Nothing exciting. There's no magic like this place, no cool weapons like you've got." Blasters didn't seem like they were too far off from guns, but she couldn't say for sure when Rey's didn't work. "People go to school or work to pay for homes filled with stuff we're told we're supposed to want, supporting families that look like they could be happy but probably aren't and do that every day until we retire or die. Basic capitalism, I guess."

[provenforce]

That gets a bit of a wider smile from Rey. She glances down for a moment, examining the tool in her hand, before looking back up at Chloe.

"I've heard of things like that happening in the galaxy, but not on Jakku, where I'm from. It sort of sounds like the kind of thing you'd find in stories, to me." Families that care, that support each other, working for more things than you could ever reasonably need. She had had very little, before coming here. Even now, so much of what's in her room is functional, though she has started collecting things that she simply thinks are pretty.