[Semi-Open, Arrival] Dreaming Wide Awake

[oyedeng]

WHO: Naomi Nagata, James Holden, Amos Burton, a Rescue Crew and OPEN
WHAT: A woman falls out of space and onto Thedas. Some damage is incurred, some recovery time is needed, some reunions are happening. Also: Space resident's first exposure to snow.
WHEN: Covering arrival, quarantine/recovery and first steps in a snowy Kirkwall
WHERE: Wounded Coast, Riftwatch Infirmary, Kirkwall
NOTES: If you want to continue any CWs for description of/discussion of injuries sustained, pain suffered, Holden being a sap

At first, there is nothing. She floats, as she has done all her life, when the ring gate decelerates everything in an instant, and Naomi is knocked out cold.

Her dream is a simple thing. To stand aboard the Rocinante, to hug Alex, to touch her forehead to Amos', to hold Holden close. To tell them all she has to say, and to be welcomed back.

Instead, she comes to when she falls, thin body impacting on hard ground, vision flooding with flickering green, and beyond... the horrifying sight not of metal, not even of the darkness between stars... but of a grey, cloudy sky.

[ ooc: Closed and Open Prompts in comments below. If you'd like to do something else or discuss handwaving/continuing TDM threads, feel free to shoot me a message: inkcharm or Discord: inkcharm#4573.

Please also take a gander at Naomi's Permissions/CWs/Opt-Outs as well as her Info post. ]

Comments

[elegiaque]

Baudin heroically doesn't say anything about how Tony's stupid rifter speech doesn't mean anything because even sundials have six o'clock on them and it sort of does, actually. In context, even if that wasn't the case, it's difficult to misunderstand as an instruction and despite literally everything about her when she's working she is substantially less likely to take five minutes to loudly engage in some insufferable pedantry.

It's not not on the table at all, but not when the sky is ripping open another of it's sparkly vaginas and birthing the latest poor unfortunate. No; with a visual association to Tony that she finds frankly irritating, she is likewise gloved and it's that—not the ice-shimmering and unusually string-less bow on her back, not the sheathed sword or any of the several knives on her person—that she reaches for, or more accurately reaches with.

With a weather eye triangulating herself between Amos and Tony, she bolts for the groaning form that might be human and plants her feet between Naomi and the rift, raising her hand open-palm to connect to it with force that staggers her, briefly. Possibly the first thing the new stranger will see is the swinging end of a long brunette braid, attached to a tiny woman dressed like a sexy pirate who apparently thinks she can fight the sky.

[innerharbor]

The thing Amos hates about demons is that he hasn't gotten them figured out yet. Despite what a lot of people might think, Amos has been outmatched in a fair fight, with or without guns. He knows how to control a fight, to come out on top even when he's weaker and worse armed.

Demons... don't really follow those rules. You hack and you slash and you kinda just hope you hit wherever their vitals are. Amos hasn't really seen a pattern where that comes in. It's just overwhelming force, all the time, and maybe Amos should invest in some armor, because his sword is getting really hot?

Jesus fucking Christ, this is stupid.

He backs up enough to almost walk backward into Gwen and the newest newbie, but his spatial reasoning is too sound. Too many firefights for that shit. You don't forget where your allies are. You just don't.

Which means he turns a bit, sidling away from the nearest demon (Our Lady of the Emerald Fist is the heavy hitter somehow, so let her hit) and turning around to see-

He feels the blood run out of his face, which is a strange fucking feeling, to be honest. His gut twists, too. Maybe those demons did something? He'll check it out later. Later. Now isn't the fucking time.

"Naomi?" He almost never uses her name when boss will do. A sprite comes whizzing toward him, and Amos just bats it away like he's at Camden Yards, all attention wholly focused on the form on the ground. Naomi, smaller than ever, struggling to fucking breathe. "You changed your hair again."

[oyedeng]

Even in the moment, all Naomi registers are flashes of what is going on. The flash of a long braid, the shape of a person. Voices, movement. Sparking, sputtering green light. And that terrifying, distant sky, grey and yet so bright and alien to her that it hurts.

She doesn't know what to focus on while the weight of an invisible giant on her chest threatens to grind her nothing. Not until a different shape moves into her fading, blurry field of view. Her lips form the shape of a name before the identity fully registers - the set of his shoulders is familiar, and surely it's a trick of her mind trying to make sense of sky - horizon - light - gravity, a new set of rules and perceiving the world that is too unfamiliar to her, a sense of being pulled down, always down, into a planet that doesn't wish for anyone to go up.

The second time she tries, she presses the name out with some effort and a trickle of blood: "Amos..." There's an edge of desperation there, a strain when she tries to push herself up. She's not seen him in months, and she's still half-convinced he's a figment of her pain-addled mind. Layered under the shrieks of unfamiliar creatures, the movements and voices of unfamiliar people and the spark-sputtering of the rift, the sound of a bone snapping is distinct, but almost drowned out by the noise Naomi makes behind clenched teeth.

[propulsion]

Snagging up the device, which kind of looks like a cartoony remote control shapewise, antenna and everything, and is otherwise a delicate mess of springs and cogs and dials, Tony has his back to much of the actual as he pokes and prods at it. Slaps the side of it once.

Clik- clik- clik-clik-clk-

He pivots to check what Amos is doing, if he's handy with a pen and paper. No? Baudin's in the process of taming the rift and so he will just have to

get hit with a wobbling stream of strange green light, with love from a wisp, immediately dropping the thaumoscope as his fingers lose feeling, and he staggers aside. Pins and needles weakness sinking into his muscles, slow to fade. "Okay," he huffs out, and points towards it with his open palm. Green lightning leaps with a jagged flicker, scorching the ground where it forks but otherwise halfway evaporate the screaming spirit. "We're closing her up," where the emphasis is the volume of his voice kicked up over the strange storm-sounds of the rift.

[elegiaque]

Having broken off from the rift long enough to have knocked that nearest demon back off its ... feet? (Sure, feet. And several feet back, at that.) —with a percussive blast from her gloved hand, Gwenaëlle squares her shoulders and braces herself as she lines up with Tony to reconnect. The effort is lessened, spread across the two of them, and considering the force the two of them specifically bring to bear it's not quite as much a struggle as it might have been without a third, fourth or fifth hand.

Not that it looks fun. It's not a process that allows for anything like multitasking, and while Gwenaëlle can hit hard—she isn't built to withstand much, reliant mostly on whoever else is around and sheer fucking luck to stay on her feet while closing a rift instead of killing whatever's around it. There's a reason that she quite likes closing rifts that are near trees that she can climb into and use for cover,

so it's for the best that she and Tony don't take as long now as they might have, if this had been a few years ago.

(A few years ago, and she'd never have walked into this scenario; she'd have known, quite rightly, that she wouldn't have walked out of it again alive.)

When the rift takes the remnants of its spilled out guts with it, she pivots to Amos and Naomi: “This is one of yours?”

She sounds French. She sounds posh. She still looks like a sexy pirate, that wasn't a hallucination.

[innerharbor]

Two thoughts run through Amos' mind, enough to distract him from the rift, the fight, everything. Succinctly translated from mind to mouth, they are:

"Yeah. Fuck."

He bends down to check over Naomi, huge fist open in gentleness, fingertips barely touching her pulse. He pets her forehead, trying to comfort like one would an animal, because how do you comfort someone dying? And that is what she's doing.

Amos nearly rips the crystal off the leather thong around his neck, speaking into it-- "Cap. We got someone incoming to med bay. Prep them for sudden re-pressurization and other high grav damages. It's the Belter you think it is. She's gonna be okay."

And with that, he scoops Naomi up like she barely weighs anything (to be fair, she really does) and looks over his shoulder. "She's dying, Princess." Welcome to your new nickname, Gwenaëlle. "You keep track of the Professor, yeah?"

Because Amos is planning on booking it and hoping for the best, here.

[oyedeng]

It's a little unfair, Naomi thinks, as she's gathered up like she's hardly a burden, that her clearly dying mind would conjure only one member of her family up for her. It's nice to see Amos again. She'd have liked to see Alex and Jim, too. Especially Jim.

Cap registers, somewhere through the pain, like a tether to keep her from floating away, because something in her understands bone deep that when Amos says 'Cap' he means 'James Holden'.

Naomi tries to hang on to some shred of consciousness that understands Amos to be much too solid to be a figment of her imagination. She's a dead weight in his grip, breath a faint, wheezing sound as she tries to curl her fingers into the fabric folds of his clothes, tries to will herself to reach out and grasp at what she didn't know she needed to come back to for months.

It wouldn't be fair to them, Naomi thinks in quiet defiance of the darkness closing in on the edges of her vision, to die before she made it back. Her head hits Amos' shoulder a little too heavy, and she tries to tell him that she's coming back, but she's pretty sure the strained rasp of her voice doesn't get further than his name before she's choking on any other words she might have mustered. Beneath the fragile dome of her ribcage, her lungs and heart strain to keep operating against the brutal pull down the well, and it's all she can do to cling to some semblance of awareness, rolling eyes sliding over the people behind Amos without fully registering them - she'll recognize them, later, most likely, when the haze of pain doesn't do its best to blur them out.

[propulsion]

Well this was a bust.

Tony is shoving the thaumoscope into his satchel and should probably be gathering up the sensors, but instead he's moving at a fast clip towards where Amos is gathering up a whole woman in his arms. If and when Gwenaëlle looks to keep track of him, Tony is coming in hot, furiously trying to understand the situation as fast as possible.

"What happened?" he barks, boots sliding in field mud as he approaches. "She get hit by something?"