[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

[okayimin]

The quip gets a raised brow, but it settles. And she huffs at the description of Holden. "He should mind himself more than others for a change, is what I've noticed. Reckon you should to, while we're talking about it. Mind the state of yourself til your body settles a bit and you won't give any of us a reason to worry."

Edict handed out, Sawbones settles back on her stool. "All right, you answered my question. You got any? I don't know what they're telling Rifters these days."

[oyedeng]

Naomi's eyes soften at that, and she gives Sawbones a nod - agreeable, perhaps surprisingly so. Or maybe Naomi just wants to keep someone in her corner who has pegged Holden just right, too.

"Much that makes my head hurt," Naomi admits. "Ask me to run a relativistic calculation of fusion product spectra for themonuclear plasmas and I can shake something together, but this world operates on very different principles." For a moment, Naomi hesitates, then she shrugs - with her hands, not with her shoulders. "I thought I'd ask something... smaller, but perhaps more on the level I'm familiar with." Perhaps it's telling, then, that her hand drifts to the black ink circling her throat. "I was wondering if you'd tell me about the tattoo."

[okayimin]

Half of those words mean nothing to her, but the curiosity that's building at the incomprehensible bits sours quickly when Naomi touches her own tattoos. Sawbones' hands stay where they are in her lap. She doesn't need to touch the brand, she knows it's there.

"It ain't a tattoo," she says crisply, "Some folks do have those." She gestures to Naomi's tattoo, "Dalish mostly. They're elves that keep to themselves mostly, prefer their old ways. I'm from Orzammar, an underground city." How had she explained this to Amos? It's not a memory she hangs on to. "Orzammar's got a caste system. Everybody who ain't is Casteless and they get the brand."

[oyedeng]

Naomi frowns. 'I'm sorry' is the easy thing that springs to mind, especially as she can know recognize what sort of thing she stepped into, but what else can you even say to that. Belters are considered less than by so many Inners, but the marks they put on themselves are their own choices.

Well... mostly.

"Where I'm from, we're all human," Naomi says, carefully searching for the right way through the angles of unpleasantness and overlapping but not really similar experiences. "But I'm a Belter - a person from the Belt. We mine resources for the Inners - the people from Earth and Mars. The work is dangerous, and you have to wear a protective suit. Covers all of you, 'cause you have to shield your skin. Wear a helmet on your head, too, that goes all the way around and over. It closes with a metal seal that sit around the neck."

Her fingers linger on the tattoo still.

"We do the work, but we're poor. It's dangerous, but our equipment is often junk and scrap. The suits used to be worse than they are now, and many Belters couldn't get the better, newer stuff. So sometimes the seal got damaged, or was just old and shit, or it was someone else's suit you inherited and it didn't fit your growing pains quite right, sasa? So older Belters, many of them have scars on their neck in the circle pattern of their suit's busted seal, burns from heat or from cold that got through. And any Inner would see that scar on someone and know 'ah, that is a Belter'. Many of them barely consider us human anymore, but less than."

It's not the same, so Naomi doesn't pretend it is. She doesn't say 'I understand' or 'I know what that's like', because she doesn't like to lie like that. Hardship knows hardship. Less than knows less than, no matter how untrue it should be. Casteless and Belter isn't the same. And yet.

"Thank you for telling me." She doesn't say 'you could have not answered', because Sawbones strikes her as strong enough to know that, and Naomi appreciates she got an answer anyway. "Your turn?" she offers, in case Sawbones wants to take it and ask more questions.

[okayimin]

Sawbones had lifted her chin a little in challenge even before Naomi had started speaking. But then Naomi ran with Holden and Amos back in whatever mad space sky ship they lived on. Neither men had offered her stories in exchange for what she'd told them, but Amos had Dust Town written all over him and Holden was the sort that was so decent, it made 'em a little stupid.

The instinctive defensiveness eases as Naomi explains Belters. It's not near the same as being Casteless, but it's not so foreign. Saying anything in response seems partly, would shift the delicate recognition of each other.

So what she says instead is "What's themonuclear plasmas?"

[oyedeng]

Naomi looks towards the ceiling for a moment, in thought, trying to figure out how far down the ladder she has to go, not because Sawbones is by any means stupid, but because Naomi's degrees and line of work deal with a lot of concepts and technologies that are either not known to the people of Thedas yet based on the state of their technological advancements, or do not exist yet.

"So you know how there are three states of matter, ke? Solid, liquid, gaseous. And some matter can be all three of them. Heat up ice, you get water, heat up water, you get steam, which is a gas. Plasma is basically... superheated matter, forming a particlar type of gas that we sometimes call the fourth state of matter. Thermonuclear plasmas are those involved in chemical reactions that release tremendous amounts of energy - and heat."

She looks down again, biting her lower lip a little to see if the simplified explanation brings any clarity.

[okayimin]

The concepts are familiar enough for Sawbones to catch on, but still, it's one of those things. Like when she was first learning to read and it seemed every new letter opened into a new word and a new sentence and a new idea. "What sort of matter makes plasma? And how do you heat it? Is it explosive? What do you do with it?"

It sounded a bit like lyrium. There was nothing particularly magical about lyrium to dwarves, but it was a craft that Sawbones had never had much access to either above or below ground.

[oyedeng]

"Well... if you want to artificially create it, you'd need a neutral gas. Which is... hm. Basically just a gas that has specific chemical properties. You'd need an intense heat source or electromagnetic field, a controlled environment and a lot of gear and know how that supercedes what I could rig up here."

Naomi shrugs with her hands. Chemistry isn't really her area of expertise, but she'd covered the basics in terms of thermonuclear fusion.

"Do you get lightning here? Lightning is a form of natural plasma. The sun is, too. So are stars."

[okayimin]

"We do have lightning," Sawbones says, eyes bright. It's Amos telling her about gravity all over again, but much more sensible, so long as she ignores the business about the sun and stars. Lightning already seems chancey.

"But what do you use it for?"

[oyedeng]

"The energy is useful for a variety of technologies." Bombs come to mind. Naomi's just... not going to mention that. "We use it for propulsion. Imagine a... well, a ship sitting on land. Or... perfectly still water, I suppose? Imagine there's no wind, and you have no oars. There's nothing that can push or pull your ship. So how do you move it? You create a thermonuclear reaction with plasma, you generate a lot of heat, which converts to energy."

Naomi makes a motion with her hands like a small explosion.

"So you generate the energy on the ship, and create various chemical reactions to funnel this energy out the ship and into one direction," she explains, motioning away from one hand held up in place of the ship, "which propels your ship the other direction."

[okayimin]

"Heat and energy..." There's a very keen look in her eye. "There's lyrium. It tends to explode if you handle it wrong. And the magma rivers in the Deep Roads of course."

And that might just be what's behind the golemns. At least in part. But there are things you don't say to a surfacer, even if they're technically not from the Surface at all. She sighs.

"Not my field," she says almost regretfully, "Never had a hand for metal crafting and the Crafters will happily slit throats before they share tricks with another caste." Nevermind a Casteless, "Right, your turn."

[oyedeng]

It's the same thing everywhere, isn't it. Earth, Mars the Belt. Different Castes and those without it. Humans, Elves.

People always try to group themselves and 'other' themselves to put their boots on someone's neck. It's not sympathy in Naomi's eyes, but she subconsciously scratches on the seem of her neck tattoo in thought.

"Lyrium, then, not mechanics. How do you handle it right - or wrong?"

[okayimin]

"Well, you handling it at all would be doing it wrong to start," Sawbones says, matter of fact, "It's a crystal deposit, in it's raw form. You normally only find it underground, which is good. The best case scenario for a surfacer handling lyrium is maybe it blows off a limb. Worst case, they lyrium poisoning. That's boiling skin, delirum, hallucinations." She gestures absently. "Dwarves can handle it okay, but the older ones in the Mining and Crafters Castes tend get a bit addled from the exposure. Up here, you'll see it in liquid form. That's refined lyrium."