faderift | [Semi-Open, Arrival] Dreaming Wide Awake

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[Semi-Open, Arrival] Dreaming Wide Awake

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. ]

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Feeling slams back into Naomi's nerve endings as violently as she impacted the ground, as if an entire space stations is pressing down upon her body, brittle bones creaking, cracking and threatening to give way as gravity demands its tribute in pain.

She tries to scream through a windpipe that feels too tight with the sudden, brutal shift into a gravity she doesn't belong in, no time for her bones and organs to adjust, but all that comes out is a wounded, whimpering sound, the taste of copper in her mouth as she attempts to push herself up on something broken in her arm, to suck a breath into a body radiating agony, organs fighting not to collapse in on themselves, black at the edges of her vision flickering like something green and weightless floating like a torso with long, clawed fingers slowly stretching towards her, Naomi's mind unable to process what she's seeing (the rift and wraith she name for yet, under a sky she shouldn't be seeing) or hearing (the crash of waves that is utterly unfamiliar to her) or feeling (the unspeakable pain of gravity).

It registers, dimly, in her reeling mind that she needs help, that she is far from where she was just a moment ago before her sweet, lost dream... and that she might die, here.

Naomi Nagata's bones aren't as dense as a human's should be, her muscle mass lower. This might not be obvious to most people on Thedas, although even they might notice that while she's not taller than any human should be, her limbs her thinner, the proportions a little off - a little elongated. She's a little lighter than her build suggests, too. Almost elven, though her ears are round, and the cut of her facial features is different.

She struggles, at first. Arriving in Thedas, going from no gravity to her first time on a planet exposed to regular gravity, her impact on the ground broke her, crushed her, hurt her, and in addition to the regular quarantine she also requires medical attention at first. The time in quarantine is a time of healing. Of staring at windows in open fascination - and perhaps a little terror. Her breathing is a little laboured at first, she's in constant discomfort and mostly bedridden. Not sick - it just seems like just being here is a physical strain to even just lying in bed, breathing. James Holden is with her often, and there's a softness to her face whenever that's the case. He makes it easy to ignore the pain, the discomfort - or to bear it, at least. And when he's not there, any company is a welcome distraction from the pain she's in, whether it be a crash course on Thedas or a healer checking in.

Before long, Naomi proves herself a headstrong woman pushing herself into walking on trembling legs. It's not that she can't walk or isn't well enough - it's that she walks like someone who feels five times as heavy as she actually is, and like she expects the ceiling to fall onto her at any moment. She might request some assistance with that at first. Sometimes, during that period of adjustment, she pushes a little too far - faints, when the strain of just moving about becomes a little too much, or else overbalances and scrapes her knees on stone floors. She curses everytime it happens. "Fuck" or "Sabaka" or "Kaka Felota" seem to be favourites.

There's progress though. A little more every day - she breathes more easily, she walks a little more steadily, she stumbles a little less often. Her body gets used to existing in gravity. The discomfort never quite leaves, and sometimes she still rolls her shoulders stiffly or hisses a little through her teeth in discomfort. "Unlikely that will go away," Naomi will explain if anyone asks, then smile wrily, fingers flexing on the hand with the green sliver of the anchor in her palm. "Nothing to be done about it."

Perhaps you meet Naomi on the ferry between the Gallows and the rest of Kirkwell, overwhelmed and in some visible discomfort as she looks out at the water. Feeling eyes on her, she looks at the source of the gaze, wide brown eyes a little cloudy with pain. She shrugs with her hands, not with her shoulders.

"I've never seen this much water just sitting in one place before in my life."

Naomi can be found exploring Kirkwall eventually. Whenever the horizon rears out from in between buildings, it takes her a moment to adjust to feeling dizzy. More wondrous than the sight of Kirkwall itself, though, is what she finds there. Oh, Naomi knows ice. This? She's tentative the first time she reaches out, carefully touches her palm to some untouched snow, and pulls back in surprise when she finds the cold oddly soft to her touch, like finely shaved ice. Her hand leaves an imprint behind. When snow flakes flurry down from the sky she staunchly refuses to look at, Naomi flinches away from the flake at first, eyes wide as she watches more snowflakes drift down.

When the first snowflake touches her cheek, she reaches up, eyes wide with wonder. A soft "oh" falls from her mouth, and then, hesitantly... slowly... she glances up. Snow flakes catch in the dark curls of her hair, on her laches. For a moment, Naomi holds herself very, very still, uncertain and tense as snow flurries lazily around her.

And then there's a sound - a soft laugh, more of a disbelieving giggle, the disbelief and wonder in her eyes making her look overwhelmed. She doesn't even look when she reaches out a hand, just grasps for the nearest person, fingers curling around an offered hand or around someone's elbow or shoulder, eyes never leaving the display. There's a touch of uncertainty and wonder in her voice, quiet and soft: "What is this?" The voice of a woman who has never experienced snow before.

The Hanged Man lures Naomi, later, after she's had her fill of being outside, of unlimited air and snow. There's a lot to be gleaned from shitty bars, after all, and she's not one to say no to a change to kill the ache in her bones alongside her last remaining brain cells with some cheap alcohol.

Hence trying to gain the attention of the first person she can clock as belonging to Riftwatch, and asking with a slight smirk: "Any recommendations?"

They're doing some field work.

Amos isn't the biggest fan, not really. His ideal days are spent knuckle deep in wiring and electronics, the nebulous warmth of a ship's hull at his back, the only thing keeping him from an anonymous death in the vacuum. It's calming. It makes sense. This shit is pioneering, new never before seen, experimental road-clearing work. It's cool and all, but it's not what Amos is built for.

Then one of the instruments begins to... hum. "Hey, Stark?" The humming gets louder. "Think we got a live one."

The green always shows up when he's not looking. One second, he can see a pure, unspoiled ocean. The next second, there's a demon, and Amos is trying to give it space while tripping around a warm body he doesn't yet recognize as his people.

At least he brought a fucking sword, and that gets shoved right into the eye (one of many) this demon offers up, hissing and snarling.

"You should take it easy," Derrica tells her, knowing full well Naomi isn't necessarily interested in that advice.

Derrica isn't a healer with extensive knowledge of anatomy. The concepts of what ails Naomi are a beyond her in some respects, but she can still ease pain and settle the strain on Naomi's body into something manageable. She's very gentle when she reaches for Naomi's hands to help her lever up off the floor.

"Next time, you can lean on me," she offers. "Save your knees, right?"

One of her attending doctors is a smallish, straight-backed man with pointed ears, who doesn't smile much but does take a particular interest in the woman's... conformation, if they want to call it that.

"Have you endured some kind of serious illness?" he asks Naomi with quiet curiosity, standing by the fire as he steeps a cup of herbal tea for her.

Laura rarely goes near the infirmary. She heals better than most, left to her own devices, and it carries the old stench of other people's blood. To her, anyway--others don't seem to notice or care. But she's been told to fetch bandages to take on a mission, and for all she might dislike the place, she does what she's told.

Her current objective is waylaid by the sight of a woman hitting the flagstones and saying something unintelligible. (Not Trade, nor Nevarran, Orlesian, nor any of the others she's familiar with. Not from the parts of those languages she knows, anyway.) People unable to walk aren't unexpected in the infirmary; since coming to Kirkwall, she's learned that its purpose is housing the ill. People unable to walk, unassisted by others, is more concerning.

She walks over, a pinscratch frown between her brows. Dark-haired, dressed all in black, a girl on the cusp of adulthood with sharp green eyes in a solemn face--she holds out a hand to the other woman. "You should look at your feet."

It's also cold.

Not void of space cold, or anything, but if you hate it, you might make some comparisons. Tony isn't a fan. He rode out here bundled in a big fur coat that he has been informed before it several sizes too large for him and is also an intended fashion for women, but it is also the only thing that seems to buffer him against the sleet-specked wind.

Furs are bundled on his horse. He is out here in light armor, gloves veined with copper wiring that glow faintly lyrium-blue, one of them glowing in green at the centre of his palm where a crystal lens is placed over his shard. He looks a little ready for a fight, as he is ready to, you know, learn.

When the rift splits open, he'd been twenty feet that way with a bundle copper rods he'd been sticking into the ground.

"Rats," he says. "Baudin! Watch my six."

Rods are dropped. The sensors he'd already laid down will have to do. Tony runs across the field towards where the thaumoscope is resting, now that Amos is engaged. He's somewhat aware that this is now the worst day of someone's life, or at least in their top five, but like, he really wants to get these readings, so he runs, dodging the darting tongues of Fade energy that erupt from the rift like lightning, and seem to blight the ground with black ichor.

Edited 2021-02-09 04:33 (UTC)

Naomi grimaces - more at the fact that someone needs to say this to her than the fact that it's being said. She reaches up, accepting the offered hand to get up again. Her entire body screams at her to cease, to yield to the pull of the floor. It's better than it was on her arrival - but better is not yet good.

"My knees would thank you." She snorts a soft, wry laugh. "So would I, of course. Hate to say it, but the help would be appreciated.

She doesn't know this woman, other than glimpses she's caught around Kirkwall. But it's second nature to offer her hand when the woman reaches out in the midst of her wonder.

"It's snow," she says, smiling. She holds out her other arm to catch some of the flakes on her sleeve, turning to show the woman, "Here, before they melt. If you look close, you can see their shapes."

Nothing that would count. Nothing that the medical standards of her time haven't fixed since - malnourishment and dehydration, hypoxia and other work place accidents - and therefore nothing she could share with someone working under this world's medical standards.

The thought of telling these people about the state of the art gel that can regrow limbs...

Well.

"Just some childhood sicknesses typical for my world, nothing serious or with long-lasting effects." And even those only suffered because they didn't have the money for vaccinations and other procedures.

She's young - and Naomi can't help it, the way her mind immediately tries to gauge how much older is perhaps than Filip must currently be. It's a painful train of thought, and she steers away from it with some effort as she takes the girl's hand and pulls herself up.

Naomi's gaze drops to her feet, amusement playing along her strained and tired features.

"Does that help?"

The woman is tall, towering over Naomi in both height and build, and it's by virtue of her disposition that Naomi doesn't feel an instinct to back away. She knows the types of people who use their physical stature to try and intimidate anyone they come across.

So at the prompting, Naomi leans in more closely, looking at the flakes on the woman's sleeve with fascination, mind already tripping over the laws of thermodynamics.

She huffs a laugh, behind her cupped hand so her breath doesn't melt the flakes faster. "They look like small ice crystals, but... softer."

"That's an excellent way to describe it," Diana says, smiling warmly at the woman. She loves moments like this, the wonder of discovering something new and being able to see that moment happen in another person. She studies the snowflakes on her sleeve herself, admiring the lacy, intricate shapes.

"It's snow. I've been told that each snowflake is different from each other, but I can't say I've ever been able to confirm it. They do tend to blend together after a while." And, of course, it's cold, though that's a drawback Diana is still learning.

"And where is that? Your world?"

Brother Gideon is new to the organization, hasn't met most of its wide variety of non-Thedosians. The entire phrase 'my world' strikes him as utterly preposterous, but part of signing on as a physician in this particular war was to accept ideas he might not have normally.

"What sort of sicknesses are common to children?"

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.

"Nothing with a descriptor in front of it," comes the answer, so smoothly given that it has to be born of long habit and experience. The Hanged Man is not John's particular favorite, but he is a known face among it's patrons. A slight smile as he shifts his grip on his crutch, sizing her up before he adds: "Though I won't discourage you if you're feeling adventurous."

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."

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.

Amos isn't dressed for the weather, but he's used to going it cold. Space is cold as hell, and Baltimore prepared him for that with harsh winters and stolen jackets. He shrugs most of it off, by now. When it's really cold-- and compared to the freeze of space, this ain't shit-- he keeps his temperature up by exercising, getting his blood up.

Naomi ain't built for that.

Instead, he packs a snowball, and sends it whizzing over her head, hitting a nearby tree. Now that he has her attention, he calls, "pretty, ain't it?"

Jone is not a terribly patient or forgiving person, especially those she just met. Waiting for the ferry is a trial for someone who only finds patience in battle, so she spends her time staring openly at any oddity that crosses her path.

Most elf-blooded folk she's known don't show signs of it on their person. This lady, though, Maker, she looks it. And then she spews some weird shite, and Jone has to comment.

"What, you grew up in a desert, luv?" Jone considers what she's seen of the Hissing Wastes. This bird ain't quite got the accent. Not that the Wastes is the only desert in Thedas, just the only one Jone's seen.

Naomi flinches - less in fear, more just in surprise as something strikes past her head and hits a nearby tree. Not close enough to hit her, but unexpected. Kirkwall still has her mildly on edge, an unfamiliar place with rules she's only just learning. Besides, she's used to tossing power tools around in low gravity - those don't gain the sort of velocity that would surprise her.

Her surprise is cleared up with an explanation when she spots Amos, lips curling into a wry smile. Trust Amos to see something he'd describe as pretty and throw it to get her attention.

"It is," she confirms, smile widening. Alright, she'll admit it - planets have their merit. So much is strange here. This? This is an unexpected, strange delight. "What is it, exactly?"

She bites her lip, then crouches down to gather some of it up in her hands - it's cold, but also loose when she curls her fingers.

Naomi nods slowly, glancing at the man and deliberating for a moment before her lips tug into a cheeky little smile.

"Alright then." She's had fungus based alcohol distilled in dirty space station pipes. Might as well see if this place can shock her. "So what's the worst I could order, and do you want one as well?"

Amos is scooping and packing another snowball as he speaks. "This? Shit, boss, it's snow. When it's too cold for rain."

With his free hand, he points upward. "Something about the atmosphere hitting right temperature for water to freeze. I dunno that kinda math." Where on Earth (or Thedas, or space) would he have ever had need to learn geosciences?

"We'll try again after I patch up your knees."

There is still some discomfort in being in the infirmary. Isaac's absence looms large. Her own quiet worry over it is ever-present, but Naomi is easy to focus on. Derrica remembers Holden's face talking about her. It's one of the few things from the dream that hasn't stung to re-examine.

Derrica wants to ask her a whole list of things, but first—

"I've never seen a Rift do this to someone," Derrica tells her, as they collectively manage to ease Naomi back into a chair. "Wysteria Poppell is going to have so many questions about it."

This sounds like a joke, but it's kind of like a warning.

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Page 1 of 6

[Semi-Open, Arrival] Dreaming Wide Awake

[Closed] Naomi, Rescue Crew and some wraiths

[Open] Over a Period of Time in the Infirmary: Quarantine & Recovery

[Open] Gallows/Kirkwall, First Snow post Blizzard

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hanged man.

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snow snow snow.

ferry.

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