There's a story in my veins, with scars on every page

[notathreat]

WHO: Ellie & OPEN
WHAT: Rifting in less-than-gracefully, a rogue explosion or two, & initial trouble accomplished
WHEN: Arrival and during the first week after.
WHERE: The Hinterlands, The Gallows
NOTES: So much swearing holy shit.

[Arrival.]

The worst part about lucid dreaming is when shit gets a little too real. Especially when it's not the usual kind of horrible. So when Ellie goes from another nightmare about things hunting her in an endless horrible sewer to being sucked into the water, hurtling down through the rain-soaked Seattle depths, she tries to tell herself that she can breathe underwater. She opens her mouth and tries, and the foul water fills her throat-

And she launches out, along with a gush of Seattle sewer water, hits a hillside and goes tumbling.

... and it's steep enough that she keeps going.

Ellie coughs, chokes, tries to scream, and unleashes a garbled stream of hacking, choking profanity.

Maybe you're the unlucky person on the trail she happens to literally bowl into (and possibly take out).

Or maybe you're the one who finds her screaming back into the face of a despair demon, soaked in foul-smelling sewer water, having just hurled a piece of rock shaped suspiciously like a revolver into its face.

She absolutely just called the demon a motherfucker.



[Gallows; Quarantine Times]

A bath, a few square meals and a bit of explanation later, Ellie seems far less... feral. She's dressed in local clothing, a tunic, pants and boots, and has stopped acting like a cat, roaming the stairways in the towers and popping up unexpectedly in places people didn't see her enter.

She shows up near the top of one of the towers, tucked into a window, looking down at the courtyard below.

"... so I heard there were actual griffons roosting up here. Is it true?"


[ooc; HMU if you want a custom starter!]

Comments

[acreage]

"Disappear. We don't know what happens to them."

It sounds weak, to his ears. But it was all too recently that he'd only briefly left Naomi, came back to their room to find it empty. She hadn't left any note, there'd been no sign, and definitely no new rift activity over the Gallows.

But he does look at Ellie, sideways, comment, "I promise I won't tell anyone if you get upset."

[notathreat]

Ellie gives him a half-smile back, something fleeting and torn between a little sad, a little soft. She wants to say that she isn't upset. But that's not true. It's just that what she's upset over is something she isn't ready to explain or face.

"... it's not the first time I've done this," she confides. "Ended up in another universe, with... glowy shit." She stretches out her fingers, indicating the green anchor on her palm.

"So if some people disappeared from here, maybe they went back. Or someplace else."

[acreage]

Or disappeared back into the Fade, but that's not an option he's about to tell a new rifter, least of all a young one.

Least of all when she's distracted him with an admission like that.

"What do you mean?"

[notathreat]

Shit, how to explain?

Ellie rolls her eyes upward, pinching her lower lip between her teeth, trying to figure out how to lay it out in a way that makes sense.

"You know how every Rifter has a world, or a reality they're from?" she asks, prodding at the anchor. She's missing two fingers on that hand. The smallest ones. The stumps are healed up, but the scars aren't neat.

"Before I came to Thedas, I went from my world, to somewhere different. And then I came from there to here."

[acreage]

Well, that's. Fucking weird.

"A place like Thedas?"

He might sound faintly dubious from surprise, but his tone is otherwise steady. He believes her, even if he doesn't quite get what he's hearing.

[notathreat]

"Kinda? Seemed more like my world. One moon and all."

Ellie gestures up towards the sky. "But way in the future. There were spaceships and colonies out on the moon. They were even starting to terraform Mars-"

Ellie stops short, awkward. That all probably sounds like gibberish to him.

[acreage]

He does manage not to laugh, but he can't help the smile at that description. There's really no chance — none that he can imagine — that she dropped into his world, but it's a funny thought.

"Seems more like my world, by the sound of it."

Poor bastards, Mars always in-process to be terraformed in, apparently, every reality.

[notathreat]

Ellie shoots him a look, a sort of desperate curiosity mingled with good-natured jealousy, and groans aloud. Even if she's thrilled, she's still kicking herself for not insisting on grabbing that shuttle.

"Fucksake. Has everyone been to space but me?"

[acreage]

He smiles, drops his head; though that doesn't do much to hide his obvious mirth.

"I wish I could tell you that you'll have a chance here, but the griffons might be as close as you get."

Fuck, but he misses space.

"I used to work out there. Mostly in the Belt, out towards the outer planets. Where have people been that you've heard of?"

[notathreat]

"Y'know, griffons are pretty badass. Not bad if you can't have a rocket."

The guy's got a good smile, one that relaxes his whole face, makes him seem more approachable. It doesn't drop Ellie's guard entirely, but it can't help but endear her to him, a little bit.

"We've just been to the moon, but we've sent rovers to other planets. That was back in the day, though- society kinda crumbled, you know how it is."

Ellie gives a shrug, glossing over the latent horror. You know how it is.

"The asteroid belt?" she asks, giving a guess. "What'd you do out there?"

[acreage]

Does he know how it is?

There is, at least, a slight frown that makes it obvious he didn't miss the implications of that, despite her lighter tone. Maybe he has an idea; because he does know an overpopulated Earth, waters spreading and climates shifting in the aftereffects of global warming. He grew up in the tensions with Mars, with the Belt; has seen a cold war and a shooting war between the planetary superpowers; survived Eros's last gasp and the paradigm shift the protomolecule brought; caused the opening of the rings and the blood-soaked gold rush that's followed. Society's always been on the brink, the last few years more than ever.

But if Ellie doesn't want to talk about it, he isn't going to make her. Makes a sound of acknowledgment instead, before answering.

"Ice hauling, at first. More recently, captaining a ship-for-hire."

Gunship for hire, but they spend just as much time out of active engagement as in.

[notathreat]

The easy acknowledgement makes her wonder if he does know. There are so many different types of apocalypse, and they're so common within the different worlds. It's a little depression to know just how many ways things can get fucked sideways.

Then again, there are always survivors.

Ellie gives him a glance, nodding to the tower stairs. She climbs them without hurry; plenty of time for them to talk if they want it.

"Mercenary or smuggling?" she asks plainly, with no judgment in her tone. She was half-raised by people who were basically both, and she's in no moral place to judge.

[acreage]

"Above board," he says, and while he doesn't laugh, there's something of it in his face, his voice.

He continues up the stairs with her, his amusement plain. The suggestion clearly doesn't bother him, so, you know, there's that.

"We've done work for corporations, private citizens, and the occasional government."

[notathreat]

"So you... your job," Ellie clarifies, gesturing with her hand as they hike up the stairs, going animated -- it makes her look a little younger, loosens her shoulders, brings a light to her eyes.

"Is to fly around the asteroid belt freelancing a spaceship."

She turns to him, a wide grin on her face.

"I'm so fucking jealous right now. You literally have my dream job."

[acreage]

It's sweet, her energy and enthusiasm; and it finally does make him laugh.

"I'd say it's not all it's cracked up to be, but I'd just be trying to make you feel better."

She wouldn't believe him; and really, she shouldn't.

[notathreat]

"No shit," she says with a snort, a laugh of her own caught up in it. She can't hold it against him, but he's going to be getting a lot of questions in the future, and there's no getting out of it.

"Okay, so tell me something boring about your spaceship."

[acreage]

"Well," he says after thinking on it for a moment, "how do you feel about physics?"

There's a lot of potentially-boring physics that goes into the running and upkeep of a spaceship, after all.

[notathreat]

"You mean the physics of a rocket. Rocket science."

If he thought this would put her off--

But no, Ellie's grinning at him, all humor and light in her eyes, one of those moments where she can really bring the best parts of herself to bear.

[acreage]

"You're going to have to give me a better idea of what you don't like."

— is his suggestion, good-humored.

[notathreat]

"Fuckin'... regular bullshit?" she mutters, shrugging.

"I dunno, man. All the books, ever- it's like they can't imagine anything but more normal people shit, but in space. Having the same dumb as fuck arguments and love triangles and politics. It's not supposed to be earth-but-some-people-are-purple."

[acreage]

He huffs out a breath.

"In that case, I do have some bad news for you." There's a different quality to his voice, now; ripples of genuine frustration, old anger. "People take a lot of the same old bullshit out into space. Old prejudices, or they build new ones that aren't too different."

[notathreat]

Ellie gives a loud groan under her breath, sounding her age, for once. A little glimpse of someone not quite old enough to drink.

"I knew it. Let me guess, wars too? Fighting over land or resources or whatever else?"

[acreage]

"All of the above."

He remembers Naomi saying once: we can't seem to stop fighting war after war.

"Water, land, agriculture, minerals." Creepy alien technology. "But now it's Earth, Mars, and the Belt."

[notathreat]

"Figures."

Ellie sighs, deeply.

"People are the same no matter whether they have tentacles growing out of their faces or not, I guess. Sucks."