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

[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."