goneawayworld | Rey embarrasses herself in various venues

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Rey embarrasses herself in various venues - Open

Who: Rey + Open!
What: Rey’s various tryings and failings to decompress
Where: R&D labs, Halls, Gardens
When: Over the course of a few days before the corporate drone event
Warnings/Notes: Petulant children

1. Baby’s first lemon - Gardens

Farmer Bob could do without the parade of new hires, and here comes another one. This one’s a scrawny young woman whose eyes light up at the sight of all the plants and offers things like “I’ve never seen a farm” or “Stars, this is so much food.” Farmer Bob isn’t exactly talking back at Rey but that apparently isn’t enough to squash her side of the conversation as points and asks for names for various vegetables. He’ll grunt them out, and she’ll nod and offer an equivalent if she’s heard of one from her home and usually tack on “I’ve never tried that.” His response is just sort of a gruf try-them-in-the-mess-hall before she’s sent along her way.

She finds a yellow one, bright, colorful, and oh-so fragrant. She reaches up to touch one, and it’s so ripe that it practically falls off the branch in her hand.

Well. It’s definitely going to rot if she just leaves it on the ground so she might as well eat it so it doesn’t go to waste (and Rey would never.). She digs her fingernails into the tough rind and peels it back, so she can take a large, enthusiastic bite--

--Oh, that’s awful, her face twists into something foul while her mouth floods with sour. Her eyes dart around to make sure Farmer Bob still isn’t watching, but kriff is that another new hire? At least it’s easy enough to tell who is likely not to snitch on her based on who’s wearing coveralls. She spits out the bite into the dirt beds and quickly tries to bury the evidence. She holds a finger up to her lips at the new hire who saw her taste test indicating that she would appreciate some secrecy.

2. Communicators don’t float - Gardens or Halls

After Rey’s chat with Kylo, Rey understandably isn’t feeling like her normal self. Well, as normal as she could be on this rig, thrust once again into an unfamiliar world.

She’s trying so, so hard to not let it shake her. She needs to keep her walls up to keep him out. They had walked away from each other and there was no reality in which they didn’t part, the Force had not willed it.

But the Force willed them to come back together here.
She has her datapad perched on her knees while she’s sitting on the edge of a large hydroponic pool. It wasn’t too far from the baths but still a quiet, secluded spot in the garden where she felt she could be alone. She keeps opening and closing the messaging app. It’s not like it was a long conversation - just a handful of messages from either of them but there’s one she keeps scrolling to: It seemed like we were on the same page and the following, Yeah. I thought so too.

She swallows and closes it again before opening it again and throws her head, exasperated wondering why she is torturing herself about this again and letting out a loud, frustrated noise that is almost loud enough to block out the small splash of her communicator slipping out of her lap and into the water.

Almost.

She scrambles, hand reaching out to save it almost immediately but even Force-enabled reflexes are not enough to grab her communicator without falling rather gracelessly into the hydroponics tank. It’s shallow, so she bangs her elbow on the bottom before she emerges gasping and soaking wet. Even if no one witnessed it, she’s certain to run into a few folks as she’s trudging down the halls back to her quarters looking like she showered with her coveralls on.

3. This laser sword isn’t going to fix itself - R&D lab

Rey had found out that most new hires had any weapons on them confiscated when they arrived, but she had apparently been lucky that the nonfunctional broken pieces were apparently not enough of a threat to take it from her. She tucks it underneath her thin pillow in the evenings and then during the days takes it to a discreet corner of the lab she had convinced some techs to let her work mostly undisturbed, bluffing and saying that the execs had told her when she was hired that getting this fixed was her top priority. It was enough of a bluff to work, and she stays out of the way that it’s almost like no one knows she doesn’t really belong.

Although it probably helps that she… doesn’t do any actual work. No, she tinkers and picks up pieces and looks at wires intensely but each day she wonders if she’s actually going to get this repaired.

When, she has to assure herself. When she gets it repaired.

Even if she has… really no idea how to repair it. It’s not that she’s not mechanically inclined, and every Jedi before her had built their own saber right? But it’s disheartening to turn the broken pieces of kyber crystal in her hand. This saber had spoken to her when she first touched it, and she’s clearly unhappy it’s not saying much now. She succumbs to her defeat for a moment, folding her arms on the table and resting her head there, slumped over next to her work.

[ ooc: None of these work? Hit me up with a private plurk or on discord to plot something out. I will also do prose or brackets, with a slight preference for brackets ]

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Saturday has actually been watching for some time, leaning casually a rake and, basically, waiting for it.

"...they taste a lot better if you peel 'em first, and sprinkle on some sugar." She levies an assesing look at the other woman, shoving back a mop of black hair. "Rey, isn't it? Here, try this."

Saturday plucks an orange - they're in the citrus section - and peels with the suddenly very sharp fingernails of her metal arm. She splits the segments in two and offers Rey half.

"The yellow one was a lemon. This is an orange." Though she's offering with her metal hand, the fingernails don't look half as pointed as they did a second ago.

"I wasn't expecting anything so sour." Rey has the palate of someone who's eaten extremely little variety (just rations and whatever she caught herself in the desert), so despite her adventurous spirit, it's really hitting her hard. She works her jaw trying to get the taste out of her mouth while Saturday hands her something else to try.

She sniffs it a little warily before splitting it at it's natural breaks. She takes a much less enthusiastic bite, but makes a pleasant noise when it turns out to be very different from the lemon.

"This is how fruit should taste," she's talking with her mouth full because what are proper manners? She breaks off another piece, "Thank you. I'm guessing all of this stuff is native to Earth."

"At least lemons are sweet, too. Lime is bitter and sour - real taste experience." Saturday munches her own orange segments. "Limes are the green ones. And yeah, everything here so far seems to be from Earth. At least, I haven't seen anything I don't recognize, and on my metaplane we still haven't met any life that didn't come from earth."

Saturday's been considering, and 'alien' is starting to feel like a rude way to put it; the whole thing does depend entirely on your perspective, and when interdimensional travel gets involved what good is trying to keep an anything-centric view? She picks another orange and tosses it to Rey. "We're not getting paid, so I say dig in."

She offers Saturday a loose grin. She has no qualms in skirting the rules, especially for food. "I don't think Bob," she tips her head in the general direction of where she saw the farmer last, "is a big fan of grazing so just watch out for him so he doesn't tell us we can't come back."

It'd be such a pain to have to sneak in.

"I had never heard of Earth before I got here," Rey seems awfully casual about this fact. "Seems like most people are from there though."

"He's a crusty bastard, but he's been all right. Looks the other way if you don't take too much." Saturday had learned that quick, since the mess hall served just a little less than she needed.

"Where are you from, then? Not Earth, I take it?"

"Mm-mm," she shakes her head to indicate, no, she is no earthling. She manages to swallow most of what she's eating before she continues.

"Pretty much a nowhere desert planet," and honestly Jakku isn't worth naming even if Saturday would recognize it. It's not home, it's just where she was left. She shrugs, "No one really ever goes there willingly."

"Hoi, sounds like Puyallup. I'm from the wrong side of the tracks myself. Red Town. Biggest slum in the western hemisphere," Saturday says, with a note of defiant pride. "We're not so bad off that people don't come by on purpose, but they're all criminals and rich kids looking for a thrill."

There's a certain challenge in her voice as she says it, like she's testing Rey, or possibly a theory about Rey.

"We've just got the criminals," Rey sounds awfully nonchalant about that, shrugging. "I worked as a scavenger pulling salvageable parts out of Imperial starships in exchange for rations. It wasn't the most... above board activity but we din't really have any other choice."

Edited 2020-05-21 03:53 (UTC)

Saturday nods, satisfied. Rey is a normal, regular kind of person, then, someone who understands how the world works.

"Scrapping's not bad work, if you can get it. You had your own shop, or did you contract?"

"Oh stars, I would have loved my own shop. Plutt was always pulling the most serious banthashit," Rey is talking with her mouth full but apparently just on a tirade now. "Always changing scrap values day to day and trying to undercut us--"

Rey is ready to go on, apparently this is a topic she feels passionately exasperated about. It's easy to forget that it's not her life anymore regardless if she was on the rig or not. It's easier to talk about that life though than either of the new ones she's been thrust into.

She shakes it off, offering a soft smile before she changes the subject. "Do you tinker at all?"

Saturday listens astutely, with many supportive noises, outraged exclamations, and questions that indicate more than a passing experience with hand-to-mouth living. Plutt's shenanigans make her wince in sympathy.

"Pissant motherless fuck," she agrees. "How'd he keep folk from organizing against him? Paid his muscle that well?"

She shakes her head at Rey's question, grinning sheepishly. "I'm pretty useless with tech, actually. It's kind of a curse - the one expert I know says it's 'cause of me having a lot of magic that I came into real early. Fucks with the electrical currents, or something."

Emily hasn't had to blend in and pretend--that shiny futuristic medical degree of hers fast-tracked her to something resembling access--and she's come to filch components for circuitry the small robotics bench hasn't got. Being forced to do anything with these, ah, vintage supplies is certainly a challenge!

On her way back to robotics, she passes her roommate slumped at a bench and stops. "Rey? Not really the best spot for a nap!"

Rey's pity party that she's throwing for herself clearly was not meant to last long. She tips her head to peek an eye out at Emily's voice before sitting up, stretching her back and rolling her shoulders. She's been at this bench for a bit.

"Oh, hi. Not napping," she seems a bit distracted and holds up the broken lightsaber, "I'm working. In theory."

Alia works in the labs, but it's a more legitimate job. She's no tinkerer and, frankly, next to her? Almost the entirety of Jorgmund's staff are. She tends to keep to herself, however, because, well. What good would come of bothering people and attracting undue attention? Especially with a lot as unpredictable as some of the New Hires.

All the same, it's hard to miss the whole aura of frustration and despair Rey has going on over there. She slips over quietly and reaches out, plucking one of the lightsaber halves off of the table. The construction was odd, some pieces were of metals and techniques she'd never even seen before. A very interesting experience. But, looking at it - "Is there some sentimental reason you're not just building a new plasma sword? This one seems pretty well wrecked."

It doesn't feel accusatory, but Rey can't help but bristle a little when sentimentality is brought up, pursing her lips and holding back an immediate (and defensive) response. She holds onto things, and while she can deny as much as she cares to, deep down she knows it holds her back. She's been told so in both kind and much more blunt ways.

"It's not a normal sword," okay she's still a little defensive, but she thinks that bit is earned. It isn't just any old mass produced weapon. She taps the crystal, "This is the important part, although I want to preserve the casing if I can."

At least Alia didn't mean it like that. She catches the defensiveness, eyebrows rising slightly, and sets the half back down at the table. "Well, the casing's going to require a patch. The metal here is burnt, it'll never be structurally sound. You'll need to grind off the damaged material and then fit a ring or a band of some kind to hold it together." Rey... probably knows all of this, but Alia's used to humans not knowing as much as they should on subjects like this. Unless they were scientists. And, well, if Rey were a scientist, she'd already be fixing it, right?

But the crystals were the important part? They looked, well. Pretty well broken. She holds her hand out for one of them. "May I? What happened here, anyway? It looks like something exploded, but..."

Oh, this is genuine technical help, and Rey perks up at it, tilting her head and listening intently. She turns the casing in her hand as she speaks, confirming that, yeah, those fixes would likely get her at least some of the way there.

There's a bit of hesitancy to straight up hand over part of the kyber. Rey takes a moment, eyes flicking once from the kyber back to Alia, but her intentions seem honest enough.

"Sure," she places one of the halves gingerly into Alia's outstretched hand. It buys her a second as she mulls over how exactly to explain what happened. "That's... not far off from what happened. Someone was trying to take it from me, and we had a bit of a struggle over it."

A bit. Probably an understatement.

"The crystal is... concentrated energy," Rey wishes she had the texts she had stolen to learn more. There's still so much of the Force she didn't know. "I got knocked out from the blast but I think some of the energy was released when we broke it."

Loken, for his purposes, is also working on his gear in the R&D Labs. Unlike Rey, he isn't hiding it, but made an actual bureaucratic request, so the techs are watching him with their fingers hovering over the joy button should he act out in any way. Which is probably good, as he looks like either a very large droid. Or if the First Order made an oversized stormtrooper, with whirring power-assisted armor. He is presently wearing it, and checking the outputs and neural interfaces as he opens and closes his right hand trying to see if there is any input lag or power outage he should be aware of. His crimson eye-slits slide over Rey, slumped over in a corner, and he calls out to her, in a voxgrille emitted voice that makes him sound harsher than normal.

"Are you all right, Mamzel?"

She starts a bit at the question, head popping quickly up and snapping around to Loken. His appearance unnerves her, and things through Force feel so weirdly murky here that she can't get a good read on anyone's signatures. Not that she is an experienced Force user in the first place, but it still feels odd to dull that sense.

"I'm fine," she offers a bit sharply. What is it with men and dumb masks and voice modulators? "Just took a short break from working," she adds shuffling the pieces of the broken hilt around to not look totally idle.

"Ah, gear maintenance? I am not a techpriest, but if you need another set of eyes or an assistant I am at your disposal." He straightens, then bows slightly, the armor making a surprisingly graceful bow as the neural interfaces translate his motions quite well. If she can pick up anything from the force there is a sensation of calm, but old pain as well from him. Determination and anger, though not directed at her.

Catra likes the gardens the best out of the whole rig. There's green stuff here that reminds her of the nicer places she'd been on Etheria. Yeah, all the industrial crap was like the Fright Zone, but the Fright Zone wasn't really home. Just the place she'd grown up. She's wandering along, just taking a chance to use some spare time to stretch her legs when the sound of the fall and the splash comes to her ears. She turns, just in time to see Rey trying to haul herself out of the pool. Catra snorts, then breaks into full on laughter.

But at least she's moving towards Rey, hand outstretched to help her out of the pool.

"You're not supposed to swim in these," she says, trying not very hard to stop laughing at the site of the soaked Jedi.

Rey gladly accepts Catra's hand, hoisting herself back on the edge, gasping for a deep breath now that she's back above water.

"It wasn't exactly intentional," she huffs, reaching back to wring out a hair bun that came loose. "My datapad fell in."

And then she fell in, but Rey is going to try and keep a little of her dignity and not explicitly say that. She lays said communicator on the ground, safely guarded from falling into the water again. Not that it really does her any good now. She's not even going to attempt powering it up at the moment, figuring it'll do more harm than good.

"So you went after it." Just like something Adora would do. Not that Catra is going to say it out loud. Her amused laughter has softened to a mere grin as she she plops down to sit next to the soaking Rey. She keeps a good couple feet of distance though--she's in no hurry to get wet.

"How'd you manage to drop your pad in there anyway?"

"Yeah," Rey isn't too proud to not smile a little at herself, offering Catra a loose grin. It would have been a comical sight, she imagines. She starts tugging at the scratchy collar of her coveralls, wondering if it'd be worth it to run back to her bunk in just her undershirt and not get weighed down by the bulky jumpsuit.

Her face scrunches a little at Catra's question, expression souring. She can't help but reveal some emotions about it. That doesn't stop her from trying to speak plainly and evenly about it.

"I was just talking to someone from my home," she nudges the communicator with her foot. "It was... frustrating."

"Oh," Catra says in response to that answer. She draws her knees up towards her chest and rests her chin on them, eyes and ears both focused on the other woman.

"Been there, done that," she says with a groan, her eyes rolling. "There's someone I know from home here, too."

"Yeah?" She perks up a little. She's not... excited, per se, but from Catra's reaction it seems like she's not the only one who got stuck with someone who possibly made this whole situation more frustrating.

"We just have... some history, I guess." Putting it mildly there, but Rey really isn't in a place where she's fully figured out her own feelings at the matter and oscillates between being angry with him and being angry that he takes up so much space in her brain. "I don't know about you but they managed to pick the one person who makes this even more complicated."

Edited 2020-05-17 01:57 (UTC)

"It's the same for me," Catra admits after a moment. "It's... stupid. I shouldn't be so weird about it because we kind of made up, I guess? But I still feel really unsure. We were fighting each other like... yesterday, it feels like." Ugh, is she really going to just spill this to Rey? The girl she met looking for a place to sleep? She turns her head away, like that might make her feel less vulnerable. Being vulnerable sucks. She should change the subject.

"I'll deal with it though. No big deal."

Rey sort of idly picks at a thread on the sleeve of her jumpsuit. She's not too eager to spill her guts to a stranger, but her eyes flick up to Catra before they're back down at her sleeve. It just feels a little bit familiar.

And Rey has never really been able to talk about this particular person without raising suspicion so perhaps that is egging her on too.

"Yeah," she offers sympathetically. "We um..." She twists her face searching for the right word, "Had a truce I guess. We fought but then worked together but now..." there's something on Rey's face that probably makes it obvious that's a vast oversimplification but she shrugs and presses on. "Like you said, just have to deal with it."

"Mmm." Catra plucks at some of the grass growing at the edge of the pool, her fingers worrying it into little peices as she thinks.

"She's always been so focused on... being the hero, you know? She tries to do everything. For everyone. She never lets herself just--just be what she wants or do what she wants. And I don't think..." Catra growls under her breath as she tries to collect her thoughts and can't seem to make them focus.

"I don't think she gets how I feel."

That last sentence hits Rey in a strange way. She shifts and sort of fidgets uncomfortably at the edge of the pool.

Calm. Control. Those were supposed to be the qualities a Jedi had right? Rey can do that.

"Maybe..." Rey sort of rolls the word around her mouth indecisively, trying to not let her defenses go up in too much of an obvious way. "Obviously I don't know what she's thinking, but--" She tips her head, eyes squinting but unfocused at some indeterminate and really meaningless place that is not Catra. "Maybe she doesn't know how to be everything needs her to be."

Her hands sort of twist in her lap again and she taps her heel, the most minor outlets of the sudden onslaught of nervous energy she's feeling talking about people from home and well-- feelings. Complicated feelings.

"Or maybe she's scared."

"What she doesn't know is how to do what she wants. She's so focused on being the hero and doing everything for everyone--I don't know." Catra gripes, her face twisting into an unhappy grimace. There's unhappiness, anger, and discontent radiating off of her. But also concern. And love. So much love buried under all of those other awful feelings.

"Probably? I mean, I know she gets scared. And..." She exhales sharply. This is stupid. Why is she talking to Rey about it? And yet, she continues.

"She always has to take everyone's problems on her shoulders, the idiot."

Edited 2020-05-27 00:52 (UTC)

Adora's running an errand, ducking through the hallways and a little lost in thought when she rounds a corner and spots Rey, soaking wet and dripping water in her wake. Her eyes widen and then she hurries forward toward her.

"Rey! What happened? Are you OK?"

She looks fine to Adora, but she can't be sure. She's definitely soaked through.

"Hey Adora," Rey is, in fact, alive and in one piece. She even manages offer a weak wave. She's not really injured besides a bruised ego. Her elbow kinda hurts, but really that's minor.

"It's kind of a funny story," she's not so proud that she can't find the humor in it, offering a little bit of a shy grin and hooking her thumb behind her. "I had a run in with the hydroponics in the gardens."

"Did you fall in? Oh no-" Adora can't help but be somewhere between amused and concerned for her new acquaintance (friend?) and she frowns, thinking, "I'm going to grab you a towel, hold on!

"Yeah," Rey huffs a soft breath, "My communicator fell in and I tried to save it."

Not successfully, obviously.

"Wouldn't recommend it for swimming, not that I can anyway. Too shallow."

"Definitely too shallow for that..." Adora laughs and then she pauses as her brain catches up.

"You don't know how to swim? I could teach you!"

If they had a pool, anyway.

"Oh?" Rey's never one to shy away from a new challenge, always curious to learn something new. She smiles and nods, her bad mood mostly extinguished even if she's still dripping wet in the middle of the hall.

"Yeah, I grew up in a desert. Not a whole ton of places to practice. I think the gardens had more greenery than the whole planet."

"Really? A planet that's nothing but desert? That sounds... wow. Not great."

She pulls a face and then tries to move past the thought. She's gotten used to greenery and living things. The idea of a world without them seems strange and alien.

"But - yeah - I'm not sure if they have a pool, but I could definitely try to figure out a way to teach you the basics! We had to learn during cadet training and I've always been pretty good at it."

It wasn't like he was actively avoiding Rey, or anything since their argument... if it could even be called that. His phone screen had been shattered at his hand in the aftermath, either way, whatever one wanted to call it.

Kylo was just keeping to himself. Same as he had been. He was not what these people called "a team player", isn't that what they asked him when he arrived? He'd answered no, and meant it. There was a lot about the rig to discover, that he hadn't yet. He would take his time to discover, as opposed to rushing in and being found out. Then punished for that.

When he steps into the lab, he doesn't even need to go inside to know Rey is there. She's working, busy and tinkering with something he can't see but has an idea of. For a moment, he considers taking the coward's way out: walking away and leaving like he'd never been. But by now, she's likely already sensed him so there would be no point. Stepping silently inside, he announces himself with the grace and absolute sugar coated charm one can expect from Kylo Ren.

"You won't be able to fix it like that."

His presence pricks at the edge of her mind, and she squeezes her eyes shut, even more tightly than she had a moment ago. A fresh wave of annoyance thinly veiling hurt bubbles in her stomach. Maybe if she just keeps her head down and ignores him he'll go away.

He does not, in fact, go away.

Her eyes flick up from where she's rested them across her folded arms and she just sort of fixes a stare at him for a moment. Then, sitting up straight, she reaches out to grab the main broken pieces and keeps her grip tight on them.

"I shouldn't need to fix it in the first place."

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Rey embarrasses herself in various venues - Open

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talking to rey is like talking to adora without the emotional baggage

they deserve a break from the baggage tbh

Re: they deserve a break from the baggage tbh

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guess WHAT

r u d e