open ( ☄ ) across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.

[realists]

WHO: Jyn Erso & YOU
WHERE: Around the ship
WHEN: The first few days after her arrival (Dec 28-31)
WHAT: Getting her bearings, exploring, etc, etc.
WARNINGS: SPOILERS IN COMMENTS PROBABLY; mark in the subject line if you don't want them and I will steer clear. I will match format as well, so come at me.

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[ 001 - HANGER BAY ]

Jyn knows something familiar from home is in that hanger bay and it drives her insane that she can't reach it. Which is probably what draws her back to the door morning after morning, checking to see if the doors will open.

They do not. She kicks them. They still do not open.

Something something put your freakin' dog tags on and get over it, Erso later and she gets inside to peer at the other ships, but mainly it's to throw herself on Cassian's U-Wing and just sit there. It's a study of pointlessness since she can't go anywhere on it, but it's from home and that's all that really matters.

[ 002 - TRAINING FACILITIES ]

Her trips to the training facilities garner better results, at least if you consider siphoning off excess energy through a violent explosion of fists and feet to be something better. The training dummies fare better than, say, a person would, but it's honestly hard to tell if Jyn would pull her punches with a person. She works herself until her limbs are shaking and her muscles are strained to breaking point and then simply moves on to the next apparatus.

The circuit she makes quickly becomes her standard, even when she ventures into the gym late into the night. Boxing, running, climbing, running again.

She's hooked into the climbing wall when her fingers slip and she goes flying down before the auto belay catches her and jerks her to a stop with a hastily aborted shriek of surprise. She kicks the wall. It does nothing.

"Damn it!" She jerks on the belay to lower herself down but finds herself... stuck. Which is just great. She jerks at it again. Jerks at it gently like maybe if she is nice it will give in to her. Guess what? It doesn't. Stuck and only half unwilling to wrangle herself out of the harness to climb down freely, Jyn glances around for someone else to press the button from the bottom. She tips all the way back until she's basically upside down and calls out, "Hey! Could you give me a hand?"

[ 003 - SHOPPING CENTRE ]

Maybe, maybe, if her assigned job wasn't as an exterminator, Jyn would actually work. She has no particular distaste for bugs and parasites, but she also doesn't have any real need to work with them on a daily basis. Not being incredibly social doesn't mean she wants her companions to be bugs.

Still, she works at least one single, solitary shift for the extra credits only so she can paw around the shopping center without dragging Cassian away from his own job. His own much less generally offensive job. Meandering around a market is not something she ever had time for, usually striking with precision and retreating. Now she wanders, unsure of how to find what she's looking for.

The confusion doesn't look comfortable on her expression, eyebrows knitting together in annoyance.

Comments

[straycloud]

"You understood half. That must have been enough." Half strikes him as a sensible amount, and he nods amiably. Briefly, there's a flash of shrewdness in his expression, but it flickers out as quickly as it appears. There's no reason to jump to conclusions, not right now, and he has other priorities. "Do you think you could tell me of this friend while we look for... ah, what are we looking for, again?"

[realists]

"I'm looking for yarn." But she has no idea where to find yarn because it hasn't been on her shopping list in all her years, on any of her planets. Yarn isn't particularly useful in her life.

She doesn't even know where to start. All the clothing stores are pre-made clothes and she just wants, well, parts.

[straycloud]

Koumyou feels suddenly enlightened, and it startles a laugh out of him. Not at her, no, but at the simple nature of her need. It isn't the whole picture, absolutely not, but there was a reason their paths crossed. To find yarn is the perfect reason.

"How amazing," he remarks mildly, his squint becoming more pronounced as his customary smile reaches his eyes. He beckons to her, starting off as if he has full faith that she'll follow. He glances back to her, adding, "I'm glad you called out. I know just the place."

[realists]

She wants to protest that she was not calling out!!! but decides against it, going with the flow in order to achieve her objective. Her absurd objective of yarn.

Which means she does follow, mouth slanted in a frown. Somewhere Baze is telling her not to encourage him, but she needs the yarn.

"Do you knit?"

[straycloud]

It's probably for the best that she just goes with it. Somehow, resistance would have only managed to encourage him even more.

"I probably could if I wanted to, but I prefer to fold paper." There's logic to his statement, if obscure and something he doesn't bother sharing with Jyn. He ducks through a group blocking the walkway, slowing only for a moment to be sure he doesn't lose her. "My hands are better suited to it. Your hands look more accustomed to it, too."

[realists]

"I don't fold paper." Or knit, for that matter. She has no hobbies at all when it comes down to it. Cleaning her stolen weapons? Stealing food? Does trying not to die count as a hobby? She'd had dolls, once upon a time, a rainbow of stuffed animals that all had names she still remembers and pretends to forget.

She follows after him cautiously, mouth settling into something not quite a frown. A natural seriousness.

[straycloud]

"We'll have to pick some up." It's an absurd, overly-familiar offer, but it strikes him as a good idea. It isn't that much of a walk to get to the craft store with some obscure punny name that escapes him at the moment. They'd have gotten there sooner had he been more determined to head there directly. "It's better than chanting mantras. You don't have to memorize words with paper,"

[realists]

"I don't chant either."

There's a lot of things she doesn't do. She mostly just beats stuff up until she feels better but that has been working for her since she was very small and used to bite people when they upset her. She'd still bite people now if it gave her an advantage.

There's a tiny note of derision on her tone, but she isn't opposed to faith on a whole, generally. She just doesn't do that prayer thing. She tried once, it made her laugh.

[straycloud]

"Of course not." The only indication that he caught the tone of her words is the little grin he shoots her way. It's entirely unoffended, maybe even obscurely pleased. He turns, walking backwards and holding up a hand as if that illustrates something. "You don't have the hands for it."

His own hands are calloused, scarred, and distinctly not the hands of a man that spent his time practicing mudras. "You'll like the paper. I'll show you how to make a paper airplane."

[realists]

Without thinking, she looks down at her own hands. Pale and thin with cracked nails and bruised knuckles from a bad dream that made her lash out into a wall before Cassian calmed her down. She could have done with Maia's synthskin gloves still. They're an artist's hands or a scientist's, precise and careful and incomprehensibly strong.

She is neither, dreams plucked from her before they could fully form.

Looking up again, a crease sprouts between her eyebrows. "Airplane. You must be pre-spaceflight." Airplanes are just fairy tales, stories of uncivilized civilizations before any scientific renaissance that brought them into the galaxy. It's almost silly, how humans thought they were the only ones.

[straycloud]

"So I've been told. Isn't that the strangest thing?" Koumyou finally turns back around after narrowly averting a stumble. "All the possibility out here. There are so many people here that shine like stars, and I'm glad I get to reach out to them."

There's much he should do back in Shangri-la, but it could wait. It had to, clearly, but he'd return to it. Abruptly, he turns his attention to a storefront, grinning broadly. "Aha! We're here."

[realists]

He sounds so much like Chirrut, nonsense that only makes half sense, that it makes her chest ache. She half expects him to speak to the willing spirit of the Force surrounding them, but the rational part of her knows that the Force is unknown to him. Maybe it's still unknown to her. She doesn't know.

Her eyes flicker to the front of the shop and she pulls a face at the brightness, the pastels and glistening glass windows. It's unlike most things she's seen, but then, nearly everything on the ship is unlike anything she's seen. Mostly the food.

"We'll find yarn here?"