hadriel_logs | Intro Log: Eight Legs No Heart

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Intro Log: Eight Legs No Heart

Who: New arrivals and everyone else!
What: The intro log for June.
Where: The colosseum and all around the city.
When: June 10th-15th
Warnings: Spiders. Soooo many spiders. New people. Probably swearing.

For once, the new arrivals to Hadriel will not be waking up on the cold hard ground of the colosseum. Oh, sure, you'll still awaken in the arena - but this time the Door has been kind enough to ensure that you wake up comfortably arranged in a very nice chair. Or maybe not so comfortably. Some of those look pretty awkward - hopefully you didn't wake up with a crick in your neck! And hey, feel free to try to drag some of these super cool chairs to your new homes. They're probably not cursed or anything.

As you make your way out of the arena, be careful getting to close to the walls - well, except that's the only way out, so good luck! Chilling up on there waiting to get the drop on you are Skulltulas. These funky-looking spiders have squishy underbellies, but their upper exoskeletons are hard and very difficult to break through. They really just want to nibble you a few times, and maybe suck out all of your blood. No big deal, right? Have fun!

Have you conquered your arachnophobia and managed to escape? Great! Feel free to go explore the rest of the city! Find a house, find a new monster, or simply scavenge for supplies. Good luck, and enjoy your stay in Hadriel!

► This log covers June 10th-15th.
► Feel free to make your own logs as well!
► All characters arrive with phones that have network communication.
► Please put your character's name and open/closed in the subject line of your starters!

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"Because you are my mother, yes?"

Duh.

....This is getting troubling. Now that he looks at her hands, too... does this mean that she forgot, like Galadriel? He doesn't like that idea.

What.

"What." Rey blinks. Did he just say what she thought he did?

She shakes her head. It isn't the first time someone has ever come up to her, acting like they knew her when she had no memory of them. Both in this world and her home. Having your head and memories tampered with tends to invite incidents like those. But what this kid is suggesting is something entirely new. No one has ever thought of her as a mother before.

Until now, evidently. But why?

"You must be mistaken. Can't be your mother. That's not even possible..."

Aren't we lucky that they had Sex Ed With Firo And Rey now, because Muscovy can guess what her issue with the possibility of being his mother is.

"Family does not have to be related by blood, yes? What is important is that you don't leave each other for good no matter what happens. And you are my mother so you should not try to leave me, yes?"

Not related by blood.

Well, that sort of explains some things. Sort of.

"That isn't... No. Am not your mother. Have never even met you before."

This is weird. This is so goddamn--

Wait a second.

...Waaaait a second.

"You wouldn't happen to come from some other world that you weren't from originally, would you?" She recalls the stuff Carlisle had said to her, and this is ringing all too familiar. "Do you know Firo, too?"

So that is how it is. For a moment, loneliness washes over him. It wasn't that bad when Galadriel forgot about him. She was his aunt, but only that, and had only been his primary caretaker for a fairly brief time. Rey... there is a reason why they had come to the conclusion that she should take the title of his mother. Because she just was a lot closer. To have her deny that she even knows him-

But that is the solution, isn't it? He just has to make her remember. Tell her all the things so that she will know that they are a family.

He nods, the smile returned. "He is my big bro. And you are my mother, and we are a family. We lived together on the planet, and when the other Rey came you adopted his last name and I did too. And you're the head of the household because the treehouse was yours and you're the strongest."

Well, his story lines up with what she already knows. Carlisle even called her 'Ms. Prochainezo' when they first met.

Still. As far as she is concerned, the 'Rey' that those two know is a completely different person. She isn't obligated to take on the responsibilities of this other Rey that exists in some other universe. Especially when that entails being some kid's mother.

"Apologies. Don't remember any of those things. Am not your family. Wouldn't wish that on anyone, anyway."

Rey had been pretty clear to Nick about what being family entails to her. How she has a track record for hurting them. No one should willingly want that.

"You cannot stop being family, yes?"

His smile might be a bit too sharp, too bright now.

Family is forever, that's the very definition of family. You can fight and hurt each other, but in the end you will come back together. You cannot leave for good, you cannot just walk away.

Once you have committed, you cannot back out, and it doesn't matter if the worlds are being silly and take her from a place where she won't remember yet.

This is maddening. Also absurd. While he is smiling, her jaw locks up and her hand balls into a fist. For someone who has tried and tried to disassociate herself from the mistakes of her past selves, accepting this is too much. Mostly because she doesn't even remember because it also wasn't her.

"No," she snaps, turning away before she can even look at the kid. "We are not family. Don't even know you."

Rey really is living up to the 'you can hurt each other' aspect of family, as she makes to leave. You can't just walk away? Well, she's trying.

"Trying" being the key word here.

Because Muscovy cannot force her - he's weaker than her, and he knows it - but he can follow her.

She'll come around and stop being silly eventually. He just has to be patient. Good thing that patience is a thing that he is good at.

...And now he's following her. Great.

Perhaps if she ignores him, he'll go away. She keeps walking, taking the long route towards their house. If Muscovy talks, she won't answer. Whatever he has to say, she doesn't want to hear it. Not about this other world, this other Rey, or this 'family' she supposedly had made for herself there.

While she doesn't look at him, she can sense the boy still following her by the time she makes it to her house. It's a strange looking structure, though not out of place with the architecture of this city. And spacious, to boot. Definitely not a place where Rey would be living by her lonesome.

It's also a significant upgrade from a treehouse.

Muscovy doesn't say anything, and for a while she needs to turn around before he is noticeable.

That ends when his fairies decide that they have stayed in the canister that dangles from his backpack long enough and fly up, chattering at him with their bell-like voices, growing agitated that he doesn't answer before they're distracted by something that they pass and take off to look at that.

They return after a while, carrying a big bag of chips, and settle down on his head to open the bag and start to eat, so that the rustling of the bag and the crushing of chips announces his position.

He looks at the house curiously, but only briefly, because he is mostly focused on not losing her.

What the h--

When Rey hears those chimes, she does glance over, finding two little flying people floating around Muscovy before taking off. A brow arches as she turns to look ahead, acting as though nothing ever happened.

Hearing the bag crinkles and the chip crunching, the muscles in her face twitch a little more. He's still following her. Why? Because he thinks she's someone else. And while it's not like it's easy to mistake her face for another person, it's still a frustrating thought.

She scoffs to herself, continuing to ignore the boy as she makes her way through the front door. While she attempts to slam the door shut before Muscovy can make it through, there is a little space and window of opportunity for him to do so. Sneaky that he is.

He'll take the opportunity, slipping in after her, complete with munching fairies and big backpack, and then just stand there, looking around briefly while he waits for her to continue on. Or stay there.

Hopefully, she didn't trick him in here to then slam the door shut on him and run away, but if so... he'll find her again. He's fairly good at finding people.

As it turns out, the two of them aren't the only ones in the house. Hearing someone coming up the walkway, Nick had left his desk upstairs and headed down to the first floor, glad to work in the company of his roommate rather than in the silence upstairs. He's moving just a hair slower than usual -- those steps are giving his leg trouble again -- so he doesn't make it to the door by the time Rey's through it.

Correction: Rey and guest. Nick's glowing eyes start at the flying... insects (he'd swear they looked like something out of a children's book at first glace, but given he comes from a world where giant, radioactive mosquitoes are common, he's not ruling out that they're something more sinister). They trail down to the kid's backpack, finally landing on the kid himself, giving him a curious look. His gaze is only there a moment before it flicks back to Rey.

"Didn't know you'd be bringing company over." He'd have put on his trench coat if so, and maybe be less surprised by the fact that Rey brought home a child in the first place. Apparently, the Door had no qualms with bringing in even young kids.

The flustered ringing in her ears almost deafens her to Muscovy's presence when he breaks through the door. By then Rey is marching into the house, shoulders squared and hands in fists when she stops in the middle of the living room.

She blinks at Nick coming down the stairs, the ringing only just subsiding for her to make out his words. Her senses flare up again when it occurs to her what he said.

An "oh goddammit" blurts out of her mouth as her head swings from the child over her shoulder, and back to Nick. "I wasn't," she hisses through her teeth. "He just followed me here."

NICK HELP. Rey doesn't know what to do with a child that thinks she's their parent. In all of the many lives that she has crammed into her brain, this one is new territory for her. And that makes it terrifying.

He doesn't contest that he just followed her there - after all that is kind of what happened. So he'll just stand by the door, the fairies thankfully quietli sitting on his head as they watch the big things curiously, and wait for the two adults to have their conversation, looking Nick up and down with interest as he stands there. Who is this man, and how are him and Rey related?

It doesn't take a detective to see that Rey is being pushed to a limit by this kid's mere presence. Nick doesn't know why that is just yet, but he knows that her hitting any kind of an edge can make a situation dangerous in no time.

So he steps forward to diffuse the situation, to pull Rey out of it and let her decompress. "Let me handle this," he utters to her as he crosses the room, dropping to one knee before their guest to put him on eye-level. "You got a name, kid?"

Edited 2016-06-15 03:39 (UTC)

For as calm as the boy seems to be, Rey is the very opposite. Her unease is only slightly muted, but palpable enough that someone like Nick would be able to pick it out from a mile away.

She wants to tell him that the kid's crazy, but the facts lining up make that difficult. Still, when it had come to Carlisle, he hadn't expected much from her, if anything at all that she can recall. This one, whoever he may be, wants her to be his mother. A total stranger, no less!

Relief is visible in her disposition as Rey sinks back when Nick passes by, approaching the strange child with a more gentler nature than the one Rey had graced him with.

He's starting to wonder about how stressed out Rey is. Yes, she seemed to be stressed out by him, but that heightened when this new person showed up (that it also coincidenced with him forcing his way into her home doesn't occur to him.

And the guy that had hurt Rey and made her unhappy and was potentially dangerous for her was someone whom one could not receive a proper physical description on, because he might be able to get a new body...

Rey doesn't seem to be straight-up afraid of him, but he wouldn't have expected anything else, because Rey is strong and probably wouldn't want to admit to being afraid of anyone.

Why not cut straight to the point. Instead of answer, he replies with a question in turn.

"Are you two from the same world?" It's directed at Nick, not Rey, for obvious reasons, but he tries to keep an eye on both for their reactions.

Nick makes it his business to know most of the folks in town, if not by name then by face or presence over the network. This is the first time he's seen a kid this young in Hadriel -- with all the spiders he'd seen around when he'd been on his patrol earlier, the assumption he's new is an easy one to make.

However, the kid asks an oddly specific question in return without answering the one he was given. Nick doesn't balk, doesn't give a tell that he and Rey have an eerily similar nature, despite their vastly different appearances. It could be a coincidence, but Rey isn't exactly the talkative sort with most folks -- neither about Hadriel, nor herself, so the chances she'd have explained the multiple worlds and her synthetic nature to anyone so new is zero to none, especially when that someone is a small child she likely just met.

That is unless Rey has been hiding the kid somewhere, or knows him from her own world. Given the question posed, he doubts the latter. Of course, the Door has brought in all sorts over time: synthetics, an alien, the consciousness of a ship. Nick suspects there's more to this 'kid' than he can tell from just a glance. There always is.

Still, he handles him like one. Having lived in Diamond City for so long, Nick is no stranger to children. "I asked you first."

"And I asked the more important question, yes?"

Normally, he would back down - this stranger seems to be stronger than him, which would be enough of a reason when he's alone, and he's not just alone but... looking at how Rey stands off to the side and caused the issue in the first place, he for now is also without his most important back-up. And he doesn't know what is up with his second most important back up - how things are with Firo.

So he should back down.

But the thing is, even if Rey doesn't remember him, she's still his mother. She's still family, and while Firo doesn't know it anymore, the two of them vowed that should that man would meet a terrible accident should he ever show up so he couldn't trouble Rey ever again.

Which means that he needs to figure out who this guy in front of him is, at least to the point where he can rule out that it is him.

"No," Nick responds calmly, unimpressed by the kid's deflection. "Seeing how you're the one who followed her here and walked right into our home, maybe you oughtta introduce yourself before we get to the hard questions."

Not that the answer to the kid's question is particularly difficult, but the finer details may be tough for a child to grasp --that is if this is a child at all, and not some alien in disguise or another trick of the gods. Seeing how unnerved he's made Rey, there has to be something.

"And seeing how you are a strange man living with my mother, I get to ask you who you are first, yes?"

That seems quite logical to him - children might not have any power over their parents, but it is always enforced on boys that they should look after all the women in their family, or at least he has seen that a lot. So by what people say, it should be within the boundaries of even a child to look after his mother, no matter the age.

So there it is. His eyebrow rises in a silent question: mother?

He's dealt with his fair share of stragglers in the wasteland -- kids whose parents had abandoned them or been killed by raiders, children with nowhere to go but the refuge a place like Diamond City might offer them. Some ended up back in the wastes, eking out a life for themselves, or dying in the attempt because they thought they could take on the world alone. Some, however, made friends, surrogate families. They got attached, stuck around.

Which is what Nick assumes happened here. He'd be partially right, though it's not a lost duckling situation. The rabbit hole goes far deeper.

"I'm Nick Valentine," he says, before adding firmly, "now answer the question."

Edited 2016-06-15 13:27 (UTC)

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