kore_logs | [Open] Farming Club Shenanigans

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[Open] Farming Club Shenanigans

Who: The Farming Club! Also open to anyone who wants to come by and harass them.
What: Agricultural avengers assembling to till some soil, plant some crops, water the ones they've already got, and converse amongst themselves in a lively fashion.
Where: A large patch of open space between House 11 and the edge of the woods.
When: Day 79-81 (please indicate which day in the thread header!)

Ned's not really one for leadership, but it isn't quite so daunting when he knows he's just acting as a kind of deputy. Erik was the one who said he should get everyone together, and so get everyone together he shall. He put out a message on the network the previous evening, naming a time and place and politely (and a little awkwardly) requesting that everyone whose name is on that trusty list for farming duties show up to help get some more things planted.

They won't be able to accomplish it in one day. Some things will need to go in other places with different soil types (according to Lydia, anyway), and some things will need to wait for the greenhouse to be built. But in the meantime there are plenty of things to be done. Grass needs to be cleared, to give them a larger plot to plant in. Someone mentioned irrigation systems. He thinks there are other things - ways of regulating sun and shade, of keeping the crops safe from birds or other dangers. He hopes he'll have enough willing hands to help do them.

Ned's brought all the tools he can find - shovels, trowels, gloves, seeds, and assorted other items. He has also set up a wobbly table that he found in the church basement, with a few pitchers of cold lemonade and a dozen or so glasses on top. There is a social component to this too, he knows. It's part of all of them working together, against the people who brought them here, looking into a future in which they aren't starving and at one another's throats, but dependent on one another to keep all this going.

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Ned isn't sure how he should divide up his attention - should he be assigning other people tasks, overseeing them, or working on his own? From the look of it, most people seem to be settling in to their individual tasks well enough, and he's grateful. He isn't cut out for this bossing-people-around business, even if they are willing to be bossed. That's more Erik's specialty than his.

If people have questions, they can come him, but in the meantime he's going to be making himself useful. He starts shoveling at the grass, clearing up space for more planting. As he does, though, he keeps an eye on what other people are doing, watches for any disasters in the making. Though he feels like a fraud pretending to be an expert, he at least knows a couple of things, can provide a little oversight.

Wallie's not exactly involved in this. Still, he's out walking about, getting some sun and some good weather and some exercise, and... well, he's not the sort of guy to turn down a task that needs to be done. Shonsu might be above this sort of labour, but Wallie certainly doesn't consider himself to be.

So he picks up a shovel and comes over to work beside Ned, as casually as though he'd already volunteered to do this.

"Stop me if I'm in the wrong spot," he says. "Just along here, right?"

Odd how, despite the size of the town and the limited number of inhabitants, there are still plenty of people that Ned has never spoken to before. Ned has seen Wallie around, once or twice. Pretty hard to miss him, actually. He's never gone up and introduced himself, however. If he's honest with himself, he knows the reason why, too, and it's not just his perpetual shyness around new people, though that certainly didn't hurt.

Wallie is, well, frightening-looking.

Ned would hate to be the sort of man to judge a book by his cover, or to avoid another person because of the way they look, but in this case his timidity has won out over his principles. For one thing, he isn't accustomed to other people being his height, much less towering over him by more than a half a foot. He's used to compensating to make other people feel more comfortable around him, not being the one made uncomfortable. He's also not really used to seeing people with face tattoos - are those swords? He thinks they are, maybe.

So there is just a dash of nerves in Ned's voice when he answers, "Just here is great, thank you." Should he leave it at that? No, that's rude. Ned pauses in his own shoveling, turns towards the man and says, "Uh, hi, by the way. I'm Ned."

The grin Wallie gives Ned is warm and boyish and entirely at odds with his appearance. He knows he's a bit of a fright. Handsome, maybe, and he certainly feels like he traded up in the whole deal, but also a bit overwhelming. He does his best.

"Wallie," he says. "The name is Wallie. You're running this, aren't you?"

He starts digging. There's a pleasure in rough labour, something he's missed, something satisfying in a life that's mostly aimless. Maybe he can't compete with some of the more... supernatural... residents, but he's strong for a regular human being.

"Running is giving me too much credit, I think."

That grin goes some way towards setting Ned at his ease. Privately, he thinks that 'Wallie' is an awfully pedestrian name for someone who looks so out of the ordinary, but he kind of likes that. He lets a couple moments pass in companionable silence before he works himself up to say.

"More like, vaguely organizing, or, I don't know, not even that. Inadvertently catalyzing. I just sort of found some tools and asked people to show up. People are doing the rest all on their own." As per usual when Ned's a bit nervous, he is chattering on at quite a brisk pace. "It's not like I even know all that much about farming. I mean, yeah, I guess I did some of this sort of stuff, part-time, but that was ages ago and I was never in charge."

Ned stops his ramble with a short sigh. This is why he isn't meant for leadership positions. Hard to seem like an authority figure when he can't stop himself from explaining his own lack of qualifications immediately to anyone he talks to.

"So uh, how long you been here?"

"A couple months, give or take a few days." He tries to keep track, but the days just sort of slip by and run together after a while. He tries to keep a rough sort of tally system, the best he can do without any actual ability to read or write, but he knows he's forgotten days here and there. It's an inevitable amount of human error.

Wallie flashes another grin. "Don't sell yourself short, either. Catalysts are important." He's a geochemist, after all. He knows these things.

There is, though, something on his mind. It's the main reason he hadn't offered Ned a handshake. He couldn't have failed to noticed Ned's 'coming out' on the network, and well... he doesn't like believing in things like that, but if it's true? He has no idea what would happen if Ned touched him.

Bringing it up seems awkward, though.

Ned is pleased enough at the lack of handshake that he hasn't even noticed the omission. He smiles faintly at the injunction not to sell himself short, thinks that Wallie seems quite different from what he'd been expecting.

"Thirty days for me, today. Well, thirty days, four hours, and uh..." he pauses to look at his wrist communicator, prods it until it shows him the time, "...twenty-two minutes." Belatedly, he realizes that the over-precise timing thing might seem creepy or odd and adds in an embarrassed mumble, "Or thereabouts."

For a while he focuses on upturning the grass, pausing now and then to check that he's gotten all the roots, or to bend down and pick up a troublesome rock that's in the way. There's a rhythm and monotony to the work that he doesn't mind all that much, but he knows it will go by even faster with conversation.

He means to ask where and when Wallie is from, the same way he would anyone else, but what he blurts is, instead, "So uh, those tattoos on your face are pretty unusual. Or, I guess, they seem like that to me, though I guess it's possible that where you come from, everyone has those, and the people here are the ones who look strange."

Oh, good to see his foot still fits so nicely in his mouth. "Sorry, um. That was probably rude. I was just curious."

Edited 2013-06-10 01:31 (UTC)

Wallie turns, a slow grin spreading across his face before he burst into laughter -- warm, loud laughter. "No, don't worry about it. Everyone asks me that sooner or later."

He leans back, leaning on his shovel for a moment, drawing the back of his hand across his forehead. "The truth is, I died, and came back as someone else." He'll let it go unspoken as to the implications for Ned's powers. "I still have his body, and he..." Another quick grin, almost bashful. "It's a preliterate society. No written language. The tattoo on my forehead marks me -- well, him -- us -- as a swordsman of the seventh and highest rank. Everyone in that society has some sort of craft mark tattooed on their forehead."

If he's slightly wistful, well. It's not so much the place he misses, but the people.

Laughter is better than a lot of other reactions; Ned smiles back hesitantly, feels the knot of nervousness in his gut loosen. It only continues to do so as Wallie explains the origins of his tattoos. He definitely hadn't anticipated quite such an epic or complicated story, but he listens with increasing attention, mouth dropping open a little.

"So, wait, lemme get this straight. You died and woke up in someone else's body?" That in itself isn't too much of a stretch of imagination for Ned, and if Wallie has been around for as long as he says he has, perhaps he'll be aware of that. Resurrection, or avoiding causing it, is an everyday part of his life. "And that someone else was from a different world." Or at least, Ned guesses so, from the way Wallie describes it, the way he says 'that' society as if it weren't his own, the fact that he uses the word 'preliterate' which implies a knowledge of literacy. "And in that world people have tattoos of their professions, and you're in the body of a level-seven swordsman, I guess, which would explain the sword," Ned nods to the weapon strapped to Wallie's back.

"That is..." there's a pause, and then the corner of Ned's mouth starts to tug upwards into a grin, "...possibly the coolest thing I have ever heard."

Well, that's a new reaction. Wallie grins, shaking his head dismissively. "'Cool' is a new description of it, but yeah, that's about the size of it. I was living in Edmonton when I died. Where I woke up was, well... somewhere different, yes."

Still grinning, he turns back to the digging, because he's feeling just a bit awkward and there's work to be done. "The previous owner of the body was called Lord Shonsu. He... well, he failed a task, and I was given his identity and his skills and told to take over."

He shrugs his broad shoulders, wondering how far Ned's willingness to accept his story will go. The existence of gods complicate things, even for him.

"I was... pretty sick, when I died. I thought I was still hallucinating in the hospital at first, having juvenile fantasies about being Conan the Barbarian with a sexy slave girl waiting on me. Then I met a god, and... things got filled in for me."

What would it be other than cool? Okay, Ned can actually imagine it being a lot of other things: traumatic, baffling, disorienting, depressing. But Wallie had spoken of it with relative ease and cheer. Besides which, his strange story mirrors closely some of Ned's sillier daydreams as a young boy. Dreams of waking up a different person - someone better and stronger, in a some magical other world where the rules were different. A colorful and dangerous and exciting place, thoroughly unlike the grey damp gloom of the boarding school.

He keeps listening in rapt silence. He knows he should probably go back to shoveling, the way Wallie has done, gives the ground a few distracted and half-hearted jabs that barely dislodge the top level of grass. The pretty sick part doesn't sound too fun, nor does the dying. It occurs to Ned that he died and came back, too, but he pushes that thought to the back of his mind where he's been working hard to keep it, since it happened. He's still not really ready to process it, yet.

"A... god?" All of this is sounding more and more like something out of a movie. It occurs to him for a second to wonder if Wallie is lying. Then again, far-fetched is the norm, here. Maybe what calls itself a god in this other world is nothing more than... than some other species with a great deal of power.

"What was the task? Did you succeed? Is-" he stops himself, realizes how he must sound. He bites his bottom lip, smiling and looking back down at his now-still shovel. "Sorry. Don't mean to interrogate you. It just... sounds really interesting, that's all."

"No, it's all right."

Wallie's... made his peace with it all, by now. It's his life now, for better or for worse, and even if it's different than the one he was born to, he's found a stability in it, a purpose, a degree of love that he never found in Saskatchewan as a boy, or New York, or Edmonton, or anywhere else his life has taken him. Not that his life was ever bad,, just... rootless.

"It was a minor god, I understand. A god of jewels. He appeared to me in the form of a small naked child, and the mission was on behalf of the Goddess who is the primary deity, I gather." Wallie throws over a shovelful of grass. "Gods are funny, incidentally. They won't just tell you what you need to do, which in this case was to go deal with sorcerers. Incidentally, not magic. Technology. Writing."

Ned is glad that Wallie isn't irritated by his constant questions, because it's a thrilling story and he'd hate not to hear any more. He goes back to his digging as he listens. Ned might not be willing to accept that there really are angels in this place, or that Judeo-Christian god-with-a-capital-G exists, but all of this is detached from his life and so fantastical that he doesn't question it. Why wouldn't there be a god of jewels, in this other world?

"Deal with them... how?" Ned doesn't know if that's a delicate way of saying he was supposed to use that rather large sword of his to get rid of the sorcerers in a very permanent way, or if he was negotiating some kind of deal or peace or who knows what.

"They used writing to do magic?" he asks, misunderstanding.

"No, not like that." Wallie shakes his head. "What they called sorcery, what they represented as being sorcery, was technology. Chemistry, engineering. They had a sort of electrical generator they used as a security device, they had gunpowder, they had lens-quality glass. The rest of the World is getting by with slave labour and simple tools and ritual dressed up as magic and no understanding. But the sorcerers have writing, so they can have books, so they can write down what they've discovered, so that they can build technology upon the discoveries of their forebears."

He lets out a breath of... well, it's something akin to excitement, admiration. In the sorcerers he sees the seeds of civilisation, and more of his own nature, then in the swordsmen.

"I couldn't have killed them, if that's what you're suggesting. And gods aren't that specific about how you're supposed to fulfill their tasks anyway." Wallie huffs, half a laugh. "No, I'm more a renegade sorcerer than a swordsman, by the standards of the World. I forced a peace. Apparently that's what the Goddess wanted. I was promised a long and happy life, with my wife."

Wallie sighs. "I don't know what I'm doing here, in that case."

It makes sense to Ned that superior technology, without understanding, would seem like sorcery to the people Wallie is talking about. When the people who are keeping them here changed them into monsters, when they interfered with people like Elizabeth's powers so that she couldn't escape, it seemed like magic, to him and to others. But he believes it is only because they lack the knowledge and technology to understand how the scientists are accomplishing it. He thinks about that term, 'the scientists', that he uses sometime to mean whoever is keeping them captive. He could as easily substitute in 'sorcerers' or 'gods' and mean much the same.

Interesting the way Wallie says he couldn't have killed the sorcerers. Does he mean that he lacked the skills, or that he morally would never do such a thing? Ned isn't really sure. Still, he feels a bit easier for it. He knows killers, here. Is one, himself. But it's nonetheless reassuring to him that Wallie wanted peace, made peace instead. When he comes to the end of his story Ned looks up to give him a wry, lopsided smile.

"None of us do."

Whatever force had brought him here was stronger, then, than whatever protection he might have been given by the grateful gods and inhabitants of, as he called it, the World. It doesn't surprise Ned. They can pull in people from other universes, from across time. If they wanted someone they took them, no matter what.

"We've all had our lives disrupted," Ned continues, but he adds, "though I suppose some of us had less to leave behind." Ned thinks that he must miss his wife, and the world where he played such an instrumental role to political stability. It was a bit different for an unattached piemaker.

"Yeah." Wallie sighs again, shaking his head. "I can't claim to be the only one upset about that. Not fair of me." He flashes a smile but his heart isn't in it, and it's more than a little bittersweet. "You probably have things you've left behind, yourself. We all do."

What's less? Anything at all is hard to have torn away from you. Sometimes he thinks of little Vixi, and wonders how much bigger he's grown since Wallie's left.

"What about you?"

"Not really," Ned says. He thinks of Digby with a pang of sadness, but other than him, what did Ned's life really have going for it? His shop? Was that all his life had been but silence and isolation, exhaustion and a kind of hopelessness that he had gotten so used to that he didn't see it any longer, even when it was wrapped around him like a shroud? His small smile is rueful and he shrugs. It's easier to see how empty his life before had been, now that it is starting to fill.

"My story's nowhere near as exciting as yours. No gods or swordsmen or wars with sorcerers. Just owned a little pie shop. Lived with my dog. All very simple. Wouldn't make a good summer movie."

Of course, if Wallie has been here as long as he said, chances are he knows it's a bit more complicated than all that. Then again, Ned hadn't spoken to him at the time: perhaps he hadn't heard? It seems a longshot, but not entirely impossible.

"If it weren't for the cameras and the food shortage and people disappearing and getting experimented on, I might even like it better here."

He knows it's perhaps a worrying thing to admit, but perhaps Wallie will understand, as someone who already went from one life in one world to a different one in another.

"That," Wallie points out, "is how the summer movies start."

He pauses for a moment, because his hair is coming down and he has to pause to clip it back into his ponytail. By this point in his new body, it's almost second nature.

"I... understand, though. I was never unhappy in Edmonton, but I was... unattached. The World is far from perfect, but I found some roots I'd never had before." He shrugs. "There are easier places to be happy, but who am I to judge?"

"Unattached," Ned repeats, bending to toss aside a troublesome rock. "That's a good word for it."

In his case, that un-attachment had been deliberately crafted. But it's impossible to stay that way, here, and now that he's had a taste of attachment, he doesn't think he can go back to the old way. He's putting down roots here; literally, with all this planting, all his little plans for making this place more liveable, and figuratively, in his relationships with the people around him. Is it wise?

He catches himself in a reverie, not saying anything or looking at Wallie, realizes he's being rude.

"Even if it is how they start, I don't think I'd make a very good protagonist."

Wallie glances at Ned, pausing.

"That's not how I understand it," he says; his tone is pointed but not unkind. "I do listen to the network, at least some of the time."

He hadn't answered Ned's 'coming-out' if only because he didn't know how to respond. He doesn't like these sorts of supernatural situations, remains sceptical that it can even be possible.

"Incidentally, I'm not sure what would happen if you touch me, but I'm not eager to find out, either."

Ah. Well, that clears that up. Ned laughs softly, a bit embarrassed, pushes his hair out of his eyes and goes back to digging, at least until Wallie says what he does about them touching. He has a very good point; his aliveness situation is complicated, and Ned doesn't like or trust complicated.

"I'm not sure, either." He meets Wallie's eyes, promising gravely, "I'll make sure neither of us find out." The onus of preventing contact should be on him, since he's the one with the freaky powers. It's possible that nothing would happen. But it's also possible that a single touch from him would kill Wallie, instantly and irrevocably. It's a forceful, extremely unpleasant reminder of just how dangerous he is.

"You don't have to worry. I'm good at making sure that kind of thing doesn't happen. Uh, normally." Laura had been an exception, an extraordinary circumstance. He doesn't intend to make another mistake like that again.

"I won't offer you any hugs," Wallie suggests. As far as he's concerned, the responsibility is as much on him. Not touching is sort of a two-way street, after all. "If we're lucky we won't have to find out what would happen."

He buries his shovel in the ground again, returning to his labour while he talks. "It's a bit hard to swallow, you know, that sort of story. I think the only reason I can accept it at all is because, well, what happened to me was probably just as weird. I still don't know how to take the vampires and things we have around here."

"Every time I think I've hit the 'nothing can surprise me anymore' threshold, this place proves me wrong."

Ned doesn't mind Wallie's skepticism. In fact, it's rather reassuring. That kind of outlook, which finds his very existence to be improbably, has been instrumentally useful to him over the years. He's had more than his fair share of near-misses, all of which did not become complete catastrophes only because the truth was too unimaginable to the witnesses. The case with Laura had been the exception: it had been too public, the process of cause and effect too public, to dismiss as anything else the way he normally would.

"I wouldn't believe in vampires either, if it weren't for the evidence of my own eyes." And neck, he thinks, wryly. "Or psychics or any of the rest of it. But there are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, etcetera."

Perhaps if he had a chance to see Ned's power for himself, Wallie would believe it more easily. But Ned isn't really in the habit of wandering around giving demonstrations. He's still convinced that people only accept what he can do because they don't think about it hard enough, and have never seen it in action. He doesn't intend to jeopardize that.

Ned spots a few of the newcomers milling around, looking as if they need direction. He sets his shovel aside and looks at Wallie. He's glad to have met him, spoken to him. Now, despite his imposing frame and appearance, Ned doesn't feel that same uneasiness when he looks at him. Wonderful what a little chat can do.

"I'm gonna go... pretend I know something about leadership and help those people, but it was good to meet you, Wallie." In lieu of the traditional parting handshake Ned waves again, this time with a bit of a smile quirking the corner of his mouth.

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[Open] Farming Club Shenanigans

day 79

Re: day 79

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