kore_logs | [open] a friend in need's a friend indeed

"They don't really give us much more beyond the basics, do they? No chocolate, no mangoes, no ostrich." Which, to her, had been a regular addition to her diet for a while. Don't judge, Ned.

The blurted remark has her stilling for a moment, but then she ducks her head, smiling a little as she looks up at him. "I was hoping you wouldn't. A few people know, but they're ones with secrets and differences of their own." People she wouldn't be outing either, so they were one big secret keeping happy little group. "I've heard there's a hunter in town here with us, and while I've also heard he might not be a problem, I'm still not sure how comfortable I'd be with someone like that knowing about me."

"Ostrich?" He's less judging and more, well, impressed. Ned knows now that she's lived here and there and everywhere across the world, but having eaten ostrich before surprises him. He wonders if she did so as a human, or as a jaguar, or both. Did things taste different when she was a jaguar? Is that the kind of thing he can ask without being terribly rude?

Ned can hear her talking her way around specifics, and nods. There's a different kind of community, here, one in which all the secrets don't have to be so carefully guarded. Some can be aired, identities that are cramped with the constriction of long hiding can come out into the air and stretch. But other secrets, he knows, ought to still remain that way: for the well-being of the person keeping them. He respects that she doesn't say any more than that.

"Well, this... hunter. If he does start to be a problem, let me know, alright?" A moment later he realizes that offer may not be immediately clear, and so he elaborates, "I'm friends with some people. People who aren't all that fond of the kind of guy who would make trouble for someone just because she's a bit different. People who can help, if things get out of hand." People being, of course, Bruce, River, Erik, even Charles.

"Yeah. It's more of a red meat than a white, which you wouldn't think because, you know, bird. Really good, though." Raw or cooked. Yes, she'd had it both ways. Chasing down an ostrich with her brothers and managing to get a kill had always been an exhilarating experience. When they were in jaguar form, they always strutted around a bit afterwards and came home smeared in blood from rolling around it.

Her smile grew, her head ducking down a little as she nodded. "You're the second person who's told me I can go run to them and hide if I need to. It's sweet." And hadn't been something she'd really been expecting here, but she was glad for it, even if she didn't think she'd need it. "Same goes for you, you know. My metaphorical skirt's pretty good for hiding behind."

"I'm a vegetarian," Ned says, with a rather apologetic half-smile. "Which doesn't exactly make things easy, around here." Things aren't quite so dire, yet. Elizabeth provided quite a bit of help, when she let him pull some baking supplies through a few tears, but those can't last forever.

He shuffles in discomfort and happiness when she says calls his offer sweet, because that wasn't his intention at all. He just wanted her to feel like she had backup, had someone on her side. It's important to know you have allies, and he knows that all too well, having gone without any for so long. Which is why her counter-offer means so much to him. "I'll keep it in mind."

"No, I guess not. I don't exactly see a variety of soy or tofu products for you to snack on." She gave him her own half smile, feeling a little sorry that the man couldn't eat meat. Most of her diet consisted of it for both preferential and genetic reasons. She'd never met a vegetarian were. Not that they didn't exist, but she'd never had the pleasure.

"Make sure you do." Riley gave him a pointed look. "I'm not as meek as I look, I promise. I'm fully capable of taking care of myself or anyone else that might need it. It's not like you'd be throwing me to the wolves, pun not intended, if you asked for my help. Besides, I kind of like you." Her smile was teasing now as she crammed her hands deeper in her pockets.

"I manage." If things get truly desperate, Ned knows he'll have to start eating meat. It will be complicated, and probably not all that pretty at first, but he'll get by. He'll have to. He's just hoping to put off that day for as long as humanly possible.

It takes him by surprise, her just coming out and saying she likes him like that. He really isn't accustomed to that sort of open, even careless friendliness. It'd be one thing if she wanted something from him. He's used to manipulation in friendliness' clothing. But that doesn't seem like what's going on, so Ned half-laughs, head falling forward.

"Uh, same." He hesitates a moment, then says, "Look if you ever want... I mean I know it's not the same and all, but there's an ocean, and if you ever feel like going for a swim..." he trails off again, letting his offer be implicit. Ned hasn't gone into the water much in his time here: there are tales of giant squid, and it never seemed all that safe to go on his own. But if there was someone else there...

The offer has her smile widening in genuine pleasure. "Really? Maybe if we stick to the shallower end, we can avoid the boogiesquid." Truthfully, she didn't want to believe that it existed, but after seeing what she'd seen in the woods, she was less likely to just dismiss it out of hand.

Then her smile went back to the teasing one of before, only a little more evil. "I even promise to find something to wear when we go." She remembered his discomfort in her nudity, let alone his own disrobing down to his skivvies.

But the idea of having someone to go swimming with did sound fun, and she could suffer through wearing a tshirt or a bathing suit, if she could find one.

"That would be preferable," he says. Boogiesquid may be a cute nickname, but he has a feeling that the actual creature won't be terribly cuddly.

Her comment about finding something to wear while swimming embarrasses him, unsurprisingly. He hunches his shoulders forward an inch more, smiling half-apologetically. At least Riley's maintained her good humor about the whole thing. He'd feel bad if, once outside the dream, she felt shy and upset over the whole thing. Apparently he's still going to be shy enough for the both of them (and maybe a few other people too).

He can tell that she's teasing him, but it feels friendly rather than malicious. "Probably wise. Wouldn't want to scandalize any seagulls."

"We have to think about the seagulls." She nodded sagely, trying not to grin and not exactly succeeding. "Maybe I can find a pair of swim trunks for you as well? Might be better than swimming in your underwear."

She couldn't help it, really. He was just so easy to tease. And it was nice to be able to. To have a little bit of familiarity with someone here that she could use in a playful manner. It was the little things like that that made her feel less alone here.

She was infinitely grateful for both Ned and Balthazar at the moment.

"Already have a pair," he says, grinning. There isn't much to do in this town, after all. He'd gotten over his reluctance at snooping through someone else's things within the first week. The room he'd adopted as his own hadn't had any clothes that fit, but one of the other unoccupied ones had, and Ned had... appropriated them, quickly. Amongst those clothes had been a pair of swim trunks that would fit him, even if they are a garish color of lime green.

"Listen, um..." Ned pauses, feeling a bit awkward but offering, "Have you had breakfast? If you want I could let you go get cleaned up and I could make you something..." he trails off, shrugs, lets his invitation stand as is. Ned's not exactly the best at the whole making-friends process, it's still a work in progress, but offering to cook for people is one of the few surefire techniques he knows.

She gives him a wide smile, nodding as she pushes off from the wall. "I'd like that, Ned. Thanks. I promise I won't take long."

She just planned to grab a quick shower and change and that shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes. "What's for breakfast?"

"Oh, I'll cobble together something," he says, waving a hand through the air vaguely. For perhaps the millionth time he wishes the food situation in this place were different, that there were supplies refilled regularly and reliably, that there were enough around for him to make Riley a fantastic breakfast rather than something merely passable.

The again, maybe it's a good thing that's not the case. If it were, he thinks it would be all too easy for him to get very comfortable with this place, to stop thinking of him as someone who was kidnapped and start thinking of this house as a home, cameras or no cameras.

The cameras were what reminded her every day that this was not home. She wanted to know who was behind them and what it was they thought they were playing at. She wanted to get an answer instead of yelling into them fruitlessly for an hour.

She grabbed a clean set of clothes from her room before heading into the bathroom to shower and change, coming out fifteen minutes later much fresher and with a bounce to her step as she went into the kitchen to look for him. "So, what's for breakfast, barkeep?"

Since Riley left, Ned's put away the cleaning gear and set out the breakfast things on the table. It's not much: tea, some slices of the loaf of bread he'd baked yesterday, a few jars of his jam, and a little plate of scrambled eggs for each of them.

Ned raises his eyebrows at the barkeep comment. "Aren't you a bit young for bars?" he teases.

She sat down, waiting for him to sit and join her before she started eating. "Depends on what country you're in."

She paused as she reached for the tea, grinning. "Sorry. I know that was a joke, but, it's still true. Lots of countries don't quite have the same strict age limits on alcohol that they do here. Or, well, in North America, where I think we are."

"Good point. I'd forgotten about the whole world-traveler thing," Ned says, joins her at the table with a contented smile. "Though I'm not sure this is North America. The climate might be the same, but River says the stars are wrong. So who even knows. Doesn't exactly look like the North America I'm from, anyway," Ned comments, poking at the eggs with his fork.

It could be the result of being in a different version of reality, where the constellations have shifted. Or, for all Ned knows, they could be on another planet entirely, one made to imitate Earth. Or they could be false stars they are looking at in a false sky that is really just a dome. Or countless other possibilities.

"So, um. What were you up to back home, before you got snatched? Are you in school?"

"It smells North America-ish. The trees, the air, most of the vegetation. Each continent has a different scent depending on what's indigenous to the area." He probably didn't need to know that, but it just jumped out of her mouth before she filled it with a forkful of eggs.

The constellation thing was definitely news to her, but she hadn't spent much time stargazing recently.

"I was actually about to start my year-long exploration. We sort of... take a year off when we hit our majority and go see what there is to see without having our families around us. Lets us see if we want to settle anywhere else or if we want to stay with our family."

She took a sip of tea before continuing. "As for school, we were all home schooled. Mom's a teacher, so it just seemed easier than having to jump from school to school when we moved."

"Do you have, like, enhanced senses even when you're in human form?" Because he definitely wouldn't be able to identify a continent by its smell, and he considers himself relatively attuned to his olfactory sense.

Her explanation of the traditional exploration sounds reasonable enough, though he can't quite fathom it, himself. But Ned knows that his view on this sort of thing is different from most. He'd been living on his own since he was eighteen, had been living essentially alone amongst a crowd of other boys for another nine or so years before that. He knows from books and movies and some of the people he'd dated that people who grew up with stable families often feel stifled by them, long for a chance to be on their own. But there's nothing romantic about being alone, to him.

"Did you have any idea what you were planning to choose? I mean, between staying with your family or leaving them?"

"Yeah. They're not as good as when I'm shifted, but they're better than a human's." She wrinkled her nose a bit. "Like I know there's something edible that's rotted that hasn't been cleaned up yet in the living room still.

Eating another bite, she gave that next question a bit of thought. "I haven't. I mean, I love my family to death, but I might want to go out on my own, when I'm not being used and studied. But this is also making me realize how much I miss them. But then I think of how I'd be able to call or visit them and I can't do that here, which makes it worse. So, um, no. I don't know." It wasn't really much of an answer, but she hadn't really had much to go on to answer it yet.

Ned, too, wrinkles his nose. Rotted is a very bad sign. But he takes note of what she said about enhanced senses; it is the sort of thing one wants to know about a housemate. He's going to be extra sure to make as little noise as possible at night so that he doesn't wake her up, now. No reason to penalize other people when he has insomnia.

Interesting, too, that she says a human's as if she thinks of herself as something else. It makes sense, though, particularly after what she'd told him about other shifters living separate of humans, about how they had their own culture and traditions.

He makes a vague sympathetic sound when she talks about not being able to call or visit her family. "It's not really comparable. You're completely cut off, here." Ned pauses in the process of spreading jam on his bread, looking up at Riley and asking plainly, "How are you doing with that? Missing your family, I mean." He's not sure why he asks. It's not like he'll be able to do anything to make it less horrible for her. Still, he feels the need to express his concern, to acknowledge that it can't be easy. She's one of the youngest people he's met here, and she'd still been living with them when she'd been taken...

The line between humans and shifters was something taught to her from a very young age. You don't go telling humans that you can shift, because humans on the whole were scared of things they didn't understand and would likely default to killing it first and learning about it from its corpse after. She didn't see her human friends as some separate species, but in terms of generalization? She knew she didn't fit in with the rest of the world. She'd watched movies and seen how people treated anyone with a visible difference. She could only imagine how they'd react to her in her hybrid form. Jaguar would just make them think of her as a cat, but the hybrid would make a reality out of all the Hollywood movie monster fears people had buried in their psyche. It was why she was generally careful about shifting into that form more than the other.

"I'm... okay, I guess. I'm lonely. I'm remembering all the little things about them that pissed me off, but they seem kind of dumb now. I wonder if they're freaking out that I'm gone." She looked down at her plate, pushing a lump of eggs before she speared it and lifted it to her mouth.

"You know it's funny," Ned says, quietly, the warm mug of tea between his hands and not meeting Riley's eyes. He doesn't exactly sound like he's winding up for a joke - not that kind of 'funny', "but I'm so much less lonely here than I was there. Guess that's the silver lining of... not really having a family." Sipping at the tea, Ned shrugs, a tiny movement of his shoulders. He's not fishing for pity - doesn't want it, in fact - but he's not going to lie and pretend he's worrying about anyone waiting for him.

"River thinks time is stopped in our own worlds, while we're here. A couple of the people who disappeared and came back again said that when they showed up at home, no time had passed. So they might not even realize you're gone."

That's got to be better, right? A small comfort. It certainly is to him, thinking about DIgby, alone in his apartment. Ned wouldn't want him thinking he'd been abandoned again.

"If it'll make you feel less lonely, you could tell me more about them?"

Edited 2013-07-17 20:16 (UTC)

"That's not all that weird, is it? I mean, you're here with a bunch of people with some similarities. No one wants to be here and none of us can leave. That's more than most strangers have. And here... you're not alone in being a little different." She wanted to reach over and rest her hand on his, but she'd remembered how skittish he'd been with touch in her dream, so she kept her hands to herself.

Riley found that information to be a bit of a relief. Sure, it meant it wasn't likely anyone would be looking for her, but it also meant that her family wouldn't wind up here by accident or be worrying themselves sick over not hearing from her. It was oddly comforting. "Well, there's that, I guess."

She looked up at him, reaching for her tea. "Really? I could, I guess. Well, there's my dad, who's the reason we move around so much. He's the anthropologist and he got a bee in his bonnet, mom says, when he was in college to see how much modern civilization affected those that didn't want to be affected. Mom and him fell for each other like rocks, so she wound up going along with him. She's kind of a mix of a stay at home mom and a teacher, so we really never got off on our homework. At all. Like, ever. There's Brian, the oldest brother. He's okay. He's just always been a bit of a know it all towards me and Finn. Finn's my other brother, and he's great. He's got this way of looking at things that's kine of like a permanent silver lining or optimism and it's hard to stay bummed out around him."

It seems like Riley understands pretty well, actually, why he enjoys being here, even with the cameras, and experiments, and danger and drawbacks. He's not alone in any number of ways.

Ned likes listening to her speak about her family. He chews almost absently at his bread, gaze straying between the various utensils on the table, trying to come up with a mental picture and sense of each of them. His mother had stayed at home, too. She'd not been an official teacher, no, but she'd taught him how to bake, how to clean and cook and look after himself. It had all seemed rather tedious at the time, but those skills had come in pretty handy, when she was gone.

If this conversation were an equal exchange, the way conversations were supposed to be, he'd share this detail with Riley. After all, she's telling him about her family. But it's not that simple, for him. He doesn't have any experience with it, doesn't know how he'd even begin to really talk about his mother in conversation. He thinks about her all the time, but that never really manifests in speaking about her, to anyone.

"More of an optimist than you?" Ned's having a hard time picturing a more cheerful, bright version of Riley. Doesn't seem possible. After all, look at how well she's been coping with being brought here. Always a smile for those around her, never angry or impatient or petty, even though she'd left behind such a fascinating, good life full of loving, wonderful people.

"What do your brothers do for a living?"

If she'd heard that sort of description of herself, she might have felt a bit of shame over how she'd reacted to Brigid in the woods. Granted, the other girl had totally started it, but Riley hadn't had to sink to the same level. It helped that they'd sorted things out and things had been explained and understood, but she still felt a little guilty that she'd taken the bait so easily. Yes, she could smile and be pleasant, but she had that secondary side to her nature that could and would lash out when it felt she or those she cared about was threatened. She was human, but she wasn't. It was a hard thing to explain to someone, so she generally didn't bother trying.

She smiled as she sipped her tea, nodding. "More optimistic, but also more of a trickster. I think it's a boy thing, but he and Brian play horrible pranks on each other all the time. They learned to leave me out of it when they found out I play dirty." She grinned, remembering the Nair incident. Yeah, they'd left her out of it after that.

"Right now? Brian's taking doctorate courses. He hasn't clarified what field he's going into, but dad's sort of hoping he'll follow in his footsteps. Finn's... Finn. He helps out wherever we wind up and always finds an odd job to do, but he doesn't have a career in mind. I think he might be one to take off on his own soon." Which was a sad thought for her, but she knew they'd keep in touch.

"What about you? Do you have any family?"

[open] a friend in need's a friend indeed

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)