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

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

Who: Ned and OPEN
What: Random encounters & fallout from dream-walking tomfoolery
Where: House 20, the garden, anywhere around town
When: Day 89

It's been a long week. A long, mostly-sleepless, weird week during which Ned has seen far more of his friends' and neighbors' subconsciouses than he would have liked to. Plus, a creepy city made of crystals that everyone seems to have seen, but no one will claim as their own. Shady stuff. Today, he is determined to wear himself out. Perhaps if he's tired enough, whatever mojo the men behind the curtain have put on him won't be strong enough to stir him out of a deep and dreamless sleep.

It's probably a futile tactic, but he can't just do nothing.

So he is a bustle of activity - cleaning the house, walking around town, checking on the crops to see if they are holding up well (carefully, with an eye for any enterprising tigers roaming too close to the edge of the forest), keeping an eye out for new faces and an ear out for rumors of missing ones.

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"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?"

"I was never really one for pranks," Ned says, with a half-apologetic smile, because he is contradicting her maybe it's a boy thing theory. "Usually ended up on the wrong end of them."

Then again, Ned knows that what he's calling a prank and what she's calling a prank are perhaps not exactly the same thing. He doubts that two brothers, who ultimately love one another underneath the mischief, would do anything truly 'horrible' to one another. Riley probably means 'horrible' in the sense of cheesy or contrived, rather than genuinely degrading. At least, he hopes she does. Otherwise, he isn't so sure he envies her quite as much as he thought he did.

The question isn't exactly unexpected, but he never knows the best way to respond to it. He's a terrible liar, so that's out of the question, and besides, Riley deserves better than that. But any kind of no, whether it's a shake of his head, or a verbal one, is going to be a heavy thing. No one really expects and outright no to that inquiry, in his experience. They expect, at worst, a yes, but we're not close. Which is, technically speaking, somewhat true, for him. His father isn't dead, at least, not that he knows of. He could be. It has been twenty years.

He settles for something more oblique, to give him time, and give Riley a chance to back out, if she was only asking in a polite, cursory way. "Depends on how you define family." He pauses, and adds, "And have."

Edited 2013-07-19 01:29 (UTC)

"A few here and there aren't that bad, but they get these... phases. And it's like a basic prank war for about six months until mom and dad get pissed off enough to veto all pranking. And mom can be kinda scary when she gets riled up." Which was a bit of an understatement. She never was afraid of her mom physically, but when she got that look in her eye or they flashed green from temper, the Samson children knew to head for cover.

"Well, I guess it depends on what it means to you?" The emphasis on 'have' had her curious, so she propped her chin up, giving him a curious look.

A prank war between equal and willing participants does sound different to what Ned had experienced. He wonders if that is just one of those sibling things that he's never going to really understand, but will just have to accept is normal. There's an ease and fondness in the way Riley says her mother can be scary that makes Ned think she can't be too scary - not bad scary, but the normal amount of necessary motherly anger to keep her children in check and raise them to be responsible adults.

Before he gives his answer, he takes a big bite of his bread and uses the time in which he chews it to think about what family means to him, how he wants to define it, how he wants to reply to Riley's question.

"River is my family," he begins, slowly. "We're not actually related, but she's like a sister to me, and I... think she misses her real brother pretty badly." He knows that if River caught him calling himself a poor replacement for Simon, she'd probably throw something at his head and call him a boob, but he can't help thinking it on occasion.

As for the rest of it, he decides he just... doesn't want to poke that hornet's nest. Especially not after some of the nightmares he'd had. He'd had so much private information about himself and his life and his family in particular revealed without his permission that he is grasping greedily at his privacy. But he doesn't want to lie, so he says, prodding at his eggs with his fork, "As for other family, I'm gonna say... functionally, no, I don't have any. With the addendum that it's complicated and I can't- it's not really pleasant breakfast conversation."

He shoots her a very quick, apologetic smile.

"River? That's the girl who talks a little funny, right?" She'd had a couple very strange conversations with her, but hadn't been around her often. Thinking about it, it wasn't that much of a stretch to see why Ned might feel more comfortable in her presence. She didn't really seem fully connected to the now, but that wasn't a bad thing.

She gave him a small smile, nodding. "You don't have to tell me if it makes you uncomfortable, Ned. Share what you want. I'm not trying to interrogate you or anything." She put her tea down and reached for her toast, smearing jam over it and taking a huge bite. Did she want to know more about him? Yes, but not at the expense of his comfort levels. She always figured if there were things people didn't want to share, it wasn't her right to know them unless it had something to do with the safety of herself or people she cared about.

"She... has a unique way of expressing herself." Ned knows that it's not really River's choice, after all, the way she speaks. At times it is poetic, at others amusing, but he tries not to let him loose sight of the fact that she can't really communicate in any other fashion, and that it's unlikely she enjoys how much it throws everyone, at first. Her approach to being different is not the same as Ned's, but that doesn't mean it isn't hard for her, on occasion. "But she was my first friend here, and she's the best little sister you could ask for."

He appreciates Riley's understanding, that she lets him know she's willing to listen, but still curtails her curiosity for anything beyond that. But he doesn't change his mind. He remembers the way it was, at boarding school, when all the other boys knew he was the one whose father had just left him there. No doubt Riley wouldn't react anything like they did, but she would still know.

"Maybe another time."

And then, because he wants to take attention away from his own lack of answer, and because he's genuinely curious, he leans his elbows on the table and asks, "Riley, what's your favourite flavor of pie?"

She's surprised at the question, blinking curiously over at him as she finishes the mouthful of food. "My favorite kind of pie? Oh, well, huh. It's hard to pick just one. I guess it would be strawberry. I've always loved a good piece of strawberry pie."

Which got her thinking about it, a small smile on her face as he pictured a pie, topped with whipped cream and just begging for her to eat it. She missed the little things, like treats and ready-made food.

"Why? What's yours?"

Ned smiles at that. Strawberry. That was what he'd guessed, but he is wrong sometimes; people can surprise you. "Just curious." It's not quite the truth. It might seem silly, but Ned thinks you can tell a lot about a person, based on what kind of pie they like. Strawberry is just about right for Riley: bright, versatile, sweet, a little unusual.

"I love all pie equally," he says, with an air of fairness and solemnity. He can only keep it up so long, however, before he's admitting, "But I suppose, if I had to choose, it'd be peach."

He's not exactly sure what liking peach pie best means. Surprisingly enough, he's never known anyone else who liked it best.

Ned makes a mental note to make his next pie strawberry, smiles at her as he takes another sip of his tea.

"Peach? I had a really nice peach pie once. Sorry, Ned, going to still have to stick with strawberry anyway." She smiled and moved to finish her breakfast. It was nice of him to have made it for her, and if she'd known about his other intentions to make a strawberry pie, she would have told him not to bother, if only out of habit. But if that pie happened to get made, there'd definitely be a piece with her name on it that she wouldn't mind sitting somewhere and enjoying.

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

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