kore_logs | from the land of the ice and snow ❆

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from the land of the ice and snow ❆

Who: Meja, & open
What: A Valkyrie wakes up in the Cape. A tiny storm brews and then, suddenly, vanishes.
Where: The woods, park, and town.
When: Day 103

All at once, the lack of a presence is both painfully overwhelming and difficult to comprehend. It's as though something more important than gravity, yet more difficult to see than the wind, is gone. The disconnect is sudden, and she can't seem to remember falling asleep. Yet here she is, in woods she doesn't recognize with something around her wrist that... is entirely unfamiliar. She doesn't own any electronics; they don't like traveling between Realms. What's more, this one talks. "We hope you enjoy your stay." Meja blinks, fighting for consciousness. She doesn't sleep, why is this difficult? And then, as she staggers to her feet, it comes to her.

She can't feel Yggdrasil anymore.

The source of her second lease on life is missing. How is that even possible? Meja turns to the tree she's leaning on and presses her ear against the trunk. Yes, she can feel this tree. It's healthy (though grumpy — something about a burning incident), but it's not connected to Yggdrasil. Somehow, even waking up in a strange forest, with a technological wristband, is less unnerving than suddenly being away from the entity that holds the Nine Realms together. Is this some sort of pocket realm? Perhaps it's a trick by the Dökkálfar, and she isn't in her right mind to sense Yggdrasil at all.

A rumble interrupts her thoughts, and suddenly she realizes that her confusion and tension have whipped up a tiny storm of sorts, darkening the sky around this part of the woods. Though the droplets on her face make her feel less alienated, she holds up her hand. Small glints of light, making soft noises like distant cries, shine from her gloved hand as she disperses the storm. It clears in a matter of minutes, restoring sunlight to the forest once more.

Muninn is missing as well, she notices. Surely her raven friend would be the most disgruntled at being separated from the World Tree. He would be unable to seek out his brother for their immature little bouts of insults, which she'd come to understand as their way of touching bases.

"Muninn?" she calls, loudly, but only silence greets her. She's still feeling rather groggy, unintentionally strengthening her Norwegian accent. "This isn't funny, dumming... And it's not my new home."

Still without an answer, Meja sighs. She has all of her belongings, at least. Sweeping the hood from her head, she keeps her white cloak unglamoured — for now — and proceeds through the woods. She keeps her weapons sheathed, but also keeps her senses on alert for anything else in the woods. At first, all it gets her is the scuffle of running hares. But as she walks, she slowly makes out a small number of buildings through a large expanse of what seems to be a park. A town?

She takes a deep breath, still comfortably inside of the woods, and runs a gloved hand through her short platinum-blond hair. Time to see where I am. She's more nervous about it than she'd like, but the buildings she can see are of a style that she... hasn't laid eyes on in a long, long time.

On the other hand, she'll learn nothing in the woods. So, slowly, she proceeds forward.

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"There is." She's just as eager to switch to a safer subject. "I'm not sure that many of us know much about farming, but we've managed enough to keep from starving. There's a human who doles out the rations."

She shrugs, vaguely.

"I'm not sure why he gained that responsibility, but he is fair about it, at least. I think, on the whole, our hunting and fishing has gone better, but most species can't live entirely on meat."

She bites her lower lip, worrying it as she turns that over in her head. "Well, it's been a long time, but I used to have a friend who was... very plant-oriented, and there might be something I could contribute," she reasons. As long as magic works properly in whatever Realm she's found herself trapped in.

"How many people are here?"

"I'm not certain of the exact number. Forty or so, I think. Less, perhaps. People come and go very frequently, and I find it difficult to keep track."

Too many, in her opinion. Not a lot, but at the same far too many.

"If you can offer aid to the farming effort, it would probably be well-received. As a community, we need what help we can get."

Meja drags her gaze from the town back to Shiala, furrowing a brow. "People come and go? You mean, taken and brought back?"

Suddenly she's reminded of the way trolls kidnap children and wait for them to mostly starve to death before actually eating them, storing them in the deepest parts of their caves to prevent escape. It's a thought that has many, many bad memories tied to it, and Meja shivers ever so slightly. There's no sense in thinking about it. Trolls don't have this type of finesse.

"That's a lot of people to support on a limited food supply. I'll try to do what I can."

Magic, she's sure, will be very helpful; she just needs to practice.

"Yes. Sometimes they disappear permanently. Sometimes they return. I've gathered that this is the case, at least."

Shiala hugs herself; she doesn't like that, doesn't like an enemy she can't fight. Not one that's too strong for a frontal attack, not one that slips in stealthily and must be defended against, but not there at all.

"It's good of you to help. I know next to nothing about farming, but... I try to help where I can."

Because the hydroponics bays of Feros are somewhat different from the farming here.

"I see."

The Valkyrie absorbs that information for a long moment, as they walk. People are brought and taken on a frequent basis, and no one's seen those responsible. Not a single glimpse. That's... Well, that's fairly unnerving. It's clearly a tight, logical, and powerful operation. She can't even appeal to Yggdrasil to aid, which has been her last resort in a few old cases. Instead it's clear that they're on their own here, at least for now.

"Experience tells me that they'll either slip or give us a clue at some point," she reasons. "No operation is perfect forever."

"I hope you're right," Shiala says, and she sighs a little. "If they've made any sort of slip in the past, then I haven't been here to witness it."

It's a depressing conversation, really. There's no good news to share, and plenty of bad news, and if Shiala is avoiding the recent matter of the sea monster attack, well, perhaps she can be forgiven for that.

There will be plenty of time later for Meja to learn that Kraken aren't unique to her world. She nods. Meja has, well, an excess of time to wait out her capture. But rather than escape, her thoughts are still buzzing around helping her fellows find enough to eat. It's a much bigger concern, in her mind, not the least because of her own protective instincts towards others.

They're now at the edge of town, and all of those thoughts are temporarily stalled as she looks at the architecture. Yes, it's rather run-down, but it reminds her of... times long past, in her own world. Her expression is rather on the wistful side.

"I take it this place is a lot different, in appearance, than where you're from," she comments, with a small smile.

"Very."

Shiala pauses for a moment, wondering how to be tactful, how to not come across as being dismissive of what is, to her, woefully primitive. "I was living on Feros, which is mostly Prothean ruins but with a modern settlement built into it. It's a bit... frontier, I suppose, but it wasn't... primitive. Here... we don't even have electricity, anymore." She shakes her head. "It's been... something to get used to, certainly."

"Midgard used to look like this." She doesn't mention Ragnarök; they don't need any more depressing topics, she's sure. "A very long time ago. Now it's much more advanced, though it doesn't have any magic."

Midgard has been, in recent years, trying to forget its past.

"This place doesn't look like it has much magic, either. So it appears I'll be getting used to something as well," Meja chuckles, smiling more broadly in an attempt to lighten the mood. "You wouldn't happen to know which one of these houses is... 6, would you? This thing"—she glances at the comm on her wrist—"said something about staying there."

"Where I'm from, magic is the sort of thing told in ancient fairy tales." Shiala looks at her slightly askance -- only slightly. "Except I've already met someone for whom magic is, perhaps, not supernatural, but just part of the nature of their world -- as biotics are merely a fact of life in the galaxy I know."

It's something to think on, if nothing else.

"But house six? That's easy to find. I'm in seven, myself. We're neighbours. I'll show you the way."

"Are we?" Meja favors Shiala with a grateful smile. "I think I lucked out, in that case."

All complaints aside, the situation, she thinks, could be much worse. At least there are kind and interesting people trapped with her here, and there's help to occupy her time with. If there was nothing for her to do and no one to talk to, that would be cause for great concern for the Valkyrie.

"Magic is a simple fact in the Nine Realms. But on Midgard most do regard it as... fantasy." She shrugs. "Most humans can't use it, anyway. Magic is difficult and requires a great deal of study. It's an easy way to blow yourself up, or worse, on accident."

"Like most talents, I suppose," Shiala observes. It's strange that she's thinking of "magic" as a viable thing, now, but... perhaps it's just a name. It would be easy to claim biotics as magic in themselves.

"How do you define 'magic'? What can you do with it?"

It's been a long time since someone's asked her a question like that. Meja thinks for a long moment, as they walk. "Magic is a life-force of sorts. It's hard to define. I presume it comes from the world itself, perhaps from Yggdrasil. You can do a great many things with it. Set fires, imprison others, freeze water, protect a forest from specific threats — there's very little you can't do with it, once you learn it properly. Though the bigger things get, the more tiring they are on the person who created them."

Interesting. A different explanation, but is that from a different understanding or a different universe's rules? The end result is similar, so perhaps it's not so surprising that they have the same label?

She really doesn't know how these sorts of things work.

"Those are definitely the sort of things I would term impossible, or would have before I came here and witnessed such things for myself," she says.

The thought that so many of them come from different places is an intriguing one. It's been a long time since Meja has been somewhere completely new, like the Cape, even if the circumstances are, well... less than terrific.

No magic at all isn't a stretch for her to imagine — before the age of fifteen, she'd never known about its presence and had only read about it in stories.

"So there's no magic at all in your world," she hazards. "What did you do before being, ah, brought here?"

"I am, or perhaps was, a commando. I was disciple and bodyguard to Matriarch Benezia for two hundred years, but, most recently..." Shiala sighs a little. "I've been helping the humans of Zhu's Hope rebuild their colony after the death of the Thorian."

She shuts her eyes. It's home, now, but the course that took her there isn't easy.

"They were infected. I was briefly absorbed by it. We are... linked, now. Or at least, we were before I came here."

"I'm sorry to hear it," Meja offers, with a sympathetic smile. She thinks of her own forces, and Eloise, and hopes that they're managing all right in her absence. Hopefully Eloise hasn't started any fights with Lady Ingibjörg — but she's not holding her breath. "Looks like you've gone from one rebuilding project to another."

"So I have," Shiala says, and sighs. "I think I would have preferred to stick with the one I already knew."

She gives Meja a brief, sad little smile. "What of yourself? What are you, in your life?"

Here's where she'd like to say oh, I travel or oh, I live on Midgard and do what I can. But no. Shiala's shared so much, it would be rude to clamp down now. Even if her duty makes her feel terribly self-conscious. Still, she can't quite help the sheepish smile that spreads across her face.

Giving an authoritative position to someone made uncomfortable, in life, by authority must have made the universe cackle. Or perhaps just the Norn.

"I'm a general," she explains. "It's my duty to look after and protect Midgard, and any other Realms that require my assistance."

"Oh!" Shiala straightens. "Midgard was... Earth, yes?"

She understands this, as one soldier to another, the value of protection. She's spent her lifetime protecting, and she can respect that in someone else.

"Then it sounds as if you do good work."

Meja nods in confirmation. It's not easy work, making sure an entire Realm isn't being abused by another. Especially with magic the way it is.

"I try my best. Earth is a big place, and some of its enemies are very small. But it's been fairly peaceful, up until recently."

Earth doesn't seem like a big place to Shiala -- no bigger than any other planet, really, and... well, cultural bias, Thessia seems far more important to her.

"In my time, Earth had only recently joined the galactic community. A mere thirty years ago, nothing more." She folds her hands behind her back. "What sort of enemies does Earth have other than your own interspecies wars?"

She's honestly curious. Are there other species in this other realm?

"We haven't had a true war, among humans, in a few hundred years," the Valkyrie explains, a fact that she's quite grateful of. "Some of the other Realms are peaceable enough — no one ever receives threats from Alfheimr or Vanaheimr. Our biggest problems tend to be the Jotunn, the Giants. They inhabit three different Realms, with three different tribes, and they care nothing for Midgard or the gods."

An argument can be made that the gods deserve it, but really. Why do immortal beings insist on their grudges? Meja makes an effort not to keep them. Save for one being, of course... but all of the Realms would be better off without him skulking behind the scenes.

"The Jotunn are intensely warlike, but disorganized. No tribe but the Frost Giants can decide on a King. That doesn't stop them from causing everyone around them a headache, unfortunately. Then there's the Dökkálfar, the dark elves, who live somewhere under Midgard's surface, but they don't surface all that often. Thankfully. Whenever they do, they cause a significant death toll in a short amount of time. And then, occasionally, there are smaller threats. Pockets from the old days, monsters who have been around for a long time. Kraken, trolls, dragons, kokko, draugr."

To Shiala, it's a lot of words without meaning, and it leaves her with the distinct feeling she has a bugged translator. It also sounds very little like the Earth she's heard of -- only second hand, perhaps, but still she's heard enough to know it isn't much like... this.

"I... haven't heard of any of these species. I get the feeling that the reality you're from is very different from my own."

Magic aside, too.

from the land of the ice and snow ❆

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