[OPEN] January Catch-All

[ghostbullet]

Who: Melanie King (ghostbullet), Daisy Tonner (hadnoright), Alice Dyer (closureisformovies), CT (liesdontfindyou) & you!
What: Catch-All for Blue's character
When: January, and some backdated December stuff
Where: All over! See character prompt headers.
Warnings: In specific headers where relevant.



Melanie, Daisy, Alice and CT all have open prompts in the comments. More may be added, depending on if anything gives me reason to/I think of anything else worth putting up. Closed starters are also available upon request if these prompts don't work but you want to do something!

Ruby Rose and Gwen Stacy have their own open top-levels at the links that I'm also still very open to tags on.

Comments

[not_the_last]

"It's lovely, isn't it?"

Cassandra's stopped by a fence at the side of the road, looking out at snowflakes drifting down onto a white field ringed about by dark hedges and tall bare trees, all dusted with glimmering white and silver. She seems to be enjoying the view as much as CT.

[liesdontfindyou]

CT snaps back to reality, her gaze flicking over to Cassandra for a moment before it drifts, instead, down to her gloved hand where snowflakes gather as she talks.

"Yeah. It is. I've never actually seen snow before, or, well, not like this."

[not_the_last]

"Really? Did you live somewhere much warmer than this?"

She knows such places exist -- too close to the sun to ever see snow -- and has even been to one of them. (Well, one of them and also one imitation of one of them.)

[liesdontfindyou]

"Much warmer, yeah. The colony I grew up on had a generally more tropical climate and my home city was one of the warmest. We had plenty of rain, but never snow."

She rubs her fingers together and watches the flakes on them melt.

"Its name actually came from the idea that the planet was uniquely caught in our sun's glare."

[not_the_last]

"Oh? What was its name?"

(It still seems odd to her, hearing the word planet used for a world one lives on. But one can't spend more than a year in Crichton's company and not be used to that by now.)

[liesdontfindyou]

"Resol," she answers, her voice taking on a touch of an accent that she doesn't have in English or Emeran. "It literally means the glare of the sun, or the heat of the sun's glare, in Spanish. Which is the second most common language on the planet, since most of the original colonists came from one Earth continent."

[not_the_last]

"That's a lovely name." The accent is very vaguely familiar to her, but she can't place it; it isn't one from home, she knows that much.

"To me this feels a lot like home; my country's in the mountains, in the north of the continent. It's a very rare winter that we don't get a great deal of snow."

[liesdontfindyou]

"It was a lovely planet." The past tense is, unfortunately, literal. "For all its faults."

CT wanders over to the fence Cassandra is stood at, still listening to the crunch of each step as she does.

"It must be beautiful," she says, casting her gaze out over the scenery again. "Does that make this more comforting or homesickness-inducing?"

[not_the_last]

Oh, she catches that was; CT gets a swift glance, but no more direct question.

"On balance, I think," she says, "comforting. I spent some time in a ... an artificial place, I suppose is the best way to describe it, where it was always summer, and always on a ship out at sea. I was a great deal more homesick there."

[liesdontfindyou]

"That's— the same place Crichton was stuck, right?" He hasn't talked about the ship a great amount, but enough for her to recognise the shape of it. "I'll be honest, if it weren't for all the additional weirdness, that description alone would make it sound a lot like being on the military frigate I spent years on during my service. It was as artificial as you could get. Just this hunk of metal floating through endless space, no seasons, day and night cycles all timed to the exact second... based on Earth time, of course."

Nevermind that the majority of those aboard were from other colonies. Earth-based timekeeping always overrode everything else.

She leans against the fence. "Pure scientific and military efficiency. It can make you miss even the worst weather, sometimes. And it was definitely enough to make people homesick, whether their home was still there to go back to or not."

[not_the_last]

"It really was very like that. Sun and sea is pleasant enough, but it does grow wearying when it never changes. And it never changed at all. A friend of mine -- do you know Master Connors? Phil Connors? He gives the weather report here, on the radio."

[liesdontfindyou]

CT shake her head. "I don't know him, no, but I've heard him on the radio and read his reports in the paper."

[not_the_last]

She nods. "He's very learned in the ways of weather, from his own world. He studied the weather there, on the ship, every day we were there, and he said it never once changed. Down to the same clouds, crossing the sky at the same times."

[liesdontfindyou]

"That's— downright disconcerting. Even the Mother of Invention didn't have tells like that. Though whether no simulated sky at all is better or worse is probably down to personal opinion. I always tried not to think too hard about what was happening beyond the walls of the ship, open space is— well it's not my favourite environment."

Too vast and unpredictable. It was all well and good being on the inside of the thick, metal hull of the massive ship, but the few times she had to travel with nothing but her armour between her and the vacuum were terrifying. Not thinking about being thrown out there by decompression in a drop-ship or a strike against the Invention was in her best interests.

[not_the_last]

Cassandra shakes her head. "Open space ... to be honest, I have trouble even imagining it. Crichton's described it to me a few times, but that isn't really the same."

[liesdontfindyou]

CT makes a low noise of agreement. "It's something you have to experience to really understand. Undoubtedly beautiful, but it's the kind of beauty I'd rather keep a nice, thick bulkhead between me and it. Even then, the first time I stepped on a real starship it took me days to get over the space sickness and the feeling of impending doom every time I saw a window out. My first team lead had to help me get my space legs."

And back then the program luckily still cared enough to give its new arrivals time to adjust before throwing them into their initiation matches. She's not sure that would have held if they'd kept recruiting later.

[not_the_last]

"Mm. I know people who say the same about the snow. -- Not the sickness and impending doom part, the part about how it's beautiful but they'd much rather see it from inside some nice thick walls."

[liesdontfindyou]

Jokingly: "Well, one's decidedly more deadly than the other. But they are both just as cold."