GAME OPEN

[thequietmods]

The storm ends at some point during the night and with it comes a restful, almost enforced sleep. There's still a chill in the air when the morning comes, but it's being chased away by the warm spring sun. There's even birds singing, of all things, as if the view outside the cave wasn't quite idyllic enough. Almost too idyllic, some might say, but being paranoid never got anyone anywhere, right?

Immediately outside the cave is a broad valley. Not as green as it could be, much of the grass is brown, but there's a few tufts of proper, lush vegetation poking through. Immediately outside of the cave is a large stone head, almost Olmec-like in design, with an oddly contented smile. A sign leaning up against it declares that it's 'open for business'. Nearby, tossed carelessly onto the ground, are a few tools. Shovels, axes, saws, and the like. Rusty and dinged up, but serviceable.

Off a ways is a large forest. Opposite of it is a river, and the grass is definitely greener on the other side. And, a few dozen feet outside of the cave, are the Blank Men. Tall, pure white, smooth, and the instant the new residents lay eyes on them, they know what they're for. How they know, no one can say. They just do. Whether that makes them trustworthy, that's up in the air.

Far off in the distance, there's a massive lake that the water runs off into.

The sky's blue, the air is clean, and there's a whole year before Winter comes. The world is theirs to make of it as they will. How will they start?

Comments

[withtherats]

Bruno smiles in what he hopes is a reassuring way, making sure Jackie keeps his balance. It's not until Jackie comments on something that he turns around to see - oh, wow, suddenly food! And a pot, wonderful!

He perks up. "Oh, you have a gift too?" That'd been a Madrigal-only thing back home. What a useful one too, much more useful than seeing futures-no-one-wanted.

[71lines]

"Ninja magic," she comments to Jackie. Just offhand. Surely Larkin's the only one who doesn't know what a ninja is, right? "I've got some food stored like this, but only enough for a few days. A week at most, if we stretch things thin and skip meals. We're definitely going to have to start foraging and hunting once we've got our shelter set up." If she'd known she was going to be stuck in the wilderness, she would've stocked up some more, maybe even picked up some soldier pills. But who can predict being kidnapped like this?

She glances up at Bruno and shrugs, nursing the fire to a good start. "A gift? I guess you could say that." Her master had used 'talent', but hey. Gift worked, too. Not everyone could work space-time jutsu like she could. It was a point of pride. "What, do you do ninjutsu?"

[withtherats]

Bruno, meanwhile, looks confused now. Impressed, but confused. "'Ninja'? And what's... 'ninjutsu'?" While he'd agree the Madrigal gifts could be called magic, Tenten's using a bunch of other words that have no meaning to him. He can't answer her question without knowing what she's asking.

[jinzhong]

Jackie takes Larkin's offered hand as well, and then: "Ninjas have magic?!"

Then she explained a little, and he nodded like it made sense to him. Food was stored somewhere. Didn't matter where, there was just food. "I can roll with it. I don't think I wanna eat much right now, anyway."

[mad_larkin]

Larkin's inclined to think of it as heretical psyker powers, but if it gets them food, he's not going to judge Tenten for it. Out loud.

"Thanks for the meal," he says, instead, "once we've eaten, we can figure out how to get those things to build a shelter."

[71lines]

Larkin's a wise man.

She turns to answer Bruno, but just bursts out laughing at Jackie's interjection. Okay, yeah, maybe that should be addressed. "Ninjutsu is ninja magic. You don't think we can do everything we do without it, do you? And ninjas are... Think of us as covert operatives." A glance at Jackie. "...With magic."

And, voila! Fire! She sets the pot aside, pulls out a knife, and starts roughly chopping everything in preparation for breakfast. "You may not be very hungry now, but you'll want food later. Best to start work on a full belly."

[mad_larkin]

"Covert operatives?" Larkin settles beside her as she's chopping. "That's what I do. Did. Perhaps... do you two have skills like that?"

He looks up at the other two men. They don't look like soldiers, but maybe they're spies of some kind?

[withtherats]

Oh, they've got two spies? Bruno feels like this happened in a telenovela once... he tries to remember more details of that as he moves to sit, motioning for Jackie to do likewise. He doesn't think he remembers any stories about magical spies, but - and then Larkin's asking if he's one too and Bruno decides his experience with telenovelas probably isn't very relevant actually.

He scratches the back of his head sheepishly. "Er, well... I... did hide in the walls of our house for ten years or so..." (He's not sure whether that counts, regarding the question.)

[jinzhong]

"Um..." Jackie shrugs. "I'm good at planning, like, heists, and shit. But we were never really good at covert stuff...kinda not the point, y'know? We had to show strength." Wei would have been good at that kind of stuff. But Wei was good at everything, and Jackie was just...Jackie.

Helpfully: "I've seen a lot of movies, though."

[mad_larkin]

He looks over at Bruno, "Ten years? Well... that's some kind of stealth. Most people couldn't do that."

Then, to Jackie, "Sometimes strength is important. Movies, though? Those usually aren't realistic. At all."

[71lines]

Bruno hid in a house for ten years? Her eyebrows are rising again and the only reason that she doesn't interject is because Larkin already covered it. Jackie and Larkin do give her a new topic though, one that she shifts to while placing a pan over the fire. "What's a movie?"

It didn't sound like it'd be useful, but it might be more useful than a criminal life, which is what it sounds like Jackie lived.

[jinzhong]

Not a question he'd expected to be asked, but of course ninjas don't know what movies are, they've got important ninja shit to do.

"Uh...kinda like plays? But they're recorded so they're the same every time," he says, waving his hands a little. "It's like a bunch of really fast pictures in a row with sound matching up."

[withtherats]

Bruno looks delighted. "Oh! like telenovelas? Except, only one episode. And it's the same episode every time..." Wait. Ok, now he looks a little less delighted, a little more puzzled. Why would anyone want only one episode of a telenovela?

...He does not realize knowing what a telenovela is but not a movie is kinda weird.

[mad_larkin]

Larkin's assuming a telanovela's like a television show. "Movies are longer. And there's a lot of them. Sometimes, there's series. Like the one about a Sister of Battle. That ran to fifteen separate movies." He's not sure if they know what a Sister of Battle is, but that's not important.

[71lines]

"I see!" Tenten's going to get an education around these guys. How much of it is useful, God only knows, but she will. She hmms and continues working on their food while they explain, eventually plating up several okonomiyaki for the group. "Breakfast is served. Everyone," including you, Jackie, "enjoy. We're going to have a hard day's work ahead of us, especially without any movies to watch."

Maybe she can convince Larkin and Jackie to act out a few movies later. That'll come this evening, they might need some firelight entertainment.

[withtherats]

Bruno nods along with Larkin's explanation. Like telenovelas but with different pacing makes more sense. They might focus on different types of stories or something, too... "What are the 'Sister of Battle' ones about? I mean, what does she do in them?" He's imagining a veiled nun living in a warzone.

He's distracted as Tenten presents the okonomiyaki. "Oh, gracias - ah, that's true, we do have a lot to do. Maybe we should save the Sister of Battle stories for the end of the day, then." He examines his food curiously before taking a bite. Hm! Bit different from the food he's used to, but not in a bad way.

[mad_larkin]

Larkin takes his food and nods his thanks, digging in. Bruno's more right than he thinks. "They're about the adventures she has, fighting Chaos and rooting out heresy. The plots got pretty repetitious by the end. There were big fight scenes and she's always have one bit where she lopped some guy's head off."

[withtherats]

"Wow, much more violent than my telenovelas," Bruno comments thoughtfully. "At least, most of them, anyway." He thinks he vaguely remembers the idea of action adventure stories like these battle nun movies. There were always explosions and lots of chasing people.

He doesn't want to get too distracted before they get to work though, so he busies himself with eating rather than offer further commentary.

[jinzhong]

"Thanks," Jackie says when Tenten hands him the okonomiyaki. He's hungry despite himself - of course you're hungry, lan yeung, you literally-- - no, he doesn't want to finish that thought.

"Sounds cool," he says to Larkin about the movies. He tries not to think about the decapitation bit. Too real right now. "I like watching kung fu stuff, you know, like with Bruce Lee." Can't beat the master.

[mad_larkin]

"Bruce Lee?" he asks, "Who's that?" Pretty much all the movies and media in general in the Imperium are propaganda of one kind or another, so there's not a lot of widely known actors. Maybe he's from a different planet, one that Larkin doesn't know about.

[withtherats]

"A popular character?" Bruno offers, half-suggestion half-question. He really doesn't have experience with actors as being an important part of media - he'd mostly watched his stories in the form of rats on a little stage with tiny face-cut-out scene-settings and a lot of imagination. (The ones that he actually saw rather than created himself had all been in visions, and he's very unclear on how the stories 'occurred' - he had assumed they were all set on some sort of tiny stage, but then Jackie said it was actually pictures moving around, which made much more sense...)

[71lines]

"I know a Rock Lee..." she trails off doubtfully, trying to remember if she'd met a Bruce in the Lee clan.

This isn't her best breakfast, she thinks, but that doesn't matter too much as she wolfs it down. The dirty implements go into the pot. "I'll wash these in the river, then get started on work. Take your time." She means it, it's not sarcasm. Some of them don't look quite used to this kind of food.

[mad_larkin]

"I'm fairly sure we don't have overlapping cultures," Larkin says, "unless you're all from the Imperium and you haven't been letting on?"

He's eaten similar food to this, but not quite the same. The cabbage is a comforting familiarity, at least.

[withtherats]

"I'm from Colombia," Bruno provides. He's never heard of anywhere called 'the Imperium' but he'd never been much for studying world geography, so. Probably just someplace far away he hasn't heard of before.

[mad_larkin]

"Never heard of it," Larkin says, getting up, "Where should we start?"