wilderlogs | THE LAST HOMELY HOUSE ※ RIVENDELL ※ LOG 2

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THE LAST HOMELY HOUSE ※ RIVENDELL ※ LOG 2

THE LAST HOMELY HOUSE
OOC POST
The group is told to take a week of rest in the Last Homely House as the injured and sick among them heal. The Elves promise them that at the end of that week, there will be a great Council, with representatives of several peoples in attendance.

Until then, they can wander the peaceful halls of Rivendell, which are filled with travelers from all over the Wilderlands who are making a rest stop while they travel through the lands of Middle-Earth.

The most notable part of Rivendell is the Hall of Fire, a great feast hall where people can eat, drink, and be merry. This is the great social hall of Rivendell, where the Elves and their visitors share news of lands far beyond, tell stories, or perform music. The music here almost sounds divine, especially when the Elves sing and play, but they're just as eager to hear songs from other lands, so if any of the squad decide to share, they'll be glad to listen.

Some of the hall's guests are a touch more lively than the others, like a party of dwarves staying at Rivendell. Their stories are a mite more adventurous and if you get in their good graces, they might be willing to share some of the beer they brought with them. Listening to their stories or their talk about their craftmanship is a way to get into their good graces.

The Elves love learning, so there are libraries the group is allowed to browse, though they mostly only contain tales of Middle-Earth (for now), though the Elves seem to be collecting what books about other lands they can. These libraries often have viewing stations with telescopes pointing at the sky. The Elves have been almost delighted by the changing skies, enjoying the challenge of trying to understand how the sky has been knitting itself together with the addition of new worlds.

There are also beautiful balconies here, overlooking the gorge and the waters below, and terraced gardens filled with flowers, bushes, and flowering trees. Their rooms are open to the outdoors and have beds that seem grown into the shape of bed-frames instead of carved. The bathrooms actually have running water. The Elves have figured out how to direct the clean running waters of the gorge in primitive indoor plumbing. Water for hot baths has to be heated first in brass cauldrons over coal braziers before getting dumped into the bath.

It's time for the squad to rest, eat, and regroup. If a great Council is going to be called involving them, it might be a good idea to make sure they go into it as a united front, lest decisions about their fate be made for them.

NOTES
✦ Joint log: Since this camp period won't be particularly long, everything will take place in a joint log. Players can post starters with prompts for others and tag into other players' prompts.

✦ Post in actionspam format. Plots and mod-run events in the game are meant to be in actionspam format to keep a brisk pace.

✦ Cursed Weapons/Powers: So they know about how they'll be treated: those with cursed weapons and dark powers will be tolerated by the Elves after entry. While they'll get the same general treatment, the Elves around them may at times seem uncomfortable. Those with cursed weapons will only be distrusted a little, as the weapons themselves will seem more suspicious than their bearers. Those with dark powers or some kind of dark nature (such as being a vampire, Necromancer mage, werewolf, etc.) will be treated with the greatest distrust.

✦ Fairy Swaps: The Elves may be slightly alarmed by the Brugh fairy swaps but get over it easily. However, if the character swapped in is one of the "dark" characters, the swap might be extra cause for alarm. (A potential prompt idea).

✦ Npcing: There will be two npc threads. The "Random Encounters" thread is for characters to have a totally random encounter with an npc. These npcs will be fellow travelers from lands beyond. While they can't give much information about the group's status as Chosen Ones (that will happen during the Council) they can provide info about events in the Wilderlands beyond that may come to affect the squad in their travels. The "Specific Requests" thread will be for more specific issues your character might want to discuss with the Elves. While they'll push any Chosen Ones discussion off to the Council, they're willing to discuss issues with the characters, like if they have questions about having received magic, about being bound to their weapons, etc. The Rivendell Elves have heard a lot of gossip from all over and can potentially provide info based on things they've heard.

✦ Clothes: The group will not yet be fully equipped for their travels (that will happen upon leaving) but everyone will at least be given new clothes since theirs are dirty and sometimes torn. Characters without appropriate travel footwear will also be given light and sturdy boots that will somehow be in their size without their size being asked. They'll also be given basic toiletries like scissors that can be used to cut hair and beards. There are no razors, however, because the Elves don't need to shave so they don't keep them on hand.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Dixon's the happiest he's been since this whole endeavor started - the happiest he's been since a while before that, actually, since out here he's able, just a little bit, to pretend that nothing that happened back home really matters. The upshot of his reactivity is that the ups are pretty high, and he's been grinning, whistling, smiling for no real reason since the first night here, where he made a cluster of companions with the Mirkwood elves and the dwarves. The last few nights he's joined them at mealtimes as they've turned into a little clique like a group of band kids at high school. After dinner each night the table devolves into drinking and increasingly off-key singing, usually until well past a reasonable hour for people to get to bed.

He's developing quite a repertoire of dwarven mining songs and the more uncouth elven songs, which the Mirkwood elves seem tickled to share, knowing it rubs some of the more elitist of their race the wrong way.

In that good buzzed place, he ran up a staircase and down the hall to get his iPod, needing a refresher on lyrics to teach his new friends "What's Your Mama's Name Child", and on the return trip he's both winded and crossing paths with Revan as she peers through a telescope on the balcony.]

You gonna come join us? Don't think I ain't seen you being chatty with everyone. [Not because, you know, he's been stargazing at her or anything. Obviously. He coughs into his elbow, the effort of sprinting up stairs having exacerbated the "lungs finally free of tobacco" smoker's cough.]

[Don't think Revan hasn't noticed Dixon's attention, what with the Force perceptions and all. Fortunately for his fragile dignity, he's far from the first person to find her charismatic, and it doesn't occur to her to call him on it.]

I'm just being a good guest, Dixon.

[Revan's cunning strategy laid bare.]

I almost feel indebted over that first bath alone.

[Yes, putting those two statements together does add up to Revan thinking that her mere presence is a valuable enough gift to offset any debt, why do you ask.]

I about cried at that first bath. [An understatement. He did cry. Relief is one of the approximately forty emotions Dixon can be moved to tears by.

Infatuated though he is, the idea of Revan in the bath doesn’t even flick across his mind.]

You should come down and meet the Mirkwood elves. And the dwarves. I’m not going to talk sour about our hosts, on account of the baths and clothes and hospitality and all, but the Mirkwood elves and the dwarves are a bit less...

[The word he’s dancing around saying is ‘condescending’, but he suspects that might be an attitude the Rivendell elves are reserving for people like him and not people like Revan.]

Reserved?

[Revan supplies a nice, value-neutral word, because certainly Dixon doesn't think poorly of their hosts or anything so gauche as that.]

Yes. [He makes a little finger-gun gesture at her.] That.

[He just gave Loken a big lecture on not being a dick to the hosts; he's going to try and live by that, no matter how many fifty-dollar words and stares down their nose they give him.

He gestures towards her telescope.]

Looking for home?

[She chuckles.]

I don't think I'd recognize Dina through a telescope, or not without a label, anyway. I've just never seen an optical telescope before.

[Telescopes just aren't as big a deal for a civilization that travels the stars, and the ones they do use don't bother with anything so limited as the visual spectrum.]

[Dixon adopts a look that's not all that uncommon on his face: vague confusion.] You've never seen a telescope?

[It doesn't really occur to him that she used the term 'optical' to differentiate from other types of telescopes, partially because he doesn't know what that word means off the top of his head and isn't going to ask. Nor is he going to ask for clarification between Dina and Dantooine.

He isn't completely oblivious, though; living in the middle of nowhere gives plenty of opportunities to look up at blazing stars, unmasked by light pollution. He had a telescope growing up, glowing stickers on the ceiling marking out most of the major star patterns. Tea and beer and cigarettes on the porch watching the stars start to poke themselves into the sunset.]

Mind if I take a look? I recognize most of the constellations.

[Possibly it won't look the same from here, wherever this is. He's not sure.]

[Explaining radio telescopy to Dixon is not a labor Revan wants to undertake at the moment, or ever, and she lets his misplaced surprise slide into his next question without comment beyond the slightly skeptical expression she gets when someone breaks out with something baffling. He's probably familiar with it.]

Maybe not the ones here.

[Not that she'd recognize his homeworld's night sky to know. Revan steps aside to give Dixon a turn.]

[He is familiar with it. He's familiar enough that he really should be immune to its sting by now. He walks on over.

Before he actually takes a look at the stars, he manages to convince himself that it's actually going to look like the sky over Ebbing and that he's about to pull out a smidgen of enjoyable knowledge for them to have. It's not even like he's trying to impress her, he just wants to share something with her. He wants to have something to share.

Unfortunately, the sky's a splatter-painting of unharmonized, reckless stars and planets, and he's walked himself into a situation where he's got to admit he's clueless.]

I think that one's Mars. [It's a straight-up lie, and he gives up about halfway through the sentence, as evidenced by how even the false confidence plummets into a meek wobble.] Nah, I got nothing.

I couldn't find my ship, either.

[Aware how fragile Dixon is, Revan treats it like he's making a wry joke. Of course he never expected to see anything he recognized.]

[He knows she's doing him a kindness, and though he doesn't thank her, he's grateful. It allows him to keep that thin shell of the illusion of dignity. He steps back from the telescope.]

What was it like? The ship and the crew and...? [He doesn't even have the messiest sketch of what her life might have been like. It occurs to him that he doesn't even know if her crew could fit around the dinner table or be a group larger than his hometown.] I know you need to get back there, but do you miss it?

[Not unwilling to talk about home, at least until Dixon blunders into something more sensitive than that, she lets him change the subject.]

The Ebon Hawk? I stole it from a crime lord on Taris when we needed to run the Sith blockade. Nice little freighter, fast hyperdrive, lots of aftermarket mods, about half of them illegal in the Republic.

[Revan leans back against a table, folding her arms and reeling off that particular adventure like it's nothing. Davik's security hadn't been worth much, and neither had he and that pet bounty hunter of his. The entire caper ranks low on her list of ridiculous escapades, really.]

However, "crew" is probably less accurate than "a bunch of people who followed me and I can't seem to shake."

[She says it with affection mingled with...something, a certain chill or distance that casts a pall over the emotion. Easy enough to dismiss as homesickness.]

I miss what I had with them, yes.

[Totally honest, totally misleading. She wonders if all this deflection is going to catch up with her anytime soon. Not where Dixon's concerned, of course--she's sure she could tell him to space himself and he'd just ask for directions to the airlock--but the others are expecting the Revan who Revan's been pretending to be, the hero who led the Republic to victory in a righteous war, not the blood-soaked tyrant who rose in her place or the amnesiac still reeling from the blow the revelation of her past had dealt her. When her doubts catch up to her in the long watches of the night, she fears the emptiness the Council left in her mind will swallow her and take any trust the others have in her with it.]

...All of them would tell me to get over it and do my blasted job.

[Half the words she says to start with mean nothing to him - Taris, Sith blockade, hyperdrive, whatever - so instead he just listens to her tone and absorbs that. A good ride. He believes that it's homesickness. He believes there's affection, too.

He's not even a little bit surprised that she's amassed a following; that, to him, is only sensible when you're met with someone so enthralling. She's got a magnetic, gravitational pull; of course she had a bunch of people following her around. He'd probably be one of them; he probably is now.]

My friends on- my friends at my job were a little tough love like that too. [He doesn't want to say "the force" yet - besides, he's like, 99% sure "the force" means something way different to her. But it's really the were that trips him up, the past-tense for a community he was ejected from not by coming here to quest for but weeks before that. A group that, as soon as he lost his employment with them, turned out not to be friends but just colleagues.]

How much of your job was stealing shit from crime lords? Because that's only sort of legal. [Actually, he's pretty sure that earth laws or space laws, stealing is one of the constants in terms of illegality.]

[She waggles her hand in an "eh" gesture.]

The Republic has bigger things to worry about and I don't care what the Sith think. The Exchange--the big crime syndicate--might put a bounty on me, but I doubt it. They're too pragmatic. The Sith already have one out on me, and anything they'd do to me if someone managed to collect would be way nastier, so the Exchange might as well save their money.

[Revan shrugs, unconcerned, like this is a normal thing people have to deal with. Taxes. Oil changes. Prices on your head. Besides, the Sith already caught her once and she broke out...though it cost her dearly.]

We're at war, Dixon. The Exchange is the least of my problems.

Point. [There's a mercenary logic to what she's saying, and Dixon gets it. He sticks his hands into his pockets and looks back out at the stars. For as much time in his life he's spent looking at them, he never really wondered about what might exist among them. Maybe he once thought there might be aliens, but he never thought of whole governments and empires and wars and anything beyond little green men.]

Littler problems don't go away just because you're at war, you know. [It's not one of those impudent attempts to save face upon being corrected; it's just a fact he believes, and a way to hold open the door to her that if she ever wants to talk about a littler problem, he'd hear it. He'd probably be a lot better at hearing it than a large problem anyway.

But he doesn't suspect it would really be about stolen spaceships, at least not out here. And he doesn't expect her to ever take him up.]

[Dixon's effort might not have met with success--Revan certainly doesn't venture anything--but he's rewarded with a truly warm smile nonetheless. Pain shared is pain lessened. He had been listening.]

Believe me, I don't have any little problems.

[The smile shades into something sadder. Revan has only a Potemkin village of false memories stretched inadequately over endless nothing. You have to have a life to have little problems.]

Not yet, maybe. But we do this adventuring thing long enough and I bet you'll get some small problems. Even if they're just blisters on your feet or something like that.

[He's resisting the kneejerk impulse to ask about her bigger problems. She hasn't pried into the particulars of his life, only the symptoms. There's been no digging for salacious details. He'll do her the same courtesy.]

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THE LAST HOMELY HOUSE ※ RIVENDELL ※ LOG 2

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