legionworld | softly, with grace [open]

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softly, with grace [open]

Who| Rebecca & OPEN
What| After adjusting to culture shock, Rebecca is released to the world at large! Surprise, she's still overwhelmed.
Where| Around the tower!
When| Her first day or thereabouts, sometime after TTHS!
Warnings/Notes| None!

[Crew Quarters, generally around]

It’s just her luck to finish fighting one dragon and end up in some bizarre otherworld before she’s even made it back to the ship home.

...Actually, it isn’t, she thinks to herself. Normally her luck is pretty good, and she can’t imagine what she’s done in her life to deserve waking up in a death void and then finding herself surrounded by steel magic. But she’s over it! She’s definitely over it. It's been enough time that she's accepted this, and how could she not? She has people to help...people who aren't even here, but even people who are here. Rebecca never thought her soldier life would bring her to this point, but...you don't need a reason to help people, not when she's in such a position to do so. Becoming a Legionnaire had been the right thing to do, she's sure of it.

She’s inside the ship (or miniature planet, whatever, adjusting), she has her room and everything. Crew quarters aren’t much different than a tent (, she lies to herself)...and Legionnaires aren’t much different than fellow soldiers, and...

No, no, it’s all completely different, but she's going to get used to it! Just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad. Well, it's not good, she'll just figure it out! She settles on leaving her bow and arrow in her room and heading out on a walk to familiarize herself with everything. If anyone so much at looks at her for more than a half-second, she’ll greet them with a slightly hesitant, but still smiley:

"Excuse me...if you’re free, might I have a moment of your time?"

[Mess Hall]

The first thing Rebecca does in this new place is load up her tray with vegetables that look familiar to the ones she knew from back home. Well, or the ones that looked mostly similar. She’s not about to take her chances on that melon(?) with polka dots or the fruit she’d assumed was an orange until someone cut into it and revealed it was blue inside. What a ...wonderful place.

She’s ready to make her way to a seat, admiring how quiet the mess hall seems to be at this hour, when she notices that the ground is coated in some sort of slimy gelatin paste that someone had spilled previously. Just from looking at it, she knows it’s going to make a gross mess if she slips in it...and it’s too late to stop walking, her eyes going wide as she realizes she’s about to walk right into mess she’ll have to clean off of herself. Eyes on the wall, she just thinks at the last millisecond that she needs to get away, and—just like that, she vanishes in a flash of flame that disappears as quickly as it came.

The new problem is that she finishes putting her foot down as soon as she reappears, and the only thing in front of her is a wall. She immediately walks into it, hitting her head, and stumbles back. To everyone else, it probably looks like she burst into flame and then walked into a wall, but there was a very unfortunate chain of events there, and she looks mortified. The tray of vegetables she'd been holding onto just drops onto the ground with a clatter, and she hurriedly scoops them back on. Rebecca miraculously manages to say a few words before taking the quickest exit—hopefully someone will come and say something before she walks out, everything is the worst.

"Oh...oh, you idiot!"

Either way, she still needs to eat, and later she can be found standing next to a vending machine and eating whatever’s available inside of it. She looks exhausted and in need of a proper meal, but she will persevere. She can't afford not to.

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"Saw what?" Sam asks innocently, glancing around for the nearest table and snatching up a few napkins. He kneels down next to her and started wiping up the mess.

Edited (tenses my eternal enemy) 2016-09-06 06:29 (UTC)

That elicits a small, appreciative laugh from her. Her first day could be going better, but at least someone is cooperative.

"Right! There was nothing to see." Once they've scooped up enough of the gunk, Rebecca will stand, setting it down on a nearby table before continuing to speak. She can recycle it in a moment, someone will just have to tell her what that means first.

"But..." And she still looks a little flustered, even if her smile is back. "...if you did see something, it might be because I haven't really done that very often yet."

"Oh, it's cool. You should've seen me when I first got my powers. Learning to fly is way harder than comic books made it look."

He'd crashed more times than he wanted to count. (Did his helmet keep count? It seemed like the kind of thing it would do. Maybe he could purge it from the systems.) He'd overdone more than a few energy bursts and toasted things a little more thoroughly than he would've liked, he'd flown into asteroids (thankfully, he was charged up enough to go through instead of becoming a splat on the rock)...

If it's embarrassing and at all possible to manage with his powers, Sam's done it. Possibly more than once.

"It gets easier after a while."

"Oh, that...that happens with the rings, right? I can't even imagine trying that yet."

As it stands, Rebecca isn't really wearing her new uniform yet (it's a little embarrassing!), so she's left in new casual clothing (still strange) and without her flight ring. The fact she can fly later if she wants to...that's going to take even more adjusting.

She looks a little more overwhelmed than she means to, but she attempts to put on a bigger smile! She can handle this, she's not going to let things get the best of her (she did all of her crying in the hospital, probably).

"I can only hope so! I mean, well, I learn quickly, but thank you. I have a lot to learn...and teleporting into a wall isn't helping me."

She says the word 'teleporting' like it's a little foreign to her still.

"Flying's really cool once you get over the first moment of 'ohmygodimgonnacrash,' you'll love it."

A beat.

"I mean, unless you're afraid of heights or something, in which case I guess it's not so cool."

Eloquence, thy name is Sam Alexander.

"It's really cool?" She thinks he means 'cold,' honestly, because what is modern slang to a country girl? "The only fliers I've known ride pegasi...flying without one must take a lot of training."

She sounds a little impressed with him. It must have taken a lot of training to master a power like that.

"I guess I can't say whether or not I am until I try, but I'm not opposed to trying it if it means I'll be able to respond more quickly."

She's still trying to really figure out how superheroism works, but helping people is generally a good thing. She has no problems with that.

It could be cold, to be fair, once you got far enough up in the atmosphere (or out of it).

"Some of our fights stay grounded, but sometimes we're all the way out of orbit, so flying's important. But it's not as bad to pick up as it sounds. Mostly, you just gotta be sure you don't start too fast."

And the flight rings, mercifully, seem considerably more forgiving to him than learning to fly with the Nova Force had been. They don't get up to such ridiculous velocities. If he'd learned that way, he's pretty sure he wouldn't have crashed facefirst into the moon.

"All the way out of orbit?" Rebecca only has a faint sense of what 'orbit' means, because she's only been filled in with the basics of how planets work. But. That means space. And isn't there nothing out there. "Can we really fly out there?"

She looks a lot more nervous at the thought of flying around where there's no oxygen and no life, but she's trying her best not to. But she can't help it. She's sixteen.

"And how do you do that? How do you make sure you don't start too fast?"

"The transsuits fix that stuff. So even if there's no air or it's super cold, we're still fine. I like fighting in space better, honestly." Tons of room to maneuver, awesome scenery, less chance of major property damage (always a concern with a destructive power like the Nova Force). "It's pretty awesome."

Trying to explain how to do it, though...

"It's...ugh, I dunno how to say it." Learning to fly had been pretty intuitive to him. It was nothing like driving a car; when you were using a power that responded to your mind, it was just a matter of keeping yourself on task. "The flight rings...work off your thoughts? So if you let yourself get carried away, they might pick up on that. You have to make sure you're thinking about not going crazy right off the bat."

"Ah...I don't think I could even fight up there even if I wanted to. Arrows wouldn't really travel well, would they?"

Teleportation and arrows...and now she's left with the impression that there's a lot of fighting done in that thing that isn't the sky. Maybe, she thinks, she should be going to school and trying to fill in some of these blanks.

"But that doesn't sound so bad! I don't ever get carried away." Well. "Usually. I think I can handle not being crazy, too."

"Momentum's more important. Like, you can still shoot, but since the physics of the atmosphere are kinda different when there's, well, no atmosphere, there's nothing to push back against, and it's easy to get things moving but hard to get them moving the way you want them to."

Sam might've been tanking in school, but space was one subject he felt perfectly comfortable getting into.

"But there's a lot of technology for dealing with all the zero-gravity problems. Maybe the nerds in the labs can figure something out for you." Did crossbows work better in those conditions? Maybe crossbows would work better. Although, loading them...

Physics. Ohhh, Rebecca never really went over things like physics or space in school, mostly because they weren't really something to study.

"R-right...and it's...harder to move things because of gravity, too, I think." She isn't even sure if she's said something important or right, she just sort of wants to sound like she understands. "Who are these nerds, though? Are you telling me that they might be able to help me with a weapon? I feel a bit naked being without one for so long."

"There's a few guys around here who build weapons and do science-y stuff. They can probably make you something cool," Sam explained.

That wasn't...a particularly great explanation, Sam.

No, that's a great explanation. Rebecca beams brightly, pleased with this new bit of information.

"That's such a relief! I don't know much about science, but...ohh, I'd hate it if my only bow were to break or if I were to run out of arrows. It'd be hard to be an archer without them, I'd think."

"Yeah, I can get that...I'd be pretty boned without my helmet." He'd managed okay the handful of times he'd lost it during a fight, to be fair, but that had been a lot of luck, some fast reactions, and being able to figure out how to get it back in short order.

"Your helmet?" Considering she's talking about a weapon, there's a very brief moment where she imagines him fighting with his head. No, no, that can't be right. He's not headbutting things. Probably. "It must be a very special helmet, then?"

It's not what he meant, but he does that too.

"Yeah, it's...kind of my connection to my powers, back home? Without it I'm pretty normal. Except since I got here, I can do the same stuff without it, but most of the time I'm pretty normal."

"I see! I've never heard of helmets like that...oh, but I've heard of weapons like that, I think. They're very rare, but they do exist.

She'd have no idea if she hadn't heard it from someone else though and seen the wielder for herself. She's not from Caelin or Sacae, but even Rebecca admires Lyndis' sword movements.

"Yeah, there's weapons and stuff too. Mjolnir and all that. I dunno if helmets are really a thing for anyone aside from the Nova Corps, now that I think about it."

Weapons, sure. Suits of armor, whether their powers were magical or technological, sure. But just helmets seemed to be a pretty uncommon thing, as far as he could tell.

"Well, that doesn't mean you're strange." No one ever said he was? "It just means these Nova Corps are unique, that's all."

She's only saying this because sentient, power-granting helmets is a bit out of her league. It is weird knowledge. But it's at least something she can understand.

"I can live with strange, anyway. The upsides are pretty good."

If strange meant being able to fly across the galaxy, he was totally down with "strange."

"Right...because you've had, um, powers before now." Casually throwing out the word powers is still a bit strange. "Were they different back where you come from? I was speaking to someone earlier who had powers where he came from as well."

"They haven't changed much. But I guess I used to be, uh, more durable?"

He's pretty sure that if he repeated the Hulk smash incident here, he'd be a splatter on the side of a building.

"So you've got to be more careful, then...and I've got to learn how to not hurt myself learning these new ones."

The bottom line, she's realizing, is that it seems everyone here has to get used to something when they arrive.

"Yeah. But if you've gotta learn how to use superpowers somewhere, here's a pretty good place to do it. Trying to figure out this stuff on your own can go pretty badly."

He has Stories.

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