TEINAR > The Meeting Place

Back to my roots.

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Rhi-Rhi:
This was amazing.

Of course Malriiko had heard of the, ah, 'access points' but she had never really believed they were true. A skeptic through and through, she never made a habit of accepting things she couldn't touch and see and taste herself as truth--excepting her deities, of course, but that was entirely irrelevant. Yet here she was. It had worked, and she was made a believer.

Unless that wine she'd drank at dinner was spiked and this was just a drug-induced hallucination. There was always that.

Felt too real for that, though. The air smelled thick and earthy, the soil gave beneath her boots and the grass crunched wetly with each step. Was this...Earth? Blinking and rubbing at her eyes, Mal looked upward and saw the moon through the haze above and for a moment felt dizzy because this was the first time she'd seen it above her. Shit! She stumbled and quickly caught her balance. Gods, this was trippy and looking up made her feel kind of upside-down. She ran a hand through her short, spiky white hair and took a deep breath of non-filtered and non-artificially oxygenated air; for Earth it was clean air, but to her it just felt...gross and oily and dusty. In all her years she'd never actually been on Earth or anything remotely like it and she had thus never before experienced grass, either. It had always been metal for her, and she liked her metal, thankyouverymuch. The Libra was clean and orderly, just like she liked it. This was...different.

But the grass was intriguing and she found herself wondering what it felt like--and found herself fixating on that more than "holy hell, where the fuck am I?" like she probably should have been. Then again, it was never really her nature to panic. Mal had always just sort of quietly accepted things and taken them in stride once the initial shock was over. There was no point in carrying on.

Mal gave a quick look around the area. Didn't look like anyone else was here, though there were benches and obvious signs that people had been here recently. Good. She didn't need an audience, people looking at her funny just because she'd never seen this stuff in her life. She stooped down and poked at a blade of grass, then pursed her lips and picked it. Huh. Fragile stuff. Flicking the piece away, she pressed her palm flat to the ground and ran a hand through it. Kind of soft, too...

Within minutes, Mal went from standing to sitting, and then sitting to laying stretched out flat on her back, arms beneath her head and legs crossed at the ankles as she stared up at the sky, her coat off and tossed to the side so she could feel it on her bare arms. Yeah, this must be Earth or a bad trip. Weird. So this was real gravity, the only thing keeping her from falling up into the sky...

Either way, she was in no hurry to get back. The Libra would be fiiine for a few minutes. Wasn't gonna blow up the second she left or anything. But for now, she was quite enjoying the feel of grass on her skin--not so much enjoying her increasingly wet bottom. Apparently, the grass was wet; she wasn't going to think about why it was wet.

Eugh. Apparently living in a metal space station all her life wasn't enough to beat out the earthy drow in her and here she was, the usually OCDly tidy captain laying around in the dirt and liking it. Of all the things that could have happened, her first instinct was to lay in the grass. Go figure.

She rolled her eyes at the thought.

Tally:
Scheherazade had wanted to fly him here herself, but the last thing Roman wanted when he had a couple days of leave was to stuff himself into a flight suit and go sailing over the wasted earth.  He didn't take advantage of leave as often as he should have in the first place.  When he did, he wanted to do it his way.

That meant no dragons, no skyscrapers, no cell phone.  It meant stranding himself in the middle of nowhere with a little ice chest holding a few cold beers.  Scheherazade wheeled overhead, somewhere in the middle ranges of the stratosphere, keeping well away from this place.  It worked all kinds of havoc on digital systems.

Nothing here could hurt him, so he weaved through a strand of trees and just let his thoughts wander.  His plan was to find a place to sit down—maybe one of the little stone benches you found around here sometimes—and think about anything else but work for awhile. Gabriel would have been proud of him, he thought.  He was relaxing for once.

But he wasn't alone.  Coming out of the shade of the trees, he stopped short.  That wasn't just anyone laying in the grass over there.  He'd never met the woman himself, but had seen enough photos and video of Malriiko Arabar to recognize her.

He'd made enough noise crunching over the fallen leaves and brushing through the low-hanging branches that she must have heard him coming.  But would she know him?  He was in plain clothes, but his own image was out there in the digital ether, available for anyone to see.

He leaned against a tree and raised a hand.  "Hey."

Rhi-Rhi:
Leaves crunched and twigs snapped and Mal bolted upright with a muffled curse and turned just in time to see that her visitor was human. Of course. Oh no, it couldn't just be some...mutated squirrel that came to check her out, it had to be sentient. How embarrassing.

With a scowl, Mal picked leaves out of her spiky hair and dusted off her clothes--plain clothes as well, though she was no less recognizable out of uniform. Then she cleared her throat and tried her best to look professional while sitting in grass and leaves. "Hello," she said slowly, narrowing her eyes as she studied him. Why did he look so familiar? She felt like she should know him. Had he followed her? Huh. Creepy thought, that. And what was with the ice chest? Hm, either picnic food or organs, she supposed. "Can I help you?"

Then it hit her. Why he looked familiar.

She'd seen his face all over the media.

A Pilot. Roman Rosales. One of the big names. She couldn't remember what he did, just that he was high up on the hierarchical ladder.

She had her hand on her gun before she had time to think, but it was lucky her thoughts caught up to her because that was as far as she got before she stopped. Pulling a gun on a Pilot, Mal? In a one on one interaction where he can already see you and it? Really? Yeah, that was stupid. With a grimace, she released it and leaned back on her hands, tilting her head to peer up at him.

"Roman Rosales, was it?" she said, smiling. "Well, I must admit you're about the last person I expected to see here apart from the Imperial himself, but with the way this day is turning out so far, I'm prepared to eat my words. So what brings you all the way out here to the sticks? A little far from home, isn't it?"

Tally:
"Not quite as far as you," he said in a quiet voice, and if she chose to hear menace in it then let her.  He had no game here.  It took too much effort to turn himself off, to get his mind into a place that wasn't wholly rooted in the ATC, in the Citadel.  He wasn't about to unwind all the layers of denial and excuses he'd had to tell himself to get to this point, the point at which he could walk away from whatever fresh stack of papers had found its way on his desk and tell himself, with only the barest grip of tension in his stomach, "I'll do those tomorrow."

"And you're stealing all my lines."  It would be rude to leave now, wouldn't it?  Here they were.  No walking away from this one.  He hung out by the tree a few moments more, since she seemed so trigger jumpy.  "I'm the last person you expected to see?  Imagine my surprise, huh?"

Curious, and now somewhat less likely to get a gun pointed at him, he left the trees to join her in the grass and the wan sunlight.  "I'm taking some time off.  I guess you're doing the same."

A person could do little else out here.  The Meeting Place wasn't good for much except losing yourself in.  He set the ice chest down. but remained standing.  He was trying to decide if he should stick around or leave her be.  He understood how it could be.  Who wanted someone else around when you had gone to such lengths to get yourself alone?  "I wasn't sure if you'd recognize me."

Rhi-Rhi:
Mal gave an amused snort and a quick roll of her eyes. "Oh, please. Me stealing your lines? You're the psychic here."

But there was humor in her voice and she had relaxed now that she was convinced that he wasn't an immediate threat. She remained where she was as he approached, glancing curiously at the ice chest. It was a little difficult to find someone, even a Pilot, intimidating when they were carrying around a little cooler, and besides...

"You're much shorter in person," she mused out loud, tilting her head as she looked up at him. She draped one arm over her knee and pursed her lips. "Maybe that's it. It took me a second or two to recognize you, but your image is all over the news. Alright, maybe not all over, but enough. You always looked taller." She squinted at him a little, then shrugged.

"So, what did we bring with us today?"

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