[open] we could strike the chord

[headinjuries]

CHARACTERS: Anyone who wanted to go to the vigil!
WHERE: Royal Street Gaming Parlor.
WHEN: DAY :031
SUMMARY: Concordia honors the dead. Hosts honor the dead, or maybe just do a little 007ing. As in snooping, not macking on hot ladies. We hope.
WARNINGS: TBA.

This is here for any and all of your mingling needs. Start your own top-levels, harass each other, etc etc.

Here is what we know is happening, courtesy of our fearless mods:

The hosts will be few in a throng of relatively peaceful people. Most people in attendance are younger (30s and below) and a proportionally large number of them have some kind of physical modification, though most are relatively low-profile mods. There's also a small contingent of androids in attendance.

A low platform has been erected in front of the Royal Street Gaming Parlor and the speakers for the vigil either stand on it or, as is the case with some more high profile appearances, they speak across an extranet connection via a holoscreen projected onto the Parlor itself. For the most part the speakers are small time: a few workers from a small local chapter of Mind Life (accompanied by a few skittish looking androids), a beta block councilwoman, a Mother and Sister from a nearby Church of Lirinity. Most of them have nothing more than words of support and condolence.

Somewhere close to the middle of the vigil, Seong-Hye Ngazi, the Public Security Commissioner for Concordia, speaks via extranet connection. She seems somber, competent, but also confident, and speaks about condolences for the losses, regret for the circumstances of the attack, and Public Security's dedication to finding the party responsible for the attack.

Otherwise: it's your fairly standard memorial gathering. Poems are read, some tears are shed, there are some people with signs and a small contingent of rabble rousers on the fringe of the gathering that quickly get chased off by Public Security, etc. You're welcome to create and interact with your own NPCs if you feel so inclined!

Comments

'local thief stands around feeling smug when he should be guilty' - ftfy

[sensitively]

[ As she makes her way into the area cordoned off for the vigil, on the platform raised in front of the gaming parlour, Rey finds herself wondering what she’s doing by coming here. She knows some of the other hosts will be in attendance, both her Nestmates and some Broodmates, the latter being some consolation in the wake of her newly-healed injury. Perhaps it will distract her from her own concerns. In her efforts to fit in she's donned the airy, loose-fitting white clothing given to her upon her awakening, left her dark hair unbound and unrecognizable, loose about her shoulders; the last thing she wants at the moment is to call unnecessary attention to herself.

Perhaps, also, she will use the time and place to write her own eulogies in her head for those she’s recently lost.

Most of the speakers giving platitudes to the dead, though, do so over holographic projection — an extranet connection, she deduces — and to Rey this is surprising. How meaningful are their eulogies to the deceased and their families, if they aren’t even present in person? From what she can glean of the spoken words there’d been an explosion, and several deaths, and judging by the group of protesters on the fringe of the gathering there is more than bad blood after the fact.

She straightens her spine, feeling another pull of the scar and answering flare of pain along her spinal column. Rey tries to concentrate fully on the vigil before her, but there’s a keen sense of misplacement, mainly for the lightsaber she no longer possesses. She feels naked without it, despite only having owned it a short few days.

It’s then that she opens her senses fully and feels the hackles on the back of her neck raising, needles along the length of the puckered scar along her spine. She turns and sees Ren on the opposite end of the outskirts of the crowd, staring at her intently — how long he'd caught on to her presence, she has no idea — and at his hip, clipped to his belt, the hilt of a very familiar weapon.

Unable to help herself, she bristles along the unintentional connection. ]

( That’s mine. )

[narcissithstic]

[Persistent. He'd expect nothing less from the girl that lives as a near-literal thorn in his side.

For a little while he says nothing, thinks less. The announcements continue, and it could almost seem as though Ren hadn't heard her at all— until his eyes slide over to focus on Rey, following the connection between them like a wire. With her hair down she looks vastly different, but her anger, and the expression it prompts, remain entirely all-too familiar.

White clothes. Why she hasn't made time to purchase something more suited to local taste—

Well. Maybe his work has kept her too preoccupied. The idea isn't altogether unpleasant.]

Come and take it, then.

[Come and worm your way through a sea of people attending a solemn ceremony to cause a public spectacle.]

[sensitively]

[ She wouldn't have survived long on Jakku if she hadn't had such a persistent, pervasive stubborn streak.

Her anger seethes, flashes to a boil in the time it takes her to process his thought. He'd have her angry, she realizes; as consumed by fury as she was in the hallway of the Bearings. Better for her to become distracted. Better for her to make a mistake. She tamps down on that urge to throw herself at him in a feral rage, instead turning away from him and leveling her gaze at the holoscreen image of the Security Commissioner. ]

( That's what you'd have me do, isn't it — cause a disturbance in a place where families are mourning their dead. I'm sure it'd please you if I were arrested. )

[ Despite her attempt at self-control, an undeniable spike of hate wells up in her heart. After having spoken to both Bellamy and the Darkling, as well as recalling the warnings of some of the others, she knows that they all to some degree have felt the sting of his saber cauterizing the length of their collective spines, an echo of what he's done to her. Ren himself must know exactly what he's put her through by doing what he's done; the searing pain in her sternum just below her heart is enough of a testament to that.

Which reminds her: ] ( By the way, how's the rib? )

[narcissithstic]

Seen to. [Not 'better' (lies within the Nest are so paper thin they hardly stand a chance against even the gentlest gust of wind), but it carries within it a petty promise that even he holds allies amongst them.

Though most of them she's met already.

His lip twists slightly at the corner; beneath everything else he wants to close the distance between them, though he knows better. He has to know better.]

This world is dangerous, Scavenger. Mind your actions: I doubt your brood would appreciate you unraveling all their hard work.

[sensitively]

[ There's a pettiness of her own that rears its head when she hears it, that he's been tended to; these allies of his obviously don't know Kylo Ren as she does.

She fixes her eyes on him again, scoffs at his words of caution. ] ( I've faced worse. )

[ To her surprise a spike of possessiveness toward her Brood flashes through her, when he mentions them — one that she herself doesn't even fully understand. ]

( And I'm not unraveling anything. I want what you've stolen from me. I'm not going to stop until I get it back. )

[narcissithstic]

What -you- stole. [His. His. Clamoring for the seat of a throne just beyond his reach only to find her there as if it'd been fate all along. Whatever reason the Force might have had for favoring her had to have been a mistake— critical, crucial, perhaps he'd missed something in the moment, too distracted by Han Solo's prior demise.

But then, if he was secure in that thought, he wouldn't have made certain to hook the saber to his belt here and now...]

It's mine— it belongs to me.

[sensitively]

( Is that why you've all but -chained- it to yourself, for security?

Maz Kanata offered it to me, and it came to me. Not you. And you're afraid it will do so, again, aren't you. )

[ ...he's so transparent, she doesn't even need to be in his head to see that. ]

[narcissithstic]

[Despite his determined, persistent efforts to suppress any and all subconscious thoughts, his mind rings clear as struck glass the moment Rey makes her suspicions known. It hasn't slipped his notice that for all the lives he's taken, all the worthless refuse he's tortured and tormented over the years, only she remains capable of reading him so effortlessly.

How exhilarating; how utterly repulsive and endlessly infuriating.]

Shut -up-. [As graceful as a struck nerve.] You have no idea what you're interrupting.

[sensitively]

[ Her anger flash-boils again, and she bares her teeth as she stares him down from across the sea of organic and inorganic attendees. ]

( — No, you shut up! I've been briefed on the mission, I know what's at stake, but if you think I'm going to let you get away with what you've done, I — )

[ And then her thoughts abruptly cease, as the list of fatalities from the explosion are read again — their visages flashed briefly across the holoscreen — and she zeroes in on one name. It's a name she's heard her entire life, in myths and stories passed on from off-world traders. Legend.

Rey's mouth drops open in surprise, her anger dissipated in a cloud of disbelief. ] ( ...Anakin Skywalker? He was here — ? )

[narcissithstic]

[Was. As if he'd simply come and gone of his own volition; whatever she might have meant by it, it's the phrasing that has Ren's own temper flaring as a mirror to her own.]

Before he died. [Hissed, the thought shoved against her skin with a white-hot flash of memory - ash and dust across his tongue, fingers tacky with blood, a heat at the corners of his eyes that refused to wane.

The weight of an empire clutched in his arms, cut short.

Everything she could never understand, and a grief so deeply wounding that his side feels better by individual comparison: never has he felt so broken, so naked in his own skin, as he did when Anakin Skywalker laid listlessly in his grasp. Even Han Solo fell short of that mark, though the fracture remains compounded— gruesomely twisted. Mangled scar tissue Ren stubbornly refuses to acknowledge for what weakness it might incite.]

[sensitively]

[ Before he died. Anakin Skywalker had lived again, here, briefly — and then lost his life just as suddenly in a hail of fire and smoke and debris. The sensation she receives from Ren — potent, given their proximity to one another, despite being on opposing ends of the sea of attendees — is nothing short of searing pain. Grief, disbelief, furious rage.

His grandfather; the one he'd feared to fail to measure up to, she'd seen, when she'd blazed her way into his head like a charging bull rancor. He was — and possibly still is — afraid he would never be as strong as Vader.

She glances back up at the screen, at the handsome young face of a man who looks only a few scant years older than herself. But he wasn't Vader, here. Not here. And that means... ]

( ...He didn't know you, did he. He was a Jedi, here. ) [ As he was before he'd become a Lord of the Sith; before he'd aligned himself with the Empire, before he'd hunted the Jedi to near-extinction.

Rey's resulting conclusion is sharp, unkind, a needle-like stab in an already-festering wound. There's too much malice in her heart for it to be anything otherwise. He'd mourn this grandfather he'd never known, who didn't know him, and yet not his own father?... ]

( It serves you right, to be spurned by him, as well — his saber didn't choose you, either, did it. )

[narcissithstic]

[He was badly wounded when Cathaway had taken him to her side, careful to ease his pain— not just the physical, but the agony he'd been stricken with for too long beneath the brutal demands of the Force. Glossed ceilings, gentle fingertips that acted as a living balm where little else could.

They were one and the same, she'd promised, speaking of the Nest and every living inhabitant it housed, hoping to dissuade him from unnecessary cruelty against his own kind. Every attack made, no matter how slight, would cause him pain - would cause her pain.

It was an effort made in vain: he'd disappointed her time and time again in the months that've passed since, costing him more than just his favor.

Still, he eventually found footing. A means to drag himself back from the brink and strike a fragile balance between control and chaos. He should be coveting it, protecting it in spite of how Rey thinks to claw her way beneath his skin. Instead, with rage boiling feverishly in his blood for her merciless prodding, he falls predictably short of the mark.

As he'd done on Starkiller, Ren squares his heels with a practiced precision, posture going stiff, eyes lidding in an instant. Within less than a handful of seconds the Force moves to pierce the sanctuary of her mind, lancing clean through once it finds purchase. Not for information this time, but for pain.

If her broodmates are so worried about her well-being, let them be the ones to muzzle their rabid akk dog.]

[sensitively]

[ For that brief flash of a moment she's cowed, the pain suddenly lancing through her mind drawing her features up in an agonizing but silent grimace. Rey grabs her head and takes a knee down on the pavement, from where she stands on the outskirts of the vigil — catching herself only at the last moment from faceplanting onto the ground in a crumpling heap by grasping blindly ahead of her and gripping the back of a stranger's arm for a brief few seconds.

And then that person, a young woman with perfectly-coiffed hair and stylish body augments, suddenly turns and shouts out across the crowded gathering, a roar loud enough to be heard over the crowd and the holonet display, towards Ren — ]

— BEN, STOP IT! —

[ — before the woman carefully snaps her lips shut, looking bewildered at her own outburst and confused for a long moment as other attendees of the vigil turn around curiously to gawk at her.

Rey, still kneeling on the ground and panting through the searing agony that has momentarily stopped, hasn't said a single word; she can only look on at what's happened in nothing short of stunned surprise. ]

[deployed]

[ A moment later, Bellamy breaks through the crowd. He's trying to be as surreptitious as possible. The last thing they need is for attention cast on them for creating a disruption here. Every memory this gathering drags to the forefront for him has to be set by the wayside for now, because the last thing he can allow is for this scuffle to escalate into physical blows. ]

Rey.

[ Bellamy's out of breath, but his voice is firm as his hand finds her shoulder. Something's shifted, Bellamy can sense Rey's surprise, but this is the last place to press her about it. ]

( I've got her. )

[ It's projected towards Ren, though Bellamy's gaze doesn't lift from Rey to find him. It's meant as a display of trust, even if his entire body is prickling in apprehension as he steps around in front of Rey, crouching to look in her eyes. ]

Are you alright?

[narcissithstic]

[He feels shocked raw. Chilled down to the marrow in his bones, hearing his name— no, not his name, but the memory cast off from it, already left ground out in the dust of the past. Compounded by the fact that it's been spat out through the mouth of a woman he's never seen before, never known.

For once (twice) in his life, he's too stunned to retaliate.

Instead, expressionlessly, he goes ghostly pale, his features wilting visibly down to nothing more than a narrow tic at the edge of his mouth: before Bellamy even fully moves in, Ren recedes, slinking backwards into the crowd and leaving the connection between himself and the Nest entirely empty— silent.]

[sensitively]

[ Still on the ground, Rey is watching his reaction when he goes pale and begins to disappear from view, blending into the crowd and the encroaching darkness on the periphery of it. She keeps her eyes on him nevertheless even as Bellamy kneels down in front of her, one hand on her shoulder as he catches his breath from exertion. He'd run all the way here, to stop their altercation.

And then the realization of what she's done sinks in fully — her fleeting hold on that woman, the way her mind's suggestion had taken root in the woman's own head and had forced her to shout out that name — and Rey's eyes flick to Bellamy's, chastened, her temper cowed for the moment.

She'll follow Ren, eventually...but not now, not until she has time to process what has just happened. ]