exsiliumlogs | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Date & Time: about 10/25 on
Location: VR room
Characters: Peter and whoever
Summary: Peter's made some of Hemlock Grove in the VR. he might show some people, but anyone can wander in.
Warnings: Peter has a dirty mouth?

It takes him the better part of two weeks, but after a lot of trial and error and database combing, he finally manages to get it right. Home. Well, home for the moment. The VR opens right into the middle of a winding, nearly-shoulderless Pennsylvania road, facing a rusty mailbox that reads Rumancek in peeling reflective letter stickers. There's a break in the metal shoulder-guard and a set of stairs leading down a rather steep hill to a flat area below, where an old blue trailer sits in a bit of clearing upon which the woods is definitely encroaching. It's nothing much to look at; whoever lives there obviously does not value any sort of lawn maintenance. The backyard has a hammock stretched between two trees and an ancient fridge that's entirely purposed for beer storage, judging by the bottles littered nearby. There's a creek nearby, and on the other side of it and up the hill a bit is a pond overlooked by a huge house. Mostly there's just a lot of trees, though, and the occasional low rumble of a train passing in the distance.

Sometimes it's summer, all verdant green and buzzing cicadas and humid heat that just barely avoids being oppressive. Other times it's autumn, and the trees are ablaze in red and orange and brown. Either way, there's almost always a breeze making the leaves whisper overhead and the screened back door of the trailer is always propped open.

Peter can often be found in the hammock, but sometimes there's no sign of any human presence in the VR at all. Sometimes, the only hint of another presence might be the brown blur of a wolf running near-silent through the trees.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Yep. Kinda surprised how much the illusion works, all things considered."

He tilts his head up to look at the canopy of trees, and when he looks down again Tempest is suddenly down a layer and a half of clothing. Despite the fact that he's half naked, it strikes him that he's pretty sure he's never seen Tempest wearing this little clothing. It leaves him unsure whether to be intrigued or apologetic. Ultimately he goes for the in-between and shrugs. "Sorry, I felt like summer today."

"I don't mind. I like summer."

Though, she can't help but cross her arms; despite still being fully-clothed, she still feels exposed somehow without her jacket or her cloak, or . . . really, anything that has a hood. Not that she hasn't taken it off before, but it still takes a few moments of getting used to.

"As much as I like my jacket, it's a bit too hot for it, though."

"Just a bit." As far as Peter's concerned, the point of the VR is to have a place to sprawl out, to be exposed and take up as much space as he wants instead of hunkered down in the cramped quarters of the rest of the base. He moves just a bit easier in here, shoulders looser when he shrugs, stretches out his feet until he stops the rocking of the hammock.

"You wanna sit?"

Even with the nervous gestures, the set of her shoulders starts to relax. It isn't the base, there isn't a hundred people in here - it isn't her forest, or any forest she's familiar with, but just being here in the middle of one, as fake as it is, is enough to help her relax. She rubs at her arm for a moment, then drops her arms entirely as she glances back to Peter.

"With you?" She knows what a hammock is, at least. She's fallen out of plenty of them in her youth.

"Or by yourself if you think I have cooties." Peter rolls his eyes, but he's smiling. "Nowhere else to sit except the ground, unless you want to walk."

"I will chance these cooties, I think - whatever they are." She shoots back. She comes over there and carefully sits down next to him, making sure not to rock the hammock too much. Because that would be embarrassing.

He's still got his toes on the ground anyway, keeping them at least kinda still. But once she's settled he lets them up, leans back so he's laying on the hammock width-ways, which makes them swing gently.

"Cooties are mostly things kids make up because girls think boys are icky and boys think girls are gross." He folds one of his arms behind his head. "Anyway, yeah, this is where I was living before all this bullshit. Come here when I get sick of the moon." Which is a lot, honestly, but he's gonna leave that part out.

Tempest laughs, leaning back a bit more in the hammock as he lets it swing. She's just a tad taller, especially with her boots, so she lifts her feet enough so they're not dragging on the ground. "Well, boys are rather gross." She says, slow and thoughtful.

She tilts her head back to look at the sky, sighing out. "I cannot say I blame you. Thought about making my own . . . whatever-it-is in here myself." She can't quite bring herself to do it, because it would mean dredging up old memories she tries not to think about.

"Granted." Humans in general are pretty gross if one thinks about it. Peter just doesn't mind gross very much. It'd be pretty rough if he did.

"Virtual Reality. Kind of a lot of work. This took me a couple weeks. But I'm no good with computers, either." He's quiet for a minute, watching the clouds pass overhead between the branches of the trees. "Worth it."

Humans are gross, but it's a topic better left unspoken. Tempest has yet to meet a human she doesn't like here anyway.

She's quiet for a bit too, even after he stops talking. When she finally speaks her voice is quieter, as if someone else may be lurking around and she doesn't want them overhearing. "I am utter shit at these bloody computers, but I would make my village."

"Yeah?" It's not the most surprising of revelations. Peter figures most people would, if given the chance, make the place they think of as home. The fact that she's admitting it, though, is a little more surprising. "What's it like?"

"Small." She starts off with, keeping her eyes on the clouds moving overhead. "It was hidden in the forests . . . mm, a three day walk from the capital? Give or take. Built at the bottom of a rather large mountain as well - my understanding was that it was supposed to hide it better, with the mountain to the back, and the trees all around. Our . . . what is the word, shrine? Was built into the mountain itself. And the homes were oftentimes meant to hold more than one family."

She hums a bit, thoughtful. "It was considered a half-Elven village, but many of those who lived there were human or Elf - there was only a handful of children like me."

Peter is a good listener, especially as teenaged boys go. That's what a life of living as an outsider will do, if the outsider is smart. It was a point of pride for him, having a finger on the pulse that places like his high school didn't even know they had. He's listening now, not really looking at Tempest but nodding in the right places, drawing a picture for himself of where she came from.

It's never occurred to Peter that Tempest was a half-anything, because he just doesn't assume things like that. But now that he knows, things begin coming a little clearer. It's probably important to understanding her, just as much as knowing Peter's heritage is important to understanding her.

"So just about as different from this as you could get. Sounds pretty okay, though."

She doesn't remember telling Peter what she was - and if she didn't, she figured he wouldn't care either way. She doesn't take her eyes off the clouds, but she can't help the small, amused sound. "Mm, very different, but pretty okay. Rather boring, from the perspective of a fifteen year old, but okay otherwise."

She folds her hands on her stomach. "But things like that never last. I came to understand that when I got older."

"Pretty sure everything's boring when you're fifteen," he says, with all the wisdom of a seventeen year old who is so past that stage. "Wouldn't exactly know. Staying in one place for a year or two is about our limit."

He shrugs, lifts up the arm that's not pillowing his head so that it hangs off the back end of the hammock. "People do seem to fuck up good things on the regular, though."

"Ah - I was almost fifteen, I should say. My birthday was that coming winter. But I wanted to see the world and travel a bit - my parents were alright with it, too."

She smiles a bit, briefly, before she sighs. She stays quiet for a tad longer after that, almost as if she's done explaining things, before she speaks up again. "They do fuck things up, don't they." She hardly ever curses in this language, but it fit. "My village was destroyed, because somebody else did not like the good thing we had."

Peter just nods at that. He's been beaten up too many times for the horrific crime of being unapologetically different to expect anything different. Some people just couldn't let other folks keep on keeping on if their way of keeping on wasn't the same.

"Only takes a couple to ruin it for everybody." He's silent for a moment. "You weren't there?"

"No, I was there." She says, and she finally lifts a hand to trace the outline of a cloud through the branches. A distraction from the memories she's dragging up. But now that she's started talking about it, she can't stop.

"When it started, I ran to find Maias - a young man we had saved a few weeks prior. My . . . boyfriend, I believe is what he would be considered now." She says it almost as if she's amused by the thought - but she isn't. Far from it. "To beg his help, and then to beg him to stop when he told me that he and his men were responsible."

She hums a bit, tracing the branches above next. "He had been watching from the mountain overlooking my village. When I refused to go with him, he pushed me off."

Well. That explains a lot. Really a lot. More than Peter probably wanted to know, strictly speaking. But now he does, and now he needs to figure out what to do with that. This isn't like Roman blurting out his family weirdnesses in the small hours of the night in the midst of an evening of grave desecration, or Isaac's confusing and grief-fueled explanations about Scott. This is something else, somehow, although it makes Peter wonder what it is about him that makes people tell him things.

Still, he doesn't know what to say. What is there to say? So in the end all he does is bring his arm down from where it's been hanging off the hammock and puts his hand over the hand she's not tracing the tree branches with. Doesn't take her hand, doesn't hold it, just puts his hand there, fingers overlapping hers.

Contact is something Tempest isn't used to. Maybe once, long ago when she was still a child she was used to it, but living the life she had, she pushed most attempts away. She had a reputation to uphold, a persona she'd crafted to keep people at arm's length and then some.

But Exsilium was proving to be a horrible place for that persona. Every person she talked to, every one that showed her even the littlest bit of kindness chipped away at it, leaving her confused and awkward and unsure in so many ways. It's why her hand twitches under his, why she tenses up for a moment despite her best efforts not to.

Instead of pulling her hand away, though, she forces herself to relax and almost hesitantly turns her hand enough to curl her fingers around his. Enough that he can pull away if he wants to.

"Sorry." She says after a long moment. "Not the most pleasant of topics, hm?"

It's not an entirely un-awkward thing for Peter, either, this being in the position of comforter. It's not the contact that feels awkward, though, it's the reaching out. He doesn't have any practice at it, has spent most of his life doing the exact opposite. Usually, Peter waits for people to reach out to him, doesn't ever elbow his way into anything, which goes far to explain why he's never had any friends. But when Tempest finally turns over her hand he shifts his fingers to make it easier to hold them. His hand is warm, skin a little dry and fingers a little calloused.

"Nah, it's fine." He shrugs, turning his head to look at her for the first time. "Things aren't always pleasant. And I asked." He really means that. "You'd make it, though, even still."

It's almost a cautious movement, let her fingers naturally relax to rest laced between his. Her hand is cooler than his, calloused more than his from a life spent using a sword. But as her hand tightens a little, there's nothing where her ring finger should be.

She turns her head to look at him, finally, letting her other hand drop. She isn't sure she understands what he means, and it's clear on her face. "I am here, yes?"

Peter smiles in a way that isn't exactly happy, lets out a breath that sounds amused but isn't. "You're here." There's something about the way he says it that indicates this is a not insignificant fact. She did, after all, get pushed off a mountain, and Peter's recent experiences with mortal peril have left him with a certain appreciation for the fragility of existence. But this was all a long time ago for Tempest, when she was younger than him, from the sound of it.

"I meant you'd make one of these--" he lifts his other hand and gestures to the VR around them "--if you could."

Her only smile isn't very happy either. But she's trying, and here she is, sitting in a hammock holding hands with someone she just told a big part of her life to. "I may, at some point." She says slowly, thinking about it. Even if it was long ago, she remembers every detail, even about the forest surrounding her home.

"Although . . . " It's a little forced, but no less impish. "I think I would leave the mountain out of it." It's an attempt at a joke at her own expense, a way of lightening the mood that she ruined.

That makes him snort in something much closer to genuine amusement. "Nah, just make it so you can fly."