[ january i log: barrayar ]

[barrayarmods]

Who: Everyone
What: Arrival on Barrayar and what follows
When: January 2nd - January 17th
Where: Barrayaran guerrilla camp
Warnings: None (at the moment)


welcome to barrayar.
It's the dark of night when you come to in the foothills. Snow on the ground, chill winter wind whistling. A steep mountain range towers just ahead, its peaks illuminated by the light of two moons. Whatever you last remember, it isn't how you got here, and you feel oddly jetlagged, slightly queasy.

And you're not alone. There are nine other people close by, all looking equally lost and confused. But before any of you have a chance to figure out what's going on, the soldiers arrive.

They're dressed in weather-worn green uniforms, bearing swords and bows, and they surround you immediately, poised to attack. But they quickly realize you're not their enemy, the ones they call Cetagandans. They're just as confused as you are, but rather than hanging around to puzzle it out, they start shepherding you toward their camp in the mountains while it's still dark. There's a war on, they say, and you unlucky bastards have just been dropped right smack in the middle of it.

the guerrilla camp
It's a few hours' hike through the mountains to get to their hidden camp, set up in a clearing framed by dense, hard forestry and backed against a rock face. Daylight is finally dawning when you make it there. You and your fellow sudden arrivals are ushered to an empty tent on the far end of the camp, just big enough to fit all ten of you. You can't help but notice they've posted guards all around it. You aren't under arrest – they just don't know what else to do with you.

You are able to glean, from hearsay and what the soldiers are willing to share with you, that you are on a planet called Barrayar, and this is their home, and ten years ago they were attacked without warning by the Cetagandan Empire. They've been holed up in the mountains fighting against their invaders ever since, outgunned and outmanned, but scoring little victories where they can. They don't tell you much more than that. Some dialect of Russian seems to be one of the predominant languages of the camp, but for the most part they all speak English too, if with an accent. They're gruff and wary, and if you look a little less – or more – than human, they'll eye you with suspicion, maybe even make obscure hex signs at you that seem intended to ward off evil or disease. But they aren't hostile to you, not unless you start something with them.

the outsiders' tent
It's not in the greatest shape, but if you look around the camp, the rest aren't much better off. It's cramped, but you've at least been provided with bedrolls and heavy wool blankets to ward off the frozen chill, and if you're in need of clothing, they'll provide it, although it probably hasn't been washed in…a while. The soldiers bring you food at mealtimes -- not very good food, mostly tough meat and groats, and they keep you your own campfire, just to keep you warm. They've also hastily dug you your own latrine area at the edge of the perimeter, just behind the treeline. No private bathroom stalls in this outfit, unfortunately. The entire camp seems tense and wary, and the soldiers are alert, but they don't talk much. You could try sneaking past them, but you probably won't get far.

Well, at least you've got each other for company: the outsiders on Barrayar.

Comments

arrival

[shri]

He's trouble.

He's big and he's trouble and he looks better with blood on his face - or maybe just that he's used to it, she can't tell.

Perhaps the more sensible thing is to leave him, and in another circumstance perhaps she would. But with nine of them near soldiers she doesn't know and doesn't trust. Armed when as she looks over everyone else, none of them are.

It makes the decision easier when he looks like he as brute strength to spare.

She unwraps her scarf from around her neck she's using to shield herself from the cold and crouches near him, not close, not boxing him in, but she holds it up as answer to the surly question on his face. "Before the blood freezes on you, here." Rocked up on her toes, her elbow balancing her weight against the inside of her knee. She's not armoured so much as well dressed, but not for this cold. Heavy leather gloves and boots that are plated in sections with metal, clothes that are dirt and blood stained for a long time, the way anything worn long enough becomes worn in.

sry for his awkward lakshmi

[traitorous]

That's unexpected.

She moves closer, and every military-bred instinct in his body tells him that she's a threat because no one voluntarily moves closer to him unless it's with a knife or a gun in their hand (or a sword, in some very rare, very strange cases). All she has in her hand is a scarf, held out to him in silent offering. For the blood, she says. He hadn't realized he was bleeding.

Maine blinks once or twice just to be sure that she's actually there, and once he confirms that yes, she definitely is, he gathers his hands against the ground and heaves himself up into a kneel. The pain in his head is still very present, twisting the trees into fuzzy green shapes, and he sways unsteadily for a few seconds before the world rights itself and he can focus. On the soldiers, cutting through the rocks and frozen brush to check on the remaining eight. On the scarf, dangled across her open palm. On her face, committing small details to memory.

THANKS, he writes with one finger in the snow, after he's carefully plucked the scarf from her hand. He presses it to the gash on his temple. Thanks doesn't feel quite good enough for a stranger who came to his aid when she absolutely didn't need to, so he finishes it off with two dots and a backwards c. :)

Better. Or the best he can do right now, anyway.

Maine you are a big dumb cutie wth

[shri]

She waits, careful on her haunches. It's like watching a wounded animal, curling over himself. Seen it before, seen it in herself. The nervous, waiting for the blade to drop. The need to lick wounds and hiss at everyone and everything out of sheer rejection of intentions. Once she remembers as a child, her father showed her a wounded horse, badly treated, it could not bare to be touched. Patience was how it was coaxed to the hard, not force, and patience, when you're twenty five going on sixty, is easy to cultivate.

Well, sometimes, when she's not in the middle of her own wars.

So she waits, when he looks like he might fall, she braces herself to catch the considerable size of him, a hand that hovers to assistance for him to take if he wants. But there's no jumping, no forcing him, he will take it, or he won't and when he does gather the scarf from her, she offers the barest of a smile. Flicking up at the edges of her mouth, crinkling in the corner of her eyes. She might have a pretty smile under all that ornamentation and severity.

When he writes and does not speak, she is not bothered by it either, or even inclined to speak up until that drawn ... C? With dots? Her English tutors hadn't taught her what that meant. Perhaps it was just a ... emblem of gratitude? Didn't assume either way, just graciously nodded her hand and where her hand is loose from the wrist, she waves it away. "No matter, I assure you. Keep it as long as you need."

A moment where she almost reaches out - he's not one of her men, she does not have the right. So she taps the corner of her eye on the same side of her face to where she means on his. "There is a little there still, I think."

[traitorous]

Maine was born on a desert planet with towering sand dunes and violent dust storms that lasted for weeks at a time. The first fifteen years of his life weren't easy, and shit only got harder on the day the Covenant swept into his system with their city-sized ships to burn his planet until the mountains of golden sand turned to shiny black glass. His home was an absolute wreck even before the Covenant came, hardly worth saving, but that didn't stop the UNSC from evacuating as many people as it had ships to carry them.

The UNSC didn't have to do shit, and it did.

She didn't have to do shit, either, and she did, despite his tumultuous, fist-swinging entrance. Even for a man like Maine, it's hard not to respect the level of brass it takes to approach him when he's at his ugliest, snarling and bruised and ready to lash out at the first person who looks at him wrong. He presses the scarf to the side of his face when she gestures to her eye, mentally filing a reminder to return it to to her later, once he's cleaned the blood from the fabric.

The soldiers sort through the small crowd behind them, checking each person for weapons and speaking in sharp English that occasionally lapses into quieter Russian. He can hear as they move further away, heavy boots crunching over snow and rock, and it's only then that he takes a moment to look around.

He has a mountain at his back, and a line of trees in front of him. There are no weapons just conveniently lying around within arm's reach, but there's a particularly sharp broken branch jutting from the ground by his knee, the same branch that put a gash in his thigh minutes earlier. No, that's stupid, fuck the branch. He doesn't need a makeshift shank to kill some people. He looks over his shoulder. Ten soldiers? Fifteen? Twenty? It's hard to tell in the dark. Now that he's slightly more focused, he's sure he could take out at least a quarter of them before they bring them down again.

Also stupid, for a multitude of reasons. Not worth it. Get your shit together, asshole.

Maine ties the scarf around his thigh and drags himself to wobbling feet. Lakshmi is graced with one squinting, speculative stare before he leans in toward her, offering her an arm to help pull her up.

[shri]

He's a thing to see at his full height. Half that of a Lycan but more than a normal man. He'd been something to see fall too. Like giants of the stories her father told her once, come crashing down. She hoped not to see it again. Instead, she waits, like it comes easy, as he goes through the motions, taking stock of his surroundings, what's available to him.

See what he'd do, maybe he would go out swinging, she wouldn't blame him. It feels an easier option than handling this mess. But he just seems to look, elects to do otherwise, and -

Reaches down to her. She regards it momentarily, he far too easily dwarfs her as her hand slips up, grips hard to his forearm and lets herself be pulled. Granted, she probably weighs nothing to him, it's not like she'd be much of a burden. It gives her an excuse, stumbling forward into him as she comes up, a too wide step as she gets her footing that tumbles closer than perhaps she need be.

It gives her the excuse she wants, murmuring soft and low to his ear for a half second. "They've got no firearms, just swords, but ability enough in them. They say there is a war on." A quick relay of information and her own assessment, one soldier to another - since apparently this group is together now. "Might be worth waiting until we know more."