✷ ✷ ✷ ɐılnɾ ✷ ✷ ✷ (hurlyburly) wrote in thedisplaced, @ 2018-02-13 17:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log/thread, julia wicker, kylo ren / ben solo |
Who: Julia Wicker and Kylo Ren
What: Waiting to disembark for Middle Earth
Where: They almost leave the boat
When: First day the boat is docked
Rating: L for LANGUAGE!
It didn’t take much for Julia to get ready. Her wardrobe was small and mostly black, her hair and makeup routine were minimal and she had the same slender jewelry pieces that she arrived on the boat with. She’d met Petunia and Remus, but had only spoken briefly with Kylo at Margo’s party. She was curious about him, and if Julia was going to be invited to live in the physical cottage with the other Brakebills students (that remained to be seen) it was probably better to get to know him. Not only that, but it didn’t take much to get Julia’s attention when it came to magic. Whatever this not magic was, she always wanted to learn more. Sure, it was funny that Kylo called it The Force, but the resistance movement on Fillory had called themselves the FU Fighters, so it probably wasn’t even worth bringing up. Maybe she should have been more impressed with the top of the line cruise ship, her arrival, Middle Earth, all of it, but anymore and it was all just a dangerous inconvenience to her. Julia worked hard to bury her frustration until she could direct it somewhere more productive. When she spotted Kylo, she gave him a small wave and a gentle smile. He seemed pretty shy. Julia waited for him to approach and started softly, “So I was thinking we could head out of town and try to find a meadow or a clearing? I’d love to see a demonstration of what you can do if that’s alright.” Considering that Julia's reaction to him had been one of curiosity and interest rather than spreading his history to the entire network and yelling about Eliot's poor choices in men, Julia was already slightly above other Physical Cottage residents. But also, there were enough instances where they did end up fighting, that Kylo knew there was something to be said for understanding how the other could fight, and what the skills were. And while he'd had some of those conversations with Eliot, Julia had expressed interest, and with the memory of Atlantis, and the Kracken not so distant in his mind, Kylo thought it was a smart idea. He'd taken one look at the clothing that was being worn locally, and instead of the more typical Earth costume he'd taken to wearing, he'd put his clothing back on, so he was dressed in all black, a tunic over it, but - as he hadn't for so long - he was not wearing his mask. He had no interest in putting that back on, even if there was a certain amount of comfort to dressing as he did at home. All other potential identity crises aside, his clothing still felt right. He offered Julia a small smile, just the barest curve up to his lips, and he nodded. "That's fine with me," he agreed. "It's been a while since I've had the space to do much of anything." He tilted his head. "Do you have the same discipline as Eliot's? Or is it something else?" “Discipline?” Julia asked. She wasn’t entirely certain what he meant. “We both use magic similarly. Eliot went to a school called Brakebills. I’m not sure if he told you about it? He and Q are considered classically trained magicians. I sort of wasn’t accepted. It’s a long story, but my education was…” Julia searched for a diplomatic word, rather than describe her time with the hedge witches, the things that she had done, the people who had gotten hurt. “...less formal. I sort of had to figure it out on my own. Technically, I’m what you’d call a Hedge Witch.” She looked over his clothing, and though it was different, she didn’t recognize where it was from. It might have even been local, for all she knew. They might not have looked the friendliest both dressed in black, but she wasn’t one to talk. “We still do things more or less the same.” Julia looked down at her hands, performed a simple series of gestures and produced a small, sparkling light which hovered above her fingertips as her first demonstration. Kylo frowned slightly at her question. Maybe he'd used the wrong word. He'd absorbed quite a bit of Eliot's magic and how he thought and talked of it over the months, but he still could not call himself an expert. Also, as she explained, it occurred to him that perhaps that was simply a formal way to refer to the different abilities they all had. If Julia's training had been less formal … well, someone trained as a Jedi, and someone who simply learned to use the Force on their own, would not have the same language to describe it. He'd run into that more than once. He nodded, his eyes shifting from her face to her fingertips. "I just mean, Penny's a traveler and does telepathy and that sort of thing - Eliot's is more physical, telekinesis, the like. I only wondered if yours was the same. It looks similar." He pulled his attention back to her face. "Formal education can be overrated," he offered. "They always tend to have a lot of opinions about what you do with things then." Julia shook out her fingers and the spark vanished. It was true that in the thirty-nine other timelines where she had been accepted into Brakebills she had been sorted into a knowledge discipline, but as a hedge witch she wasn’t aware. “Oh. Um, no. Nothing like that.” She smiled apologetically and shrugged. There was something though. Maybe there was a word for the type of person a goddess responded to? If there was, Julia didn’t know it. “I’ve done a lot of different types of magic. I definitely can’t teleport like Penny. I haven’t really tried a lot of telekinesis? It’s mostly just been about learning what I can, I guess.” She smiled at him. “So what about you? You said you call what you do the force? Is it something you channel? How would you describe that?” Kylo looked over at her curiously. He supposed it wasn't unheard of that someone hadn't seen Star Wars, but he'd run into very few people who were from Earth and the same version of it Eliot was, who didn't know it. And he happened to know, considering Margo having known, and from conversations with Quentin, that the films very definitely existed in Julia's universe. A few months prior he would have likely smarted off, and there was a part of him that was still tempted to, but instead he glanced into the distance trying to find a likely object as he considered how to explain it. Irritatingly, the way the Jedi explained it couldn't be improved upon much. "It's the energy between living things," he told her. "The tension if you will. In my galaxy it's… worshiped by some who can't access it, but also revered by those who can. Some, like me, are sensitive to it, and can make use of it." He reached his hand out, pulling on the distance between himself and a small branch that was lying three feet away. The branch reacted near instantaneously, and shot the distance between, and he wrapped his hand around it, then offered it to Julia. "Telekenesis, telepathy, influencing how people think, or manipulating the physical universe. That's just some of the things, I can do." Julia took the branch. She didn’t feel anything special about afterward, and twisted it in her fingertips. Her expression remained thoughtful as she puzzled over what he said. “It sounds a lot like magic. Someone told me magic is the building blocks of creation and the gods left those tools behind for us to be able to use. The ones that are sensitive to it, I mean.” She wasn’t sure how much she believed that. Mostly because having met a few gods, Julia didn’t put much stock or faith in them. “How do you focus? How do you direct the force? We use rituals, gestures, words. But, you don’t need to use any of that?” Julia asked. Kylo considered this. Gods in his world were usually ways that people tried to explain the Force, legends or mythologies, and he supposed that made sense. The galaxy was vast and people didn't like not being able to explain things. Even if Eliot hadn't exactly described magic to him in that way, it was an interpretation that made some sense. The sensitivity aspect was also familiar. "It's," he started, then paused trying to think of how to explain it. "Less direction, and more sensing what's already there and using that. At least, I don't think of it as direction. More taking something that exists and using it. Like - you could put a sail up to utilize the wind to move a boat. The Force is everywhere, you have it, I have it - light, dark, life, death - that stick," he nodded to it. "It's died, eventually it'll be returned to the earth, and that will create new life. I can sense that, so I can use it, as a weapon or a tool. In my galaxy people use it differently, and access it differently. There are people who worship it, although they can't sense it. The Jedi act as if they own it, but they didn't and don't. The Force is bigger than that. A lot bigger." “...Did you just say Jedi?” Julia had heard of Star Wars. She’d seen the original movies as a kid a few times. Q had dragged her to the prequels which she’d seen once and mostly forgotten about them. Julia’s head canted slightly. “Did Quentin put you up to this?” she asked. Fillory she could accept. Harry Potter-- well those books weren’t so different from Fillory. Maybe comics were the same way. But Star Wars? They were just movies. And she didn’t recognize Kylo Ren. Julia’s life had been a bit busy the past two and a half years. She hadn’t really gotten around to seeing the latest movie. “That’s hilarious,” she conceded, rolling her eyes. Kylo almost had her. Kylo raised an eyebrow, amusement filtering over his face at her response. What had been a more serious sort of conversation had just turned… well, interesting. Quentin had in fact not put him up to this, and he hadn't even thought about it, but now that he was here… "I can't show you my lightsaber, as Eliot's been holding onto it of recent," he shrugged with a smirk. “Uh huh. You’re hilarious. Eliot totally had you fuck with Quentin when he first got here, didn’t he?” Julia shook her head. “Seriously though. Do you actually call it the force?” It didn’t seem real to her. It didn’t seem like it could be real. Julia was having a difficult enough time accepting her current situation. What she didn’t want to accept she kept comfortably in a warm little bubble of denial. "You have no idea who I am do you?" He asked, bemused. It had been somewhat obvious, perhaps, but now it seemed very likely that she had not seen the films. "That's honestly somewhat refreshing." And that was the truth. To not be recognized as his parents' son, or as Snoke's apprentice, or any of the other things, was freeing. Even if it seemed likely that she'd eventually figure it out. "Yes, I actually call it the Force, because that's what it is. I trained as a Jedi, until… we had a falling out," he waved a hand, that was less important in the moment. "And I've got a different perspective now. But I wasn't born in this galaxy. I was born on a planet called Chandrilla, and now I'm here, teaching you about the Force, sort of." Julia pressed her lips together tightly, trying but failing, to keep a straight face. She was waiting for him to crack, to admit it was all a ruse, and when she didn’t she started to laugh. Just laugh at the pure, utter ridiculousness of it. And she couldn’t stop. It was the first real laughter she’d really felt in a long time. Not at him. It certainly wasn’t cruel, although she still wasn’t sure she believed he wasn’t still teasing her, either. “So you were a jedi?” she said, trying so, so hard to regain her composure and failing. “And you left because they sucked?” Julia didn’t entirely disagree with that, either. They seemed too emotionless and sexless to really want to root for. “And not you’re teaching me about the force?” By the time Julia did calm down, she was wiping tears away from her eyes. She thought she could probably hold it together. Maybe. “Uh, you realize you have to show me your lightsaber now, right?” Because she was calling bullshit if he didn’t. "I feel like sucked is an understatement," Kylo responded dryly. He didn't want to get into the details of how much his training had sucked, but sucked really didn't cover the full emotional range that he felt when he thought about being there with the other trainees, or what had happened with Luke. "I'm far too emotional for them, but I suppose at one time I was trying to be a Jedi, yes. I got over it." Another understatement, probably, but then again Kylo wasn't certain what he was these days and it wasn't exactly what he'd been with Snoke either. "I'll tell Eliot to bring it," Kyo glanced over at her. "I probably should have anyway, as who knows what we'll stumble across around here. But fair warning, it's a very real lightsaber - you need to respect it or you could lose limbs, and they don't have good replacements around here." Julia watched Kylo’s face very carefully. “Holy shit, you’re serious.” The smile drained from her face and Julia felt in uncomfortable weight of fear and anxiety in the pit of her stomach. She had to think it through. She paced a short distance, back and forth next to Kylo. “Okay. Magic is gone. So I haven’t been trapped in my own mind. This is not an illusion or a dream I can’t escape.” Julia continued to pace back and forth a few times as she thought this over. Because she was willing to accept being swept into another world, because places like Fillory existed. She was willing to accept characters in books existed, because Fillory existed and apparently people sometimes visited these places and then wrote them down and got the account published. Who’s to say J. K. Rowling wasn’t a magician who wrote about magical methods and schooling from another dimension? All of this Julia was able to track. Except Star Wars. “But one of the last things Q and I did was visit the god Bacchus, so, maybe Waverly is right? Maybe we made him angry and I’m just insane now…” Julia frowned. No, that didn’t seem quite right. “Shit.” Kylo glanced back the direction he'd come to see if Eliot were perhaps on his way already. Not that he'd have the lightsaber, but it didn't seem as important at the moment. Kylo didn't really know Julia at all, so trying to figure out what to do here was… Something you can do, he told himself. Not even certain where the instinct came from. But Julia's world wasn't unfamiliar to him through Eliot, and Kylo was not the same person he'd been when he arrived here. He'd watched Eliot for months now, maybe he'd learned a thing or two? At any rate, where he'd been bemused before he now felt a little guilty. Even if you were used to world hopping as a concept, it was something different to actually do it. "Look, don't mind me," he shifted his tone, turning more serious. "You're not insane. I do have a lightsaber. I did train as a Jedi… all that's true and it's not just me playing with you. Ask Quentin, or Eliot, or any of them. There's quite a few people here from my galaxy, like," he paused, who was she likely to know? No one from his time probably since she didn't recognize him. "Obi-Wan Kenobi," he finally settled on the Jedi, if she recognized the Jedi as a concept, it seemed possible she might recognize that name. He paused for a moment, then added: "You guys have an entire world that's just fountains from one world to another. Consider this that, with free alcohol, but without fountains, or any ability to choose where you end up, or whether you go - which, to be fair, does sound a little insane, but that's more or less the jest of it. And some of us are from a galaxy far, far away. Or maybe really close, it's unclear since who the kriff knows where Middle Earth is anyway." Julia was impressed and a little surprised. Kylo’s response was comforting and she tried to smile for him, nodding her head. Eliot must have told him about the Neitherlands. Right? Because she didn’t want to believe she was mad, either. Though, how was she really going to know? “Obi-Wan Kenobi, huh?” she said quietly. She wondered if he’d look like either of the actors that portrayed him in the movies. Maybe it didn’t matter. She wasn’t sure which option would be better or worse. “This is so fucked up.” If she wasn’t crazy, though, it meant maybe she really was stuck. A room full of her friends, Harry Potter characters, gods and now lightsaber weilding badasses couldn’t figure this out? She felt a little defeated. “How long have you been here?” she asked. "So he introduced himself," Kylo shrugged. But he was also pretty certain it was considering everyone knew him, his Grandmother, and his mother, and Kylo had seen holos, of course because he'd been named after him after all. He gave her a sympathetic smile though, since, well it was fucked up. The whole thing had sent him on loops multiple times, and while at this point in his experience here, he didn't have any desire to go back, that hadn't been true when he'd been only a few days on the spaceship and been faced with his parents, both of them younger than they should be. He reached over to take the stick he'd pulled to them with the Force and spun it in his hand as if it were his lightsaber. "About a year. I arrived last February, when we were also on a ship, but it was a spaceship, and we were docked at Coruscant, so it was more familiar territory, sort of." There hadn't been any sign of the Jedi on that Coruscant. "I met Eliot soon after." Julia nodded. She still shivered slightly but at least Kylo has successfully talked her down as she felt the tension seep out of her shoulders and back. “Have you two experimented much? Magically, I mean.” Julia blinked slightly, in her effort to change the subject. “To see if there’s any kind of relationship between magic and the force?” Kylo raised an eyebrow, the experimenting could have taken so many different forms, but magically certainly made the most sense in context. "We've some. I've had opportunity to see El perform battle magic, and I worked with Penny some on helping him with some mental blocking. There's certainly some similarities. In my world, we'd likely just say the gods were working off of the Force, and perhaps were at a different level of ability to control. But it's hard to say exactly. I've been more interested in practicalities, we do sometimes end up in battle situations, so knowing how he works, and what he can do, and him knowing what I can do, means we work better together." “Kady’s the best at battle magic,” Julia said. This was real. Kylo from Star Wars was real. The fact Julia was conveniently in a world where none of her friends hated her and they were all alive and well was something she tried not to think too hard about. Except she was Julia. And this was starting to feel too convenient. “I … need a minute. Um, you and Eliot should go have fun. I’m going to go back to my room, I think.” Julia wasn’t sure how she felt about using the bracelet to teleport, but someone was going to have to try it out eventually. Why not her? "I haven't really spoken to her," Kylo shook his head. He knew she'd arrived, knew she was friends with Penny, so who knew if she'd be back at the Cottage too when they got back, but that didn't mean that he'd had time to learn really anything about her or what she could do. "I'll have to talk to her later." His gaze took her in, trying to decide if this was an okay sort of needing a minute or something like Q would try to pass off as all right. There was half a thought about trying to use the Force to figure it out, but he squashed it. She wasn't a close friend, just a close friend of a close friend, and he really was trying to not use the Force for things like that. She seemed alright enough. "Yeah, okay," he shrugged. "We'll catch up with you later?" “Yeah, that sounds good.” Julia offered Kylo a smile and rather than use the bracelet for a quick escape, at the last minute decided it wasn’t that long of a walk to get back to her room. “I’ll see you later.” Julia, like Q and the other magicians, regularly had high levels of drama going on at any particular moment. But even she wasn’t entirely sure of it was a good minute or not. What she needed was a little quiet to decide how fucked she was. Then maybe she’d decide what she wanted to do about it. If it wasn’t too hopeless. But outwardly, she seemed alright when she gave Kylo another wave as she left. Kylo raised his hand in something that might have been a wave. It wasn't a gesture he was used to making, and it felt a bit awkward to do so. But it seemed like the thing to do right now. He and Eliot could go on their own today, but he had little doubt that he would get a chance to speak with Julia again as it seemed like he was typically closer to Eliot's people than he was his own. |