Byron Sully (byronsully) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2013-05-01 20:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, byron sully, obi-wan kenobi |
RP Log; Byron Sully & Obi-Wan Kenobi
Who: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Byron Sully
When: Wednesday night April 24
Where: Sam’s
What: Meeting over food
Rating: Low
Obi-Wan had yet to master the art of cooking in his new surroundings. Perhaps it was the fact that the appliances were completely different from what he was used to or maybe it was that he simply didn’t understand how to prepare the food from this planet but regardless of that, he often found himself venturing down to Sam’s for dinner. Tonight was no exception and as always, the place was crowded. In addition to being an excellent place to dine, it had become a gathering place for the refugees and as he walked in, Obi-Wan smiled in greeting to some of the people he’d come to know since he’d been here. All the tables were full so he made his way to the bar and found a stool next to a man he’d never met before but had seen on the network. If he remembered correctly this man was even more out of his element than Obi-Wan was so he decided to introduce himself and perhaps make a new acquaintance. “Excuse me,” he said. “Is this seat taken? I’m afraid I can’t find a table and this appears to be all that is left. Unless you’re expecting someone of course.” Sully turned to take a look at the man who had approached him. He looked pleasant enough and so he nodded his head, pushing hair back over his shoulder as he did so. “It’s not, do feel free.” The man might have looked a bit familiar, but Sully didn’t know who he was. That was the case the larger majority of people in Potts Tower. Other people might know who people were, but any of the books Sully had read as a boy didn’t appear to be a favourite of the Tesseract because Sully certainly hadn’t seen any of his fictional favourites showing up. He could only assume because of the way the man was dressed that he was probably a person who lived in the tower. Sully certainly hadn’t seen anyone on the streets of New York dressed as the other man - at least not yet. “I’m Sully,” he added, reaching a hand out to the other man. “You’re here in the Tower too?” “I am,” Obi-Wan replied. “I’ve been here..oh a few months now I believe. It’s quite easy to lose track here I’ve found. I’m Obi-Wan Kenobi and it’s nice to meet you Sully.” He seemed to recall the man posting on the network upon his arrival and that he was from Earth’s past. “How long have you been here? I confess that I scan the network but it seems that so many people come and go that I can’t keep up with everyone.” Not a day went by that he didn’t look to see if Anakin, Padme’ or someone else that he knew had arrived but so far nothing like that had happened. It was disappointing but he knew that there was nothing he could do to change it. “I’ve been here...” Sully wrinkled up his nose. “I can’t rightly say, to be honest. A month? Maybe a bit over. Like you say it’s easy to lose track of time. Pleasure to meet you though, Obi-Wan.” Sully reached for the drink he had in front of him and took a sip. “It does seem like there’s a lot of folk here though. I can’t say that most of them are names I know, even if it seems like that ain’t the case for everyone. Some people seem to know a lot of folk, like when that Indiana Jones man showed up? Everyone seemed to know who he was and be quite excited. I guess it’s what comes of not being from now.” Sully gave the other man a bit of a smile, trying to decide if he ought to ask more questions. He couldn’t quite decide if Obi-Wan wanted to talk, or would prefer to just order some food and eat alone and in silence. He decided he’d ask a question or two and if Obi-Wan seemed interested in talking then he could respond in kind. If not, Sully would let it go. It wasn’t as if he required conversation exactly. “Are you from here? I mean, more like this time and all?” “No I’m not,” Obi-Wan replied. “I’m actually not even from this planet to be quite honest. I come from another place and time. Another galaxy even.” He picked up the menu and glanced at it for a moment before looking back at Sully. “and I did notice that everyone was quite excited to see him. I don’t know him at all but he looks exactly like someone I do know or actually will know eventually. All this business about being fictional is quite confusing to say the last.” He’d gotten used to it more or less although Obi-Wan still found it odd when people on the streets recognized him. It didn’t happen as often when he didn’t wear his Jedi robes which was why he rarely wore them outside the tower. He was wearing them now however but thankfully Sam’s was filled with refugees and they took little notice of him. “Things here have been a challenge for me, even the food is different. We have different plants and animals that don’t exist on Earth so it’s taken me some time to get used to eating here without making myself ill.” Whatever Sully had been expecting, this hadn’t been it. The idea that the other man had come from somewhere completely different - some other planet in space? Well, he was reminded of the fact that Brian sure would like this place. He’d have had a billion and one questions for Obi-Wan about whatever planet he was from, Sully was certain. As it was, Sully just gave Obi-Wan an appraising look. Perhaps in some ways this person had it as much as difficult as he had, perhaps even more so. “Yeah, neither am I,” Sully stopped and then shook his head. “I mean, from here. Well, I’m from Earth, but over one hundred years ago. It’s a lot different here than from what is... now. So - I ain’t been exactly certain about the culture or food or things like that myself. I guess at least I got the plants and animals down though. “What’s odd is I grew up in New York City. I mean, when I was really young. But this ain’t nothing like the city I left to go out west. So it’s been interesting.” He took a drink and then looked over at Obi-Wan. “Is there anything here that’s like your home much?” He thought for a moment. Was there anything here that was like his home? “I lived in a large city for years on a planet called Coruscant but aside from the climate it was nothing like this. We had vehicles but they traveled in the air not on roads as they do here. I traveled a good deal and some of the planets I visited were a lot like Earth but the people who lived there were not all human. I know that must sound very strange to you. I can assure you I’m quite sane though.” Obi-Wan grinned at his companion just as the bartender walked up and asked him what he would like. After ordering a grilled cheese sandwich and the drink they called beer here, he turned back to Sully. “So you are from the past, I am from the future. Well more or less. I’m not sure where my world fits in respect to Earth. I’ve been told that the events which I remember took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away although how long ago and how far away no one has taken the time to explain to me.” Obi-Wan was also still very curious about the time that elapsed between his leaving Luke with Owen on Tattooine and his meeting with the boy nineteen years later. “I have a rather large gap in my history that puzzles me. There were six films about my life, well not just mine, mostly about the times. I came here after the third film of the series and then the story picks up a number of years later and I’m much older. I would love to know what I was up to all that time.” The bartender put his beer down and Obi-Wan took a sip. “What did you do back in your own time?” he asked, curious about the man. Sully listened and tried to imagine a place where you could travel between planets as easily as people here seemed to travel between buildings, towns, cities, and even continents as best he could tell. The months that it had taken his mom and dad to come across from England to New York City the time he’d been born, was nothing now. He’d heard people say it was a matter of hours only between London and New York City. “It sounds a little out there, but Dr. Mike’s little boy, Bryan? He’s read some crazy stories about people who travel to the moon and back, and I get here and realize that they ain’t so crazy after all. People have done that, so in that context, perhaps it doesn’t sound quite so strange. At any rate, you seem normal enough,” he grinned good naturedly and took a bite, trying to figure out how he should answer Obi-Wan’s question. “I’ve heard people here call me a mountain man. I’ve done a bit of everything, honestly. I can do some buildin’, and I’ve done some trackin’ and huntin’. When I first went out west it was a miner, but I ain’t done that for years. When I needed some friends the Cheyenne were there for me and most recently I’ve lived around them, and helped as a go between between the U.S. Government folks and the Indians. A lot of folk in my time don’t consider what I do real work, but someone’s got to act as a negotiator. The army don’t care much about what happens to the Indians, and they don’t speak the language at all. I care, and I can communicate with both groups, so I’ve helped with it rather a lot. Guess that’s not a real straight answer, but I’ve never been much interested in one thing only.” While he was entirely sure what a Cheyenne was or an Indian for that matter, Obi-Wan did understand negotiation. “That is something that isn’t any different in my time,” he said with a wry smile. “I’ve been involved in many negotiations and most people don’t consider it work at all but it is, it’s sometimes harder work than physical labor.” He thought for a moment of some of the treaties he’d helped with, negotiations he had been involved in with Anakin and felt a pang. Would he ever stop missing him? It didn’t seem as if that was possible. “These Cheyenne you speak of? What sort of people are they? Are they natives of this planet?” Obi-Wan was ever curious to learn more about his surroundings and he knew that when he returned to his room, he would get out the computer and begin to look up some of the things that Sully was telling him. It would seem that Earth had a very fascinating history and Obi-Wan was eager to hear more about it. “The Cheyenne?” Sully raised an eyebrow at Obi-Wan and then nodded, taking a sip of the drink in front of him. “Yeah, they’re natives of this country. Like, back before white folk came over from Europe, the Indians lived here. The Cheyenne are just one group of Indians - there are a lot of others as well, Pawnee, Sioux, to name just a few. But they didn’t live much like the white folk did - and there have been tensions there. Seems like there still are a bit in this time,” Sully frowned. “It’s a lot more complicated than that, which you might guess, but it’s hard to pair it down to just the essentials.” Sully tried to think to what he knew, which was less bookish history and more the history he’d been given by Cloud Dancing and Chief Black Kettle - more the history he knew from his own experience than anything that would make a museum display. “Probably the main tension tends to be that the Cheyenne - many of the Indians - tended to view the land more communally, and the white folk like to own it. The government kept pushing the Indians onto reservations - land that wasn’t always the best, or even their own - so that they could give other land to towns and cities. Most Indians in my day would be considered violent and uneducated, but they’re neither. They’re angry sometimes, but rightfully so. Most folk would be under the circumstances if they were able to think about it. And they’ve got their own history and religion and culture - different from white folk, but not less educated. “I saw on the network that there are Indians that work in the government of this country now and that’s good. It means they’re working together more now... in this reality. Perhaps in a hundred years or so that’ll be true in my reality as well.” While the names of the races were different, the issues weren’t all that different from things Obi-Wan had seen. Many of the planets he’d visited had indigenous species that were taken from their homes by people who decided to settle there. “That sounds very familiar,” he said aloud. “We might come from very different times and places but those kinds of things still went on in my world. People decided they want to settle in a certain place and often the ones who have been there the longest are expected to just move without saying a word. Hence the negotiating that we were speaking of. Unfortunately those negotiations weren’t always successful.” Sully thought he shouldn’t have been surprised to hear that the sorts of problems they had on the frontier in the 19th century were the same as the sorts of problems people traveling between planets had, but there was a bit of him that was surprised. Then again the same sorts of problems seemed to happen here - over a century after his own time - so perhaps it would be an inevitability of human beings: A vaguely depressing thought. “Nor are ours,” he shook his head ruefully and shook the thought away, turning his attention to the man next to him. “What other sorts of things do you do besides the negotiations?” “I was a member of a order called the Jedi Knights,” he began. “we were responsible for keeping order in the galaxy, peacekeepers if you will although when necessary we fought. For many years we fought in the Clone Wars which were actually engineered in order to destroy our order so that our republic would be turned into an empire.” Obi-Wan shook his head. It was hard to enough to grasp all of Palpatine’s machinations and he’d lived through them. He had no idea how to explain it to someone who knew nothing of the galaxy Obi-Wan lived in. “In fact when I left, there were only two of us left. All the rest were killed. From what I understand the Order did eventually rise again but I had been long dead by then.” He took a sip of his beer and looked over at Sully. “So I guess in answer to your question I did whatever needed to be done. I believed in the Jedi Order and what it stood for, I was sent to live in the temple as a young boy so I never knew what a so called normal life was like. The Jedi believed that one should give up all ties to family and sever emotional connections. Live through the Force which is rather difficult to explain. Some people call it a religion but it’s more than that.” Obi-Wan laughed. “I’ll stop blathering at you now. I’m sure it all sounds very strange to you but if you’re curious, I’m sure you can find references to all that on one of the computer sites.” “It does a bit,” Sully admitted, tossing his hair back and looking over at Obi-Wan seriously. “But in truth, not much more than any number of things here are for me. In a way it sounds familiar, cause there are a lot of folk who’d like to try to do that to the Cheyenne, no doubt. Fortunately it doesn’t look like they’re able to - leastwise not in this reality.” Sully took a final bite of the food in front of him and gave the other man, a Jedi Knight, a smile. “Perhaps I’ll have to check out some of the bit about the Jedi,” he said. “Although I ain’t real good at doing the searching thing yet. Or most of the things. I’m figuring them out, and there’s been some folk that have been quite kind and generous, but I’m still trying to figure it out, honestly.” He took a drink and then glanced at his empty plate. “I’ll let you get to your food, Obi-Wan,” he said with a smile. “But it’s been a pleasure talkin’ with ya.” “Likewise,” Obi-Wan replied. “I hope we get the chance to speak again sometime. I too am going to see if I can find some material on the things you spoke about. I’m glad we ran into one another. No doubt we’ll be seeing each other around.” Potts Tower was a small place for all its size and there more than a slight chance that if you saw someone once, you’d end up seeing them again. |