driftfleet | 003 winter wonderland

Entry tags:

003 winter wonderland

Who: Sansa Stark
Broadcast: Fleet-wide
Action: down on the planet
When: 20 December - end of the month

> > > carol singing

( Sansa enjoys the systems that are cold and this one is no exception. This planet is full of ice and snow and the people are warm and kind the way she remembers the North being when she was a child. They do love music, impossibly so, and so she decides to sing a few of the songs she knows down in a cafe when some others are singing their own. It's nice to learn new things to sing and she has one of the new songs on the tip of her tongue as she goes to get a cup of warm tea, needing to stave off the chill. When she sees someone she recognizes from the Fleet, she steps back a bit and allows them to step to the counter first. )

Oh, did you want anything? Far be it from me to be in your way - how rude of me.

> > > stitching time

( Lord Akeldama's waistcoat was coming along nicely and rather than sew up in the Fleet, Sansa has chosen to do it down in a cozy corner near a fire in a bookstore down on the planet. She has a little basket of sewing things she's bought from her small supply of credits and she's hoping a few others will take her up on the offer to make things for them. She sends a message out to the Fleet indicating the same, that anyone can come and put in a commission. She sews fast and accurate; Sansa doesn't think it will take her long to turn out a few pieces and earn a bit of money. For now, though, it's Lord Akeldama's waistcoat and she's just pricked her finger. She makes a soft sound and brings the wounded finger to her lips to suck it. )

Ouch! You'd think I would be better at this.

> > > wildcard

( Have another idea? Leave me a start below! )

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Oh, well, you must tell me how people dress in your world so I can help you replicate it. I think it makes it better when you can wear the things you're most comfortable in - at least for me.

( Perhaps it makes her stick out more to wear dresses in the Westerosi style but Sansa doesn't care. Clothes are like armor and clothes make a statement to the world - she wants hers to exude confidence and poise. )

It shouldn't be very difficult to learn how to make them and to start teaching you.

My planet is... [She pauses, just for a brief moment, because well. It's difficult to figure out how to discuss a planet that isn't exactly a planet anymore. But that's a subject for later.] Some parts of the galaxy might consider our typical dress more modest, and perhaps not as elaborate as other prominent worlds, but it's more practical than anything for a planet with as many mountains as ours.

Though personally I prefer clothing more functional than anything elaborate. Ingrained habits die hard, I suppose.

[She has a passing thought about Naboo fashions and how those, while popular among many, were about the actual definition of Far Too Much to her.]

Where I come from, in the North, we have to be very practical. There's not mountains, so much - that's in the Vale - but it does stay cold the greater part of our days. We use a lot of fur and leather in our clothing.

( Sansa lifts the bit of brocade she's been stitching, the fabric shining a bit in the ambient light from the fire beside them. It's really a lovely bit of fabric but far more impractical than anything she'd wear back home. )

Something like this wouldn't really be in the realm of possibility. It's nice to have pretty things to make sometimes, though, even in the dead of winter.

[It really is beautiful, and shows just how much talent and effort went into stitching it. Leia leans forward just a bit to get a better look at it.]

Winter is difficult where you're from, I take it?

Winter can last for years, where I'm from. We have to spend our summers preparing for it. The words of my house aren't a proclamation or a proud boast, they're a warning of things to come: Winter is Coming.

( Sansa gives Leia a bit of a smile, though. Talking about home is pleasant, yes, but she's more interested in where other people come from, what shapes the others that Atroma has chosen. )

Tell me about your home, though. It has mountains?

[The idea of a years-long winter is not a thought Leia is fond of. Between Hoth and this planet (even though it's much nicer and more habitable than Hoth ever could be), she's had enough of winter for a long time.]

We do, yes. [did, her mind wants her to correct, but she's ignoring that. It's easier to talk about Alderaan in the present tense with people who don't know and have no way to know what happened.]

Not the whole planet, of course; we had our few tropical and more temperate regions, but Aldera, the capital, was in the mountains. There's not a city like it anywhere else in the galaxy.

I stayed for a while in the Vale of Arryn. There were mountains there, mountains so high that the castles were impregnable by armies on foot. It was lovely there, in a way, but it wasn't my home.

( Sansa pulls out a few stitches that were messily done and works backward, trying to correct her mistake. There cannot be any mistakes in something she's making for someone else. )

Your Aldera sounds very beautiful, though. No matter where I go, Winterfell will always be my home. Even when it was burned to the ground and held by my enemies, I held it there in my heart. No one could take that from me.

[Leia nods; she knows what Sansa means. There are places that are beautiful in the galaxy, places she remembers feeling comfortable, places she'd be willing to live in if everything ever ends, but they aren't her home really. Not at least in the sense Alderaan was.]

I'm sorry to hear that happened to Winterfell.

( Sansa gives her a smile; there's a happy ending to this part of the story, at least, and she's glad to share it. )

We got it back. Perhaps we had to rebuild, but we got our home back and were able to start making it ours again brick by brick. Home is very important to me, even so far away from it as we are here.

[There's a quick flash of sadness, one that quickly fades into relief for Sansa's sake, at the discussion of the fate of Winterfell.]

I'm glad to know that it wasn't gone for good. Rebuilding might hurt but it at least gives a physical place to return to.

It feels wrong to only talk about myself, though. Please, tell me more about where you come from. Is it more like this place? Or is it a place where people don't sail through the stars?

( Sansa likes hearing about other worlds and the magic within them; she never thought such things possible until coming to the Fleet and now it seems just about anything is possible. )

We have space travel, yes. Long enough that I doubt anything exists from a time before it existed.

[Certainly there's nothing far back enough to know just exactly where humans came from, or which planets developed space flight first, beyond any individualized folk tales.]

Out of everything here, traveling to other planets is the least strange thing, for me.

It's still such a wonder to me, being able to travel the stars and close the distance between different worlds. Where I'm from, it takes weeks to sail across the Narrow Sea from Westeros to the Free Cities. I couldn't imagine trying to travel to even the moon, much less a star.

( Sansa's eyes light up a bit in wonder at it. She'll always be amazed by these simple things, no matter how long she's here in the Fleet. It's a kind of magic to her, really, and it's so far beyond anything she's ever experienced in her life before coming here. )

When I was a girl, even traveling from my home at Winterfell to our capital at King's Landing would take a month by horse. In one of the shuttles, I imagine it would take less than a day.

[It's still hard to imagine that for most of the people with the Fleet, outside of this place, space travel just doesn't exist. Having travel take that long--travel that isn't sub-light travel, or going from one end of the galaxy to the other--sounds both inconvenient and incredibly difficult.]

I can't even imagine that. The amount of preparation that would have been needed just to ensure the trip itself went safely must be astounding.

[She pauses, then adds--]

From my home planet, we could travel to the center of the galactic government in only several hours.

Oh, it's nothing like that in Westeros. I live in the far north and during the winters, sometimes the weather is so foul we cannot go south at all. You can cut short a bit of the trip if you cut over to White Harbor and take a ship but even still, it's leagues and leagues overland.

Here, I'll get a napkin and draw you a map so you can see how I mean. It's quite different than what other people tell me - so far as I know in the Fleet, anyway.

( Sansa rises and gets a few napkins and comes back to their cozy spot. She has a pen, a remarkable sort of quill that doesn't require an inkpot, and she starts to draw. )

See, the north is vast - I suspect it's at least five hundred leagues from Winterfell to King's Landing. But it's a bit over a third that just to the Wall, which is still part of my territory in the north. It's a terrible distance to cross on horseback. And, if you have a party of travellers or a host of soldiers, you're slower still because you must have wagons for supplies and they break down. The way you travel is ever so much faster.

[Leia watches with interest as Sansa draws a rough map of Westeros, imagining what it must be like to live there. It's a singular land, yes, and thus small by what she's used to. But without flight and space travel and any of that? It would be a large, difficult place to live.]

Even ships on water, those are rare where I'm from. Usually they're only used on natural preserve planets, or for fun rather than for vital transportation.

How often did you travel around your territory?

Not very often. I first went south when I was twelve...possibly thirteen? I can't remember if I'd had my nameday yet. I didn't come back to the north for another four years. Even if there hadn't been a war at the time, I wouldn't have come north again for a long while; it takes too long to travel.

( If things hadn't gone so badly, Sansa thinks she might have married in the south and never gone home again. )

[It does take a long time, she can fully understand that reasoning. But it's still a bit sad, she thinks, that travel takes so long one can be away from home for that long.]

That's a long time to be away from home.

It is. I feel like I lost a lot of myself in being so far from home. Home is something inside you, yes, but sometimes you need reminders of it to carry on. I miss what it was like as a girl with my parents. I've lost them both now. I never got to see my mother again - I would give anything to have her here.

( Sansa tips her head a bit, curious. )

Do you have anyone from your home here, Leia?

One, yes.

[One that she knows of, anyway, and everything surrounding who they are and what time they're both from makes it all that much more complicated. Not that anything was ever really easy for the both of them.]

Have you met Han Solo? He's a... friend of mine, from back home.

No, I haven't had the pleasure. Is he from Alderaan, then? Just as you are? Or somewhere further away?

( Since they can travel so easily in her world, he could be from as far away as King's Landing from Winterfell. )

[She shakes her head. She doesn't even know if Han had ever been to Alderaan before the disaster, this reminds her, but part of her hopes he had.]

No, he's from another planet called Corellia. It's very different from Alderaan.

Oh, I see. Is it far from Alderaan, then, or did you meet somewhere else entirely? I'm sorry if it's too many questions; your world seems so different from mine.

( Sansa likes learning about new places as much as she can, which is why she likes when the Fleet is in a system and not drifting. )

No, you're fine, don't worry.

[She shakes her head, before continuing.]

Corellia isn't far from Alderaan; they're both core planets, so it's only several hours at lightspeed between them. We met elsewhere, however.

[She pauses for a second, weighing her options before continuing--]

He tried to lead a rescue mission to help me, but his plan wasn't the greatest. So I took charge instead.

Sometimes men don't have the best sense of how things will work out in the long term. They like to just...smash at things and hope for the best.

( Sansa has more than a little experience with the men of her family being stubborn and hard-headed with honor. She wonders what this Han Solo did that made his plan go awry. )

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