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Damara doesn't expect a lot out of this 'new life' they are supposedly rewarded with, after it's all over. She has learned not to expect much of anything, after the eternity she has been alive, for all that she has also been a ghost (she does not see what the difference is – in the end, they still weren't free of Sgrub's machinations – but what else should she expect of a plan put together by Peixes?). She's never really expected she would be rewarded, as well, to be perfectly frank. Life is not kind to her, in any universe, so she learned to be equally unkind. She's unsurprised when she steps out, directly into the sunlight – her entire body goes tense with the feral instinct of mortal fear and a will to survive that she has not felt in a very, very long time. After all she's been through, only for the sun to be her end? Pathetic.
But the sun does not burn. It's not the Beforan sun, or even the Alternian one, and she turns her face upwards to let the warm rays greet her face like an old friend. This is the human world; the blue sky and yellow sun that she recognizes from dream bubbles not her own. It doesn't hurt her skin, but it does hurt her eyes, so she looks away from it and takes a moment to blink away the dark shadows left behind in her vision.
It seems so strange, now, how she's always assumed that Earth wasn’t so different from home. She barely remembers home, aside from the foggy and vague memories of the dreambubbles, but Earth seems both duller and brighter all at once – it's louder, it smells funny, and there is nothing familiar in the flora around her. There are insects she cannot name, and overhead fly tiny colored birds she's never seen before. They chirp, instead of screeching. She finds it a much more soothing sound.
Her injuries sing their discontent as she shifts in place, but she ignores them – pain is a constant in her life, and there is no reason to start letting it distract her now that she's alone on an alien planet. The assigned colors of her Aspect are enough to mask that she’s injured, should any potentially dangerous humans come across her, and as far as she’s concerned, that’s all that matters, until she can find a safe haven to tend to herself. She doubts anyone would look for her, if they were to arrive on this planet as well; she’s made no friends of her enemies, and plenty of enemies among her friends. She’s good at looking out for herself, though; it’s what she has learned to excel at. But first, she needs to find shelter, and luckily, she has arrived to this world in a forest. She knows how to survive in a forest. It's the way she was raised, until Sgrub happened.
She misses the Lost Weeaboo's, sometimes.
Nostalgia is useless, so she tears her mind away from it and focuses on the present. She does not know which direction the sun on this planet dawns or sets in, but she walks towards the morning light anyway. No direction is better than any other, right now, and she needs to find a good enough copse of trees to serve her purposes.
What she finds first is not shelter, but what looks like an encampment of sorts. She stands at the edge of it, gaze sweeping over the supplies left stupidly unattended. A boon, she thinks, and she takes a step forward, intending to search through the left-behind things for supplies, but she’s interrupted as a group of laughing human males stumble into the clearing, shoving at one another. They look around nine sweeps, and Damara purses her lips. She does not go unnoticed for long, but then, she is standing in their camp. Even humans aren’t that unobservant.
The male that looks like he’s possibly in charge of their group looks up and spots her, and his face goes from startled, to confused, to mocking as he scoffs at her; and then he gives her a slow once-over that makes her skin crawl with indignation, because his eyes have no right to be on her in any fashion. His scoff turns to a leer, like she knew it would, and she imagines ripping his eyes out of his skull to teach him the meaning of propriety.
“Hey Sweetheart, how about you ditch the Halloween get-up and come party with us? We've got plenty of sleeping bags to go around.” The boy's with him snicker – Damara's expression doesn't change.
“いいえ。” She replies, curtly, and not just because she doesn’t know what Halloween is. This only seems to amuse the boy further, because he shoves at his nearest companion and motions at her.
“Haha, the bitch is foreign, too. Come on, sweetheart, I can show you a good time – then maybe I'll let the other boy's have a turn.” He's an amateur – Damara has said more suggestive things when she was bleeding out, and this boy's posturing only reveals how little experience he has, so she can only roll her eyes at him. He doesn’t take offense for long, and his inexperience is obviously not for lack of trying. He’s just an idiot, apparently. Damara doesn't give him ground when he approaches her, only stares flatly at him. He fingers the loose lock of hair framing her face, lets his hand drift down as his leer grows. His fingers breach the collar of her shirt, and her hand snaps up to grab his wrist in an iron grip, because she will teach him that her silence was not her permission.
“Touch me again and I will wrap my fist around your intestines and pull them out through your filthy, infected nook, do you understand, you rotting petri dish of discarded genetic tissue?” Whether he's more startled by her words or her snarl, Damara doesn't know – it has the intended effect, though, because he jerks back and tries, futilely, to pull his wrist from her grasp. She’d call it cute, if she weren’t so disgusted by this species’ idea of a threat.
“What the fuck, you fucking psycho bitch, let me the hell go!”
“I asked you if you understood, Wriggler.”
“Christ, yes, yes, okay, fuck, I understand, I'm sorry!” She lets him go, satisfied – his friends are equally as pathetic as he, she notes, as she looks around at them. They seem frozen in place as they gape at her, and she scoffs. One last look at them, and she turns on her heel and leaves, listening to the slow chorus of movement behind her as they rush towards their friend, muttering unkind things that they mistakenly believe she is far enough away to not hear.
She falters when something sharp and hard collides with her spine, unexpectedly, and stumbles a little at the impact. She twists around to see the stone sitting innocuously on the ground and then looks up to see the boy who dared touch her scowling at her. Does he think he’s safe, just because she’s put a little distance between them?
“Come back again, sunshine, and I'll think about giving you what you're asking for, you fucking freak.”
“Dude, knock it off, you want her to come back and murder us in our sleep?” One of his friends says, tugging on his arm and casting nervous glances at her. She watches them with narrowed eyes. The boy scoffs and mutters something under his breath, before throwing his hand up in handsign she recognizes and has used herself.
“Whore.” He calls, dismissively, and then turns back to his group – they mutter amongst themselves, before they break out in jeering laughter, and she watches as they once again leave their camp, heading in the opposite direction. Damara doesn’t like feeling overwhelmed like she currently is. She’s never considered any of the humans in the game to be dangerous, but it’s obvious that the species has the capacity to be, for all that these humans had been pathetic. The intent had been there; others who are more capable may have the same intent. She’s starting to realize that she’s out of her depth. She has little knowledge of Earth, of what the people here are like or what their weaknesses are, but they are obviously not like the humans who played Sgrub. Viciously, she stamps down on the thread of anxiety trying to thicken into a noose she can hang herself by.
She takes the supplies they have so kindly left unattended again, captchalogs it, and continues on her search for shelter.
By the time she arrives at the stream that she finds the Seer of Light, Rogue of Void, and Mage of Doom at, she has been walking for hours. Her blood has clotted and dried enough that every time her clothes shift, the cloth pulls painfully at the scabs – she has found no one else since the encampment of human's, and she's grateful. She considers ignoring these three, as well, and striking out on her own – but Damara is not an idiot. The humans know this world better than she does, they understand better how to survive it, and they have the information she's going to need if she wants to survive it. She doesn’t want to risk running into less benign beings again, either.
She approaches them, and says nothing, insinuating herself amongst them like she has the right to belong where she chooses to – otherwise, she knows they would deny her. The pink girl is too friendly, and gold-blood is in a quadrant with her dancestor, and the lavender one is the only one who seems appropriately suspicious of her. Damara resents all three of them, and it takes far too long to pry the Mage from beneath his shelter of shade, even with Damara as proof that the sun will not harm their kind.
She's thankful when they are once again moving, but she stays silent. She ignores the conversation around her unless she's directly spoken to (especially after the pink girl’s attempts to talk to her), and even then she only says something senseless in the language even she barely understands. They seem to walk forever, but she's been on her feet all day – she's tired and her wounds itch and hurt in altering stretches, and nothing at all good seems to have come from this stupid piece of rock and water and atmosphere being recreated.
One foot in front of the other, her mind whispers at her. Keep going. If you stop now, you are a failure. A piece of trash unfit to survive.
The sight of what she assumes is a strange human hive comes, almost, as a relief. After the show of human sentiment between Wriggler and Ancestor has taken place – an uncomfortable moment, and it seems Captor agrees because he stands to the side with her, and though he looks away from the indecently pale interaction happening in front of them, she, at least, knows how to keep a consistent reputation – but afterwards, when all the hugging and declarations and apologies are over with, and the Ancestors have turned their attention to more business-like matters, Damara finally allows herself to sit and look over her wounds.
It's a gash across her stomach, shallow despite it's length and the amount it bled (she would have noticed her organs sloshing out of her body, she thinks), and it's already bleeding again because removing her shirt pulled the scab away. She takes care of herself while the Ancestor's are busy taking care of their Descendant's wounds, and while Maryam takes care of Captor's. The bandage job she does isn't as neat as theirs, but it will do well enough for healing.
The others talk, then, in low voices. They do not exclude her – she does that herself. She sits on a far chair positioned by a window and watches the strange nature outside instead of the strange nature inside. She pays no attention to the conversation, not even when, one by one, they begin to dismiss themselves. It's only when there's a presence in front of her that she draws her attention back into the room. She looks up and meets the gaze of the Seer's ancestor, who watches her back just as intently, a drink that smells bitterly sweet held casually in her hand.
“Not a very talkative little lady, are you? Tense, too.” Damara just stares at her, until the pale-haired woman motions at her arms, where her nails have been digging into her skin for who knows how long. Damara releases her grip on herself and stuffs her hands down against her thighs.
“I had a proposition for you, but now I think you've got a bit of extra energy you need to burn off. Come along – we can kill two birds with one stone.” Damara almost ignores her. Almost. But for all of her bravado, she's not about to contradict the adult whose territory she's in, so she stands after a moment, and lets the woman lead her.
They end up outside, again, and suddenly a long, thin metal club is being held out to her. Damara stares at it, and then at the woman. Neither of them blink for a moment. Clubs are not Damara's strife specibus. Eventually, the adult sighs.
“It's called a baseball bat. Take it. Go swing it at some trees. I'll talk while you work out that tension.”
If this is some kind of test, she doesn't know what it's for or what it's supposed to mean. She waits a moment longer, but the woman just stares at her more – she takes the 'bat' just to make her stop. The woman sits down on the steps and motions her out towards the trees. She swings it, half-heartedly, at a tree.
“I've been talking to Jeff since the first of you kids started showing up. He's a total babe.” Damara doesn't know who Jeff is. She doesn't really care. The sound of metal-hitting-wood is oddly satisfying, so Damara taps the bat against the tree, pulls back, and swings again.
“-how to keep you kids out of the public eye-” Harder, this time, because she’s discovered something cathartic about pointlessly hitting an inanimate object. She imagines it'd be a bit like hitting Peixes again, since the bitch spent so much of her time doing shit nothing.
“ -solution is to do it on our own terms-” She hits harder, and it's Serket's face instead, her smug, know-it-all grin breaking to pieces in the eye of Damara's mind, her condescending voice cracking into pain.
“-with the other kids going to start school, you're the obvious solution-” And then Horuss, because why not. Why not? Being kind and sweet, where has it ever gotten her? Nowhere, it's gotten her nowhere, it's gotten her no recognition or respect, it's left her heartbroken and bitter, and she hates every moment that Zahhak is nice to her, tries to get along with her for Rufioh's sake. The bat falters.
“-let us take a few pictures, write a few notes, you tell some fake sobstory -” And then she's hitting, harder than ever before, over and over, because Rufioh and his stupid grin, and his stupid pausing speech, and his stupid horns and his stupid apologies and how he tries so hard to still be her friend even though she doesn't want that, she doesn't, she wants him and he stomped all over her heart, because love is meaningless and so is she.
“-for science.” There are ruddy, rust-colored tears blurring her vision and spilling down her cheeks, and she can't stop swinging the English-damned bat at the English-damned tree, she wants it to die, she wants it to double-die, and it won't, so she screams at it. Every hit she makes accompanies a scream, until she's out of breath and her arms are too weak to hold even themselves up.
The Ancestor is silent as she splints Damara's three broken fingers and wraps her sprained wrist. Damara's still drifting in her own thoughts, still distracted even if she's exhausted, so even she's a little surprised when she lifts her head up from where her chin had been resting against her collar, and answers the offer she's surprised she even heard. She even answers in full, clear English, like she had earlier with the fool and his friends. She'll slip back into East Beforan before the morning, but for now, just between her and this woman, she'll behave.
“I'll do it. You just want me to act like some dumb little country girl with a life-altering disability, right? Fine. Whatever. On one condition.” The human raises her eyebrows in question, and Damara swallows around the rawness in her throat.
“Let me stay here.”
“I wouldn't have dreamed of anything else.” The woman says, with a pleased smile. She's probably manipulating Damara, but what's the use in caring about that, anymore? At least she has a place to stay, in this strange world. At least she has a way to survive. It's about as good as it ever gets.