nexus_crossings | (no subject)

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It's difficult to say where Jake has set up camp - the last time he was here, this was a park, but he doesn't remember some of the hills and the meandering, mostly-iced-over stream that cuts through the middle. The Nexus does that sometimes, rearranging terrain and buildings when you're not looking. Twisted trees sprout here and there, and he's found enough deadwood to stoke a roaring bonfire bright enough to be seen from miles away, the white snow reflecting the blaze into a million glittering sparks. The smell of cooking meat wafts nearly as far, mingled with woodsmoke.

Despite the warmth of the fire, Jake has not shed many of his layers, bundled up in custom-made winter gear made to fit his nine-foot frame. Only his face and tail are bared by design, his gloves temporarily removed to tend to the skewers of meat being roasted by the flame. His bow and arrows sit to one side, far enough away to not risk catching fire, bloody arrowheads boasting of a successful hunt.

Should anyone come by his fire, Jake smiles, baring sharp teeth. "You the explorer type, or would you rather stay home? You ever itch to see what else is out there?"

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It was the wafting smell of the meat that drew Harald out towards the area where the tall blue man was sitting. Was he a man? He had a long tail which could mean he was alien or perhaps part animal? The Viking thought himself tall for a man at 6'4" but this creature dwarfed him.

"Not stay home. Explore, learn, become stronger."

Harald's thick Norwegian accent coming through as his English was weak and broken. The sight of the bow and quiver of arrows interested the Viking because he too was a hunter.

"Meat smell good. You are hunter?"

It's not often that Jake hears English anymore, except when he pays Hell's Gate a visit. It's not as though he's speaking it now either, his own mastery of Na'vi having grown in leaps and bounds from years of immersion to the point where he sometimes forgets he ever knew otherwise. The Nexus is handily covering for his lapse, the translation field active this deep even if the antiviolence field is weak. He tilts his head a little, unable to place the accent but recognizing that it's an Earth one.

"Well this didn't fall out of the sky," he jokes, waving vaguely toward the roasting meat. It's pretty much impossible to identify what creature it was before, but it was substantially sized, more than enough to share despite Jake's much larger size. He turns the skewers, then reaches for the arrows, scooping up a fistful of snow to rub the arrowheads clean one at a time. "I've hunted here before, but it's different every time. Easy to get lost. Or get hunted back."

Harald wasn't used to being a visitor in the Nexus much compared to his other band mates like Ziggy and Mick, yet he did like visiting and meeting new people. This one was certainly different. The Norwegian often just slipping into English without thinking because not many spoke his language outside the tour.

"What creatures to hunt here?"

The Viking wondered and thought about bringing his soul mate, Trygg, to the Nexus to hunt together. They could roast meat over a roaring fire just like this man was doing here. As for getting lost---Harald wanted to avoid that part.

"You hunt alone?"

Jake shrugs, the gesture partly obscured by his thick fluffy coat. "All kinds of stuff. I don't know what most of 'em are; unless something from Pandora got through to this side, I couldn't tell you. Unless it was a tiger I guess, I saw a picture on the news once." He's careful to hold his hands away from himself as he cleans the arrows, reddened water dripping down onto the snow instead of his winter gear. Each of the arrows is about as tall as Harald himself, from fletching to tip.

He makes a sort of grunt in his throat. "Today I am, but that's not always the case. Especially when the Great Hunt rolls around, then it's pretty much the whole clan. Yearly migration kind of thing, we get enough talioang to feed everybody for weeks."

Manny has seen many humanoid beings in the Nexus, but the sight of Jake still surprises him. Not only because he’s blue, but the fact that he’s significantly taller than most of the other humanoid beings. Tall enough to look at him in the eye.

Regardless, the mammoth goes over to him to answer his question. "For me, it sorta depends on the situation. Sometimes, I like to see what’s out there, especially in the Nexus. But otherwise, I like to stick around in just one area."

Jake's first thought is that Manny is a very small, very fluffy 'angtsìk, and he glances around to make sure there isn't a much larger parent grazing nearby. Once you almost get trampled by an enormous territorial herbivore once, it tends to stick with you. But there's no one else in sight, and when his visitor speaks (which is a surprise in itself) it's proof enough that he's probably not about to get his ass kicked because he's too close to an angry critter's baby.

His pointed ears flick forward, the motion partly restrained by the hat he has pulled over his head. "You just more comfortable at home, or is it too dangerous?"

"The first one." Manny replied. He notices Jake glancing around as if he’s checking for something or someone else nearby so the mammoth decides to clear it up. "Just so you know, it’s only just me around here."

"Huh. Takes all kinds of people, I guess." Jake can't imagine not going out to see what's beyond the parts you know, what it would feel like to be content seeing the same stuff every day.

He inclines his head when addressed, dark eyebrows going up. "Never hurts to be careful. Back home, not paying attention is a good way to get eaten."

Manny nodded to this man's words. "Of course. Even back in my own world and perhaps here, predators are sneaky when they’re out hunting."

"Not just the predators," Jake says with a small grin, showing a flash of teeth. "But sometimes the critters you should be most scared of are the ones that don't try to hide, because they're not afraid of you."

He leans forward to turn the skewers by the fire, evenly roasting the meat all the way around. "So if you're more the homebody type, what brings you out here?"

"That’s also true for all creatures, regardless of where they’re from." Manny nodded to Jake's words. "Sometimes, I like to take a stroll around the Nexus to see if there’s anything going on. What about you?"

Jake blinks, and looks around at his little camp. The bloodied arrows, the roasting meat, the roaring fire. His gaze returns to the visitor. "Hunting?" he says, a little surprised it wasn't more obvious. "I know my home territory pretty well, but sometimes it's nice to have a challenge. And get to eat something new."

"Alright then." Manny looks over to the meat being roasted over the campfire and back to Jake. "By the way, where exactly are you from? I don’t think I've ever seen anything like you before now."

Edited 2024-02-12 17:28 (UTC)

"Back atcha, pal." His tail lashes a little, like an idle cat might. "Home's a place called Pandora. My part of it's forest, for the most part. It never snows there, but I saw it sometimes back when I lived on Earth. What about you?"

"Pandora? Is that like some other planet or something?" Manny asked. He would’ve assumed that it’s another place on Earth if Jake didn’t mention the planet separately from this Pandora he spoke of. "I'm also from Earth, but I think it’s from many years before your time."

"You know what planets are?" That's a surprise, almost as much as him being a talking animal in the first place. The Nexus brings people from all sorts of places in all sorts of shapes, but Jake doesn't have a lot of experience with the ones who don't walk on two legs. "And sorta, it's a moon, if you wanna get pedantic."

Jake shrugs at the latter statement, ears perking forward in mild interest. He still hasn't recognized what Manny is, the knowledge irrelevant to him when he'd been a kid going through overcrowded schools, and especially not when he was a soldier. "What makes y'say that? You could be from way after. Or you come from a completely different Earth; there's a lotta those around here."

"Of course I know what they are. We all live on at least one planet in our own worlds, although not every world has the means to go between them." Manny replied. Sure, there are strange stuff frozen in ice from his world that looked like they came out of a sci-fi movie. But that doesn’t mean that Manny has any idea of how they work and all.

As for Jake's latter statement. "Is your world going through an Ice Age? From what I gathered from talking with a lot of people here is that they’re mostly a thing of the past."

Jake shrugs, leaning over to turn the skewered meat by the fire. "In their worlds, I'm sure that's true. Thing about the Nexus is everybody's kinda time traveling here. Some folks are from a long ways forward, some are back, but it's not like there's a calendar here saying what year it is in the Nexus. And there's a lotta differences in the Earths. I've met folks from Earths where it got so hot the oceans dried up decades before I would've been born, and folks where humans ended up makin' a space fleet so big they go across galaxies. And that's not even counting the Earths with superheroes and vampires and shit like that. Or ones where humans never showed up at all. In mine, all the animals are dead, pretty much. So's the plants. But unless your Earth is the same as mine, that doesn't mean it's gonna happen to yours."

He pauses and lifts his gaze up to the visitor, gesturing towards the fire. "Speaking of which, you hungry? I don't know if you eat meat, but I've got plenty."

"Trust me, it took quite a while for me to get used to the weird time and space displacement thing around here. If all the animals and plants are dead in your Earth, then I can safely say that my Earth is way further in the past to yours." Manny replied. Even though it only happens on one or a couple of Earths, he still isn’t comfortable with the idea of every animal and plant species going extinct. Especially considering that he’s still wrapping around the idea of his own species going extinct in a lot of people’s worlds.

When Jake gestures to the fire that’s roasting the meat, Manny shook his head. "Sorry, but my kind are vegetarians. I'll have to pass on meat."

Jake shakes his head. "Missing the point. My Earth's history ain't the same as yours. Can't just assume somethin' about either of ours based on what happened in the other. You're probably right this time, but that won't be the case every time. Why's it matter, anyway?"

Too bad about the food. Jake doesn't have much other hospitality to offer, not this time of year, when the snow's covered most of the plants he could normally forage for. And that's assuming he could even identify what he's looking at. "Well, you're welcome to enjoy the fire, if you want. Don't got any fruit or anything on me. How do you normally get enough to eat, in this kinda weather?" Big guy like his visitor must need to eat a lot to keep that bulk fueled.

"I guess you have a point about our Earth's history not being the same, considering the different circumstances our world's in. And like I said, it just seems to be a common theme among the worlds represented here that my kind and ice ages are a thing of the past and I just wanted to be sure of that." Manny said.

Upon being asked about how he gets enough to eat, he walks over to a pile of snow and clears it out with his massive tusks. "I normally travel a lot to find all the food that I can eat. If they happened to be buried under snow or covered by some other object, I'll just shove it out of the way." He then picks up some grass with his trunk and eats it.

"What is 'your kind' anyway? Never seen one of you before." Jake taps two fingers against his chest. "I'm a Na'vi. Name's Jake Sully, olo'eyktan of the Omaticaya clan."

He watches his visitor clear a broad swath of ground, a little impressed. "Handy," he comments. "Guess you gotta clear it fast, or you're gonna be doing that all day."

"I'm a mammoth. My name is Manfred, but you can also call me Manny if you wish." Manny replied. "And don’t worry, I'm used to doing this in seasons like this."

'Mammoth' rings a vague bell in the back of his mind, but Jake never paid much attention in science class and the last time he took one was a lifetime ago, so that's about all he'll get out of it. "Manny. I See you," he greets his visitor a little more formally, touching his hand briefly to his forehead before letting it fall away.

"It ain't that I'm worried, 's just polite. Big guy like you's probably eating whenever you can, right?"

"Yeah, I eat a lot when I get hungry and it’ll be a while before I had to do all of that again." The mammoth replied.

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