fulfilling a promised lesson on the fine art of blasting things ...

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Walking back to the Millennium Falcon through the Nexus has gotten a little bit easier each time.  The first time, it took him more than an hour to get back despite the fact that his ship has always been parked about a thousand yards away from a path that leads to the forum.  The shiftable nature of this place makes no walk to and from anywhere as straightforward as it seems, but you can get used to it.

 

For a while, he cleans up the areas that he thinks both he and Verity are likely to be in for a while - the cockpit and the lounge especially, but also near the entry ramp and the living quarters.

 

He did promise lessons on how to fly and in due course, he will get her into the sky with him ... but he's still doesn't have a ton of fuel yet and the priority was always teaching her how to use the blasters.  So he's pulled four weapons out of the storage lockers, completely disassembled them and cleaned them.  He also discharges all, but one, of the plasma magazines.

 

They get placed them on top of the holochess board, which, sadly, is among one of the biggest flat surfaces available to him on the YT-1300 and then, he takes a shower and slips into a light weight pair of pants.  It seems to take a long time for him to drift off in the small bunk that he's claimed for himself.  The sound of the winter wind skips across the surface of his ship and makes a low howling sort of sound.

 

This is one of the reasons it's always preferable to put your ship in a proper hanger, but, when you're Han Solo, you work with what you got.  After a few hours he wakes up, not knowing what time it is, until he opens the entry ramp and looks outside.

 

It seems too early for her to arrive.  The sun hasn't even reached the apex of it's path yet, so he decides to lay back down.  Leaving the ramp down for her to facilitate her letting herself in. 

Comments

[twelve_not_fourteen]

She wants to learn how to draw? For some reason that surprises him, though, perhaps when he thinks over it again, maybe not. She has been game to learn just about everything he's been willing to show her. Perhaps it's the nature of it. It's relatively niche as far as blaster skills go.

Still, it makes him regard her thoughtfully for a moment.

"I think that's a good plan." He says, as he starts walking back toward the access hatch they climbed through to get here. Han opens the door and coaxes Verity to enter. "Ladies first."

It makes sense to have her go down first, anyway, so he can slide the door closed behind them.

[brave_heart_verity]

She wants to learn. And maybe she enjoys watching him. That's allowed. She's pretty sure that's allowed. If it's not a skill she ever really needs, that's okay.

The longer he looks at her like that, the more she's going to wonder why.

"Thank you." She'll scamper down as quick as she can and step out of the way. This watching people on ladders thing isn't so bad, she's starting to see why he enjoys it.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

There's another component to learning how to draw that maybe she doesn't realize. It's going to mean a lot more Han in her personal space. Should be interesting to she how she handles that considering she asked for it.

In terms of the ladder, just wait till she gets to see him go up and down a ladder when he's not wearing a parka. The view is even nicer. She certainly doesn't need to steal glances from Han, though, unless she's worried about him being too encouraged by it.

As soon as he's off the ladder, Han unzips his coat. He's not particularly cold apart from his hands, which only got a little chilly when he started demonstrating for her. She seems pretty fond of the DL-44, but then, she hasn't got to shoot anything else. He wonders if it should become his next side project to begin modding the other one.

"You did alright." He says. It seems to be an appropriate time to give his thought on how it went. "At this point it seems like all you really need to do is put in some practice."

[brave_heart_verity]

No, she hadn't considered that, but she did ask. This time, it's on her.

She's noticed that people assume there's more to the looks than she has to offer. Her looks are usually for purely aesthetic reasons; she looks at art the same way. It might be a lovely view, but she's not going to try and snog a statue.

"Practice makes perfect," she repeats with a small nod. It's not a surprise to hear that. "I can live with having made a decent start. Maybe someday I'll bring you to the shooting range and you can see the weapons I'm used to. I'm sure they'll seen laughably old-fashioned to you."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

A part of him wants to say 'how different can it be?' If so much of what he showed her about his ship seems rooted in certain consistencies that are universal, he can't imagine her worlds 'blasters' being much different than his - though, to a certain degree they are.

Still. It's the nexus and if there's one thing he's noticed, there's a lot of room for the unexpected.

"What makes you say that?" He says, as he shrugs out of his coat and lays it out on a nearby crate.

[brave_heart_verity]

Ver takes a moment to remove her coat before trying to explain. "The guns I've been training with use small explosions to propel small pieces of metal at the target. No lasers, no light show, but a lot of noise and kick."

It's so disappointingly primitive when she says it out loud like that.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

It does sound like her people have hardly evolved from throwing rocks at each other, to be honest. When you say it outloud like that.

"Interesting." He says as he rubs his rough hands together for a little bit of warmth. "I'll be honest that does sound a little backwards."

You know what's funny is that he didn't really plan for much entertaining after the blasting and looking over the ship - though he knows there's still a little bit left to show her. It suddenly dawns on him that his life is kind of empty when you get passed his work. A realization that makes him feel small for a moment, before he literally starts trying to shake it out of his head.

[brave_heart_verity]

He wouldn't be entirely wrong. But in some ways, he's not so evolved beyond it either; violence is violence is violence.

"Yeah... there were more advanced kinds of weapons, but they weren't available to the general public. Which is probably for the best." There were enough problems with supervillains having horrible things. The banal evil of the careless and stupid was best limited.

She wonders what's wrong. It'd be hard to miss that behavior. Has she overstayed her welcome? Or is he regretting saying that about a dead universe?

"I suppose arming the general populace doesn't seem like such a good idea when people are sometimes born able to shoot lasers out of their eyes and stuff. The anti-mutant rallies would have been a lot more violent."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Oh, certainly the fact that it's her culture and not his culture has a high influence on his opinion of their primitive weapons. (And there are some people where he's from who think blasters are unrefined. They're misinformed, clearly.)

Han's egocentric viewpoint tends to make all the things he knows and is familiar with 'the best' which she has probably noticed by now.

Also, he still thinks her place is weird when she talks about it, he just realizes how much of a jerk he sounds like when he says it outloud.

"Mutants," he begins, drawing back to what she said earlier, "are the people who have powers, right?"

[brave_heart_verity]

She's noticed a slight tendency toward being self-centered, yes. It's a familiar sort of attitude, one she's always sort of going to miss when it isn't around.

"Right. They're born with a genetic mutation that gives them abilities. Some people decided it was not something their all-powerful god could tolerate, so they would sometimes take matters into their own hands. Yes, I know. They're very confused people."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

So, what he gathered there is that some people are born with it and some people are not. (Harrumph) And that the people lacking the power seem to object to them having it. Ver, also, seems to have picked a clear side to favor.

"Do they consider you a mutant where you're from?" He says after quietly pondering for a moment. As he understands it, she wasn't born with the truth thing - it was something of an accident, but she can do magic?

[brave_heart_verity]

Not being racist is an obvious choice to her. One of the perks of the curse: she's not taken in by rhetoric about superior races or genetic purity.

"No, I don't have that particular gene. I'm just a regular human being with a clumsy father." She gives a little shrug. "The government had a classification system for people with powers, and a training program. I was considered so useless they actually made a new lowest possible score for me."

She's not bitter or anything.

Okay, she's a little bitter. But it's still better to be considered useless than to have Maria Hill's attention.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Han's not the type that would hold anything against people who are born a certain way. They didn't have any more or less control over the circumstances of his birth than he did, but, he can empathize with feeling like you've bombed out in divine favoritism.

Captain Solo is the consummate have not and sometimes it just gets to him. Resolving those issues is something of an ongoing process, but it in some respects drives him to a certain greatness itself.

"They just didn't know what they had." He says with a shrug. Clearly, he thinks they underestimated her. "Lots of people make that mistake."

[brave_heart_verity]

She's not sure she'd call what she's got 'divine favoritism'. Just plain bad luck.

"They knew exactly what they had. Maybe that was the problem. An organization with that many secrets might not like having a human lie detector around. But I'm probably better off this way, I'd make a terrible hero."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Perspective. The grass always seems greener from the other side, as the old earth saying goes. Though, Han does have the idea that Ver doesn't exactly love her ability to see through people's lies. It at least makes him aware of the notion that having powers isn't inherently a blessing.

Though ...

"Yeah, I can't imagine you in a line of political work." Right or wrong, Han has the idea that lies come more fast and furiously in bureaucracy than they do in his line of work.

"Would you get rid of it if you could? Your power, I mean."

[brave_heart_verity]

This is true, and she's guilty of her own bouts of baseless envy.

"Politics?" The idea makes her laugh. "No, I wouldn't survive long. I haven't got the knack of telling people what they want to hear or the stomach for knowing I'll never follow through."

It's a question she's heard before, but she's still not quite sure how to answer it. "No. I don't think so. I hate it, but I don't know what I'd do without it. Getting rid of it wouldn't magically give me the life skills I'm missing, so..." There doesn't seem much point.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

That's an interesting answer. Not to the politics part; that one he expected, but to the one about her power surpised him. He expected her to just want to be rid of it if she could be, but here she is telling him it wouldn't solve her problems.

"I ... suppose I could understand that." He says after giving the reveal a certain amount of consideration. He doesn't really have many points of comparison, though.

[brave_heart_verity]

There was a time she absolutely wanted rid of it, no doubts raised and no questions asked. But then people started asking her that question and making her think about it. Funny how that works.

"It's okay if you don't." Yeah, she noticed that wasn't a real definitive answer. "I wouldn't want you to. I mean. I wouldn't want you to know what it's like to deal with this kind of thing, because you don't deserve that."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

It not like he isn't trying to see it from her point of view, it's just out of the realm of what he can relate to. He can relate to the idea of not wanting to profoundly change who he is right now.

He supposes if there was any correlation of something about his life that he hates, but probably wouldn't want to be different, it would have been growing up on the Trader's Luck. Sure, that place rotted something fierce, but it made a survivor out of him. That's worth something, he supposes.

"I'm sorry you have to go though this, sweetheart." He says after milling those thoughts around in his head. "I really am."

[brave_heart_verity]

The effort is kind of him, and it's not that she doesn't want the comfort of being understood. But watching people try to understand and not get there is hard. She'd rather nobody try than see people she likes giving up on her.

"Thank you." She truly appreciates it, and will give him this smile for his troubles. A little kindness and a little sympathy is enough for her.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"Well."

Here there are at the point where she'll realize there's not much to her friend Han once you get passed the guns and the ship. She at least has retangles that will pull up things for them to look at.

"Guess I could show you the engines and the hyperdrive." He says, knowing they didn't get to that part earlier.

[brave_heart_verity]

There's more to him than the guns and the ship. If he's not ready to show her those parts yet, that's okay. They can take their time.

"Okay. I don't really know anything about engines so please don't be insulted if I look completely confused." Finally, something he can show off and explain to her as much as he wants.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"I think a lot of people are in the same boat that way." He says with a shrug. "Nobody thinks about their engines unless they're not working."

Though, at that point, if they still haven't figured out how they work, you'll be paying a kings ransom in repairs. The cost of towing is deep space alone is usually very high.

"I can keep it brief, if you want."

[brave_heart_verity]

"I don't own anything with an engine," she points out. She's never even owned a car of her own. City girl. Not her problem if the cab's got issues, she'll just get another.

"Oh, no, I like it when you explain things."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

She hasn't ever owned anything with an engine, meanwhile, apart from those first couple years of his life that he can't really remember, they've always been present in his life. In fact, Han's spent a lot more of his time living, even at this age, on ships than he has on terra - though the Luck was more frequently docked than traveling somewhere.

Han decides to leave his coat behind, if they're going out again, might as well leave them by the access hatch. Though, her lesson on how to draw might take place inside the ship, since, the signigificant part of learning to draw isn't in pulling the trigger, it's in taking out the weapon from the holster.

Anyway, he starts walking toward the stern of the ship, expecting her to follow.