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[Kiyevanie]

Pain. 

Hammering, tearing, unbearable pain.

Her head felt as if someone drilled a red heated wire through it and the rest of her body wasn’t in much better shape. For a moment she toyed with the thought of opening her eyes, but before she could do it a new wave of pain rolled over her and pulled her back into the darkness.

*****

At her second awakening the pain in her skull had lessened to a fierce throb. About the way she knew from the morning after one of the longer nights in the mess hall – showing all those wannabe macho guys that she wasn’t a weak little girl, just because she was two heads shorter. Usually that involved the intake of strong alcoholic beverages – mostly homemade brandy out of the few fruits of Pandora that didn’t harm the human metabolism. Bad hooch.

But this here didn’t feel like her bunk in Hell’s Gate, the ground was too hard and her position too cramped. Furthermore, she felt pain all over her body and that was unusual for a simple hangover. What the heck – where was she? And how did she come here?

Thoughts moved slowly through her head and when she tried concentrating on the past there was only a dark hole. Painkillers – a kingdom for a painkiller! She raised her hand to press it at her temple and stopped, stunned, as she hit something hard. A breathing mask, she was wearing an exopack.

That was for sure not her bunk.

Slowly she realized that she had to be somewhere outside. Nobody wore an exopack inside. Not good. Not good at all. She decided to open her eyes. That ended out more strenuous than the expected. Her lashes were clotted and at the first moment everything seemed hazy. She blinked hard for several times, but the picture only slowly cleared up to the strange, unreal colours and structures of Pandora’s vegetation. Everything was blue and violet, fluorescing sparks in the darkness: it was night and that made her situation even worse. If there was one thing that was on top of every “How To Survive On Pandora”-list then it was this one: not being outside at night.

At least plants and glowing points stayed where they were, nothing growled out of the darkness at her and she didn’t lose her consciousness again. Encouraging signs. Getting bolder she tried to get up and felt for the first time that something tied her to whatever she was lying on. She felt around with her hands over her body and felt the familiar straps of her pilot chair. Without thinking she found the button that opened the straps, then she started another try to get into another position.

That immediately turned out to be one of her less good ideas. Dizziness rolled over her and she needed all of her willpower to keep her revolting stomach under control. As long as she didn’t know where she was and how far from help – and that she needed help was a sure fact – she couldn’t vomit. She closed her eyes again and sank back into unconsciousness.

The third awakening was insofar more pleasant as it had become day in the meantime – and she was still alive. She tried to get up again and this time her body rewarded her with only a slight dizziness. She looked down and saw she was wearing combat gear – and it showed traces of heavy usage. The bottom half had inflated during her crash – the upper half as well, but she hadn’t worn it, something she really regretted now. The straps of her safety belt had left deep marks in her bare shoulders. She felt as if she had several burns on her bare arms and her neck hurt every time she turned it. Looking up she could see what was left of her parasail, tangled up in the branches of one Pandora’s lower trees. Geez – whatever gods had been holding their protecting hands over her, they must have had their work cut out for them. Flashes of memories came back. The battle... how her chopper had been shot, the ejection seat, her frantic tries to somehow steer it to a place that was neither rock nor deep forest – and then nothing anymore.   

She moaned and buried her head in her hands when her situation sunk in. She was stuck somewhere in the Hallelujah mountains, injured, miles away from civilization, without any equipment and what was worst, she hadn’t the faintest idea how the battle had ended. She looked at the small multifunctional gadget on her wrist and started swearing. If that thing still worked properly her crash had been two complete days ago. In this time almost everything could have happened, from a retreat of the humans up to the complete obliteration of the Na’vi. Also it explained the burning thirst in her body.

With great effort she got up and leaned against her chair, until it toppled over. Her hands went hectic over the downside, until she found the familiar form of the first aid kit. One could say a lot about the RDA, but their technical equipment was the best men could provide. At first she pulled out the water container and pushed it into the fitting place of her exopack. Automatically a straw appeared before her parched lips. The water was stale and tasted of the disinfecting tablets but at this moment it was tastier than a freshly tapped beer. She forced herself to drink slowly and controlled and to stop after some few swallows. Who knew how long she would have to last with this? Then she started to care for her several scratches and burn, to bandage up the long cut at her upper arm and finally injecting a broadband antibiotic. Her situation was bad enough without an infection.

Looking at it she had exactly two opportunities. She could stay at this place and slowly die of thirst or she could start to move on, hoping to find any intelligent being that wouldn’t kill her at first sight. And if it did, at least she would die fast. She wasn’t the type to give in easily, so she decided for the second option. With the straps she improvised a kind of harness to fix the emergency package to her back.

Stumbling and staggering she started walking, muttering quietly to herself. „Trudy Chacon – you got yourself into shit again!“ 

[Kiyevanie]

After a short while of walking Trudy stopped midstride. Yeah, she was walking – but where to? Crap, she must have hit her head harder than she had thought if she just stormed on like that. She looked over to a bolder, checked for any unwanted guests there and sat down, holding her head with both hands while she tried to make a decision.

Basically, there were two options of how the war had ended – either humans had won or Na’vi. If humans had won, she was screwed. Too many people knew she had switched sides, her file probably was labelled “traitor” and “deserter”. If she was lucky and ran into a victorious human mercenary she would be shot on sight. If she wasn’t, they’d take her in as a prisoner of war and she’d have to deal with what asshole Quaritch would call “martial court”.

If the Na’vi had won – well, then “shoot on sight” would be the less lucky option. If whoever she ran into just took her as a prisoner of war she might actually have a chance to convince them that she was one of the good guys and maybe – if they were still alive – get in contact with her friends. Trudy would have to talk pretty fast though, ‘cause she was deeply convinced that humans as a species weren’t very popular on Pandora currently. And that was not even related to the outcome of the war.

Usually a person of quick decisions she realized now that she had just too little information to go for a certain course of action. What she needed now was a place to gather intel, rest a bit, maybe get rid of her mask and literally take a breath. After a while of staring at the ground without actually seeing anything her head suddenly went up and she just could keep herself from smacking her forehead the last moment. The shack! The HabMod they had brought from Site 26! It wasn’t too far from the Well of Souls and even more important – she knew more or less the direction it should be from where the main part of the battle had happened. So, as long as she could find this direction...

Trudy knew there was a compass in the emergency kit she was dragging along, but she also knew that instruments weren’t really precise in this area. Still, it was better than nothing and the only chance she had now. 

 

A few minutes later she was walking again, compass in hand, trying to find the direction to her destination with the twisting and turning pointer. Not that it was an easy walking – she had seen how the Na’vi moved through her forest home. Lithe, graceful, without any sound. Trudy, on the other hand, wasn’t much of a scout person. Yeah, she had picked up a few things and wasn’t a total newbie, but she just had spent much more time in her chopper’s cockpit than out in the wild. And she was injured. Maybe a concussion, several strained tendons, bruises, burns, sore places all over her body – if she had a best shape, she now was lightyears away from it. Her combat boots made way too much sound for her peace of mind, and even though she had pulled up the top half of her coverall by now she still felt how the twigs stuck to her arms and legs. And everything was just so damn huge! “Suck it up, Trudy”, she chided herself. “Na’vi kids can do it, you can too!”

And she stumbled on, trying her best to make as little sound as possible.

[Random the Navigator]

  ***

Some distance away, but drawing closer, was a song.  A light song, but with a steady rhythm; a walking-song, in the tradition of the Bushmen or the Na'vi, a sometimes-wordless accompaniment to a foraging mission or a long hike.

Just behind the song was the singer: a young girl, dressed in somewhat undersized Avatar fatigues and a backpack, but her neck draped in the lei of the Tawkami Clan.  She looked to be somewhere between ten and thirteen (it was so hard to tell, since Na'vi girls didn't tend to get chesty), with a roundish, pleasant face and a mouth meant for whistling and smiling at the same time.  Her eyes were wide like a child's, bright with intelligence and curiosity.  But there were depths in them too; if she was a child, she was one who had seen much.

She picked up a scent; all at once she froze, ears turning, and her chanting stopped.  Gas, grease, fire...  Not good!  But medicine too, or at least disinfectant; clothes like hers, no flowers, and stress-sweat.  Someone was hurt.  Someone who had been in the War.

She paused, leaning on her digging-stick, and listened to the sound of shrubs and bark brushing against trousers and sleeves.  The unsteady tramping of boots, stumbling sometimes and crushing the grass.  Should she help? --Stupid question; she had a child's compassion, and she could never live with herself if she didn't at least look in on the poor creature.  So the real thing she asked herself was whether helping would be dangerous.

She knit her eyebrows, since she had them.  She didn't smell anything like a gun on this one, and humans didn't tend to carry bows.  As for knives, she trusted her own reflexes; she could disappear up a tree in less time than it would take to say so.  But even if the lost human had a Bowie knife, it couldn't be worse than a Palulukan's fangs...and she'd dealt with those before, coming out a little less popular with her father but none the worse for wear.

She smiled at the memory - that had been some escapade! - then started walking again towards the stranger.

[Kiyevanie]

After walking for what was maybe an hour or so Trudy realized she was even worse off than she had thought. She still felt dizzy, despite her medication and her head still throbbed. Once or twice she had even found herself almost nodding off while walking - that was not good. She had to keep alert here on Pandora. Even though the fighting initially might have scared off most of the wildlife - two days had gone by and Pandora, being a healthy ecosystem where all life was in an eternal circle of being born, living, dying and being nurture for others of Eywa's children, had its share of scavengers. Trudy hadn't met them yet and had no intention of doing so now. For the umpteenth time she wondered where her sidegun had disappeared to - probably being lost during her fall. Not that it mattered against anything more dangerous than a lost merc, but she'd feel better with it. Her bowie knife was more a tool than anything else.

She stopped, wiping her brow best she could, then stretched, groaning slightly when the straps of her improvised backpack rubbed on her sore shoulders, then listened, trying to spot anything unusual. She didn't have Na'vi or Avatar senses, but she knew enough to know the yipping of a pack of viperwolves. But there was... wait... had she heard singing, of all things? She froze, listening more intensely now. But there was nothing.

~Awesome~ she thought to herself. ~I really need to find that damn shack - I'm starting to get hallucinations~

[Random the Navigator]

The girl heard the Nantang too.  Not to be cheated of her discovery, she waited until they drew near and...

The Tawkami Clan was in most respects a typical Na'vi society.  But every Clan had a specialty; for the Omaticaya, it was weaving; for the Tompa'tanhi, their healers; and for the Tawkami, their mastery of herbalism.  Herbalism could take many forms.  Plants and their products were good for everything from seasoning food (of course) to medications (the Tompa'tanhi often sent for the rarer blends) to ceremony - and, lately, for chemical warfare.  So now the girl reached into one pocket of her fatigue trousers and took out a small capsule containing the pollen and root-powder of a particularly noxious plant.  She knew she was going to regret it when the thing burst open; but so would the Nantang, and the stuff couldn't possibly be worse than disinfectant...could it?

She spotted the antennae of the pack leader and executed a perfect slider pitch.  The capsule flew straight, then took a sharp cut downwards...right onto the snout of the pack leader.  Much yelping and running ensued, most of it away from the girl and the human for whom she searched.  She pinched her nose until the yelping faded, and knew for certain that that pack would not be hunting anywhere near this place tonight.

She was wrong on one count, though: It was worse than disinfectant.  "Fpi Eywa!!" she yowped, eyes and nose running; then she muttered something about "tsyit of pul", "tsyit of Pa'li", and "tsyit of toktor", followed by the two most derogatory names of that plant.

[Kiyevanie]

Now - this was definitely not a hallucination. Although it sounded weird enough to be one. First the almost insulted yelping and yowling of the viperwolves, then the sound of a young, female voice calling out something in Na'vi.
Trudy's thoughts moved through her head with the speed of a fly caught in honey, but even she guessed that the first one was caused by the second.

She hesitated. Should she call out? Obviously there was one of the Na'vi nearby and the voice had sounded annoyed, but not scared or desperate. So maybe they had won after all? This could be her chance for some help, if the owner of the voice wouldn't just do to her what she had done to the viperwolves.

Right that moment another wave of dizziness rolled over Trudy and she knew that she was sitting neckdeep in shit and was sinking deeper. Better grab the straw she could see (or better: hear) and hope it'd hold.

"Hello? Kal-ti?", she called, adding one of the few words she had caught when they had been preparing for the battle. "Anybody here?"

[Random the Navigator]

The girl heard the tawtute voice and smiled.  Inglisi, huh?  Well, that was a German-based language at least, so she figured she'd give it a shot:  "Kaltxi yourself," she said cheerfully.  "Or call coffee, or call chocolate" - here she was playing with the way the Na'vi word sounded like "call tea" - "...but you'll get best results if you call Molly."

And she stepped out to where the human - scorched in places, cut up in more, obviously about to collapse - was swaying on her feet.  "Are you lost?" she inquired, cocking her head.  "I can see you're hurt..."

[Kiyevanie]

Trudy stared at the apparition in front of her and the rest of her balance just left her there and then, bringing her down on her butt. She definitely had hallucinations... she had to have.

There, coming out of the bushes was a girl... well, in her early teens, Trudy guessed. But that was not what had the pilot gawping now. It were the Avatar fatigues, the noticeable eyebrows (Trudy was too dizzy to count any fingers) coming with the Na'vi hairstyle and jewelry. And then - that girl spoke decent English, with a slight accent Trudy had heard before, but couldn't place - just that it definitely wasn't Na'vi. So - everything pointed at an Avatar driver here, but heck, Trudy was pretty sure she knew all the drivers on Pandora, she had flown most of them around after all. All high-class scientists - but no young teenage girls.

"Must have banged my head worse than I thought", was her first, rather incoherent thought, "I'm dreaming up young Avatar girls now..."

Then she tried to get herself together. If this was indeed a dream she'd do nothing worse than talk to the empty forest, but if not... the girl spoke English, she had the name to go with it, didn't look as if she had sided with the RDA and Trudy did need help. Desperately. So she gave it a second try.

"Um... hi... eh... Molly", she started again, knowing that she must probably be quite a weird sight herself - a human, all messed up, in the middle of nowhere, with the rest of her warpaint still smeared over her face. "Yeah... guess I'm lost", she admitted. "My chopper got shot down by that damn Dragon." She paused, again looking at the girl her mind still had problems wrapping around. "Say - that you're here - does that mean that we've won?"

[Random the Navigator]

At first Molly found the pilot's stare unsettling.  She'd always gotten a bit of that, ever since she came to be, and it brought back bad feelings - of being a specimen; of being an experiment.  Too, she wasn't at all sure which side this human was on.  She hadn't thought about that before, and it was way too late to get away now...  What if the woman knew her father?  Would even her village at Greenhome be far enough away?

But then the human lady spoke, and Molly noticed the warpaint; and between that and the name "Dragon", all of a sudden she knew who she was dealing with - and she was floored.  She still had a grip on her digging-stick, but she allowed herself to slip down it so that she, too, ended up on her rump, albeit a little more gracefully and in a controlled descent.

"Gott im Himmel..." she whispered; then her voice leapt with her spirits: "That was you??  You're the one?  You must be, you're wearing the Omaticayas' colors, but...but...  Aiee, we thought we'd lost you!!"  She leaned forward, eyes shining as incredulousness yielded to joy; then, half in laughter, she answered the pilot's question.  "Yes, we won - hoo, boy, did we ever!!!"

[Kiyevanie]

It took a few moments until the words really sank into Trudy’s mind, but then relief flooded her system, almost making her passing out again from the intensity. She closed her eyes as she felt a load slide off her shoulders she hadn’t realized she had been carrying. They had won! That whole insane stunt that had written “suicide mission” all over it, they had pulled it through, somehow. She didn’t even need details, that would be for later, but for now it was enough that they indeed had won that impossible battle. It sure hadn’t looked that way when her Samson had erupted into a fireball...

And that girl, Molly, she knew who Trudy was. She knew the Omaticaya, could place the smeared colours on her face. Meaning the Omaticaya had survived too. And when Molly said “We thought we had lost you”, that meant...

Trudy opened her eyes again, almost as shining as Molly’s now, then grinned, for the first time since she had woken up in her destroyed pilot seat. “Oh hell, it was a dang close cut – I must have had a whole army of guardian angels - and one of 'em has been doing overtime to send you to me. Actually, I still don’t know how exactly I survived, I thought I was done when that rocket hit – thought I’d go down in my own blaze of glory. Say, do you know about my friends?”, she asked now. “Norm, Jake... did they make it too?” Then she shook her head, wincing the next moment. "Geez, look at me, blabbing like a baby and I haven't even told you my name. I'm Trudy and you have no idea how glad I am to meet ya, Molly."

[Random the Navigator]

Molly put a finger to her lip, thinking.  "Jakesully?" she asked, making sure they were talking about the same person.  "He did more than make it - he Bonded with Toruk and jumped on that big kunsip that shot you, and he blew it right out of the sky!  Shows what happens when the Sky People put their fake Dragons up against our real ones."  She looked indignant for a moment - the nerve of those people!!!  "What'd they think was gonna happen, right?"  She laughed at their insanity, then continued.  "So, I guess Eywa decided She'd had enough, because the next thing that happened was all the animals went crazy and trampled all the Sky warriors on the ground, and wild Ikran attacked their ships from the sky, and the Angtsik came and bashed those machines they wear, and...well, I'm glad I wasn't foraging that morning!  But from way over here, it sounds like it must have been fun to watch.

"I don't know about Norm," she went on quietly.  "I don't know who he is, unless he's that Dreamwalker who rode with the Horse Clans.  I only know there was one, not who he was or how he turned out...  Does that sound like something your Norm would do?  Se'ni says he fought in both bodies...  But there's almost nothing left of the Horse Clans.

"Anyway, we're going to hold a big old ceremony under Vitraya Ramunong, the Tree of Souls.  Everybody's there, everybody that made it.  We're gonna have the biggest prayer circle there ever was.  I think it's 'cause we won, or maybe to begin to heal the hurt...the wounds in our spirits.  But somebody said it was about Jake.  And hey, if they're honoring heroes, you need to be there too."

She looked Trudy over with an eye to her probable physical capabilities.  "But...you're gonna have a little trouble getting there, aren't you?" she asked gently.  "And if you've been lost for as long as we've been looking for you, you've gotta be hungry.  But I have food with me, and I know where to get water; and if all you can handle is water right now, I know what to put in it to make it food.  We can camp right here until you're feeling stronger...  Sound good?"

[Kiyevanie]

Trudy made her way through all that information."I know about Jake and that Toruk, just not that he acutally managed to crash down the Dragon." A wide grin appeared on her face. "Woot!", she called out, as images flashed before her inner eye. "Should have known that guy was batshit crazy when I first met him - but the good kind of batshit crazy!" Her eyes widened. "And Eywa called on the wildlife? Hooo boy, I can see a lot of dumb faces there." Her grin turned outright ferocious now - if she had had fangs they probably would have shown right then. "Guess there's a whole heap of useless metal trash around here right now." She knew what power was in a Titanothere - a whole herd of them stampeding? Total annihilation of anything in their way. "Well, they had it coming - pissing off local deities at own risk."

A bit quieter she added: "It was darn close for a while, I'm glad that this cavallery came - we did our best, but it didn't look good for a while. But I guess you already know that." The sudden rush of endorphines faded when she thought about the next part of Molly's information. "So nobody knows about Norm... yeah, he rode with the Horse Clans. Brave as hell, but batshit crazy too. Norm's never been something like a warrior." She winced when she realized what 'fought in both bodies' probably meant. "And if he lost his Avatar... gee..." Sadness crossed her face now. "Seems there was a high price coming with our victory. Dang. I liked that guy!" She swallowed and blinked rapidly at the thought that the lanky xenoanthropologist might be dead now. "But it was never a question that he fought along with everyone else - that's just how he is. Was. Whatever..." She blinked again, trying to clear her suddenly blurry sight. She had lost people in battle before, but it never got any easier. "Who knows, maybe he did make it. And maybe not. Almost nothing left of the Horse Clans? Crap... so much useless deaths of good people, just cause those greedy idiots couldn't get enough."

She looked at Molly now. "Yeah, I'd like to be at that prayer circle tonight. Not cause I'm a hero or something, but to say good bye to those we've lost in this fuc... frickin' war. But you're right. At the moment there's not much more walking in me. About that water... is it safe for me?" Trudy still had no idea if and how Molly could be an Avatar, where she was linked in from, but she just didn't have the energy to care for it. But Molly being an Avatar - no matter how that was possible - meant she'd know about the problems the human body had with Pandora's toxins. "And how far is it to the Tree?" She hoped not too far, considering the fact that Molly had walked here - on the other hand Na'vi and Avatars could walk much longer and faster than humans, and although Molly was by far not grown up she still was a good part taller than Trudy herself - plus, she was used to move through the forest.

[Random the Navigator]

At the words "lost his Avatar", something flickered across Molly's face - her expression went neutral for a heartbeat, and her eyes in that same instant went dark and almost grey.  She was an Avatar; she was a child; the death of one of her own would have had to strike a nerve.  But there was something more to it as well, something deeply personal...just for the briefest moment; and then it was gone in the time it takes between a small bird's decision to fly and its actually doing so, and in the meantime she'd framed a response.

"The water?" she said.  "Water's the same everywhere; it's root vegetables and tubers you've got to watch out for, and any animal that eats them.  But if you're worried about the water, just use one of those tablets I'm sure they gave you; if you're out, you can pour the water through a spare filter.  If the filters in your mask are the only ones you've got, there's plenty of burnt stuff around here to make charcoal out of, and that'll work too - for the air and the water.  And once we get to the Well, there should be spare-everything in that shack on the rim."

[Kiyevanie]

"The shack on the rim - that was where I was trying to go", Trudy explained. "Before I realized that maybe I took a bite too huge to swallow." She patted the straps of her makeshift backpack. "I've got some of those tablets", she said, "and a replacement filter, so I guess I'll be fine. And - hey.. thank you, Molly. Thank you very much for your help. I thought tough ol' Trudy could make it on her own, but I can't. Without you I'd be royally screwed here."

She was far from her usual self, but even in her current state - and griefing herself - she noticed the short shadow crossing Molly's face when the fate of Norm's Avatar was mentioned. "I know", she said after a moment, her own face sad too. "It's hard to lose one of your own. I wish it'd get better over time... growing up. But it'd be lying and you deserve better than that." Shortly her face looked grim. "And it sucks that a kid your age should be confronted with that kind of crap anyway. Not here on Pandora, anyway."

[Random the Navigator]

Molly looked down and bit her lip, but still didn't say anything about the matter.  Perhaps she didn't want to...or perhaps she couldn't, whether the topic was too sensitive or she just hadn't figured out how to talk about it or what to say.

Instead she refocused on practical matters.  "Okay, then I guess I need to get you that water," she said.  "Can you walk again yet, for a little ways?  I'd like to leave you in a safer place, and I know just the one..."  Her eyes came back to life and twinkled as she smiled.  "It's where I attacked the Nantang, don'tcha know.  They won't bother you there, neither will anything else...and it'd be a good place to test the seal on that mask."  Now her look was full of mischief.

[Kiyevanie]

Trudy realized quickly that Molly couldn't or didn't want to dwell on a subject that was obviously painful for the young girl. Never being someone to peek her nose to deep in other people's business the pilot respected that, letting it go and too focusing on the much more pressing issue at hand: her own state and how to deal with it.

"Lemme see", she muttered. "If I'm able to get up I'll be able to walk a bit too." Safe place sounds good to me." She squinted at Molly. "What did you do to shoo those wolves away anyway? I swear, I've never heard a Viperwolf make that kind of sound." Eyeing Molly and her equipment she added: "Maybe I should get myself something like a hiking straff?"

Sitting on her rear for the discussion had rested Trudy's legs a bit. And the information she got had mobilized a few more energy reserves: she wouldn't have to survive on her own in a hostile environment, she still had friends and somewhere to go to. So she gathered all the strength she had and - not very gracious and far from her usual way of moving, but that didn't matter now - made it to her feet. For a moment she swayed a bit, but then she took a breath, settled her shoulders, readjusted her backpack and nodded towards Molly. "Alright, let's go."

[Random the Navigator]

By the time Trudy got to her feet, Molly was doing a classic 'indignant mom' pose - hands on hips, leaning forwards a little, and tapping one foot.  "Silly you...I was going to help you up, but noooooo..."

She noted Trudy's interest in a hiking staff.  "You can use mine," she said.  "I never go foraging without it.  It's mostly for digging up roots and teylu and stuff; that's why the pointy end.  But I can use the round end to pound seeds and nuts for food or for medicine, or to scatter the ashes after I put out a campfire, or to poke things that bite so they'll bite the stick and not me...  And, yeah, sometimes I lean on it towards the end of the day when I'm tired, and sometimes I dig a hole in the ground and lay the stick over it and make it a drum.  And sometimes I lend it to a friend."

She smiled, then explained about the seed-pod incident.  "As for what I told the nantang?  I made a really bad smell and now they won't have anything to do with the place, and neither will anything else that's got a nose. You'll be safe; you can even sleep, once I'm back to keep watch.  C'mon..."

She led the pilot to a space among the roots of several large but otherwise ordinary trees, with very little undergrowth.  "See? --Lots of handholds good for climbing; that's why the nantang like it here.  But see how the trees kind of lean in together? --That's how Hometrees grow.  These are gonna be a Hometree someday, a long, long time from now.  I wonder who's gonna live here?  Do you think Eywa's growing it for the Omaticaya? --OK, now sit...that's it...  Smell anything?  And here's my stick."

[Kiyevanie]

Trudy gave Molly a slightly sheepish look. "Yeah, should have let you help me up", she agreed. "Blame it on me trying the last years to show all those tall guys with more biceps than brains that I'm not weak just cause I'm a gal one or two head shorter than me. You're neither a guy with little brains nor do I have to prove something here..."

She hobbled along while Molly led her to the safer place, grinning when the girl explained about her little adventure with chemical warfare. "Clever", she stated. "Effective and nobody gets really hurt. I almost feel sorry for them - they'll probably sit somewhere far, far away from here now, trying to get that stench out of their noses - and they got sharp noses, I swear a Viperwolf can smell you from half the moon away." In a way it had been the same thing when she was waiting for one of the scientist teams while sitting in her chopper. No Nantang with even a trace of self-esteem would even come close this awfully stinking machine.

Looking up she estimated the size of the trees that would be her resting place for now. While already impressive they still were far away from the huge giant the Omaticaya Hometree had been. "So these are gonna be a Hometree one day?" Her eyes followed the massive trunks, the place where they were leaning together to one day form the spiral and the inner structure that gave them strength and still had been a weakness for one of their kind. Trudy fervently hoped that these trees would never ever share the fate of the former Omaticaya Hometree. "Maybe for a different clan", she mused. "The Omaticaya sure need a new home before this one is all grown up."

She sat down on one of the side roots and gratefully took the swiss army knife of a staff from Molly, studying the structure and matching it with the explanations. "I've never thought about all those uses for a stick", she admitted. "Thanks for lending it to me."

[Random the Navigator]

"I'm also not two heads taller than you," Molly pointed out.  "One, maybe, but not two!

"But I used to get a lot of that too, back when--"  She paused and reconfigured.  "Well, almost everywhere I've ever been, I was the smallest or the youngest or the newest, so nobody thought I could do anything either.  It's not like that now; see, my Clan is letting me forage by myself in a war zone!  Not my smartest idea, but they wouldn't have let me do it if they didn't think it was safe enough..."  She looked thoughtful.  "Hmm...  Maybe I'm still trying to prove something too," she confessed.

She joined Trudy in looking up at the nascent Hometree.  "Another Clan...  Maybe even mine?  We're the Tawkami, which means 'Sky-Seers'; besides plants and what to do with them, we gather teachings of all kinds, even from way 'long time ago.  When the Lorekeepers from other Clans visit us, they stay for a long time..  We're kinda Eywa's eyes and ears, too.  Who better to protect a Hometree right next to the Well of Souls?

"But...maybe there's gonna be a new Clan, one that didn't exist before.  Be kinda cool if they made one for Dreamwalkers, huh?  Then we wouldn't have to prove anything at home...  And by the time these trees are old enough, maybe more Dreamwalkers will actually be able to climb them."  She smirked, then got up to fetch the water.

[Kiyevanie]

"One head taller", Trudy agreed; she didn't have to look up further to Molly than with most other humans-

But she raised a brow at the last part of Molly's words. "Dreamwalkers and their climbing skills - they might surprise you", she called after the leaving girl. If she had wondered if Molly had ever been at Hell's Gate this was an almost sure pointer that she hadn't. Or she would know more about the drivers there. Alright, Grace had liked to keep both feet on the ground, same as John, but Angelo for example - that guy could shinny up a tree while wearing his massive oversized combat boots in no-time. She also had seen paradise bird Spaz doing some respectable climbing. For Gillian climbing was a living and even newbie Anna by now knew her way around a tree. So whoever those clumsy Dreamwalkers (interesting use of Na'vi terminology) were Molly had met - the current crew in Hell's Gate were off the list. Well, there were a few remote locations out there not even Trudy had ever flown to. And that the RDA liked to keep secrets... that wasn't a surprise either. And it was very obvious that (apart from a few bits and pieces) Molly wasn't too keen on sharing whatever secrets she was hiding either.

So, instead of poking further into Molly's secrets, Trudy stuck to the things the young Avater had told her. For example the part about the clan she was living with. Or about proving something to someone - that clan maybe? That Na'vi wanted drivers to prove themselves was something Trudy had whitnessed first hand when Jake had been trained by Neytiri. Alright, from what Trudy knew no Na'vi would ever try to hold a kid to a grown-up warrior's standards, but she still guessed that these Tawkami wanted to know first that Molly could hold her own before allowing her to roam around if they had taken her in. Sky-seers... the Na'vi did have a knack for poetic names, even prosaic Trudy liked that. Would that clan ever move to this place, in the ages it might take this Hometree to grow to full height? Did clans even move at all if they weren't forced to by something? The Omaticaya had turned out to be deeply rooted in their home, but that was one clan out of many. Other clans might have a different way of living.

She moved into a more comfortable position leanign her head against the trunk, keeping the stick in hand, and closed her eyes. There was so much new information pouring through her head that she felt a bit lost with it. It always had been Norm, who had been after all this information. She swallowed again, thinking how much the guy would have loved to be in her place right now. What had Molly just said? Lorekeepers? Trudy smiled faintly - maybe they should talk more about those ones, something like that might probably raise her friend from the dead.

One thing was pretty sure though. "Ya know - I dunno if it's been your smartest idea or not to go foraging here today, but for my part I can say I'm more than grateful that you did!"

[Random the Navigator]

Molly smiled a little; then, holding up the tails of her fatigue shirt, she did a little curtsey and smiled bigger before leaving.

But once there were enough trees between her and their campsite, her face took on a troubled look.  It really wasn't fair that she had to hide so much of herself from Trudy, or from anybody else she met from Hell's Gate.  She had, in fact, taken great pains to avoid even being seen by anyone who had ever been stationed there.  A lot of that was on her father's orders, but by now the felt need to hide herself had worked its way into her Being.  She could trust the Na'vi.  But even other Avatars were potentially dangerous, and a human?  Humans, above all, had never stopped gawking at her, trying to "figure her out", wondering how she could possibly exist and whether it was right that she did.

She would have liked to answer for herself.  After a ten-year-old's lifetime of not participating in the world much at all, she finally had light and speech and interaction and some form of movement besides turning her head or clenching her fists in a hospital bed.  She should have had playmates and a whole forest for them to crash through.  She should have had people saying how big she'd grown, how strong she was, how smart or cute or pretty.  She should have been in school.  She should have had the chance to play sports.  She should have known the rest of her family and how the rules could be delightfully different at Grandma's house.  She knew how human childhood was supposed to go, and that for most of her life such a childhood had been out of her reach.

Her father's experiments had been a desperate bid to provide her with these things.  She had to hand him that, at least.  The rest of it...  Why hadn't he thought of all that while they were still on Earth??

And what about now?  Now that her soul was firmly seated in a functional body, was he proud of her?  Did he consider his efforts a success?  Heck no!  For all she knew, he was still trying to fetch her back to her human body and was furious with her for not coming along.  And as for playmates and lessons and encouragement and a parent's pride, she hadn't had that until she'd taken up with her friend Nok and the Tawkami.  For them, she wasn't a Wrong Thing; just a child, fit to be fussed over and shown off to friends, and they'd long since stopped asking themselves where her tawtute body was.

If she could only be sure Trudy would accept her like that, as-is, what-you-see-is-what-you-get...  But no; even Trudy had had that same "What the fuck?" look on her forehead.  The kinder version, true, but still...

Yeah, maybe this was the wrong day to be wandering around in Avatar fatigues.  If she'd dressed like at home, nobody would have even blinked.

She came to the stream and filled the canteen and her own waterskin slowly, almost meditatively.  She looked upstream, where all the water was coming at her like all these new conditions and the decisions she had to make about them; then she looked downstream for a long time, pretending that the course of nature and the flow of life were carrying them all away.


She returned to the campsite with her mind a little clearer.  This knot in her soul was standing between herself and probably the first healthy human relationship she had ever had.  And she couldn't go to the ceremony thinking more about herself than about whoever it was for.  So she'd determined to come as clean as she could without endangering herself...and that meant setting a few parameters.

She plopped herself down and presented the water containers.  "Drink up," she said.  "We gotta have a talk..."

[Kiyevanie]

While Molly had been gone Trudy had tried a while longer to make sense out of every twist and turn her life had taken the last weeks and days - and hours - and finally dozed off for a bit. When Molly came back Trudy's eyes lit up, spotting the full canteen. She fit her straw in and thirstily took a sip. And then another one. And one more. She actually had to restrain herself to drink too fast, in case her system wouldn't be up to it, because although the water still tasted of disinfectant and filters it also tasted fresh. She'd drink more, later, and even put a nutrient tablet into it - or try whatever Molly had mentioned a while ago, but for now her body needed water even more urgently than anything else.

"Thanks", she said once her mouth felt properly hydrated, motioning to the water canteen. She looked up to Molly now, noticing a certain unease around the eyes and a determination that hadn't been there before. Whatever Molly wanted to talk about, it was serious. "Okay, Molly. What's wrong?"

[Random the Navigator]

The young Avatar smirked.  "Nonononono," she corrected, waving her hands in a chalkboard-eraser movement.  "The question is, 'What's right?'  I'm gonna tell you what's right.  Accept that, don't ask me anything else about it, and we can be friends, and I haven't dared make friends with a tawtute in three years.  I wanna beat that today, and I wanna do that with you.  Deal?"

[Kiyevanie]

Trudy let that sink in for a moment, then quickly nodded. Molly hadn't dared to make friens with humans since three years? Heck, whatever was in her past, everyone needed friends. And with Molly being a driver she needed friends from that part of her heritage too.
Apart from that - Trudy just liked that girl that had come out of nowhere into her life. So she held out her hand for a fistbump. "Deal!", she said.

[Random the Navigator]

"Hokay," Molly began, gathering her courage.  "Number One: This is me.  All of me.  What you see is what you get.  Don't go looking for my Sky Person body.  This is me.

"Two: I'm an Avatar; I'm a Dreamwalker.  My Clan knows the difference.

"Three: My father did one good thing and a lot of bad ones.  All my life he made me think I was one of the bad ones.  That I didn't belong; that I shouldn't exist; that I'm a hassle and a bother and I'm not supposed to be here 'cause I'm too hard to explain.  That I had to be hidden like some big bloody secret.  My Clan's still trying to set me straight about that.  I think that's why they let me forage today.

"And Four..."  Her voice regained its playfulness, a departure from the fierce, half-strangled tone in which she'd delivered the rest.  "Four, if you think the sissies who drive Avatars can get 'em to shinny up an anything, you weren't there when I was."  She delivered a sharp, toothy grin.