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[Upon awaking Mulan took her time warily exploring the ship, after having retrieved her armor and weapons of course. Finding no one to speak to, eventually she turned to the unfamiliar device she located among her belongings.

The video focuses mostly on her face, revealing a young determined looking women wearing red and black armor with a coin pattern. Her dark hair is unbound and hangs carelessly around her face, straight and loose.]

It's my understanding that wherever they are on the other end of this...object, someone can hear me. Whoever you are, I want you to show yourselves. [Tersely, teeth briefly bared.] This is not a request.

I do not know if I came to this strange place by chance encounter or deliberate action. But this is not my land, nor is it any land I am familiar with from my distant travels. And I have no memory of my arrival here, either. The only explanation I'm left with is abduction.

Whoever you are, whatever it is you may want me for, speak. The longer you make me wait, the less the likelihood you'll have of anything like my willing cooperation.

[Posturing? She is, a bit. Normally her course of action upon arriving in unfamiliar territory would be to keep her head down. But given the circumstances, she thinks it's important that she put on a strong front, let anyone out there who might be looking know she means business. That she's no easy pickings.

And that the abrupt manner of her being brought here has made her more than a little angry.]

Or if my unknown captors are too cowardly to explain themselves, then it is my hope that these words will reach someone who can enlighten me.

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Aw, y'hear that, mutt? You can stay.

[There's a bark from somewhere off her camera.]

Indrani. The Lone Wanderer, the scrappy kid from Vault 101, salvation of the Wastelands. ...Sorry, I don't get to do that a lot anymore. Indrani's fine.

[A slight nod in acknowledgement, and thanks, and she offers her name in kind:] Mulan. I've been called more than a few things in my time, too. Not all of them pleasant.

But we can continue this when I find you.

[She pockets the device carefully, still somewhat unsure of it, and re-checking her gear goes to begin her way down the worn path before her.]

Kay!

[Indrani's in her room in her ratty, stained jumpsuit, shotgun disassembled for cleaning on the shelf beside her, though she's currently involved in putting the finishing touches on her modified environment suit. An immense, scarred, and rather profoundly ugly dog of a sort of German shepherd, boxer, hyena mix dozes on the floor. The door's open, though, and the Flop isn't a private place. Any inquiry makes the chick with all the guns and the big dog pretty easy to find.]

[Mulan travels as fast down the hillside as common sense would allow. It's not good to be out in this weather, never mind the warning that Indrani and a few of the others have given her. Not to mention she's in a haste for something like a thorough explanation.

The city itself takes her aback a bit when at last she reaches it's limits. Anything past a medieval level of technology would be like nothing she's ever seen. But she can gawk later, she reminds herself.

Her presence draws little reaction from the others she passes in town. Strangers wandering around, looking out of place and lost must not warrant much comment. She's directed to the Flop almost immediately, and once there it doesn't take much to point her toward the woman she's looking for. She stands in the doorway to the room, rapping her knuckles against the frame; tries not to let her gaze be hypnotized by all the puzzling contraptions of metal she sees within.]

Indrani? I'm here, as promised.

Hiya.

[She sets aside her work and shoves enough off the bed to provide a seat. There's not really anywhere else to be. Dogmeat shifts and rolls onto his back, hoping for petting. He tends to not be as hostile to strange women, which is silly. Indrani gets shot at by ladies just as much as men at home. But... dogs. What can you do?]

So, ready for your basic rundown?

[The dog gets a look in passing that just might be a small. She crouches to hold her hand out, and rub him near his neck.

She stands again and out of a lack of anything better makes her way to the seat offered to her, trying not to look too awkward or conspicuous. She put her hair up and tied it back before coming down from the ship, but now that she's indoors she might seem to take up a lot of unnecessary room in her caped armor.]

Yes. I suppose that I am.

[That is a bit weird, but Indrani knows people who wear their damn power armor all the time, and that's a lot bulkier. She doesn't do armor for the most part, herself, preferring to rely on speed, stealth, and being tiny.]

Okay, we'll try to do this in easily digestible chunks. Welcome to Verdana. I think it's a great place, but no one agrees with me. There are people who've been living here all along, and their story is pretty complicated, but there's also us. People who woke up in little tubes on the ship. All of us were taken from home... somehow, from wherever and whenever home was. There are people from different times and, well, realities. Like, where I'm from the civilized world ended when my ancestors burned the sky in the name of political purity and we live in the dust that remains. And a whole bunch of people are from places where they fly around in space, which is real cool. Infinite possibilities. Questions so far?

Not...exactly.

[She looks wide-eyed. And a little hazy. But it's an awful lot to take in, though she's doing her very best.]

I've traveled to many lands in my time. But this place - Verdana - is clearly very much unlike anything I've ever experienced.

Good. Means it actually makes a little bit of sense.

[She's actually a terrible person to explain this to most people. Her frame of reference is way off.]

Honestly, the place itself is a lot like home for me, but not for the majority of people I've talked to. But anyway, that ship? No one really knows how we got there, and we're on a planet or in a universe or... something that's not where we started. And now, far as anyone knows, we're stuck here. And the situation here is... dicey. The people living in this city are, well, pretty much your average people. But you probably saw the big shiny dome on your way down, and the people inside there are bizarre. Whoever's in charge likes attacking everyone out here and being a totalitarian shit, which is normal if unpleasant, but, like, they have no immune systems. They can't leave. How people gets like that I don't know, and I grew up in an armored underground vault.

"Immune systems"? [While spaceships is a completely outlandish thing for her, at least she can follow along the concept. We're starting to get into far dicier waters here now, though.]

[Oh, right, magic crystal. At least Indrani's not very good at biology herself, and therefore won't veer wildly off into jargon on this particular subject.]

Um, they get sick from anything. Like, you know, if you get sick once you won't get that same thing again? They just haven't been exposed to anything. I sort of meant to illustrate how cut off they are from, well, everything. Other people, but the animals and the outside, too. To a degree that I find crazy. I mean, I understand would-be tyrants. I even understand hiding out. But this is beyond having a fortress to hide in.

[Oh, well that's a little less confusing. She nods.]

The wealthy and powerful where I come from often shelter themselves from the outside world, often because they claim to be better - but mostly because they don't want to have to deal with it. And nobles in my experience tend to be more sickly and 'delicate'. [Her tone is disparaging. She's met a few nobles worthy of her respect in time, but most of them are all talk.]

They seek to use their influence to control a world that they do not understand.

Right, right, that's the part I get. Not into it, but the powerful think they're better and ought to be in charge of everybody else, y'know? The guys under the dome, they live in an entirely different world. They don't even seem to want to be in charge of the people out here, just get rid of them. Last guy I met who had that plan... Well, doesn't exist anymore, but he messed with me. Anyway.

[Indrani's floundering a little on her attempt to describe the Authorities as deeply alien. The more she thinks about it, the more they're just the same thing in a different hat. Oh, well.]

So do the dome-dwellers consider themselves our rulers, or just our enemies?

[Because in her experience the two might not be mutually exclusive. See: evil queens.]

Ummm... I haven't asked. I'd guess both. They definitely do some ruling, but whenever things get hot out here, there are attacks. So there's kind of a flux going on.

[See also: Enclave.]

So for the most part it sounds like we are left to our own...devices.

[She falls silent musingly, and in doing so her eyes wander some more around the room. Speaking of 'devices'.]

Sorry, but I have to ask. What are all of these...things? Is this type of equipment common here, in this Verdana?

[Ah. Right. Magic crystal.]

Um, double-barreled shotgun, disassembled for cleaning, parts for an environment suit with breathing equipment, I just kinda liked that one and I think it's part of a toaster oven, some leftovers from a filter I was working on... Stuff. It's pretty standard tech here or at home, but with people coming from different worlds, I think it's all over the place.

We have next to nothing in the way of 'tech' where I come from. [Her and Emma didn't compare that many notes, but from what they did it was obvious.] Everything where I come from is either powered by fire or magic.

A short while back I met someone from another world, different from ours. She had a weapon she called a 'gun' but... [Gestures to the shotgun.] It was much smaller, than yours.

You work with these things? It is your trade?

My other ones are smaller. Guns are just tools, same as anything else. Different guns for different jobs. Likes swords.

[She doesn't know a lot about swords, but enough that she's sure of that.]

And it's pretty close. I end up doing a lot of fighting, and around here the hunting thing is big, but building and fixing stuff is way more fun.

I'd probably be much better with the hunting.

[She looks at the gun, and then back around at the other things with an incredulous sort of wonder.]

But you've certainly given me a lot of information, as promised. And I think I've...mostly understood it. The important parts, anyway. Is there anything else that you think I need to know?

[Inclined to show off a little, Indrani pulls her revolver from its accustomed place under her good hat on the shelf and begins to break it down too, barely needing to look down.]

I think those are the basics. People off the ship are mostly cool, we come from everywhere, the guys inside the dome suck, there are big scary animals and raiders outside the city... Oh, yeah, this building here is boarding for newbies. You don't have to stay here, since there are empty buildings all over, but I haven't gotten around to moving out and getting someplace furnished yet just to get away from the crowd. Just find a space. Hell, that that one, if you want.

[She points at the unused, only slightly broken bed on the other side of the little room. It's currently host to a couple of stained sacks set to air out, unfortunately.]

...I'll clear that off.

[She cracks a smile at that, though it's more a weary, almost despairing kind of a one. Why not? She doesn't particularly care, and it's not as if she's had a roof over her head for awhile anyway.]

Kind as it is of you to offer, if I can find a room of my own I should probably take it, since I'm sure we'd both prefer not to be in each other's space. But I see no reason not for me to stay in this building.

[She gets to her feet, going to give the dog another round of petting as she does so.]

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