Rey's warehouse- Friday afternoon

[thatwaslucky]

Rey had visitors. She was thrilled to have visitors. She adored her visitors. It was just that this year was going to be more complicated.

She'd come back to the island to train with Kanan, who'd had to leave on short notice, and Anakin was kind enough to take her on so she could stay. But as her teacher at home was his daughter, who had complicated feelings there and had just suffered a lot of terrible loss and trauma all at once, Rey just… hadn't mentioned that change for nearly a year. And when she finally came clean, while Leia had appreciated her reasoning, she really had not appreciated anything else about the situation. Naturally this meant that she came this weekend, which meant Rey had had to warn Anakin ahead of time, because that would have been the worst situation to walk into without knowing.

And the rest of Rey's guests didn't know about any of that, though there was a decent chance they'd figure it out if they so much as heard Anakin's name on radio.

So yeah. Complicated weekend.

When she brought Leia to the warehouse to at least show her where she was doing her training, she made sure to have a lot some rum for the squirrels.


[Open!]

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[disastertrashfamily]

Whether or not it had been a good idea for Beau to leave Jester to her own devices for a little while, that was exactly what had happened. She'd come down to the warehouse district on Beau's recommendation, something about how she'd be totally into the murals, and then gotten a bit distracted handwavily, with permission leaving dick drawings all over Barry's warehouse.

But Beau had also mentioned that Rey had a warehouse down here, so Jester was in search of that, too.

Don't ask how she'd gotten a rum-bearing squirrel to point her in the right direction. She was adorable and she had her ways, and now she was knocking at the door, okay?

[thatwaslucky]

And while Rey had visitors, she wasn't exactly expecting anyone aside from them to wander around this way, so she went to open the door and smiled when she saw who was there. "Hi!"

[disastertrashfamily]

"Hi, Rey!" Jester beamed at her. Hey, these were much nicer circumstances than the last time they'd seen each other, right? "Beau told me where I could find you. She said this is where you do all your really cool stuff?"

[thatwaslucky]

"It is," Rey said with a little laugh, letting her in. "We recently got an upgrade."

[disastertrashfamily]

"Oh my gosh, this is super cool," Jester breathed, her eyes lighting up with enthusiasm the way they did with ... pretty much everything, to be honest. She had her sketchbook in hand almost immediately to draw the obstacle course (and included a little cartoon Rey doing a really elaborate series of flips). "How have you been?"

[thatwaslucky]

"Good." More or less! "I should probably thank you personally for the weapons rack."

Which she once tried to use as a weapon itself.

[disastertrashfamily]

Jester absolutely beamed at that. "I'm so glad you like it! We thought you could use it, just after all the stuff you collected in --" She paused, and while she didn't actually outwardly wince and she was never going to admit to it, it might come through pretty clearly in the Force. "-- you know. That place. Also just because you're pretty cool in general."

[thatwaslucky]

"Thank you," Rey said, smiling. "How about you? How've you been?"

[disastertrashfamily]

"Really good, actually," Jester said, so brightly it was kind of hard to doubt her. (She wasn't doing that well, but she always felt like it was her job to make everyone around her happy, and if she had to mask her own troubles to do that, then that was exactly what she was going to do.) "We've been spending a lot of time with my mom and going on some little adventures and things and you should totally come and visit Nicodranas sometime! I know you have beaches here but the Menagerie Coast is totally different."

[thatwaslucky]

"I do like seeing new places," Rey told her.

[disastertrashfamily]

"Plus, you know, your last impression of our world kind of sucked," Jester added. "And you shouldn't be stuck with that one. And -- have you been to a whole bunch of new places? Because I'm pretty sure my mom would love to hear about them."

What with her whole agoraphobic situation.

[thatwaslucky]

"I've been to a few new planets," Rey told her. "One is covered almost entirely in water. Another literally covered in trash."

[disastertrashfamily]

Jester made a distinctly grossed out face at that second one. "Okay, I'm not sure she'd want to hear too much about that one, but the water one sounds cool!"

[thatwaslucky]

"It wasn't bad." Rey had actually kind of hated it. At least no one tried to kill her on the trash planet unless she provoked the resident monster, and she'd started feeling bad about that. "At least it was very pretty."

[disastertrashfamily]

That was not a fair trade at all.

"I wonder if you'd get sick of seeing all that water all the time?" Jester mused. "I mean, I grew up on the coast and I saw the ocean all the time but it wasn't everywhere."

[thatwaslucky]

"I don't know," Rey said. "I grew up in the desert and it was nothing but sand, but I don't know if I ever got sick of it, exactly. I just wanted to see something new."

[disastertrashfamily]

"No, I totally get that," Jester answered. "It's -- no one was supposed to know my mom had me, so I spent a lot of time in my room? And now I get to travel all over the place with Fjord and Beau and Yasha and everybody and it's the coolest."

As nonchalant as she sounded about that, she was ... not.

[thatwaslucky]

And Rey could pick up on that. But if Jester was going with that, she wasn't going to stop her.

"What's been your favorite so far?"

[disastertrashfamily]

Jester was a long way yet from understanding that she didn't have to be the strong okay one for everyone all the time, so she appreciated that.

"Well, I really like Zadash," she mused, "since we made a lot of good memories there."

She wondered if the temple of the Allhammer still bore traces of her handiwork.

"But I think this place has a pretty good chance of at least being high on the list."

Because Shadycreek Run was definitely not on the list at all.

[thatwaslucky]

"It's pretty good here," Rey said. "The stairs are... not a favorite, but otherwise the people are good and the scenery's actually pretty great."

You know. Why she liked the beach.

[disastertrashfamily]

"Yeah, but with all the stairs everybody must have amazing calves," Jester decided. "It seems pretty tiring though."

She made a show of sighing, but it turned into a grin pretty quickly.

"I guess you guys are forgiven for stealing Yasha and Beau away from us. I guess."

[thatwaslucky]

"I appreciate that," Rey smiled. "It is nice having them around."

She'd ping in Monday, seriously.

[disastertrashfamily]

"They're pretty neat," Jester agreed. "But so are you."

There were maybe five people in existence that Jester didn't or wouldn't like. Maybe.

"Oh! I brought you something," she blurted out suddenly, unslinging her haversack from her shoulder to pull out a small, soft-looking package wrapped in blue tissue paper with hamster unicorns and rainbows hand-drawn all over it; it looked like a fairly large piece of folded cloth might be inside. "I wasn't really sure what to get you, 'cause I don't know that much what you like in terms of clothes and stuff, so it's kind of more of a souvenir."

It was, in fact, a piece of folded cloth: a tapestry about a yard wide of the city of Nicodranas, as if viewed from the balcony of a taller building, and looking out toward the Lucidian Ocean in the background.

Oh, and a smaller, less fancy drawing on parchment paper that was tucked into the middle of the folded tapestry, this one of the Mighty Nein along with Rey, Liam, and Karolina, sitting around a campfire presumably on one of the nights of their trip back from Shadycreek Run. That one was clearly Jester's work, which could be confirmed either by the style, or by the dick drawings hidden in the picture.

[thatwaslucky]

"Oh," she said, surprised. "You didn't have to do that. Is this something I should open now?"

She still didn't really know how gift etiquette went.

[disastertrashfamily]

"I know I didn't have to, but -- you're Beau's friend, and that means you're pretty cool 'cause she doesn't make a whole lot of them, and it was fun," Jester replied. "You know what else is fun? Watching people open their presents."

She made a little 'come on' gesture toward it.