strangetrip | [For Rey] Vending machines

Rey barely catches Lillith's words as she steps up to the candy vending machine; she could get almost anything she wanted to eat from the bar downstairs, but candy was not one of them.

She never had a sweet tooth growing up -- there was barely enough credits for the meager portions she ate -- but she'd grown fond of the taste in the last eleven months she has been here.

Rey regards Lillith curiously for a moment, determines that she doesn't recognize the other woman, then attempts a smile.

"This," she says, tracing a finger over the tiny dollar sign. "Is what they use to represent currency in this place. It was confusing for me too, at first. Our symbol, where I'm from, is a little different."

Rey digs into the pockets of her slacks, and pulls out a few coins. She extends a hand, filled with a fistful of coins, to Lillith.

"Would you like to try it?" she asks.

"Ah." Lillith smiled at the pretty young woman. "This is the symbol for the currency Coby called 'US', yes?" She traced her finger over it, committing it to memory. "So these must be the machines of vending."

She studied them anew. Now the spirals of wire began to make sense. They must turn and push the items forward. She turned her gaze to the other woman. "You are kind to offer but I have no way to repay you. It would be enough to know, please, how do they work and what is inside?"

"They're US dollars," Rey says. "Or US coins. The US is a country on the planet Earth, and from what I understand, is actually where we are now."

Well, sort of.

When Lillith protests that she couldn't repay her, Rey shakes her head. "There's no need to worry about paying me back," she says, smiling. "I just got these coins at the bar."

Still, she's not about to force the money on the other woman, so instead, she provides a demonstration. She slips a few coins into the machine, presses the letter A and the number 3, and the spiral of wire slowly curls back; the item, a Snickers, falls down into the slot below with a light clunk. A new Snickers bar seemingly magically moves forward, taking the place of the old one.

Rey retrieves it, before showing it to Lillith. "It's a Snickers," she says. "Peanuts, chocolate, and caramel, all compressed into a thin bar."

A beat, and then: "Did you want to split it?" she asks, opening the wrapper. It's pretty good."

She peels back the wrapper the way one might peel back the peel of a banana, and then offers it to Lillith, offering to let her break off a piece before Rey takes her first bite.

"Ah, you are not from this world either," Lillith murmured but the question trailed off forgotten as the machine began to work. She was not Percy to become obsessed with the making of them, but still she could not fail to be impressed with such a clever machine.

"I wonder that it has not put shopkeepers out of work." She walked over to the side of the machine to see if there was an engine. "But how is it powered?" she asked aloud, and then saw a cord connecting it to the wall. Like the lamps. "Ah, electricity. I must learn where it comes from."

It was only then that she realized the other young woman had continued speaking to her after the brown package had dropped. She seemed to be holding out some sort of a food bar in offer.

Lillith looked at once quizzically and apologetically. "Please have my apologies. I become, how does he say...wrapped up, yes, wrapped up in new ideas. Can you tell me again, what is this thing you are offering me?" Her native accent also tended to emerge when she grew interested in magic or science.

Rey shakes her head at Lillith's first few words. She isn't from this world, but after eleven months here, it's starting to feel like she can't say she's from anywhere else. This place was actually starting to feel like something she could call home.

Rey's not sure if she's qualified to remark on whether or not machines are putting shopowners out of business; the issue starts to get very complicated, especially when you start throwing droids into the mix.

"I don't know how exactly power is generated here," Rey admitted, because there didn't seem to be a generator or a plant anywhere within their little patch of the world's reach. "But normally, it's a small machine called a generator that can power up a small area, or a bigger one called a plant that generates a lot more energy. The energy is disbursed as needed to various machines and lights."

She smiles at Lillith's last few questions. "Where I come from, there's machines that wrap food and seal them on all sides. I'm not sure if that's exactly how it works here, though."

Rey nods a head towards the Snickers she still holds in her hands. "It's called a Snickers. It's what the people here call a candy bar."

"Thank you," Lillith replied at the explanation, however simple, of the mechanical process by which the energy was supplied. No matter how interesting she found it, it would be impolite not to respond to the offer.

"It is an interesting thing, is it not, to name a confection after a form of laughter?" She considered the 'candy bar' again and, abruptly, determined yes, she would like to taste it.

She took the bar from the other woman's hands and broke off a small piece before handing it back to her. "I am called Lilli."

Lillith's observation is enough to draw another smile from Rey. "I guess so," she admits. "I just never really thought about it before."

She takes a bite of her Snickers as the other woman introduces herself.

"I'm Rey," she says. "I've been here for about eleven months now."

A beat.

"How long have you been here? It couldn't have been very long. It's hard to avoid someone's sights for very long here."

Mostly because there wasn't much "here" here to speak of.

"Not long at all, Rey," Lillith replied, deliberately obscuring her actual arrival out of habit. She had no reason to believe Rey was a threat, but she hadn't survived eight years of her sisters' machinations by letting information pass beyond her control if it could be used against her.

She put the 'Snickers' into her mouth and savored the taste of it. Too sweet for her taste, but Beatrycze would never want to eat bread and cheese again. "It is good, thank you. Is it your favorite or are there others I should try when I acquire coin of my own?"

"I like the Reese's too. We don't really know who refills the machine, or how they do it, but sometimes there's Reese's Pieces, and other times there's Reese's Peanut Butter cups."

Rey turns, and looks at the machine, frowning slightly. "It's strange, though. I don't really understand the purpose of providing us with coin to buy out of a machine that they somehow magically refill anyway. You think it'd be easier to just have it all available down in the bar."

But that's really one of the least peculiar parts of this place.

"What was the place you were from like?" she asks, taking another bite of her Snickers bar.

Lillith did not find the provision of coins particularly mysterious and said as much. "The coins provide a sense of normalcy, like keeping a child to a strict bed-time schedule even when they will not be attending school or working in the fields ever again." As she had done with Beatrycze for eight years on the run.

She considered the other machine that she could not see inside and asked, "What is kept in there?" before she recalled she had been asked a question. "I am sorry. I have always been led by my curiosity. You asked what my world was like.

"In places, it was as brown as the desert beyond the doors. In others, the dull gray of dirty snow and sleet gray of a winter sky. The Feywild was the loveliest jumble of colors you can imagine, the trees blue and the skies purple, and everything as vibrant as a fresh streak of crimson on a white canvas. It was old, too, unbelievably ancient. In many places you could not walk ten miles without stubbing your toe on shrine that had been abandoned before your own race was born."

Rey finds the analogy a little odd, but doesn't remark upon it, though she briefly wonders if Lillith was a laborer herself.

"Soda," she says, wondering how she begins to explain soda to someone who might have never had any. Truthfully, until she wound up here, she'd never tasted it either. "It's a syrupy drink with bubbles in it."

But before she can continue describing soda in further detail, Lillith tells her about her world, and Rey is captivated. Jakku had really only one color to speak of: brown. So seeing, or even just hearing about other planets and their magnificent array of colors was enough to send a jolt of excitement rising up in Rey's chest.

"Did you ever go in any? The temples, I mean."

"Is it like champagne?" Lillith asked, a smile spreading across her features and lighting up her eyes. "It has been such a long time since I have been able to drink much of it. It is my favorite."

She had always loved the bubbles in the pale liquor, the way they filtered the light and broke it into colors.

"Oh, would it be wrong to ask if we could try it?" Lillith found the vending machines so enchanting, she had to reel herself in when she realized the other woman was still waiting for an answer. "Yes, of course. Sometimes I h-ad to stay overnight in them when I was traveling." Hide out, she'd almost said, and that was no good thing.

"Not quite. It's far sweeter, and sort-of acidic." Rey hadn't yet developed a taste for the stuff.

Still, that doesn't stop her from sliding the last few coins into the machine so that Lillith can make her selection from the listed flavors. "Just hit the button of the one you want," Rey instructs, stepping away to make room for the blonde. She doesn't particularly like it when other people are hanging over her while she's trying to do something, and while she's not sure it's the same for Lillith, she'd rather avoid risking it, especially when they barely know one another.

"The only ruins I've really been to is... well, Maz Kanata's castle, and it wasn't really ruins at all. Just really, really old. Older than almost anything I had seen up until then. The planet I lived on for almost all my life was basically just a desert. Nothing there but the old shells of ships, most of them stripped and hidden beneath sand."

"Planet?" The term is not utterly unfamiliar, but she has only seen it used in arcane texts. "You have been to more than one?" She supposed she had, now, if this Inn counted. But it did not sound to Lillith like this was what Rey meant.

She asked this while studying the drink vending machine and when she had finished speaking, she frowned. "I can see no way to choose between these options. Do you have a favorite or a recommendation?"

"There's thousands of them," Rey confirms, "Though I've only been to a handful." She's not sure what kind of place Lillith has come from, but she figures that bears a little more explanation, given how she has met a few people who haven't known technology at all -- and Lillith definitely seems like one of them. "We travel between the planets in fast-moving self-contained metal ships. I like piloting them, a lot, actually."

She smiles a little at that, then mulls over the options in the soda machine. "If it were me, I'd go with Sprite," she says. "I don't think it's that overwhelming compared to some of the other choices." She's tried every one since they've arrived here, and while soda wasn't exactly her beverage of choice, if she had to choose from a selection of them, she'd definitely choose the lemon-lime beverage.

Lillith took the suggestion for the "Sprite" without further discussion, except to say, "Where I am from, a sprite is a type of fey. I think they would not like to have a drink named after them."

She smiled as the beverage container rolled down through the inner workings and came down a shute into the holding area. It was some kind of metal jug. Hm. She bent to pick it up and didn't know how to open it. Well, she would discover it, while she addressed Rey.

"Metal ships." She murmured to herself and produced, floating above one hand, an image of a ship like the ones that passed over the Ozmit sea. Much like sea-faring ships, in fact. "Like this?"

Up until now, Lillith has been asking the majority of the questions; now it's Rey's turn to ask about something Lillith said.

"What is a fey, exactly?" she asks.

The Sprite lands with a heavy clunk in the chute, and Rey watches as Lillith retrieves it.

And then, she watches again, as Lillith conjures the image of a ship above her hand. It wasn't magic itself that astounded her (the Force itself was almost its own sort of magic); it was the versatility of magic she found surprising. Every time she had thought she had seen it all, someone else was there to surprise her.

"Not quite like that," Rey says with a smile. "There's all sorts of ships, so they all look different. They're just all completely sealed because there's no air in space, and they're all metal because most are propelled by a heat source. Simple wood would burn up quickly."

A beat, and then:

"I don't know if anyone has told you this, but every now and then, this hotel links up with another place and we can go there for awhile. If any of those places happens to be high-tech enough to have spaceships, I'll take you there and show you them."

Rey was eager to see exactly how other people's spacecraft worked, too. She hoped that eventually they'd come upon such a place.

"How interesting," Lillith replied as her finger caught on the ring atop the metal canister. She lifted it, and, to her surprised, it pierced the top. Clever. Potions would be much less easily damaged or spilled in such a container, but how did one fill it?

"Yes, that is a very nice offer. I would like that." She raised the can to her lips and poured a small amount onto her tongue, then her head tilted as she considered the combination of bubbles and syrupy citrus-sweetness. She wasn't sure what she thought, but it wasn't unpleasant.

"You asked about the fey, yes? They are creatures of magic, most of them wild, with little interest in the mortal races, unless their paths are forced to cross."

Magic. That much Rey was familiar with now. It was like the Force, but it wasn't. And even though some of the abilities she'd seen people use were very similar to the Force Powers she had learned from Qui-Gon, they weren't the same. They drew from something else.

"What do they look like?" Rey asks, peeling back the wrapper to take another bite of her Snickers. It's nearly gone now. "And why don't they have any interest in mortals?"

Lillith considered the question. "A rainbow of beings. Some good, some evil. Some tiny, some huge. Some terrifying, some delightful." She sipped the sweet bubbly beverage and spoke the words of her spell.

"A sprite," she said and then gestured with her free hand to reveal a small male creature with bi-lobed green wings. "Looks like this. I have known no fey well and met only a few, so I cannot speak their minds."

Rey's mouth hangs open slightly as she leans down a tad to get a closer look at the creature. In many ways it looks like a miniature human, save for the tiny flittering wings on its back.

She looks up from the creature up to Lillith, her brown eyes still wide. "Is this your magic?" she asks, gesturing at the fey. If Lillith has never been close to a fey, it bears to reason that this is either some sort of projection, or else it is an illusion.

"Yes." Lillith smiled, a hint of pride in her tone at Rey's surprise. "Although I am nothing and no one special. A small gift with smoke and mirrors. Little more."

It was not false modesty on her part. Lillith knew what she could do and what she could not. She could cause distractions and misdirections, frighten people and deceive them. She could call them from the dead, soulless, to serve her need, and she could, if she needed to, cause her illusions to kill. But she could not heal and she could not cause large amounts of damage. Like many things of the Feywild, she survived and protected others by protective coloration.

"You should take pride in the things you can do," Rey says, her gaze steady on Lillith. "You might think that who you are or what you can do isn't special, but there's always going to be someone else who thinks that it's extraordinary."

For one brief moment, her thoughts flicker back to Finn -- the man who had defected from the First Order. He'd thought nothing of leaving the Order, or the courage that it took to do so. It'd been nearly a year since she'd last seen him now, and a small part of her wishes she had the moxie to tell him as much before that fight with Kylo Ren that had rendered him unconscious.

"Can you make other things?" she asks, suddenly. "If I were to show you a picture of something, could you make it look that lifelike?"

It was sweet, Rey's concern for her self-esteem, if somewhat misguided. Lillith knew who she was and liked that person, but she also knew what she could not do. She felt no need to discuss the point with Rey, however, and simply nodded appreciatively.

"I can. Although it will not be real. Only an illusion," she cautioned Rey. "And there is a limit to how many illusions I can hold at once and how large. But if there is something you wish to see, I can try."

Rey finishes off her Snickers, pockets the wrapper, and then quickly reaches into her bag and pulls out a medium-sized leatherbound book; she quickly flips through the pages, most filled with notes or observations or simple drawings of spacecraft or aliens or droids... or even herself.

Finally, she stops on a page, and turns the book over to Lillith so she can get a better view of it.

"Can you show me him?" she asks.

A simple drawing of Finn in the same sketchy style as the other decorates the page. He's wearing Poe's jacket and an easy smile -- an easy smile she hasn't seen in a very long time.

Lillith knew the answer before she saw the sketch. She looked still, curious at what or who she would see. The handsome face, she could not make it. Eyes soft with sympathy, she shook her head.

"I am sorry, kochanie, but I cannot create with magic what I have not seen. Butterfly or kitten, perhaps, but not person. It would be travesty, injustice to handsome face or worse, monstrous."

She pursed her lips and felt the phantom tail wish to swish, angry, like Zvezda's. "From portrait, maybe. You have more--" she pointed to the sketch. "I paint him. Then maybe more real."

The disappointment registers on Rey's face immediately, even despite her best attempt to rein it in.

"Oh," she says, looking down at the upside-down sketch of Finn's face.

But before the disappointment can settle down in the pit of her stomach, Lillith makes a different suggestion instead. She regards Lillith with wide eyes for the second time that day and asks:

"You paint?"

And then: "Would you really?"

"If you have more sketches and will tell me of him--for expressions and feelings, I will do my best." It pleased her to be of some use in this place and Rey was a nice girl. "I do not have my own brushes and paints, but I have found some I may use."

Rey nods in affirmation. "I can do that," she says. "What room are you staying in? I can probably have something for you by the end of the week."

"210. The room called Paris Violets. If you leave it for me, I will find you when I have questions. I will." Lillith had spent many months drawing Beatrycze's family. "To draw a portrait without a study requires much input from one knows the person."

"I will," Rey says. Though her expression is serious, there's an excitement radiating off of her, as if she is trying very hard to contain her excitement and has managed to pull together the appropriate facial expression, and not much else.

"I should yet going, though," Rey says, this time with a smile. "It was good meeting you, Lillith. If there's anything I can do, please, let me know."

"Thank you for sharing candy with me," Lillith said with an easy smile. "And teaching me about machines. I will see you soon, I hope."

She would like to do something nice for the young woman. She seemed very strong but also lonely. This man, he meant a great deal to her. She would help her have him close to her heart.

"If you'd like, I can show you the next time I have something around the inn to repair. I will look for you then."

With a slight nod of the head, Rey stuffs the book back into her bag, then heads in the direction of her room.

[For Rey] Vending machines

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