expiationlogs | [ open ] never judge a book by its cover

Entry tags:

[ open ] never judge a book by its cover

Who: Jim Kirk & You!
Where: All around Aldrip
What: Catch-all for the month + open prompts for Jim's glitches (child!Jim, pirate!Jim, and 63!Jim).
Content Warnings: Profanity, canon-typical violence involving swords and a biting child. Potential for discussions of genocide and eating disorders in the child!Jim prompts.

1. [ OPEN - CHILD!JIM ]
there ain't nothing in this world for free

Downtown Aldrip is full of hustle and bustle at the height of the day, denizens and Chosen alike flitting from place to place. The main square is always buzzing with crossing foot traffic, people coming and going from the various shops, packages in their clutches - or perhaps from the library or city building. Jim hasn't approached any of the official buildings yet, instead choosing to be an unobtrusive people-watcher from the sidelines. He hasn't seen any police or Starfleet around, and while he would be wary of adults in general (adults lie to you, especially to children, because they think they can't handle the world as it is when really, children have to live at the whims of the world more than anybody else) - he's warier still of being sent back into the care of the strange Vulcan man he'd just run away from. He doesn't know what happened to Spock, the Vulcan kid he'd woken up with - he was too freaked out by the sudden appearance of the adult and his subsequent refusal to answer simple questions (in a way that made any sense to Jim, anyway). Instead, Jim had done what he did best - break free by any means necessary and run, scrambling across the kitchen floor for the doggy door, and shoving himself through it. He'd scraped up his hands pretty good and bumped his knee, but the ache was fading already. He'd had worse, at any rate.

Jim gets up from his position in the shade of a tree, making a wide circle around the main square. He hasn't done this in a while, but desperate times call for desperate measures. He quickly finds his mark, arcing his gait casually, sandy head hung low. Putting on airs of a teenager not paying any attention, Jim bumps into his target head on - if they have anything in their hands/a bag, he makes sure to send it scattering. If not, he intentionally trips, sending himself sprawling to the ground - if not taking them with him.

"Oh, I'm so sorry [Mister/Ma'am]!" Jim springs up, either to help gather the person's scattered belongings into a helpful pile, or to help steady the person on their feet, hands too quick and light to be noticed (unless, perhaps, the person he'd marked was a better pickpocket than him - whoops). "I'm sorry, I should have watched where I was going. Have a nice day."

His retreat is too hasty, but Jim ducks away quickly - the key was to be in and out as fast as possible. Whomever he's started walking away from may notice something missing from their belongings, or perhaps directly their pocket - be it cash, their tablet, or whatever Jim managed to grab. If they choose call out after him, he'll start running, and if they try to grab him - be careful, he bites.

2. [ OPEN - CHILD!JIM ]
i ain't no fortunate one

The dock is lively at this hour, with a decent crowd milling around the various food stalls and wares, set up for perusing. It's not uncommon for a bit of trouble to unfold itself - fights breaking out over haggling gone wrong, stowaways on boats, general skullduggery as is wont to occur anywhere shifty types can gather freely. At the height of the day, however, it is a little unusual to be happening in broad daylight - there's someone yelling up ahead, people being shoved this way and that before a scrawny, sandy-haired boy emerges from press of the crowd, panting and wild-eyed - clearly looking for a way out.

His crime, what has an angry shopowner on his tail, coming up behind him to collar him roughly? Well, he's got what appears to be a sandwich in his grip, though at this point it's more of a squished lump of meat and bread. Jim kicks out with both feet, thrashing in the man's hold with all the strength he has, to no avail. He gets smacked in the back of the head for his trouble, so Jim turns and bites down on the guy's hand, hard - look, it's worked so far, so if it ain't broke?

"Ow, FUCK - ! Fucking kid - " This gets him thrown to the ground, sufficiently freed from the shopkeeper's grip - Jim's still clinging to the sandwich (if it can still pass as one, at this point), rolling across the ground to land at someone's feet. He scrambles to a sitting position, jacket pulled askew, and seems ready to bolt again - if not for the fact that his back is trembling, where he's pressed against the person's legs.

3. [ OPEN - PIRATE!JIM ]
yes, i am a pirate, two hundred years too late

"En garde, you dirty dog!"

There's shouting up ahead, a small crowd gathered at the end of the dock with one man visible above the commotion (or, more accurately, the source of it), clinging on to the side of a boat with one hand while the other brandishes a sword that he sweeps through the air in front of him, demanding a bubble of personal space. He's scruffy and dressed in an open, airy shirt - is he supposed to be a pirate, or something? As you get closer, those who are familiar with a certain Captain James T. Kirk - Jim, to most of the Chosen he's met here - may recognize him. Beneath the unshaven scruff and general...ridiculous swagger, apparently.

"I've commandeered this vessel, and shall be setting sail!" The announcement is bellowed brazenly, Jim tossing his head to shift pieces of hair out of his eyes, a grin twisting his mouth. Either someone's cosplaying pretty hard, or he's not his usual self. "Back and away with you, unless you'd prefer to be driven back by my blade! Dealer's choice!"

Maybe someone should step in and calm him down...or if you have Spock's number, maybe someone should alert him to come get the glitched Captain. If you can get Jim to put down the sword and stop threatening the locals, that is.

4. [ OPEN - 63!JIM ]
dude, dude, dude, dude looks like a lady

For anyone out in the surrounding forest near the outskirts of Aldrip, they may come across a young woman one morning, just near the border of the forest - far enough in for her task, but not venturing too deep within. Despite it being early and not particularly hot out, she's dripping with sweat, hacking at a tree with an axe - and cursing up a storm, because she's been at this for at least an hour and the pile of wood next to her is just sad, really, for the amount of energy she's expending on it.

"Mother - " Jim kicks the tree in irritation, which just makes his foot ache, and drops the axe with a disgusted noise before plopping down in the grass. Ugh. Perhaps his frustration isn't from the tree (although what the hell, why couldn't he just buy lumber in this godforsaken town) - but the fact that he's not himself at the moment. He's been glitching all over the place and he's getting sick of this shit, to be perfectly honest. This isn't the worst it could be, glitching into a woman - at least he still knows who he is, has his memories in full - but the ponytail he tried to put his new excess hair into is sad and lopsided. He's better at braiding hair when it's not on his own head.

He also doesn't own a bra since he's normally a dude, and no one told him boobs started to hurt, after a while, without support. So he's sore, tired, and frustrated - maybe he'll just flop and lay in the grass for a while.

5. [ CLOSED TO SPOCK

ashaya
- CHILD!JIM ]
no one cares if you grow or if you shrink

Waking up is a violent affair.

Nightmares are not an uncommon occurrence for Jim - the rapid beating of his heart, quickening under duress, breaths ripping their way through his airways until finally the adrenaline woke him up, wide-eyed and sweating. There was a time when he was too thin for the sweat, when his body could spare neither the energy nor the moisture and he would simply shake himself awake, tremors lessening as he grounded himself in reality - but never quite abating, the tremble still visible in his hands, the subtle shake of his shoulders.

He’s better now, or so they tell him. Able to eat more than just the nutri-dense ration bars, recovering and resilient, as children are wont to be. But he still has the nightmares, and as Jim would know if he wasn’t currently glitched - they’ll always be there. New and old and different, he will trade one for another, swapping orange, fuzzy fields for red-tipped rocks, or the cool sickly green of a starship in crisis. He’ll learn to wake quieter, to tamp down on the instinctive panic, to swallow the spike of adrenaline and soldier through.

But today, Jim wakes with a startled shout, almost dizzy with the suddenness of consciousness. Sandy bangs, lightly colored from exposure to the sun (they would darken as he got older, evening out into a dirtier blond at the root) plaster against his forehead, lips parted on ragged inhales. Jim sits bolt upright, sheets tangled about his legs as he kicks them, struggling to feel all his limbs freed. If they weren't free, he was trapped, and being trapped meant nothing good. It stopped you from running, and when you stopped running - that's when you were dead.

The room is unfamiliar, as wild, wheeling eyes look around for anything recognizable. No dice. Jim can't remember anything, not how he got here, where here is, nothing. That is, decidedly, the most troublesome, moreso than his nightmares - though trying to tell that to the panic winding its way through his chest is an exercise in futility. Recovery has made him weak, because there used to be a time when he wouldn’t be paralyzed with fear, when he’d wake up ready to fight - when the panic attack could be diverted to a more convenient time, when the other kids were asleep and could not hear him.

There’s nothing to stop him now, as the attack settles itself against his ribcage, threatening to choke him - except something does, right in his tracks, when his eyes land on the most unexpected detail of all: there’s a Vulcan at the end of the bed.

Jim’s seen Vulcans before. There were Vulcan crew members on the Kelvin, some who died and some who didn’t, which meant there was a pointy-eared contingent at every remembrance ceremony Jim had ever been forced to attend. They were interesting, if strange and other (perhaps that was why they were interesting) and Jim certainly liked their company a lot better than the people who just wept (there was no shortage of those), who all seemed to want to hug him. No, the Vulcans did not want a hug - instead they would bow, sweeping and low, and when Jim asked why the elder, severe-looking one had told him, We owe your father a life-debt we may never repay him, James Kirk.

So yeah, Jim’s seen Vulcans. He’s never seen a Vulcan kid before.

It distracts him from the fear, from the way his chest aches and the bewilderment of unfamiliar surroundings. Jim stares at the blunt bowl cut, the severe line of the kid’s eyebrows, the pointed tips of his ears, poking out from beneath dark hair. The Vulcan has a softness to his features, different from that of the adults - not as severe cheekbones, a layer of baby fat protecting them. He can’t be much younger than Jim, though anyone younger than him is automatically sorted into the take care of the kid category.

Still, what comes out when he opens his mouth is perhaps harsher than Jim might have liked, all the bite and snapping of a cornered animal, fingers twisting in the sheets. “Who the fuck are you?”

SOMETHING ELSE /
WANT A CUSTOM STARTER?
Hit me up via PM, Jim's contact post,
Plurk, or Discord!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Prison? For what?" Jim's brow furrows; this is the first he's hearing about this, and certainly the first he's hearing about some kind of crime. Well, aside from the juvie he'd been threatened with - what, had his experience on the colony planet not counted? "Who put us here?"

"For a lot of random stuff it seems. Or stuff you actually did." He was 100% guilty of his crime. "The Council is supposed to be in charge but no one's really seen them. They might not even exist and this place is run by...I don't know. Some computer thing. No body knows, but people have been trying to figure it out."

"Do they tell you, or are you just supposed to guess?" Jim makes a face; he doesn't like the sound of any of this bullshit. Adults always make things so stupidly complicated. "A computer? Can't we just hack it?"

He says this as if it's obvious, and a thing most people can simply do.

"We all get a piece of paper that has it written on it. You probably have it somewhere."

Hack it? "Um. I-I don't really know anything about computers, but I'd guess if it was easy someone would have done it already."

Jim frowns at Levi, shaking his head. "Paper? What the hell are you talking about? People don't write things on paper anymore unless they're super fancy."

He sighs, the kind of sigh that says great, I have to do everything myself huh? Jim bites off another piece of the sandwich and chews thoughtfully; now that he's away from the yelling shop manager, he seems to be gaining back the devil-may-care confidence he had an abundance of at this age. "If you can show me where it is, I can hack it."

"I guess these things are fancy. You can't destroy them. But they still use paper here. They did where I came from too. We didn't really have computers."

His rubs his head, "We're, um, we're in it if the theory is correct."

"Where did you come from, then?" Jim eyes him dubiously, like he thinks Levi must be pulling his leg. To be fair, he does. Paper is a vintage commodity in Jim's time; it would be much easier to put it on a PADD.

"We're in a computer? Do you think I'm just some dumb kid, that I'm going to buy that?" Jim squints at him, trying to determine if Levi is being serious. "Why would anyone want to do that?"

"I-I'm from Prehevil...but people here are from a lot of different places. And different times. There are things they find strange you find normal or things they find normal you'll find strange. I only ever really used a computer after I got here and got the tablet."

He resists the urge to roll his eyes and shakes his head. "I'm not joking with you or trying to trick you. Its just a theory about how this place works since it doesn't seem quite, um, real. And we're not sure why they'd do this to us either. I think they just want to fuck with us and see us suffer." He thought of whoever ran this place as Gods and oh boy Gods sure liked to fuck with people in his experience.

"I've never heard of Prehevil. What star system is that in?" Different places, different times? What, like time travel? Levi seems...oddly sincere, even if it sounds totally ridiculous to Jim. He eyes him for a second before he declares: "You swear you're telling the truth?"

"Yeah, what else is new?" Jim grumbles, finishing the sandwich and dusting the crumbs off on his pants. "Adults are stupid. They fuck everything up and make everyone else pay for it, I'm not surprised. I have to save my friend from one, he just appeared out of nowhere."

"Uh..." Space travel is not yet a thing where Levi's from, so he's got no clue what a star system is. "E-earth? Europa. I promise I'm telling you what I know, it sounds crazy but its true."

He laughs bitterly. Levi has considered himself an adult for a few years now, but he can't deny that the guys in charge are like that. "Gods and Generals and whoever is in charge are all the same. They see you as toys to play with, break and discard when they get tired of you.

"What happened to your friend?" Another incident like with the shop keeper? Levi's noticed glitches, but he's yet to glitch into a younger version of himself so he doesn't expect something so radically different. "Maybe I can help."

"If we're on Earth, where's Starfleet?" Much as they can be a pain in the ass, they'll know how to contact his mom. Contact somebody who gives a shit - not about him, but about his surname, Kirk. "I haven't seen any of them around."

"Yeah!" Now, Levi's speaking his language; Jim vehemently agrees, sitting up a little straighter. "They're all full of shit."

"I don't know. I woke up in this weird house with him, and we were alone. He went to the bathroom, and then this guy showed up." Jim's face crumples, upset that he's trying to hide. It's not working very well. "He wouldn't tell me what he did to Spock, so I bit him and ran away."

"Uh...w-whats starfleet?"

Spock, huh. That name is familiar but not enough for hm to place it. "You think he hurt your friend?" Not saying what happened to someone seemed pretty sus.

"You know, those guys who fly around in spaceships?" Jim doesn't mean to be rude (for once), but how could somebody not know Starfleet? He doesn't understand just how far away from home he really is. "Universal peacekeepers or whatever."

"I don't know. Spock wouldn't come out when I yelled for him." Or couldn't, Jim's not sure. He'd been forced to bail before he could find out. "There's no one around who can help. No security, no Starfleet, nothing."

Well, that's not really helping. "Spaceships?" He is not at all picturing the correct thing here. "We don't have those where I come from. I don't know about here.

"Then you have to help yourself. Do you want help?"

"...yeah?" Jim's staring at Levi like he has three heads. Who's never heard of a spaceship before? Jim couldn't even say he must be from a backwater colony, because backwater colonies had to get there via spaceship. "How do you not have spaceships? You know, like up in the air? They go to the moon base and shit."

Help himself, ha. Nobody's ever helped Jim before, why should he start expecting it now? Jim eyes Levi critically for a moment at the offer before he nods, once. "If you're offering, okay. Vulcan ass is hard to kick, fair warning. They're like, super strong 'cause the gravity is different."

"We, uh...I-I think we're from very different times. It was 1942 for me." A shadow crosses his face at the mention of going to the moon. A part of him would very much like to go there, but for reasons that are probably insane to Jim.

"I'm offering. I don't know anything about Vulcans but I've fought foes bigger and stronger than me before."

"1942?" Jim's bewilderment only intensifies, suspicion returning to his gaze. "That's like 300 years ago! Are you seriously messing with me?"

"Their planet has more gravity than Earth." This, Jim remembers from school, a little species primer complete with kid-friendly animations. All the species in the Federation were covered with brief facts. "So he's...three times as strong, I think? But we can take him, we just have to get creative."

Hence the biting, and Jim scrambling out through the doggy door on the back porch.

"I'm not! There were barely even computers where--uh, when I came from." Really just in that bunker with Logic.

More gravity? That's what stuck things on the ground, right? Fancy science thing he didn't get and wasn't sure if it mattered here. "Well with two of us I can distract him while you get our friend, or something."

"So you're telling me you're a time traveler too?" Jim's tone is dubious, but at the very least it seems like Levi believes it, so. Maybe he's just delusional? It can't be real...right?

"Yeah, that's a good idea! Maybe we should light his house on fire." He nods, mind already whirring with how they could draw the Vulcan away from Spock. "I'll climb up to the window and jimmy it open for Spock."

"Uh...I think its more like...we're from different worlds and they're at different times sometimes." He usually files it away as 'multiverse bullshit' and tries not to think of it.

...wow right to fire, huh? "M-maybe not a fire, that'd put your friend in danger too. But if you know where he is I could get the other guy to the other side of the house."

How? Well probably not a fire, but gunshots haven't been ruled out.

"Uh huh." Jim's still eyeing him like he might be nuts, but honestly, his day is already so goddamn weird - and Levi has proven not to be a threat (not that he can't be one, but that he doesn't seem to want to be), so Jim's taking it in stride.

There wasn't a lot to do in Iowa; fires were entertaining as hell. Jim considers it for a moment, then nods, shaggy blond hair dropping down in his face. "Okay, we can do that. But if it doesn't work, can arson be plan B?"

Levi knows this shit is hard to believe, so he doesn't mind the stink eye Jim's giving him.

"Um." Well, it wasn't like anything here was real so who cared if they destroyed it. If it was a local who was holding Jim's friend they weren't real and if it was a Chosen...well, if things got out of control they could probably handle it. "Sure, I guess."

Why fire is beyond him but whatever works.

"Sweet." Jim nods, apparently satisfied with this answer. Fire is his go to because it's tried and true, and the easiest weapon for someone who can't really punch his way out of a situation (well, not until he's older). "We should get some gasoline. And a rope, in case Spock can't climb down."

This kid seems to have an unhealthy desire to burn things. Huh. "I, um, don't actually know where you get gasoline in this place. But I know where we can get rope."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ open ] never judge a book by its cover

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject