victory_road | 3. Video

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3. Video

[Newt appears on the screen again. She's back to looking nervous but this time for a different reason. She's sitting on the ground with stuffed ponyta toy in her lap.]

Hi...um I just had a question about....birthdays.

Mine was last week. But when I was home I'd already had my birthday for the year. So am I eight now? Or am I still seven.....

Was I six the entire time I was here and didn't realize it? I don't know how it works....I just want to know how old I am.

[She's confused okay.]

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The ...moon I was on was. But that's because there was a crashed ship on it with the alien eggs inside. When they got out and killed or took everyone. I had to survive alone in the air ducts on the colony for weeks before the marines showed showed up.

[Oh yeah, Newt takes nothing about survival for granted. In fact it's taken her this long to not just assume everyone she meets will die on her.]

I think Earth might be okay....but I don't know. I've never left the moon before and I woke up here before we got there.

[This story is... it's the sort of thing that makes Armin's head hurt just because it is so far out of his frame of reference. Thankfully during his time here, he's been growing a bit more accustomed and knowledgeable about space and aliens and space travel, but it is still a somewhat unreal concept for him.

But in some ways, it is still familiar. Maybe their experiences hadn't been exactly a like, but there were commonalities too.]

It's not... exactly the same, but when I was ten, monsters came and destroyed my home town. A lot of people were killed or had to flee. I've never had to survive alone, but-- I know what it is like, living in a dangerous place.

But, if it means anything, this place isn't like that at all. Things are very safe here.

Oh...I'm sorry that happened to you. It's ....really hard ...to lose everything.

I'm glad you had people with you.

[There's a pause.]

It's weird. When you're alone. You're scared all the time and it's just you and the things...and you're not sure if you're going to die tomorrow or the next day or if you'll run out of food or get hurt....

[Shakes her head before she falls too far back into those memories. She was semi feral for those weeks but if she thinks about it too much it's not great.]

It sucks.

[Sums it up nicely.]

.....Yeah. I didn't believe people at first. They kept telling me no one died here and it sounded fake. But so far no ones died, so maybe they're right.

Yes.

[Suck is an understatement. Not that Armin has been alone like that, exactly, but he remembers the hunger while in the refugee camps, the terror of the nightmares as he and Eren and Mikasa had clung to each other at night, the fear in everybody as they waited for the inevitable second shoe to drop, for the Titans to attack again.

It had not been a comfortable time.]

If it makes any difference, I've been here for over a year and a half now, and I've not heard of anyone dying yet. They do disappear back to their own worlds sometimes though. And you cannot really predict when they will do, or who will.

That's better then dying.

.....Maybe I'll start to believe it more once I'm here longer.

[She'd had so many people die on her. Everyone she'd ever known, her entire colony and then most of the highly trained marines.....that it's going to take some time to shake the certainty of... people die on you unless they're Ripley or helped by Ripley, that's just what they do.]

When we first got here, none of us could really believe this world was so peaceful. Or that there was so much food.

It gets... easier to believe over time.

[Armin has to admit, he still sometimes wakes up and expects it all to be some dream, expects something to come crashing down and ruin everything --which is why all their cupboards are carefully packed with more dry food than your average household would store-- but that happens less and less.]

I had ....some food. Stuff I could find when I went looking. But even before that, most of the stuff we ate on the colony was already made in packages. So the food here, and lots of it is strange to me too.

I hope so. I like most of the stuff in this world.

[There are a lot of bug pokemon that remind her too much of xenomorphs and she still misses her friends a lot.]

[Armin isn't bugged (hah) by bug pokemon, but he had found out the hard way that fireworks were far from fun for him.]

Have you had ice cream yet? A friend of ours first took us to an ice cream shop when we were still pretty new here. They had more flavours than I ever imagined possible.

No. But I was at a circus and had cotton candy. That was really good.

Also Korra showed me vegetable food there that actually tasted good. I didn't think they could do that.

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