Ridahne was no stranger to sun. She had lived under it her entire life, her skin darkened by it and the land she knew sucked dry from it. In fact, her home planet had two suns. One was thriving, the other, a hollow bluish-white mass that no longer emitted much heat. Many astronomers claimed it would explode like one final act of defiance before turning to gas, or dust, or whatever it was suns were made out of. Ridahne never thought about it much. But she did know how to deal with its effects; she knew all about hydration, about what kinds of things she could eat or drink when water was in short supply, or how to find it or filter it if she wasn't at home. She knew that animals lounged in the shade and thus, the best trap was simply a small tent. She knew how to tell time by the sun (she never was one for watches, really, never could afford one anyway) and even knew how to light a fire with it, given the right tools and resources.

It was no surprise, then, that she was not entirely phased by the warm summer wind--was it summer? It felt like summer--or the glare of the sun as it drew tiny droplets of sweat from her skin like a necromancer conjuring up the dead. But this was not home. This was not Azurei, and she did not know what kinds of plants to eat or not eat, what kinds of creatures were dangerous and which ones were decent to eat. She could find little water in the usual ways and, she noticed, it was never clean, no matter how hard she tried to filter it, boil it, or otherwise purify it. It had a very faint, sharp chemical tang that one would only notice if they hadn't been raised on it. To make matters worse, Ridahne had very little money to her name. Actually, she had only a handful of credits--a universal but altogether inferior currency, the acceptance and value of which was sometimes hit and miss, depending on the locale. But she had her knife. She had her sword. They were the only nice things she owned and she would not be pressed to sell them, not by any pains of hunger. They were all she had left of home. She used to have a gun, too, but that she sold long ago.

It was a mistake coming here. The whole planet was a waste and yet its inhabitants were staggering on with all the desperation of a virus still clinging to a dying host. Ridahne knew she could not return home, even if she did somehow find a ship to carry her there and she held no hope of that. If any ship were to bear people away from this place, they would be rich people. She was not among them. Even so, she wished that she'd gone somewhere else, landed in some other planet. Not that it was her choice but...a girl could hope.

The wind brought a sentience to her wavy ebony hair, giving it life to reach up and swirl around like kinked black tentacles. Her hair was the only thing she would ever let mask the intricate lines of tattoos on her face, mostly stemming from the base of her right ear and blossoming outward like a twisted mass of black, blue, and white foliage. Her stomach growled. Alright. She needed to eat something, even if it was scrubby brush or a half-starved bird, or the rotten remains of someone else's dinner a week earlier. Rising from her seat underneath an overhang of broken concrete slab where she made her hidden little camp, she brushed off her uri, a flowing sarong designed especially for ease of movement and hot weather, and started off towards where she knew she would find people. It wasn't much of a 'downtown', but it was as close as this place would get for now.