Trees.
Real trees. Not pictures on a holo or overheard words from a trader. Real, actual trees, right in front of her. Rey reaches out to run her fingers over the bark of the closest one, marveling at the roughness. She tilts her head back towards the canopy, her eyes half closed as she listens to the whisper of thousands of leaves rubbing together.
It's so different from Jakku, where the wind would howl and shriek across the endless desert, kicking up deadly dust storms in its wake. The sand scoured life from the surface of that planet, and the only shrubs that managed to eke out an existence were scraggly and brown. But here, plants cover every surface, an unimaginable amount of green rolling over the hills as far as Rey can see.
The breeze pushes waves of rustling leaves towards her, and as it passes she takes a deep breath. Trees smell different than she thought they would. More wet, and a little spicy.
She lets out a laugh, stepping away from the tree and spinning a little bit with her arms spread wide. This new planet is so much more than she expected. She supposes anything would be – though she had dreamed of it, she isn't sure she ever really expected to get off of Jakku. But now she's here, in this amazing world full of green.
She hears a beep from behind her, and turns to find BB-8 following her, the droid's spherical body bumping over the uneven ground.
"It's wonderful, isn't it?" Rey asks him, unable to keep the smile off her face.
She kneels down, poking at the springy green plant that covers many of the stones scattered across the ground. "Do you know what this is?" she asks the little droid who had rolled up next to her.
BB-8 lets out several notes.
"Moss, huh?" She scratches some of it away from the rock and rolls it between her fingers. She had heard a trader say that moss always pointed towards civilization once. That always sounded like bantha fodder to her.
She looks back at the base where Han had taken her and Finn. She doesn't know where civilization is on this planet to be able to prove the trader wrong, but maybe she can ask someone. Han might know. She definitely can't ask General Organa. The woman had already looked at her so strangely when they arrived, like she couldn't believe Rey was there. If she was a Rebel General, Rey supposes she wouldn't expect a girl in sand-worn, scavenged clothes to show up in her secret base, either.
Rey is jerked from her thoughts when BB-8 lets out a series of high, panicked whistles. She immediately looks around her, trying to spot the threat through the trees, before she hears the screaming roar of jets. Her blood runs cold as she peers through a break in the canopy, finding the blue sky filling with TIE fighters.
She turns towards the base and begins to run.