Liah Rainey (phasedthrough) wrote in downfallrpg, @ 2010-03-26 21:19:00 |
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Current mood: | mischievous |
Hanging Out
Who: Liah, Verity and Jasper (NPC)
Where: Verity and Jasper's suite
When: around 4 p.m.
There was craziness going on, from everything Liah had heard when she'd gone downstairs for food earlier. Rumors that someone had been killed, that there was a guy locked up who'd supposedly done it. It all served to reinforce Liah's opinion that she'd been right all along and there really wasn't anywhere that was truly safe. Craziness, and she wanted no part of it, didn't want to know who'd died-- although she only knew a handful of people here by name anyway-- didn't want to be involved. Head-in-the-sand selfishness? Maybe, but she didn't give a shit right then.
She was restless and twitchy and couldn't settle on what she wanted to do, and as she paced by the connecting door that joined the suite she shared with Rowan and Juny to the one Verity and Jasper shared, she caught a glimpse of Verity in the living room part of his suite. The door often stayed open at least a crack, and that was how she'd managed to know that. Maybe she'd just make a visit... in an unconventional way. She grabbed her sketchbook with one hand and then turned to the wall between where she was and where Verity was, and carefully and quietly, she phased halfway through the wall, her face, one arm and shoulder, part of her torso and one leg in his suite. Then she stared at him and waited to see if he'd notice the sudden unusual wall decor.
Verity was quite intent on his work. He'd been interrupted a few times too many today and was just getting back into the swing of things, his mind wandering as his fingers worked their accustomed circuits. He wasn't thinking about anything important (deliberately, in fact), just letting his mind wander across the plots of decent movies, the homework assignment he'd been glaring at the night before the world ceased to be, whether people actually enjoyed Nascar or just said they did so as not to disappoint their friends, and other imponderables. He was getting somewhere with the alarms. He'd have to tell the boss guy. Terry. For some reason his head wouldn't hold onto the name.
Jasper looked up from the paperclips he was still sculpting with, blinked a few times, and waved at Liah. He tugged his brother's sleeve. Verity looked over and dropped a screwdriver on his toe with an undignified squawk, so at least his reaction was satisfying. Used to making a fool of himself, he recovered with a smile. "Well, hey, Kitty Pryde. And how're you this fine day?"
Liah waved back exaggeratedly at Jasper, then giggled when Verity noticed her. She'd wanted a reaction and she'd gotten one, so that was good enough. She stepped fully into the room and breezed over to where the boys were sitting. "Jasper! How's my favorite little cute face?" She always talked to him even though he hadn't really replied to her as of yet. She leaned down to smooch the top of his head, not lingering and not getting too personal... no need to flip him out. She grinned at Verity and sat down on the floor near the end of the couch, propping her sketchpad on her knees. "I'm bored. It's all rainy out and evidently there's some, uh, issues downstairs." She'd remembered Jasper's presence and didn't elaborate. "So I thought I'd come over and bug you. Whatcha doing?"
Jasper didn't pay her any special mind, but given that he was a ten-year-old boy and had always been about as awkward as his big brother, Verity didn't necessarily think it was odd that he was sitting stiffly and in silence just then. He declined to comment on it. Denial was working well for him as a defense mechanism.
"Is it raining again? It stopped for a little while. Well, long enough for Rowan to show off." He shrugged a little. "Working. I want to make sure we have at least backup electronics, and that means convincing gadgets that prefer to be plugged in to work with batteries. At least the smoke detectors and stuff like that are battery powered. I wouldn't want to have to rig enough of those for the whole building. But I think I can manage a security system for the first floor, then I want to get some really bright lights, then hot plates for cooking. Then I guess I can start seeing if there's a way to get an energy hog like a small fridge or a microwave going, just for important stuff." Right, important microwave stuff.
Someday, somehow, Liah was determined that Jasper was going to talk to her, but as little as she knew about kids, she knew there was no point in rushing it. She'd just keep getting him used to her presence, and one day it'd all work out. That was her theory, anyway. "It's been raining on and off for a while," she said, flipping open her sketchpad and making a point not to look at what she'd drawn prior to their little apocalypse-a-rama; she just turned to a clean page and pulled her drawing pencil out of the spiral that held the pad together. "Makes it darker." She smirked when he said Rowan had shown off to him despite the weather. "He loves to do that. It's pretty cool, huh?" Glancing up occasionally, she began to sketch Verity, wanting to capture the intent look on his face as he fiddled with his electronic stuff. "Lights would be awesome," she said, feeling like a cave dweller with as much time as she spent in the dark here lately. "And hot food, and cold food. It could make this whole deal not quite so sucky." She'd decided that in his way, Verity had to be a genius. Nothing mechanical seemed to phase him the least little bit.
"Yeah, canned beans aren't a huge luxury, are they? I'm kind of used to eating crap, mind you, but this is a whole new level. At least we still have the gas lines and the water. When those give out, and it can't be too long, we're really going to be in trouble." And even the water coming through the pipes was probably a little suspect at this point. The world had a lot more dead stuff around now, and whatever had happened to all the big animals, the little ones were still chugging right along, rotting all the corpses along. "That's why hot plates, really. We might not like it, but we'll survive on canned stuff for a while. We could get really sick from bad water, though. And people have mostly lost their immunities to icky little aquatic squiggles. Not to mention regular old pollution. Detroit isn't known for its water quality." All through his rambling speech, Verity didn't look up from his projects.
Liah had become accustomed to Verity's rambles and to his somewhat absent-minded presence when he was working on something. "I am too," she said when he said he was used to eating crap. "I was a diner waitress. Grease, salt and carbs were the food groups around there. I'd seriously love some cheese fries right about now." She sketched in the basic shape of Verity's head and then began working on the pattern of his hair. Sighing, she said, "I'm gonna be so pissed when we don't have hot showers anymore. Can you imagine the level of stank in this place then?" Maybe she could stay in a happy little dreamworld where she could pretend the gas water heaters in the hotel would last, not to mention the water. She snickered at his last sentence and said, "Detroit isn't known for its anything quality." She frowned a little as she drew, not wanting to think about water-borne pathogens and doom and despair right then.
"We'll get used to it. You can do all kinds of things about that. Use the sun to warm up water for a sponge bath, I read once. And I think you can use oil or dust... I've seen those in movies, anyway. And if it comes to it we can start using that water-free alcohol stuff." Still, none of those options were exactly convenient. "What we really need to be doing is setting up ham radios or something to try and contact other groups of survivors. Besides the ones who're hanging up corpses in grocery stores, I mean." He glanced guiltily at Jasper as he recalled himself, but the kid didn't seem to have noticed. "Maybe I should be working on those radios instead, actually." He'd have liked to ask Liah what her thoughts were on the enclave of other survivors, who they were, what might be going on in their heads to be so violent and to act totally contrary to their own interests. But not in front of Jas.
"Do you know how long that would take?" Liah asked him when he said they could use the sun to warm up water. "But I guess, besides surviving, what do we really have to do?" It would have been depressing if she'd let herself think about it-- the notion that they were trapped with no real purpose beyond staying alive-- so she tucked it away with the other things she was keeping buried inside herself. She smirked at the mention of dust and added, "We had a chinchilla once, when I was about Jasper's age. That was how they took baths. This plastic house with, like, this gritty dust in it." She hadn't thought about that chinchilla in years. She sketched some more, nodding along with Verity's spiel about ham radios. She couldn't help with that any more than she could flap her arms and fly next to Rowan when he went out, but it was a great idea. Her gaze twitched to Jasper when Verity said corpses, and she was also relieved that the word hadn't seemed to phase him. "Maybe," she said, thinking that at least he'd be one of the few people who'd know what the hell they were doing.
"Depends on how much sun we get?" Verity shrugged noncommittally. It was somewhat grim today, but still warm, and he didn't want to make a prediction. He hated being wrong. Brainpower was the one thing he could honestly be proud of, and coming up short in his only real area of expertise sucked. "I wouldn't say we're down to just surviving yet. I mean, there are pillow forts going on. And pillow forts are awesome. And I find this fun, weird as that is. And you're drawing... I mean, we haven't quite reverted to cave people yet. And even cave people seem to have had fun drawing on the walls and devouring aurochs and stuff." And he would be the caveman with the most gadgets, hands down. That was one fight he could win. "We're still doing stuff, is what I mean. No crazy post-apocalyptic decay of all civilization yet."
Sometimes, Verity surprised Liah, and this was one of those times. She found herself charmed by him displaying a sense of humor by talking about pillow forts, which might've been more for Jasper's benefit than anything. It was still cute, though. "We should find every pillow in every empty room and maybe in storage, too. Can you imagine what could be built with that many pillows?" Jasper and Juny would love it, anyway. She glanced at Verity, down at her sketchbook and then back at him again as she tried to get the exact shape of his chin down. "Yeah, I'm trying to get back in the habit of drawing." She didn't feel she knew Verity well enough to get into why she hadn't been, but then he didn't know her well enough to realize how odd it was that she'd barely touched the sketchbook. "We're still doing stuff," she agreed. "Maybe the civilization decay will wait a while." She hoped so, anyway.
"Well, here, at least, we're holding together. There are some weird people, but, well, I haven't seen any big fights. And everyone who can is pitching in. We're working well. Forming our own little social contract to replace the old one." Verity had less than no idea what he was talking about. He faintly remembered mention of a social contract in a high school level World History book, and that was really it. Seemed like an important-sounding observation, though. Verity considered his options, looking down at the alarms. About ready, he thought. He only needed a few more big tweaks, and then there'd always be bugs. No one was a perfect genius. Or so he'd always assumed. Maybe the geniuses just had the sense to be quiet about it so as not to make everyone else jealous? "We can hope it'll go on this way. People trying to work together."
Liah smiled slightly. "There's always weird people. Doesn't matter where you are." There were a bunch of people she hadn't even met, but she was okay with that. She was lucky enough to be in a situation where she felt secure-- sharing living space with Ro and Juny, close to Verity and Jasper-- and she was good with not being BFFs with everyone who might be under the roof of this hotel. She drew some more, erased a line and blew the eraser dust away, then looked up at Verity. "It might," she said, sounding mildly doubtful. She figured things would move along relatively well until they hit upon serious shortages or some other problem and then people would turn to infighting among themselves. It was a little too doom-and-gloomy to say out loud, though.
"I'm trying to stick to optimism, here!" Verity sighed. "But at least we're okay. Day to day, that's the important part." And he had plenty to do to keep him busy, to feel like he was being useful. And if Liah's suspicions, not too different from his own, were right? Well, then he'd make sure to prove himself useful and be there to make sure his little brother was left alone. He hadn't caught anyone upsetting Jasper yet, and was hoping that the horror of the situation would keep it that way, but he wasn't sure he believed it. People upset Jas without meaning to, and he was always unreasonably angry. His gadgets would at least make sure they were worth keeping around. He came to the conclusion as well that those musings were uncomfortable and a little too grim to speak, so he just nodded sagely.
"Yeah, we're okay," Liah replied, perfectly willing to give him that. She smiled at him, glanced at Jasper and then returned her attention to her drawing. She could understand wanting to be optimistic. She wasn't an optimistic person herself by nature, but she'd done a pretty good job of keeping up her front thus far, hadn't she? It was easier when the kids were around, because she definitely didn't want to upset them. She fell silent then, concentrating on what she was doing in the same way V and Jasper did on their activities. Once she was closer to done, she'd show Verity his official portrait. Heh. Until then, she was fine with just chilling and having someone to hang with, whether they talked or not.