Amanda van Eeden (carabinadeases) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2016-07-25 11:48:00 |
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By the time the day that she and Ria had chosen to get together had rolled around, Amanda was more than ready for a night off. All governments were haunted by a typical set of petty problems and little annoyances, of course, and Austin was no exception. What this city possessed that made trying to getting anything accomplished particularly frustrating was an excess of assholes on motorcycles. Assholes who had struck again the day before, attempting another raid on one of the supply depots. The fact that they had not actually gotten away with any of the rations this time felt like a minor victory when faced with the prospect of going into August without having this problem locked down. Criminals were an inescapable part of society -- particularly now that half the country had fallen to the walkers -- but that didn’t keep the Hellhounds from driving Amanda crazy. Valuable resources that should have gone to rehabilitating Austin were instead being wasted on tracking the rogues down. Or, to be more accurate, the resources were being wasted on failing to track them down. To top it all off, Hemings was not pleased, and she would only grow less so the longer the situation went on. “Oh, thank god.” Amanda greeted Ria with a hug, as her friend ushered her through the door into her house. “You don't know how much I've been looking forward to this all day.” Amanda was in fact not the only person who had been looking forward to this day. Ria had practically ran out of the doors of the hospital when the clock had struck the 24 hour mark, freeing her from her shift. She loved her job, she loved helping people. But Austin, and by extension it’s hospital, was a mess. Sure, the doctors and staff who had been manning it for the last two, nearly three years, had done the best they could in keeping it up and running in a reasonable manner. In doing so protocols had been tweaked, the chain of command had been bent and the emergency room didn’t function as it should. Ria was bumping up against doctors on a daily basis who thought it was their job to go into surgery with the patient, instead of assessing the situation and handing them off to surgical as they should. She could understand that that was how things had ran before, but that wasn’t how she was going to run her ER. Of course more than one doctor also bristled when it came to who called the shots, her presence in the hospital was not an entirely welcome one. Which was why she was pleased beyond anything to see a friendly face. “God, you don’t know how much I’ve been counting down to this either,” Ria breathed out as she gave Amanda a quick squeeze before releasing her again. “Some dipshit plastic surgeon tried to waltz into my ER today and tell me how to run the place,” she huffed, moving back into the house and towards the kitchen. “He even had the nerve to insinuate that I was unfit for my job because I fail to possess a penis.” Ria exclaimed with a scowl, grabbing two wine glasses off of a shelf and put them on the counter. “Wine?” She asked, taking a breather in her rant to offer her friend something to drink. “Please,” Amanda said, following Ria into the kitchen. She looked around her friend’s home with obvious interest, measuring (as always) the quality of a home in Austin against a home in Denver. It was still hard to believe that the people at the hospital had spent three years willingly packing themselves into what had formerly been patients’ rooms. In that respect, at least, they had managed to improve the lifestyle of the city’s residents. It was a small victory, but what the hell. It still counted. “This surgeon sounds like a complete bastard, Ria. Want me to get him fired? Pretending for a moment that I actually possess that kind of power, instead of being little more than a glorified babysitter.” As she continued the conversation, her gaze shifted from her friend’s decor to the bottle of wine, eyeing it avidly. The California wine country might have fallen along with the rest of the west coast, but some enterprising vintners had managed to revive the wine industry anyway. And thank God for that! Wine -- the real thing, not whatever they’d been brewing in toilets at the UMCB -- was one of those small luxuries that made life worth living. Amanda leaned forward against the counter and gave her friend a dazzling smile. “After all, you’re a genius. Far better than they deserve down here. He ought to be thanking you for the honor of having you handle the ER.” “He is,” Ria replied with a grimace. “I’m kind of horrified he hasn’t had a sexual harassment suit either, you should see the way he treats his nurses.” To say she wasn’t impressed with that particular surgeon would have been an understatement. “But, as much as I would love to see you do your thing and have him fired, I believe my reputation and likability at the hospital will fare better if I don’t use my connections to get people fired,” Ria replied with a laugh, glancing away from opening the bottle of wine for just a moment. “You don’t really think all you are is a babysitter, do you?” Maybe she had a different opinion of what Amanda’s job was, but all Ria knew was nobody could pay her enough to do what her friend did daily. She met her friend’s dazzling smile with one of her own. “I mean, I’m not going to deny my genius,” she began. “Right now though I’m pretty sure they all think the new doctor is both too young and too reckless to be managing the entire ER.” Ending up in quarantine just days after her arrival hadn’t exactly helped her reputation around the hospital, and to be fair her decision to go out into the city hadn’t been a wise one. “You’re who the people of Austin should count themselves lucky to have,” Ria added as she passed a glass of wine over to Amanda. “I am one hundred percent biased, but you’re too good for this place.” Accepting the wine glass, Amanda skirted along the counter to reach her friend and slipped an arm around her waist in a companionable sign of affection. “Good lord, talk about receiving the compliment of compliments! You’re such a treasure. I don’t know what I would do without you here to say wonderful things about me and provide a sensible counterpart to all my worst bulldoggish tendencies. This is why I’m so glad we’re friends. Well, one reason among many.” Ria in turn slipped an arm around Amanda and gave her friend a stunning smile. “I’m no more a treasure than you are,” she began, pausing to give her friend a squeeze. “And I’m also nothing if not a really good cheerleader, plus, I couldn’t let you come to Austin on this adventure and not join you!” It had never been a secret between them that Ria was a bit of an adventure junkie. “For the record I like your bulldoggish tendencies and being a counterpoint to them, so I’m glad we’re friends as well, for so many reasons that would take more time than we have to list off.” Tossing her friend a pleased expression, Amanda gave Ria a last, soft squeeze and then stepped back again to raise her glass. They needed a toast, she decided, even if it was only the two of them sharing a very informal drink together. She thought for only a moment before the words to express what she wanted sprang to mind.“To showing up misogynistic old men with our wits and our skills, utterly trouncing them in the process. And with the fervent wish that the childish factions in this city will learn to get along because, yes, I sure as hell feel like their babysitter some days.” Settling back against the counter as well, Ria brought her own wine glass up in a toast, bright smile still firmly in place as Amanda spoke. “To all of that and more,” she chimed in, clinking her glass gently against her friend’s before taking a drink. “While you’re babysitting the city, I’m trying to make sure they stay in one piece,” Ria remarked with a laugh, amazed at just how many cases came through the ER -- especially for the size of the population in Austin. “Let’s be honest, this city would be lost without us.” Said mostly as a joke, though Ria did wonder just what Austin would have crumbled into had the government not acted. It felt so strange sometimes to think that they had all been living their lives in Denver, unaware of the chaos and horrors this city was being subjected to at the very same time. “They do seem very determined to implode, don't they?” Amanda took a sip of her wine, leaning a hip against the countertop for stability and to take some of her weight off her feet. There were sacrifices that came with wearing the shoes that she did, and the occasional need to take advantage of a chance to give her feet a rest was one of them. “Did you know that blobs of infectious material used to rain from the sky? That’s something that actually happened.” After pausing to give Ria an incredulous look that expressed just this flabbergasted this information left her, Amanda gestured with her glass in the general direction of the Capitol. “I read about it in some files compiled for me about the time before we reconnected with the city. It was some side effect of Olinger releasing the s’mores gas whenever he damn well pleased. I don't understand the science behind it, but the idea of living here with that kind of doomsday threat hanging over them in appalling.” A twinge of something strikingly like guilt shot through her. Which was ridiculous, since it wasn’t as if Amanda was responsible for Boonman’s decisions to delay intervening in Austin situation. She shook her head and took another sip from her wineglass. “They’ve got fortitude, I’ll give them that.” A nod was given in agreement with the way it seemed Austin was quite possibly hellbent on imploding. Ria had only had a few in depth conversations with locals, people who had been fighting tooth and nail to survive in the climate of the city before the government had broken Olinger’s death grip on it. She couldn’t imagine living that way, of that he supposed she could count herself lucky. “I guess you could say they may not know any better, though,” Ria remarked, her eyes slowly going wide as Amanda began to talk about blobs of infectious material falling from the sky like rain, or some terrible sci-fi movie. “Please tell me you’re kidding about that,” Ria exclaimed while she wordlessly urged Amanda towards the living room where they could both sit down and make themselves more comfortable. “Was nobody brave enough to try and stop that madman from tormenting this city sooner?” she added, knowing only what Amanda and the news coverage had told her about Reeves Olinger. He was a tyrant in the truest of words, a horrible excuse for a human being who had done things in the name of maintaining his power and control. “You know I don’t know politics, so I’m sure that played some part in why nobody acted sooner,” Ria added quickly, aware that Amanda was much closer to that particular situation than she had ever been. “Politics are why we didn’t intervene sooner,” Amanda acknowledged, with a slight grimace. She letting Ria steer her over to the sofa and took a seat, careful not to spill even a drop of her wine as she kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet up beneath herself. “That, among other things. But the people here had no idea that their ‘blob rain’ wasn’t falling everywhere. Olinger had them convinced Austin was all that was left of the country.” Settling down onto the couch, Ria continued. “They do have fortitude,” she agreed. “And while I’m not saying the gangs had the right idea, but, maybe they felt like fighting back the way the did was their only option?” It didn’t give an excuse for the rogues doing what they were doing now, but it put the Hellhounds in a bit of a different light -- maybe not a sympathetic one, but there was always two sides to each story, right? “Maybe.” It was as close as Amanda could come to admitting that perhaps there was more than just her own way of looking at things. Even if, when it came to the Hellhounds, she was fairly certain in her opinion, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that the beleaguered people of Austin saw the outlaws as heroes. “But many of these men were criminals even before the outbreak, and whatever their motives might have been, they terrorized innocent civilians as well as Olinger’s patrolmen. Not to mention what they did with the prax.” She sighed, using her free hand to massage the spot between her eyes. “Sorry to get caught up in work talk. I just wouldn’t cast any of the Hellhounds as the heroes of this story, no matter how much certain members look like they just walked off the cover of a romance novel.” A slight smirk broke through Amanda’s pained expression. “A romance novel that I would read, admittedly, but they're a lot less pleasant to deal with on real life than they would be on the page.” “Don’t be, everyone needs to vent about work sometimes,” Ria answered with a knowing smile. “And oh, believe me I am not casting them as heroes,” she assured her friend, laughing as she added. “Maybe you should take of writing as a side hobby, I’m sure the United States would just eat up tales of handsome bikers,” said as joke, though Ria did believe that the general romance novel reading public would eat up the sort of stories they could write about Austin, putting their own fictional spin on things of course. Amanda laughed. “If babysitting ever loses its luster, that’s exactly what I’ll do.” She ran a hand through her hair, wishing she could brush off the Hellhounds as easily. “Enough of my problems. Let's talk about yours. Are there any doctors at the UMCB that you can stand, or are they all driving you crazy?” Ria didn’t quite have the same opinion (yet) of the Hellhounds that her friend did, but she was just as happy to move onto a different topic. For a moment after Amanda posed that question to her Ria thought about it, there were actually more doctors she liked than disliked, if she was being truthful. “No, the vast majority of them are both tolerable and good doctors,” she began with a faint smile. “While I can’t say she and I are friends, I have a lot of respect for Dr. Singh, from what I’ve both seen and heard she’s a talented surgeon. Dr. Whelan is another one that comes to mind, though every warned me that he could be, well a dudebro, I’ve yet to see evidence of that. He seems fairly subdued to me. Apparently the two of them along with Dr. Whelan’s intern ran a mobile clinic while the previous mayor was restricting who could and could not get medical attentions.” She stopped, realizing that now she was rambling about work. Though it was a far happier topic than the previous work related one had been. “Is there anyone in the Capitol you’re fond of, or at least like?” Ria turned the question back around on her friend, feeling it was only fair. “I heard about their clinic,” Amanda replied. It was hard to tell whether the doctors behind it were brave or simply reckless. Despite all the good their work may have done, they were very, very lucky that Olinger hadn’t stumbled on their operation and thrown them in that deathtrap they called a prison. “That tooks some balls.” Ria simply gave a nod of agreement. So far those she had met who had survived under the tyrannical mayor were both brave and a touch on the ballsy side. Amanda took another sip of her wine, stalling for time as she considered Ria’s question. Her coworkers at the Capitol, for all that they drove her up a wall at times, were at least decent people. “Believe it or not,” Amanda said, finally, “I like the mayor. She’s green and in way over her head, but at least she gives a damn about the city. I couldn’t tell you what she thinks of me in return, but I can’t imagine it’s anything good.” She tipped her head to the side and gave a shrug. “Then again, maybe it is. Nina Clarke gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘reserved’ and I’m still learning how to read her.” “I must admit I’ve only met the mayor very briefly, but she did seem to have a passion for this city and restoring it.” Ria respected her a lot for that fact, even if she was incredibly green. “Though, if she thinks poorly of you my opinion of her may change slightly. Because anyone who can’t see you’re amazing is simply blind,” said like a friend who clearly had a very strong bias. “Well, if anyone can accomplish such a feat, I have no doubt it will be you. You’ve dealt with politicians far more opaque and hard to read than she is, I’m sure.” Ria only knew portions of Amanda’s life in the realm of politics, but she was positive her friend could and would be successful at whatever she put her mind to. “I have, but it’s incredibly taxing all the same. The world would spin more smoothly, I think, if everyone would just lay their cards all out on the table, rather than playing them so close to the chest all the time.” Breaking into a smile, Amanda leaned forward to touch Ria’s knee. “Another reason why I’m glad you’re here. A friendly face that I can trust? Invaluable.” Ria mirrored Amanda’s own smile. “Likewise, I probably wouldn’t have come to Austin without your already being here,” of course the career advancement had been a large draw, knowing that a friendly face would be amongst the crowd of people was in fact an even bigger one. “And we’ll both settle into this new life eventually, right?” Ria added before she emptied her wine glass. “Until that time comes though, at least we have each other to bitch to.” She paused a beat. “And we’ll always have one person here who knows us for who we truly are.” |