InsaneJournal

Who: Tom Bronson and OTA
What: Playing guitar on a corner.
When: Let’s say early afternoon.
Where: Random street corner. Quite probably near a deli or other takeout food place, since it’s around lunch hour and thus, lots of people that could pay a couple bucks for the music.
Warnings: Probably none.
Status: Incomplete

Welcome to the Jungle, indeed. Tom hated to admit it, but it seemed that in this case, Axl Rose was wrong. This jungle had neither fun, nor games. Giant marshmallow people, the apocalypse, and ridiculously overwrought proposals of love from out of nowhere, those it had. Those it had in spades. But fun and games seemed to be in pretty short supply. Not that Tom was really surprised about that. It was the apocalypse, and even if his Catholicism was so lapsed it could be called dead, he was pretty sure that nowhere in the Book of Revelations did it say, “And then they all stopped and played GoldenEye for like three days.” Although that would be a much better way to decide the fate of the world, in his opinion. Then again, he was born the same year as Nintendo. Could he be blamed for believing that videogames could solve most problems?

Well, videogames and music. He was pursuing the latter right now. He’d skipped out on fighting the giant marshmallow guy, largely because the rest of the JSA wasn’t here for him to depend on and he was still kind of self-conscious to fight in front of other, more established and experienced heroes. Especially Superboy. The guy had died a freaking legend, there was no way Tom was throwing down side-by-side with him without a little practice and prep time first. Besides, much as he felt kind of weird to admit it, the JSA had become almost like a family to him, and their sudden lack of presence here was making him twitchy. Tom found he even missed his dad more than he thought he would, now that he couldn’t just hop a cab or a friendly teleporter and go see him. He didn’t miss Magog being a giant toolbag, but it was kind of hard to miss that douchenozzle.

Instead, he’d focused on securing a place to stay. He was no stranger to taking care of himself, so once he actually had a place to hang his nonexistent hat, he could handle himself fine. He’d just been missing that first key ingredient: A place. Technically he still was, although he had found temporary shelter in an unused studio apartment he’d broken into through the window. One thing about his werepanther form was that it made outdoor high-altitude B&E a lot easier. All he’d had to do was jump from a nearby roof, dig three of his claws into the sides of the building, and then use the claws on his remaining free hand to slip between the window and the latch and unlock it. It was his first B&E, but not his first time picking a lock, and the candles he’d stolen the next day to avoid tipping the landlord off through electricity use weren’t his first shoplifting experience. He hadn’t done any of these things in a very long time, but what could he say? His past was not pristine and he didn’t really find that problematic. Everybody rebelled as a teen, he just may have done it a little harder than most. And at least the skills learned during his teenage rebellion were coming in handy now.

The next step was getting money, because while he was okay with crashing in the apartment for now, he knew it wouldn’t last. Eventually the landlord would notice that someone was using an apartment that was supposed to be empty and would call the cops to kick the squatter out. Ideally Tom wanted to have made enough money by then that he wouldn’t need to squat in the cramped apartment, but if he hadn’t, he at least needed some kind of income. It was easier to haggle with a landlord if you could actually pay the lower price, after all. Problem was Tom wasn’t what you would call uniquely qualified for many positions. He was a young artist, which was to say that he was coasting on mom’s money and, after she died, the inheritance while he wrote and performed music, drew, wrote short stories, and tried to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. He could handle regular household work like cooking, cleaning, and minor household DIY repairs, but that was about it. He was good with a guitar, though. He was good with paints and a pencil, too, but that was less marketable until he could get a drawing table and get cracking on a few of the graphic novel ideas bouncing around in his head.

Without anything resembling a fake ID, let alone a package deal that could pass a pre-employment background check, most jobs were out. He couldn’t even get a job at a music store. So even though he felt bad about it, Tom had to resort to his teen-rebel-born illicit skills once again. He really did intend to pay for the guitar when he had the opportunity, but he needed the guitar to make the money he would need to pay for it, so he figured it wasn’t quite as bad as straight up stealing the thing. It was a nice guitar, too. Acoustic of course, made of a sturdy wood with a comfortable groove. He’d also “borrowed” the case to go with it, and was now sitting behind the opened case, with the guitar in his lap. He’d been playing for a few hours already, but wasn’t making much money. There were a few dollars in the case and maybe five in change, but that was definitely not what he wanted to see. He wanted to see enough that rent for even a crappy place wouldn’t be a pipe dream, but so far that wasn’t looking good. As he strummed an acoustic version of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters, Tom idly wondered what he was supposed to do if he ran into a demon. He wasn’t even really sure how to identify them. For all he knew, a demon may very well have been one of the ones to throw a dollar into his little guitar case turned makeshift lockbox, not that he would have cared much right now. So long as it didn’t cost him his soul or require him to kill anyone or anything, demon money spent just as well as everyone else’s.

He had a feeling looking the part of the starving artist helped. He hadn’t been able to secure a change of clothes yet, which meant spending what little of the pocket money he’d had on him on the laundromat, but he’d already used all that up. For the past three days he’d been washing his clothes in the sink, which was better, he presumed, than nothing. Still, it left his clothes smelling just a little bit like dish soap, a smell he would hopefully be able to get out once he was able to regularly use the laundromat again. It also meant that there was no color protection and everything was starting to look sort of faded. His skin-tight t-shirt, once black, was starting to look a sort of graphite gray, and his jeans were fading to a point just past stylish. There was also a hole in the right knee, but that was for style. Other than that, all he had to his name were the pair of black chucks and the tan, fur-lined Sherpa jacket he’d been wearing when he got here.

As the end of Nothing Else Matters faded from his ears, Tom took a moment to decide on a new tune and began to play, relaxing a little more against the building he was sitting against. An amused little smirk played across his face as he strummed out the first few chords of Welcome to the Jungle, hoping it might get him a little more money than the lesser known Metallica piece.