and your prize is more dead robots [closed]

[bitch4bitch]

Who: Erika, Foster, Tim, Connor, and Chara
What: A search party with emphasis on the PARTY-- god no this will probably suck for everyone
When: July 19 and 20
Where: Umui I7 and I8
Warnings: dead robots, plant plague, Foster

(( OOC: Search results here! This is gonna function as a small mingle log, so feel free to do group or solo threads as you please in the various locations, since we got two tiles with both land and sea, AND a ~camping segment! ))

Comments

Day 19, I7

[cacoethes_mori]

Wow, exploration! We are organising it like this because it's gonna be impossible to find threads later if we don't.

a mystical quest to the isle of tortuga (it's the boat part of the search)

[yourattention]

[Boaty McBoatface is actually . . . not the kind of boat Connor knows how to sail. Because when he says "sail," he means that really literally: it needs to have a sail. The principle is mostly the same, though, and he's been practicing? But he's not great with maneuvering it so. This might not be the smoothest boat ride anybody has ever experienced.

There's some assorted baskets with lids clustered to one side of the boat, which Connor points to as whoever's tagging along files onto the boat.]

Don't touch those. Those are supplies so we don't all die.

[bitch4bitch]

[Erika is... not really a huge fan of boats, generally? She guesses they're not the worst, but it's not like she's gonna jump at the opportunity to sit in an open wooden box out on the ocean for who knows how long.

Except for in this case, where the alternative is being stuck on land with HorseAss McMushroom, and if she stuck with him for that long she's genuinely not sure if she could hold off from doing something needlessly violent. Which she guesses she's supposed to be not doing right now.]

Ah, thanks for the warning. Very specific, and informative. What kinda supplies?

[yourattention]

Hatchet #2, rope, tarp, mana pool water, coconuts, relatively nonperishable food, fishing rod, fire starter, lantern.

[There's at least one perk to being a boy scout - well, actually it's more a retroactive reaction to that time he nearly died because he didn't pack shit before sailing out but nobody has to know that. Even if a lot of people know that happened. Thanks, Storyteller.

If you're wondering where Hatchet #1 is, it's propped up against the baskets. Don't worry about it.]

If you get hungry, open the basket that's inside the smaller basket. It's fruit, so it'll go bad faster.

[bitch4bitch]

[Hatchet #1 and Hatchet #2. Seems legit.

She sits down against a side of the boat and nods as she eyes the baskets.] Sweet. Shit, you're really, like... prepared and all that crap, huh? Guess that's pretty reassuring.

CAMPING OH BOY

[cacoethes_mori]

They camp out overnight, and thanks to the fact that at least Connor knows what the fuck he's doing, they have a campfire. So here it is. One (1) campfire, for camping, please camp your asses around it. Or don't. It's a free country deathflower quarantine island.

here's timothy ota

[postictal]

[One campfire, no marshmallows...and a chain-smoker off to the edge of the congregation, because he might be a piece of work but he's not about to make people sit through his secondhand smoke unless they'd...prefer that?]

[He shouldn't be awake, but he's never been much of a sleeper. Four hours a night is a good number for him, but oftentimes, he can just tell when the night isn't going to be conducive to what passes for a restful night for him. Maybe it's the trees, jabbing upward in a loose scatter that's nothing like the dense woodland of Rosswood park, but nonetheless drags at his peripheral vision. Maybe it's the automatons, lumped in the grass and flowers like sentinels.]

[So a red dot smolders a little ways away from the campsite, smoke curling up into the night air.]

[If you can't sleep either, and don't mind the nicotine smell, you don't have to be awake alone, either.]

[cacoethes_mori]

[There is no stealthy approach at his size--Tim has plenty of opportunity to get up and leave if he doesn't want to interact with Foster.

But if he doesn't, Foster will settle just behind him, politely (as he sees it), folding his front legs up under his chest and gathering his back legs out of the way like an extremely relaxed dog.

He isn't relaxing, though.

And he is definitely not going to be sleeping with this many people around.

He's keyed up and alert, not restive but absolutely not capable of resting. It's not excitement so much as paranoia--a relentless, unremitting awareness of the physical presence of other living bodies.]

...you know Erika's a werewolf, right?

[postictal]

[He has plenty of opportunity, but...for whatever reason, he doesn't. Maybe it's apathy. Maybe it's something like gravity, or inertia. He does, however, tense slightly at the tingle of someone behind him. Watches me - ]

[Remembers Jay, and the lens of a camera on his back. Remembers Alex, and the lens of a camera on his back. Remembers too many things slinking up from behind, too many blank faces in between the slits of the trees and the spots of opened windows, and he shifts slightly because he has to, so Foster is in his periphery.]

[He's not sure whether or not he actually knows that Erika is a werewolf (doesn't remember what he knows), but he's lost the capacity to be surprised. Whatever might have once arrested him was lost upon his arrival to Sol Raveh - and whatever wasn't lost then was lost in the cages and the sluicing rain. So Erika is a werewolf, and Tim occasionally becomes something he doesn't want to be either. The people here have issues.]

[He hisses out smoke from between his teeth.]

Okay.

[Erika's a werewolf.]

Does she know you like to share, or does she tell just anyone?

[cacoethes_mori]

[Foster makes eye contact with him, because he has to, the same way Tim has to turn to see him, the same way he has to be awake and alert, knowing there are other living things nearby.]

I'm talking about the cigarette. It's rude, you know.

[It's delivered with humour, not contempt. What Tim does to Erika and what Erika does to Tim is above him, really.]

Have you looked at her eyes? Her teeth? It's not secret.

[postictal]

You came to me.

[It's a disgusting habit. It's foul. It'll kill you. It's deeply, hideously destructive and unnecessary and impolite, and a thousand other things besides. He's heard it before. And yet, the nicotine is already threading into his veins and the smoke is ghosting into the night sky, and it's familiar like a hand around his neck, garroting his windpipe.]

"Werewolf recognition" isn't really a thing where I come from.

[yourattention]

If you give me one of those, will it put you out?

[He sounds tired, like he really should go to sleep and isn't, but that's not exactly anything new. Either way, Connor sits down next to Tim because sleep is just . . . not going to happen. It's not. He's never been that great at sleeping to begin with, but it's been even worse since he hit a birthday he genuinely thought would never happen. He's been trying not to think about it, and that's resulted in him not sleeping. For whatever reason.]

[postictal]

The opposite, actually.

[God, but sometimes he misses the hell out of coffee. He can't even say how long it's been since he last had any. Well over a year, at least. It's the little things; the ornamental drapes of normality over a life that's been anything but.]

[But he digs the tin out of his pocket and holds it out, if Connor's interested.]

We don't have any coffee.

[yourattention]

[Connor takes one, pulling his lighter from a pocket and lighting it. He holds it there a fraction too long, too used to weed where lighting a joint is more of a process, before taking a drag.]

We don't have bread. Ignis's beefcake [as opposed to Laurent's, obviously] was like "oh what the fuck you want a greenhouse for this is paradise" and I just want fucking wheat. I want -

[He wants a lot of things. Some are less feasible than others. They're never going to get internet, for example, but wheat? That's possible. That's doable, and it has to be enough that they can have one civilized thing.]

- a hamburger. It's not a hamburger if you don't have a bun, it's just a sad lettuce wrap or whatever.

[postictal]

[It's probably a bad sign that Tim can figure out what "Ignis's beefcake" means with a minimum of exerted brainpower. There are lots of things that are bad signs, objectively, but he's long since lost the urge to challenge them.]

[He smokes, when he should be sleeping.]

[A hamburger. The thought is so bizarre, so removed from the island hell, that the dissonance is enough to make him vaguely hungry.]

You know how to grow wheat?

ERIKA VS FOSTER BULLSHIT feel free to hop in

[bitch4bitch]

Ugh. Ugh she doesn't want to be around this guy. Like, for any period of time, but especially not overnight.

But it's become increasingly clear that that's pretty much unavoidable, since she doesn't think she's got the authority in this little group to make him fuck off, and no way is she going off on her own just to get away from him.

She settles instead for shooting him the occasional not-so-subtle glare as she checks over her weapons, making sure they're clean and ready for use. This is, of course, not at all a coincidence. Eventually, she pauses long enough to speak up. "So, you wanna talk about how you're definitely alive?"

[cacoethes_mori]

Foster had, superficially, assumed Erika's issue with him was settled after their seaside conversation. The revelation that whatever issue she truly had was unaddressed, however... well, it comes as no surprise.

What does come as a surprise is the form it takes.

He's kept some distance from the campfire, preferring more quiet and less warmth and light... besides which, taking up such a vital, central location with his disgusting body would obviously be wrong of him.

Now he looks at Erika with an unusually alert expression, one with a wide smile that wavers between confusion and curiosity.

"Do you think I looked like this back then?"

[bitch4bitch]

"Uh, no? But there's kinda two tiers of bullshit here. There's the one where you've got all that fae crap, and there's the one where you're not dead. What was all that about raising yourself, huh?"

Sorry, Foster, she hasn't really made the connection between the two - though, in fairness, why would she? She's not sure making undead people suddenly just regular alive people is something fae tend to do.

[cacoethes_mori]

"It's all the same bullshit." Foster snaps, sharper than he knew it could come out, and the surprise shows on his face before his eyelids fall to half-mast, producing something not entirely unlike derision.

"What interest is a rotting corpse to a fae? Why recycle garbage when you can make new? Her dissatisfaction with my rotted state, her disgust at a form that did not serve her purposes, did affect me." He studies Erika for a moment, looking for anything resembling comprehension.

There was an incident, early on, wherein she had expressed her displeasure by turning him into a cow for three days and three nights. It had been... formative.

Foster (and cloak) OTA

[cacoethes_mori]

Foster doesn't sleep, but he does eventually settle down away from the fire. He doesn't care about his own flammability, but while taming it isn't really on the top of his to-do list here, setting the cloak of death on fire is still probably not going to help. Probably.

He's crudely modified his knapsack by ripping the stitches on the shoulder straps and tying them together so that he can wear it sideways around his (humanoid) waist, which is to say, resting on his equine shoulder. He fishes the cloak out from beneath a toothbrush and an ocean-scoured rubber ducky: more than a yard of rich red fabric with metal filigree, it is by far the most conspicuous (and least likely) object he owns.

Which is saying something, but at least the rubber ducky is obviously someone's trash.

[yourattention]

"What are you, Firenze? You gonna pull a crystal ball out of there too?"

Connor's laid a poncho out to pretend like he's going to sleep, because the more effort he makes to at least appear like he's trying to take care of himself the less likely it is he'll get a visit from the Evan that lives in his head. He might actually sleep some, but it's unlikely - Umui is too silent and dead to make it easy on him. He's used the the noise of a city, and even nine months on it's sometimes too quiet for him.

[cacoethes_mori]

"What's fire ends?" Foster asks, after a long enough silence. He had this problem last time Connor spoke to him, but a more serious version of it. This time he's fairly certain it's just that he misheard something, and not... something more complex.

What does a crystal ball have to do with it? Scrying... fire? That doesn't.... not make sense, but Foster couldn't scry the outside of a paper bag and he knows it. Whatever, maybe he can make sense of it a different way.

"This is the cloak of death." He corrects Connor just in case, but says it like that's not a totally ridiculous combination of words.

But for once, he's actually very aware it is.

Or at least, it is outside of the extremely fae context he bought it in.

[yourattention]

"You know, like -" He should know better than to make pop culture references to people who probably don't even have Harry Potter. "Nevermind. He's just a centaur I know."

At some point this lie will probably catch up with him but whatever. It's fine.

"Why do you have a cloak of death?"

Day 20, I8

[cacoethes_mori]

After a refreshing(?) night under the stars that hopefully didn't remind you too much of your own fleeting mortality, the search expands to new territory. Look at these fucking flowers. Wow.

but in davy jones' locker, what lies in store? (boatquest pt2)

[yourattention]

[We're still in a boat. We still got baskets you shouldn't touch over there. The difference here is Connor is pouring mana pool water into the gas tank out of a glass jug. The last thing he wants is to have to fucking push the boat back to land. He could, but it would be annoying.]

Sorry, uh. It runs on mana pool water? I'll be done in a sec.