logsinthenight | And it feels like I've been away for an era

Entry tags:

And it feels like I've been away for an era

characters: Rosinante, OTA
location: Harbor, Bonfire Square, Scrapyard
date/time: May 27-31
content: End of the month catch-all. Having taken stock of their few remaining supplies, Rosi is boiling water, and ruminating on what to do next.
warnings: n/a

Harbor

This is technically a little risky, what he's doing here, but only because the lake is not his friend and never will be. It, like the sea, hates him. But while others are worrying about food, Rosinante is worrying about water. Sleep is something they can all do, but they'll each need one of the other two if they're going to survive until they can get supplies, and at least water is a more or less inexhaustible resource. It just has to be gathered and treated.

To this end, he has acquired stock pots and a few barrels that once held other food and drink, now all gone. Out at the edge of the water, he fills each barrel by submerging it in the shallows a few inches, tipping it up, then scooping with the stock pots to top it off. It's slow, but the shovel on the ground beside him, a piece of tubing from the pawn shop, and the submerged, half filled-in pit of gravel show his original plan of digging a good hole and siphoning into the barrel didn't work out very well.

He notices light, or maybe the crunch of pebbles underfoot, and beckons you toward him. "Want to give me a hand with this?"

Bonfire Square

The stock pots are better than the barrels for one task in particular - boiling the water over the pile of burning torches. With a few hefty branches carved from a nearby tree, Rosinante has constructed a basic rack to hang them on and let them boil.

In the meantime, he's seated cross-legged on the ground near the fire. His completely soaked clothing shows that in part, he apparently needs to dry off. Feel free to ask about that. Otherwise, he looks at you, hair hanging into his eyes. Probably needs a cut. "You, uh. Don't know if there's anyone around who has a cigarette left, do you?"

Even one would sure be nice right now. Just one. Anything for one.

Scrapyard

That metal hull is something he's had an eye on for months now, but this isn't a place Rosinante comes often and he's standing well back from the pile itself as he looks the remnants of that boat over. For chained within, but watching him closely, is the enormous spirit dog, and while the creature isn't as large compared to him as it is to everyone else here, it's still plenty menacing. He takes a step forward, and it tenses and sniffs at the air.

"Easy," he calls out to it, and bends down to pick up a chunk of wood. Maybe it will accept it as a chew toy? He doesn't exactly have meat to hand out, and that's probably what works best.

"Easy, buddy, I just want to see the boat..."

Maybe he could use some backup.

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Soldat knows how to make minor repairs on their own arm, how to fix metal shutters over a lantern to keep the light hidden, but nothing of this size. They tilt their head to one side for a better look at some of the rust. "I know a little. Not about boats, just metal. Smaller things. Like this." The metal hand lifts a little, buzzes.

"Maybe there's books in the library on boat repair?" That... didn't get ruined in the flood? If they're lucky.

"Seems awfully specific, especially since most of what's in there are stories from other worlds, not instruction manuals."

Strange stories too, though some are all right. He struggles to get into a lot of them, though - the worlds described inside are so alien and sometimes that can be fun but other times he has a hard time understanding what they're even talking about, with their references to people and events and technologies he's never heard of.

"But I could ask Pluto next time we see her. They obviously know how to maintain their ships."

"There's some stuff on real things there. There's a book on the city I came from. Not instructions, really, but not a story, either. So there could be." They shake their head, and start circling the boat, trying to get an idea of whether it's something they'd know how to drive.

Not that anyone would likely let him pilot a boat again any time soon, and they'd probably be right. "It's a thought, anyway, if Pluto doesn't have anything."

"Yeah. Or I'll ask around. Maybe others here have metal skills I don't know about. I wouldn't mind learning, anyway."

There's the briefest of thoughts that it would be amazing to return home with such an ability, to spread the knowledge even though metal is limited and mining it is difficult in his ocean world. But it's truly brief, for he can't allow himself those kinds of fantasies. Only makes being here harder. Beacon isn't home, but it's where he will have to remain.

Like most things here, this boat was not built with someone his size in mind. He finds a couple of metal beams and a board that doesn't look too rotten yet, and fashions a simple ramp so he can scramble up high enough to see the deck. It doesn't look like it's in any shape to be stood on, this really is a skeleton of a boat, so he sits on the edge rather than climbing aboard and lets his legs hang down the outside of the hull. It creaks under his weight, but the thing is big enough and has been here long enough where it's clearly wedged into place solidly, and not yet old enough to crumble entirely or the flood would have done away with it.

"Not much left of the deck or cabin. But that's probably a good thing in this case. Should make patching the hull easier, and then I can rebuild the rest with wood."

He'll need a hell of a lot more rope, though. There's no sign of rigging, or even any sort of mast. Needs canvas for the sails, too. More things Pluto will have to help with, given their inability to rely on Rastus for supplies.

It probably wasn't built with someone of Soldat's weight, either. They don't even try his ramp, just peering up at him as he examines it, not wanting to rock it or, worse, break it while Rosinante is up there. Knowing Rosi's luck, they would. "Long-term project, for sure. There any sign of the engine controls?"

Because Soldat is assuming it never had a mast or rigging, but a motor, like the ferry and the boats in the harbor in Beacon's past.

"Engine?" he repeats, blinking, then looks over at what remains of the cabin again. Right - this world has ships with fuel, rather than sails. Their rarity in his world means he never even considers them an option, but of course here, the ferry is one. Or had been one, wherever it is now. The ships of the Night Market, too.

"Hard to tell from here, but maybe. Then again, they might be so old they're not worth salvaging. It's not that hard to rig up some sails," he says, then looks back down at Soldat with a shrug. "I figure it's been here about as long as those car hulls, right? And those don't have much left in them."

Sure. Cars have hulls, right? What else would you call those rusted-out things lying scattered throughout the scrapyard?

The fact that there's technically another word for it doesn't change that using "hull" is perfectly understandable, so Soldat doesn't make any kind of correction there. "Probably, yeah. A lot of what's here has been pretty gutted, and what's not gutted is rusted. Can work out some way to control the rudder without electrical controls? Or direct it with just sails?"

Soldat knows how to drive a wide variety of boats with motors, but they don't know a damn thing about sails.

"I assume it's still got a wheel in there at least. If not, I could just make a bar. The lake's calmer than the ocean, so it won't need much. Then just replace the ropes," he says with a shrug.

But at that he hops back down to the ground, stumbling in the scrap before he regains his feet, and walks over to the rudder behind the ship. It's bent and as rusted as the rest of this so maybe he'll have to replace it entirely, but there's plenty here all over the ground to use for that purpose. It doesn't turn anymore either, he finds - but vinegar and oil will take care of that.

"I'll have to think of something good to pay Pluto with again. We're going to have to rely on her a lot for the basics," he says with a frown. Maybe she'll give them said basics out of the good of her heart, though. Wouldn't want them all to suffer here, would she? She seems to want their help.

The ferry hadn't had a wheel. (If it had, it might have made more fucking sense, and they might not have crashed it.) But this might not be the same model, and anyway, Rosinante knows more about boats. "At least we have plenty of building materials," they say, a bit glumly. So many ruined buildings, and uprooted trees, and smashed bridges. There's even lanterns-- not that Soldat will ever give up the bits of Aziraphale and Kal-El's lanterns.

"We'll have to do some negotiating." Surely if Pluto wants their help, she'll have to help them stay alive.

"Planning on it." Thankfully, that's something he's usually good at. There's been a learning curve or two here, given the mismatch between the dynamics he's used to and the ones these people bring, but ultimately people are people everywhere and once he's got a read on them he can usually work with them to get what he wants.

Usually. Can't make promises in a place like this. So far so good, though, and Pluto already believes he's intending to work with her the whole way. Which he might, still, anyway, so it's not like he's being completely misleading. But that reminds him -

"I still haven't heard of there being any sign of the Wild Hunt. I wonder if they got cut off from us after all, thanks to the flood." Where did they hang out, again? Somewhere underground.

That much, Soldat knows: "They live in the mines. We never found the entrance to those, so. Hard to tell." Though it's worrisome to think of people in mines, underground, in a flood. They might not have fared well. (Good fucking riddance. Don't think like that, Sarge. I'll think however I like in our own goddamn head. Still not nice.)

Someone should probably look for them. That someone should apparently probably not be Soldat, especially since they're pretty sure if anything happens to them after all this, Misty will go berserk.

"They might have someone who knows how to repair a boat, though," they add, reluctantly. "They were very pushy about. Helping with things."

"Might be worth looking for them. If they've been hit as hard as we have, they might need our help this time."

And as much as he disagrees with their outlook on Beacon and life in general here, they did help break him and the others out. Sure, it was probably engineered to make them feel indebted to them, to make the bitter pill of their ideology easier to sympathize with, but he doesn't need any of that to sympathize with people just for being people. And maybe, faced with sudden mortality in numbers they hadn't seen in the past, some might come around to seeing things their way.

"I know some people have found tracks, right? Like from carts that might have unloaded at the ore dock. Maybe we can follow those if we find more."

Reasoning for why Soldat told Sarge to shut his ethereal mouth, right there. Members of the Hunt are not HYDRA. They don't deserve to drown in a horrible flood.

"If they're still there after the flooding." That's the big question, isn't it? Soldat thinks back over what they've heard about people looking for the mines, about Aziraphale's dream. "Did anyone actually say where they found the tracks, before?"

Because it was Bruce who found them, they're pretty sure. And Bruce is gone.

"Not that I heard, but we could ask around. Or just look, I suppose. All I ever heard were rumors. It's... I hope it's not too late."

Because the flood was a month ago now, and that's a very long time to be trapped. But they live underground so surely they have shovels and secret exits and stocked supplies, right? He never got a good read on how prepared they were, and maybe they just weren't - if their goal was the death of all life on this world in acceptance of the finality of things, maybe they didn't make backup plans for catastrophes. Maybe death to a flood was part of their philosophy. But in his experience, it's one thing to say words like those and another to truly accept one's own mortality when it comes knocking. So many young Marines were taught to fight for the greater cause of eradicating crime and suffering at the hands of pirates, and yet there were always deserters who fled, preferring to live rather than to fight to the end when things got dire. And he can't say he ever blamed them when he heard those stories.

"Might be," Soldat admits, a little dubiously. "But we had other things to think about. Not really surprise we didn't think about them until now."

They squelch the urge to sigh, and instead pull out their tablet to frown at the map application (Who will be updating that, without Robin? Anyone? Maybe somebody can talk that Will guy into it.). "Guess we'd better look. If just to see if they managed to survive. Gotta be in a place we haven't explored yet, but not far from where we have explored. If someone found tracks early on."

"Unless the tracks were for something else. Like the train," he suggests. That's a far more unfamiliar concept to him, but as far as he knows they also run on tracks that might even look sort of the same as ones used for mining.

"But either way, we should look. Hell, finding the train could be interesting, too." He'd like to see one, if only to understand better what that even is.

Looks like this is a thing that's happening. At least with Rosinante, they have backup. ... but they can't go right now, looking at the clock function on the tablet: they have lunch to prepare. "After lunch? I have to go make it at ten-hundred hours. You can come," he offers. Rosinante needs to eat, too, right?

"You still have enough left for the group meals, huh? I might come by later," he says with a shrug. He's been getting by on sleep and water for the most part, so that those who can't sleep well have enough food. Insomnia strikes him sometimes, but not enough to kill him yet.

He'll leave it at "might", anyway - if he does pick up food, it's likely to be at the tail end, when others have had enough. The side benefit is getting to eat when it's quieter, less busy. It's more pleasant that way.

"Group meals are more efficient. Makes ingredients go further to make a larger batch, than to make lots of smaller batches." Soldat sighs a little, and adds, "And there were a lot of can hoarders." Most of whom are in fact gone now. "So there's lot of things that need to be cooked with something else to really edible."

A can of preserved green beans or cream of corn or spam, or something, isn't nearly as good just on its own as it is when part of a recipe.

There's also a lot less of them to feed. And a lot of people purposefully not eating. Soldat wishes they could be one of them, but between nightmares and their metabolism... well, they're still eating less, and it's probably starting to show by now. "If you do. I can come with you to look, after. Safer in twos."

"Right." He doesn't sound eager, exactly, but it's not a no. He does want to look, and he knows Soldat is useful company. He's just not extremely thrilled at being reminded about the buddy system, especially when he's one of the ones always trying to make sure people use the safety apps in place and check in with others before going anywhere far on their own.

"I'll see you after. I'll dig through the network in the meantime, maybe I can find a more specific mention of where anyone's found tracks already so we have some places to start."

Don't worry, Rosi. Soldat will be quiet, easy company, they promise. Or would promise, if they thought it would help. Instead, they just nod. "Good idea. I'll see you after, then."

And they give the boat one more glance-over, and the dog-spirit one more pat, before heading back out of the scrapyard to finish their patrol and get back to the Invincible. Cooking time coming up, which will at least be relaxing.

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And it feels like I've been away for an era

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bah wrote a tag last night and never hit "post"

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