Intro Post

[shitstorm_eve]

Welcome to Carlyle... Waking Up It's happening again. All around town. Maybe it's in the cereal aisle of the general store while no mothers with squalling children are traversing it. Maybe it's in the middle of the town's lonely graveyard, full of hundred-year-old graves in the middle of the night. Maybe in the local city hall restroom, eyes opening to a gaze-full of toilet paper, or in the town's settler museum full of wagon wheels and old farming paraphernalia. There are still a few government workers milling around since the first influx. People in bland suits of various shades of grays and browns, nothing particularly impressive, but if they approach someone who doesn't seem to belong they'll bring them through the intake process. Though there's a chance that, instead, they'll meet a kindly marshall. Average middle-class white guy, a tall Midwesterner with some scruff and a formal uniform and a stocky build. He will discretely move them through if it's needed, make sure they have an ID and paperwork and phone and some concealing clothes if they have the body type that works for it. If they look special or like someone the government might want, he'll try to keep things on the down-low for them. Better than to lose people again. Getting Familiarized When investigating the town, they'll find it with trace damage from the night before. Someone is replacing a door that has ax-marks in it. Another is rebuilding a fence, a crashed car ready to be towed away. And yet another person is filing an insurance claim with his agent, his shed completely burned down and the air closeby filled with the scent of settled smoke. Most of the residents of Carlyle are friendly. If you stop and ask for directions, they'll give them. It's also a time of year in which there are lots of outsiders, on top of current events. Unfortunately, if anyone's dressed in an entirely unfamiliar way, someone might over-react. They may excitedly run to get one of the agents, or they might scream about it happening again, or they might be absolutely delighted and want pictures so they can go viral on FaceBook. There's a cafe in town where there's are a slew of reporters, talking about post-Vesanalia clean-up and the lost arrivals. At first, someone who wanders in might be mistaken for another reporter, there to order coffee or jam microphones at the management outside. But someone might be smart. A towns-person might notice something off, a familiarity in their gaze, or might hear them say something suspicious. The next thing they know, those reporters are turning their microphones towards the newcomer. Settling In Someone might need somewhere to sleep. Well, there's a nice little hotel where it's free. There's probably government surveillance if you care about that sort of thing. Otherwise, your rest will go undisturbed and have the average conveniences of a mediocre bed, a Febreeze smelling duvet, a somewhat new TV, and bathroom with a tile pattern installed in the 80s. One could try a barn, but there's a chance they'll be run out by an angry man in honest to god overalls and an unironic cowboy hat with a pitchfork. They could also try to sleep in a vehicle. Let's just hope the owner doesn't come checking before morning.

Comments

[sociallychallenged]

Hank's not from any post-apocalyptic nightmare world, no irradiated wasteland, but his occupation has led him to know about that type of behavior. The sort that makes fireworks make a person's hair stand on end or a car back-firing can keep you up half the night. Where you make a mistake and accidentally place your six pack in the freezer instead of the fridge and end up sure there's a shooter in your house until you discover your mistake. A hand drawn to a holster is never a good thing.

But she looks about as out of place as him, and he wanders over to the girl, looking at the messy device on her wrist. Like a smartwatch out of the fucking fifties or some shit.

"You get dial-up on that?" he jokes, but his expression remains heavy. His arms crossed in front of him. "You alright?" Worth inquiring about that high level of caution. She might be new, like him. She might be a local girl with some asshole she's watching out for. Either way, it's worth a word.

[quixotically]

Elle's heart is still thudding away in her chest. The man makes a joke that she doesn't understand (and that's been happening a lot, since she woke up here), but he looks so serious, and she finds herself bracing for whatever he's really thinking. ... but... then all he does is ask her if she's okay. And her raw nerves fray a little more, and she can feel tears prickling at the corners of her eyes. It's like she deflates, her shoulders slowly hunching and her head lowering. "I..." She's not even sure how to answer. She ends up tilting her head to the side, not quite a shrug, not quite a shake of the head. "I... don't know."

[sociallychallenged]

Oh jesus, she's gonna cry.

Of course she's given an answer that tells him nothing about the situation, no more than he asked a question that warranted any specifics, though. He ambles over, a big broad guy with a booming voice next to this much smaller girl, who is giving off the impression of being much more fragile than she actually is.

"Sounds like you're still working everything out." So he sits down with a grunt, crossing his legs and letting his hands rest in his lap.

"You know there's a diner that'll give people that are new here a discount. If you're not, then I am. And I got a few bucks I could spare on a meal. Figure a full stomach is better to face a bunch of unknown shit on than an empty one. What do you say?"

[quixotically]

Elle is... surprised when he sits next to her, and it gets her to look over at him, blinking. New here... She wouldn't have guessed. He doesn't look like he'd be out of place among the people she's seen so far. (She doesn't realize that she doesn't really look out of place, either, because she feels so out of place right now.) She hesitates, but she wouldn't even really be able to describe why, if asked. "... Sure." A beat. "I'm... new, too." Another beat. "I wouldn't... be able to pay you back. Not with money."

[sociallychallenged]

Hank, being in the profession he's been in, and having met some of the people he's met, unfortunately takes that statement the wrong way. Fortunately Hank is mild-mannered and leans highly towards the bashful with come-ons. He's an honorable gentleman through and through... with a side of being a foul-mouthed piece of shit. He's not going to take advantage of what sounds like a proposition as payment.

"You don't need to repay me. I have enough money to cover it. Besides, if you eat a whole one of their big burgers, you win a T-shirt." He says that as if it's an actual prize, an edge of humor to it.

He stands up and offers her a hand to help foist her up if she takes it.

"Just being in a new place is pretty good reason to be upset."

[quixotically]

Elle is used to people reacting similarly to bashful when she offers to help them -- repay them. It's similar to when she turns down payment. People don't really expect it in the Mojave, and it's so much the norm for her that she doesn't even look twice at his reaction. ... it sounds like that T-shirt is probably pretty good, though. She should look into it once they're there. There's another brief pause before Elle accepts his offered hand, though it's shorter than before. "It... That... would bother me -- does bother me... But... That's not really..." Once on her feet, she rubs the back of her neck awkwardly. "It's happened to me before. I can deal with that okay. That's not what's... troubling me." She snags her fedora off her pack, fixes it snugly on her head (and her bullet scars sliding out of view as a result), then hauls her pack up off the ground.

[sociallychallenged]

He wants to ask how it's happened to her before, whether it's in the sense of that head injury or the sense of literally ending up in a goddamn other universe (how does one fix this shit, by the way?) But if that's not the source of the immediate trouble, then he can save it for later.

"What is it, then?"

He tucks his hands into his coat pockets and walks beside her, still with all the bearing of a big old bear huffing its way to the river. Formidable or friendly, depending on the gaze one looked at him with.

[quixotically]

"It..." Elle doesn't know why she's so self-conscious about talking about it. Any wastelander would understand, and there's nothing saying that this man wouldn't, either. Elle fidgets with her glove -- not her Pip-Boy glove, but the fingerless black lace glove on her other hand. "There were... some things... taken from me. After I was found, I was taken to the police station. And they confiscated some of my stuff. There were a couple that were... gifts. They mean... They mean a lot to me." Well. That's the nice and very simplified version of it all, anyway.

[sociallychallenged]

"There's a cop in a ranger hat that might be able to help you out. He helped my partner." To an extent, anyway. To get Connor into the system, they had to wage some trickery.

"It's probably not impossible to get it back so long as it wasn't drugs or explosives. What was it?"

Hank is thinking through the legalities, but honestly it's hard to put ones mind back a good twenty years and remember laws of the days of yore in a whole damn different state than the one he operated in.

[quixotically]

That... doesn't give her a whole lot of hope. (And they did take her stimpaks and Med-X, not just her guns, and the thought of never getting her stims back, when she won't be able to get more...) "Some of them... were chems. Um -- Not the gifts, but... Some of the things they took. The gifts were... guns." Not explosives. But dangerous, anyway. "A pistol and a rifle... They took my shotgun, too."

[sociallychallenged]

"Guns, huh? Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem... Sort of. We're in the US and the rules involving those can be pretty lax." He stops to grab a newspaper out of a newspaper stand. An honest to god dispenser. He knows they've been going out of style even now, by his time they're unheard of. But this? This is a nice nostalgia shaped feeling to take to the diner.

"What sort of chems? You're not talking about hard drugs or anything?" He has to clear that up, see what she might (or probably isn't) on. She doesn't really look like an addict. She just looks... well... kind of destitute. With a satellite on her arm.

[quixotically]

"No. I mean... There might've been some Jet, but I don't remember picking any up. Um... When I'm out prospecting, I mean. Sometimes, I find some, like, in raider stashes, so... I bring them back to sell. But, the chems I had... were just... Stimpaks, Med-X. They took my Rad-X and RadAway, too." They didn't really understand what they were, though, when she told them. The police just took anything that looked definitively drug-like to them: needles, pills... Strange liquid in blood bags was close enough.

But she doesn't sound too concerned about it, not like she is about her guns. "There... aren't really rules about guns where I'm from. They're too common... We need them too much to... put rules on them."

[sociallychallenged]

The word 'raiders' at least establishes the difference between a culture where people are using and selling drugs just to avoid dealing with their problems and some inherent larger problem.

Also things called 'Rad-X' and 'RadAway' are utterly new to his vocabulary. Stimpaks and Med-X could be possible brand names but-

"What sort of place are you from?" He asks first and foremost, before heading into that diner he'd mentioned, holding the door with his foot.