sixthiterationlogs | Gonna burn those blue suede shoes; [OTA & 2 Closed Starters]

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Gonna burn those blue suede shoes; [OTA & 2 Closed Starters]

WHO: Veronica Sawyer
WHERE: The River & Various
WHEN: June 23-25
OPEN TO: ALL, Kira & Nerys
WARNINGS: n/a

[OTA]

Dear Diary,

It's really fucking hot.

Understatement of the year, Veronica thinks as she stares down at the line, sweat tickling down the back of her scalp to gather at her hairline.

Thinking about going bald, she adds in a looping scrawl. Could start a new village fashion.

The sad truth is that she probably could. With the sun giving them the finger day in and day out, it's surprising people aren't lined up at Kira's door begging him to shear them like the sheep. It might even look cute, now that she considers it—

That's it. She's got to get some kind of relief or she really will hunt down the kitchen shears and do something she'll regret later.

Even at half capacity, the river's still the best option available. Well, unless you want to swim in the fountain, and Veronica's just not that comfortable with the idea of accidentally dog-paddling into somebody fresh arrived to what's beginning to actually feel like hell.

Towel in hand, she abandons the steamy shade of the house and trudges to the river, where she strips all the way to her panties and bra before wading in. No jumping from the dock today, unless you want to break something.

[For Kira]

Even with all of the windows pushed all the way open in this house, the breeze that slips through the dining room is paltry at best, barely ruffling the pieces of paper she and Kira have neatly stacked to one side. It's worse outside, though, the sun aggressive and unrelenting. It's a miracle there haven't been more people sick from it.

"Okay, so a map," Veronica says as she flaps a makeshift fan she folded from a piece of her precious typing paper. "We should see what's in the storeroom, too."

[For Nerys]

Truthfully, Veronica feels just a little guilty. In a normal situation, there would be nothing wrong with snagging the discards and peelings that don't make it into a meal, but here, everything always feels so damned precarious, like they're one bad day away from starving or freezing or succumbing to heat exhaustion. Like you have to monitor every step of the food chain like a hawk. Fretting, she'd walked past the compost pile enough times that Mark had begun to look at her funny, and realistically, a few bits of potato and root snagged before they made it in weren't going to make a difference.

Still, she feels a little bad. Not that getting drunk won't immediately fix that.

Soup pot in hand brimming with cast-offs, she knocks on Nerys' door.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Kira gives a thumbs up from his position on the floor, laid out next to the stacks of supplies. If he's very still and low to the ground, he can almost feel air drifting over the sweat on his skin, and he's just glad he's still sweating at all.

If he faints again, especially in front of Veronica, he'd rather just not wake back up.

"Like, for more supplies, or for telling people what's kept there," he asks, dropping the hand to slick his hair back from his face. "Welcome to the Snuggie and Sock Imporium, it's a hundred degrees but the sleeves are in the front," he bites out, waving his other hand across the air until it lands on a stack, and he can steal a piece of old wrapping paper to fold into his own fan.

"You know, at the time, I thought those Snuggies were just meant as an average sort of gag-but-practical gift, but obviously I wasn't thinking big enough," Veronica replies as she slumps back against her chair. In approximately 90 seconds, her back will get hot enough that she'll lean forward, and then the cycle will start over again.

Elbows on the table, she blows a stray piece of hair out of her eyes. "Maybe we can label it that on the map, Snuggie and Sock Imporium. At least it's honest."

"I can't believe I've been here long enough to draw a map," he grouses, shoving himself up as she slumps back. They'll take it in shifts, two halves of a whole productive person in this heat. Picking up the sketch journal Casey left in his wake, he drags himself up to the opposite chair, dropping it onto the table with a thud. Pencils rattle and roll from the impact, and he stops them with his arm.

This was certainly lighter work than watering crops or patching roofs, but he'd rather stay on the floor today.

"Snuggie and Sock Imporium," he agrees, writing it at the top of a blank page. He hasn't used the journal since their trip to the woods, the names of his and Casey's families imprinted from the last page. "Inn, Hospital, blah, blah," he adds, listing some of the obvious buildings below it. "I vote we call the house full of scientists what it really is: Medical Marijuana Dispensary."

"This is the sort of necessary information people can't get just by looking at the big map at the inn," Veronica agreed with a sober nod. "Honest labeling is a public service."

Leaning forward, she braces her elbows on the table and then jabs a finger toward part of the map. "Like the spring. How are people supposed to know about it if we don't tell them? 'Heals injuries, makes hair look great.' And maybe something about teeth, because there are way too many people around here who have no way to brush."

"I don't know if we can write small enough to fit everything people won't know on these maps," he says, eyes sliding over to her finger tracing their rough draft. "There are a few toothbrushes left in the storeroom, there are killer fireflies in a cave, the river goes the wrong way now and by the way, none of us might be real."

And, his personal favorite canyon fact, in relation to this project: "And sometimes the rules are made up and the map doesn't matter, because the forest shifts and loops in on itself. That happened to me a few weeks ago, the river just went on and on."

He eyes their stacks of paper: "Maybe we can fold it up like a pamphlet and write some advice on the back."

Humming to herself, Veronica reaches for one of the scavenged pieces of wrapping paper, slick white on one side and twinkling with foil stars on the other. They could fold it up and make it work.

"There's just so much to tell somebody fresh to this hell," she says, and feels only the slightest twinge of guilt about it. Has she made important friendships here? Yes. Does it presently literally feel like Hell? Also yes. "We'll have to make a list and figure out what's most critical."

Leaning back once more with a sigh, she looks blearily at the chandelier hanging over the table. "What we need is a welcome center. Like when you go to a new state and there's a chirpy person behind a counter who gives you maps and tells you how long it takes to get to Cedar Point."

"I mean, that's kind of what the Inn is, the advice you get is just a really mixed bag." Leaning back enough in his chair to start to tip it on its legs, he tries to remember his first night and the days that followed.

The list in his head is an unhelpful didn't freeze to death, Mark saw me in my underwear; at least we have hot water; Ravi's bedside manners match his usual patients, but he taps his pencil against the table's edge and thinks instead, what would he have wanted to know?

"Usually when I meet someone at the fountain," he thinks aloud, "I try to get them dry and fed before anything else. So, obviously the basics of where to get a meal and where to sleep the first night, but what about after that? How soon are we supposed to show them the wall of crazy on the blackboard?"

"How full is the inn right now?" Veronica asks, not unaware that Kira doesn't actually live there anymore. She keeps records of a lot of things, but where people live hasn't been one of them. It didn't seem necessary.

"Really what I'm asking is, if things are so overwhelming, and if there's a possibility of not finding a bed at the inn, why don't we convert one of the houses? Sort of a halfway house for people with shitty luck. It's not often we get more than a couple of people through at a time." Not since she herself had first arrived, in fact. "If we're doing this, why not that? Why not look after those people for the first day or two and make sure they aren't getting frostbite or heat stroke, that they have a place to sleep, that they haven't had a total mental meltdown? And then," she continues with a flat laugh, "we show them the board of crazy."

"Isn't that what the Inn should be," he asks, trying to imagine how many people still call it home. "Shouldn't it just be the people who take care of it and fix the meals lingering in the rooms?"

Not that there's any way to force them into houses, but maybe they could ask. "I mean, we can do it anyway, there are some big houses no one's using. Not tgat there's much way to tell with the houses but to check for dust and raccoons."

"Maybe it should be, but it isn't," Veronica answers. "It's not like when the first wave came through we were thinking this far ahead. The inn was just sort of... the place where you went so you weren't alone in Weirdo Town." She shrugs. She'd been there a few days herself at the very beginning, might still be there were it not for Cougar.

"Anyway, we can't just tell people they have to get out because it makes more sense. That would go over great." She arches her eyebrows Kira's way.

"At least it would be fun to try," he says, trying to imagine the pair of them lecturing malingering inn residents out into the general population. The last of Bodhi's friends might be an especially fun rock to beat themselves against, from what he's seen of the man.

"Do you know which of the houses has the most rooms? I don't know that we've had more than three people come through in a week, but we might as well be prepared. And are we going to take it in shifts to watch the place, or get other volunteers to help?"

"The ones with the most rooms are all taken, I'm pretty sure," Veronica says, and reaches for one of her homemade journals. She's got a crude map in the front of one, the white space filled in with notes: Added, crossed out, added again.

"I've never gone around and counted bedrooms, just where people were staying," she adds, "but I don't think it would be that bad to just have a few bedrooms. There's always the couch, and sometimes people already have someone to stay with or would just rather claim their own place right away. We can muddle through, and plus, I'm thinking location is probably more important. Someplace close to the middle of town, or at least close to the fountain."

The first house he thinks of is Sonny's, right next to the inn and marking where the splitting paths narrow into the one that heads right for the fountain. That being taken, he purses his lips around the end of his pen, bobbling it in his mouth while he leans ever back in the chair and thinks.

Eventually gravity requires him to fall on his head or tip back, and he settles again in a clap of chair legs and his own feet, spitting the pen onto the table. "There's a brick house behind the inn, or across from one of the houses behind the inn, we'll have to check. I'm pretty sure it's empty still, and anyone who didn't want to cook would have a short walk to the daily meals."

After Cougar gave him a much-needed haircut and shave, Jake has been feeling much better. It's still hotter than Satan's asscrack, the only saving grace being that it's not actually very humid, but the relentless sunshine has been making him feel like he's going to go out of his mind. In deference to the fact that there's a teenager living in his house, he hasn't resorted to going around naked, but it's been pretty close some days.

Instead, he's taken to taking the dog down to the river and slipping down the embankment into the water with him so that they can both splash around.

Submerged up to his chest, he grabs the stick Baby brought him and flings it back onto land, watching with a smile as his dog scrambles back up onto the riverbank to retrieve it.

Veronica's presence gets a smile and a nod from him, but as he's currently wrestling with the dog, he can't really greet her properly until she's already about as deep in as he is. "Hey kiddo," he says, ignoring her state of undress (because really, what the hell else is she going to wear to go swimming in this heat) as he hurls the stick away again and taking the opportunity of Baby's absence to wade deeper into the water. "You holding up okay? I'm surprised there aren't more people out here with us."

"They're probably passed out from the heat," Veronica suggests, and glances down the length of the river. There are a few dots drifting further downstream that could be people if they're not wildlife. Somebody who wanted more privacy, maybe.

"I keep wanting to open the paper and see when we're going to get a break from it." Nearly a year in, and somehow that's still her instinct. "I think it'd be easier to take if I knew when it was going to end."

"Yeah, fucking tell me about it," he agrees, taking the opportunity of Baby still fetching the stick he'd thrown to let himself fall back with a loud splash, one hand on his face to hold his glasses in place as he submerges himself underwater. Still holding his glasses with one hand when he emerges, he shakes himself like a dog, wet hair flinging drops of water everywhere before he puts his glasses back on and wipes the lenses with wet fingertips. "I keep slapping the bedside table for my phone every morning," he continues, like he hadn't broken stride at all, "but mostly I just knock Cougar's hat off onto the floor and then he gets all pissy. You know what he's like."

As per usual, any time Jake talks about Cougar, his voice is a mixture of incredible fondness and mild exasperation. Veronica should be used to that at this point.

The dog comes wading back towards him, stick in his mouth, and Jake grabs it, lightning-fast. "Go say hi, Baby," he instructs, attempting to push him towards Veronica, but the dog's attention is stuck firmly on the stick in Jake's hand. Shrugging, he holds it out to Veronica, lifting his eyebrows in a silent question.

"He is very particular about that hat," Veronica agrees as she sinks into the water. It isn't as cold as it used to be, but it's still just about the best thing she's ever felt.

"I'm sadly not that interesting to dogs today. Aretha was passed out next to the bath tub last time I checked," she continues, and motions for Jake to just go ahead and throw the stick. "Not that I blame her. I kind of wanted to pass out next to the bathtub, too."

It's been astonishingly hot--worse, if her memory is right, than when she'd arrived last year--and Nerys has taken up the equatorial Bajoran habit of taking a nap in the heat of midday. While she's always found it makes her sticky and groggy every time she wakes up, it's not as if there's a ton of useful activities she can do in that period, and it's always good to have more energy in the twilight hours.

She's just getting past the bleary-eyed stage when there's a knock at her door. It's a rare enough occurrence that she hustles, frantically peeling strips of hair away from her face and back behind her ears before she opens up. "Veronica, hey," she says, and is glad that her friend probably won't judge her disheveled state too much. "What's in the po--ohhhhhh."

And Nerys starts to grin. "Time to cook?"

"If it's a bad time, I can come back," Veronica replies, and looks down to the pot as she swings it around to clasp in both hands. It's obvious enough that Nerys had been asleep, but none of them are looking exactly glamorous these days.

Except maybe Peggy and Stella. Those two are working some kind of magic.

"I'd say I was worried about the supplies going bad, but isn't that kind of what we want?" Or maybe that's just fruit. "The truth is, I just couldn't lay around being hot anymore."

Nerys has never looked glamorous even on her best days, even when making a conscious effort. Perhaps one of the most disconcerting things about her mirror universe counterpart had been that she was so skilled at looking attractive--but then again, she's pretty sure that she herself has the better set of overall priorities.

"Well, we'll need some kind of yeast, it needs to ferment. But first we need to get enough sugars for it to do that..." Nerys makes a face as she realizes what the next steps are.

"Aw, shit, Veronica...we need to heat it up. Not quite boiling, but it needs to cook for a while. As if we aren't all cooking enough already."

"At this point, it's so hot I don't even know that it would make that much of a difference," Veronica replies with a soft little laugh. "I mean, if we're already boiling..." She shrugs, the handle of the pot clanking.

"You think it would be safe enough to leave it? Like, go for a swim or find some shade or something while it cooks?"

"True, though the thought of starting a cookfire makes me feel even warmer somehow." Nerys sighs, chewing on her lip as she thinks about it. "Well, if we make the fire and don't go too far away from it, I think it'll be okay. Just don't want it to boil down and burn, and then we'll have to explain why we ruined a pot by cooking scraps soup."

She snorts laughter as well. "Not to mention we wouldn't have anything to show for our booze efforts. But you know, if we go down by the pond, we don't just have water to keep topping up the pot, but somewhere to cool off while the fire's going. Sound like a plan?"

"Like starting a campfire?" Veronica asks, and then can't help a full laugh, her shoulders hitching forward with the sound. "I mean, if we're going to do this, might as well go full hillbilly and cook it over a fire in the woods." Not to mention that, yeah, it really would be a bummer to come back and discover they had to start over from scratch.

"That would be a good place," Veronica nods, sobering a little. "It's cleared out a little because of the rocks. So, far enough from the trees for the fire to be safe, but we wouldn't stink anybody out like if we did it by the dock."

"Hillbilly?" Nerys asks, though she's sort of picking the meaning up from context. There are backwoods folk on Bajor, plenty of them--they'd made for some good scouts and guerrilla fighters, when you could convince them to join a group. Emphasis on when, seeing as Bajorans don't tend to go that completely off the grid unless they're utter iconoclasts.

"It's probably not going to smell too bad," she theorizes, though the pot is letting off a vegetal aroma that might get unpleasant if they don't start cooking it. Also, Nerys' definition of 'not too bad' is probably not equivalent to that of Veronica. "Sorta like soup, probably. It'll only really reek if it burns."

She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand, squinting up at the sun to judge the time. "Fuck, it's hot. Let's get moving before we pass out from the heat. There are worse ways to spend a summer afternoon, we could be hoeing the garden or something."

"Yeah, like..." Veronica trails off, trying to think of a way to describe a hillbilly without sounding like the pampered suburban teen queen that she is. "Someone who lives in the woods— The hills. They shoot their supper and make their own booze." Which is apparently all of them in this place now.

She hefts the pot and heads back out to the road, waiting for Nerys to follow, glad for the sunglasses she got in her last creepy-but-useful gift box. If only there had been a bikini in there, too.

"I feel bad for Mark, trying to keep everything from dying," she says with a little frown, thinking of last winter's struggle to keep everyone fed.

"Oh, okay, like," Nerys says a word in Bajoran, "back home. Though it's not exactly a way I ever thought I'd be living." She laughs, with a faint shake of her head. "Expectations, I guess. And if we can make our own booze, then maybe that makes things a little less crappy." Okay, maybe more that it makes people forget that things are quite as crappy as they are, but they can't exactly be choosy.

She closes the door behind her, then grabs a couple of the curtain-towels hanging on the washline outside her house--fortunately they dry fast in this weather--before following Veronica up the road. "Mark doesn't seem to ever catch a break," she agrees. "Either it's too cold or too hot, there's too much rain or not enough. I mean, even without climate control technology, I'm pretty sure farming isn't always this difficult, right?"

Not that Vee will know much about it, either.

"I mean, I'm not exactly an expert on farming and I have no idea what things are like in the future, but where I was from, the weather was definitely less of a pain in the ass," Veronica answers with a roll of her eyes. "This place, it's like everything that's actually important has to be an uphill climb. Pet dogs and Christmas sweaters, those we get handed to us, but having enough food for the winter, we have to deal with this." Hands full, she casts a glance toward the brutally bright sky.

"It really makes you wonder, these people -- If they are people, the ones keeping us here... If we royally screwed up, would they actually let us starve?"

Nerys, even after the amount of time she's spent here, still misses a good half of the references many people use (what exactly defines a sweater as being 'Christmas'--and, for that matter, the point of that holiday, seeing as she's had three or four different explanations of its 'true meaning'), but she gets the gist of what Vee is going for. "It's pretty classic psychological manipulation," she says, "with some variations. I saw the Cardassians do it sometimes, when they felt like putting in an effort to break someone. As for the presents, there's a human saying, something about a root vegetable and a stick?"

She ducks underneath a low-hanging branch before it can smack her in the face. The shade feels good, or at least marginally less oppressive in the heat. "Would they let us starve...is a good question," she muses, after a moment or two of walking. "I guess that depends on how much they want us alive, and for what."

Cougar's on the front porch when he hears footsteps behind him, his hat pulled low over his face. To some, it might look like he's sleeping in the shaded area, but he hasn't been able to sleep in this heat since the sun started to stay up in the sky and he's not sure it's going to change. He doesn't need to look since he already knows who it is by the footsteps, but he uses his thumb to tip his hat up a little, anyway.

"I'm coming with you," is all he says, heat-logged and energy-sapped. It might be different if he could sleep, but the sleeping pills he's been hiding away haven't been touched and neither has the alcohol in the cellar, as if Cougar just needs to out-stubborn his insomnia.

"You're gonna have to get your own towel," Veronica replies as she steps past him and down the steps. She doesn't slow; even going to grab a towel first, even in this heat, he'll catch up quickly enough.

And of course he does, not bothering with the towel, although it occurs to Veronica that in this heat, he could probably drip dry in five minutes flat.

"Hopefully it won't be too crowded down there," she adds, conversationally. Not that she'll be deterred if it is.

In this heat, towels are just one more layer that he doesn't have to deal with. Despite his hair being at its longest in years, Cougar still intends to shake it out, half like the animal his namesake boasts to be. It's too hot for any of that and as he follows after her, he feels like his limbs are melting into the ground, like he'll stick to it soon enough.

"Maybe people will be lazy," he suggests, because he had been, until she'd come along. Sweat is already beading and rolling down his back and he reaches down to yank off the tank top, lifting his hat to do it, because it's too hot. He drapes it over a shoulder as he settles his hat back on, tucking hair behind his ears. "I miss air conditioning," he complains, as if that had been a steady thing for him back home. Really, Bolivia had been just like this, which is why Cougar had stopped wearing a shirt in general, his sacred heart tattoo the only thing apart from bare skin on show.

"I think I could do without the A/C if it just felt less like I was living in the Sahara," Veronica replies, and dabs the towel against her hairline. "I keep trying to remember when it was so cold it felt like my fingers were going to freeze off. Like if I can focus on that extreme, this one won't seem so bad." Except that it really isn't working.

"Did you see Aretha passed out in the bathroom? I think she likes the tile. I couldn't get her to move."

Cougar grunts his assertion that he'd seen the dog. He's not sure where Jake had taken Baby off to, but he suspects that it's somewhere in the woods near the river, as if that would somehow cool them off. The shade would help, but right now, he just wishes they had a way to shave all the fur off. "Need to get the fur off her, just like I took it off Jake," he says, smirking a little vindictively with the pride of having made that awful goatee-turned-beard go away, at least temporarily.

"I still like heat more than cold," he admits. "It's the sun," he says, with a dark glare upwards. "The sun is the real problem." It's why he isn't sleeping, why his nightmares are creeping into his waking moments, and why he's worried something is going to go very wrong soon.

"Yeah," Veronica agrees with a squint of her own toward the sky. "I stopped expecting things here to make sense a long time ago, but this may be the most fucked up thing to happen yet."

When she's sitting on her bed at night, restless and rereading her notes, it's occurred to her more than once that whoever put them here might be sending a message, and it might be more than what it seems on the surface. Yeah, the sun being up all the time is miserable, but it also makes a person ask bigger questions about the place.

"I used to think I preferred cold to heat because at least in winter you can put on more layers or start a fire or whatever. Then we went through last winter. Now I'm pretty sure they both just suck."

Sighing, she pulls at her ponytail, tightening it. "What do you think it means? The sun."

He thinks it means that whoever is trying to control them in this place has a very sick sense of humour, but also knows how to effectively torture someone. He's seen it work before, once you deprive someone of their sleep and their sanity for so long, they will tell you everything. He's not at that point just yet, but Cougar is starting to think that if he has to go another week or so in this place, he's going to break.

"It means something is going to happen," he says, with sureness. "We will not be ready," he adds, his paranoia rampant. Then again, something always happens. Lightning, floods, hail, something always happens. "Too little sleep, too much heat, we will just take what happens." Maybe that's the point, making them complacent for whatever they send next, whether a demon or more weather or something else.

"We're never ready," Veronica points out, although the idea of what he's talking about makes the pit of her stomach clench. She can't deny it -- It isn't just the oppressive heat that's making it feel like the other shoe is going to drop. It's just statistics.

"I just hope whatever it is, nobody dies this time," she adds, her mouth settling into a line, focus diligently on the dusty road ahead of them.

He feels more ready, usually, but right now, he feels more like he's about to splinter in ways that he hasn't in a long time. The glue he's using to keep himself appearing together is starting to melt, in this heat, and he hopes that only Jake is around to see him if (more likely when) he slips. "Too much death," he agrees, his voice hoarse, because in a war, it's understandable.

Here, it's lightning and it's monsters, demons that shouldn't be taking lives, especially in peace time. "And you?" he prods, because he has immediate concerns that come before the rest of the village. "How are you?"

"Hot," Veronica immediately answers, and softly laughs. "Annoyed. But I guess I've been worse." At least in the way that Cougar means.

"Kira and I, we're trying to put together... Well, they're not actually baskets, but sort of like a welcome basket for the poor bastards who come through the fountain. Some info, a few necessities we've been able to scrounge. Turns out raging against the machine is a lot less cathartic than it first seems, so we might as well be productive members of our pseudo-society."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Gonna burn those blue suede shoes; [OTA & 2 Closed Starters]

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