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

[teen_angst_bullshit]

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.

Comments

[teen_angst_bullshit]

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."

[3ofswords]

"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?"

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"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."

[3ofswords]

"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."

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"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.

[3ofswords]

"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?"

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"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."

[3ofswords]

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."