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WHO: Cougar Alvarez
WHERE: Bungalow #22
WHEN: July 2nd - Day After Arrival
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: n/a
STATUS: Closed

It takes Cougar two tries down the well before he gives up. The sirens and the windstorm force him to move on and make nice in the inn, but when things clear up and the sun rises on another day, Cougar slings his pack over his shoulder and heads out to explore the rest of the strange settlement they seem to be in the middle of.

It's quiet.

Normally, Cougar likes the quiet. He's a taciturn man himself, preferring signals and gestures over words, but this is an eerie kind of quiet that he doesn't like. The homes are empty and that means something drove everyone out, but for Cougar's life, he can't figure out where they went. He tries to go to the edge of the cliffs, but he can't climb the sheer face. Returning back to the village, he finds a dark green bungalow near a forked path and knows that if he wants to get a better view, he needs to be in a sniper's nest.

More than that, he's going to need to set up base. Throwing his bag to the roof, he grabs for the porch and starts to lever himself up, using the windows and the shingles of the roof to scuttle his way along until he's managed to free-run himself up to the apex of the roof. He tugs his bag along with him (stuffed with a few berries he'd found on his exploration) and settles down at the top. High above everything, he feels at home even in this strange place.

He sits, cross-legged, and chews on some of the berries as he stares at the streets that wind below him. He'd prefer to be much, much higher, but this will do for now as he stakes his claim on this house as a base and keeps an eye on all the vantage points around.

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"That could definitely be helpful." Just in the quick survey Veronica had done of their rag-tag group, she got the impression that Cougar was definitely not the only one capable of hunting in the group, but if they were going to feed everybody, they needed all the help they could get.

"Do you have a way of kill—" Her tongue revolted on her, pressing briefly to the roof of her mouth. "Catching them?"

He raises his brow and notes the way that she stumbles on the word 'kill'. He thinks it might be the same if he spoke more and had to talk about fire or helicopters, but he's spoken even less since Bolivia and only the other Losers would know. He leans back to lift up the oblong stones that he's fetched -- enough to stun a bird.

The kitchen knife will do the job of ending their lives. With this and the farm animals nearby, he thinks he could feed at least three or four. "You don't like to eat meat?" he guesses, at her reaction.

"Cougar," is all he replies with, letting his first and last name remain a mystery to these people. Names don't go on comms and names don't have to be known here, but he takes in Raleigh Becket's name carefully, catalogues it with the rest, and wonders who this man is. He's not anyone that Cougar's seen before, which could be a very good or a very bad thing.

He hefts another pinecone in his hand, up and down, and eyes him carefully. "What did you find? Anything?"

"Not a whole hell of a lot," Sam replies with a certain degree of resignation. "It's more like what I haven't found. No signs of people outside of us have been in here in years, the place seems to be of the same technology my grandparents' parents would have used, and the pipes are shit."

It's negative, most of it, so he adds, "Plenty of shelter though and there's a river that might be useful for fresh water in the meantime. There are some tools in the kitchens and such but most of it is barely sharp enough to cut through butter let alone be used for hunting or even eating with."

What Cougar wants to know is who was there before. There's civilization and there's evidence that they've been gone for a time. What he wants to know is what drove them out and how they got out, because there are always signs when something goes bad and there's a body count. Teeth, bones, graves.

He hasn't found any of that, which makes it even more worrisome. Maybe there's just another fountain waiting for them. "Worried about someone coming to hurt you?" Cougar asks, raising his brow.

"Not much. What did you learn from the test? That my big head makes a great target?" That, at least, gets a laugh out of him and a shake of his head. Raleigh can laugh at himself, though not as much as he used to back when. Back before Yancy, he laughed a lot. Now those laughs are a little more rare and fleeting.

"I could have told you that without any real life experimentation." Yancy had used it as one often enough. Still, it's said with a smile. He's in a decent mood in spite of being used for target practice. The guy has a little bit of an accent and he wonders where it's from.

"Where are you from? You know, before this place?"

Cougar's learned that Raleigh Becket has enough patience not to come vaulting up a one and a half story building to get revenge on a man playing with pinecones. That he's good natured enough to strike up a conversation. That he would probably make a good ally.

"Around," is his answer to the question, because even with all that Cougar's learned, he still isn't very good at trusting anyone. "You?"

"Around," Raleigh says in response, laughing a little. "Spent some time stationed in Lima, in Anchorage, in Hong Kong...all along the Pacific coast." Most Rangers don't get to choose their assignments and Raleigh had been among those. He'd gone where he was needed.

The weather in Lima had been a hell of a lot nicer than Alaska but Raleigh had kind of liked the snow and the cold. It made the world seem pure again, somehow, and untainted by the kaiju. It's something he likes about Hong Kong too, the way humanity fights against the kaiju and just keeps building there.

"Your turn. What constitutes around for you?"

"Bolivia. Afghanistan. LA." He could keep going on until Cougar had named more than half the countries on the planet, but he's not sure what he'd done had counted as anything but passing by. He remembers Lima and Hong Kong, but only briefly. Their work had been in the lesser known parts, the ones you hear about on the news, after.

He raises his brow at the Pacific coast, because he'd rather talk about that than himself. "Why Pacific?"

"No, that's not it," Veronica replied with a shake of her head, and looked briefly away. It wasn't that she necessarily minded talking about J.D., it just wasn't that easy to explain. Never mind that it made her look like a terrible person, and truth or not, she'd rather not point out her own awfulness this early.

She squinted back up at Cougar. "I just kind of went through a thing before I got here," she tried with an ineffectual motion of one hand. "People died. It wasn't fun."

Raleigh laughs. "You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you," he admits. He doesn't know if kaiju and Jaegers are a thing with everyone else or not so he's kept it to himself for now.

"I was in a defense unit, part of a multi-national coalition. It put me all around the Rim," he explains. That, at least, makes a little more sense. Possibly.

He raises his eyebrow and thinks that people die all the time. What does it mean for him when people die and nothing impacts you anymore, nothing but twenty-five little angelitos. He keeps his face steady, but if Jensen were there, he would know what the thought does to him in how he briefly falters in the slight widening of his eyes.

"Good people?" is all he eventually ends up asking.

He shrugs, because he doesn't know what he will and won't believe, if he's completely honest. After Max, after all that technology, after being betrayed by someone he'd have died for, he thinks he would believe a lot. "Enemy?" he asks suspiciously, because if every country had banded together, they had to be fighting something. Something big.

Something as evil as a man trying to suck up the world in the name of...whatever Max stands for, really.

"Huge one," Raleigh agrees. "My version of the world, monsters rise up out of the Pacific and attack the shore. It's not a place you want to be, in the kaiju kill zone. It's exactly where I threw myself. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's sitting back and doing nothing. As soon as the defense corps started up, my brother and I volunteered."

Ranger school back then had been a bunch of hopefuls with no idea what they were getting into. Raleigh had just wanted a chance to fight back, to do what he was best at with the person he loved most. It'd turned out to be the perfect motivation and the perfect team.

"I'm always going to be the first one between people and danger, if I can help it."

Cougar gives a slight scoff and ducks his head to hide his amusement. It's the exact kind of thing that Jensen would love, though probably only until an actual creature rose out of the ocean and started to destroy things. Then, your Godzilla fantasies had to fall apart a little, he thinks.

At least, if nothing else, these things have brought the countries together. "Would do the same," he admits, even if he's sure a sniper wouldn't be much use against the things the man is describing. He shakes his head.

"Snukes would've been good for you to have," he realizes, wondering how something so awful and terrible would have worked out so perfectly for someone else.

Veronica stills, watching Cougar for a long moment. It's a telling question, one that shines a lot of light on his moral flexibility. She'd be lying if she said it wasn't a little worrying.

"Misguided people," she answers, because not even Heather truly deserved to be described as a bad person. They were all just kids and kids do stupid shit; she's living proof of that.

"They didn't deserve to die."

In his experience, there are plenty who deserve to die and many who don't. He doesn't get to judge the people he's never met, so he'll have to take Veronica's word for it, even though a part of him wants to know for himself if they ever would have wound up in his scope. "People die," is what he says evenly, without much emotion. "Doesn't matter who deserves it. Just that it happens."

And then you have to move on. Or, if you're like Cougar, you have ridiculous amounts of night terrors and give people black eyes when they try and wake him up.

"Snukes? Sniper nukes, I'm guessing?" Raleigh remembers K-Day. He remembers how it'd taken ten days and the destruction of the entire Bay area to take down Trespasser. That area is still uninhabitable to this day due to the nuclear fallout.

"Not sure it would have helped. Nukes just tend to annoy them more than take them out. Direct strikes are better but, again, I'm biased. I like getting in a giant robot and punching danger in the face."

Cougar shakes his head, trying to figure out how to explain what had been described to him. He shuffles to the edge of the room and sits there with his legs hanging over, seemingly uncaring about how far down it would be to fall. With his hands, he makes a large shape with both hands that shrinks down into a fist, singular.

"Takes everything," he says. "Sucks it up to nothing. Little dot," he says, that fist now a pinch. "Would take your monster, make it a lizard." Seems like a good solution to him, but he can't argue with the benefit of going to punch something. He raises a brow, though, sizing up Raleigh. "Giant robot?" he echoes, wondering if his English is failing him or if he'd really heard that right.

"That's bullshit," Veronica immediately says, frowning. The cool way he says it stings like a betrayal. Even in English, he sounds indifferent, but this matters to her. It ought to matter to everyone, and not in the holding hands, cleansing meditation way Miss Flem was always trying to push down their throats. They're human beings, they deserve dignity. They deserve people actually giving a shit when they're no longer alive.

"You don't know anything about it. Don't imply I shouldn't care about whether people are murdered. That's basic fucking human decency," she says, and swallows hard, trying to decide whether she wants to just keep on walking.

Edited 2016-07-21 07:05 (UTC)

He raises his brow at her when she reacts the way she does, knowing that he can't keep his past a secret. He also doesn't want to be this far when they talk. Holding onto one of the eaves, Cougar gracefully slides down and drops from the roof to the ground, where he can be face to face as he talks to her. "I'm a sniper," he says, calmly and evenly. To him, death and murder are two different things. Murder doesn't come from orders. Murder is what happens in Bolivia when you put children before yourself and see twenty-five futures go up in flames. It's taking out a former teammate because you have no other choice.

"If you don't accept that it happens to everyone, you go crazy," he says, his eyes glinting as intense as ever. "I know."

"Sounds like something we'd definitely need," Raleigh says. The idea of it pleases him and he wishes he was a scientist so he could figure out how to invent that kind of thing and bring it home. He thinks it might cut way down on casualties.

"Where did you run into it? Some scientist built it, I'm sure, but how hard was it to get?"

And would Raleigh be able to get out of here to get his hands on it. That was the bigger, unsaid question.

Cougar's face darkens as he thinks about how he'd had to kill a friend, nearly lost his hat (and his head), and how Pooch had been hurt. Everything about the snukes leads to more bad and he's not sure he likes the idea of going back to that just for one of them.

"Bad man," is all Cougar says, his face as dark and cloudy as it gets. "Max," is dripping with disdain and irritation, thinking of the children and their stolen lives and all the other bad Max had left for them.

Raleigh can see the cloud pass over his face and it's easy to see that this is something difficult to admit to for him. It's a piece of knowledge that Raleigh tucks away; he's collecting information about everyone as he meets them so he can get an idea of the dynamics of of this place.

"Hope he doesn't come here," he says, genuine and honest. "Hope that this place ends up being...well, safe enough. I think some of us have come from places that are in a lot of turmoil."

As much as some small, fiercely indignant part of her would have liked to stomp off, Veronica's glad when Cougar slides from the roof and forces her to look him in the eye. It isn't as if she knows him, not really, but he's been kind to her from the first moment she came sputtering out of that stupid fountain. He probably deserves the benefit of the doubt, to at least be heard out.

"Sorry," she says, and heaves a slow sigh as she looks away. "Sore subject. It's... a long and stupid story. I trusted somebody, and they turned out to be not a nice person."

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