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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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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?"

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 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.

"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.

"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."

Cougar snorts, because if he comes here, he's not going to make it far. Rifle or no, he'll make sure to find some kind of weapon and take Max out before he can inflict himself on the village. Quick and quiet, in a way that no one has to know about. That's what being a Loser means, sometimes.

"You have your lizards and robots," Cougar says. "I hope they don't come here."

"Yeah, if they come here, we're probably fucked," Raleigh agrees. "Still, they need an ocean to come up through the breach. No ocean as far as I can tell here."

As much as Raleigh has been able to discern, it seems like they're enclosed into a canyon. That means that there's some natural protection from kaiju, at least, so he doesn't have to worry about that.

"Who says fountain is not an ocean?" is Cougar's calm response, because after what they've seen so far in the scant few hours they've been here, he's not ready to rule anything out. Whatever strange lizard creatures this man is running from, Cougar wants to be ready.

"Is that what Army does now? Fights lizards? No war?"

"The PPDC fights the kaiju. Bigger threat than some petty squabbles between countries," Raleigh points out. "Of course, I don't doubt that North Korea still wants to blow America off the map, some things never change, but right now we've got bigger issues."

His world is a strange one and he recognizes that. Before K-day, Raleigh hadn't paid that much attention to the news but it was a hell of a lot of wars and fighting all over. Now there's only one war.

There's always an enemy, thinks Cougar. Sometimes, it's big enough that whole countries band together to fight it and these big lizards sound like they're definitely enough of something to merit more than one country in the mix.

"How do the robots work?" he asks, because while he's not the machines guy, he still has a healthy curiosity for weapons of all kinds -- even if it's not the kind you can turn around and bet in a poker game.

"You've got two pilots," Raleigh explains. "Because you control it with a neural interface and it's too much for just one person. It has to be someone that you can sync perfectly with and not everyone is equipped for it. My first co-pilot was my brother. We were...unstoppable."

Until Raleigh got cocky, of course, but that's not a story for right now. Right now, he's just explaining how jaegers work and it is pretty cool from a scientific perspective.

"Once you drift together and sync your brains, one of the pilots controls the right side and one controls the left. My body movements move the limbs of the jaeger, if that makes sense?"

He thinks about his team and that experience with them, syncing minds in order to work together for something bigger. Pooch? Yes. He could handle it easily with Pooch. They're both sensible and calm and even with their fair share of mischief. Clay? Aisha? The thing would explode before they even took a step.

(He refuses to even think about Roque)

He pales, though, to think of syncing with Jensen like that. "Mierda," he says, paling as he thinks of all the things he might never look at again if he did that. "You know everything in their minds?"

"Yeah, everything," Raleigh says, giving the other guy a shrug. "So it has to be someone you really trust and know really well." Hearing him curse, too, gives him another bit of information about Cougar - apparently he speaks Spanish.

"Hablo espanol, Raleigh tosses out. "If you ever want to use it. I picked it up in Peru since I was there for a while."

The relief that floods him is a welcome feeling. He appreciates Jake being there to translate his silences and his expressions for him, but fluent Spanish always makes him feel more comfortable and it's not like Jensen is here to work at his silences or Pooch there to have conversations with him in his limited Spanish. He's alone and can't help wanting to hear his mother tongue. "Es mi primera lengua, cuánto tiempo pasó en Perú."

"Tres años más o menos," Raleigh says, grinning a little. "It was decent enough time, even though I was too busy trying to save the world to really go and enjoy the sights or anything like that."

"So, any time you want to speak Spanish, I'm good. I know Japanese too. That one is a little harder to pick up, though."

"No Japanese," Cougar says, gesturing to himself. In a pinch, he thinks that one of the other Losers might have mustered something up, but he'd have been lost. Pashto? He can do. Russian, he can even get the basics, but Japanese is Greek. So to speak. "What is Peru like, in your world?"

He wonders if it is the giant lizards or the robots that have laid claim to the country. He also wonders how he can suggest that either of them go after Max, if he's sitting in the same universe, somehow.

"Right now, bit of a mess. Kaiju hit Lima hard," Raleigh admits. "Gorgeous place though and the people don't give a shit about the kaiju destroying things. They just keep rebuilding."

In the US, most of the coastal cities have been abandoned. Not so in South America and the Far East - there's a lot more rebuilding in defiance of kaiju attacks, daring them to come back and take their land.

Last time he had seen Lima had been a flyover to get to the inner countries where people needed things blown up and people shot. Cougar's very good at the shooting people part, but it turns out he's not so good with the part where he's stuck in a place because a fountain spat him out.

He wrinkles his nose with distaste, but maybe the rebuilding is the sort of hope they need here. "Why do you think we're here?" he asks, because it's the question he's not asking. Why not ask now?

"No idea. I know that it's pulled us all from different places and most of us had a damned good reason we were in those places," Raleigh says. "I sure didn't want to leave my post to come here and I'm pretty sure you didn't want to either."

It didn't make sense. They were all from different walks of life, different countries, different versions of the world. How had they come here? How had they all been brought together? Was it calculated or was it by chance?