sixthiterationlogs | Event/open; c'est quand on vit dans une poubelle

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Event/open; c'est quand on vit dans une poubelle

WHO: René Vallières
WHERE: 7thi
WHEN: Throughout the day
OPEN TO: All!
WARNINGS: None so far, will update

i. ꜰᴏᴏᴅ; near house 75
He wasn't expecting this when he first woke up. René wasn't expecting anything in this village to be easy, either, but he heads to the kitchen, groggy from not sleeping properly, in a daze that, in a perfect world, he could fix with copious amounts of coffee. This is not a perfect world, and René presses the heels of his palms into his eyes to wake himself up, and once he rounds to the kitchen for a glass of water what he sees has him up and awake instantly.

That is definitely the window open. That is definitely a fox looking pointedly at him on the kitchen table, and that is absolutely the fox with his bowl of peaches in his mouth. The entire bowl, the fox's mouth picking up the kitchenware, not the individual pieces of food. René says the only thing he really can.

"Good morning?" How did the window magically open?

His question seems to have angered the fox and--did he wink? No, that's absolutely impossible, but the fox definitely jumps from the table to the window and takes off. René stares, gobsmacked, before his reflexes finally kick in and he bolts out as well, stopping in the middle of the road when the animal's too far ahead to feasibly catch.

"What?"

ii. ᴄʜᴀsᴇ; near fountain
It happens again midday. Not with food, but with his backpack--just his backpack, nothing's in it, thank god--and the moment the fox darts between his legs with it, René is at least prepared this time. Sort of.

What follows is a myriad of cursewords leaving René's mouth, none of them in English and one in German thanks to Aurora's influence, and the young spy bolting as quickly as he can after it. There's more than just one, he realizes. He's curving towards the fountain, half expecting the fox to be leading him some where, when he calls out to someone in the corner of his eye that he's sure is another person and not another fox.

"Grab grab grab grab!"

iii. ᴘʀᴏʙʟᴇᴍ; steps of the inn
It's not night, not yet, but René has decided he's very much done with today. He's done with the village in general, especially the foxes, though his frustration has peaked and now plateaued into a simmering annoyance with absolutely everything, especially animals of the canine variety.

It used to be small, yippy dogs where his least favourite animal. Foxes are now squarely number one on the 'please exterminate' list. At least he got his backpack back.

Except, as René gets up from his rest on the steps of the inn, he feels something clamp around his leg. Not enough to bleed, but tight enough to get a grip on, and it's--

--oh, Christ. It's a fox. René shakes his leg. Nothing happens. He repeats it once, twice, three times. The fox is latched firmly onto his leg. Slowly, sighing, he tries to walk. He staggers, just a bit, trying to adjust to the animal weight, and resigns himself to dragging the thing up to the inn. Maybe a glass of water on it's head will scare it off... Or maybe that will cause the fox to bite his leg off.

Either way, he'll be rid of it.

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Her heart felt like it stopped in her chest when she saw Renee's dark hair and scowl. In the fading light and relative distance, for a moment, she believes that he has finally come to the village. Weeks of waiting and praying and the figure she had ached for had at last been drawn through the fountain. Without thinking, she darted forward, nearly wrapping her arms around him in utter joy before reality, and his current state, hit her.

There was a fox clamped on his leg, small but holding firm to him. "Cesare-" the name died in her throat. On closer inspection, while he had similar features to her beloved brother, it was nothing more than a resemblance. It wasn't him, this was some stranger. Some stranger with a fox attached to his leg.

"Forgive me," she tried to brush off her embarrassment. Grabbing a stick from the ground, she smacked at the fox's back. "Did you attack its young?" Why else would the creature be like this?

René notices things. He notices tells and tics, he notices lies and differentiates them from the truth. Even before Camp X, even before the war, he was trained to do this. A journalist out on his own, visiting Paris--visiting France--and hungry for something to write about that wasn't just entertainment. He had gotten his wish, unfortunately.

He doesn't notice the other, doesn't notice the wrong name. It's very hard to focus on things like words when there's a fox attached to his leg. René has just given up, which goes against every fiber of his being, but it had been happening all day. Even a pretty blonde can't shake him out of his slump.

"Forgiven," he murmurs, full of wit despite the situation, and he's rather surprised when such a dainty young girl actually manages to fend the fox off. Long enough that he can shake out his leg, anyway, and he lets out what can only be described as a huff.

"All day. All day, they've bene like this, since waking." That's the answer to her attacking the young comment. He offers a slight grin.

"Thank you. You saved me more torment than you can imagine."

He may not look exactly like Cesare, but the similarities are enough to make her heart hurt. For a brief moment, it felt as if she wasn't really alone, that she had someone who understood her and could weigh against the villagers from the future full of words and ideas that were beyond her, as well as the mysteries this place possessed.

But none of this was his fault. He was a victim of the strange occurrences as much as she was, if not more. There was no fox attached to her skirt. There didn't seem to be any grievous harm done, though it was possible that there were bite marks that she didn't see.

She tossed the stick to the side and pulled open the door, letting him in first before the fox came back. "Thank me after we clean and dress your wounds. Fox teeth are sharp. Here, sit down and let me fetch some water."

This place does a number on his internal clock, slowly but surely dragging him from night-owl to someone who rises and retreats with the sun. There's only so much work he can do by fire and moonlight, and waving around the woods with a torch sounds like asking for trouble. No one's--well, probably, no one's seen a Wendigo ever and there was some mass-hysteria in the depths of winter with dwindling food supplies--but there are clearly things here. Mostly badger-type-things, a fucking bull moose, apparently, but he doesn't want to run afoul of either in the dark.

Getting up with the sun also gives him time to hike toward civilization for a few hours before attending his business closer to home. His friend from outside logical time and his preferred hemisphere of the globe has apparently moved down the road, and it isn't entirely strange to see him on the walk.

It is a bit strange to see him half-dressed, half-awake, and shouting down the path. "Ay," he calls ahead, "Luc!" He stretches his arms up over his head as he walks, shifting under his pack, settling his shoulders as he draws even. "What's going on?"

Owen. René likes Owen, enough that he feels a little guilty for giving him a false name. What a pair they make, from two different halves of the world, trying to find some semblance of sanity in this world. There is none, René's beginning to think. It's senseless.

As illustrated: René gestures with both hands to the road in front of him, fox having disappeared beyond the horizon, and then to his window, open with its curtain fluttering. Another back to the horizon, and then an exasperated shrug.

"A fox. A smart fox. Just--" another hand gesture, this time of the rude variety. "-up and took my breakfast."

"There have been a lot of them recently," he agrees, though when he thinks about it--it's only been on this side of the divide. Maybe they're finding a better time of it and migrated over here, maybe they have some kind of territory shifting from further on the shore than anyone's gone.

Looking down the path, he follows it back toward Luc's house, the door still open, and realizes the man means took it from inside. Strange as this place is, he'd expect wildlife to behave like--wildlife. Foxes might scavenge from garbage, or get used to people enough to take offerings, but this seems extreme.

"That's odd, that it would go to the trouble. I haven't seen or smelled any kind of fire that would drive them into town. Sure you didn't just have another long night on a rooftop," he asks, brows lifting over a poorly repressed smile.

Wanda was about to leave when she heard the man behind her shout. Before questioning his motives she turned and grabbed at the fox holding the backpack tightly in it's jaw.

At a later date, she wished she would have thought this through because foxes have claws and she could feel them searing against her arms as she struggled with the furry creature.

The scuffle was short lived. Wanda had managed to grab the backpack but there were thin scratch marks running up and down her arms, along her shoulders and one across the flat of her abdomen where the fox had ripped through her tank top.

"Damn fox." Her accent was thick as she assessed the state of her arms.

It's more than he could have asked for. The young woman had grabbed the fox, quick as you please, and just as René heads towards her the creature struggles a little too much, determined to let go.

"The backpack was not worth those scratches," he comments, breathing heavily with the effort he'd just had to exert in his sprint. "Tiens, come here, are you alright? Thank you of course, but--" he glances over the other's abdomen, concerned, "--let me help you get that cleaned up."

Wanda had reacted and her lack of forethought showed. She looked over at the man and rolled her shoulders in a shrug. There was no changing what had already happened though that was likely the last time that Wanda tried to grab an animal that was running away.

She passed the empty backpack back to him before looking down at the array of cuts. If they were able to scab and not get infected then she'd be fine. "Thank you. Do you have any linen?" Or anything that she could use as a bandage to keep out infection. Wanda was used to getting hurt but she hadn't had to treat every cut or bruise growing up. This place was different and the lack of medicine meant that any small cut could be deadly.

What made it worse was that the medicines she had were on the other side of the breech.

She shrugs, like getting mauled by a fox is normal--maybe the wounds aren't that deep, but René is thinking disease and blood loss and every single worst case scenario. Old habits die hard, apparently.

"Some clean linen," he says quickly, "That will have to do. Come--" He gestures for the other to head up the road.

"To my house. This backpack was definitely not worth this."

It wasn't that getting mauled by a fox was normal. Just that Wanda was used to worse injuries and thin scratches like this didn't faze her like they used too. Her fingers flexed slowly as she tested small muscles moments. Only her skin ached which meant that the cuts hadn't been deep.

"Okay." Wanda turned to follow him and for a few moments, she's silent. "I hadn't known it was a backpack." If she had then she might not have reached for it.

"I just reacted when I heard you."

Jean-luc has been interested in the other village ever since he's first heard about. Admittedly, he'd meant to get around to visiting a good deal sooner than he had. But to be fair he also hadn't quite expected to be sidelined as badly as he had by the plague that had been running through the village. But it has, at least, been and gone, and that's reason enough for him to actually begin to explore a little more.

Finding it to be all but swarming with foxes is... unexpected. Not particularly out of what he'd consider to be the ordinary, but not something he'd expected. To say nothing of the fact that what he considers to be ordinary and what anyone else might consider to be ordinary are too very different things. (And at least it's only foxes - he can think of a number of things that would be worse, or at least harder to deal with.)

On the other hand, he's pretty sure that backpacks aren't something are usually the sort of thing foxes are interested in. Better still, he is close enough to hear René's frantic call, and even before he's managed to put together that René must be the owner of the backpack in question he's already bending to grab the creature.

And promptly misses the fox, but does manage to get a hand on the backpack, although wresting it from the fox's jaws is going to be another matter entirely, especially given that it's latched on hard enough to still be hanging on when Jean-luc straightens back up and never mind that it means that all four of the fox's limbs are off the ground.

At last! The backpack is grabbed, even if it's a struggle, and just as it's finally wrestled from the beast, René catches up.

"Thank you, thank you," he mumbles---apparently he needs to repeat himself today--and he takes it from the other with a grateful nod of his head.

He hasn't seen him before--he's shorter than him but most people are shorter than René. He holds himself with authority, and if René didn't admit that he was instantly reminded of Duncan Sinclair, he'd be lying.

"They've been doing this all day. I thought this side of the village was supposed to be quieter."

There's a nod at René's comment, but other than that he hands over the backpack without so much as a second thought. Or a question as to what - if anything - might happen to be in the backpack in question. After all, it's hardly any of his business what anyone happens to be carrying around. Even if he can't deny a bit of well-hidden curiosity.

"Supposed to be, perhaps. But I can't imagine that trying to convince them of that fact is going to go over well."

Mostly because not even he knows anyone who's capable of communicating with animals, much less having it actually be productive. And short of building a temporary wall between the two settlements - something that's easier said than done - he can't think of a whole lot that can be done to keep the foxes contained to one of the two settlements.

Although that said, he's not ruling out the possibility of there being something that can be done all the same.

On the list of things that Graves expected to happen this evening, seeing a man come into the inn with a fox latched onto his leg is not one of them. Distracted from his own thoughts for a few moments, Graves only watches, before he hands him a glass of water. Food is a precious commodity these days, and while water is even more so, they can spare a glass of it nonetheless.

This is a new face, he notes -- he likes to think that he's seen most of the other villagers around here and there, with few exceptions, but this is one he hasn't so much as come across before.

"Here."

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Event/open; c'est quand on vit dans une poubelle

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