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002 ♙ open

WHO: Jess Brightwell.
WHERE: The inn.
WHEN: Sept. 7th.
OPEN TO: Anyone!
WARNINGS: Doomsday prepping because rude, mother nature.
STATUS: Open.

Jess wasn't normally one to spend time idling around when he had a canyon to comb through, but the growing ferocity of the earthquakes had shifted his priorities in an abrupt. Getting caught in the forest during yesterday's quake and nearly pitching forward into some brambles on account of the buckling earth had made it abundantly clear these things were getting worse--and the next one could do actual damage.

To think he'd brushed off last week's as an overactive imagination. Hindsight was 20/20.

He really didn't care to find out how bad their living situation would get if the buildings caved in on their already meager stores, and to that end Jess was determinedly preparing the inn in case of the worst case scenario. Being a pessimist had its advantages.

Jess spent the better part of the morning lugging around water and filling up whatever would hold it, then moved on to the unoccupied rooms in the inn, going through each one and making it less of a potential deathtrap taking down mirrors and moving heavy or breakable objects off shelves. His own room had already gotten a makeover: he'd pushed his bed far from the window, moving the rest of the furniture out of the way so he wouldn't be likely to get crushed by a shelf in the middle of the night.

Better. Not great, but better.

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Sharp intelligence aside, there were some glaring differences between Raven and Thomas. Jess couldn't recall the big German swearing in English, or much at all, really. He tried to imagine Thomas declaring his excitement over a bunch of broken shit and couldn't do it, the image was too strange.

Repressing a laugh, he snorted in amusement and lifted himself higher on the balls of his feet so he could reach better. Some days he wished he had the other boy's insane height.

"History and literature are more my areas. You'd have to explain the nuances. Broken parts look like broken parts to me," he said. His searching fingers came away with nothing except paint flecks. Not surprising. Something would have to be bolted to a stud to avoid falling down, what with the inn rattling like an old tin can from the force of these tremors. "Nothing up there."

But as he lowered himself back down, he noticed something on the floor, next to the door frame's moulding. If he hadn't been facing the door, he would've missed it entirely.

"Wait... I think there's a key."

Maybe something had been up there, after all. He bent to collect it.

"You think?" She began, then stopped herself. Sometimes Jess made it easy for her to respond to him quickly with an immature retort. Something about him easily brought it out in her.

A key meant there was the possibility of discovery, and whether or not that could lead to answers about the inn and even their current circumstances, Raven wanted to unlock it. She knew, on some level, that a key was simply a key, and there was a lot of broken shit around the inn that it could easily unlock, giving non-answers included. But her curiosity often got the better of her when exploring the inn's rooms, and she wanted to see if she could locate another treasure like she had the typewriter sitting in her room.

She looked over at him, and her expression shifted into one of impatience. He didn't move fast enough. No one moved fast enough for Raven. "Bring it over here, Wordsmith. Let's see if you really did find a key."

Ignoring the taunting, Jess straightened with the key in his hand. She could wait a little.

Upon closer inspection, it wasn't the broken nail or bit of scrap metal his eye had thought it was from the periphery of his vision. Small and old-looking, the key looked like the kind a person would use on the rooms or a personal drawer, though Jess thought the shape was wrong to fit one of the doors. Made for something else, then.

"Must have been dislodged in the earthquake," he observed. Technically, it'd been his find but Raven had been the one to guide him in its direction, and so he turned and tossed it to her. "Was that what you were looking for?"

She caught it effortlessly, which surprised her. She didn't make it a point to show him that.

Looking over the key, she listened to him, and turned it over in her hands. She already knew the answer to his question. Much like a bird in flight, she didn't particularly search for anything in particular. All she sought was something shiny, and she found something that would lead her to one of the greatest finds of the day.

Easily, she replied, "Nope."

Folding the key into her palm, her smile didn't waver when she looked up at him. "Got any theories as to what it'll unlock?" She didn't stay facing him; Raven turned around to look at the chest of drawers in front of her, and tried to fit the key into the locks.

"A desk or a cupboard, most likely." In his professional opinion.

Too bad it wouldn't open the magical doorway back to the real world where things made sense, like in fantasy books. But realistically, it probably opened a junk drawer. The key itself didn't concern Jess too much; if there was a locked compartment that they'd had yet to search, he could always take his lockpicks to it. He'd fashioned a workable new set out of boredom when the sun set and made it too dark to leave the inn.

He started to slide his hands into his pockets, readying himself to get back to it now that he'd done his part in Raven's scavenger hunt. "Give a shout if you uncover any secret caches. I should get back to work."

Sometimes Jess Brightwell made it too easy for Raven to pick on him.

Glancing over her shoulder, she paused in her search to slot the key into a keyhole. Eyebrow arched, she looked at him as though he'd grown a second head.

After a moment, where he didn't add on anything or even laugh, she asked, "What work?" And found herself genuinely curious.

All she knew of Jess was that he spoke with an accent that was strange yet familiar, he was afraid of a library, he knew things she didn't, lived somewhere in the past, and he seemed a bit like a nerd. Despite being able to paint a better picture of him than most of the people in this town, she still didn't know him. Was he any good at anything? Putting broken clocks together? Reading? Sewing?

He was good at walking, and had warm hands, but that was all she knew of his skill set.

What work? she said with a blank look, as if she routinely sat on a satin pillow and had people hand-feed her grapes, as if it weren't borderline offensive to everyone here forced to put in hours of hard labor each day. It was so reminiscent of something Dario would have said during their postulant days, back when he was going the extra mile to be prickish, that Jess almost had to wonder if Raven and Dario weren't long-lost cousins. Or maybe Raven, from the future, was actually his descendant.

Dario's descendants. Wasn't that a terrifying prospect. They'd probably live up to their forebear and still be talking down to Jess' descendants a thousand years from now.

Stopping to lean against the door, Jess said airily, "Oh, you know, busy schedule of knocking on doors begging for food. Then I have plans to walk around aimlessly for a while." Exactly what the useless scrubber Dario had once believed him to be would say. "There's also preparing for another earthquake. Someone has to do it."

Despite the abruptness of her own question, it had been her attempt to query what he did around the inn. It wasn't completely clear to her — Jess was an adventurer, someone who went outside and committed the world to memory, but she hadn't quite been able to glean what it was he was so skilled at. Reading, most definitely, and being a pain in the ass — but what did he do all day?

She didn't so much as react to his smartass response, almost expecting it from him. It seemed like there were days she could have a decent conversation with him, and then there were these ones where the banter was borderline condescending in a way that reminded her sometimes unpleasantly of Wick.

Her brow remained arched, and she continued to look at him as though he wasn't quite giving her all the information she needed. "How are you supposed to prepare for another earthquake?"

To Jess' silent gratitude, she didn't follow up her nonplussed response with one of her usual teases. That was more than fine by him. He wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

"Trying to keep things from falling on us, getting supplies in easy reach should we have to get out of here in a hurry, that sort of thing," he replied, a straightforward answer. "Taking precautions might at least give us a better shot should something go wrong." He was doing it whether some of the town residents wanted to chalk yesterday's up as a one-off incident or not. Lightning could strike the same place twice, he knew that, and he wanted to be safe. He wanted them all to be safe.

It was an impossible dream here in this backwater nightmare, he knew that, too, but it was something to aim for. If poor odds frightened him off, he'd never have been able to sit for that placement exam in the London Serapeum.

"Why, what were you doing? You're tearing through here like you lost your best friend." That was a poor choice of words, and Jess regretted them as soon as they were out of his mouth. It wasn't the most heart-warming comparison to make when he actually had Thomas behind in one of Ptolemy House's rooms like a piece of junk.

It was a poor choice of words.

Raven's expression was often teetering between looking at someone like they were the least intelligent person in the room, and like she was silently laughing at them. Some people made it easy in the town; she often wore an expression of judgement whenever she was with Jess, if only to see if he ever got annoyed with it.

Rather than looking at him as though she was judging him for his comment, her expression fell.

She'd torn up the Ark to protect Finn, had almost sacrificed Murphy in a quickly pulled together plot to save him. That desperation she felt months ago hit her now; she hadn't been able to save Finn like he'd saved her from being floated. She'd searched through the Ark and her own mind much in the same manner Jess described her tearing through the room they stood in.

She looked down and shrugged her shoulder, sweeping her fingers along the top of the drawers she'd been scavenging through. "I'm looking for things," she said. She didn't look at him, instead tilting her head up to peer at the top of the drawers that stood just a little higher than her chin. "Taking precautions should something go wrong." She looked at him, and shrugged her shoulders again. "Sometimes the best weapon is made out of parts of a broken clock."

He'd said the words, but it was Raven who reacted to them, looking as downcast by them as he felt for a second, having lost his best friend to the Artifex's machinations.

Lost, but not gone. Not for good. Maybe. He hoped, anyway. He was hardly in a position to prove Thomas was still alive like this, and from the way Raven quieted and lowered her eyes, he could only guess she'd lost somebody, too, or held someone close in her thoughts. Not knowing if they'd ever live long enough to see their loved ones again was a constant pall.

Shaking off the moment, he straightened up from the door. "'Things'," he repeated. "Should we be worried you're building bombs in your bedroom?"

"Would you move out if I was?"

It wasn't like Raven disliked Jess. It was a natural response for her to have — if he questioned what she was doing, she wanted to pull it back and focus on him.

Raven wasn't stupid enough to build bombs in her bedroom. She'd take up a bungalow for that.

Shaking her head, she glanced at the set of drawers, as though it'd change shape and give her something new to discover. "Do you know what the time is?" She asked before she looked at him, her expression one of curiousity. She toed the clock pieces on the floor gently. "Because I'm starting to think we should take note of when certain things appear."

"There are easier ways to get rid of a problem roommate without bringing down half the block." He really hoped the joke was just that--a joke--and Raven wasn't building bombs anywhere there were people.

Earthquakes that could bring down the block were quite enough to deal with. They didn't need friendly fire, too.

The look Jess gave the pile of scrap turned inquiring. "You're planning on rebuilding it?" he asked, despite himself. He had an idea Raven was pulling in all manner of parts and building away in her makeshift workshop, but he was vague on the details of her latest fix-it. A glance at a clock would be a hell of a lot quicker than marking the positions of the sun and doing the mental calculations involved.

She shrugged her shoulders, all of a sudden becoming quite humble. "Maybe."

Truthfully, Raven didn't know what she was doing. All she knew was she had to keep herself busy. Fix something. Build something. Pull something apart to see whether or not she could kick it into life. Raven hadn't felt so restless since Arkadia, and she's beginning to loathe falling back into that routine of never quite being comfortable in her skin.

"I just think we should be taking advantage of what we have," she said. Scraps and broken bits included. Where he might see destruction and junk, Raven saw an opportunity and possibly something more. "Maybe if I can get this clock working, we could have a proper time of day. Or we could just have something to help us tell incorrect time. It's better than having nothing."

He wondered if this was Raven's way of expressing what they were all feeling--a sense of restlessness and uselessness, of wanting to do something meaningful and act instead of just react. A broken clock that told the wrong time didn't hold much intrinsic value by itself; the real value, he guessed, was what it could do for Raven.

Jess could relate all too well to having a pair of itchy hands that needed a task to occupy them.

"'One man's rubbish is another man's treasure'," he quoted, thinking it appropriate. Jess wasn't about to speak against her interest in scavenging. If anyone could make use of the town's deitrus, it would be the town's mechanically-inclined space girl. "You should, if you think you can get some mileage out of this stuff. It's just going to waste otherwise."

He nodded his chin at her--particularly the hand holding the key. "Happy hunting. You never know with this place, you could hit the jackpot."

Her brow crinkled. That was something Sinclair often said. It was something her mother used to quote, before her mother stopped being quotable.

When Raven looked around her own room where she'd come to store a lot of the random bits and pieces she'd found in the town, she thought of it as rubbish. It still was. There were pieces of things she didn't quite recognise away from the rest of its skeleton, but she knew that they became treasure when she began to use her imagination and let her instincts take control.

The clock was a piece of shit, in truth, but Raven knew it could become something of value if she put her mind to it.

"And find a rover to get home in?" Raven smiled and rolled her eyes, releasing a pfft of disbelief right after. "Yeah, right. There's no jackpot to be found here." The town was hollowed out, left with only bits of debris and what couldn't be carried by whoever previously lived here. Raven wasn't as hopeful as some, but she tried to be more upbeat than she usually was. "Maybe I'll have to make my own."

Edited 2016-10-22 00:08 (UTC)

And yet, a key.

A key could unlock nothing, but in the spirit of optimism, it could unlock something. A stash of year-old brandy wouldn't be so bad at this point. "Sometimes the best weapon is made out of broken parts. Didn't someone say that once?" he said with a taunting quality to his voice.

If she found a translation machine stuffed into one of these cabinets, he wouldn't complain.

He rapped on the door with his knuckles in passing. While she busied herself rifling through dusty drawers, it was about time to get back to work--for real this time. "I'll leave you to it. I'll keep my fingers crossed you find a junk full of parts. That's like catnip to mechanics, yeah?"

Raven rolled her eyes.

Broken things made the best weapons sometimes. If they had a proper bomb on the ground, it would've made things difficult yet perhaps easier with the Grounders. But Raven had heard of what had happened at Tondc, and though she believed she could make something as horribly destructive as that missile, she was glad all they had was some chemicals from the fallen dropship and her brain.

Making a homemade weapon had to be more dangerous, but Raven preferred to use her own hands and her own mind to create something that could potentially hurt a lot of people. She felt she understood the consequences just a little better that way.

Content to let him slip out the door and be a nuisance anywhere, Jess had to ruin it in his typical Jess Brightwell way: he had to say something weird.

Turning to look at him, her brows pulled together. "What's catnip?"

"It's you and that clock," came the answer, still in the same tone as Jess disappeared around the corner. She'd figure it out eventually.

... Or she wouldn't, in which case something told him he'd love to hear her ideas about what it could potentially mean.

While Raven busied herself here, the other rooms on the floor were calling his name for some much-needed reorganizing, and his footsteps started carrying the sound of his voice away from the room. He could double-back and hit this one later once she'd gotten what she needed. "I'll be down the hall."

"With your catnip."

And hers. Raven might not have remembered in that very moment he held a key she wasn't too sure she was looking for, but she would later. There were many locks to unpick, and she only had a specific number of tools to break doors and peel splinters into being with.

Letting Jess go would be easy. It was obvious to her this wasn't his scene, and she didn't particularly want to share her adventures with him, either. The dust she'd find was hers to sneeze. He could go find his own.

Under her breath, but not quite as soft as it possibly should be, she commented a little too kindly, "Weirdo."

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