sixthiterationlogs | of earthquakes and aftershocks

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of earthquakes and aftershocks

WHO: Kate Kelly
WHERE: The Inn
WHEN: 10th September and a few days after
OPEN TO: Inn Residents, whoever else might be in the building: then, everyone!
WARNINGS: TBA
STATUS: Open

Earthquake

It's 5pm, or would be, if anyone paid much attention to things like clocks here. Sunset isn't for another two and a half hours or so, and the day's been hot. Not as humid as it has been. The Inn is mostly quiet, as it's hours after the midday dinner and the only people around either live at the Inn or have reason to be there. Supper will be made soon, as it's been a good day with the food supply.

Then, a minute later, the ground starts to shake.

Repairs and Aftermath

The Inn hasn't been as badly damaged as some other buildings. Foundations are still strong, walls haven't been cracked. But it's a big building, with lots of furniture and light fixtures, and it got shaken.

Having been turned into the unofficial community centre, it'll take some work and a few days to get everything straightened up again.

There's also the little matter of the water supply...

ooc: this is a party-style post, so set up your own OTAs or tag around and have fun! Setting is both for the day of the quake and a few days after to try and fix things up.

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Peggy is exhausted and extremely grateful that she's not in worse physical shape after what's happened. Things could be a lot worse and yet, without much sleep to help her, she's not sure what that counts for. Tired, she plods her way to the inn to find herself somewhere to sleep given that her house has collapsed in on itself and has nowhere left to live. She'd barely even managed to get her things, but now she has them in her bag, like a homeless person the road.

When she sees Nerys, Peggy heads towards her wearily, thinking that commiseration is the name of the game, now. "Are you all right?" is her first question, thinking it's the one that matters most.

Peggy is toting a bag after her, looking somewhat the worse for wear, wearing her fatigue like a cloak. Nerys can't really blame her; she herself probably looks just about as good right about now. The bag's not a good sign, though--a sign that yet another house is beyond saving. Shit.

"I'm fine," she says, automatically, then clarifies after a moment, "My ankle's been in better shape, and I could use a bath, but...I'm all right. How about you?" She deliberately looks at the bag, lifting an eyebrow, if only because she'd rather hear about it than look at the carnage again.

Peggy offers a gesture towards her foot. "I'm no doctor, but I could take a look if you'd like. I helped plenty of soldiers with their foot woes, especially during the winter months," she says, but happily takes the opportunity to sit down in front of Nerys, brushing away her frizzing hair from her forehead. "I'm quite well," she promises. "Unfortunately, the same can't be said for my home."

She'll have to move out, that's certain. There's no way she could go back to that place without worrying about her safety. And while she likes to think of herself as quite handy, the way it's sort of collapsed in on itself is a touch too much for even her.

"I'll have to go house shopping at some point," she confesses. "Right now, I just want to decompress and I thought I'd stay at the inn for a while."

"If you have time," Nerys says, "just to make sure I haven't done anything irreparable to it? I think it's probably okay, it doesn't hurt too much when I walk on it." She's figuring not, but there could be muscle damage she doesn't even realize yet, or that doesn't turn up for a while.

She settles into the chair across from Peggy and starts to undo her boot, wincing as the pressure of the laces eases up. After a second, though, she pauses and looks up. "If you want somewhere a little more quiet, my house is still standing, and it's just me in there," she offers. "The windows are all shot to hell, and I'm going to need to reinforce some of the beams, but it's okay provided we don't get another quake."

For that matter, Nerys is used to taking up far less space than her own building, so she's not particularly inconvenienced by the notion of a houseguest or even housemate.

"I'm only really skilled at basic field medicine," Peggy warns, but it had been enough to play nurse to the Commandos when they'd needed the help and beggars couldn't really be choosers in their world. Still, she's already easing towards the food to examine it, thinking that it could use a proper binding and elevation. She reaches for some cloth, gesturing to the foot as she offers to wrap it.

"I'd be thankful if you wouldn't mind my staying a night or two, but I'm still rather fond of my own privacy," she admits. That, and there's a part of her that still feels leery of taking on roommates, what with her bad string of luck with them getting killed or hurt or dragged into her mad life.

"Better than nothing," Nerys says. She really is pretty confident it'll be all right, but better to have someone else's opinion on top of that. She gestures in response to Peggy's movement, nodding a little to allow the wrapping, though she wishes that she could wash up first. With the water being like it is, however, it's probably a better idea not to try.

She winces slightly as Peggy touches a sore muscle, but it's not a full jerk of pain, just a hesitation. "It's not a problem," she says. "I know how you feel, believe me--but until people figure out what the hell is going on with housing, you're welcome."

Of course, provided her own place doesn't fall over in a brisk wind.

Peggy is cautious with her movements. While she'll need to move the foot around a great deal more, she also doesn't want to hurt Kira in the process. "Thank you," is her sincere reply, beginning to wrap up the foot so that it's bound and some of the swelling should hopefully reduce. "I should have known that the flooding was just a prelude to something worse."

It's not that she believes in omens, but she does believe in the science of picking a logistically poor position. In her haste to get shelter, that had been what she'd done. Now it was time to fix it, is all.

However, Nerys has been hurt--and far worse than this--before. She's determined the fine line between stoicism and expressing pain visibly and verbally, as yelling tends to get you killed behind enemy lines, but bottling it all up results in it feeling far worse.

"I hate to say it," she comments, hissing faintly as Peggy moves her ankle to get the bandage in position, but waving off the other woman's pause. "But maybe it's all a prelude. The orchestra warming up." Having been the plaything of omniscient beings once does add a little to her cynicism.

Peggy finishes by tucking the end of the bandage into the top, making sure that it's not too tight to ache. She does inch closer, to prop her own knee up and offer a little elevation to help, at least while she's there and they're talking. "That quake was worse than anything I could ever imagine," she says. "What on earth do you suppose could be worse than that?"

She asks this as if she doesn't already know. Because, as awful and terrifying and bad as the quake had been, it was still only a fraction of the terror and pain she had felt in those few seconds of Whitney Frost grasping her.

"Thank you," Nerys says with a slightly pained smile--mostly because her ankle's sore. Having it wrapped will be far better for her in the long run, and she's more than grateful, in the absence of dermal regenerators and anti-inflammatory hypos, for what she can get.

As Peggy continues, Nerys is pretty sure her question is rhetorical, because they can both likely imagine far, far worse than an earthquake, even one that seemed almost impossibly random. "You never really get used to them," she says. "I lived in a seismic activity zone for a while, and the problem is that you're never sure if it's nothing major or if it's going to be the one that ends everything."

"Do you think we're bound to get more?" Peggy asks, seeing as the thought hadn't quite occurred to her. Yes, it's true that she's wary of their environment, but she had thought (perhaps incorrectly) that the large quake might be the cap on the top of an already terrible day. "I would hate to imagine what further damage might happen."

Truth be told, if they get another quake like that, she can't imagine they'll have much of a village left.

"Having seen those floods and now these earthquakes...I don't know." Nerys shakes her head firmly, slightly reluctant to speculate, as if that might call down danger upon them all. "I mean, seriously, what could be next, a godforsaken volcano?"

Or a blizzard, or an ice storm. There are any one of a rather large number of possibilities for natural disasters, and the notion of facing any more of them in the near future (or at all) gives Nerys chills.

"Please don't joke about that, I would hate to be an Italian with Vesuvius suddenly under my feet, so to speak," is Peggy's wry comment, gently placing Nerys' foot back on the ground as she runs a hand over her forehead to try and rid herself of her headache. "It's odd, though."

"For all the awful, there's also those strange gifts. And, of course, the fact that every time something bad happens, we seem to catch a windfall after. The weapons," she points out. "The inn, after the wind."

Admittedly, Nerys doesn't quite follow the reference, but the context is quite clear, so she nods with a wry twist of her own lips. Peggy's expression as she touches her head is worrisome, but there isn't much she can do, which frustrates her to no end. It's not like she can offer a painkiller hypo.

"So we might get something else after all of this, you think?" she asks, leaving her foot out of her boot for the time being. It might not be a good idea due to swelling, but it's probably not good to have it tightly enclosed either. "Some sort of gift that's a double-edged sword?"

"I think if history has proven anything, it's that we should be on the lookout for a continued pattern, yes," Peggy agrees, though she's not entirely sure what could possibly happen after such an awful earthquake. Perhaps it will shake some new food source out of the sky for them or prove to be equally as helpful.

Or, there will be no pattern, and they've just got to sweep up the remainder of the mess. "At least you've managed to get yourself out of the worst of the hard labour," she points out.

Nerys nods, making a mental note of it, to see if they receive something (whether or not that gift is something with teeth, or, as Julian likes to say, a 'Trojan horse', remains to be seen) and what the proportion is as compared to the destruction.

"I'm still going to work," Nerys admits wryly. "I can walk, and the foundations of my house aren't going to fix themselves. I've done physical labor on far worse injuries than this." She says this with a bit of pride, though she's not entirely certain she should feel that way.

It's more reason that Peggy likes Nerys. She finds herself smiling with ease to hear her dedication to the community, even through her hardships. "Well, don't push yourself too hard," she says, glad that Nerys doesn't know that she's being extremely hypocritical in saying this. After all, she had pushed herself up with the rebar puncture wound as quickly as she could.

"It's a shame we haven't got more painkillers here," Peggy says thoughtfully. "Or that we can't make some."

And well, Nerys recognises the sentiment, she's expressed it often enough to others and meant it as much as Peggy means it now. She's also heard it and not taken it into enough consideration, in the past, but she's never been in a situation quite like this before. Everyone's labor is valuable here, and even one person's wellbeing could tip the balance. If she overdoes it, she could make herself sick or lose some ability, and the idea of that, here, terrifies her more than natural disasters.

"I'll try to be careful," she says, smiling at Peggy, a little sheepishly. "And yeah...I don't know what kind of plants you'd even use, on Earth, for that kind of thing. Don't want to just be randomly eating plants as an experiment."

"No, I don't think you'd like to do that. As much as you might find something that works as a painkiller, I imagine you also rather run the risk of giving yourself some rather strange hallucinations," Peggy says with a knowing nod and a laugh. "Maybe Mark could help? He seems quite well to do with plants and all."

"Mark, and maybe Helen--she's a doctor and a scientist, so potentially she could advise. Humans used something prior to synthetics, right?" Nerys asked, lifting a brow in curiosity. "I mean, really, you had to. On Bajor, when we were out in the wilderness and up against a wall for supplies, there was a seed from a flowering bush that helped, if you chewed on it."

She huffs in irritation at herself. "It's so damn frustrating not knowing anything about where I am. I've always been somewhere where the things around me were familiar or easily learned. Now I'm like a child, somewhat."

"All synthetic items have to derive from something," Peggy points out, thinking logically. "So then, there must be some plant here that could be adapted into a painkiller, I'm sure," she agrees, but she very much understands where Nerys is coming from, seeing as Peggy feels like her knowledge of medicine is woefully underprepared compared to others.

Still, at least that's not all that they can do. "There must be something else that you can provide, though? In order to get away from feeling that way?"

"Well," Nerys says with a soft sigh, testing her injured foot very carefully on the floor. She rolls the ball of the sole, then shifts back gingerly to her heel and the swollen ankle. "I work hard, I can hunt and I can plow and I can build. If someone tells me what needs doing for plants, I can do it. It's just a little like working with a veil over my eyes."

She frowns, the metaphor not quite right. "I don't feel like I'm not pulling my weight, I just feel...ungrounded."

"I feel the same," Peggy admits, because no matter what she does, it seems like there isn't much for her to do in the midst of the day beyond exploring. Even that grows more frustrating as she continually wonders whether it even serves a purpose or whether she ought to give up. And if she gives up, then what does she do with all her time?

Sighing, she gives Nerys a wry smile. "I'm not very good at this," she admits.

Nerys smiles back, equally wry. She reaches up and runs a hand through her hair--it's getting really ridiculously long, she needs to cut it--and lets out a sigh. "I'm not very good at it either. There's not enough tech for me to build any kind of transmitter or scanner, so I don't know how to find out where the hell, when the hell, we are, much less send up flares for rescue. There's got to be some kind of boundaries to push, Helen said, but I don't know where to start."

A thought comes into her mind, and she voices it without filter. "It feels like we're going to get slapped back every time we try to build something bigger. It's hard not to lose the will to act."

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