sixthiterationlogs | [closed] winter breakers

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[closed] winter breakers

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: House 42 (Mark and Helen)
WHEN: January 13/14 - during the snowstorm
OPEN TO: Mark, Helen, Ravi
WARNINGS: Will put in tag headers if any arise beyond smoking weed and going stir crazy.

Stay the night, Mark had said; it looks awful out there, he'd said.

It looks a lot worse in the half-light of day, the sun obscured by clouds, the trees visible in how they whip and bow to the wind, until they disappear behind the falling snow. Kira's hardly at his best after a night on the couch, listening to the wind howl and his fucking goat clopping around the room. Goats are kind of inherently creepy, and they're ten times worse in the middle of the night.

But she's his, and there's no telling if it's the weather or something worse that has them down a bit of livestock.

Point is: there's a cramp in his shoulder, a goatlick of hair slicked out over his scar, and the plans to let her out in the morning are not going well. "Hey guys," he calls to the waking household, "The porch is basically gone." The wind has apparently been bad enough to pack snow against the front of the house; Kira is surprised enough by the sight, and bleary enough after sleep, that he stands there a moment staring at the wall of it.

The goat takes seconds to push past him, headbutting the barrier and making it fall in on top of her. The layer carries on in a slope, and the wind starts to blow the still-falling snow back toward him. Anyone coming into the room will find a goat bleating helplessly as she shakes herself out of the pile, and Kira trying to nudge her out of the way with his foot, unable now to close the door against the wind and snow.

[Four adults, one goat, two days. Free for all post for individual and multi-person threads.]

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I've been up awhile, although it took me an honestly embarrassing amount of time laying there in bed to figure out if it was actually morning or if I'd just been woken up again by the goat bleating, the goat gnawing on something I probably couldn't replace, Kira cussing the goat out, Kira throwing things at the goat... You get the idea. The quality of the morning light is about as good as it had been the night before, all thin and gray. Days like these, I really wish I had a watch.

Dressed in my long johns, I step out into the living room and blink blearily at the door. I can't lie; I'm kind of sorry the goat didn't just keep going.

"Guess we're staying in today. It's fucking cold, close the door."

So much for that famous Mark Watney hospitality.

"Oh sure, just explain to me the spatial theory that lets the door pass through the goat," Kira bites at him, getting a socked foot under Bethany's stomach and using his entire leg to drag her backwards out of the snow. The door eventually shuts, soft white snow blustering around its edges, bursting along the floor. So much for the collection of socks he's hoarded extremely far out into the snow from here.

The goat: the goat.

"I hope you appreciate how I'm not leaving you to the elements and literal goat murderers," he tells her, doubling over to catch her horns as she butts him in the thighs for his trouble. "Do you think the person who left her to me did it out of hatred?"

"I think you were sleeping with him, so you tell me," I mildly reply as I step off into the kitchen. The coals in the stove are stone cold; apparently Kira and his friend had been the first ones up, and it looks like the little stock of wood Helen and I keep next to the stove has been depleted.

"Come in here, I'm going to hand you up some firewood from the cellar," I call back over my shoulder. At least the furnace hasn't gone completely out yet; the air's warm when I pull open the cellar door. "Don't let your girlfriend eat it."

"Oh, well. Probably yes." It's clearly not the expected answer, though it at least confirms something about the time he spent here. When he first met the people who knew him before, he'd had a few moments of wondering just how much he'd forgotten, but it seems there's no one to disappoint on that front. He thinks he knows the name, just from the context of his notes, and there's a lot of relief in knowing he will probably never be forced to deal with it.

Just their goat, to keep alive for however long he's able. She butts his thigh from the other side, and he resigns himself to following Mark away from her; the leftover snow is thankfully more interesting. "You don't also have a shovel in the cellar, do you?" If this kept up, they'd need more than a goat to push through that mess.

"I wish I had a shovel anywhere," I call up as I begin hefting logs into my arms from the stockpile we've been dutifully building in the basement. "The only thing close we have is a really short one, but it's probably at the inn. Sometimes I use it in the fields as a spade."

Stopping just under the doorway, I hold up the first log for Kira to grab. "There are some makeshift tools in the town hall that might do alright to move snow." I tip my head into the light and squint up at him. "I presume that's what you're talking about."

"No Mark, I was going to bust a hole in your living room floor for the goat to shit through, then spend the next few days potty-training her." Kira takes the logs as they come, hand sinking at the unexpected weight. He only fumbles the first inasmuch as it drops less gracefully where he wants it, and the others follow with solid, evenly spaced thuds.

What is he going to do with the fucking goat?

"We need something to get us to the hall," he points out. "Assuming this lets up enough to make digging worthwhile." Shovels not being stocked in most bodegas, he's at least familiar with making-do. "How many frying pans do you own?"

I pause at that, staring blankly a moment at the earthen wall of the cellar before shaking my head and resuming the steady passing of logs up through the door.

"Are you planning on digging with them or putting them on your feet? Because they're cast iron, so I doubt they'd work well for either of those things."

I feed a few more logs into the furnace to get it properly roaring, dust off my hands, and then climb back upstairs.

"I have a pair of dubiously-crafted snow shoes."

"Mostly I'm planning on clearing what's at the door with something other than my hands," he elaborates, "but I'm open to survival craft projects while we wait for this to blow over."

Assuming it would. From what he's read, most disasters here are a matter of days--but the sun hadn't set for at least a month, and why should they assume to know any fucking rules beyond the ones that fuck them repeatedly?

"If it's the pans you're worried about, I'm pretty sure we can find you a new set."

"I'm not worried about the pans, it's just that they're heavy," I explain as I cross the room to stoop in front of the stove. "I get what you're saying, but they're really not ideal. Take a look in the cupboards, we've got to at least have some big ladles or something in there."

Not that I relish the idea of trying to dig through a snowbank with an oversized spoon, but needs must, as they say.

"You know what, there might be some lids for the bigger copper pots that aren't as heavy as the pans."

"Mark," he says, fumbling another log onto the pile, his arms steadily tiring, "I'm hurt that you don't believe in my strength." It's a fair point, and Kira likes the mental image of grown men wielding pot lids and ladles against the elements. It feels the right amount of absurd for the situation.

"You think there's any point in trying before the storm ends?"

"Honestly? Not really, no," I reply with a glance back over my shoulder. "I'm going to want to get out and do some welfare checks once things calm down some, but I think everybody should be okay unless it drags on for more than a couple of days." Looking back to the stove, I adjust the pile of wood inside to my liking and then reach for the flint.

"Surprising no one, Helen and I could probably be stuck in here a month before we needed to worry about it."

"Yeah, I assume if the food ran out you guys would just figure out how to break down the enzymes in the upholstery for nourishment." Or something. "Which is probably what the goat is going to live on now that I've stopped watching her for two minutes."

Bethany had better turn out to be the world's best sled-goat by the end of this. Her charms are such that he can see why someone might consider putting her to the chopping block for a chance to go home. Someone who isn't him.

With the others of the household not in the room, and all of them here long enough to maybe already be thinking it, Kira only bites his lip a moment before asking: "People talk about a monster coming through, last winter. Do you think it might be out there again?"

It seems like forever since I even thought about that thing, and I'd been with the group that had killed it. There's just so much to worry about in this place over the winter months, and the truth is we haven't seen anything so baldly threatening since.

I pause, canting my head. "Could be," I allow, probably sounding more cavalier than I should, and blow on the sparks I've made until they catch on the kindling. "We killed it, but the body disappeared, so like everything else around here, there's really no telling. But there are definitely bears and moose and things like that out there, so I think we can agree that going out in the woods unarmed and alone, particularly at night, is probably best avoided."

"I thought bears were supposed to hibernate," is Kira's I watched a documentary once contribution, and the extent of his knowledge on literal bears. It's difficult to wrap his head around the wildlife until he remembers magic boxes containing puppies and goat deliveries: the canyon feels too small to house multiple bears, but who knows what forces put them here, or how much better they are at slipping out.

He starts herding the dropped logs into something of a stack. "I don't know why I'm expecting this place to make any sense, though."

Helen had seen plenty of snow in her day. She'd climbed in the Himalayas, gone skiing, even seen the routine snows of winter in Old City and in London. Still, there was something that was sort of nice about a fresh, clean snowfall - provided one didn't have to go anywhere.

Here in the village, there were things to do. In order to keep things moving, she had tasks she did every day to keep them all in candles and soap and she always went to the clinic to make sure there were enough supplies of bandages and healing herbs. She couldn't do anything of that nature with the snow piling up like some sort of greeting card.

Further complicating matters was the fact that there was a goat currently inside the house. A goat.

"Livestock aren't meant to be indoors," she said mildly, raising an eyebrow. Still, they were stuck with it, and it was going to make for an interesting few days.

This is the sort of thing that he wishes he had a house robe for. Of all the strange wishes that he had, lounging around in a house robe is somehow the one that he keenly feels, especially when it's snowy and there's no way that he's trudging back to his house with Major, unless they magically develop snowplows. With a thought to hope that Minor is all right, he shuffles wearily, wishing for all that lovely coffee they'd found. Alas, he'll have to settle for the warmth of Helen's body as he slides against her side to wrap an arm around her waist, bowing his nose for a kiss, tired and cold and weary of the snow already.

"I feel like this is hardly the strangest thing that's happened to us," he admits, not exactly very sharp and astute with his communication just yet, feeling like the snow is making him thick.

"They're going to be indoors when the outdoors look like that," Kira said on the matter, as if he had the social standing to make declarations like the rejection of his terrible, hand-me-down goat meant rejection of himself as well, and people should care. People specifically being Helen, whose house this actually is.

Whatever: he's not leaving Bethany to the wolves. He imagines there must be wolves, with everything else that goes wrong.

Bethany bleated some kind of agreement with Ravi; Kira looked down at her weird horns and her terrible goat eyes, and it wasn't a betrayal if he said it, because he cared intrinsically for her well-being. "I don't know about that, goats are pretty inherently creepy."

Helen had never been the sort to be openly affectionate but everyone in this house knew that she and Ravi were together and, oddly, they'd been together for the better part of a year now. It was rapidly becoming one of the longest term and healthiest relationships she'd ever had, for as strange as they might seem as partners, and she was more than happy to give him a kiss and stay within the circle of his arms while she assessed the situation.

"It really isn't. I have lived an entire life of strange things and this hardly ranks. It seems like a normal day, other than being snowed in. Of course, it means you're going to have to consent to staying with me for the next couple days. Whatever will you do, Ravi?"

As to their particular goat problem, she looked over at Kira and laughed a bit. "Well, I have no issues sharing a house with a goat. I used to have a veritable menagerie back home. One goat isn't going to alter my worldview terribly - even if there is a question of demonic possession in play."

"I'm just saying, if we can evolve, so can goats," Ravi grumbles under his breath, but he doesn't think that they're going to pitch the goat out. Namely, because they can't. Kira is right, it's not like they're going to be able to get it out now, which is a shame, because he's already thinking about how that animal is very much not house trained.

Sleepily, he stays by Helen's side even if he gives a few steps of space between them, rubbing at his eyes. He perks up when he hears his name, though. "Don't act like you don't love it," he informs her with a salacious wink, and a snap of his fingers, though maybe too much sass.

At least he's waking up.

"Why is there a goat?" is his pointed question. "Why are we skipping over the basic why question?"

"The point of the goat being here is that it doesn't get used for satanic rituals," Kira points out, though it's hardly why he thinks any of the animals have gone missing. Bad luck, interference–someone getting tired of their usual portions. Kira's never gotten tired of fish, but someone inevitably must.

As long as it doesn't happen to his goat, he doesn't entirely care. "If nothing else, Mark wouldn't help, and you can't fudge the orgy with three people."

He punctuates the joke with an examining look at the open floor. "Though, maybe if we sacrificed Ravi and fucked the goat, it would make up the margin in depravity."

"I'm not sacrificing Ravi. He has his charms," Helen said, still utterly amused at the entire line of conversation thus far. She shrugged and looked toward the aforementioned to address her next statement.

"If Kira's trying to protect the goat from injury, the point is moot now. I don't think there's a way we'll be able to let it back outside because of the snow so we will have to endure. Keep Calm and Mind The Goat, Ravi."

The Keep Calm campaign frustrated her to no end but it was, at least, a recognizable meme in modern conscious.

"I haven't had enough coffee for this conversation," Ravi protests with a faintly disturbed look on his face, because honestly, he's starting to think that staying asleep would have been the better decision. He gives them both a plaintive look, as if he's asking them to somehow summon it from mid-air, even though he knows that it's not going to happen.

Sighing, he gives the goat a wary look, finger on his nose. "I call not-it on having to deal with what comes out the other end," he says, because that is not how he wants to spend the snowstorm. "Without responsibility in that area, I welcome the goat into our lives with open arms," he announces cheerfully.

"How long do we think that this is going to last?" he asks, glancing out the nearest window.

"Bethany has...her charms," Kira points out, neither convincing nor convinced as he watches her butt the edge of the door now that the snow is safely held behind it. A pulse and a face are, in his book, enough to avoid ritual sacrifice.

Which puts Ravi in the safe zone, watching his screw up and turn away. "I've had exactly little enough coffee for this conversation, maybe if you dig some out of the kitchen I'll stop." No promises, considering probably cabin fever and a dogged lack of subject boundaries in the face of—whatever you call never being friends with someone in the first place, arriving in a big fuckoff canyon, and being informed that another you was trotting around having all kinds of relationships without your knowing.

Aggressive oddballing is all he has, this side of the impossible. "How long do they usually pin us down with anything," he asks, genuinely wanting to know. "Actual cannibalism lengths or just, long enough to make us wonder if it'll get to that point?"

"I doubt we'll end up cannibalising one another," Helen said, scoffing at that. "We live with Mark Watney, after all, and if anyone could keep us alive through a blizzard it's him."

She had great faith in Mark's ability to keep them in a closed system for long enough until they could get back outside once again. If that faith was misguided, Helen didn't want to know about it.

"Besides, I've been stranded in the Himalayas before. I think I'm prepared for this."

"If he starts having Mars flashbacks, I'm going to have to put on some very aggressive potato puppet theatre to get him through it," Ravi deadpans, joking about it, but the mental image is definitely worth at least a little entertainment, as far as he's concerned. He gives Helen a curious look. "Where in the Himalayas? Are we talking Nanda Parbat climbing trek? Or Yeti exploration?" he asks, eyes a little wider.

Of course, all this needs to wait, because Kira said the magic word. Pointing at him, even if it's belated, he decides that needs to happen first. "Let's coffee up," he agrees. "Then we can start strategizing."

"Mars," Kira asks with feeling, using up his ability to engage with the subject this early. Reeling the reaction back in, he is blank in a way that says, actually, not to tell him. The mystery of Mark is for a later hour in their enforced proximity, surely.

Maybe the mystery of Ravi, first. "Agreed; as the non-badasses of the house, we can deal with breakfast. The adults can solve the survival aspects." Not that coffee and breakfast don't sound very important to surviving this.

"I will join you in coffee even if I may fall on the side of badass," Helen said. "I am still in need of sleep, especially since I have reverted to mortal since I've come to this godforsaken place."

She looked over to Ravi and grinned at him. "I've done both Nanda Parbat and Yeti exploration. How do you think I knew how to hunt that wendigo last year? I've done it before."

"Sometimes, I think everyone's life but mine is really interesting and I just sort of got missed by that until the last year, where I was then kidnapped and put here," he says, with a rather petulant twist of his lips that he doesn't want to rest in for very long.

To be fair, zombies aren't normal, they just became normalized thanks to Liv. "Also, do I count as an adult, because I'm self-volunteering myself to the children's table if it means not thinking at this hour."

"I mean, this is the part where I tell Helen she's Age and Beauty and let her into the kitchen first, so no, you're not an adult." Kira isn't either: he has zero experience with yeti exploration. Zero experience with wendigos too, but at least he has some grasp on what they are, what they do.

The idea of one being here, in this snow laden, closed off space, where people got trapped in their homes and supplies were even more scarce before the first harvests--it makes too much sense.

"Let's not talk about wendigos while we're snowed in, maybe."

"I'm a whimsical child who wants his coffee," Ravi is happy to agree with that definition, because honestly, he is not the sort of mature adult that he should be age or grace or beauty anywhere here and he doesn't mind trudging in last, with one last wary look at the goat.

"I mean, we could talk about them. One assumes that if we're trapped in here, any potential wendigo creature would be out there, correct?" he surmises, not pointing out that a good Bigfoot hunt has always been on his bucket list.

“Wendigos and yeti tend to prefer the outdoors over the indoors,” Helen agreed. “And I do speak from experience. I certainly miss having my dear friend to provide insight on these matters.”

Helen tipped her head a bit toward the kitchen and coffee. “Let’s have coffee and I’ll tell you both about how I acquired a cryptid as a butler. You’d probably call him a Bigfoot or a Sasquatch.”

"I preferred Biggie Sass, myself," Kira interjects into this absurdity. Yes, some crytpids were probably real, but even in his mother's circles talk of them hadn't been this blasé. The least he's going to do is try to keep up.

"I always imagined a wendigo could open doors. Or just step on the house, depending on size."

"In my world, they have a lack of opposable thumbs, which is not something I tell myself just so I don't have nightmares," Ravi says, digging through the cupboards to look for the coffee, though as he's now in the kitchen, he thinks he wouldn't mind something else. "Is the pot still being kept in the same place?" he checks. "Out of curiosity and all.."

"The one I encountered here two years ago didn't have opposable thumbs," Helen contributed. "But if I'm going to discuss the variances in genus among primate cryptids, I'm going to need something caffeinated to get me through the entirety of the discussion."

She actually rather liked snow, theoretically, but she wasn't looking forward to digging herself out in a few days. For now, though, she was going to enjoy it while it lasted and enjoy a morning with Kira and Ravi. "Kira, you don't seem terribly surprised by the existence of things that go bump in the night. Typical Tuesday for you, I suppose?"

"Anything's real if people believe in it enough," is the simplest way to explain--everything, but especially his experience of the supernatural. Wendigo might not be as common as they were in the days of settlers and starvation, but they still happened, and it was easy to keep believing in something that killed friends or family, which kept the problem, well, alive.

Flippancy is his best defense: he can't pretend not to know what he knows, but he doesn't have to lend it any power. Especially in a place like this. "Tuesday is a social construct that dissolved months ago, but, sure."

"I believe in a ridiculous amount of fantasy novel plots, and yet, not once has the Millennium Falcon ever showed up outside of my door to let me carpool into work," Ravi protests, as he starts to make his cup of coffee into something he likes.

Obviously it's not something he can pick up from a local shop in Seattle, which is one of the biggest disappointments of having to be stuck in the middle of nowhere in a tiny village where local entrepreneurs haven't exactly started to develop their careers in coffee.

"Speak for yourself, on Tuesday, I go to the hospital and give the rats a new round of tests. I call it 'Teaching Tuesday'," he says, because that's what his life has come down to.

“It takes a lot more effort to actively believe something doesn’t exist than it does to leave your mind open to possibility. Just because you haven’t seen it yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen,” Helen reminded Ravi gently.

“As to Tuesday being a construct, well, I do miss some way of marking time. Seasons seem to still occur with some regularity but I wonder if we ought not start counting days. Then, of course, we’re just making tick marks on the cell wall, aren’t we? It doesn’t mean anything except to us fellow prisoners.”

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[closed] winter breakers

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