[closed] winter breakers

[3ofswords]

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.]

Comments

[3ofswords]

"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."

[notsocommon]

"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.

[zomboligist]

"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.

[3ofswords]

"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?"

[notsocommon]

"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."

[zomboligist]

"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."

[3ofswords]

"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.

[notsocommon]

"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."

[zomboligist]

"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."

[3ofswords]

"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."

[zomboligist]

"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.

[notsocommon]

“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.”

[3ofswords]

"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."

[zomboligist]

"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.."

[notsocommon]

"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?"

[3ofswords]

"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."

[zomboligist]

"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.

[notsocommon]

“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.”