[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

[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.”