sixthiterationlogs | lord willing and the creek don't rise [open]

WHO: Raleigh Becket
WHERE: Along the banks of the river
WHEN: 10 July
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: None
STATUS: Open

Raleigh has spent the last week just trying to figure out what, if anything, is the rhyme and reason to this place. He's found himself a house that's decent enough shelter and while there's no tech and no maps, it's a comfortable enough existence. Food is something that has to be gathered daily and so he's taken it upon himself to figure out how to use the woven fish baskets to set traps along the river.

Amazingly enough, they work, but only just. Without bait, it's hit or miss if any fish swim into the traps and they're in such states of disrepair that half the time if he does get a catch, the fish is able to get itself right out. The traps themselves remind him of primitive versions of the ubiquitous crab traps all along the Pacific coast and Raleigh is familiar enough with those. He's gone crabbing before when the oceans are deemed safe and there's not pollution levels off the charts from Kaiju Blue. It usually kills all the fish, makes the place a dead zone for a couple years, but up in Alaska it's been a while since one has actually been killed in the direct area. Usually they kite the Kaiju further down the coast, away from the viable fishing industries.

This morning, when he goes to check the traps, he notices that the water has risen. The landmarks he's gotten used to along the river are now submerged and there's water splashing around his knees when normally it'd come to his ankles. Finding his traps in the swollen river are a problem too, as the surge seems to have pushed them away from where he normally sets them. If that's the case, they're not going to be eating well tonight, and there's the more immediate problem as to where all this water's going to go in an enclosed canyon.

"Damn," Raleigh hisses, wading into the water to try and get what traps he can. They're a precious commodity and he doesn't exactly know how to make them himself; he had intended to sit down one evening and try and recreate one but he hasn't had the chance yet. Losing them now means losing his one guaranteed way of feeding himself and it's not something he's willing to risk. Not without a fight.

When he hears the footsteps of someone else approaching, he calls back to them without turning around, too focused on the task at hand. "Help me! The river's rising and I'm losing all my traps. I don't know what's going on."

Understatement of the year.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Jo was wading back in, hating the scrub pants again. Heavy and clinging on the parts of her out of the water, and then too fluid and away from her skin under it. What she wouldn't give for a pair of jeans already, but there was no clothing left behind. Not any house or building she'd rummaged through.

She pushed back into the water, hands feeling through silt and grass, ignoring the chill of the river as it hit her bare arms, shoulders and upper chest against and again. She could deal with hot and she could deal with cold. Goosebumps prickled on her skin and she moved in half arcs, trying to feel around her feet, and feeling like she stirred up more cloudy dirt, unhelpfully, with every step.

Worrying she might miss anything by inches, or even step on one by accident.

"Not exactly. Of the two anything like this one," She was not all that much better at not feeling odd saying these things, not even since she had announced it for common knowledge in the pub that first day. "--one of them was far worse--" The one where. Well. Everything was worse. But so was her ability to even recollect it clearly at all. "--and one of them was better, but only marginally."

"This hasn't ever happened to me before." Raleigh doesn't know what it means for him. This is his first time ever being in a place like this, in a place that rips him away from the real world and puts him in some sort of alternate reality that he can't escape. The fact that she has done it before is intriguing, though, and he pulls out another trap before figuring out how he wants to ask her about it.

"When's the last time you were in a place like this? Come straight from there to here or did you make it back home first?"

And if she'd made it back home first, how does he do it? How does he go back to the place where he's needed?

If she could be numb to it, it might be a different story. But she isn't, and it isn't.

Even when she's frowning, and she's still searching in the water, hands and arms in wide arcs, face scrunched up like she's focused on the task and not his words. She still isn't. She still wouldn't wish this on anyone else. She still feels bad that they are in this straight, and annoyed as fuck she has to go through it all over again. New rules, new lands, new alliances.

"Right before," Jo said, fingers finally brushing something in a too fast movement that sends her half turning that way, feeling around and pulling another basket up hard and fast from it's stop. "I haven't been home in--" She gave a hard lunge and chuck of the trap, aiming for the bank beyond the water, before she started to finish, again. "In the better part of half a decade, give or take a few years. But I think it's more give, than take."

Beat. "Time is strange in these places. Even when you're keeping track of it sometimes."

"Hard not to have a place to call home," Raleigh says. "I've never been in a place like this before but I haven't been in one place for a long time in years. I kind of miss having somewhere I can call home."

This place, he thinks, isn't going to be that. It feels a little too unsettled to be a place he can truly call home and he doesn't know if he can trust it.

"I guess you can understand that too?"

Jo isn't expecting that, and maybe even just how much she isn't, shows for a few seconds. Because she doesn't even hunker back down to searching right away. It's not the kind of thing people say when grilling her for being too many places and knowing too many things, all of which don't help anyone, no less herself out with where she happens to be standing now. Those like her, even extrapolating, that's never the kind of things they'd say either.

They don't think of home, when they give up home for the road. But Jo'd always had the life, no road, and the Roadhouse.
Until she had no home, and the road, and Milliways. And then none of them. And then the shadow of one ripped home; family.
And just again. Finally making that choice. Building something, that even if it wasn't a home, had been something more, hadn't it.

To hook under her rib cage and pull so hard at his words.

"Sure." Jo rubbed scratched her wet fingers in her hair. "Something like that."

"I think we've got a lot of these traps back out," Raleigh says, surveying their work. There's a hush between them now and he wonders if he'd said the wrong thing by mentioning what it's like to move from place to place. He's never been in a place like this before and this isn't her first rodeo; he's curious as to her experience but prying doesn't seem like a good idea.

"Thanks for your help," he says, flashing her a grin. "I'll have to do something nice for you in exchange. You got anything around your house that needs repairing? I used to do construction and I don't mind trading a favor for a favor."

If anything, he said something right, more right than he can even guess at, the kind of right that all but takes the wind out sails right, but sometimes that's a lot harder to tell with Jo. Wrong can go balls to the wall, caterwauling profanity and dangerousness sharpness in seconds. But this was quiet. This was something she hadn't expected. Not in this one or other ones. That was the kind of comment if took people a good while to realize. Because.

Because Jo made a mask of it. The ease with which managed all of this. The necessity. The aloofness. Putting it out there.
Talking about it like it was old hat. Because it was old hat. It was years on years of this. But it didn't mean she didn't miss it.

Home.

(Her mother.

Slam, went the shotgun,
and Ellen-Harvelle-Who-Wasn't-Anymore.)

She considered the offer and while she'd been about to shake her head, it turned one way as though starting and then stopped. Her head cocked to the second. Thinking better of the refusal. "I don't at the moment. Not that I can think of. But I'll could keep it in mind in case something comes up? I mean, those houses are crazy old. Something's bound to break on me when I least expect it, right?"

Plus, having favors in her back pocket for bigger emergencies? Well, that wasn't a terrible plan either.

"Usually does," Raleigh agrees. "I picked up construction several years ago. I've gotten pretty good at it." He'd worked on the wall as well repairing whatever shithole houses he'd lived in along the way and he'd learned how to do most things himself so he wouldn't have to pay someone to come in.

"Can do a little plumbing too," Raleigh says, laughing a little as he looks at the water rising. "I guess I should have taken some classes on weird weather phenomena, huh?"

"Really how could you ever have been so thoughtless and not planned just for us, every second, when you were picking what things to learn?" Jo's mouth has smoothed for serious toward a smile, and detoured right into a smirk that sets her copper eyes bright. She knows how to do this kind of easy banter at least.

It's a good kind of favor to have, especially when they have no clue what will actually come at the next. No one knows why it's abandoned, or why the creek is suddenly suddenly rising, she'd hazard already, given they haven't even had any rainstorms to proceed it. But that's all she has any clue about, and it could be something else.

Raleigh laughs at that. It is a little stupid to think he could possibly have planned for this as much as it's stupid to think that the world could have planned for the kaiju. But, still, it's hard to not feel a little guilty that he doesn't have the answers.

Raleigh has always been a doer. He's always been a helper, the kind of person who rolls up his sleeves and gets things done. It's hard to only be able to contribute so much here and be hamstrung by what he doesn't know.

"Yeah, I should have been a hell of a lot more thoughtful. I'm kind of an asshole for that, huh?"

lord willing and the creek don't rise [open]

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