(no subject)

[seekingcrocodile]

WHO: Killian Jones
WHERE: The woods, the inn, the village, his and Emma's house
WHEN: October 16 and after
OPEN TO: All; one thread closed to Emma
WARNINGS: None
STATUS: Open; ongoing

---

[Out and about – open]

He'd been a bit confused when he woke up a few mornings ago and found a couple of boxes sitting on the table. He'd heard them mentioned but hadn't received any himself yet, and he doesn't know how to explain that. His curiosity had gotten the best of him and he'd opened them; one held everything he needed to bake a cake, and the other had shaving supplies. He knows that based on the weather and the best anyone can tell about what time of year it is, that Emma has a birthday sometime around now, but how did whoever left this box know that?

Despite the fact that they're all pretty sure someone is watching them, and the fact that he knows they're being toyed with, he decides to set his pride aside and use the contents of the boxes anyway. When he goes about his tasks now, it's with a freshly-shaved face. He feels so much more like himself now, and as he heads out into the woods with the harpoon to do some fishing, he can heard whistling and humming what some might recognize as sea shanties. Even after he returns to the inn and goes through the rest of his tasks for the day, he doesn't stop humming. With the surprise he's got planned for Emma later, he's in a comparatively good mood. Feel free to interrupt him at any point.

[For Emma]

The first thing she'll notice when she comes inside is the smell of something baking. There's the smell of food, too, but definitely something baking. He even set the table, and lit a few candles (though that's as much to be able to see as it is for anything else).

“I hope you haven't eaten yet. I have a surprise for you.” Two surprises, actually, because when she gets a look at him, she'll see that he has shaved off the beard that he'd been forced to grow since arriving here. “There's a cake waiting for you.”

Comments

[zomboligist]

"You can make money off of pretending to be anything so long as you have decent fries and mozzarella sticks on your menu," Ravi says knowingly, because he, too, has been taken in by the allure of awful foods far too many times in his life. "Not that we've got those options here, sadly. It doesn't seem like anyone's rushing to open a restaurant in the middle of survival."

He extends a hand to shake after making sure it's clean. "I'm Ravi," he says. "You are? Besides someone well-acquainted with several catchy tunes?"

[seekingcrocodile]

"I don't know what those are." There's a lot he doesn't know, which he probably isn't going to be learning about here. The things available here are closer to what he's used to, even if they're still more modern.

"Captain Killian Jones." Which is probably a bit hint as to why he knows those catchy tunes.

[zomboligist]

"Well, it may be a blessing that you don't have to endure the deep fried fish, but not knowing what mozzarella sticks are is just a crime," Ravi insists, his stomach growling and grumbling at him seeing as it's not like he's got the chance to feast on them here. He shakes the man's hands, a touch impressed with his accreditation. "Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti," he says, which doesn't really give him any insight as to why he might know some of those songs, but hasn't got much experience in singing them.

"So what's a Captain like you doing so far from a sea?" he jokes, as if he doesn't already know that they're all trapped and doomed and trapped a little more.

[seekingcrocodile]

"Then perhaps when I leave here, I shall have to find some." He's sure that at some point, Emma will make sure he tries some. He's slowly learning new things about the strange world she lives in.

"If I figure that out, I'll be sure and let you know." They'd all like a way out of here, after all, and figuring out how they got here and who's responsible would be a big step in the direction of being able to get home.

[zomboligist]

He talks like he's getting out of here. Ravi already very much likes this man, though he has no idea why he thinks that he's getting out when the rest of the population seems a little less inclined to believe the same thing. "Have you got any ideas, then, for getting us out? Obviously, ship by sea probably isn't an option unless that river opens up into a great bay that just happens to be invisible."

Still, he'll take an invisible escape over anything else, because it means getting home and stopping a whole other crisis back there.

[seekingcrocodile]

“There's no sea here.” He's not one hundred percent sure of that, of course, having not followed the river to its end in either direction, but he's been a good distance in both directions and hasn't found any indication of the sea. Even if he knows that there must be sea somewhere; the river has to come to an end. “Though if there were, and a vessel worthy of travel on it, I could get us away from here.” Maybe not home, depending on where home is, but at least away from here.

“No one has found a hint of a way home yet, but if I never looked for a way out when I was in a new place, I never would have gotten anywhere.”

[zomboligist]

"Well, if ever a sea opens up and if ever a vessel finds you, remember your dear old new friend Ravi," he encourages, seeing as he'd really like to be out of here sooner rather than later, given the potentially imminent apocalypse back home that he's been trying not to think about. "How can we be stuck? It's not like there are bears guarding the exits."

"There aren't bears guarding the exits, are there?" Ravi clarifies, hoping that he hasn't just made a stupid assumption.

[seekingcrocodile]

"With the woods that are around here? There might be." He hasn't seen any, but the thought does occasionally cross his mind when he's walking through the thick underbrush with an armload of fresh-caught fish. "I haven't heard of anyone coming across a bear, but I also haven't heard of anyone coming across a boundary of any sort either."

They're in a seemingly-endless wilderness that likes to remind them that there were apparently residents here before them, but without giving any clue as to the fate of those residents. "Even if there was a boundary and we could make it across, there's no guarantee that we would be in a world that any of us came from or could get back to."

(omg I lost this notif so if it's too late, feel free to ignore)

[zomboligist]

"Where do you think we are, then?" Ravi wonders, because part of experimentation and science is understanding the variables of the situation. In this case, finding out what people think of the world they're in (or rather, what world that is) at least helps him in building a case. "If the boundaries suddenly gave way, what do you think lies beyond all this?"

[seekingcrocodile]

"I don't think I'm qualified to answer that." He's been a lot of places, sure, but he's always known where he was going and that he was going to them. He'd also, with one notable exception, had a map of the place, or been able to acquire one. Everyone came into this place knowing absolutely nothing about it. "There must be an ocean out there somewhere, based on the presence of the river, but how close it is, or even if it's within the boundaries we haven't discovered yet, I couldn't say."

[zomboligist]

"So no tracing the river back to the source? I thought that was a mountain or a lake," he admits, feeling briefly stupid for not knowing how rivers work, exactly, but he'd been too busy at medical school figuring out how to save lives until he'd been forcibly boxed into a role where it didn't matter what you did, seeing as they were already dead.

It does tend to take the pressure off, though luckily he had his experiments to keep himself occupied.

[seekingcrocodile]

"The source and the mouth are two different things. The source could be a mountain or a lake, and it ends in an ocean." He knows a lot about water. He's been making his living on it for centuries.

"The ocean could very well be outside of the boundaries we're not allowed to cross." Since no one has found those yet either.

[zomboligist]

"This is clearly where I failed map skills," Ravi says with a helpless shrug, seeing as he definitely spent most of his time working with dead bodies and not river sources. "I don't understand how we're being kept here, truthfully. We're filled with intelligent people and we still can't escape."

"We're lab rats," he realizes.

[seekingcrocodile]

"What kind of rats?" He's seen a lot of rats, living on ships as he has, but he's never paid attention to the differences between them.

Nor is he aware of half the references people from a modern culture make. He's still a little behind the times there.

"Some of us have map skills. Some of us have other skills. They're all what will eventually get us out of here."

[zomboligist]

"The kind that people use to test variables on," he says, his eyes widening a little as he looks at this place in a new light. "Like when you give them an obstacle just to see what they do," he finishes, trying to quiet the dread in his heart though he knows it's going to haunt him for days if he's lucky, but realistically it will be weeks.

"If you do find a way out of here, I'm hopeful that I've earned enough friendship to be one of the first you tell," he suggests hopefully.

[seekingcrocodile]

"If I find a way out of here, I'll be sure and let everyone know. If we don't all survive, then we can't say that any of us did." That's how it was with his crew, and even though he's not the captain and this isn't his crew, every survival instinct he has right now is telling him to look out for everyone. They're all in this together, and together is the only way they'll get through it.