trans_9 | Katzenjammer [Open]

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Katzenjammer [Open]

Aside from the comatose state she reached after Cassie finished her post-exorcism first-aid, sleep hasn't come easily to Eva since the possession. What little she's gotten has been interspersed with nightmares, so it's while all the Animorphs are sleeping that she slips out of Cassie's house and finds herself at the Drunken Dragon.

It's all too much. Too much going through her head and too much space alone in there. When she woke up it was because she was thrashing in her sleep and accidentally smacked her head into the bedpost. She found that she was clawing at her scalp while she dreamed.

She needs to feel a little bit out of control again, by her own doing, because that means less control that other people can take away from her. And she needs to dull the knowledge of how many bad memories she dredged up for Marco by going and getting herself possessed.

"Wine. Whatever you have. Keep it coming," she says, then, as if clarification is necessary, "I'm going to get drunk."

(( OOC: Open post but since Eva's going to be bemoaning the state of everything everywhere, please poke me first if you want to throw a character she's never met before at her. ))

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"I honestly do, most of the time." Though they didn't really bring kids door to door in shabby old motels. Never knew who your neighbors might be. "When I was at Stanford, though, I had a girlfriend. And she was one of those people who loved Hallowe'en and would drag me out every year."

"I notice the distinctive past tense in the word 'had'." She takes a drink. "You went to Stanford? What did you study? I did Berkeley and UCLA."

Sam looked at his water, then pushed it aside and asked for vodka. Straight. "My life isn't conducive to having many people close," he replied, reaching up to rub the bridge of his nose. "And I was pre-law. Things happened, though. I had to drop out."

"Good choice," she says, looking from the vodka to him. "Demony things or usual life things?"

He picked up the vodka, raising an eyebrow at the question. "Demony things," he confirmed, knocking the shot back with a shudder.

"Well, I'm not going to go picking at any wounds you don't want touched," she says, taking a sip. "How'd you meet Tom?"

"Thank you." It had been years, but the whole thing with Jess still hurt. Whatever else had happened, he had loved her and still did.

He grimaced slightly. "Umm. Well, after the whole Shiva thing? I kind of ended up in the brig for a while." Best explain that, most likely. "Schmuz was technically a prisoner when Shiva broke him out. He'd been sentenced to stasis because of a Yeerk plot to take over the ship. It didn't happen, but there were a lot of ill feelings toward Yeerks afterward." He picked up his water again. "I...just wanted to make sure he was treated fairly, you know? After what happened with Shiva and knowing the history that the crew had with Schmuz, I didn't want to see him killed when he'd actually been helping."

"Oh, dear, not ill feelings towards the Yeerks. What a travesty." She tops off that sarcasm with another gulp. "But you didn't answer my question."

He rolled his eyes. "Look, I get the ill feelings, okay? And I even understand it. Just explaining my choice in this." It was the first choice in everything that he'd had and he still stood by it.

"Anyway. Iniss came to talk to me while I was in the brig. Can't remember exactly what brought him by, other than to check up. And while he was there, I asked if I could talk to Tom." Because while he'd known Iniss for several weeks at that point, he'd never talked to Tom before. "I don't remember how long we talked, but it was a while. And when everything with Rachel went down, he came to me and Dean while Iniss was out of his head. In a lot of ways, it's easier for him to deal with us like that than people who knew him before."

"It's that general attitude I have a problem with, not you. I've run into my fair share of apologists, Stockholmy hosts and ambulance-chasers looking to benefit from the short supply of defense attorneys." And while she's fully aware that there's more to Yeerks than the damage they cause, while on a normal night she would even have a reasoned, less biased opinion accounting for cultural differences and human resentment, tonight the subject is a sore one.

She sighs and picks at her lip, taps her foot against the stool leg. "I can imagine. I'm sure it's difficult when everyone's disappointed you can't just be normal and happy again." She knows from plenty of personal experience, although in her case it was a bit different, since she wasn't there to see how everyone else was changing too. She came back to a veteran son and a husband with actual coping mechanisms.

Sam decided to let the first bit go for now. It wasn't terribly important in the grand scheme of things and he hardly needed her approval for the fact that he had protected Schmuz the only way he could at the time. It was what being a Hunter was all about: protecting the people who couldn't protect themselves.

"I'm sure there's a lot of that with Tom. He's the older brother, he's supposed to be the one who manages, you know?" God knew he'd seen it often enough with Dean. "Once I get some time, I'm going to take him to the Sensoriums and show him the X-Wing I fly. It seemed like something he was really interested in when I mentioned it."

Interested wasn't nearly strong enough a word for Tom's enthusiasm, actually.

"Mm. No matter how mature Jake is for his age, there's no way to really purge that sadness when you've lost part of someone. And knowing Tom it'll just make him doubt that he should be here even more." Poor kid. Not that she doesn't understand. Spending years being told you, your personality and your mind are worthless makes it all too easy to want to not matter again.

"An X-Wing? Isn't that...Star Wars?" Eva's still got a bit of closet geek left.

Sam nodded, grinning widely. "Yeah, it's Star Wars. I'm part of Rogue Squadron here on the ship. I can't get him on the real X-Wing because the cockpit is too small and I don't know when the next time we'll be in real space will be. But the Sensoriums make up for it and should be able to manage a slightly larger cockpit without messing things up too much."

"Those Sensoriums really are a marvel, aren't they? I've got to try more famous movies in there. I already did Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Marco and I did an impromptu re-enactment of Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman." She's not going to mention King Kong in case Sam doesn't know about the morphing. "Ooh, imagine doing something like Fantasia or Metropolis in there. As much as I'm self-proclaimed luddite, I can't help but be amazed at everything Stacy can do when she's not bathing us in slime."

He chuckled and nodded. "I haven't done anything like that in there. I use it for training, though. Either in the X-Wing or just plain old hand-to-hand. Or research," he admitted, glancing over his shoulder. "I tend to think up an old friend's place when I have a lot of research to be done. Stacy can import books I need into the Sensorium from the media library. So it gives me a chance to work where I'm comfortable in a way that I'm comfortable."

"What type of research? Legal?" She should really try using the Sensoriums instead of the Media Library, if only because the library's a bit bare. "What were you planning to do with the law, anyway?"

"Same stuff as usual, honestly." He shrugged. "A while before you woke up, we had something we called the Nightmare King on board. Turned out to be a real horror, honestly, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it was."

"I've heard a little bit about that. It's all taken care of, isn't it? It didn't exactly sound like a walk in the park, from what I've heard."

He nodded. "Yeah, it's been taken care of for a while now. But I was tracking down everything I could in the media library on what it could be and I felt more comfortable in Bobby's house than anywhere else."

"Bobby's house being what you're conjuring, right? What did you end up deciding it could be?"

"Yeah. He's another Hunter back in our world, but he doesn't really travel much to do his hunting these days. Takes care of what shows up around his place, has a hell of a lot of research material otherwise." Sam smiled, because he really did love all those books. "Never did find out. There were too many choices, too many things that could attack through dreams."

He went back for the water, because this was actually an easier conversation than Jess. "Turned out to be something straight out of Lovecraft. And I do mean straight out, because the name I heard mentioned later was Nyarlathotep." It really shouldn't roll off his tongue as easily as it did.

"Gesundheit," Eva says with a smile. She's more than a little glad she wasn't around for this Nightmare King. Hard enough with small demonic possession, no need to be around for something the whole ship seems to remember with some sort of weight. "It seems like our problems come less from the Ohm than from happenings on Planet Meatball in general. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not."

"Well, that tends to be the problem when you're trying to pull together weapons to defeat an unstoppable force," Sam pointed out. "And we humans have come up with some really scary stuff."

"It's just unusual all the different things that attack within the ship. We hear that the Ohm destroyed universes, but mostly we just have Stacy's word that they're worse than anything she can throw at us. Then we have villains, demonsouls and Yeerks," she really can't keep the hate out of that word, "all with us. I'm not sure how Stacy expects us all to cooperate, is all."

"I've been there when the Ohm attacked before. It...wasn't pretty." Sam didn't like thinking about it too much. "I'd been up in the X-Wings for most of it. Got grabbed by GLaDoS straight afterward, though. Seriously annoying."

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