trans_9 | Life's a Drag, Pun Intended [Open]

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Life's a Drag, Pun Intended [Open]

Finally having moved all the scrap he allotted for the day from the borders of the explored city to the little abandoned building he's calling The Warehouse, Howard nearly collapses onto the couch he's 'borrowed' from a neighboring, uninhabited house. After laying completely still for a few minutes, soaking in Stacy's downright weird artificial sun - though he guesses it's not much weirder than the FAYZ's - he sits back up and looks over today's haul.

A bedframe. About sixty pounds of various pieces of scrap metal, mostly aluminum this time, from the looks of it. Some PVC piping. A cardboard box full of jewelry, some of it looking expensive. Some weird alien cube that keeps making humming noises when it's not chirping. A dead iPod-ish computer thing. Corked bottles full of smokey, glowing substances. Walkie-Talkies with no batteries. Folding chairs. A box of gel pens. Flashlights. What looks like an alien ukulele. Something that may or may not be a magical wand. T-shirts with four arm-holes. An empty refrigerator that doesn't appear to work, but may be useful with a lock installed. Not that he'd have been able to get it here without the trolley he also kiped. And another plastic box full of various odds and ends. There's another mountain of stuff, slightly better organized, just behind The Warehouse's door.

Howard chews on the end of one of the gel pens and sings to himself as he starts sorting. It's probably nearing time for him to actually let other people come look through the stuff too. He cracks his neck and rubs one shoulder ruefully - skinny teenage bodies aren't made for dragging refrigerators.

"Spacey Stacy, give me your answer, do
You're totally crazy and more full of snot than the flu
Your food is a sloppish nightmare, but it's better than starving, I swear
It's not your fault, but could you use some salt? Because some spice is much overdue..."

(( OOC: Feel free to have your character find stuff in Howard's pile of junk, as long as it makes sense to have found in The City. ))

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Zouichi catches that look, and looks quizzically at Howard for a moment. He'd forgotten that Howard himself was a thief, once they'd gotten back in the rhythm of talking. After all, hadn't Howard just told him how often he'd been robbed in the FAYZ?

He follows Howard up the ladder, pulling himself easily up to the attic. "I thought you had a flashlight."

Never mind, because Zouichi does. He reaches behind him, sliding a slender black metal Maglite-type deal out from a loop in his belt, twisting it to shine a light around the various boxes and old knickknacks.

"Left it in the warehouse. Don't tend to carry it on me during the day." He follows the light with his eyes, squinting - he wonders if Zouichi's eyes adjust like his do, or if Zouichi's just That Cool that they switch to night vision instantaneously.

"Holy shit!" He stumbles backwards and narrowly avoids falling back down the hatch. "Shine the light back over there. There's a face in there!"

Zouichi does as Howard asks, swinging the light back around until it falls on the area Howard's pointed out. And it's not just a face, it's several faces protruding from the wall, grey and indistinct in their features, but still obviously humanoid.

The music has stopped now; in its place, he can now clearly hear the sound of children's voices. Crying? Moaning? Something in between? And some other background sound that he can't quite place.

"What the hell is that?" Howard's mood has gone from apprehensive and jumpy to outright panicky. Not to mention that he's heard way too many upset children's voices in his life. More than anything, it reminds him of that night with the fire evacuation, on Sherman Avenue.

He scooches behind Zouichi, nearly trembling, and fumbles for his pocket knife

"A ghost?" Because that's the only explanation Zouichi can come up with right now. Or an alien, maybe. Or a ghost alien.

It's getting louder, that crying, more insistent. Somehow, it feels like it's resonating within Zouichi's bones, echoing inside his head. It sounds like human children. He shakes his head, trying to clear it.

"Perhaps we should get out of here." Just a thought.

"Who the hell does that?" Because no way kid faces just ended up in the wall. If Howard were thinking clearly, he'd suppose maybe it's possible it's an illusion or something, but right now all he can think is that there are kids in the wall and that's terrifying.

He's halfway down the ladder as he calls up to Zouichi "way ahead of you". As he descends he notices that the floor is covered with green-ish grey fuzz, which surprises him, because he didn't expect to able to notice anything else when confronted with that sort of thing. He sprints out the dojo and waits for Zouichi outside, pacing restlessly and taking quick, deep breaths.

Zouichi comes up behind him a moment later -- he's not panicking, but he is walking faster than usual. "Ugh, that noise."

He doesn't comment on Howard's mad dash out of the attic, but he does look back at the dojo, considering. "Did you see that floor? It was like moss, or maybe some kind of fungus." In fact, they might have some of it on the soles of their shoes.

"Ugh, if I never have to hear kids crying again..." He's scuffing his shoes into the dirt, trying to get any traces of the mold off him. "Can moss do that? Like, swallow a person? Or just grow into that shape?"

He stops pacing and takes a long, slow breath. "You okay?"

"I doubt terrestrial species are capable of putting on that kind of performance," he said. "But it's entirely possible it isn't terrestrial, considering the ship on which we found it."

Zouichi nods. "I'm fine. I've never heard anything like that before."

"I'd say it's nothing from Earth but to be honest, that level of creepy would be right at home back in the FAYZ. Do you think...do you think there are actually kids in there?" He asks, and then immediately regrets it, because if there's a good reason to think there are, then there's responsibility to help them. Responsibility that Howard would not want to touch with a ten foot pole, thank you very much.

"Throw in some choking and cries for help and you'd have had the soundtrack to the fire evacuation back home." He taps his teeth with his pocket knife anxiously.

He shakes his head. "I don't know. If those were children, they certainly don't seem to be alive. But I'm not exactly an expert on the supernatural, either. You don't know any Ghostbusters, do you?"

Zouichi glances back at Howard when he mentions the fire evacuation. "We're not in the FAYZ. And whoever those voices belonged to -- if they belonged to anyone at all -- they're not the children you knew."

Of course, he can't be sure of that, not totally, but what were the chances?

Howard's in a bit too grave a mood to respond with 'who you gonna call', so he just shakes his head. "I don't know. What about the Magic Department? Should we tell Stacy? Because they didn't seem dead either. Or I mean, they're a really noisy dead."

No, that's true, they're not in the FAYZ. He still keeps tapping his pocketknife and dragging his shoe back and forth in the dirt anyway. "No, I know, I'm just sick of that sound. Well, I guess we check that dojo off the list of places to train. Sensoriums are more than good enough for me."

He looks up at Zouichi, not necessarily surprised but still noting that the children in the mold were unsettling and new even to him. He really doesn't know enough about Zouichi's world - bar the zombies - to know how weird or not weird it was.

Zouichi nods thoughtfully. "The Magic Department... or perhaps the Science Department. After all, we don't know for sure what caused the phenomenon. It's possible the effects we experienced were due to some kind of environmental toxin."

His world has zombies, Synthetic Humans, psychic powers... just no ghosts. As a general rule. "Whatever is affecting this building may also have spread to other buildings in the area. If so, it could pose a larger hazard to the crew."

"Could be, like, the crazy mold makes us hallucinate," Howard says, trying to convince himself that it's something benign. "Except we both saw and heard the same thing, right? We should just...tell someone."

And lay any possible responsibility at someone else's feet, someone better equipped to deal with this, someone who is not them or at the very least not Howard.

"And it probably spreads fast, since I didn't notice anything a few days ago. Or maybe it was just...asleep. I don't know."

"Hmm... if there's a danger of it spreading, perhaps we should dispose of it." The wheels of destruction are turning.

"...do you have any weapons in that reclamation pile of yours that might be able to do the job?" Because if not, Zouichi can always go back and get his coil rifle.

Howard grinds his teeth in thought. "I have a flamethrower," he says, casting a long look at Zouichi to see how he'll react to that. Surely Zouichi wouldn't judge him for wanting to be armed.

No hesitation. "Then let's get it, shall we?"

Zouichi would be surprised if Howard wasn't armed.

Howard nods in affirmation, and starts walking quickly back to the Warehouse. Once there, he considers telling Zouchi to wait outside, but decides that won't help that whole 'trust' thing they're playing at. Instead, he walks into the kitchen and drops to his knees in front of the cabinet, reaching in and unlatching the secret door on the inside and pulling the floor out. He doesn't invite Zouichi into the hidden cellar, but he won't stop him. On his way down he quickly tosses a tarp over the still he's working on for Chase.

"Someone even more paranoid than me owned this house first," he explains. Through another hidden door and there's a stash of weapons, mostly organized by size and most of them in crates. Howard pulls out the box that contains the flamethrower, and as soon as he can, hands it off to Zouichi.

Zouichi would have respected a request to remain outside, but since Howard didn't tell him not to, he follows Howard down to the cellar. He glances at the still before Howard tosses the tarp over it, but even if he'd had some time to examine it, he's never seen a still before and wouldn't know what it was for.

The owner probably was paranoid... but Howard's the one that picked the place out, after all. Zouichi takes the flamethrower, looking back at Howard. "You don't want to do the honors?"

"I'd probably end up setting myself on fire, and no thank you on that one. I'm betting that out of the two of us, you're the one who knows how to use something like that." He waits for Zouichi to go back up the stairs first so he can lock up afterwards. "Anything else we need?"

He packs another flashlight just in case, and grabs a shovel from the closet.

True, Howard; very true. "A fire extinguisher?" You know, just in case the massive blaze gets out of hand.

"Other than that, I'm fine. Do you want to get a mask or something for yourself?"

Howard pulls a small notebook out of one of the drawers and looks over Albert's entries. "We...actually do have a fire extinguisher." He roots through one of the boxes in the closet and pulls it out, and grabs his first-aid kit and a shirt on the way out. "Mask probably won't help. Wet t-shirt'll be better."

Slinging the shirt and kit over his shoulder and holding the shovel, he has to admit this does look sort of badass. Not that it makes him feel even the slightest bit more excited about going back to face that mold. "Let's go."

"You're very organized," he says, rather approvingly. It wouldn't do to misplace the serious firepower, after all.

Zouichi nods curtly in response to Howard's words, slinging the flamethrower over his shoulder. As luck would have it, today he's even wearing his body armor. Not that he's expecting anything to go wrong, of course.

He's more than happy to start back. The sooner they get back, the sooner the creepy mold becomes scorched mold.

"Easy to lose things," he says plainly, tense now that they're going back there and a bit lost in thought as they walk back. Mostly he's just trying to keep his stomach from turning and his hands from shaking as they head back there. Bravery has never been his strong suit and for all he knows, that mold is going to grow entire people out of it to fight back. But the more he tries to calm himself, the more horrible ideas of what the mold might be capable of blossom.

When they're back to standing in front of the dojo, he takes a slow breath, all the way to the pits of his lungs. There shouldn't be any need for a fire break - the buildings are already spread far enough apart and there's no brush anywhere. Furthermore, Stacy's humidity should dampen things a bit. Unless whatever the mold breathes out is highly flammable. "Man, I do not want to go back in there."

Zouichi doesn't comment on Howard's obvious anxiety; in fact, he's a little impressed that Howard hasn't abandoned the task altogether and asked Zouichi to do this alone. Also, and there's no point lying -- he wants to see how well the flamethrower works.

"We don't have to go back in attic," he says. "In fact, it's probably too dangerous. Stand back a bit, please."

Zouichi walks up and just into the wide doors of the dojo, examining his surroundings for a moment before a line of bright flame bursts forth from the weapon in his hand. He sends the flames lancing back and forth, lighting up the windows of the building as he backs away. The dojo is made of wood, and though it's a little damp, it's not long before the building lights up.

By the time Zouichi walks back to Howard's location, the flames are climbing higher and higher -- licking at the floor of the attic, no doubt.

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