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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Alas, no expression of enjoyment, although the sentiment is there; Zouichi's used to conflagrations that are a little less controlled. But it is rather satisfying to hear the creepy mold shrieking as the building goes up. He doesn't appreciate having psychic angst beamed into his head and whatever that mold was doing, it came close enough.

As far as Zouichi is concerned, fear is an emotional response to be expected from human beings. Either through his training, his personality, or some inborn quality he was engineered with, he rarely actually feels it himself. The closest thing he's experienced is his concern for others, particularly Fuyu -- but to be afraid of harm to himself would render his mission practically impossible.

He gives Howard a little smile. "No, thanks. Actually, we might want to get out of here, in case anyone sees the flames and comes to investigate. I don't remember any rules against setting fire to mold, but you never know."

"You know, normally I'd be all for that" he really, really would, "but I don't think we should just let a fire like this burn out without supervision. Just in case. I don't want us to be responsible for taking out a whole block."

He looks around, eyes settling on a building across the road - it looks like it might have been a diner once, including a high counter to duck behind if anyone comes by. "Not that that stops us from finding a hiding place to watch it from, you know."

He picks up the fire extinguisher, kit and shovel and motions for Zouichi to follow.

Fire suppression? Cool guys don't look at explosions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqz5dbs5zmo), Howard.

Zouichi nods; what Howard says makes sense. He follows close behind, shifting the flamethrower's strap against his shoulder once more. Inside the diner, he picks a booth and sits down, glancing outside at the burning building.

"So, do you come here often?"

He chuckles. "Not anymore. Ew, smells like burning hair out there."

He pops his head into the back room, checking to see if Stacy decided to bring over any food, and sighs when it just seems to be endless empty fryers and kitchen utensils. He grabs a fork out of one of the tables, inspects it, wipes it off on his pants and twirls it in his hands, stopping every once in a while to click the tines against his front teeth. He slides into a booth across from Zouichi. "Stacy's just full of surprises, isn't she? I bet that's from someone else's screwed up homeworld."

He clicks the fork again. "You think any of your zombies'll show up? I'm really hoping mine doesn't."

He makes a face. Thanks for bringing that up, Howard. Zouichi isn't at all sure that any food the ship would have brought over with this place would have been edible, anyway -- no telling how long the diner's been around.

"If they do," says Zouichi, "That would be the end of the majority of the crew. N5S is incredibly fast-acting, airborne, and the infection rate is almost 100 percent, with the sole exception being Accommodators. There's a reason most of the humans of my world were forced to live in disease shelters. The only variable is whether the nonhuman members of the crew would be susceptible."

Also, he would probably have to kill off the infected crew members.

You'd be surprised what stays edible for long periods of time, Zouichi. Cans of preserved fruit are like tiny vessels of happiness from the heavens.

Yay, that sounds like 28 Days Later. Fantastic. Another thing to worry about, but Howard would rather know what to worry about than be blindsided should it ever happen. "They stay contagious until they die, then? Or even afterwards?"

Yeah, but how long would they have been around? Forty years? More?

"Die?" Zouichi looks a little confused. "The hosts die, and are reanimated as drones. And the drones produce a kind of... I suppose infectious spore is a good way to describe it. It is capable of surviving even in the vacuum of space. If the ship were foolish enough to bring that aboard..."

Hey, if it's not bursting at the seams from some type of obvious contamination, Howard would consider eating it.

"Well, I don't know, destroyed. But so the virus is its own thing...would there be a way to isolate places on Stacy just in case a breakout happened? Like reverse quarantines?" Oddly enough, Howard finds talking about this almost comforting. Like planning for problems in the future makes the creepiness and untrustworthiness of Stacy now less of a problem.

Zouichi does not find the current conversation particularly comforting, but he'll talk about it... to a point.

"It depends. I don't know what sort of capacity the ship has for isolating disease breakouts, but normal virus quarantine procedures should suffice once an area is contained. On the other hand, the ship has proven that at least some of its containment systems have failed or are failing. It may not be capable of maintaining its own disease perimeters.

"On the other hand, the ship itself is an enclosed area, unlike Earth. It may be possible to sterilize compromised sections of the ship."

"Yayyyy," Howard says unenthusiastically. "And I'm betting sterilization is just thrilling."

He bites the tip of the fork, looking outside. "I think our dojo's officially burned down out there. Let's go out and finish it up. Might as well give all the mold kids a proper burial."

The idea that they might have been alive still hasn't quite left Howard's mind.

"Guess it depends on whether you like having your outer epithelial layers flash-burned off," says Zouichi, standing. It's a joke, kind of.

He doesn't really think that the mold actually contains the souls of lost children or anything, but Howard seems to, so he doesn't mention the possibility that if they are real, it's entirely likely they'll just move and haunt something else.

"After you."

Howard gives Zouichi the 'never got a chance to pass eight grade science' look. "It's got big words in it, so I'm just going to assume that it's horribly painful and ends with me dead."

He grabs the fire extinguisher and shovel and heads out the door. The dojo has mostly collapsed now, and the fire hasn't spread. There's no more sound beyond the fire itself. He hands Zouichi the fire extinguisher and starts shoveling dirt onto the burning areas near the edge.

Jeez, Howard, haven't you ever seen The Andromeda Strain?

"...they don't really do that. The actual procedure is painless. However, if they did use the flash burn, it would remove the outermost layer of dead skin cells, leaving the rest of you undamaged."

Zouichi accepts the extinguisher and begins spraying foam at the flames that remain. How odd to be putting out fires. "Too bad," he says. "It was a nice place."

"If it doesn't hurt, why's it called a flash burn? You could call it exfoliating if it's just removing dead skin cells."

He nods. "Yeah, seriously. I think some of the doorways were made out of mahogany," he says, missing Zouichi's point. He winces as he seems some twisted metal in the rubble. God damn it, he forgot the shopping cart.

Once as much as done as can be, and all that's left is wreckage and dirt, Howard leans the shovel against his shoulder. "I don't know about you, Zou, but I'm going hope to where there isn't Stephen King mold."

"The idea behind it is to use a sudden burst of heat from a lamp to burn off the outer layer of your skin. It takes less than a second. Thus, 'flash burn'." Zouichi looks over his shoulder at Howard for a moment. "Pretty expensive beauty treatment, if that's what you're thinking."

Well, the mahogany was nice, too, but Zouichi wasn't really one to notice that kind of thing. The wrecked shopping cart, though... "Sorry about your cart. Maybe there's an empty grocery store out here somewhere."

He nods at Howard. "Let's go. Unless you see something you want to take back?"

"Don't worry, I'm about to go spend my money on it. And flash burn still sounds painful. Most things with 'burn' in the title do," he says, gesturing with his head to the rubble and slag behind them.

"I'll find a new one eventually. I'm good for now. That kinda killed the mood for rooting through abandoned attics."

Painful for creepy mold, maybe.

Zouichi shrugs, then turns back on the direction of the other buildings. Shame about the cart, though.

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Life's a Drag, Pun Intended [Open]

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