trans_9 | Moving on up! ... In. Whatever!

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Moving on up! ... In. Whatever! - [OPEN]

The city air felt so clean and fresh today!

Or rather, it seemed that way in comparison to the Sleeping Halls and those small, throbbing and sometimes when Jr. focused too hard on it, muggy-feeling rooms. The small red-head made his way through the city, few articles of spare clothes draped over one forearm, a set of guns balanced on top of them and held against his chest. He had his other, more commonly used set of firearms holstered at his sides as usual, but that sure was four guns on his person in that moment. With a pair of sunglasses on his head, Jr. looked ready for something exciting, something thrilling. And that something was moving. He'd been surprised at the sudden invite from Zouichi, but easily snatched up the offer - learning the inn he'd be staying in was an old styled Japanese inn was like the icing on the cake, though. Happy at the idea to flop down and fall asleep in something that actually felt like a room, he sped up his walk some, passing by the other buildings and structures as he moved.

[ feel free to be passing by in the city or assuming he's passing by any of the buildings! anyone's free to tag in ]

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"Not a bad idea! I'm surprised there are so many empty rooms in this place. But that might not last for long. At least this way we're all a little closer to the other parts of the city." Jr. had a thing about checking up on the game room every now and then, just out of habit.

"A lot of the people I talk to feel fine about staying in the sleeping caverns, which is just weird. Or they don't find their houses from back home, which is even weirder. We just moved in wherever had the best location back home, whether or not we owned it." He shrugs. "You'd think people would have ransacked this place already."

Jr. nodded along as Howard spoke, recalling some of the descriptions he heard of the place he had come from. It made sense with what he knew.

"I'm not sure if Stacy's picking is carefully thought out or just plain lucky sometimes," he mused. "I didn't have a house show up exactly, just a room that was on my ship. More recreational than move-in material. Not that I'm complaining about that - it's kind of nice having it here." For more than just the comfort of having something familiar there with him, even though the other reasons caused a twist in his stomach when he thought too hard about them. "I wonder how long this place has been here for."

"How do you have a room that isn't part of anything? Don't the walls create their own structure?" he asks, sounding almost philosophical. "Spacey Stacy decided it would be a great idea to pick up Perdido's haunted mines from our world. Couldn't have gone with In-N-Out or the comic book store. Nope. We get creaky old mines and evil ghosts. Ra ra, Perdido."

He looks around and contemplates that. "I don't know. How old you think Stacy is?"

"It took up one of the smaller warehouses. It's the game room we had on the ship ... you know, poker table, even a couple of the slot machines even though theres's not much in the way of currency period around here, so it's more a try it out for luck's sake." It was an odd place to show up, he reflected, out of the number of other place that very well could have. But Jr. had always loved the game room on the Durandal - passing the time with the soldiers, teaching the 100-Series Realians how to play ... he missed them, too.

"Mines?" He raised an eyebrow as he placed a couple of books on a table. "Anything in them actually worth going in'em for except evil ghosts?" He didn't see much of a point in Stacy bringing something in that had no use, but he didn't understand a lot of things that she did.

"Who knows? The Daligig had her way before we woke up, apparently. Maybe we can find out now that they're paying us a visit." Something Jr. wasn't sure that he liked, which was evident enough on his face when he spoke.

"Oh yeah? That sounds pretty cool, actually. You should show me that, sometime. I'm not that bad at cards." He even, predictably, knows how to cheat at them. Although he doubts he would around people carrying firearms or who could punt him through a wall.

"Eh. Probably not. There might be the crumpled body of an eleven year-old kid in there, if Stacy decided to stay accurate to reality, but that's waaaay down in the mine." Howard doesn't see the point in bringing anything from his world to Stacy, although some days he misses the beach. Not often, though.

"Yeah, you can go interrogate them if you want. I just finished setting the shattered legs of the last person who crossed them last night. They're not above wrecking us up."

That made him perk up some. "Are you?" He hadn't really done much in hanging out there to actually play as much as check up on it every now and again. "I will, then! It's around here in the city, too. By the Precinct. It's got a video game there, too ... but your mileage may vary." He shrugged. "Maybe I can set up some kind of system so more people'd come and play and bet, or something."

He made an unamused face at the thought of bodies down in a mine like that. It wasn't a very good thought. And his expression stayed in that unamused state when the Daligig talk continued. "So it's already getting messy, huh. ... who'd they hurt?"

"Well, I mean. Blackjack, poker, Egyptian rat screw, spit, that sort of stuff. The stuff we got in trouble for playing in school. I don't know what sort of card games you had where you're from." He grins at the idea of videogames. "Oh yeah? I'm down with videogames. Maybe if people made it a regular thing, it'd be a way to meet people or something."

He taps his nose. "Patient confidentiality. I can't tell you that. According to them, though, she got all up in their face first, but you know. No witnesses, naturally."

"We've got all of those. Cards are actually something that haven't changed too much over the years ... I mean, there are a lot of new and different games, but I don't think you can ever go wrong with the classics." Jr. wouldn't know about how card games were taken in school settings. He knew most of the games weren't exactly kid-friendly when it came to serious gambling and betting, but the harm in just playing for fun he never minded. Unless of course kids did actually make it high stakes. Some kids were like that. "It's a two player fighter kind of game. A.G.W.S. fighters - er, smaller versions of the stuff that are in the hangars here, pretty much. Allenby seemed to get a kick out of it when we broke it in."

He crossed his arms. "Hmm. I wouldn't call it smart to antagonize other races right off the bat, but apparently they're not exactly being the best company, either."

"We should play sometime." Howard would be one of those kids. Gambling at school was never his primary form of troublemaking - Orc was too dumb to follow along and would get frustrated and bored too quickly - but now, especially now that he's practiced more of his skills with sleight of hand, Howard realizes he's a bit eager to try it again.

His face gets grim. "Yeah, so I heard. If she started out by antagonizing them. Big if."

"Sounds good! It came set up with a few decks of cards and some chips for score's sake." A pleasant surprise.

"It's always ifs with these people -- and everyone we meet, seems like." While he didn't sound unconcerned, he did sound used the concept.

"Pretty much. The chessmaster doesn't have to tell the pawns what's up, and all that. I don't even care anymore, I just don't want to die. Seems like I've been following orders from crazy people on high for a while now, so why should that change?" He shakes his head and tries to scrub the bitterness from his voice. "I just don't want to end up getting killed because of someone else's whimsy."

"I don't think any of us do. At least not until we get a clearer picture of what's going on here." That was why Jr. went along with the flow and hung out on Stacy - there was no other real choice to, for the time being. He hoped everyone else on the crew was willing to jump ship and actually respond to any twists, turns and bad revelations that could very well come their way.

"Yeah, but I really don't." Besides, some people here don't seem to care if they're going to live or die. Plenty of people seem to think if they die in battle against the Ohm, it'll be a worthy death. "I like to think there's more to life than just being a weapon someone else aims somewhere, you know? Like, the pistol doesn't get a say, but the Daligig are the shooters. Not my cup of tea."

"Yeah, I know what you mean." Jr. wasn't about to repeat his childhood all over again with new puppeteers making him dance and shielding him from truths. "I'm pretty sure they should get the idea by now, though, that most of us aren't so willing to just roll over just because they stepped on board. Whether they like it or not."

"If they can do to most of us what they did to our patient, then it doesn't matter if we want to or not. They can press us into 'do this or be killed or mindfucked' if they feel like it." He bites the corner of his lower lip. "So I guess we're kind of screwed."

Howard wouldn't know optimism if it delivered a gift basket to his doorstep.

That brought a wry smirk to Jr.'s lips. "There seem to be a lot of us who have our own tricks up our sleeve, if it came to that."

"Yeah, and plenty of us who don't," he shoots back. "So then what? If we're not following the Daligig, we're going to have to go with you guys. We don't get much of a say."

"Uhh ... I doubt that'd happen. I just meant if the Daligig'd ever try to really screw with us we could probably come up with a way to drive'em off. Not have it end in usurping powers and people expecting everyone to follow them. Let's hope it doesn't even have to come to that first thing."

"You're way more optimistic than I am," he says with a shrug. He's seen coups and overtakings often enough that he'd be shocked if it ended differently.

"In some ways," he admitted. "I don't have the best opinions on This Whole Thing, but I'd like to think that anything we get shoved into we can get our way back out of."

"That's stupid," he says. He doesn't bother to sugarcoat that. "Everyone thinks that about themselves and plenty of people end up dead anyway."

"Everyone ends up dead if you don't make any attempt at all, though."

He shrugged slightly. "But those're just theoreticals. Even though they're not making the best first impression, things could end up working in our favor in the long run. We'll have to see. Since I'm sure they're keeping the same kind of eyes on us that we're all having on them."

As long as the Daligigs' streak of harming anybody stayed at one, of course. And Jr. wasn't adverse to getting information and things they needed from them and then getting them out of their hair if they did end up being more of a pain than a help. But he liked to think that not everyone out there had some hidden agenda - even despite how little that happened, even back home.

"I'm not about to complain about getting an expenses-paid trip on the Stacy Express, it's true. It's better than home." Pretty much anything is better than home, though. "They might know everything about us, like those people on Galilee. Their eyes are always going to be better, if just for that."

He claps his hands together. "Well, you've probably got to get to finishing moving in and I've got to go try and kill someone else's mood. Laters, man."

"Gah, don't even say that!" Galilee had been bad enough, especially with their methods of doing thing-- and Jr. never actually learned just how much they knew about his and some of the others' lives. "I have enough eyes on me at home, much less from the multi-universal folks."

He didn't have much in ways of needing to unpack, but he nodded all the same. "We'll lighten things up later sometime, then, in the game room."

He figured he'd also drag Zouichi along for that. His first lesson in poker-playing had been fun, Jr. sort of wanted to see how much it stuck with him outside of that initial breaking-in.

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Moving on up! ... In. Whatever! - [OPEN]

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