Welcome to the Jungle [Open]

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Tony has honestly been trying to avoid the whole Yeerk trial thing. It was before his time, he doesn't know that much about it, and he generally trusts the command staff and the crew to make the right decision at the end of the day. It's what they do, right? They're good people. He can tell that. Some of them are like people he knew back home. Some of them aren't. But he trusts most of them. Or, at least the ones he knows.

Still, he doesn't want to got up in that bru-ha-ha, so he's decided that it would be good a idea to chill in the Sensoriums for an afternoon. So far, he's conjured up an image of his home neighborhood - he's been a bit home-sck lately, although this doesn't help that much - and he's just been walking empty streets. He could fill it with the people from his memories if he wanted. They'd seem real, but it wouldn't be right. It would feel... off somehow.

Still, this is his home, even if it is run-down. Even if the cops don't like to come through here unless they absolutely have to. That, or they're chasing someone in force; he can't begin to count the number of times he's heard a helicopter fly over his apartment building. And then there was that one time a SWAT team had stormed the aprtment a few doors down. Someone had apparently been dealing crack or some other shit and the Federal government's War on Drugs had come rather uncomfortably close to home. He'd been a kid then, only eleven or twelve. He'd been terrified (although he would never have admitted that to his friends) and he and his family had stayed inside most of that day.

It was a rought neighborhood. There were gangs. People had been shot - hell, he'd been shot at and shot people. He'd gotten into that shit when he was thirteen and it was really only because of his First Change that he'd gotten the Hell out of it (much to the relief of his mother). He still kept close ties with his friends that were in, but... he wasn't going back to that. Aside from the fact that he could eat bullets for lunch now, he really didn't want to go frenzied war-form on a bunch of gangbangers and wake up in a pool of human blood and entrails. Once had been enough.

Besides, he had his own war to fight. The one he was fighting now. Well, would be if it weren't for Stacy. But this was home.

He'd grown tired of walking and eventually had just had Stacy conjure up a car, which he was currently in the process of trying to hotwire - just to keep in practice, of course.

"Come on, come on..." he mutters.

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"Oh... see, it doesn't work like that where I'm from," Roxie says, relaxing against the side of the car a little more. "There's the cho, but there are other things too. Fae, the dead, the things that come in from other worlds... but the cho are the only ones that shouldn't exist at all."

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"Oh, it's s'possed to exist. It should just be in balance an' not trying to kill everything."

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Roxie lets out a 'hnnh', thinking about it. "It sounds like it would be kind of nice, in comparison. Having some real structure to it."

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"Structure? Yeah, some. Otherwise the world is goin' to shit," he sighs and put his back to the car, "...poor keep on gettin' poorer, people keep dyin' and the world goes straight to Hell."

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"That's what it already feels like, with mine..." Roxie pulls herself onto the hood again, feet hanging over the edge. "I figure I'll retire someday to somewhere out on the fringes, carve my own little sanctum out of it." She says it abstractly enough that the 'someday' must be very far away for her, though.

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"Mmm," Plays glances up at her, "...we don't have that choice. I don't have that choice. I don't get no damn retirement. We gotta do or die. And we're probably gonna die."

Yeah, he thinks about this a lot.

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"I was ignoring the fact that I'm probably going to get in over my head with something and die before I'm sixteen," Roxie says, face and tone almost disturbingly placid despite her words. "If anybody ever lived long enough in my job to actually get out of the business, I'd eat my shoe." (Not that she actually has shoes.)

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Tony shrugs, "Makes two of us... though I think I'm gonna buy it before m'twenty. Started a bit later than you did, anyway... Hell, my fuckin' culture says dyin' in glorious battle is the best thing we can hope to do."

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Roxie looks over at Tony for a long, quizzical moment.

"That's stupid," she says bluntly. "Run away and you can beat their head in sometime else."

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Tony laughs for a good minute before finally replying, "...you have no idea how much I agree with that. My tribe agrees with that shit. But then again, we're on the bottom of the fuckin' totem pole because we run away or fight smart. Freakin' Get, though... Oi."

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"Your tribe?" Roxie asks. She's smiling, a little, after that laugh—it seems like her expression never tilts very far in any given direction, at least from the evidence already provided.

"I run away plenty of times. The cho change enough that I have to work out new plans of attack every few time."

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"Yeah, tribe," He's breaking the Litany so hard right now, but he doesn't care. She's not from his world and she's probably never going to get there, "My people - we're werewolves. And we have thirteen different tribes. Used to be more, but that's a long fuckin' story. An' my tribe is called th' Bone Gnawers."

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"Huh... I've never really been clear on how that kind of stuff works where I'm from," Roxie says. "I've fought some... thing that go bump in the night, guess you could say... but mostly we just keep away from each other. The cho end up eating a lot of the ones who get too curious."

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"Well, probably not th' same in your world, y'know? Different all over."

He waves a hand, "Mean, we got vampires too. Least I think we do."

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"Oh—hungry dead. We don't have anything so, pop-culture is the right term, I guess, but when the human or animal part of the soul passes on and the other one stays..." She frowns a little bit.

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"Sounds fun," he cocks a brow. Yeah, probably not, huh?

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"I've only fought one, and it was one of the dumb ones," she says with a little bit of a shrug. "Lucky, I guess."

She lays back against the hood again, letting her jacket splay out a little against her. It's odd--it doesn't seem bulky enough to fit the size of whatever that glint of metal hinted at before. But maybe that was just a trick of the light.

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"Well, you know what they say," he grunts as he picks himself up and hops up onto the roof of the car, perching, "Better lucky then good, yeah?"

Tony isn't that surprised by that. He knows Garou have techniques to hide things in the spirit world or to make things just not there for a time.

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"I'd rather be both," Roxie says with a little shrug gesture. "But I've had to use lucky a lot. Mostly self-trained."

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"That sounds sorta familiar," Tony taps a hand against the hood, "At least my tribe helped me out - or tried to, anyway."

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"My god's given me a little training, but he likes to act subtly," Roxie says, glancing over at Tony's hand. "And there aren't many people who do what I do. I've never met the other ones from my world."

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"I wish our Goddess would show up more often. Could use her help..."

He shrug again, "...that's not really that great, I guess. I think I'd go crazy if'n I didn't have m'pack an' sept."

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"Who is she?" Roxie asks, as if she'd be able to just go out and visit her. "I've gone sideways a little to get help sometimes, but nobody likes to just give it out. It's all deals in deals in deals..."

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"She's Gaia. She created us. She created everything."

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"Huh," Roxie says, adjusting her glasses. "The stories I've heard say that we" (she says the 'we' as if to refer to her world) "never really had a beginning. Just cycles... turtles all the way down with the paradigms shifting each time."