lieutenantantichrist | [11] Video/Action for Route 39

Entry tags:

[11] Video/Action for Route 39 - "4 THE MARE"

[Carter doesn't know he's gotten used to it until he wakes up alone.]

[What's supposed to happen is they get up, bitch about the cold, make some coffee and breakfast, bitch about the cold some more, pack up, and hit the road.]

[Today there's just the sound of birds.]

[When Carter sits up, the other sleeping bag is flat. There's a fat, fuzzy teddy bear thing sitting on top of it, and a crab perched on the pillow, where a head full of messy blond hair should be.]

[Both of the animals look at Blake expectantly.]

[He fumbles for his phone and hits the key that dials Dirk. He sits very, very still while it connects.]

[The prerecorded voice tells him what he already knows.]

[He drops the phone and leaves it to chirp out its message to nobody. He pulls on the nearest clothes to hand and crawls out of the tent. The bright light makes him squint. He walks toward the edge of the clearing. They'd found a good place this time. Level ground, no tall grass, surrounded by pine trees. You couldn't even see it from the road. Honestly, Carter doesn't know how Dirk knew it was there.]

[Blake rests his head against a tree and breathes in deep. The bark is cool and rough on his forehead. The air smells like pine needles.]

[Dirk had a good eye for these things.]

[He slams his fist into the trunk as hard as he can.]

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

[Over and over, and when he finally stops his knuckles are stinging and it's all silence except for his panting.]

[He turns and goes back to the tent.]

[Inside, the fuzzy thing is trying to open up his backpack. Its claws are giving it much luck with the ties. Blake unties it and dumps everything out on the floor. Soap, pokeballs, clothespins, socks. Some oranges roll away, and the thing goes right after them and starts gnawing. Doesn't even take the peel off.]

[There's something thin and white in the pile. A piece of paper. Blake picks it up and reads it.]

[He reads it again.]

[He sits there for a while as the teddy bear thing munches, and there's a low thrum and a shadow through the tent's wall as one of those ladybugs passes by.]

[He digs the little sewing kit out of the pile. He turns his backpack inside-out and opens up the seam at the bottom. He tucks the note in and sews it closed again.]

[By the time he's done, it occurs to him he's pretty hungry. Usually they'd be having breakfast by now. The fuzzy thing's gone through a lot of what he has already. Carter doesn't really feel like fighting it. For the crab's part, it's just watching with wide, unblinking eyes. It has a pair of mushrooms stuck to its back.]

[Carter remembers hearing those are edible.]

[VIDEO]

[Blake is sitting on a stump. He looks contemplative, and somewhat withdrawn. His beard hasn't been trimmed yet this morning. His pupils are a little too wide.]

Hey. You out there.

After a while here you figure things come and go. There's no point in bitching. You just gotta keep moving forward and keep your hooves on the ground.

I figure I might as well ask. I kept putting it off, thinking maybe I'd get home. But that's not happening anytime soon, and it has to be past by now. So if anybody here is from 2013 or so, maybe a little later, I got a question for you.

And all of you. Talk to me. [He thinks, then nods, and taps on the phone's screen.] Tell me something you'd want to know about what's going on at home. Wherever you're from. If you could find out one thing that's happened while you've been gone, what'd you ask?

[He looks out at the trees, his eyes a little glassy. He seems to forget the Gear is on. A moment later, he abruptly cuts the feed.]

[ACTION]

[If you venture down Route 39 today, you might come upon Blake staring out at the horizon, contemplatively chewing on some hay.]

((ooc: Blake's in a bit of an odd place right now...He'll be mostly coherent, but anyone who talks to him may get hallucinated into something unique. The Paras has one mushroom left, so you could also come join him on a spirit journey.))

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

[This is such a solid fact. He knows it so well. Why's it so hard to get hold of and explain?]

You fight bad, that makes you good. That's the definition. Right?

The only thing I've seen you do is punch an innocent girl in the face.

That was a one time thing. Everybody makes mistakes. Usually I'm out there hunting down crooks.

[He flinches sharply at that, really. Dear god...]

...Please don't ever say that to me again.

[The stop sign nearly crumples in on itself, and Blake's eyebrows jump in alarm.]

Sorry! I didn't mean it.

[He winces.] Jesus. Always putting my hoof in my mouth.

All I meant is there's some things it's safer to keep to yourself. Or one guy you trust.

[He can't even argue really, he's thought the same thing for years.]

That would be because the world, every world, is filled with jerks yeah.

They do that so you spend more of your waking hours in actual daylight -- during winter, it starts to get darker earlier, so you move the time earlier one hour in the hopes of exposing more people to sunlight. Not getting enough can have negative effects on one's physical and mental condition. Since they add the hour in again at a later time, I'm okay with it.

[...What even is this argument.]

You clearly haven't.

Pff. I'm just hoping you're being metaphorical here. My hair's not going to start picking up dirt any time soon.

[Well, unless he gets dirty through other means. Dragging his head across the floor is not one of them.]

Those sound pretty good right now. The little funky flat ones.

Heh heh heh. Hi, bird. [He waves.]

[A dawning realization comes over his face.]

Yeah. Ask nicely. God, I never thought of that. I figured they didn't give a shit.

Isn't that what you do? Pick up dirt. Not that different from a cop.

[A realization passes over Blake's face, widening his eyes.]

Hey. Hey.

My god. It all makes sense now.

Mop and cop.

They rhyme.

That's for sure.

[Blake stares contemplatively off into the distance.] Wonder why that is.

Then, the one guy you're sure is an asshole down to the core...he turns out to be okay.

A mushroom, huh.

[Wow, all right. That'd been way easier to suss out than he thought it would be. Now that he knows what Blake is on, Yusuke's strongly tempted to start dicking around with his head... but then, despite himself, he suddenly becomes a little worried about the old man, and the urge to mess with him abates. After all, it's not like mushrooms are always safe to ingest...]

You do know that some of those're poisonous, right? Like, if you're shittin' your pants within a couple hours of eating one, you're probably gonna die?

[... geez, Yusuke, that's a real gentle way of putting it.]

Yeah. It tasted like the cannibals said about the clown.

[He casts his memory back to the distance of half and hour ago.]

Kinda gritty.

[He tilts his hoof in the air.] Nah, nah. Something said the crab ones were fine. I read that somewhere. There was a whole thing about them. I forget what else.

Even the stuff that makes you shit yourself doesn't kill you here. Guy wrote a guide all about it. Well, it was about other stuff too. But a lot about that. I gave him a lot of crap for it. He's gone too, now.

[Blake's gaze turns inward, melancholy.]

Asshole.

Edited 2013-12-16 13:34 (UTC)

[Cannibals? Clown? What? Yusuke shoots Blake a look of implicit "what the fuck", not for the first time since they'd started this conversation. His expression quickly turns a little awkward, though, when Blake gets this look on his face like he's sad about something. Aw, hell. He barely knows what to do about it when his friends look like that. Despite what his usual attitude might lead people to think, however, Yusuke's not so mean-spirited that he'll kick a guy when he's down, even if it's a guy whom he doesn't necessarily get along with 100% of the time, so rather than respond with something smarmy like he would if he and Blake were just engaging in their usual pissing contest, he instead pauses, coughs, and then asks him, in the most casual tone he can manage:]

So uh... who was he, then? A friend of yours?

[Trust Yusuke to know that calling somebody an asshole doesn't always mean you dislike them.]

Edited 2013-12-16 23:14 (UTC)

Hi hi hi! No cracker, no Stunfiskies!

[Ash just signs and shoots a glare at the bird.]

They like treats and days off and cheap television, so I bet they like politeness too.

nature can also kill you. or in this case, do strange stuff to your body

shouldn't you be with someone? i don't want you getting lost in the woods

[You're going to get a suspicious squint for that because it almost feels like you're talking about his teammate there.]

Yeah, I know that feeling, what made you think of it?

Sometimes people will surprise you like that.

_{[.... Wait a second. Princess?]}

... Wait, what?

[Blake looks wistful.] I never hated anybody like I hated that prick.

I already miss him.

[The look of incomprehension on the kid's face is bothering him.] You never heard it?

[He puts his hooves together and leans forward earnestly.]

Okay. So.

See, there's this clown. The greatest clown there ever was. As soon as they smacked his ass they put a red nose on his face, and he's the kind of talent you don't see in a hundred years under a tent. By the time he's ten he can bullseye people with seltzer from a hundred yards, he can pie people in the face with his back turned, he can do things with balloon animals you wouldn't believe. He is fuckin' Mozart in rainbow suspenders. He goes to clown college on the Bozo Scholarship and graduates summa cum laude, nothing in the future but clear skies and party hats. And it's great, he's getting booked left and right. Birthdays, bar mitzvahs, that one circus place in Las Vegas that freaked the hell out of Hunter S. Thompson, he's everywhere his big floppy shoes can take him. But the years go by, and that's all there is. How far up is there to go? You can be the greatest clown in history and you're pulling the same county fairs as the twerp who can barely spin a bow tie. Clowns are a joke now, in not in the right way. People call him creepy. He sprays kids with his flower thing and they pitch a fit at him for getting their cell phone wet. One day he's in the middle of a kid's seventh birthday, he's just pulled off a thing with a unicycle that only three men on the face of the earth have ever done and a dozen've died trying, and he's catching his breath and smiling with that big red painted smile, and the kid just gives him this empty look and asks his mom if they can have cake now. And he says, I can't do this anymore. He walks out, packs up all his face paints and polka dot pants, he cashes in his 401k, and he goes out into the world to find what's missing inside him. Then at the same time, deep down in this jungle a thousand miles away, there's this tribe of cannibals. They're run by a chief who used to be wise and smart and fair, but one day his wife ran off with a National Geographic photographer and he's never been the same. Everything good in him turned withered up and ugly overnight. And the two sons, all they know is only one can be the boss once he's gone. Time goes by and the nastiest thing is these kids, they can remember, they know there was once a time when this bitter old bastard cared about them, especially the older one can remember and he fights so damn hard to make a scrap of that come back that he starts to hate his little brother, the one who everything comes easier to, the little clever one everybody likes. And eventually by the time they're grown up it's a cold war between them, and the whole clan's taking sides, and the old man, hell, he's just egging them on. Everything's a competition. One day they go out for a hunt to decide it once and for all, and the older one's been tracking this tiger for days, and when he finally catches up to it the second he's about to jump down from the tree and spear it an arrow goes right through it's head and it's his brother, the goddamn perfect little bastard, and he goes and does what he's been wanting to for years now and tries to spear him instead. And they fight and fight, there's broken ribs, there's broken noses, there's blood everywhere, until the older one drives the younger one off and he takes the dead tiger and hauls its skin back to town to show his father so he can finally be proud, but it turns out that while they were out hunting the old man's had a stroke, his rotted-out old heart is on its last legs, and when the son comes to show him he says for god's sake it doesn't matter, it never mattered. Everything they ever knew, it's going away. It's only a matter of time. There's phone lines tangled up in the vines now. The jungle's getting cleared for a highway two miles over that way and there's only so many surveyors you can have for supper before somebody takes notice. They're fighting tooth and claw to inherit something that won't last out the decade. So the older son, he drops the tiger skin on the floor of the hut and he walks away. He goes back out into the jungle that's been his home as long as he's been alive. And then he sees this clown. Who gives him a kind of tired, apologetic look, and asks for directions to a hotel. This guy who doesn't belong here, in his red nose and poofy wig, who just walks right in like he has a right, and suddenly the guy's full of this insane rage at luck and his village and the world that's moving on without him and it takes him over, all he can see is red, until he standing over a dead body. And he does what they're supposed to, what cannibals do, because that's tradition, and he'll stick by it to the end. And then as he's sitting there over the cookfire, he hears a rustling in the underbrush, and who comes out but his little brother. And it's over. All the hate never meant anything. He gestures to his side and that's all it takes to ask him to join him. And he sits by him, and as they share this together he looks at him, and for the first time in years instead of a rival for the tiny dead scraps of their father's love he sees the brother who taught him how to whistle through his fingers and how to climb trees, and he looks at him, and he says does this taste funny to you?

[Blake listens, open-mouthed, letting the numbers and symbols flow over him. They break into thousands of butterflies with fractal wings.]

Wow. That's what bugs were all along? Shit, I never knew. I thought they were just made of bug.

[They swirl around him, shining. His tail flicks at the ones behind him.]

Hey. You're smart. You should write a book or something.

Yeah. You never know, huh. Books an' covers and shit.

[He shrugs at her shock.] What's it supposed to be, 'Your Highness'? I don't know this crap, I'm not British. I'm just goin' by all the little birds on you.

Talky lil' bastard.

Heh, yeah, my dog loves whatever weird soap operas they got around here. Always watches those while packing my bags. She won't let me do it myself anymore. From the way she growled and waved her arms at me, I think she was saying I do it wrong.

Yeah. Packs my bags for me at night, pre-fight.

I guess that makes it zero hour.

[His eyes go up to the drifting clouds.]

Nine a.m.

eh my bodys gonethrough a lo t of shit. if it cant handle a littl weird crap its no good for me anymore nyway

o was with somebody. he left. now im wth steve buscemi.

The guy who just left. Couldn't fuckin' stand him at first. One of those arrogant bastards who thinks he's toughed because he watches too many movies. Then he turned out to be decent. Hell, both of them did.

[Blake rethinks that.]

Nah, Jayden was still an asshole. But he got shit done.

[... oooh.

OOOOOOH.

UUUUUUUUGH. That was terrible. Yusuke doesn't quite pick up on the punchline at first, though - probably because he was actually pretty absorbed in the story up until then. He wouldn't have expected Blake of all people to be a compelling storyteller, especially not while under the influence of magical crab shrooms, but sure enough, by the time Blake's harrowing tale had reached its end, he was so into it that his face was practically touching the screen of his 'Gear. It doesn't take too terribly long after Blake delivers the final line for it to fully sink in, however, and when it does...]

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 8 of 14

[11] Video/Action for Route 39 - "4 THE MARE"

[video]

[video]

[video]

no subject

no subject

[Video]

[text]

video

[video]

video

[Video]

video

video

video; ugh sorry for all the edits

[video]

[text]

[Video]

[Video]

video;

VIDEO

[Video]

[video]

[text] that was a weird thing to do, Dreamwidth

[Video]

video; 1/5