"Finest." Dan makes a snorting sound he's sure Saturday would sympathize with if it weren't immediately drowned out by her cursing and the sudden shift in scenery. He doesn't hide the wince as the ork goes down, nor, despite being someone who was defusing landmines and shooting targets instead of learning to read in kindergarten, he has absolutely no fondness for the sight of tanks and artillery.
Thank God, at least, that he's with another smoker, to look down at policing and violence with the same sort of disdain and frustration. That's all so much easier to put together an opinion on than the buffet of new words she's serving him, extraterritoriality, NAN, metroplex.
"You don't got to apologize to me. I know how it is. My world ain't in crisis like this where I am, but I follow enough news to know that that's just my fortune of geography." And as if to prove it to her, his memory starts to take over, an unbidden one of a dirt-cheap motel room where the television's on and reporting a refugee crisis at the southern US border. Dan, a similar age to what he is now, is cleaning his gun while watching the news anchor talk about the economic conditions spurring such a mass migration, and about how immigration officials in the United States can't - won't - adjust to the influx.
A young girl, maybe eleven or twelve, comes out of the motel bathroom. She has grey-ish eyes and long, black hair in braids and the same skintone as the refugees on television. She has a toothbrush in her mouth as she talks. "The Agency call you up for another hunt?"
"Nah. Handling it off-the-record." Dan in the memory starts to reassemble his weapon. "Mundane showed up in Marbleton with his blood sucked out and I ain't letting a soucouyant take out the whole town just because no one with a license wants to do a work trip in Wyoming and no one cares about Mundanes."
"You going to make me stay here in this shitty motel doing research like some kind of child slave?"
The memory of Dan looks at the young girl with an exasperated, affronted expression, gesturing to the weeping, starving children on the television as if to say you're going to invoke childhood slavery over being asked to stay home and read a book?. She gives him an offended shrug right back.
no subject
Thank God, at least, that he's with another smoker, to look down at policing and violence with the same sort of disdain and frustration. That's all so much easier to put together an opinion on than the buffet of new words she's serving him, extraterritoriality, NAN, metroplex.
"You don't got to apologize to me. I know how it is. My world ain't in crisis like this where I am, but I follow enough news to know that that's just my fortune of geography." And as if to prove it to her, his memory starts to take over, an unbidden one of a dirt-cheap motel room where the television's on and reporting a refugee crisis at the southern US border. Dan, a similar age to what he is now, is cleaning his gun while watching the news anchor talk about the economic conditions spurring such a mass migration, and about how immigration officials in the United States can't - won't - adjust to the influx.
A young girl, maybe eleven or twelve, comes out of the motel bathroom. She has grey-ish eyes and long, black hair in braids and the same skintone as the refugees on television. She has a toothbrush in her mouth as she talks. "The Agency call you up for another hunt?"
"Nah. Handling it off-the-record." Dan in the memory starts to reassemble his weapon. "Mundane showed up in Marbleton with his blood sucked out and I ain't letting a soucouyant take out the whole town just because no one with a license wants to do a work trip in Wyoming and no one cares about Mundanes."
"You going to make me stay here in this shitty motel doing research like some kind of child slave?"
The memory of Dan looks at the young girl with an exasperated, affronted expression, gesturing to the weeping, starving children on the television as if to say you're going to invoke childhood slavery over being asked to stay home and read a book?. She gives him an offended shrug right back.