Your Friendly Neighborhood Shadowrunner

[wheyoftheadept]

Who: Saturday… and you?
What: Open prompts
Where: Locations noted in title
When: in the period between the intro and the next big event
Warnings/Notes: Second prompt may lead to discussing disturbing events in Saturday’s past. No sexual assault, but warnings for violence, child abuse, and eldritch horrors.


1. Free Tickets to the Gun Show [location: communal bathrooms]

Saturday looks at herself in the mirror and nods, satisfied. Even Maggie couldn’t argue the rightness of this; these uniforms were hideous, and too long, and she didn’t like them. Therefore…

She picks a thread out of her newly-created sleeveless jumper. It won’t stop unraveling, so she yanks and breaks it. Her former sleeves lie limply on the sink before her as she admires herself. The room is empty (to the best of her knowledge); her dignity is safe. She starts striking poses.

In her defense, those muscles are pretty impressive.


2. Let Sleeping Adepts Lie? [location: gardens]

The gardens aren’t really gardens, except for the patch that Bunny and Gadget have taken over, but they’re green and they’re quiet and it’s easy to avoid people. These qualities are why Saturday is kneeling in a remote corner of them, hands cupped open in her lap the way her father taught her. Holding emptiness. Control is an illusion. Go with the flow.

Keep your distance, and she looks peaceful. Come closer, and you can see her jaw is tight and trembling, and tears are trickling out from under her closed eyes.


3. Come Fly Away (Or Dream You Can) [location: rig exterior]

The rain never actually stops, but sometimes it lessens into a misty drizzle, the kind of thing a true Seattleite scoffs at. Saturday, being one of those, is out on the deck. It’s evening, going on full dark; the western horizon in orange fading into pink, and the sky above is clouded velvet. She’s tied cloth around her hands and feet for grip, and is running the pipes. Her shoes are sitting neatly at the base of a large beam. She has no destination in mind, no particular purpose; she isn’t in the training area because she wants to be outside, unrecorded, unmeasured, moving for the sheer glory of it. It almost feels like freedom.

Comments

1

[heterochrocatic]

Sorry, Saturday. You aren't quite that alone. Catra is just naturally stealthy like that. As Saturday stands there flexing and posing, Catra's snorting, squeaky giggle breaks the silence.

"Oh my--" She snorts and almost doubles over. "...You look like Adora." She's smiling, despite the comparison. And she might be blushing a little because one thing she and Adora definitely have in common is an appreciation for a lady with muscles. Catra is just... less overt.

Re: 1

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday jumps and whirls, first scared as hell, then plain embarrassed that someone managed to sneak up on her.

"Uh - hi, Catra." She is unfortunately someone who blushes easily, and is turning slowly red. "Sorry, I thought the place was empty."

Re: 1

[heterochrocatic]

"She would do that too sometimes. When she thought I wasn't looking." Translation: oh I was definitely looking.

"And it's okay, I thoguht it was great." She tilts her head, examining the cloth in the sink. "...I could have helped wiht that, you know?" Claws and all that.

Re: 1

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday follows her gaze and shrugs. "It was kind of a spur of the moment thing. Don't like sleeves anyway, always feel too hot."

She gathers the sleeves up and offers them to Catra. "You can shred 'em, if you like. Figured I'd use them for grip." She mimes wrapping something around her hands, by way of explanation.

Re: 1

[heterochrocatic]

"Neat," Catra replies. She takes the sleeeves and begins neatly shredding-slash-slicing them into lengthwise strips. It's kind of terrifying how sharp those are.

"Yeah, I don't like them either. Maybe I'll do the same thing," she says, clearly pondering the idea. "But who knows what counts as breaking the rules around here--I haven't got that figured out yet, which is really getting on my nerves. You know, aside from trying to break stuff."

Re: 1

[wheyoftheadept]

"If I get zapped, you'll know this is." Saturday watches the speedy shredding with appreciation. Catra would make a good razorgirl; she's got force and finesse, and she enjoys using her tools. "Thanks for the assist. How're things with Adora now, anyway?"

Re: 1

[heterochrocatic]

"Um. I dunno." The question is one she should have expected from Saturday but she still feels kind of awkward about how to answer it.

"We... Well, I don't hate her. I don't really know how she feels about me still. It's weird. Tense. It makes me wish I could go back to having her mad at me. At least I know what to expect then."

2

[greyerrant]

Loken has his own reasons for heading to the gardens. They're the closest thing to his little PTSD cave on Luna. Less ants and Rocks to move around here, however. He watches her for a while, remembering their recent meeting, and rumbles, at least. "You're crying. I think."

He's not sure. He's only wept a few times in his life, whether from grief or pain or madness, and the concept is rather unfamiliar to him, a great deal of his emotional affect having been stripped out by psycho-indoctrination.

Re: 2

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday is so taken aback - by being spoken to, and by what the person is saying - that it snaps her quite out of the whirl of remembered blood and insect parts she'd been trying to master.

" - um, yeah. Sorry," she adds inanely, and regrets it. "Don't mind me."

[greyerrant]

"A bit too late for that. Why?"

He doesn't seem to realize he's prying, as such. Loken doesn't have a great grasp of the subtleties of mortal behavior, a lot of their motivations being fairly mysterious to him.

[wheyoftheadept]

"Ah - sorting out some things that happened lately," she says awkwardly. What is her life. "And then all this - needed to process. Sometimes you gotta cry."

"It's not a big deal," she adds hurriedly. Her hands are still cupped loosely in her lap.

[greyerrant]

"oh." Now he understands, and realizes his error. "Do you wish to be left alone?" He assumes it is either grief or loneliness, and understands some humans prefer those things to be dealt with without a whole lot of people watching.

[wheyoftheadept]

"Well, christ, now I don't know." Saturday is still teary-eyed, but now also irritated, mostly at herself. "I mean - shit. I don't. Fuck." Her voice, and throat, are scratchy.

She wants company. She doesn't know this guy. She fought murderous furniture with him That doesn't mean he need to get her emotions dumped on him. She's done that, ill-advisedly, already.

"What good do you think you'd do?" Oh, that came out way meaner than intended.

3

[takenalive]

Coming up onto the deck Alloran takes a few minutes to morph kafit bird, an eagle-sized predator with six wings, a long tail, and a heavy beak. He acquired this animal himself on his homeworld, almost thirty years ago, and it's a shape Esplin rarely had him take. Not dangerous enough, at least not to anything larger than itself.

He takes to the air in a clatter of wings and circles. The bird's instincts don't like the rain or the diminishing light, but it's not enough to really worry about yet.

Someone's clambering about like a tiny Hork-Bajir. The bird's instinct encourages curiosity and there's something comforting about following that. Alloran flies over, peering down out of the eyes on one side of his bladelike borrowed head.

Re: 3

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday spots the bird as she stands poised before a leap downwards, checking her angle of approach. She plans to jack-knife straight down and catch herself on a pipe below, then slingshot to land on a roof a few feet off - it's a bit tricky, though, in the low light and maze of other pipes and wires.

"Oh, aren't you a pretty thing," she breathes, her entire face lighting up as she watches it soar, all feathers and grace and shimmering blue wings. She stands watching it in rapture, her own activity forgotten, remembering for a moment Maggie's face when she first realized she could fly - that her own new, delicate wings were strong enough to carry her, and now she could soar.

If Maggie was here, they could fly away, be out of Jorg's killsignal reach before they even knew she was gone.

[takenalive]

It's hard to hold a conversation in flight, at least with someone ground-bound and restricted to vocal speech. It's a lot of work to hover. Not hovering means always being in motion, and always fast, so he doesn't fall out of the sky, and that means often being at a range where he can't hear speech so well, even with a predator's ears.

When he had first morphed this bird learning to fly had been a whole process. Something of him remembers. Alloran circles Saturday, making constant adjustments of his wings.

<I'm assuming that's a compliment,> he says, the thought-speech less clear than at a closer range.

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday blinks, and does not fall off the rail she's balancing on.

"...Alloran?" she says, after a quick mental rundown of who she's met and what they can do. "Is that you? Or - you-adjacent?"

Considering they had a five minutes conversation some days ago over breakfast, her recall is a little impressive. Then again, it's not every day you meet a telepath.

"That's a really pretty bird," she says. "What kind is it?"

[takenalive]

<Nearly enough. I greet you, Saturday.>

He's enjoyed flying, but this is impractical. Alloran finds a place to aim at, flaring all of his wings and his tail to kill his speed, stalling out and dropping to a patch of deck and folding up his wings. Some of the wings can serve some function as legs, but this morph is much clumsier and more awkward-looking out of the air.

<This is called a kafit bird. It's native to my homeworld. They are rapacious predators, but - yes, they also have their charms.>

[wheyoftheadept]

"Those feathers are gorgeous." She drops down next to him, easy as if she were taking the stairs. "Can I have a closer look?"

She doesn't reach out as she says it, but settles cross-legged nearby.

2

[garmr]

As the first few weeks came and went on the Rig, there are more things that Guts would come to learn about his roommate. For starters, he noticed that she tended to stow away snacks in their room.

Something about metabolism that meant she burnt through energy faster. He doesn't know the science of it. To Guts it means she just needed some extra food every once in a while. That day, he takes notice of the hours passing and the stash remaining uneaten. Unusual.

So, he sets out to find her, which is when he bumps into Saturday in the gardens and finds her looking... upset. Hm.

"... Hey."

Re: 2

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday comes out of her headspace slowly; Guts is a quiet guy, and she's gotten used to his presence, living in close quarters like they all do now. It doesn't startle her to hear his voice, but it does take her a minute to realize he's talking to her

"...hey," she says back, wiping quickly at her eyes. "What's up?"

Her voice is very steady.

[garmr]

Something was wrong, that much he could tell. It is the first time he's seen her like this.

"You left this."

Guts takes the little purple packet out of his jumpsuit pocket and hands it out to her, lowering down on one knee to meet her sitting position. He has no idea what flavor purple is supposed to be. He just noticed that the purples seemed harder to come by.

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday blinks. He's holding out one of the horrible energy bars they have in the training area. Well, not really a bar, more a kind of gel that comes in these little aluminum pouches and threatens in bright, cartoony letters to inflict EXTREME HYDRATION!!!! and MAJOR ENERGY!!!

Major Energy is the brand mascot. He's a little lightning bolt with a military cap and a cigar.

This one is Atomic Mouth-Blasting Grapocalypse. It's her favorite. She blinks, starting to look waterlogged again, and takes it. "Thanks."

Then, with an uncharacteristic failure to offer him some, she bites it open and starts sadly slurping.

[garmr]

Very unusual indeed.

Well, his initial plan was to drop off the food and go about his day, but then he finds Saturday like this and knows he can't leave just yet.

So, instead, he gets comfortable nestled in the plants. The gardens were nice. They were serene. The closest thing Guts had to the wildflower meadows and forests back home.

"Remembering home?"

[wheyoftheadept]

"...yeah. A little."

Home. And Thera, which had become almost like home, except that none of them had wanted to be there. Remembering what a fuck up she was, and how - useless, when you got right down it, she was. Not seeing the signs in Caim. Not realizing it wasn't Maggie coming home with them. Not able to fight the influence of the false Red Town. Not concerned enough with the politics Solomon was playing. Not humble enough to tell 'Jisan clearly what was going on, so that he'd stop it -

She swallows, hard.

"Not great memories."