thisavrou_log | [closed] what gonna work? teamwork!

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[closed] what gonna work? teamwork!

Who: The RvB cast + L
When: As soon as everyone arrives
Where: The Midway Hub
What: Figuring out what to do in the immediate aftermath of arriving
Warnings: Probably language, mainly

After arriving, when it becomes obvious that there is no way back, the group of them gathers. Whether it's instinctual, or out of self-preservation, or out of familiarity, Tex doesn't know, but this is what they've done. Ryuuzaki is nearby, as well. Due to his foray with Tex to the Mother of Invention via the Alter-Ingress all those months ago, Ryuuzaki has a suit to match the rest of them.

None of them know what's going on, other than the fact that they've been involuntarily sent here and left stranded. Only Tex, York, and Ryuuzaki have been here before, meaning that they may have to spend some time familiarizing everyone else with this place and the situation at hand.

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The method of insertion is new. Being unceremoniously dropped into a potentially hostile situation is not. Nor is it a shock to the system: Maine has yet to slip from the mindset that he's on a mission. For him, rallying with the others is both a deliberate action and the only choice at hand. Anyone hesitant about joining the rest of the team may well find Maine at their heels, nudging them towards the group like some oversized sheepdog.

Predictably, Maine is fully armed and armored. (If any Freelancer isn't, they'll get a look of extreme disapproval and a flat accusation: "Soft.") He keeps his Magnum in hand and the Brute Shot at his back. Once everyone gathers, Maine stands slightly removed from the rest of the group, as is his wont, and angles himself so that he can watch their collective backs. He asks no questions and offers no observations about their surroundings.

(Were it not for the glance he spares the sky and the way he checks the seal of his helmet, Maine would appear completely unperturbed by all of this. As it is? ... Well, it's been a rough week. But whatever's going on in his head won't interfere with his ability to carry out the mission. It never does.)

Maine listens closely, and he looks to Carolina for orders.

Edited 2017-08-13 12:54 (UTC)

York is, of course, in full armor, something he's never been more grateful for when they come through and he sees where they've been dropped. He's been here before, and so while normally he'd defer to Carolina he finds himself taking the lead now, sending a message to the others to convene. Once everyone's gathered (reluctantly in some cases, he expects) he makes an announcement.

"We need to stick together here. And you guys need a crash course on this place. It's hostile, to say the least, and looks like it's gotten worse."

He's got his pacdisc with him, and some survival gear and supplies in it, but not enough for all of them sustainably. And there are doubtless going to be people who need it more. He pulls it from his armor's storage and scrolls through the display to see how much water he has. The answer is not enough.

"We're better protected than many of the people who have ended up here with us."

She's grateful for that, especially in the case of her boyfriend, who would be less capable to enduring harsh conditions than the rest of them. But that means they have a certain responsibility to spread out and take the lead.

"Touching base like this here is good, but I think we're going to need to do a lot to help everyone else."

York considers that, shakes his head. "I think we should get towards the front, stay together as much as possible so we can face any threats united and better protect the others."

He expects Tex to do whatever she wants, though. "At least tune to a private channel so we can stay in contact... I don't trust the TABs to keep working, but maybe if we're all on the same frequency our helmet radios will stay synced."

She watches him for a moment, then glances back toward Carolina, who as far as she knows, hasn't spoken up. "Toward the front," she concedes. "But spread out so we're not all in one spot if something goes sideways elsewhere."

She tests the radio's systems then, activating the distress beacon and flashing it briefly. "That work?"

Historically, Maine doesn't have a great record when it comes to taking instruction from York. Or any record at all, really, beyond disregarding his advice or simply ignoring the infiltration specialist. So it's probably no surprise when Maine doesn't turn to look at York. He merely cocks his head slightly toward the man's voice.

Really? the gesture reads. Or, less kindly: Why are you talking?

It's Carolina that Maine expects to take charge. Not York.

It's only with Maine's prompting that Wash even bothers to show up, and even then, he stands at the edge of the group, avoiding conversation with any of the others whenever possible. He's glad for the armour for more than just the weather. He isn't entirely sure how he'd react if he had to see their faces, or worse, if they could see his.

This is all fucking bullshit anyway. The whole situation just feeds in to his paranoia; being lied to about where they're going, about what the mission really is. He's been in this position before and he doesn't like it one bit.

After the rest of them have resolved in what their plan of attack is, Tex approaches Washington. He's obviously wishing he was somewhere else, with the way he has been hovering on the sidelines.

"Don't think you can get away with ditching," she says.

Wash gives her a flat look when she shows up. Really, he would be happy if they just travelled in silence. It's nothing like it had been before, when they'd been a team. It can't be like that again.

"There's plenty of people here. I don't need to be."

"Doesn't matter." She tilts her head a little, to gaze at him sidelong through her visor. "You're not going to strand yourself in the wilderness."

Wash looks back. "I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself."

"As long as that's what you intend on doing."

It's weird, considering that Washington had been her murderer, but she sympathizes with the mental problems he must have suffered after Epsilon. She doesn't know for sure that he would do something like she's suggesting, but she wants to make sure that option is eliminated in his mind.

"What's that supposed to mean?" he asks sharply, tensing up at the insinuation.

He doesn't like that she seems to have him pegged that easily. Not that he'd been planning anything, more just that he wouldn't care too much if he did die. And in situations like these, it would be very easy to forget to take care of himself.

"Don't act ignorant," she says. "It's unbecoming."

She hasn't talked to him about his last appearance in this universe, or the talk they had—and she definitely hasn't told him about the fact that that talk had led to them sleeping together afterwards. But it leads to her feeling differently from this new manifestation of Washington than she might have otherwise.

She shouldn't know this. How does she know this? Or maybe she's bluffing? Nah, he doesn't think Tex bluffs. But she'd been dead. She'd been dead and gone and had never seen him after Epsilon as far as he was aware. Maybe when he'd been unconscious?

"I'm not crazy. I can handle myself just fine."

Nothing changes but the angle of her head, just a slight cocking forward of her chin. She never used the word crazy and he doesn't have to insinuate she's talking about him being insane. She knows that's not it, not at all.

All of this would make more sense to him if he knew about his previous visit here, but like fuck she's going to bring that up.

Why is the looking at him like that? He's not crazy. He's not suicidal. He's not fucking broken and they didn't abandon him because of that.

"If you've got something to say, then spit it out."

"Don't make assumptions, Washington. I didn't say you were crazy." She starts to turn away. "You don't have to be crazy to be depressed, or desperate."

"Yeah well, being surrounded by people convinced you're crazy for months doesn't give you great confidence in that regard." He's pretty sure he had been for a while. Although that could easily have been the fault of the doctors and the Counsellor and being fucking drugged up day after day. That was enough to make anyone crazy.

"I understand." She says the words in a low tone, and turns her head to address him from the side. "Just be smart."

She doesn't. She can't know. And yet... he remembers too much to believe that she doesn't understand, just a bit.

"I'm not going to kill myself, if that's what you think. Got no reason to die here."

She nods. And then she's gone, back to Ryuuzaki's side.

Like Wash, Maine keeps to the edges of the group. For Maine, it's perfectly normal behavior. Whether they're sitting in the classroom, listening to a briefing, or gathered in the mess hall, Maine has always kept to the periphery. In Wash, however, the behavior strikes Maine as unusual.

So, with all the subtlety he's known for, Maine moves to Wash's side and addresses it head-on.

"Problem?"

He's not asking if one exists. To him, that's obvious. He's asking what it is.

He glances up when Maine comes towards him. It says something, doesn't it, that Maine is the only person here who he does trust. It hadn't been Maine who left him or tried to kill him. And even with the Meta, the betrayal had been expected.

"I don't like having people I don't trust watching my back."

The big man tilts his head to the side as he works to process that. Calling it difficult would be an understatement. He remembers what Wash told him: none of them came back when Wash was imprisoned. But receiving that information and reconciling it with the team Maine knows are two different things.

"None of them?"

'Them,' not 'us.' It doesn't even occur to Maine to include himself: he knows that Wash trusts him. Why would he ask for verbal confirmation?

Wash doesn't mind giving him time. it's a lot to come to terms with. How long had he spent thinking that someone would come back for him? That one of them would find him? It had been a long time, made longer by the tedium of being locked up with only the doctors and the Counsellor for company.

"No. Can't rely on them to do anything other than save their own skin."

Were it anyone else (with the exception of Carolina), Maine would dismiss those words, or else correct them. Violently. But it's Wash. That trust goes both ways.

Instead, Maine finds himself shifting his weight uncomfortably. Uncertainty doesn't sit well with him. It never has. He's a man who makes a decision and acts on it. In this case, he's not sure what action to take.

He believes Wash. If Wash says that the others didn't have his back, then ... that's what happened.

He believes in his squad. This is an unknown, hostile situation. Working together is their only option.

"Mission," he finally grunts, then waves a hand at the others and shrugs. This is what they have to work with. They don't have the luxury of picking and choosing their team. If they did, Maine sure as hell wouldn't be working with the armored stranger Texas brought along. But he's not in charge. It's not his call.

He can feel Maine staring at him. He feels a little guilty for putting him in this position; Maine doesn't know yet what had happened, how they'd been torn apart. He doesn't know how they'd been used and broken apart by the Project. And maybe that is why he can't trust them, even more than being abandoned. He knows the purpose of the Project, or at least, he knows what Alpha knew, how his own fragments had turned against him, the same way the agents had turned against each other.

He glances up at Maine when he speaks and sighs, shoulders slumping. "Mission," he agrees. "But just until we're out of here."

Maine simply nods. He's not asking Wash for more than that. He's not even thinking of more than that. The mission; the objective; the next fight; the next moment. Maine's thoughts are entirely on the here and now. Fuck the future.

That problem dealt with, Maine jerks his head toward the barren landscape and growls. His unspoken commentary is succinct: 'This is horse shit.'

Maine doesn't ask questions. Maine doesn't demand proof or try to insist that things can't have been that bad. Maine just gets it and it's more than Wash could have asked for.

"It's okay, you don't need to be polite around me," Wash says, a faint smirk curling his lips. "It's fucking ridiculous. We've been played."

Something about the whole thing had seemed off to begin with.

The Savrii had been too interested in getting them all to go be farmers for a while, no matter whether or not the task was in accord with any specific individual's talents or recent activities. On a personal level, L judged himself as having contributed to their society, such as it was, and as not having caused any significant trouble; there had to be a reason why he and others like him were being lumped in with people who really had made themselves persona non grata, and why even peaceable types obviously weren't being given much choice in whether or not to "volunteer" for this mission. The presence of other volunteers made it all a little less concerning, but it was still hard to calm his innate skepticism.

So he had expected it to go sideways... for the conditions to be harsher than advertised, for the planet itself to have unfriendly inhabitants, for their stay to be longer than they were being told it would be. Tex hadn't had to push much with her insistence that he wear the armor that he was otherwise loath to put on, after the months spent in it after the Moira's crash, and she hadn't had to insist on him carrying a weapon at all.

He still hadn't expected this.

He assumes he'll have ample time to consider why they might be here, if it's anything beyond the obvious; immediate decisions about what to do next are more important. A large number of Tex's former teammates have arrived in recent months, but this is the first time he's seen them all assembled. The pattern they fall into seems to be almost innate -- it doesn't initially occur to them to be anything other than the team they were. He's not one of them, but having half a dozen armored soldiers around him doesn't seem like a bad idea. If someone playing leader makes any suggestion he considers strategically unfortunate, he'll speak up.

He subtly keeps a slight distance from Wash, although he's on high alert when Tex is anywhere near the other man. The armor L is wearing has been painted over since the Caducan attack: it's dark grey now, a single color, no flashes of yellow. But he remembers Wash's distress at seeing him back then, and the threat of violence, and Tex's admission that Wash had killed her at home... there isn't a strong indication that Wash is an unstable element now, but it's always better not to get shot in the face and always better to put off any confrontations in situations like this. Wash makes this easier by being slightly standoffish himself.

Finally, L offers, "It's going to be a long walk to get anywhere. There are certain things we encountered the last time we were here -- it would be good to be aware of them."

Edited 2017-08-22 09:22 (UTC)

That armor is familiar. It's not unlike what most of the others are wearing, with Carolina and Maine himself being the exceptions. The person wearing it, on the other hand, is a stranger. Maine doesn't have to see their face or hear their voice to know that. He's spent years fighting alongside people whose faces he'd see only on occasion, or sometimes not at all, both with Project Freelancer and before. He knows his allies' movements; their stances; their body language. And he doesn't know the person with Texas at all.

However, Maine doesn't question the stranger's presence. Maybe Texas knows them from the sack of shit people keep calling the future. Maybe not. It doesn't matter to Maine one way or the other. As long as the stranger doesn't interfere with his team, Maine doesn't care.

But Maine wouldn't be doing his team any favors if, in watching their backs, he didn't keep an eye on the newcomer as well. Fortunately, he doesn't notice the avoidance of Wash: if he did, Maine would immediately choose confrontation over observation. As it is, it isn't until L speaks that Maine turns to face him.

Maine doesn't look unfriendly, necessarily, given the fact that he tops seven feet in armor and has a pistol in hand. He just appears indifferent. At least, until he tilts his head to the side and inclines it slightly. It's a question without speech; he's waiting for L to continue.

The man -- man? that's L's impression, anyway -- who's listening to him is very tall, strongly built, although he thinks that if he wasn't aware of the difference the armor makes in someone's bulk, he might not have as good a guess about the other person's physique.

"I don't think you're going to have too many problems."

He sighs before continuing.

"The last time we were here, though, there were traps in some of the settlements. There's a good chance that anything useful is gone from the houses now anyway. Around the caves, there were aggressive creatures -- humanoid, with teeth for a face, not unusually strong. Some large feline predators in other areas. There are some plants that can be eaten, but..."

He looks around, frown hidden by his visor. Are there? It's been months, but things look wrong.

[OOC: For my reference!]

Edited 2017-08-31 03:19 (UTC)

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[closed] what gonna work? teamwork!

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