closed;

[kidjoy]

Who: Deacon and the Girl
When: 25th
Where: By the Pool
What: Painting guns and bonding
Warnings: Foul mouthed children



She's waiting for him in the center of the room, paints stuffed into her over flowing pack and the bag of sequins laying in her lap. Half her attention is on the door, the rest is on the water. She's purposefully sat far away from the pool out of a sense of necessity. It's beyond the disgust at the people here for hoarding something so precious to play with, it's a real fear. She's half afraid if she goes near it without someone around she'll drown. Even Kobra hasn't gotten her to get to close yet.

When Deacon enters the room, she's still staring down the water with all the distrust she can muster. He only gets a smile once she's done properly cursing at the thing in her head. Instead of a proper greeting, she just tosses him the bag of sequins.

"You bring the gun?"

Comments

[ersatzeverything]

He catches the bag in one hand.

"'Course I did. This'd be a really short crafting party if I didn't." He crouches down by where the girl is sitting and opens the bag.

"Nice. That'll glitz it up great."

He unholsters his laser pistol and sets it on the ground between them.

"So, I've totally never done this before, so you're gonna have to show me how." He wants to make sure she properly feels like it's her project without the adult taking over or anything.

[kidjoy]

Her attention goes straight to the gun, still not quite what she's used to but familiar enough that this could almost pass for a quiet day in the Zones. The boys had painted their's long before she was old enough to remember, but there had been relatively peaceful afternoons outside the dinner when she watched them touch up the designs.

"First off, gotta figure out what you want the finished product to look like." She turns back to her pack, carefully sets out the paint cans. Even though he'd requested two colors, she's brought all of them in the chance he changes his mind. Next she's pulling out paper and pens, the former of which looks like it was paperwork that she should be doing rather than drawing over. Still, she flips it to the blank side and starts doodling a rough outline over the gun.

"Some people just paint 'em solid and put on some fancy words. Or put some stripes on it. Or even a whole picture if you're good enough at drawing." She sort of hopes he won't ask for that. Ghoul was the only one who ended up with a full on mural on his gun and it wasn't something she thought she could replicate. "What's ya think about lightening bolts?"

[ersatzeverything]

"I don't think I'm up for a full picture, but lightening bolts are awesome. A lantern would be great, too, if we can pull if off. That's kinda the symbol of the gang I run with."

The idea of putting a quote on the laser gun is appealing, but it has to be something perfect. Writing just "pew pew" on it might sound like a good idea at the moment, but the joke would wear off after a week or so.

[kidjoy]

She perks up, a smile crossing her face and attention zeroed in back to him. "Your gang? You got a crew waitin' for ya back home? With your own symbol and everythin'?"

Another place where she was finding a connection between them and it was clear she was pleased to do so. She believed a crew held more importance than anything and she figured they must be tight if they'd already made a symbol. She slides the paper toward him, tapping a pen in front of him.

"Show me?"

[ersatzeverything]

"Yeah. We've got a symbol, code signs, special names for each other, everything. We're a big, wacky, dysfunctional family."

He takes the pen and paper and sketches a rough outline of an old fashioned oil lamp. Usually they'd set out an actual lamp rather than drawing one, so he isn't very practiced at it.

"Here, let me show you two of the most important signs, just in case you ever end up in the Commonwealth. This one is the sign for danger." He draws an X with six lines radiating out around it.

"And this one says that there's an ally nearby." He draws a plus sign and again the six lines.

[kidjoy]

She crawls a little closer to examine the drawing as he works, smiling the whole time at his story. The more he told her about his life, the more she thinks that he really understands the essence of the Zones. It's comforting in a way to hear that other people out there in the world, the universe, have had a similar life.

"It's the same way at home. Our's is a spider. Party put it right on the front of the Trans Am, so everybody knows it's us wherever we go."

She shuts up as he draws the code signs. They'd never really learned about things like that in the Zones, not visual ones at least.

"What kind of danger ya'll got?"

[ersatzeverything]

"We've got radscorpions and raiders and bloodbugs and ferals and super mutants and all kinds of things. Also boring things like unstable bridges and radioactive areas."

Boring in that the radiation wasn't actively trying to kill you; it was just there. Things would get pretty exciting when your skin started falling off, though.

"But the biggest danger is the Institute. They're high-tech and clever and have a massive amount of resources. And they really don't like my gang."

[kidjoy]

"I ain't never heard of half of that. What's a bloodbug? And is the radscorpion just a radiated scorpion? Cause that's not a cool name if it is."

Naming the danger was clearly an important part of there being danger. But that's coming from a kid who's world had to come up with fancy names for even getting a rash.

"Institute? Why don't they like ya? What do they do to be so dangerous?"

[ersatzeverything]

"A bloodbug is a giant mosquito. They're real pains in the ass, hard to shoot because they fly around so much. And, yeah, radscorpion is the not really imaginative name for a giant radiation mutated scorpion."

At least he doesn't run into those very often in the city. But the Institute...how to explain the Institute.

"The Institute is...they're like...clean and advanced and look down on everyone else for not being clean and advanced, but don't want to share it, either, don't want to use their advanced tech to help people. They kidnap and murder people for no reason at all, just drag them away for experiments or something, and replace them with androids--synths. They have a synth army and everyone is scared that someday they're going to totally take over and kill anyone who tries to fight back. But the thing is, the synths are basically slaves. And some of them want freedom. My gang helps those synths that want out and so the Institute hates us because we're helping people escape them."

[kidjoy]

“How giant is giant? Ya can’t shoot at a real skeeter, they’re teeny.”

She may have seen some drunken kids try at festivals and concerts that always seemed to crop up in the worst of the heat. It tended to be more amusing than the usual band on goings and free offerings.

She stays quiet a long time as they sit there. She fiddles with the edge of her vest, still as bright and dirty as the day she’d arrived. “Sounds like what we got at home. ‘cept they don’t replace people, they just change the person. And ya can’t help ‘em escape. Once they got someone under the mask, they’re just gone. Nothin’ but death’s gonna save ‘em.”

She pulls the paper back over to herself, hand out for the pen. She doesn’t look at him.

“Have ya been able to save a lot?”

[ersatzeverything]

"These suckers--pun totally intended--are, like, two to three feet long. So you definitely can shoot at them, but they're narrow and their movements are erratic so actually hitting one is kinda tricky."

He listens quietly as she talks about her home, that organization that frightens her. When she asks how many synths the Railroad has saved, all he can think about are the failures. There are more of those than there are successes. But that's not a burden to put on a ten year old girl. He keeps his voice light.

"Not as many as we'd like, but enough to have made a difference."

[kidjoy]

"Three feet long?" That would probably mean a lot more to her if she understood anything about measurements. But it sounds big from the context. "Geez, what kind of screwed up mess made that happen?"

His answer puts a smile on her face, oblivious to his inner turmoil. All she hears is that saving people had been possible, somewhere out there in the world. How could the wars have changed if they could have saved runners from the Dracs? It's something the girl can only dream about. "Enough's enough. Tryin' is what matters in the end, ya know? Not how it ends up, just that ya tried to make it happen."