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

[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."