Shimmer, Glimmer, & Gleam - A Quest of Loss & Gain

"...Fine, but you know any of us would help you out just for the asking," you mutter to the kid. You take the offered cigarettes and squirrel them away. "I need to go back to my cell and get -"

It shakes its head. "Take a feather. It'll hurt a bit but."

You give the kid a long, withering look, and it has the decency to squirm a bit. "Kid...what else is this for? You really do not wanna be killing people with your hands. Let the scum do that for you, that's what we're here for."

"I'm not killing anyone," the kid hisses. "I'm not even really hurtin' anyone, okay, I just...need to take care of something. I've already got bandages and disinfectant and stuff, honestly there's gonna be less blood than a whiffed vaccine, calm your giant tits."

"Yeah you do not get to use that language with me."

"...Okay...yeah." It looks away, clearly anxious that you're not going to help, which is when you yank a feather out by the base in one quick motion. The kid hisses in sharp pain, but you know for a damn fact it hurts less to do it like that and by surprise than it would have with a warning. You pass your hand over the feather, and offer the resulting shiv to the kid, who takes it and hides it immediately.

"You're gonna find me before you do anything stupid and let me supervise," you insist, quietly.

"...Sorry about this, Orchid," the kid says, and then it flashes a tiny piece of polished steel in your face, and -

* * * *

You startle, but thankfully this is the part of cooking rice (Bayview had 50 pound bags of the stuff, right now your community has a Rice Problem, you legitimately probably can't eat it faster than it'll spoil if you don't convert it into other cooked food) where you mostly stare at the rice and, as Chef Nettleson has stressed every time you reach for the spoon, DO NOT STIR OR DISTURB THE RICE. You feel his hand on your shoulder and hear concern in his voice as he says, "Orchid my dear, your nose is bleeding again."

Fuck. You stagger over to the wash basin and try to clear it off your face, wipe at yourself with a towel. "This keeps happening," you mutter. "Sorry, I'm probably not...food safe."

"You are not," the chef agrees. "Please, just take a seat for now. No one can doubt that you work quite hard."

It's the way he says it that gets you, as if this is a fact as unarguable as 'when you drop things, they fall'; you pull up one of the nearby folding chairs and sit, hanging your head and trying just to breathe. Nettleson remains busy, as he must. You're just about competent to do like, prep work on cooking, and it's not even as if anything going on is actually beyond your skill or ability to learn to meet it (he'd said so, like it was a fact), but what you don't have is 17 years of experience in the field that lets you juggle a million cooking tasks at the same time.

At least he'd understood that you wanted some privacy when you'd asked to cook with him.

"If I ask a personal question to distract myself from the pain would you believe I meant to ask it the whole time?" you half-croak; your throat is tight, there's probably blood running down it. Ever since you and Nattie and Marie were looking at that damn prison...

"I'm amenable," Nettleson teases, with a jovial little chuckle.

"So. You're a man like...on purpose?"

This gives him pause, but it doesn't seem to be a bad pause. He taps his wooden spatula on the side of a pan and makes a musical humming that is very comforting. "I suppose I've heard less cogent ways of saying that, yes," he sort-of agrees at last. "I might say instead that my options were manhood and death, and I'm terribly attached to living."

You sorta half-nod, which he does not see because he is, y'know, cooking. You try to phrase the question delicately, realize that this will in fact be beyond your skills, and instead say, "Why?"

That gets a loud belly laugh. "Why indeed? You've truly picked someone nearly totally unqualified for this conversation, my dear - I went to a cooking school. My business is pleasure, not philosophy." He turns and gives you that joyful smile that the destruction of the only world he'd ever known hadn't managed to kill, and something flutters in your chest through the ache. "I think the best advice I can give you is that no part of this is unrelated. Perhaps it should be, but it isn't. Me being a man is linked to me being a chef, even, though it sounds so terribly cynical to put it in those terms. Men are...respected, as artists in the kitchen. My art affirms my identity to others. But -" he waggles his spatula at you, "I must ask, what has motivated this inquiry during our busy time of transition?"

You chew your lip a bit. "I suppose...I...this doesn't leave your kitchen."

"Of course."

It still takes you a bit to work up to it. "I feel like...I dunno, I feel like I'm becoming who I am without much active input on my part. I keep reacting to the world and then it changes me and I look back and regret that I didn't do it different, sometimes. Or I don't understand why I did something on purpose, so even if I like something about myself how am I supposed to know what it is I wanna do...more? And I'm looking around at all of us, this community that decided I'm in charge, and I'm trying to figure out how we don't become something on accident. You and Jill and Sasha are the most yourself-on-purpose people I know."

"You do me too much credit," Nettleson demurs. "But it cheers me to know that I am so high in your esteem. I don't know how applicable kitchen leadership is to a larger community, but perhaps, my precious biohazard, you should take a walk, and seek out your people. Get to know them and their needs?"

"You just want me out of your kitchen," you tease.

"Obviously, now go forth!"

Choose 2 groups in your community; others will come up later I just need my updates at a manageable fucking length
[ ] Write-in
[ ] Write-in

Orchid's journal may be a good place to start. Project Throwback is also an option.

No one is idle right now. There are warehouses to convert into living and working spaces, wreckage to salvage, people to feed, resources to harvest, gardens to tend to. Unless you're on leisure time, you're working; even then, 'guild boys' (here your memories are slightly more useful and comprehensive than normal, guilds represent workers in some manner, often against the government...) make sure that people get breaks on their shifts and have access to things like seats and water and food. There's a restive anxiety about this, as though they're used to being fought on this subject and the lack of anyone making them yell or argue about it is so foreign that they aren't sure how to handle it.

Your initial, thoughtless wandering to follow Nettleson's advice brings you into a circle of older folks who are currently, and with great patience, assembling furniture. There was so much furniture in Bayview, and more in one of the warehouses, and while it is cheap, and it will not last, it doesn't have to last. It just has to be useful for the moment. Wring a year out of it and it'll be fine, assuming everyone's still alive. The current batch appears to be wheeled office chairs, as there are a lot of them. You idly wonder what the archaeologists of the future are gonna make of this shit.

You sit amongst the others, who take advantage of the bit where you have no arthritis or joint pain (yet) to make you hold the larger and more awkward parts of these affairs. None of it is terribly heavy, but it's all annoying, and you make it a bit less annoying for everyone. You have come to understand that the first like ten minutes of the resulting conversation is primarily some manner of Elderly Ritual in which which they ask after your health and give many polite greetings and ask after Jill's health(??? Okay that's new) and you in turn ask after theirs and inquire as to how the work is going and vaguely agree that this spring is very strange even though it's the only spring you've ever experienced so how the fuck would you actually know. Various plastic parts slot into each other in a comforting almost-rhythm, to be screwed into place patiently and then wiggled and tested and shook before the next part happens...

"So what brings you to our little party, young -" the grandpa speaking, a Mister Jessup, almost visibly swerves his sentence around the pronoun you're pretty sure he was about to crash into, "- elector? Surely not seeking the wisdom of your elders."

You adjust the grip on the back of the chair you're holding in place so the base can be screwed on. "Well, grandfather, I was seeking the wisdom of my elders."

Those sorts of jokes always seem to be a smash hit with the old people, who hoot and holler and mock Jessup with good-natured cheer. Andrea favors you with a playful look, and you shyly turn your head away (and discreetly wipe your sleeve on your face to make sure you're not bleeding again). At long last a small grandma, like, as-small-as-you-small, she's so fucking tiny, looks over at you and says, "Well don't leave us in suspense, young one. None of us are getting any younger."

"I hope not, I did my time," Andrea comments, to much chuckling.

You stick your tongue out at her playfully, and Andrea answers with raised eyebrows that turn your face warm. Okay. Bad move. Let's focus. "It's...well. It's no secret that I'm. Very young, and you're the only elders I've ever had. So I suppose...fuck it, I'm just gonna say it - what do you want, need, to have a home here?"

Many answers manifest, some already being solved (soft foods for the toothless of them, more doctors, a shy old man says it might be nice to search for his family), others you hadn't even considered; a temple, a school, ramps rather than stairs, musical instruments...

"When I was a girl," Andrea opines, "my own grandmother said it was her job to teach me what my parents would forget. Stories from the old country, or from times long gone, lessons that don't make it into history books. None of us here have long, dear. Not with this hard living and all this stress. If old Jessup sees another five years I'll have to make good on taking him out on the town."

"Five years," Jessup scoffs. "Five months, more like -" there is much cuffing of his shoulders and scolding, and he rolls his eyes and gives up.

"The point being that we all want to help the young folk find their way. We just need a pulpit to preach from," Andrea finishes.

The tiny old lady nods sagely, and then adds: "Find their way into your pants, Andrea."

Yep. Okay.

You flee the scene, warm laughter following behind you.

* * * *

The sentries are surely a safer bet. Or they would be if you weren't coming up on a knot of them arguing - wait, no, this is debating - about, what else, the weapon situation. Bullets are only getting more scarce, but there's this problem where getting a forge hot enough to create the theorized leaf-spring blades is also proving to be a massive obstacle -

* * * *

- you reel, catch yourself against a shelf, trying to focus back into your own head. Whatever the kid did, it triggered those, those hallucinations, those cruel dreams of a world Outside denied to convicts like you. Blood gushes out of your nose as you fight it, but that flash of light from the steel mirror is still in the corner of your vision. Don't look at it, don't look towards it - wait, someone's moving towards - no, gods fucking damn it -

* * * *

- a former member of Asset Protection catches you before you can fall, saying something you can't quite make out in a concerned voice. The sentries debating stop their argument long enough to help you into a chair, get you a clean rag to blow your nose into. It comes away bloody while you numbly accept a water bottle and sip quietly from it until the world makes sense again. You insist that you're fine, you just came here to chat, you won't work, it's fine. Their looks of concern don't really go away.

They're a motley crew. Maybe one person here had an actual military background before; the rest are civilians who spent time at a firing range or used to go out hunting, and are now enduring your training in when not to shoot, or would be if you were doing okay. What the hell is wrong with you...

"...Anyway," you half-croak. "I was hoping to figure out like...what y'all want or need or...I mean, you're kinda your own group in the community."

The Asset Protection, it clears its throat, and glances shyly at the others, before it says: "Well, Elector...I think maybe we shouldn't be. I think. Maybe that was a problem in the old world, and if everyone here does some time on the walls it'd be less of a problem."

"C'mon Jimmy," another says, "you gonna ask those sweet ol' grannies to pick up a rifle?"

"You wouldn't?" you say in vague confusion and now just everybody confused here at this break area. The debate that follows might actually be an argument instead, and as far as you can tell there are three 'sides'. One argument holds forth that warriors fight so that others can be free not to; that placing the burden of violence on the entire community is an act of cruelty. Another argues that only by sharing that burden can the new community avoid creating some kind of. Martial underclass? You're having trouble following it but it sounds quite serious.

The third is sort of like the second but based on what its proponents believe to be cold logic: there aren't enough warm bodies for a separate martial class, regardless of the ethics involved.

"I mean," you mumble, a little thickly. Your head hurts, right behind your eyes..."The thing is, there's not enough time for everyone to get trained either. What ball do you want to drop to get everyone drilling?"

There's a brief huddle. One of them raises its - her? - head to look at you, then goes back into the huddle. When they break apart, the one that peeked says: "We could cut down on rest hours -"

"Not happening," you say flatly. "Not unless you're in a big hurry to watch me personally go mad followed by me, personally, killing us all. We rest."

Hrm. That might have been the wrong thing to say; a few folks seem intimidated, even concerned. It's just so hard to concentrate with this pain building up behind -

* * * *

A guard shakes your shoulder roughly, and you snap back into yourself, blinking harshly. The light is gone from the corner of your eyes, praise the Everlasting Lady. At first you think you're in for a beating, but, no, the guard is helping to hold you up, has produced a tissue from somewhere. You tilt your head back and let the guard minister to you, not that you could stop it if you tried. Well. Maybe you could, but killing a person, even a guard, over trying to help you seems a little ungrateful.

"Do you need to go to the infirmary?" it asks, formally.

...

You might be able to lay low there while you figure out what the kid did to you, but the infirmary isn't...a pleasant place. Might be better to risk it in gen pop, where the screaming doesn't...do what the screaming does in infirmary.

Risk one
[ ] Your safety
[ ] Your emotional health