spicy_bones | A New Challenger Approaches

A New Challenger Approaches

He'd thought at first that it was a nightmare, a result of a bender after a particularly bad case; no matter how the people in his life that cared about him tried, the alcohol was still part of his life, a crutch and a numbing agent that he preferred over facing his problems and the people that were involved. The fog, dark and glittering with sinister red flecks, enveloping him where he'd collapsed in the stairwell of his building, making him feel as if he had slid back down them until he was lying in damp grass and staring up at stars that make him think that he's no longer in the middle of downtown Detroit.

Worse, he was sober. He wanted to die and he no longer had a drop of alcohol in his system to dull it. Miserable, cold, and aching, Connor sat up and inspected himself in case there might be some indication of what had happened to him. But there was nothing, just patches of wetness from the grass on his jeans and the outer layer of his slightly obnoxiously patterned button-up, the plain black shirt underneath untucked but otherwise pristine. He sat in the grass for a long while and puzzled quietly over it all, before pushing himself to his feet and panning around for any sign of life.

He didn't recognize what kind of trees he was surrounded by, so that told him he wasn't close to home. Concerning. He started to walk straight in the hopes of finding any indication that civilization might be nearby, trailed by that same mist that curled around his ankles until he found a bubble of blessed firelight. Nobody present that he could tell, but the presence of the bonfire and arranged logs around it told him that they couldn't have gone far, nor that they'd been gone for long. So he sat, elbows on his knees and his hands rubbing together slowly in front of his mouth as he debated on how to approach whatever was happening to him now. If he'd been kidnapped, he at least knew how to handle that.

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"Nice one, Jake." Nea rolled her eyes as she watched the new guy leave.

"What did I do?"

"Info dump much? Poor guy just died for the first time and you dump all that on him? You know just because you're a hermit doesn't mean you get a pass for being totally socially innept."

"That's a big word for you." Jake raised an eyebrow, wincing when she smacked him on the shoulder only to apologize when she realized which one she had hit. Rolling his eyes he stood and made his own way back to their cabin, in time to see Connor checking himself over. Closing the door behind him he walked in, staying mostly quiet as he couldn't help but keep his gaze on the other man in the room. His eyes took in what he could see and when he finally stopped it was to lean on a shelf not too far from Connor so that he could see his profile.

"For the most part death is a reset and you should be fine. Well...hopefully. No idea how it will affect someone like you." He shrugs. "Obviously you're the first half machine." He tries to make light of it, a joking sort of tone to help the mood. "Sorry for all that info...I don't usually talk about stuff, usually leave it for the other to handle. I....well until I came here it had been a while since I was around others."

Connor had been sitting in the middle of his bed in his undershirt gently prodding the badly bruised skin below his left clavicle then tracing along a razor-thin scar in the pale, mole dotted skin of his chest and shoulder with his fingertips. He looked up when Jake spoke up, just shaking his head some as he returned to taking stock of himself.

"No, trust me, I get it. You want to help and I do need to know this stuff." He wrinkled his nose, blinking a few times as if something has bothered his sinuses. It passed as quickly as it had come on.

He regarded the other man with a soft frown, brow furrowed. "How come you didn't say anything to them about it? Not that I want you airing my dirty laundry, but people have done shittier things with good intentions."

"Same reason I haven't said anything to anyone about the things I know about others." Jake sighed as he moved over to his own bed and plopped down.

"It's none of my business." He shrugged. "If you want people to know you'll tell them. I will say that it might be a good thing to let people know so they don't freak out buuut...yeah. You might be the only half machine here but you aren't the only one with a secret. You'll learn over time. Some are more damning than others...and some make us more protective of each other."

Jake can't help but stare at his hands as he thinks about the latercation that had happened recently, hearing Yun-Jin spit hateful words about not just a single person but a group of people. The venom in her voice even hurt him and it wasn't even about him.

"Just be careful who you trust with stuff...we have some real self serving types around....well at least one really. Take what Yun-Jin Lee says with a grain of salt...I think I warned you already but....I mean it."

"I'm not expecting everyone to be altruistic paragons of humanity out here. She's as human as any of us and if she starts shit, I'll deal with it if I need to." Connor moved and stretched his arm in what was clearly a physical therapy exercise, stretching and flexing and keeping himself mobile enough as they talked.

"I appreciate the help, though. Really."

"Yeah well there's a difference between being a kinda shitty person and being a raging bigot who won't save someone just because of who they'd rather fuck." Jake slips up, he doesn't mean to be a bit more blatant but he can't help it. Wincing he instead goes about removing his boots and jacket until he's in just his t-shirt and jeans.

"Sorry, there's just been some tension around camp because of something that happened." Looking over at Connor, Jake sort of chuckles and shrugs. "No problem. It's good to help...we didn't have it when we got here. Had to figure it all out on our own."

There was a long moment of silence, then a quiet "ah." So Yun-Jin was that particular brand of shitty.

He listened to Jake trying to explain himself, and cracked an actual smile, a sweet look at a private thought that betrayed the cool front that he tried to maintain.

"I get it. It's...heh. It's actually pretty familiar." A long story there for sure, complicated enough that he's not sure he would know where to start explain, if he tried to begin with.

"Yeah..." Jake sort of trails off, catching the softer look he feels compelled to look away, so he does so by flopping onto his back with his legs still dangling over the edge of his bed. Eyes stare up at the ceiling for a long time as if counting the lines of the grain of the wood in each beam. It'd been a while since Dwight had moved to someone else's cabin, cold nights and Jake not being the most sociable person sometimes being as they were. Yet so far in the not even two days that Connor had been there Jake felt comfortable.

"So, what's it like...the future I mean? Sure you're not that far ahead of us but I mean....it feels like it. With the whole androids and...well I guess you'd be more like a cyborg right? It's all like...super advanced prosthesis right? We have a few things but nothing super advanced like that."

"Advanced prosthesis, and what the Cyberlife techs call biocomponents. It's based on android tech because they decided it was appropriate to make the functioning hardware organ-like so it lent back to prosthetic research. Thirium's the blue fluid that sustains the energy and hydraulic pressure the components need to function," he explained, looking down at one of his arms, its spiderweb of hair-thin scars showing where he'd had work done. "If I'm honest with you? It's not super different, besides the income gap getting bigger. When androids went mass market, a lot of people were out of jobs and with no UBI and no rich assholes willing to help out with all that, the economy collapsed. The rest of us stuck in the middle just...try to make it work. I keep my head down and do my job and hope whatever comes next is gonna be ok."

Which, considering where he was now? Was a hell of a lot to ask for.

"Huh," Jake sat back up, rubbing his hands over his face. "Well sounds like my family will have been just fine. Good to know." Sure he didn't want to live like them but, he still appreciated them. They were his family after all, how could he not.

"Somehow I'm not surprised though, that the economy just got worse. Always hated how all that worked. 's one more reason why I said fuck that and moved to the woods."

"You're probably the smart one, if we're honest here. Go do the self sufficient thing and fuck the rest of it. Only downside's if there's an accident."

Connor pulled his shirt back on and adopted a similar posture, only facedown with his arms laying loose over the top of his head.

He was quiet for a long moment before turning his head just enough so that his cheek was pressed against the blanket and his eyes could at least be up in Jake's general direction. "So how often does this happen? I would prefer not being sucked into the mist when I go out to take a leak."

"Yeah well, I don't know. It's not that bad...even the idea of no one knowing your fate has it's appeal. Morbid as it sounds." Jake sort of chuckled, shifting to lay on his bed properly, hands folded on his chest.

"It depends, for a bit it might want you more often than the others. You're new and shiny you know? Like a new toy or something. I remember when Leon and his gang showed up it was almost always them getting thrown to the killers...or it was the monster that ended up coming with them that we had to face. After time it's taper off and soon you'll just be like the rest of us and only get pulled in from time to time. Uaully it's nice enough to give at least a little warning."

Connor listened quietly, eyes up on the rough-hewn wood floor as he contemplated that. It made sense, if the thing wanted to test their mettle first, make sure they belonged here maybe.

His head lifted after some quiet thought, his chin propping on his arms as they cross beneath it. He didn't want to bombard Jake with questions, but there was so much that he needed to learn about how this place operated that he would need to know at some point. Maybe the others would be helpful, when he felt more up to actually trying to introduce himself beyond just giving them his name.

"If I have to deal with shit like hatchet woman, you're not gonna be the only one that knows about me," he mused. A tilted little smirk came to him as he added, "Maybe someone'll be better at trying to patch me up."

"Come on, I panicked." Jake chuckled as he rolled onto his side. "Can you blame me? It's not exactly every day my hands are covered in blue blood. Blood sure...but not blue."

Shaking his head Jake shifted to pillow his head with one arm before continuing.

"But I will say it might be better others know, just so they don't freak out and panic or something. I don't think most will care much, they might have a lot of questions but I doubt they'll really think any differently about you."

Connor pulled a face. "I don't know about that, man. Best case scenario, I'm the new camp freak. I'll take care of myself unless something decides to stab me in the back."

"I mean, couldn't be any worse than when Cheryl got here. She can literally talk to the Entity to an extent...people really didn't trust her at first." Jake shrugged, or as much as he could while laying in bed.

Squinting at the lights he sighed before rolling out of bed and over to them to turn off. Falling back into bed Jake stared up at the ceiling before looking back at Connor.

"Doubt you'll be able to hide it forever but...you don't have to worry about anyone finding out thanks to me. Promise."

The young man turned onto his stomach, burying his face in his pillow with a sigh.

"Oh yeah," He turned his head slightly. "Axes are the least of your worries. There is one guy who has a giant kitchen knife....like...drags it on the ground giant. A couple have chainsaws. There's also a woman who vomits on people and hits them with a censer. No joke."

"Fuck dude, sounds like a party," Connor replied, tone absolutely dripping with sarcasm. He sighed and put his forehead down on his arms. He was running through his various skills in his mind, trying to figure out if any of them were actually applicable here. He was good with his hands, that much was apparent immediately. He was quick on the uptake but really anyone could be. He wrinkled his nose, then scrunched his face briefly, until a less detailed version of his old scanner display faded out his surroundings. That...hm. That could work.

"Well. Here's hoping I don't have to deal with them until after I've gotten some rest. I wanna see if the self-mending protocol actually works like you all healing up at the fire does. I'll worry less if I know it'll knit back together after the fact."

"A party, sure let's go with that." Jake chuckled as he shook his head.

"Yeah...here's hoping. Wouldn't be great if it didn't." Jake had no idea how to help the guy if it didn't work like the healing they all did, he wasn't exactly a mechanic. The only reason he had gotten as good as he was with the gens was because they had diagrams...and trial and error.

Lots of error.

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A New Challenger Approaches

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