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May. 22nd, 2013 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
withmyshieldPerpetual motion is the goal. Staying so busy that she falls down dead tired at the end of the day, giving her brain as few minutes as possible to torment her with “what-ifs”. The list of useful activities for someone who’s not a doctor of a mad scientist is sadly limited, and there’s no way she’s going to admit that it might be just as productive for her to be watching movies. Obsessive focus on one task seems to be the compromise. She starts leaving the utility ladder under the vent she pokes around last when she can’t keep her limbs going Just so she’ll remember, because the hallways are all starting to look mighty similar to her under-rested brain.
Probably the impulse to venture inside the vent comes from sleep deprivation, too. Sharon’s a pretty good judge of spaces and after seeing several that she can definitely get her shoulders into, she decides there’s really no good reason not to see what’s going on from the inside. Even if it makes her feel like an action movie cliche.
The vents are squeaky clean and the air is [ironically] quite breathable. She wonders what someone in the room below might think of the sound of an adult woman army-crawling through a ventilation duct. Possibly that said woman had taken a sharp turn away from sanity. They might be right, too. Her comm is bulky, but less so than the hand lamp she’d found in a closet on the first floor, and the light is pretty crucial in the near pitch-blackness. It’s the only thing that keeps her from crashing her head into a vertical shaft in front of her, which she can’t see the top of from where she’s lying on her side. In an air vent.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she says it out loud, because it’s pretty hard to up the crazy factor at this point. She bangs her fist against the steel, which reverbs loudly as something crashes down on her head. Sharon screams, and scrambles back, because whatever it is definitely had fur. When she shines her light on it, she starts to laugh softly, then louder, totally forgetting the possibility of being overheard.
It’s a teddy bear. Fuzzy, brown, new looking. It had to have come from the top of the vertical shaft. But how the hell did it get there? Something clicks in her brain, something Steve talks about, but not often, and with quiet devastation: a kid, a little girl that used to sleep in the vents. With a funny name. Sharon has an image of blonde hair, but she’d only ever seen the kid once or twice, because she’d disappeared soon after Sharon arrived. The unfairness of a little kid passing out of memory like that makes Sharon suddenly furious. Mad like she hasn’t been in a long time. She takes a deep breath and shimmies into the vertical part of the vent.
They get plucked out of their lives with no warning, try to stay sane and maybe even happy under ridiculous circumstances, and on top of it all their lives are constantly in danger. Whether its unceremonious disappearance or lasers or poison, they’re ants in a tank on their very best day, and trying to forget that fact isn’t getting them anywhere. Except dead.
Sharon’s out of breath by the time she reaches the top of the shaft -totally wrong shoes for this kind of climb, and what she finds at the top just breaks her heart. It’s a slightly wider pipe, full of little kid stuff. Blanket, pillow, a few more dolls and a few scraps of paper. There’s a sketch of a little girl that Sharon would recognize at ten paces as one of Steve’s. Her heart contracts painfully, but she doesn’t pick it up. Her hands are shaking with anger that’s only getting more intense. She dials her comm and catches her breath while it’s ringing. Thank god it always takes Cuthbert about five rings to figure out he’s receiving a call.
- - -
"Sharon?"
Bert's in the kitchen, comm trapped between his head and shoulder while he puts some sandwiches together for the scientists. She starts talking and he waits, listening, butter knife in one hand, a piece of bread in the other, and he wonders if she has any idea just how unwell she sounds.
But it's not a conversation to have over the phone.
"Sure. Sure. Which floor are you on? Okay. Take it easy. Be there in a few minutes."
She hangs up and he looks at his half-assembled sandwich line a little forlornly before getting his ass in gear.
"You're going to kill me," he says as he walks up, supplies bundled under his arm. "But why are we doing this, again?"
“That’s exactly the point, Bert. Why.” She descends the ladder and sits on the lowest rung so they’re eye to eye. Eye to feverishly intent eye, possibly.
“Why haven’t we already done this? We’ve been so focused on keeping ourselves safe day to day that we’ve forgotten that we’re just not. We can’t just sit around and wait for this space station to decide it’s time to wipe us out and start over.”
This conversation is bringing up a lot of points in Cuthbert's mind that are definitely better left unexamined, or at least unsaid. His best guesses concerning the nature of the station and their captors are wildly misfigured, or so it would seem listening to the others talk. But still, what's he going to say to her as she stares him down?
To be honest, Sharon, I'm pretty sure that 'wiping us out and starting over' is just one of many little boxes left on the to-do list of the mad gods that trapped us here, mayhap along with 'deadly frost doxies' and 'innocuous-looking, pickle-flavored beer'.
But it doesn't seem like Sharon's looking for a philosophical debate or palaver and if crawling through a couple of dark tunnels is going to make her feel like she's in control again, she's come to the right idiot.
"I couldn't agree more; I've been wiped out once and I didn't care for it at all." He hands over the supplies, tucked into two nifty little pouches he’s found that strap conveniently about the waist, along with her water pack. He’s got the cable and the metal clips they’ll (hopefully?) use to secure it in a tight loop on his belt.
She doesn’t blink before strapping on the fanny pack, which says a lot about how anxious she is to get a move on: transplant New Yorker she might be, it’s never OK to look like a tourist.
All of that seems slightly less important compared to finally finding a way to break the stranglehold Proserpina’s had on them. If she has anything to say about it, they won’t stop until they find the computer mainframe, a climate control board, or someone stupid enough to admit to being in charge.
Probably the impulse to venture inside the vent comes from sleep deprivation, too. Sharon’s a pretty good judge of spaces and after seeing several that she can definitely get her shoulders into, she decides there’s really no good reason not to see what’s going on from the inside. Even if it makes her feel like an action movie cliche.
The vents are squeaky clean and the air is [ironically] quite breathable. She wonders what someone in the room below might think of the sound of an adult woman army-crawling through a ventilation duct. Possibly that said woman had taken a sharp turn away from sanity. They might be right, too. Her comm is bulky, but less so than the hand lamp she’d found in a closet on the first floor, and the light is pretty crucial in the near pitch-blackness. It’s the only thing that keeps her from crashing her head into a vertical shaft in front of her, which she can’t see the top of from where she’s lying on her side. In an air vent.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she says it out loud, because it’s pretty hard to up the crazy factor at this point. She bangs her fist against the steel, which reverbs loudly as something crashes down on her head. Sharon screams, and scrambles back, because whatever it is definitely had fur. When she shines her light on it, she starts to laugh softly, then louder, totally forgetting the possibility of being overheard.
It’s a teddy bear. Fuzzy, brown, new looking. It had to have come from the top of the vertical shaft. But how the hell did it get there? Something clicks in her brain, something Steve talks about, but not often, and with quiet devastation: a kid, a little girl that used to sleep in the vents. With a funny name. Sharon has an image of blonde hair, but she’d only ever seen the kid once or twice, because she’d disappeared soon after Sharon arrived. The unfairness of a little kid passing out of memory like that makes Sharon suddenly furious. Mad like she hasn’t been in a long time. She takes a deep breath and shimmies into the vertical part of the vent.
They get plucked out of their lives with no warning, try to stay sane and maybe even happy under ridiculous circumstances, and on top of it all their lives are constantly in danger. Whether its unceremonious disappearance or lasers or poison, they’re ants in a tank on their very best day, and trying to forget that fact isn’t getting them anywhere. Except dead.
Sharon’s out of breath by the time she reaches the top of the shaft -totally wrong shoes for this kind of climb, and what she finds at the top just breaks her heart. It’s a slightly wider pipe, full of little kid stuff. Blanket, pillow, a few more dolls and a few scraps of paper. There’s a sketch of a little girl that Sharon would recognize at ten paces as one of Steve’s. Her heart contracts painfully, but she doesn’t pick it up. Her hands are shaking with anger that’s only getting more intense. She dials her comm and catches her breath while it’s ringing. Thank god it always takes Cuthbert about five rings to figure out he’s receiving a call.
- - -
"Sharon?"
Bert's in the kitchen, comm trapped between his head and shoulder while he puts some sandwiches together for the scientists. She starts talking and he waits, listening, butter knife in one hand, a piece of bread in the other, and he wonders if she has any idea just how unwell she sounds.
But it's not a conversation to have over the phone.
"Sure. Sure. Which floor are you on? Okay. Take it easy. Be there in a few minutes."
She hangs up and he looks at his half-assembled sandwich line a little forlornly before getting his ass in gear.
"You're going to kill me," he says as he walks up, supplies bundled under his arm. "But why are we doing this, again?"
“That’s exactly the point, Bert. Why.” She descends the ladder and sits on the lowest rung so they’re eye to eye. Eye to feverishly intent eye, possibly.
“Why haven’t we already done this? We’ve been so focused on keeping ourselves safe day to day that we’ve forgotten that we’re just not. We can’t just sit around and wait for this space station to decide it’s time to wipe us out and start over.”
This conversation is bringing up a lot of points in Cuthbert's mind that are definitely better left unexamined, or at least unsaid. His best guesses concerning the nature of the station and their captors are wildly misfigured, or so it would seem listening to the others talk. But still, what's he going to say to her as she stares him down?
To be honest, Sharon, I'm pretty sure that 'wiping us out and starting over' is just one of many little boxes left on the to-do list of the mad gods that trapped us here, mayhap along with 'deadly frost doxies' and 'innocuous-looking, pickle-flavored beer'.
But it doesn't seem like Sharon's looking for a philosophical debate or palaver and if crawling through a couple of dark tunnels is going to make her feel like she's in control again, she's come to the right idiot.
"I couldn't agree more; I've been wiped out once and I didn't care for it at all." He hands over the supplies, tucked into two nifty little pouches he’s found that strap conveniently about the waist, along with her water pack. He’s got the cable and the metal clips they’ll (hopefully?) use to secure it in a tight loop on his belt.
She doesn’t blink before strapping on the fanny pack, which says a lot about how anxious she is to get a move on: transplant New Yorker she might be, it’s never OK to look like a tourist.
All of that seems slightly less important compared to finally finding a way to break the stranglehold Proserpina’s had on them. If she has anything to say about it, they won’t stop until they find the computer mainframe, a climate control board, or someone stupid enough to admit to being in charge.
