OPEN | the waves still crash on the bonfire ash.

[evite]

who: skye & you, hopefully.
what: getting settled? getting hype? what's soon to be the usual, probably.
when: throughout the month of may.
where: city-wide!
warnings: none yet.

✈ in memoriam.

( she doesn't want to mourn. not like this, anyway. skye has too many guilt-laden memories that hang off her ribs to let them free into this city yet; she's half-convinced she'd light too many lanterns and burn the place down. so, instead, she opts to observe. she finds a quiet place off to the side where she can draw 8-bit patterns across the lantern someone had so helpfully placed in her hands and thinks back to all the people she'd left behind.

she draws a pattern on one side, jagged lines that don't quite meet so much as attempt to cross each other out, and hides a name in the blur of ink in the middle. trip, four letters, but they're hard enough to write as it is. another side depicts the layout of the bus, a messy blue print from an untrained hand. the lines are thickest for a square off to the side; not her bedroom, but the sparring room. a place that left her mourning for something that had never been real in the first place. ward. what could have been.

at one point, someone approaches her, lighter in hand and ready to help lift the lantern up into the sky. there's a beat of hesitation before she shakes her head, fingers clutching reflexively over the paper between them. )

No, I think I'm going to keep it, actually.

( is that weird? it might be weird. )

Is that okay?

✈ in officio.

( they offer her a job. well, to be more specific, they tell her to find her own work, which seems a lot more real than anything else thus far. she's not used to having things handed to her, anyway; the idea of having to find her own work seems much more skye than playing cheerful worker drone and just going where they tell her to.

not that she really has to try, anyway. the city seems more than happy to request software codes — mostly inconsequential things, housekeeping projects that likely are a little too blase for anyone they might keep on staff full time, but skye doesn't mind. it puts money in her pocket and boredom on the back burner, the former of which she prefers and the latter of which is probably better for the city.

as a freelancer, though, skye doesn't have an office. there's no official place for someone to meet her or come calling; ultimately, it means that everywhere becomes her office. depending on the day or her mood, she calls a few places "home away from home" — the coffee shops, of course, with their comfortable seating and plentiful selection of baked goods; the local university's library, naturally, and its expansive collection of quiet working tables and reference materials; and in a twist, the local gym, where skye can scout for someone she might want to approach after hours, in the hopes of filling up all that precious free time.

she thinks may might even be proud of her for that. sparring voluntarily? who would have thought. not skye, that's for damn certain, but she's trying new things. like talking to people, for one. such as: )

Hey — ( hey you, no, that's rude. ) — listen, can you hand me that?

( "it" could be anything. a lamp, a book, a muffin someone dropped on the ground. go crazy. get weird. make things happen. )

✈ wildcard.

( y'all probably know the drill. if you want something particular, please shoot me a pm and let me know! ♥ )

Comments

[evite]

( talk about a loaded question. )

I didn't really have a job. More of like... cult status, I guess.

( there is really no good way to say 'i was part of an underground hacktivist group' or 'i joined a secret government organization' or 'i was in quarantine because i got insane superpowers from this exploding rock and i'm pretty sure i'm a walking disaster waiting to happen' ... )

I bounced around a lot. Foster kid, you know, and then the system just kind of dumps you out and tells you to figure it out. ( true, if not a lie by omission. ) I guess I'm still figuring it out.

[holds_up_walls]

Cult status? So more of a position because people knew who you were or because they knew the group.

[He feels like he needs a "been there, done that, bought the t-shirt" for that. His own life as a Gundam pilot could probably fall into that category. But somehow his organization had a way of paying him. He's not sure how...]

Sorry to hear that. Sometimes they don't do quite enough. Maybe you'll have the chance to figure it out here. This place seems to be good for that.

[evite]

Neither? ( it's kind of a long story. ) More like, you join up and it feels like a cult, but nobody knows who you are anyway, so it's kind of a shitty cult? At least Scientology paid people.

( she knows that doesn't help very much. )

You're probably right, though. Figuring it out, I mean. ( she doesn't sound very confident, but to be fair, she hasn't felt very confident about this yet. ) I'll let you know how it goes.

[holds_up_walls]

...Yeah that sounds like a terrible cult. You could have left and no one would have known. Sounds like they aren't doing their job very well.

Well, you get the chance without the same forces of your world. No cult. Just new friends. Yeah, let me know how that goes. I'm sure you'll find something soon.

[After a pause]

You know, you could hang that lantern at your floor or your house when you get one. A way of keeping them close. You don't necessarily have to look at it, but its there.

[evite]

Yeah, I guess I can do that. At least for now.

( it's not that being part of shield had been bad. it just hadn't been what skye had expected. at least with rising tide, there'd been the understanding that what they were doing was anonymous by definition, that they weren't attaching their own names to their agendas. they were just doing what they needed to do to survive.

she doesn't regret coming here, but she does wonder how she'll feel about it when she goes home. it's something to think about, anyway.

skye's quiet for a moment before she finally replies, albeit a bit briefly. )

Thanks. ( it's a start. ) For the pep talk.

[holds_up_walls]

[It really was hard to tell what she was thinking as she sat there, quiet for even that brief time. This place could be rough for new arrivals simply because they had to leave everything they had, but it sounded like things had been rough for her back home too so it was hard to tell what being here would do.

When she spoke again, he gave her a smile]

No problem. I hope you start getting into the swing of things soon here.