riverviewlogs | OPEN | the waves still crash on the bonfire ash.

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OPEN | the waves still crash on the bonfire ash.

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! ♥ )

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[Lyle happened to be passing by during this. He had done up his own lantern, full of the people he'd lost during his life. He had more done it just because, but it had felt oddly good... to just let it go at the end of it all.

So now he was just enjoying the sights when he saw someone working on one of their own, offering his lighter if she needed it. Then she said she was going to keep it. He did raise a brow but then shrugged]

Hey, it's not a problem with me. Entirely up to you if you want to release it or hang onto it.

[He blew out his lighter and put it back in his pocket]

People have different ways of working through things. If that's what you're doing.

( is it? working through things. she probably could stand to work through a whole mess of things, but this probably isn't the time or the place. skye shrugs, fingers smoothing out a little flatter over the lantern as she peers up to get a better look at the man stopping by. )

I don't totally know what I'm doing, to be honest.

( both with the lantern and here in the city, if she's honest. she hasn't been here long, certainly not long enough to get her bearings, but she can't help feeling like the other shoe's about to drop. it can't just be that easy — people don't just get summoned to strange places where they get to live and work and survive without fear... do they?

granted, they probably don't wake up with sudden and uncontrollable superpowers, either. the world is a weird place. if skye would only just admit it to herself, she might feel a little better. )

I don't even know what I'd do with it. Like, just tack it up on my wall, kiss it goodnight?

[Alex Reagan tends to haunt and collect coffee shops like some people collect actual cups of coffee. The one she's in now is currently her favorite for morning coffee: good and strong, but without the taste of being burnt that it can sometimes have later in the afternoon. Later in the afternoon would mean another place with an iced latte, but for now Alex needed the caffiene more than the sugar.

She's debating grabbing some pastries, because honestly, when isn't life better with pastries, and when the woman speaks to her, Alex grabs the muffin that she asked for with a quick smile, before handing it over.]

Sure, here ya go. In my opinion though, I would recommend the blue berry over the chocolate chip. I don't know why it is, but their blueberry muffins are a little bit like crack. I find that the chocolate ones always tend to up too dry.

[Lyle decides at this point it is better to sit rather than stand, sitting down nearby. He hasn't seen her around before so he has a thought that she's might be new. Of course the fact that he hadn't seen her meant nothing really. There were a lot of people here, both natives and arrivals]

I guess that's up to you. Would it make you feel any better to put it on your wall where you can see it?

( skye's not overly particular about baked goods in general. the chocolate chip ones had simply been closer to her than any other variety, so it had been an easy choice to make when confronted with the strong need for sustenance. woman cannot live on caffeinated beverages alone.

but she's not above taking a clearly enthusiastic recommendation. she just... can't put the chocolate chip one back, because that's gross and she's not that kind of a slob. so two it is. ) Yeah? ( a considering tilt of her head, and skye points to the further end of the shelf. )

Alright then. I guess we'll make it a true Daily Double and get both.

( a beat, and then: ) Do you want to split the blueberry one? Or should I be worried you're going to jack my goods for your next fix?

Uh. ( her default is obnoxious sarcasm, and the words really are lingering on the edge of her tongue, but there's something about the genuine way he asks the question that makes her hesitate. maybe she could opt to not be a total asshole just for funsies for once, that'd be a novel concept. ) Is that... a thing people actually do around here? I mean, I don't think it would really do anything other than tear off a chunk of paint on the wall.

( the lantern does look like it's too heavy for tape, after all. it'd probably need actual hooks, and she's not really feeling like better homes and gardens-ing her assigned living quarters yet. you know, just in case they change their minds and send her home. )

Sorry. I mean, it's nice, I guess. I don't really know what to do with all of this.

( all of this... being everything. the festival, the city, the weird alien planet she's wound up on. )

Yeah, definitely.

[Alex agrees with a grin, and then she laughed quickly and easily. It was a good laugh, coupled with a shake of her head.]

I promise to contain myself around your baked goods. It may be hard, but I'll make it work. [She's clearly teasing, but she does offer:]

And I'll take one for the team and share the chocolate one too so you don't have to choke it all down, if it's okay. But I promise I'm honestly not just going to steal your food. It's on me. I can tell you're new and no one should need to pay in order to discover the goodness of blueberry or know the defeat of the chocolate chip. Also, hi, I'm Alex Reagan.

( she's halfway to protesting — no, seriously, i can get it — but alex beats her to it, money exchanging hands with a bored-looking barista before she can so much as stammer out a full sentence. skye tells herself she's just out of practice. there's not much reason to pull out a wallet on the bus, after all, and she'd spent too many years dependent on the hackability of contactless payment systems to ever really fall back on cash in the real world. why bother with paper money when you can force generate a loaded starbucks gift card into your app? )

Skye. ( unsaid: a relenting, if not appreciative, agreement. ) Oh, and next time? No "welcome to the neighborhood" excuses.

( if she can't pay, the least she can do is try to be useful, so skye busies herself with gathering an obscene number of napkins, plastic cutlery, and individually-portioned condiment packets — half of which she drops casually into the bag hanging off her arm. old habits die hard, and there's nothing wrong with free shelf-stable strawberry jam if people are just going to leave it laying about. )

Do you have, like, a serious table preference to go with the muffin theories? Because that one's free.

( it might be bathed in an excessive amount of sunlight, but it's also close to a power outlet, and she could probably stand to charge up her gear while she's here. )

[If they both knew more about each other, they might find irony in the fact that they were both very quick to sarcasm when the moment called for it. Right now he was trying to be serious, but her comment did make him snicker]

Yeah, it might cause some damage to the wall. Could always try a hook... a shelf... a levitation spell.

All this? I take it you are new here? Not just the festival, but to Quarantine?

( a levitation spell? she can't help but laugh a bit under her breath at that; the levity feels almost wrong in the cirumstances, though, and skye stifles the sound with a brush of her wrist across her mouth. )

I mean, yeah. A shelf would probably work. I'm pretty sure I left my magic wand back home, so no wingardium leviosa for me.

( it's unfortunately a little ironic that this area is known as quarantine, considering that's exactly where skye had been prior to arriving here. in a literal quarantine, held away from other people for both her own and everyone else's safety, being told there was something very wrong with her.

to his question, skye shakes her head, a slow rock back and forth as she considers how to answer it. )

To this one, I guess. Quarantine's kind of a running theme lately for me, but this one's still got that new planet smell.

[Lyle grinned when she started playing along with his joke there. Hey, if laughter was the best medicine, it was okay to laugh when you were sad because it would make things better, right? Of course that was always easier for the person trying to cheer them up]

Darn. I was so hopefully someone remembered to pack their magic wand. Too bad there's not a spell to help people remember the stuff to cast spells.

[He did raise a brow at that] Quarantine's a running theme? How so if you don't mind me asking.

( she's not sure if tile keys and bluetooth finders are exactly compatible with quarantine technology, but there's likely something similar. and if not... well, she appreciates the opportunity to carve a niche into the local economy, in any case. she's never been much of a real entrepreneur, but there's a first time for everything. )

A hack-a-track might do the trick. It might help people find their missing stuff, anyway.

( she knows she's being a little too serious. it's not that she is incapable; in other circumstances, without this physical reminder of the losses that put her in said quarantine, she might be more willing to give in to the joke. as it stands, she offers a weak smile in return before her gaze drops down to the lantern in her hands; it's easier to answer his question if she doesn't have to look at him in the process. )

I don't know how else you'd describe it, honestly. Going from one episode of solitary confinement to an entire city dedicated to... a community of solitary confinement? ( not that they were individually isolated from each other, but the point still stood. ) I mean, why else call a place Quarantine, right?

( she didn't exactly read over the entire history of the city in her welcome dossier. she's been meaning to, but actually sitting down and doing it seems to make this whole experience real in a way skye's not ready to accept yet. )

[Aww she didn't continue the joke. Oh well. He's not too broken up over that]

Never heard of a hack-a-track before. Guessing it's one of those things that's supposed to help you find anything right?

[Given what they had been talking about before]

Oh so like actual quarantine. Man that's terrible. Well, yeah this place is a quarantine, but I guess not so much for a disease. Quarantine is probably a bad description though it happens to be the name it was given. It's more like being stuck in a holding pattern.

Oh, and I'm Lyle by the way.

[Should probably introduce himself at some point]

[What Skye doesn't know is that Alex is actually really good at sneak paying for things. Back home, it's not a huge deal because she just sticks everything on her company card, and here she's been saving money so doing things like this is never a drain in her resources. And she likes to do things like this, especially when people are new here. It just makes more sense.

She does chuckle while Skye grabs napkins and stuff, and she pretends she doesn't notice the extra going into the other woman's bag. Alex doesn't judge; if they didn't expect people to do that sort of thing then they wouldn't leave it out there like that. ]

My only caveat for a table is that it ends of being near a power outlet normally, but I'm not coming here to work right now so I'm free to go wherever you want to go.

[Did Alex have an office at the news studio? Yep. Did she use it? Pretty rarely. The coffee was better in places like this, and Alex worked better when there were loads of people around her to act as a buffer for her own head.

Leading Skye to the table, Alex sits further away from the outlet, just in case.]

[ The gym seems like as good a place as any for Wally to work out some of his frustration at not being able to do anything while more and more people get sick by the day. Normally he would go for a run whenever he felt this way, but with the virus being unpredictable, venturing beyond the walls on his own doesn't sound like the best of ideas right now.

So he settles for lifting some weights, running on a treadmill that is incapable of navigating the time-stream like the one Barry Allen built back home, and throwing some inhumanely fast punches at one of the bags hanging up in a somewhat open display of his speedster abilities.

It's when he's finishing toweling off from the last activity that he hears a woman asking to be handed something, and after a moment of blinking stupidly at her, he realizes she is talking to him and reaches out for the bag that is sitting on the bench in front of him so he can give it to her. ]

Oh, here you go. [ His lips quirk up into a small smile, the time at the gym having lightened his mood a bit. ] Nothing like a good workout, huh.

Lyle, okay. I'm Skye.

( her name isn't that interesting, but explaining things often involves skye talking with her hands, which proves a bit difficult at the moment with said hands full of paper decor. she opts to set the lantern at her side for the time being, decorated sides face-down, which allows her the ability to show what she's trying to explain. )

Hack-a-track's kind of a joke name. Most people call them trackers or chips, or they have some brand names too — you know, like how people call all tissues Kleenex? They're... well, they're kind of hard to explain, but they're basically small squares with varying kinds of tracking software embedded in them. RFID, bluetooth, wi-fi, sometimes GPS; it just kind of depends on what you're using it for. They're mostly bluetooth, though. ( she pauses for a moment, considering. ) Is there even bluetooth compatibility here?

( clearly, she's going to have to do more research. )

I'll have to ask.

Edited 2018-05-12 17:11 (UTC)

Guilty as charged.

( as in, where she wants to go happens to be the outlet, so the sunny table it is. skye doesn't hesitate to claim the spot she needs, unloading her gear on the chair next to her in order to take advantage of said power outlet. quarantine isn't exactly the bus or the hub, but it seems to do decently well when it comes to electronics and tech-friendly locations. it's not manhattan, but it's not kansas city either. she could do worse. )

Do you work in places like this a lot?

( the city hadn't exactly given her much in the way of a who's who upon her arrival, but as far as skye knew, she was the only independently operating software coder around. she was curious as to who else might be living the nomad work life. maybe they could help each other out. she could always stand to gain a hardware yin to her software yang. )

( she doesn't love the idea of hitting the gym, but it's something to do, something to fill the endless span of days that loom in front of her, an empty calendar that desperately wants for activity to be penciled in. she's spent most of the afternoon alternating between the treadmills and the bags; it's been hard to ignore the casual display of difference from the man moving faster than anybody else in the room.

she wants to talk to him. she wants to talk about what he's doing, find out the hows and the whys, but talking about it means talking about her own barely-repressed abilities, and skye's not sure she's ready to do that. she gets hungry, though; hence the bag, filled with snacks she's pilfered from welcome wagon meetings and public lounges — and, okay, occasionally bought from the local grocer. it's a good excuse, isn't it? she'd normally get up to get it... but when opportunity offers, why ignore? )

Thanks. ( from within, skye retrieves an apple and takes a considering first bite. not bad, really. not great, but it's certainly better than nothing. ) I'm still debating if workouts can ever really be considered "good".

( wiping whatever might have sprayed her cheeks in the process with the back of her hand, skye tilts her head up to get a better look at him. )

Do you always move that fast?

[ Wally can't say that visiting the gym is something he does with any sort of regularity himself. It's not that he's adverse to physical exertion, he just has a job that provides him with plenty of exercise to go along with his own hero activities. He also happens to have a metabolism that's faster than most which helps with the whole staying in shape thing.

But, one of the downsides of that metabolism is hunger is always right around the corner, especially after he expends a lot of energy from say working out, which is why his gaze lingers on her bag of snacks a little longer than it should when she pulls out the apple to the point he misses part of what she's saying.

Luckily, he stops mentally kicking himself for not bringing at least a few protein bars with him to catch her asking about his speed and his eyes shift from the bag to meet her own as he sheepishly runs the hand not holding the towel through his slightly damp hair. ]

Well, not always. I think the best way to describe it would be to say there is kinda like an inherent switch I can turn on whenever I want to use my powers.

[ He shrugs, tossing the towel haphazardly in the direction of his own bag lying on the floor near the bench. He doesn't mind discussing his powers and what he can do with them as long as he doesn't have to mention the extra-dimensional energy known as the Speed Force that serves as the source of his abilities. ]

It's a good thing too because otherwise everything would appear to be moving in slow motion all the time and that's not as fun as it might sound.

Nice to meet you, Skye.

Oh, yeah. I think I've heard of something like that before. I don't think I've heard about here, but I would be surprised if there wasn't something like that. There is a lot of things here that people haven't heard of.

[A pause]

If there isn't something like that, is that something you'd want to make?

[Alex isn't a hacker, but her field is technology based, so she understands the need to power things up whenever and wherever you get the chance to. It's a bit of a second nature to her; never know when you might be going to a creepy cabin and you're wishing that your phone battery or recorder managed to have some extra juice in it. It was one of the reasons that in the bottom of her bag there were several of those power stick things, but nothing compared to that outlet being free.

She took a long sip of her coffee, and released a healthy exhale of gladness from it, because there had apparently been some blood that had slipped into her caffeine system and it needed replacing. When that was done, she nodded in response to the question.]

Yeah I do. I mean, I have an office at the network, but unfortunately I'm way more used to working in chaos than by myself. So, I come here. Besides, the coffee is definitely much better. It's kind of funny, I never thought I would have missed the type of crap that interns called coffee until I came here.

I — maybe?

( if she comes off a little unsure, he's not mishearing her. while skye would probably agree that building something like the quarantine equivalent of tile trackers would be a more traditional use of her tech genius, she's lacking the all important hardware skills to make it a reality. which, naturally, would require things like sourcing appropriate partners and relying on other people and ... well, she's not so gungho about those things. not yet, anyway. give her some time to acclimate. )

I don't know how to build something like that. I just know how to use the system once it's built. ( she pauses for a moment, considering. ) But I could probably reverse engineer something like it, if I had the right hardware to match.

( her mouth purses for a moment. )

Which I don't, so I guess it's kind of dead in the water.

( so the friendly girl with a penchant for muffins got an office. interesting. apparently, it was just skye that was being sent into the wild blue yonder with nothing more than a generic laptop and her wits. that sounded about right for her... but it did make her wonder who in the administration she might have pissed off upon arrival. )

The network? ( she wasn't sure if it was in reference to the whole retro myspace vibe on the phone she'd been given, or a news network. either way, it was probably more interesting than being a permanent floater. ) What kind of network do you work for?

( skye can't help but itch to want to do something — typing is practically like breathing for her more often than not — but it's an attempt to not be totally rude on the first ~~date~~ meeting that prevents her from fishing out said phone or laptop. instead, her fingers drum idly along any surface they can reach: the sides of her coffee cup, the lining of her jeans, and the edges of the table are all fair game. )

Wait, does your job have free coffee?

( because even if it's shitty, she could be down for that. pinch a penny where she can. )

( skye's been around hungry folks long enough to recognize the look of idle wanting in his eyes. it's not quite starvation, not quite desperate, but there's enough hunger behind it to keep his attention while she talks. she might be a handful of years post-foster system, but there are some things that never quite go away; he doesn't have to ask for a handout to get one from her. without missing a beat, skye fishes out a small container from the inner pocket of her bag and hands it out to him. it's not likely to be enough to satisfy a speedster, but the nuts and dried fruit that were collected from snack-sized goodie bags at an open house event will certainly do better than his imagination. )

Here. ( just don't thank her. it'll make things weird. she doesn't take so much as a beat before moving on, anyway, adding: ) Tell me about the switch.

( which, on second thought, probably sounds more like an interrogation than a friendly conversation, so skye backpedals a bit. )

I mean. If I ever randomly got powers — ( which i obviously didn't, no way. ) — I'd want to know how to stop them. It's probably not something you can Google.

( she knows, because she tried. often. )

Eh. Give it time. If the idea grows on you, there will be a way to do it. If the idea flops, then no harm in thinking about it for a few days. Trust me, I've had a few of those, good and bad.

So what did you do back home? Maybe there's something similar here.

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OPEN | the waves still crash on the bonfire ash.

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