Participants:
Scene Title | Boy Scouts Stay Virgins |
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Synopsis | That and many other things are discussed around a fire in Argentina. |
Date | December 8, 2009 |
The dark, vine-laden greenery that defines the swath of jungle growth in Cerro de Hierro Negro's shadow is not really lush so much as it is resilient. Ancient trunks wind crooked under thick mats of cool moss and the same damp litter of decay that makes the ground soft underfoot, with brambled undergrowth and brackish stream beds just sparse enough to be navigable if one is careful about where they step. Rumbling passages of thunder stir often through the rustle and sway of branches thatched far overhead, but the rain that should accompany it has been scattered in recent days. Crawling insects are common despite the chill wind off the mountain ahead, and every so often the shrill keen of a persistent predator splits the night or the springy passage of ungulate hooves whispers invisible along an unseen game trail. To the northeast, the flutter and burble of running water is occasional audible with gentle turns in the wind.
It's earlier in the evening, and Magnes is sitting in front of the fire wih his hands held out to it. The fire itself keeps forming into rough shapes, vague triangles, squares, dome shapes, but only very rough, and he seems to have an intense look of concentration on his face. "Can't push too hard, but can't be too light either, come on…" He has a camo blanket over his shoulders as well.
"You can manipulate fire now, too?" Gillian asks, sneaking up behind him with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. It's not camo, but it's rough and warm and dark. It keeps body heat in, which is the point, anyway. The brand on her cheek looks somewhat like many of the ones they've seen on faces around this hideout, but hers healed a lot cleaner, thanks to Magnes' unwilling dontation of a piece of his life. It could have been a lot worse, if it'd gotten infected. And would have taken a lot more time to get to this point. A lot of pain for her that she doesn't have to live through. "I know, you're just manipulating the gravity."
"Peter's older guy personality tells me things I can do that I never thought of before. I can't manipulate fire, but I can manipulate the gravity of the air. Trying to concentrate on changing the shapes of the fire is good practice for getting a feel for air control. It's… really difficult, because it's something I can't see. I'd be using water, which is why he told me this in the first place, but we're not exactly living next to a lake." Magnes takes a deep breath and lets the fire go about its business, then looks over at her. "
He shakes his head, staring forward at the fire again, seemingly in deep thought. "I feel bad. I find myself thinking I wish you were my girlfriend because then I wouldn't be feeling alone. I mean, I'm probably gonna die a virgin out here. I could have taken Claire so many times, but even if she said yes, she was always obviously unsure about it, and I didn't wanna do something she'd regret. God, I can't even talk to her. It's not like I think about sex all the time, but if I were single, I'd sleep with you in a second, at least then I wouldn't be thinking 'Life well spent, you managed to fight robots and couldn't even get laid." He sounds very unlike himself, including his choice of topic and use of certain words, and there's a hint of stress under it all.
"I totally don't want to hear about you sex life or lack there of," Gillian says, raising her hands up as if to shield herself from the talk that's a little too personal in this case. "You already had your shot at sex with me, and it didn't happen, and it's not going to happen here in the middle of fucking no where. We'd probably both end up with some kind of disease just trying to do it in this dirty place." For someone who said no sex talk, she certainly kept the subject going. But— yeah, his sex life with his girlfriend is not something she wants to know the details of. "We're not gonna die, whatever Peter insists. I've done this a half dozen times in the last year and I'm still here." Nevermind that she's died a couple times, but that's not the point.
"I'm not sleeping with you for the same reason I wouldn't before, I'm with Claire. It's just, damnit, I used to see Claire every day, we called eachother all the time, and now we're split apart halfway across the world and she's going through god knows what. Who knows what they're making her do…" Magnes hunches over, holding his forehead in frustration. The fire seems to shake and twist unnaturally, and Gillian might feel a bit of a breeze pushing by her blanket. "And I can barely control this air thing, since Peter told me I could, I've been feeling it nonstop, it's like, I can't shut it off."
"Probably not the same shit we're dealing with. Or the same shit, just a different color and thickness," Gillian states, finally moving to sit down next to him, not liking the air pushing around as she wraps tighter. "My power's always on. I don't quite understand people who just turn it on and off, honestly. It's a struggle just to keep it in, but I always feel it in the back of my head. I had your ability for a while, too. It wasn't one of the ones I had control of, but I liked to use it to jump around, until I got regular old flight, at least." Go figure. "Not saying I'm an expert or nothing, but maybe you can see it, you just don't… recognize that you can see it. I can see the flow of my ability when I stretch it out. It's not really visual, it's just… I guess it's like the difference between touching and seeing. Only it's a little of both. I know it's there and my brain pictures the knot or the thread that I know is there. Maybe you just need to do the same."
"Mine is usually on in some way too, I can barely keep my balance without my ability, I'm just clumsy and fall a lot. I don't know how people function without gravity manipulation. I can feel the gravity of things, but I think I just always ignored the air or something. Now that it's there, I almost feel like I'm in an ocean." Magnes slides a hand from his blanket, moving to wrap it around her waist. "I'm not gonna try anything, I just… miss having someone close."
"Keep up your boy scout attitude and you probably will die a virgin," Gillian says, but she doesn't pull away frop the arm. Nor does she lean into it, either. "Girls may like chivalry and politeness, but there are times that a man has to be a man. Be a little forceful. Not worry so god damn much. Women worry enough for the both of them, trust me. If you keep running away or stalling out when it comes to a conversation of something you want, you'll end up standing by yourself at the end of the day."
"I'll remember that if I see Claire again. But, if I don't make it out of here, tell her I thought about her, and I killed a lot of robots." Magnes' lips curl into a vaguely lonely smile, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a condom package, handing it over to her. "Somehow I don't think I'll be using this, though, so, maybe you should take it, I mean, you've got plenty of options. You're getting out of here alive, but it never hurts to make the best of a situation, just in case."
"They actually let you have condoms in Argentina?" Gillian asks with a laugh, but she does take them, turning them over in her hands a few times before folding them up and shoving them… down the front of her shirt. Seems the safest place to keep them for now. "Good to know someone believes I'll be making it out of here alive, besides me. And I won't be making it out cause I'm taking a flight on the Magnes Express, either," she leans against him, shouldering him slightly. Too bad her only real option would be the guy who could kill her with a touch. She doubts condoms will do much to stop that particular disease.
"It's not hard to stick a pack of condoms to your leg if you manipulate gravity. Truthfully I thought I'd have figured out a plan to be on Claire's team, and well…" Magnes shrugs, letting her do the math as he brushes the side of her stomach. "I've never told anyone this, but back home I kind of buy lots of condoms, I always find some weird one, or a new type, and I just buy it thinking 'I'm totally gonna try all of these'. I've been doing it since Bella kind of started giving me sex ed, and teaching me about the Grunberg spot and stuff. Bella's my therapist."
"Oh god, I don't need to know all this," Gillian says again, pushing against him as if to shove him away. He doesn't manage to go to far, though, but—
"Wait, therapist named Bella? Late twenties, red hair, really polite but obviously fiesty and shit?" There are so many not coincidences in her life, go figure she discovers another one. "One of my friends took me to her as support for him— she seemed pretty cool, for a shrink." Therapists may be different than actual shrinks, but it works for her. "But— there's books for sex ed, you know."
"Yeah, that's Bella. Other than you and Claire, she probably knows the most about me." Magnes' grip tightens slightly when she pushes him, then he lightly shoves against her as well, but mostly tries to settle into his spot again. "I know there's books, but it makes more sense when she explains it." he points out, though that's probably not his /only/ reason, he may or may not know that. "Hey, this is kinda weird, but you're probably just as lonely as I am out here, so…" He clears his throat, and there's a moment of awkward silence. "Er, nevermind."
"Seems she knows a lot about everyone! I still don't know how much Aaron shared about me," Gillian says, quietly considering all the stuff her friend could have told about her. Especially when he didn't know any better. Using aliases never really came up with him. In some ways she's wanted to just be Gillian for a while now… and this is the one shot she thinks she has of that. "Okay, awkward boy scout," she says, pushing his arm away and shifting a few feet away from him by sliding her butt along. "I'm surrounded by people I know. I'm not at all lonely." Except that she is. "Don't worry about it." She looks back at the fire for a moment. "So what does gravity feel like, anyway? I imagine it'd feel like a constant pull, right? Could you break someone's neck by suddenly forcing their body to experience like ten Gs, or whatever?"
"If I touch someone, I can feel, well, the sum of their parts. Humans are made up of lots of different parts, they're like a bag of things that are all connected with different weights. I can, well, crush and crack ribs, collapse lungs, crush someone's stomach, stop their heart, and yes, break their neck…" The way Magnes speaks, he almost sounds like he has experience with some of that, but doesn't elaborate. "What I was gonna say, before it got all awkward, if you just, like, wanna be close to someone, you can stay in my sleeping bag with me, I won't do anything. Sometimes Claire stays at my place, and well, we just sleep next to eachother, it's nice…"
"The offer's nice, but I don't need a footwarmer right now," Gillian says, though there's something lighter about her expression, as if he's touching a topic rather close to home, there. She did spend a lot of time sleeping with someone else, in a totally non-touchygropy way. It's just not the same… "Anyway— it sounds like you're pretty powerful. I remember this one time when I had your power it felt like I weighted a fucking ton. I couldn't lift my feet up off the floor. Maybe that's what you should do to the robot things. Stop them like that."
"If I could just get a pole, I could rip those things apart. Hiro made me do kendo drills and I chose to do them with a staff, and while I was with an organization, I learned more formal self-defense, but I still focused on melee weapon skills after regular training times were over. I've been looking for a stick to use, or maybe something one of the group might have, but still no luck." Magnes smiles, raising a hand and reaching over to touch her cheek for a moment, then pulls it back, though she still feels the general imprint of his hand, as if he's still pushing against her cheek. "I do that to Claire sometimes, so she feels like I'm with her when she walks home."
"Poles are just straight sticks. See if anyone in the camp has a knife and knows how to whittle a tree down into one and then you'll have a staff." Gillian offers, before she starts to stand up. Touching her face seems to have been weird to her, perhaps because of the garish brand on one of her cheeks and the non-desire to let others touch it. She didn't used to be this bad about touching. "I should get going. Let you get back to watching the fire and stuff. Hopefully we'll have a plan of attack in the next couple of days…"
"Alright. But, thanks for talking to me and stuff, y'know? I sometimes forget you're my friend when you're not just a little box with letters." Magnes nods, appearing just a little happier than earlier when he holds his hands out to the fire again.
"I still remember logging in and looking forward to seeing you on just so I could whine about this or that," Gillian admits with a laugh. "In some ways I kinda miss it. I wonder if that's why I started keeping a journal?" She shakes her head a bit, and then pulls her blanket tighter. "Don't fall into the sky," she adds as she walks away.