one_man_army | (no subject)

(no subject)

When he steps through the door from Milliways, he's expecting to find the interior of his tent, which is why his head is ducked. His rucksack is over his shoulder - he'd thought it might be a good idea to bring some certain items from the Bar through in case things went wrong with his room - but when he suddenly runs his face smack into a rack of metal shelving, he yelps with surprise and confusion.

(Also? That is going to leave a bruise.)

Carl glances around at the room he's found himself in, realizes he's not in his tent (and therefore probably not in Africa, either) and immediately steps back with one hand poised to grab the doorknob back to the Bar.

Except the doorknob isn't there either.

Just where the hell is he, and why is he in what appears to be a storage closet?

+++

He spends two minutes quickly mapping out the room, while digging out his sidearm and stashing it at the small of his back where it'll be hidden safely in his concealed-carry holster. He's glanced at some labels on shipping crates and all it tells him is the department the items (whatever may be in the crates - he doesn't check) are intended for.

Science. R&D. Technical.

So he's...in a lab. Maybe.

Wherever he is, he can't stay in this storage closet forever. He tries his cell phone - no service, but it figures.

He hears footsteps outside of the door (hallway? offices?) and freezes, but relaxes once they pass.

Obviously he is going to need to get out of here and figure out where the hell he is. Carl shifts his bag on his shoulder and walks towards the door, waiting until there is relative quiet before he opens it and walks out like he's belonged here this entire time.

It's a hallway. Slick walls and smooth floors, signs posted near the doors. All right, he can manage this. He starts off in the direction he hears voices - lots of voices - figuring that at least then, he can try to blend into a crowd (hopefully) and figure out what the heck the Bar has gotten himself into.

He rounds the corner and finds himself staring at a huge open room, full of hundreds of people that appear to be packing (and unpacking) various boxes, bags, and crates. The tech is definitely nothing he's ever seen before, and a lot of them seem to be carrying what looks like gas masks at their sides.

One of the larger crates is lazer-stamped with three letters on the side: RDA

And then it clicks.

He's on Pandora. (Probably, anyway.)

"...shit."

He has got to find Trudy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It certainly isn't Africa.

He keeps close to the other man and also checks his surroundings, trying not to look like he has no idea what the hell is going on here - but there's no hope of him not staring just a little bit as they make their way across the tarmac.

It's a hive of activity, and he begins to understand Trudy better with every thing he sees.

And the gravity shift...is just odd. He feels somewhat like he's slowed down, walking through the super-dense air, but he also feels...lighter.

They pause to avoid getting run over by a massive machine - it looks like a giant walking robot, to him anyway - and then keep moving.

The brilliant thing about pretending that Carl is new? Well, the staring is normal. And still, Farzan checks the surrounds, checks the sky-

Shit.

"When I say, run to the door, hit the giant button next to it," he says calmly as he picks up the pace. He doesn't want to run, because that is code for 'prey', and stingbats swarm to attack larger prey, like hexapedes. Like humans.

But he'll run if he has to, if the swarm flying over decide to swoop low.

"Run."

Carl notices the way Farzan glances up when he picks up the pace, and he first follows the man's gaze to the sky before glancing at the door, mapping a path there in his head before he glances back up at the stingbats.

They're giant - in his mind, anyway. To the residents of Hell's Gate, they're probably just a nuisance, but Carl isn't a resident of Hell's Gate. They're also pretty cool looking, but he doesn't have time to appreciate that because Farzan is telling him to run.

So he does, tightening the grip on the strap of his rucksack as he bolts across the tarmac, years of conditioning eliminating the gravity effect. He hits the button with the palm of one hand as he spins and draws the Glock with the other - not shooting, but covering, depending on how far behind (not very, he could hear bootsteps behind him) Farzan is.

Farzan isn't more then a few steps behind him, but he turns, fires, moves closer, then turns again and fires, all far faster than one might suppose.

Then again, those who don't get used to moving fast in this gravity and air pressure die.

One of the bats drop, but Farzan doesn't wait to see if the swarm wheels off; he just gets into the airlock with Carl, and lets the door slid shut.

"Fuck," he laughs, taking off his mask. "That was fun."

Edited 2012-02-13 12:24 (UTC)

Carl just sort of stares at the way the man is laughing after nearly getting stabbed by a giant flying alien bat with a massive stinger, and suddenly his girlfriend's joy for near-injury and death situations makes a lot more sense. Clearly, this place makes people crazy.

(He still loves her, but Jesus.)

"Yeah," he says, as he pulls off his mask. "Just what would one of those done, anyway?"

"If you're lucky," Farzan says, leading him through the second door of the airlock and hanging up the mask at the rack next to it, "large amounts of pain and convulsions. If you are very unlucky, it'll attack your nervous system and send you into cardiac arrest."

Here you go, Carl, a Marine admitted that something may hurt. You may feel free to be impressed!

Fortunately for them both, the barracks is mostly quiet at this time in the afternoon, and Farzan just nods and says 'hey there' to a few people (men and women both; usually wearing black armbands with beadwork, with hair everything from crew-cuts to dreadlocks; the mixture of dress that Carl saw out in the base is replicated here, too).

A few more twists and turns, and Farzan swipes his ID card down a lock, and leads Carl into a room. Trudy's room.

He hangs his mask up as well, and manages not to make a face at the description of the effects of the stingbat's attack - though he is impressed by the Marine's admission that something might hurt. He may even have to joke about that later with Trudy, if she's not in a piss-poor mood due to the fact that he's here and she has to find something to do with him, if they can't get back to the bar.

(As much as he'd like to stay a little while, he knows it would be a giant pain in the ass - not to mention he'd only been here an hour and something had already tried to kill him.)

Carl steps into the room, grateful to have made it without major incident.

"Okay," he says, glancing around. "That done."

Now he has to wait until Trudy gets back. Whenever that may end up being.

Farzon takes a long look at his face, and cracks up.

"I'll set the privacy setting so only she can get in," he says, pressing a button on a screen next to the door. "Have fun!"

And with that, he walks away, still laughing.

Once Farzan has gone, Carl is at a momentary loss. He checks his watch to make a note of the time (his time, anyway - that way he can figure out just how long he's been waiting) and then moves into the room, setting his bag down by the foot of the bed.

He moves around the room, looking at what she's done with the space (and notes the photographs that cover one board on a wall, but doesn't look at them in detail, yet - it almost feels like he'd be spying on her, somehow, and he'd rather wait until she was back to tell him about the people in them) before eventually settling down on the couch to wait for her to return.

(He's trying to figure out what to tell her.)

It's another few hours before Trudy walks in - tired, hot, shoving the top half of her flightsuit down as soon as she can - and she's already frowning.

Farzan told her there was a surprise before he cracked up, which is never a good thing.

She digs her IC card out of her pocket (it should be around her neck, but fuck that, it's not her dog-tags), swipes it to get in, and steps in.

Cautiously.

She sees Carl.

"...the fuck?"

"That was what I said, too."

Carl gives her a tight smile, because while the fact of the matter is simple: he's temporarily (he hopes) stuck here on this base, in the future, in a world where the wildlife tries to eat you on a daily basis...it's still Trudy, and he is happy to see her, regardless of the situation.

"I guess...I should say 'hi', though. That might help."

He's not sure anything will really help how fucked up this situation is.

Her hands on her hips, and her mouth still hasn't fully closed.

"Uh-huh. Hi. Um." There is a smile, because it's him, but it's a tight one that quickly fades.

"Okay, I'm gonna say it again. The fuck?"

"I was stepping out the door," he explains, motioning at his back. "Heading back to my tent, in Africa, okay? And then I run smack into a metal shelf. Which wouldn't be that hard to imagine, except the shelf wasn't in my tent. It was in one of your R&D labs."

He pauses.

"Something...bad, is wrong with the bar. It's malfunctioning. I guess the door must be, too, because I shouldn't be able to get here on my own."

She nods, and almost absently resets the privacy setting on her door back to her card only.

"Okay, and I...I take it that your door's vanish, huh?" she says, taking off her gun belt and hanging it up (clip is slid out of her gun, gun put in besides table with an electronic lock). She sits on the bed and starts untying her boots.

"Malfunctioning how? I mean, I haven't been there for a few weeks."

"Well, it started with an explosion, as far as I can tell. Out back. Left a hell of a crater. Then the bar itself started acting strangely - orders messed up, or even given literally. There's a hell of a cold snap that has taken over the back and the sky has gone from blue to red...and some weird floating crystal has appeared over the counter, too. I almost forgot that. And there's a rumor that there are cracks forming in the Window."

Aka: shit is not good.

"And yeah, my door wasn't behind me when I turned around in the closet. I'm lucky your friend found me otherwise I might have wandered around for days."

She lets her boots drop, hauls off her socks, and then rubs at the back of her head.

"That's...aw, fuck," she says, letting her hand fall. "Okay, let's try my door." She gets up, walks across to her room's door, and opens it.

The hallway is there.

"...that's a pain," she says, but this time when she goes to flop back down somewhere, she flops next to him.

"Cracks in the Window, huh?" she asks, resting her head on his shoulder.

"I went and looked," he says, draping his arm around her shoulders once she's settled down beside him. "I didn't see any myself, so it might just be the rumor going around. I think if the Window was actually cracked, the staff would be doing more about it."

Right. Right?

"Right," Trudy says. And then, "Fuck it, I need to get out of this damn suit. Hang on."

She stands up and quickly strips, dumping everything into a basket before pulling on a clean pair of shorts and a tank-top. Then she goes back to curling up next to him.

"Okay. Look. You're still here in the morning, I gotta tell the Colonel, okay?"

"That's fine. I figured you'd have to."

He nods, then glances over at her.

"So, aside from comin' back to find me in your room...how was your day?"

Trudy's not looking forward to that conversation, but hopefully it won't have to happen.

"Eh. Pretty normal - long, out in the field, boring. One of those days where I spent most of it in my chopper's cargo-bay, drawing."

"I...managed to not get stabbed by a stingbat."

It sounds as if he might have had a more exciting day than her.

"What were you working on?"

"What were you doing playing with stingba- Oh, you appeared in the main base?"

"Yeah. In a closet."

He points at his face, where the red mark beside his right eye will likely be a dull bruise come morning.

"And managed to run into a shelf in the process. Your friend found me in one of the...hangar bays? I'm not sure where it was. A bunch of people were packing and unpacking stuff. He must have recognized me from one of the photos we have. Thank god he did, otherwise I'd still be wandering around, I'm sure."

Trudy reaches up, and gently runs a finger down his face starting from near the red mark. Then she smiles wryly, leans up and kisses him.

"Closet, stingbats, and Farzan. Hell of an intro y'got yourself there."

"At least he didn't read me the complete version of the riot act."

Carl leans closer into the kiss, a feeling of relief flooding his senses when his mouth meets hers. When things had started going wrong at Milliways, part of him had begun to fill with dread at the thought of the door malfunctioning and keeping them apart, for good. Never did he expect that would lead to him landing on Pandora, for course...but he was going to take what he could get.

"I love you, you know," he says quietly.