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rainbowfic2015-11-24 06:32 pm
dray) wrote in rainbowfic2015-11-24 06:32 pm
Ignition Yellow
Name: Dray
Story: Get Off The Nukebus
Colors: Ignition Yellow #1) I've reclaimed the use of my imagination
Supplies and Styles: Collage (old RP setting), Mosaic (that RP happened to be panfandom), Frame, Eraser, Brush (henotheism), Glue [You are running on an adrenaline high today; your energy is buzzing, whether or not you drank any coffee this morning. Unfortunately, getting enough sleep may be a challenge now, since your system is on high alert and you are wired for action. Meanwhile, you know that you can't continue driving around in circles with nothing to show for your efforts. Take the time to check in with your inner GPS and make sure that you're still on course before you downshift and apply the gas.]
Word Count: 2002
Rating: PG13?
Warnings: Tomfoolery! Story tag request as well, please!
It was the middle of winter and the snow was piling up: the streets were a desert soaked in phosphorous where the lamps still worked, but steely darkness reflective of itself reigned where they had been shot through or otherwise fritzed out. The latter were more plentiful than the former, but Jolene Harris knew every footfall and she knew snow and ice. It might as well run in her blood after what she'd been through.
She was living in a town that had lost its name before it had been glassed over and turned into something between a slaughter mill and an artificial ant colony, but that was beside the point when there was no way out of it. Like everyone else, she had been transported here against her will, and after three years of scouring every facet of the land, she knew full well that there was little she could do to escape. Everyone had tried and failed and either given up or died in the process and Jo, grimly giving in to the former because she was more of a survivor than she was muleish (but only just barely), had settled in to the cycles of this horrible place in ways she'd never have thought herself capable of. It helped that everyone else that had made a go of living here were similarly grim, capable people. It helped very much that she had stumbled into a very few who she could relate to.
Perhaps of the most help, though, was that there were a very few who had impossible dreams like she did, that led them out into the cold at around seven in the morning when all was false orange and purple and grey surfaces softened to bloated curves by drifts of snow. She met up with one enormously rounded bundle of rags and blankets out in the foul weather and felt a surge of delight when she spotted him. Lag was not a creature of winter like she was. Lag was a sun-baked fish out of water, grown on unattainable ideals to compensate for the sickness he'd been born with. He was into impossible dreams like she was because he was impossible, himself.
They joined up on the single track crushed down by many similar walks and Jolene was tempted to shove the bundle of rags-once-a-man into a snow-drift, but she contained herself. Already he was peeping from within his sartorial disaster a muffled greeting, his waddle taking on a cheerful pep that she'd come to expect from him. She thumped him on the back as they made their way into the great big hangar bay that they'd come to view as a second home, and he leapt and shoulder-slammed her in response.
This was the kind of person that Jolene came to to get away from her worries, and she knew the irony in that... but there was something refreshingly satisfying when she found herself locked in battle with this lanky, cankerous idiot. Their confrontations were usually short and brutal and this one was no different. Just before they reached the doors to the hangar, they had locked arms in a shoving contest winding up with Lag on his face (was it his face? His boots pointed a suggestion that he must be) after all. She could push this asshole around and he liked it. She didn't have to be brittle and keen and malleable all at once around him. In the end, whoever won put a hand out for the other to stand up again. It was something unique to their friendship and she was highly aware of how cool they passed the gesture off as nothing.
Once they were inside, Jo stomped off her ragged boots and began feeding kindling into the stove they kept next to their monster of a project. That impossible dream she'd been called out to, it lurked nearby amid scrap and tools and broken down parts. Even the parts lurked; some were chrome-bright and reflective under the flicker of the newborn flame that Jolene was stoking, others were a rusted tangle that would do better to serve as fodder for cruel traps. Lag loved all of them equally. He began stripping down his coats, blankets and furs and hanging them on twisted thrusting beams of metal, giving them time to thaw and dry as he nattered on--he was never silent, and Jolene had come to expect a litany of cancerous dreams spouting from the man from the moment she met up with him--before he joined her at the fire and put his full weight against her shoulder.
"I ever tell you that you're the spitting image of a mangy old flea-bitten dog?" Jo asked, shoving him away.
Lag, undeterred, fell over and scrambled his way back to kneel right next to her, leaning on her shoulder again. "The heat is my home, it's in my blood," he reasoned. "I'll savour the mange and the life of a few biting fleas for the crackle of real-grown wood against the devil's frosted arse-hole, especially the way you build it. Raging! Pour on the kerosene!"
She cuffed him, knocking his toque into his gloved hands. Then she pulled his toque down over his eyes when he crammed it back onto his head again. "Save the kerosene, smart ass, we have all winter."
"The winter that never ends," Lag murmured, eyes going feverish as he stared into the flames.
Jolene slammed the door of their stove closed, judging their little furnace to be about as cram-packed as she was going to get without smothering their source of fuel. "You're so melodramatic," she grumbled.
Pulling her gloves off one finger at a time, the woman undid the knot at the top of her pack and pulled out a dented thermos. Lag gave an audible whine and pulled the cinderblock he was sitting in front of up to the furnace so that he could properly sit. "Magical beans?" he asked.
"Magical beans for a magic boy," she snorted, pouring a cup of coffee for him. Like he needed it. Still, she liked making the man happy because when he was over the moon, he was really over it. Giving him that small, measured amount allowed her to drink the rest from the thermos, anyways.
Lag took a single sip and sagged into a deep, slumping seat. "My goddess," he moaned.
Jo pushed him onto the hard floor, careful to snatch the thermos lid away before any of the drink could spill. "Alright, shut up and pull the tarp off, will you?"
"I'm still frost-bitten," Lag complained, sulking back to his cinder block like a whipped cur. When Jolene passed him his cup, however, he accepted it and shot it back in a single gulp, eyes closing in response to the pain of a scalded mouth and the joy of being warmed from the inside out. Jo let him have his quiet time. Goodness knew when she'd get another moment of it. She sipped from her thermos and waited, eyes going between the slits of the furnace door to the man who sighed and seemed to blossom, slowly, out of his lassitude. When he perked up, finally, he did so in one explosive motion, leaping to his feet and patting his knees energetically before he danced to one corner of their project and flung the tatty tarp up, over, billowing into the darkness of the freezing cavern of their hangar.
The truck was the culmination of a fully cannibalized mishmash of parts, all in various states of disrepair. Lag flung open the hood with almost as much ease as he'd done with the tarp, revealing a deep pit where a diesel engine ought to go. "Power train," he murmured wistfully. "Turbo-charge me."
Jo was prone to ignoring his melodrama, because falling prey to it usually meant that he would get more keyed up than usual. He was the only person that the woman had ever known who flung himself head-first into every challenge they were forced to endure. She was certain that under his rags he probably sported more scars and marks than any but the longest term prisoners wore, though she didn't want to open the can of worms that asking him about them would merit. His philosophy was already so convoluted and backwards that his off-hand comments about life and death gave her headaches. Instead she joined him at the lip of the chasm they had been working hard to fill all autumn. "You know we're not building a racer," she mumbled, folding her arms one over the other so that she could rest her chin on them.
"You're not building a racer," Lag thumbed his nose, but joined her in her folded-arm rest. "Those parts will come, though, I feel it. She's big, she's bad, she'll brake when when she's dead."
"She'll break when I put the pedal down, unless you're planning on clipping the lines," Jo sassed.
Lag toched his tongue off the roof of his mouth, then dug his smallest finger into one nostril as he considered the ramifications of a monster truck whose main method of coming to a gentle halt was first in plowing through half a dozen speeding vehicles. He gave another loving whine and Jo, spotting a wad of calcified engine grease near the back of the empty chassis, brought her thumb through it. She marked his gaunt cheek and laughed when the man grabbed her hand, folded her fingers into a thumbs-up, and raised it high. "Rapturous," he beamed at her.
"Stop coming on to me," she replied, giving him a thumbs-down with her free hand. Slipping out of his grip, she returned to her pack and brought forth a handful of cylindrical tubes, carefully soldered with precise workmanship, fuel-lines dangling off their top-ends, waiting for hook-up. Lag made a high-pitched noise in the back of his throat and bit his finger-tips. Jo, basking in that appreciation maybe a little bit, said, "I finally got the injectors fixed. We can put the engine back together and give her another test run."
"My saint," Lag grabbed both of her hands--and the piezoelectric injectors within them--and folded them together in his wide, tatty fingers. "You know what this means?"
"It means a hard day's wo--" She'd forgotten that he liked to pick things up with wanton abandon, and found herself cut off as he threw her over his well-padded shoulders, fireman style, to spin around and around and around.
"It means snow ploughing cater-catchers! It means cherry pickling scum buckets! Metronomes, buzz-wreckers! Oof!" He was finally winded by a knee in his gut, because this entire time Jo had been yelling at him to no avail. He crumpled at the knees and she went down like a cat, feet-first. Pushing herself away, she helped Lag back up as he wheezed.
"How are you such a fucking donger?" she asked, exasperated. "Sun's not even up yet."
"My sun is always up," he whistled, still re-catching his breath. "Two black thumbs against the world, Jolene, we're what this truck's been waiting for."
It was cheesy, but then Lag was always cheesy. Jo fought the urge to roll her eyes and, allowing the injectors (still all together, all in their respective pieces) to fall into his hands, she gave in a little to his enthusiasm as she circled around the truck and grabbed the pull for the fluorescent lights rigged up directly above them. For a moment the wash of green-white light was overwhelming, and the pair of them, overblown and pallid after months of little sun, grinned like weird, gaunt seraphs at one another over their monster project. Then Jo leapt across the intervening distance and put her friend into a head-lock, noogying his be-toqued head until he cried out for mercy and screeched like a dying rabbit. "Are you ready to get to work?" she yodeled.
"I have been all my life."
"So have I!"
Story: Get Off The Nukebus
Colors: Ignition Yellow #1) I've reclaimed the use of my imagination
Supplies and Styles: Collage (old RP setting), Mosaic (that RP happened to be panfandom), Frame, Eraser, Brush (henotheism), Glue [You are running on an adrenaline high today; your energy is buzzing, whether or not you drank any coffee this morning. Unfortunately, getting enough sleep may be a challenge now, since your system is on high alert and you are wired for action. Meanwhile, you know that you can't continue driving around in circles with nothing to show for your efforts. Take the time to check in with your inner GPS and make sure that you're still on course before you downshift and apply the gas.]
Word Count: 2002
Rating: PG13?
Warnings: Tomfoolery! Story tag request as well, please!
It was the middle of winter and the snow was piling up: the streets were a desert soaked in phosphorous where the lamps still worked, but steely darkness reflective of itself reigned where they had been shot through or otherwise fritzed out. The latter were more plentiful than the former, but Jolene Harris knew every footfall and she knew snow and ice. It might as well run in her blood after what she'd been through.
She was living in a town that had lost its name before it had been glassed over and turned into something between a slaughter mill and an artificial ant colony, but that was beside the point when there was no way out of it. Like everyone else, she had been transported here against her will, and after three years of scouring every facet of the land, she knew full well that there was little she could do to escape. Everyone had tried and failed and either given up or died in the process and Jo, grimly giving in to the former because she was more of a survivor than she was muleish (but only just barely), had settled in to the cycles of this horrible place in ways she'd never have thought herself capable of. It helped that everyone else that had made a go of living here were similarly grim, capable people. It helped very much that she had stumbled into a very few who she could relate to.
Perhaps of the most help, though, was that there were a very few who had impossible dreams like she did, that led them out into the cold at around seven in the morning when all was false orange and purple and grey surfaces softened to bloated curves by drifts of snow. She met up with one enormously rounded bundle of rags and blankets out in the foul weather and felt a surge of delight when she spotted him. Lag was not a creature of winter like she was. Lag was a sun-baked fish out of water, grown on unattainable ideals to compensate for the sickness he'd been born with. He was into impossible dreams like she was because he was impossible, himself.
They joined up on the single track crushed down by many similar walks and Jolene was tempted to shove the bundle of rags-once-a-man into a snow-drift, but she contained herself. Already he was peeping from within his sartorial disaster a muffled greeting, his waddle taking on a cheerful pep that she'd come to expect from him. She thumped him on the back as they made their way into the great big hangar bay that they'd come to view as a second home, and he leapt and shoulder-slammed her in response.
This was the kind of person that Jolene came to to get away from her worries, and she knew the irony in that... but there was something refreshingly satisfying when she found herself locked in battle with this lanky, cankerous idiot. Their confrontations were usually short and brutal and this one was no different. Just before they reached the doors to the hangar, they had locked arms in a shoving contest winding up with Lag on his face (was it his face? His boots pointed a suggestion that he must be) after all. She could push this asshole around and he liked it. She didn't have to be brittle and keen and malleable all at once around him. In the end, whoever won put a hand out for the other to stand up again. It was something unique to their friendship and she was highly aware of how cool they passed the gesture off as nothing.
Once they were inside, Jo stomped off her ragged boots and began feeding kindling into the stove they kept next to their monster of a project. That impossible dream she'd been called out to, it lurked nearby amid scrap and tools and broken down parts. Even the parts lurked; some were chrome-bright and reflective under the flicker of the newborn flame that Jolene was stoking, others were a rusted tangle that would do better to serve as fodder for cruel traps. Lag loved all of them equally. He began stripping down his coats, blankets and furs and hanging them on twisted thrusting beams of metal, giving them time to thaw and dry as he nattered on--he was never silent, and Jolene had come to expect a litany of cancerous dreams spouting from the man from the moment she met up with him--before he joined her at the fire and put his full weight against her shoulder.
"I ever tell you that you're the spitting image of a mangy old flea-bitten dog?" Jo asked, shoving him away.
Lag, undeterred, fell over and scrambled his way back to kneel right next to her, leaning on her shoulder again. "The heat is my home, it's in my blood," he reasoned. "I'll savour the mange and the life of a few biting fleas for the crackle of real-grown wood against the devil's frosted arse-hole, especially the way you build it. Raging! Pour on the kerosene!"
She cuffed him, knocking his toque into his gloved hands. Then she pulled his toque down over his eyes when he crammed it back onto his head again. "Save the kerosene, smart ass, we have all winter."
"The winter that never ends," Lag murmured, eyes going feverish as he stared into the flames.
Jolene slammed the door of their stove closed, judging their little furnace to be about as cram-packed as she was going to get without smothering their source of fuel. "You're so melodramatic," she grumbled.
Pulling her gloves off one finger at a time, the woman undid the knot at the top of her pack and pulled out a dented thermos. Lag gave an audible whine and pulled the cinderblock he was sitting in front of up to the furnace so that he could properly sit. "Magical beans?" he asked.
"Magical beans for a magic boy," she snorted, pouring a cup of coffee for him. Like he needed it. Still, she liked making the man happy because when he was over the moon, he was really over it. Giving him that small, measured amount allowed her to drink the rest from the thermos, anyways.
Lag took a single sip and sagged into a deep, slumping seat. "My goddess," he moaned.
Jo pushed him onto the hard floor, careful to snatch the thermos lid away before any of the drink could spill. "Alright, shut up and pull the tarp off, will you?"
"I'm still frost-bitten," Lag complained, sulking back to his cinder block like a whipped cur. When Jolene passed him his cup, however, he accepted it and shot it back in a single gulp, eyes closing in response to the pain of a scalded mouth and the joy of being warmed from the inside out. Jo let him have his quiet time. Goodness knew when she'd get another moment of it. She sipped from her thermos and waited, eyes going between the slits of the furnace door to the man who sighed and seemed to blossom, slowly, out of his lassitude. When he perked up, finally, he did so in one explosive motion, leaping to his feet and patting his knees energetically before he danced to one corner of their project and flung the tatty tarp up, over, billowing into the darkness of the freezing cavern of their hangar.
The truck was the culmination of a fully cannibalized mishmash of parts, all in various states of disrepair. Lag flung open the hood with almost as much ease as he'd done with the tarp, revealing a deep pit where a diesel engine ought to go. "Power train," he murmured wistfully. "Turbo-charge me."
Jo was prone to ignoring his melodrama, because falling prey to it usually meant that he would get more keyed up than usual. He was the only person that the woman had ever known who flung himself head-first into every challenge they were forced to endure. She was certain that under his rags he probably sported more scars and marks than any but the longest term prisoners wore, though she didn't want to open the can of worms that asking him about them would merit. His philosophy was already so convoluted and backwards that his off-hand comments about life and death gave her headaches. Instead she joined him at the lip of the chasm they had been working hard to fill all autumn. "You know we're not building a racer," she mumbled, folding her arms one over the other so that she could rest her chin on them.
"You're not building a racer," Lag thumbed his nose, but joined her in her folded-arm rest. "Those parts will come, though, I feel it. She's big, she's bad, she'll brake when when she's dead."
"She'll break when I put the pedal down, unless you're planning on clipping the lines," Jo sassed.
Lag toched his tongue off the roof of his mouth, then dug his smallest finger into one nostril as he considered the ramifications of a monster truck whose main method of coming to a gentle halt was first in plowing through half a dozen speeding vehicles. He gave another loving whine and Jo, spotting a wad of calcified engine grease near the back of the empty chassis, brought her thumb through it. She marked his gaunt cheek and laughed when the man grabbed her hand, folded her fingers into a thumbs-up, and raised it high. "Rapturous," he beamed at her.
"Stop coming on to me," she replied, giving him a thumbs-down with her free hand. Slipping out of his grip, she returned to her pack and brought forth a handful of cylindrical tubes, carefully soldered with precise workmanship, fuel-lines dangling off their top-ends, waiting for hook-up. Lag made a high-pitched noise in the back of his throat and bit his finger-tips. Jo, basking in that appreciation maybe a little bit, said, "I finally got the injectors fixed. We can put the engine back together and give her another test run."
"My saint," Lag grabbed both of her hands--and the piezoelectric injectors within them--and folded them together in his wide, tatty fingers. "You know what this means?"
"It means a hard day's wo--" She'd forgotten that he liked to pick things up with wanton abandon, and found herself cut off as he threw her over his well-padded shoulders, fireman style, to spin around and around and around.
"It means snow ploughing cater-catchers! It means cherry pickling scum buckets! Metronomes, buzz-wreckers! Oof!" He was finally winded by a knee in his gut, because this entire time Jo had been yelling at him to no avail. He crumpled at the knees and she went down like a cat, feet-first. Pushing herself away, she helped Lag back up as he wheezed.
"How are you such a fucking donger?" she asked, exasperated. "Sun's not even up yet."
"My sun is always up," he whistled, still re-catching his breath. "Two black thumbs against the world, Jolene, we're what this truck's been waiting for."
It was cheesy, but then Lag was always cheesy. Jo fought the urge to roll her eyes and, allowing the injectors (still all together, all in their respective pieces) to fall into his hands, she gave in a little to his enthusiasm as she circled around the truck and grabbed the pull for the fluorescent lights rigged up directly above them. For a moment the wash of green-white light was overwhelming, and the pair of them, overblown and pallid after months of little sun, grinned like weird, gaunt seraphs at one another over their monster project. Then Jo leapt across the intervening distance and put her friend into a head-lock, noogying his be-toqued head until he cried out for mercy and screeched like a dying rabbit. "Are you ready to get to work?" she yodeled.
"I have been all my life."
"So have I!"
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(Welcome back!)
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Thanks so much, man! And thanks for the welcome-back! It's been a little while. X3 I think I am going to eventually dig back into the oooold story-chunks I was working on before, but for now it is nice to dabble. Looking forward to making more!
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I'm really interested in this setting! It seems like a pretty cool take on dystopia.
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"You're not building a racer," Lag thumbed his nose, but joined her in her folded-arm rest. "Those parts will come, though, I feel it. She's big, she's bad, she'll brake when when she's dead."
"She'll break when I put the pedal down, unless you're planning on clipping the lines," Jo sassed.
That is just so perfect. I LOVE the banter here and the imagery of the cold.