TEINAR > Wastelands

There's a reckoning a-comin' [open!]

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nephero:
A storm was brewing. It didn't take a genius to notice the blackening sky, the way the winds whipped back and forth, throwing sharpened sand motes and small pebbles into the skin of one's shins.

In an hour, or maybe two, the skies would open up in a great cacophony of acidic rain, each drumming drop packed with enough chemicals to burn your skin like the sun already did. What mud there was (it was rare that the soil could hold any kind of water, even for a moment) felt oily, clung to whatever it could, and never quite washed out, no matter how many times or with how many caustic chemicals it was scrubbed.

And then there was the air. The rain brought up the moisture index by a fair margin. What was once simply dry air (smoky and not at all healthy) became packed with microscopic droplets of that same acid rain; it got in your lungs, made it hard to breathe, and if you got on your mask quick enough, the worst you got for it was a wet cough for the next few days. Thick. Mucous.

Green like the rain.

Sister Sarah Toombs (why she kept the title was anyone's guess) sat out on what was jokingly referred to as her porch. Really, it was just the mere foot of ground that was still covered by the overhang of her roof (a joke in and of itself; it was little more than a haphazard assortment of aluminum sheets, tilted downwards to keep the rain from sitting). She looked skywards, took a breath, and shivered.

A storm was brewing, she could feel it in her bones, in her hair, in her skin and every molecule beneath it. It made her break out in goosebumps despite the choking heat; it turned her stomach sour and her pulse cold. She felt sick, and was made to feel even more so from the sheer anxiety of it all.

Her supplies were late.

She ticked off the list of what she had on hand, for the fifth time since her scheduled drop off was supposed to have been there.

Four days of rations-- assorted cans of nutrient-infused mushroom paste, a few bags of jerky. Her mother had gotten her different flavors, bless her, and somewhere deep inside, Sarah's shriveled conscience gave a shudder of guilt. Sarah had long forgotten what guilt felt like, and simply thought it another wave of impending sickness.

About another week's worth of filters, both for her mask and the water filtration system she'd rigged. She'd had to burn through those pretty quick; it was summer, and summer still meant roiling storms and great deluges of poisonous rain, rain that lingered in the air even after the storm had passed on. Her mask was going to need a new lens in one of the eyes, soon, too.

Assorted tools. A mostly functioning spade shovel, the head and handle very nearly rusted to the point of breaking. She had to wear gloves to even handle it anymore, for fear of metal splintering off and getting into her skin. She wouldn't survive that. Her machete, which was going to need sharpening soon, if she wanted it to keep in good shape.

No medicine. This was what worried her the most, especially with the growing ache in her bones. If she got sick, out here, and that storm cut off her supplies for another week, she wasn't sure she'd be able to come out of it alive. If she got sick, her suppliers might not, either.

She shuddered, squeezed her eyes shut, and fought the wave of nausea down. No, no, not yet. Not before the supplies got here. Not yet.

"Fuck."

Ferr Windston:
Running through the hell in which he hated so much, Mino could see the outskirts in view. The man had been searching the wasteland for any pieces that would go for a good trade or do well in one of his machines. With his hood up and a spare filtration mask on, he looked similar to some rougish person running away from a mutant. Thankfully he hadn't had to do that throughout his two day trip. With the oncoming fear of a storm of acid and chemicals, he might have preferred the mutant. At least those could be avoided, unlike the rain.

With his breath fogging up his mask, it became hard to see. Mino kept thinking of taking it off to remove the fog by hand but chose otherwise. Alone with a heavy bag and nearly empty slead in tow, he would have no one to save him should he have a reaction to the air. Well, a deadly reaction anyway. The robotic expert would feel good about finding an nearly intact collection of CPUs. It wasn't something crazy like a supply of untainted water or seeds though. That would have been vastly better he thought.

He himself was comfortable with the stock of mechanical and electrical parts he had back in his home. The only thing on his mind was trading what little he found for more useful items. But that required him making it back alive. Which was not happening at this rate.

nephero:
Sarah pressed her head between her knees, and took deep, calming breaths. Slowly, so slowly, her stomach righted itself, and no longer felt like it was playing host to a swarm of mutated bees. She took another breath for good measure, and stood up.

She would get through this, some part of her tried to convince the far more panicked side of her. She had been through far worse. That time in lock up? Really, this was a dream vacation compared to that. Another breath, and she found herself actually feeling better. She reached down, and plucked up the binoculars that hung from a nail in the side of her house.

Putting the devices up to her-- admittedly tired-- eyes, she began a slow pan of the landscape. Her heart sank a bit when she didn't spot the usual rumbling junker that brought her supplies, and even lower when she didn't immediately see any critters that she might chop up for some home cooking.

Her stomach gave another angry roll, this time out of protest. She had to agree-- the last time she was forced to eat some of the wildlife, it had not agreed with her in the slightest. But it made her feel full, and that was all that had mattered at that point in time.

Sarah stopped her slow pan, however, when a glint of something caught in the lens of the binoculars. She moved back, and squinted, even through the decent magnification. It looked like... a person? A person running across the swimming waves of heat that always seemed to prelude a storm. Sarah licked at her lips, cracked and prone to bleeding as they were, and dropped the binoculars back onto their post.

It only took a second to go inside and grab her machete and unsheathe it-- it never hurt to be prepared, there was all sorts that wandered the wastes, and not very many tended to be of the friendliest persuasion.

Just as the figure entered what she guessed was hearing distance, she raised her free hand up into the air.

"Hey!"

Ferr Windston:
As he knelt down to take a breath, Mino heard the echo of a call. Looking around and finally to the side, he noticed the worn house in the hellish sand. Forcing a squint in order to see the woman, Mino gazed over the home. He returned with a wave and stood up. "Hello there!" He called back.

With caution, he turned towards it with his full body. With sled in tow, he gingerly approached the woman's home. "Hey, do you think it is going to get worse soon?" He asked and placed his hands up, praying to any fictional deity that would listen to not get shot. Should this one woman be crazy.

"If so, do you think I might be able to take cover until it passes!?" He asked, getting only slightly closer as time passed. "I swear I am not crazy, mutated, sick, or a threat. I am just out here gathering some parts for my robots." And with that, he placed his hands down. 

nephero:
Sarah's eyebrows nearly shot straight into her hairline, and she made a very solid point of looking at the storm clouds before looking back at the man approaching her. She kept a tight grip on her machete, just in case, but every line of her relaxed when she spotted him carting a sled.

"Have you even seen the sky? I'd be shitting you if it don't last a few days,"

She rolled her eyes a bit at the usual list of assurances of not being a threat, which she was pretty sure was a line she had used herself on some poor folk before gutting them.

Okay, so she had used it a lot.

Still, this one looked harmless enough-- if he was a killer, he hid it well. She craned her neck to look over at the sled, and even went so far as to sheath her machete back at her hip.

"You can stick around, I guess. Maybe. Got any supplies? Or a name, Not-Sick-Crazy-or-Mutated?"

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