deercountry | o1 . june catchall (closed)

[ At the idea of undead deer-dogs as a common household pet, he looks openly pained. Her gentleness only makes him draw himself in tighter, defensive as a bristling cat. ]

Wonderful. [ This is clearly a man who has not experienced anything genuinely wonderful in a while, if ever. ] Is anything about this place not...

[ He struggles for a word. Eldritch? Horrifying? Themed around blood and bones and tentacles? ]

Weird?

[She falls quiet for a moment, trying to come up with something that he might find completely mundane.]

The livestock. A lot of the livestock is pretty much standard to what you're probably used to. You're from England, right? We've got a couple horses, a cow, and some chickens at home. All pretty normal. Totally harmless.

The creatures most untouched by the world's descent into blood and viscera... are the cows.

[ Why does that feel horribly familiar to him, somehow. Stiffly: ]

I suppose that's good news, at least. We still have something reasonable to eat.

[ Is that unkind to the cows? Hm. ]

Whoa, hey. Before you get any ideas, Rosie is not for eating. Really, aside from giving some milk, she's just a pet.

[It's said lightly - she does realize that most reasonable people wouldn't actually eat an animal someone else is keeping as a pet, even if it is a cow.]

There's, um, a lot of mushrooms and fish in the local food. As far as protein goes, anyway.

[ Mushrooms and fish are fine. Jon waves off the fears that he will come after her pet cow, and does not dwell on half-remembered flickers of meat and slaughterhouses and viscera. Maybe if he sees the cow, something else will come back to him— but this is getting to be a truly nonsensical scavenger hunt, if he's now hunting down cows to look at. ]

I was in the dream that came before this, you know. [ He doesn't remember much of it, but even so. ] Still, at least for all that chaos, a few constants remained. There was a certain mundane reassurance to modern electricity and supermarkets.

[Willow's eyebrows raise when he mentions Deerington. At least that means he's probably fairly well prepared for the sort of problems Trench will likely bring. Plus, it's always good to meet someone she can compare notes with from what came before this place.]

Yeah? Me too. This is at least a little more consistent - no waking up to sudden winter with frozen zombies or, you know, cows falling from the sky. You're right, though - I miss the supermarket. And the coffee shop.

[She glances at Jon, and gestures vaguely at the shelves with a small smile.]

There's an upside, though - it's, uh, not really all that well organized, but you can read the books here. No glitchy writing, and some of them are actually helpful.

Really?

[ He looks startled, and briefly hopeful, to realize that she lived through the same; she's the first he has met here who he hadn't known there. It means he blinks at her with new interest and attention, and then settles into the conversation a bit more at-ease.

When she says this about the glitched books, though, an odd expression comes over his face: like a man distracted by a memory, unsettled to have just realized something. He'd forgotten the books. The bookshop. The man who ran the bookshop—

He swallows away a jolt of unease and emotion, and looks back to the thing before them. ]

Well. At least there's that. [ In the tone of a man wryly acknowledging a low bar. Just as wryly: ] I suppose I've organized worse.

[ (Nothing has ever been less organized than this Archives.) ]

Yup. Really. That's where Rosie came from too. Someone rescued her when she fell from the sky, and he didn't have a place to keep her, so he gave her to me.

[Her tone turns more casual, knowing he came from the dream means he's used to a certain level of... unpredictability. Animals, people, and other objects falling from the sky probably won't even strike him as terribly unusual given some of the chaos that struck Deerington.

Her eyebrows lift as he talks about trying to organize the books, like he's already found some new pet project.]

Good luck with that. I think most of us have just kind of figured out how to work around the fact that this place follows absolutely no logical organizational system whatsoever. You can always find what you need - you just kind of have to feel it out.

[ He rolls his eyes at she fell from the sky, in that particularly Deerington way. Of course the cow fell from the sky; why would she have come from somewhere sensible? Never mind that he was just professing nostalgia for even those brief moments of sanity. For as little as he can remember Deerington, this cements that they were few and far between.

She was there for it all. It sparks a furious little flame of hope in him that she will be able to tell him more. ]

Ah, yes. More dream logic. [ He is clearly not thrilled. ] I suppose it's too much to ask we could be free of that.

[ He hates to confess that it feels so familiar to him, in a way that he does not quite know how to unpack. ]

[She shrugs a little at the eyeroll. At least she had spared him the details about the guy in the plane who had been trying to save both people and animals from falling to their deaths.]

What's the old saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same?

[It still strikes her as odd that this is the very first place he's come, and she can't help but be curious about how long it took him to find the Archives when surely there were more immediate needs that most would have considered attending to. She nods to the robes that were clearly given to him on the shore by the Wakers.]

So how long ago did you make it to shore?

[ He hedges, here, transparently avoiding the question: ]

Just long enough to realize this will, by and large, be more of the same.

[ (Shiro corralled him into the very basics of self-care, upon which he took off like a shot towards the place known as The Archives.) ]

I suppose even Deerington's welcome was less disconcerting.

o1 . june catchall (closed)

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