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--- sessions:006 [2014/12/14 21:25] – Today pinkgothic
+++ sessions:006 [2020/03/08 00:45] (current) – pinkgothic
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-Charters Towers was more than an hours drive away, but that was about as close as Robert was willing to stay. There were two contenders for the worst part of the trip: Leaving the mall and stepping into the open, or navigating the streets of Townsville at full risk of being discovered by creatures with telekinesis. The mental images latter invoked ranged from death swiftly delivered to plain terrifying.
+Charters Towers was more than an hours drive away, but that was about as close as [[characters:Robert]] was willing to stay. There were two contenders for the worst part of the trip: Leaving the mall and stepping into the open, or navigating the streets of Townsville at full risk of being discovered by creatures with telekinesis. The mental images latter invoked ranged from death swiftly delivered to plain terrifying.
 All the more reason to get it over with quickly.
-At just shy of 03:00 in the morning, they were leaving earlier than originally planned, but that went without saying. Robert had briefly run his two guests through how to handle the gun and that regardless what they might know of Hollywood movies, recoil was a thing if they ever had to use it. For the time being, Keneh had his gun. He had a back-up weapon in his car. Either way, it was better if two out of the three of the were armed. That it was a psychological gesture more than a real form of defence probably also went without saying.
+At just shy of 03:00 in the morning, they were leaving earlier than originally planned, but that went without saying. Robert had briefly run his two guests through how to handle the gun and that regardless what they might know of Hollywood movies, recoil was a thing if they ever had to use it. For the time being, [[characters:Keneh]] had his gun. He had a back-up weapon in his car. Either way, it was better if two out of the three of the were armed. That it was a psychological gesture more than a real form of defence probably also went without saying.
 Robert's laptop had disappeared into its corresponding bag and he was leading the way out back. There was a certain urge to use his access to get some things out of the slumbering consumer paradise, but even a paranormal apocalypse just didn't quite manage to override his ethical system. Perhaps it was better that way. They did have to leave Townsville the one or other way, there was no real risk that if they managed that step that they'd end up stranded between the towns, and presumably it was better to enter Charters Towers without stolen goods when you could just as well buy things legitimately there. ...if not for objective necessity's sake, then at least for the psychological benefit that came from normal behaviour.
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 Either way, Robert's car was a sturdy-looking, compact build. It was meant for two people, but it was easy enough to repurpose some of the generous trunk space - even if the current tactic was mostly an unflattering 'throw everything including Keneh into the back and let the contents sort itself (chiefly via conscious restructuring from Keneh)'. "There are two rules for the impromptu back seat," Robert was explaining. "'Hold on tight' and 'Really, I mean it'."
-Delaney, meanwhile, was the current mistress of the the last two cans of soda. The front seat was hers.
+[[characters:Delaney]], meanwhile, was the current mistress of the the last two cans of soda. The front seat was hers.
 "The other gun's in the front," Robert told her as he slid into the driver's seat, gesturing to the glove compartment. "I won't be able to handle it for the next two hours, so you might as well." Not that driving and shooting were strictly compatible, but in their situation, a bad idea was still better than a completely useless idea. And Plans A through to X involved no shooting at all.
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 There's some shuffling behind them. "Yeah; I think I've got a secure posture," she remarks, voice tinged with some nervousness - but it sounds like it's the product of the overall situation more than uncertainty that she's wedged herself in properly.
-<fc #008888>Hopefully a secure posture wasn't going to be needed and rally stunts could stay on TV, but she autormatically buckled in and checked all surrounding objects were safe too. Especially the thing that could go bang and shove a slug of metal into her thigh.</fc>
+<fc #008888>Hopefully a secure posture wasn't going to be needed and rally stunts could stay on TV, but she automatically buckled in and checked all surrounding objects were safe too. Especially the thing that could go bang and shove a slug of metal into her thigh.</fc>
-<fc #008888>"Once more into the breach my friends, once more," Delaney muttered. So. They'd get out of here - that was Robert's job, no point her fretting even more over it - and get somewhere temporarily safe. Check the internet for more information. Hope that whoever was following pages had been busy identifying Deiparous Technology and whatever crazy bioweapon they were illegally working on. Hope that someone knew what the heck to do about it. Meanwhile, keep running away until they were properly safe.</fc>
+<fc #008888>"Once more into the breach my friends, once more," Delaney muttered. So. They'd get out of here - that was Robert's job, no point her fretting even more over it - and get somewhere temporarily safe. Check the internet for more information. Hope that whoever was following pages had been busy identifying //Deiparous Technology// and whatever crazy bioweapon they were illegally working on. Hope that someone knew what the heck to do about it. Meanwhile, keep running away until they were properly safe.</fc>
 <fc #008888>And figure out how to do something really, really nice for Robert once they were.</fc>
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 <fc #008888>Considering she'd had only brief, fitful napping she should be even more exhausted than she was. "Yeah, but there's no way I'm going to be able to sleep any time soon. Hi adrenaline, how nice of you to visit," Delaney griped. It was trying to keep her alive though, so that was nice.</fc>
-<fc #008888>They hadn't been jumped yet. That was good. Hopefully whatever ambush was planned was lurking outside some OTHER shopping center and they could slip quietly through the net. She twisted to peer out the window. Hope was no reason not to keep lookout.</fc>
+<fc #008888>They hadn't been jumped yet. That was good. Hopefully whatever ambush was planned was lurking outside some //other// shopping center and they could slip quietly through the net. She twisted to peer out the window. Hope was no reason not to keep lookout.</fc>
 "Seconded," came from Keneh. She'd settled with her spine pressed against the inside corner of the trunk on Delaney's side of the car, buffered by both her own jacket and one of Robert's from the most uncomfortable bits. One leg is bracing her against the back of the vehicle, the other currently angled comfortably.
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 On reflection, zombies would have been so much easier.
-**✘ IN PROGRESS**
+<fc #008888>"You could try making a game about your job. Some sort of realistic simulation, so that others also know how engaging it is," she offered with a grin. "Would it be another level of meta if you worked on it while at work?"</fc>
+<fc #008888>It was relief not to see a twisted wreckage ahead of them. Delaney really didn't think 'get out and swim' was a practical solution to evading the... things... they needed to come up with a name, this was frustrating. Whatever they were, there was a bridge they could cross and more road they could follow and with any luck they'd get out. Before the airforce decided to dump napalm all over the city.</fc>
+"A game?" Robert imbues his voice with a suitable amount of scepticism, but keeps his focus squarely on the road. "It might even rival the excitement of its spiritual successful predecessor, 'Watching Paint Dry'."
+Maybe it was good this outbreak had happened in the late evening and stretched across the middle of the night. Most people were asleep - that meant they were sitting ducks for what was rolling in on them, but it also put walls and doors between them and was going on outside. Whether that did anything to slow the outbreak itself down was quite debatable (Ethan had mentioned something about telekinesis being push-only, but he'd told them this while infected, so Robert wasn't going to trust his life to that observation), but it had evidently cleared the road of immediate danger to them. And they needed it cleared. The potential of being followed aside, Robert had no doubt that a single one of them was plenty to stop their entire notion of escape dead in its tracks. He didn't fancy driving into a telekinetic wall any more than he fancied driving into a brick one.
+In about ten minutes they would be out of Townsville properly, and the time between now and that crossed an area they had not had to mark on their collaborative map.
+For that matter, the map was probably compromised by now, if they looked back onto it later. Fortunately, it was useless to them outside of Townsville, anyway, and they could start a new one of Australia once they were in Charters Towers - much as that was firmly embedded in a much greater //mis//fortune. Some part of Robert felt they would be okay. Things would be all right, as long as they didn't try to pull an Ethan and get themselves involved in the heart of it.
+<fc #008888>Delaney shrugged. "There is a game called 'Desert Bus' where you drive a bus on an empty road across a desert for almost two weeks. Non-stop. With no pause or save button. 'Mall Guard' could not be any worse." Although it would lack the entertainment of a group of people actually trying to do just that and streaming the whole thing while wearing funny hats and daring each other to eat odd things and auctioning plushie steampunk Cthuhlus.</fc>
+<fc #008888>'Our game is so bad that people pay others to torture themselves by playing it' was hardly the best recommendation, honestly.</fc>
+<fc #008888>Sleep deprivation was not good for coherent thoughts. "What should we be calling the... hosts or whatever they are?" she asked. "Bioborg? Drones? Deis? Rousabites?"</fc>
+"'Infected'?" Keneh offered from the back of the car.
+"All of the above," Robert comments. "I don't think we're going to have communication issues," he reasons. "Unless we're talking to people who haven't seen it, in which case no term is going to work." He sucks in a breath softly, envisioning a heated debate with someone in Charters Towers as to why, exactly, they should be keeping an eye out for other cars coming from the Townsville direction, and why it might be their undoing.
+The urban landscape outside was becoming more sparse. The worst of the adrenalin that had pumped through Keneh ever since Ethan's infection was subsiding enough that Keneh now gave a yawn. The idea of leaving Townsville behind like this was oddly soothing - she no longer worried that they wouldn't escape from the city. That should have left room for concerns for everyone they were leaving behind, or for realisations that she had no roof over her head for the time being, but the relief she was beginning to feel overrode those worries.
+<fc #008888>Delaney considered that. 'Townsville has been infected by a mind-controlling parasite that gives human hosts X-Men powers' was a ridiculous story. "If we're lucky the people who need to will have gotten hold of the info and the media will already be spreading it. Then we won't have to worry about being thought crazy," she said.</fc>
+"As long as being thought of as crazy doesn't result in us being apprehended," Keneh commented. "Then I don't mind being thought of as crazy." It was true in the short term at least; in the longer term, the less people believed them as the pathogen spread, the fewer places there would be to run to. Eventually, the ocean was in the way - and in an absolute worst case scenario that she didn't want to contemplate right now, eventually the vacuum of space. At least one of the hurdles could be overcome if they thought to do so early enough.