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 Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 3:39 pm
Callum’s attempt to look for Layton at the Virgo Outpost proved to be a bust. He had barely walked into the Infirmary before he had to leave it. The sight of injured people was almost as bad as sick or old people. A senial, sick, injured old person would have been the worst. Good thing most people in space seemed to be young. Except for maybe the senshi, it seemed like they had been alive for thousands of years, given what they knew about their so-called home.
Callum couldn’t leave fast enough. With a hurried huff and thudding steps, Callum left the Virgo Outpost. On the edge of the Surrounding and the outpost, Callum paused and took a deep breath. In and out. In and out.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 3:52 pm
"Hey! Hey wait!" Looking all the more worse for the wear, Keren Della-Blue came bounding down the path after Callum. She'd managed to scrub herself clean in one of the pools at Virgo's outpost, but the basketball practice clothes she'd been wearing for more or less a week now looked a sorry state. Scrubbing things yourself - especially when you'd never worked a day in your life - tended to have lackluster results.
Her normally luxurious purple-blue hair had been braided lankly and thumped against her back as she ran. "Are you blowing this popsicle stand?" she asked, jerking a thumb towards the rainbow road ahead of them. "Because if you are - you wanna be my ticket out of here?"
She was tired of being some space alien warrior maiden's slave. Cleaning and mending did not agree with Keren Della-Blue one bit! She offered him a hand, the dirt under her ragged fingernails making her cringe. If she was back home, she'd never have let them get that way! "I'm Keren," she introduced. "With an E. KEH-ren. Not KAIR-ren."
You had to have standards. Let people mispronounce your name, pretty soon they'd be walking all over you. That was what daddy always said.
Good god did Keren miss her parents.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 4:12 pm
Upon hearing a voice, Callum turned and stared wide eyed at the slop of a mess that was Keren. Callum himself was a little worse for wear, with his white button up shirt undone exposing a not-so-white anymore tank. Callum was a bit more diligent in keeping his clothes nice; he had been doing his own laundry for years now.
Keren’s worn clothes and dirty nails made him cringe as well; Keren wasn’t alone in thinking she looked disgusting. Callum stared at that hand as if he could see bacteria crawling all over it. The girl seemed to be friendly enough, and roughly the age of his sister. It couldn’t hurt to be nice, could it?
Very quickly, he shook her hand, as lightly as he could. “Callum Quince.” Upon withdrawing his hand, Callum pulled out his bottle of hand sanitizer from his pocket, at this rate he was going to run out quickly. “And yes. I am leaving this… popsicle stand. I didn’t find what I was looking for, so I’m going back to Chronos.”
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 5:00 pm
Keren held out a hand expectantly, waiting for a squirt of hand sanitizer for herself. "Chronos?" she asked, wracking her name for why that sounded so familiar. Then she nodded in recognition, braid bobbing against her back as her head moved. "Yeah, I was there when I first landed, but I came here because it looked kinda nice."
She scowled, indicating her dirty clothes and ragged appearance. "It wasn't." Some unexpected school holiday, right? When she got home, she was going to have Daddy sue everyone. All of them. Space aliens had treasure, right? "It'd be nice to go back to Chronos."
There was a princess there, wasn't there? And maybe they'd have soap, and clothes she hadn't slept in for a week straight. Was that too much to ask? (Probably.) At any rate, it had to be better than here. Anywhere had to be better than Virgo outpost!
"The trip will be less boring with two people, won't it?" she asked. Keren didn't exactly remember the way, but it wasn't something she wanted to do on her own.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 5:38 pm
A pair of heather eyes shifted from Keren’s hand to the bottle of sanitizer in Callum’s. It was less than half gone by now. Space was just so… dusty and dirty. Just like Keren’s hand. Begrudgingly, Callum popped the lid of the bottle and squirted the most minuscule amount he could into the girl’s hand. The rest had to be saved! No telling when other space monsters might attack. What if there were space-bacteria! Like a giant amoeba that could only be defeated with disinfectant and soap. No, Callum had to save all that he could, it was the practical thing to do. Scrimp and save. “You were?” Callum had to think back to the faces he had landed with at the Chronos outpost. Those he remembered best were Flora, Chronos and of course, Felix. Keren’s vivid hair color rung a few bells. “Oh! You were! Me too… guess I was the only one not too bad off. Practically everyone from that day left for here I think. “ Callum glanced over Keren’s form again. She was what, 16 at the most? It was probably better that she didn’t travel along. At least Callum wouldn’t end up talking to himself about sandwiches again. “ Alright, come along Keren. Off to Chronos.” The man started walking. ((Callum also totally looks like Arthur Darvill))
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 5:53 pm
Keren rubbed the meager amount of hand-sanitizer she'd managed to finagle from Callum onto her palms. The sting of the alcohol made her feel the cleanest she'd felt in days, even if her hands were still caked with dirt. At least some people had come prepared! If only she'd been taken some time other than basketball practice. (Although she supposed it beat being taken from the shower.)
"I wasn't hurt too badly," shrugged Keren. Which was to say she'd been winded, but a Della-Blue did not admit injury, and Keren least of all. "I just came here to see what the fuss was." Conclusion? Overrated. But getting her cuts and bruises fixed up had been nice. Look, ma! No scar tissue!
Keren hurried to follow him, matching his strides with her long legs. "So," she said, shoving her hands deep into the pockets of her mesh basketball shorts. "Where'd you get taken from?"
It was a long walk. The point of not going alone was so you wouldn't be bored, right? And if Callum wasn't interested in talking to her, Keren was going to be bored and that would be Not Okay.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 6:14 pm
“It’s not as spectacular as it sounded huh?” Callum had to admit that the pools of Virgo did sound fairly inviting, if he was the only one who was going to take a dip. A pool of other people’s week of germs though? No thanks. Callum would rather have a shower if he could find one.
“I was at my desk. At work. I work at the bank. “ Callum wondered how work was getting along without him actually. Were all the right reports getting filed? Who was checking the cash drawers? Please god, not Cindy, Callum thought. His co-worker was not the brightest replacement for him. “I hope they're getting on alright. I feel pretty darn useless up here, not like there’s a lot of paperwork to be filled out.”
The road back to Chronos passed by the forbidden Libra Outpost, and the road there was broken, but mostly passible. Callum had to two-step out of the way of a gapping hole in the road and around some rubble. “What about you? Big game?”
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 6:20 pm
"No, scrimmage," replied Keren, suddenly realizing that to disappear during a game would have been a fate worse than death. Right now she was holding out hope to still have her Starter position when she got back to Earth - but if she'd disappeared during a game, she'd be off the team for sure! Acts of god and alien abduction be damned - they weren't good enough excuses for her hardass coach.
She picked her way around the rubble, grumbling about space maintenance and how no one had better expect her to help fix this. She was Keren Della-Blue. She was going to be a Nobel-prize winning doctor. She was not some lowly highway repairman!
As they passed the crossroads leading to the forbidden outpost, though, she couldn't help but stop and stare curiously towards the distant building. "What do you think's up there?" she asked.
It was sort of tempting to go look, after all!
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 6:29 pm
The ongoing conversation between Keren and Callum made it difficult to pick up at first. As they walked on and kept talking, however, eventually it became loud enough for both of them to notice. It was a distinctive whoosh not unlike the noise wind would make when blowing across the mouth of a cave -- however, there was no breeze brushing over them to accompany the sound.
Instead a nondescript shadow had appeared in the space between the two travelers. It had started out as an unnoticeable pinprick of darkness, but was rapidly growing in size.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 6:59 pm
“That? I don’t really know. Just another outpost I think, nothing special. We’re not supposed to go there I recall.” Callum eyed the outpost in the distance with caution. If those senshi people weren’t going to allow them to go there, there simply had to be a reason for it. Like poison gas maybe. Or it was condemned like the rest of the Surrounding should be.
Then he heard the whoosh. “Stop that, I don’t think space is a good place to whistle.” Callum turned to look at Keren with a glare that only an adult was capable of giving to a teenager. But it wasn’t Keren. It was something else entirely. “Aaack!” Callum leapt back and fumbled over a piece of debris.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 7:12 pm
"I'm not whistling," replied Keren sourly. She didn't know how to whistle, and in fact it was a bit of a sore spot for her. Callum couldn't have known that, but it still seemed like he was rubbing it in. But then he screamed and she was (sourly, still, because of the whistling dig) forced to look at him.
Keren gave the shadow a disdainful scowl and took a few steps backwards. It never hurt to be cautious, after all! Despite this, she remained defiant in the face of more interstellar weirdness. "This doesn't scare me," she said, gritting her teeth at the expanding shadow. "Callum, we fought a space whale! Get up!"
This didn't scare her at all, thought Keren stubbornly as she continued backing away from the shadow's edge.
Okay. Maybe it scared her just a little.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 7:26 pm
The whooshing continued, louder and louder, matching the intensity of the blood rushing behind their ears -- until, suddenly, it stopped. Callum and Keren had precisely one second to wonder that there may not have been anything there after all. Then the road beneath them shook with the heavy thud of something landing right where they'd just been walking a moment ago. With its large claws scraping into the rainbow and the horrible chills that ran down their spines, there was no question that their new traveling companion was everything but friendly. Its spindly form could have been likened to an enormous, demonic hand... one that could have sealed its grip around either of them easily. The broken road to Chronos Outpost stretched on behind them. There was nothing nearby that could possibly be used to fight with. And the monster in front of them was already flexing its limbs, a split second away from initiating the chase. RUN!!!
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 7:40 pm
One second it was calm and the next Callum was scrambling to get up onto his feet. Which was difficult to do with how the monster made the road shake with it’s thudding clawed fingers. “… Th… that’s not a ******** space whale!” Callum channeled his sister’s vocal tremble at the sight of the monster.
The idea of even sticking around to fight the monster was nonsense to Callum. He didn’t even bother to try to really help Keren. He just got up and ran as quickly as he could. There was nothing like running for your life to make a non-athletic desk jocky kick up his heels.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 7:59 pm
Basketball was about to pay off in a big way, and Keren was suddenly not regretful to be wearing a pretty expensive pair of Nikes. Yes, yes, it was true that she was definitely a lot scared now, but that didn't diminish her athletic training any. "Just pretend it's defense, and you've got the ball," she told herself. Time to hustle.
Keren was off running. It didn't matter to her that Callum hadn't stopped to help her - she didn't need it. She was probably better prepared than he was, she couldn't help but think even as she crashed down the road. Just pretend it was a basketball court. With rubble. And no ball, and the opposing team was a giant claw.
This was just like basketball. Not.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2011 8:15 pm
It was not even close to a space whale. Space whales were at the very least graceful in their terrorizing, and this mass of madly scrambling fingers was anything but. The damaged rainbow road was becoming even more damaged in its wake, its claws tearing large ragged divots into the iridescent surface as it chased its prey.
And unfortunately for Keren, her more high-end footwear was not translating into high-end performance -- the monster was closing in on them, inch by awful inch. To make matters worse they were approaching a particularly patchy section of road that was speckled with holes varying in size. Around one such hole was an unusual pile of rubble, quite possibly something that had been coughed up by the space whale along with all of their fellow civilians.
As the creature's claws drew closer and closer, the pair were left with only two options: they could either try to make their way over all the holes in order to keep their distance or stop and look through the pile of rubble while the opportunity was still there.
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