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One minute Joy Ann had been with Autumn, looking for Shaun in the crowds in the casino. The next she was surrounded by people, none of them familiar, and feeling completely and utterly alone. The crowds shifted, she caught a glimpse of a bunch of people from her faction gathered together, but then someone bumped into her and she lost all sense of direction again. She really didn't do well in situations with this much enviornmental stimulus.

For the sake of rainbows and glitter farts everywhere, she was twenty-two years old! She shouldn't have been feeling like a child left behind by accident in a shopping mall, even if she had totally been a child left behind by accident in a shopping mall when she was five. Joy Ann was quiet, yes, and unassuming, yes, and perhaps even cripplingly insecure sometimes, but she ought to be able to hold it together at this point in her life. She had been responsible for other people's children before the world went to hell!

...So why was she standing stock still in the middle of the casino floor with tears running down her cheeks unchecked? Oh right, it might have to do something with feeling a foreboding of crippling, imminent death as well as the general feelings of abandonment. The world was a cruel place, and the casino was even crueler.


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With all the people moving around her, all either frantically enjoying their last evening or trying to delay their last evening for another day, she didn't hear Dylan approach and almost missed his question as well. If she'd had any nerves left at that point, she might have jumped in surprise, but with the constant stress of the day, she simply blinked at his blurry face while she processed his offer.

"A tissue?" Oh, was she crying again? Joy Ann brought a hand up to her cheek, confirming that it was indeed wet. By jove she was a mess. "Th-thank you," she sniffled, taking the proffered handkerchief. She wiped her cheeks, and sniffled a few more times. Her nose was red and blotchy, but she was finally managing to get the waterworks to cut out and her face dry again. Joy Ann was definitely not a pretty crier; she was too human for that.

"I would offer to wash this for you and return it but..." It was all overwhelming, wasn't it. She tried for a smile, looking up at him from her considerably shorter height, but it wavered as her eyes flickered to the lighted price on his collar involentarily. They really didn't want the players to forget they were on the market block, did they?

"I'm Joy Ann, Joy Ann McKinsley, now from the prison," she tore her eyes away from his collar and babbled a short introduction, eager to get her thoughts away from the direction they were headed. He was tall, although most people were by her standards of comparison, with bright hair and that jersey... She had seen a jersey like that before, hadn't she? "Are you from the university? Emerston?" Not like that particularly mattered in the long run, but it seemed like there were a lot of people who had holed up in her old college, if her earlier conversation with that other girl was any indication. Maybe he was one of the three-Cs?

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"Thank you," she replied again for his gift, this time less shakily. "Is your mom big on handkerchiefs?" Most people she knew had moved on to disposable tissues, but she supposed there were some eco-related benefits to keeping a cloth and washing it instead of constantly cutting down trees and throwing them away. Was Dylan a tree-hugger, or was it just his mom keeping him prepared for the apocalypse when tissues no longer grew on trees?

Dylan Sallow was a really nice name, actually. Joy Ann smiled up at him, happy to have a conversation to focus on instead of all the noise around them. So he was from the university! "Are all of you wearing them?" she asked with a giggle for the stylish claim. Well, they weren't too much of an eyesore, she'd admit that much. It was much better than her drab prison-wear that she had adopted when leaving her faction's premises.

"...Are there a lot of you there?" Rinko hadn't made it seem like there were a lot of people camped out on campus, but maybe she and Dylan ran in different dorm circles. But here Dylan was, wearing a thirty-one... "Did you get to choose your number or was it assigned?" She asked question after question, her brain clinging to the safe topic and the thought that the university students were now like a sports team of sorts. A sports team competing against doom.

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She tilted her head to the side with a smile for the way he was repeating his mom's lesson. There were two paths of conversation that such a statement set up, and after her earlier conversation which ended in awkwardness after asking about loved ones who may or may not already be deceased, Joy Ann chose the safer option. Keep the conversation to those who were clearly living still.

"Does that make you a proper gentleman then?" she asked innocently. While the question may have sounded like flirting from anyone else, the former kindergarten teacher was asking out of pure curiosity. Dylan's perceptions of self seemed interesting. Her own crippling self-doubt seemed completely divorced from the image she was creating for him based on a simple handkerchief offer; he was a confident ginger vision from her point of view.

Joy Ann nodded at his reasons for wearing the jersey as she plucked at her drab, washed-out orange shirt. "Practicality definitely wins out," she agreed. Otherwise she'd still be wearing the floral-print dress she had been in when Day Zero had rolled around.

"There's a good number... So many I haven't met them all yet." Joy Ann wasn't usually the biggest social butterfly out there, but she appreciated people taking the time to talk with her. "Or, well, I've seen them, but names... You know..." she tacked on after a moment, not wanting to seem antisocial. For some reason, it mattered to her that she made a good impression. Only, now the conversation was kind of to a dead point...

"Um, uh... Have you..." Joy Ann wracked her brain for another thing they could talk about, blushing furiously as she came up with nothing. There was an idea... No, it was gone. Ugh, awkward.

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"If you survive this," Rajni butted in from a nearby slot machine. She'd watched the whole altercation between tears and tissues and had said nothing. It wasn't any of her business, and everyone cried from time to time. Rajni had just gotten used to ignoring it.

With a more charismatic smile she said, "But somehow the potato seems fitting." There were enough of them lying around after all.

Rajni wasn't really a talkative sort, but she had been drinking some of the alcohol; not enough to get drunk (she had far too high a tolerance for that), but enough to make this hell hole of a casino a slightly more enjoyable experience.

And enough to loosen her lips a little. Enough to make strangers seem a little more approachable.

She knew she shouldn't do it. The impulse rose within her like a dark storm the longer she lingered nevertheless, her eyes darting to possible locations of coins: pants, jackets, even within socks if they were visible. There was no end humanity would go to that wouldn't satisfy its intent, and so too did Fantasia barely consider the moral ramifications of her fork in the road. A coin was a coin was a coin.

And the announcer dude never said they couldn't steal.

Rajni wasn't an accomplice, but she did have awful good timing. As she engaged the two, Fantasia sidled up casually, acting as though she was checking out a neighboring machine. In the corner of her eyes, she considered the targets: one a weepy, gentle looking sort; one athletic guy wearing a jersey; and the newest addition was a giant older gentleman with one of the loudest Hawaiian shirts she had ever seen. Easiest target would be the chick, probably, but if all of their attention was diverted...

The volume level in the casino was awful, but Fantasia still kept her movements smooth and quiet nonetheless as she swept by, attempting to swindle the mousy prisoner looking woman in passerby. It would be impossible for Rajni not to see her, but hey--maybe she'd throw her a bone and look the other way.

Before Joy Ann could offer an opinion, a new person butted in. If. If indeed, but Dylan preferred to think optimistically. He knew there was a high chance that non of them would survive, but if he focused on that, he might as well just let the undying take him now.

He smiled. "That was what I was thinking. Maybe I'll put my number on it, make people wonder." Assuming there was anybody left outside. They hadn't heard anything about that, they were pretty contained here in the city.

The next person to come over was huge, and also very colorful. His shirt was very loud, and it made Dylan smile. "The ones I've found were bad too." He hadn't really thought about where they were all coming from, but he was pretty sure that this wasn't a potato farming town.

And, whoosh. Joy Ann had tried to step towards him, a newcomer had bumped into her, and coins went everywhere. That was the only bad thing about having so many coins, they were hard to keep hold off. That's why his were in a pencil case, in the inner most pocket of his backpack. He knew that he'd lose some otherwise.

He scooped up a couple that rolled towards his foot, and waited to see who he needed to hand the coins too. It could be either of them, really. There was no way to tell. "I've got a couple that fell."

"I'm really, really sorry," Joy Ann repeated, feeling like possibly the largest person in the room for bumping into poor Fantasia. Her eyes flickered over to Grant, and she amended that feeling to possibly the second largest. He was huge wasn't he? Like a big, colorful hawaiian mountain. It was almost as if he was competing with the visual loudness of the room, all by himself.

Oh, so they were her coins? She tore her gaze back to Fantasia and then stood up to accept the coins from her and Dylan, taking the 'gold' sheepishly. "Thank you, a keycard would be a godsend right now. I know I should take better care of these, but what's the point? I'm never going to be able to--"

She cut off mid-sentence as a casino employee in one of those awful, tacky suits approached their group, again moving to take two steps backwards towards Dylan without really thinking about it. Grant would have been a better choice to hide behind than the lankier university student, but Joy Ann really wasn't the best at thinking under pressure, unless it was an emergency in a classroom she was in charge of.

It made it worse that the employee seemed to be looking for her.

"I'msorry, I'msorry, I'msorry, I didn't do anything!" she sputtered, circling Dylan to keep him between herself and the casino attendant at first. The brilliant thing would have been to run away, since she was soon caught by the man simply reversing directions suddenly. "Oof," she exhaled again as she ran into the man, this time not falling over since he had grabbed her shoulders.

Oh... He was just taking off her price tag collar? ...And leaving.

Wait, had that really just happened? Someone had bought her. HER?!

Joy Ann stood among the group she had previously been chatting with, utterly at a loss for what to do. For one thing, she was expecting the man to turn around and tell her it had been a mistake, she was still on the selling block, and on the other... Well, if she really was now free... That really made the conversation awkward, didn't it.

"Um... I... Um..." Joy Ann tried to think of something to say and failed miserably. "But... Who..." Why her? Why not any of the people around her instead? They were all more important and more valuable than her, surely.


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