[COMPLETED] Scavenging in the Dark (Chel & Evan)

[chiickadee]

Chel was very much okay with Evan in his tight-fitting wife beater. She was okay with him in nothing at all as well. Pretty much as long as it was Evan it was okay.

She slung an arm over his shoulder and began leading him towards some stupid a** tower they were supposed to investigate. "C'mon puppy, we have mysterious to solve or whatever." She read through her instructions quickly. Blahblahblah look for tablets blah blah blah. Chel definitely did not care.  

[Inle-roo]

Evan was very much okay with Chel leading him around. This way, he could keep an eye on her and make sure she stayed safe out here and he had something nice to look at that wasn't endless desert--definitely a win/win.

"Yeah?" Evan asked as they approached the tower, summoning his weapon in case whatever had made those bloodstains was still out there, lurking and waiting for them. "You gonna give me a Scooby snack if we do?" He used the blade to poke carefully at the mutilated corpses, finding nothing but charred bones.

chimarii

 

[chiickadee]

Chel didn't find anything because Chel wasn't looking for anything. She was too busy not taking this mission seriously at all. They were out in the desert looking for tablets or something? What a joke.

"Better that a scooby snack," she said deviously. In a more competent tone she said, "Thanks for being a bro about Nevada by the way."  

[Inle-roo]

Evan looked up from the mound of flesh he was currently poking to raise an eyebrow at Chel, intrigued. It smoothed into something entirely more sympathetic as she brought up Nevada. "It's nothing," he replied. "It's definitely not something you have to thank me for." He knew the pain of loss, and while he couldn't bring Nevada back for Chel--or for Stormy, or for any of the other people who had lost her--he could at least be there for her.

"You want to talk about it?" Sure, they were technically on the job, but he could multitask.

chimarii

 

[chiickadee]

Chel shrugged. "Nah, not really. To be honest I never really loved her. It's tough losin' her, but it's a job hazard. I'm more pissed nobody told me. Even that a'int that bad though. Wasn't like I was super important to her."

Adjusting her goggles somewhat awkwardly, she continued. "Really I just ... want off this island. I never wanted to come in the first place. They blackmailed me."  

[Inle-roo]

"I'm sure that's not true," Evan said, the reply immediate and not at all thought out. He hadn't known Nevada all that well, friendly as they had been, and he hadn't known the nature of her relationship with Chel. "She was a good person, basically. I don't think she would have been with you if she hadn't cared."

He wasn't at all surprised how well she seemed to be taking it, though; Chel certainly seemed the type to make it through life on brazenness alone, and she was proving to be more practical than Evan had given her credit for. "I'd help you out of here, if it would do any good," he told her. "Pretty sure this is a lifetime kind of deal, but with so many new trainees waking up," he trailed off and shrugged. "Might be they won't notice if one goes missing."  

[chiickadee]

"Ah- you didn't hear the drama of it all, did you? Wasn't her that didn't care, it was me." Chel put her hands behind her head, looking up to the desert sky. It was way too hot and sandy to be having a touchy feely conversation. She'd rather be doing the touchy feeling.

With Evan offering to help her off the island, Chel gave a bark of laughter. "Nah, this gig's for life. Even if I ran, I got no doubt they'd track me down somehow. They got glowin' swords and s**t, I don't think a tracking device is all that difficult."

Still no tablets. Just more dead bodies being poked with the end of her sword.  

[Inle-roo]

"Oh," Evan said, happy to leave it at that. It wasn't on him to comment or judge--he didn't know what their relationship had been like, but he was glad that Chel didn't seem to be doing anything dumb like blaming herself for Nevada's death. This was a dangerous job, after all.

She may have had a point about the tracking devices, though. The weapons were just another piece of runic tech at their disposal, and he couldn't see Deus being willing to give it up so easily. "Just saying. You've got liberty time you can use too, don't forget. I know it's not the same, but it's better than nothing."

chimarii

 

[chiickadee]

"You're so cute worryin' about lil old me," Chel cooed, sarcasm dripping off her every word. "I use every second of that time and skip a shitton of duties. I'm already playing hooky too much. Gotta be careful or people notice, y'know?"

She kicked over a pile of rubble, hoping to find something buried in the stone, but there was nothing. "I'm gonna head upstairs, cool?" It wasn't exactly "upstairs," more just the dilapidated remains of a second floor. "I ever tell you the story of how I got here?"

inle-roo

 

[Inle-roo]

"Someone's got to," Evan replied with a shrug. "I know this place is enough to drive people off the deep end if they're not careful. Don't want you being one of them, that's all."

Evan pushed aside a few loose stones, uncovering nothing but bone fragments. "Be careful," he warned idly, reflexively. "Didn't you say once it had something to do with your family?" Or something like that. She had been sitting on his lap at the time and that had been slightly more important, if he was remembering right.

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[chiickadee]

Chel cracked a smile at Evan's roundabout compliments. He was really too good for this place, he was. He deserved a whole island to himself with a thousand women at his disposal for how nice he was. She worried it would get him hurt one day.

"Yeah. They told me they wouldn't touch Chris and I had nowhere else to go so I figured 'least I could leave behind in this world was safety for my cousin. 'Cept then they recruited him too. So now we're both ********' bumbling around and neither one of us wants to be here." Her foot smacked against a rock and Chel let out a yelp.

Only it wasn't a rock, it was more squareish and perfected than that. It was a tablet. "Well look at that," she guffawed, waving Evan over. "Found one!"

inle-roo

 

[Inle-roo]

he wouldn't say no to that

Evan frowned at Chel sympathetically as she told him how she came to be at Deus. "Shitty recruitment method," he agreed, "but you're both here now, and if you can't leave and you won't leave, you should at least find something that makes being here bearable."

His head tilted in interest as she called him over, and he nodded approvingly as he saw what she had uncovered. "Good job," he said. "One more and we should be good to go."

chimarii

 

[chiickadee]

"I do have something that makes it bearable, and it's sitting between your legs," Chel chided, grunting with effort as she removed heavier stones off of the top of the tablet.

At least they wouldn't come back empty handed. Upon removing the one tablet, she discovered there was a second, smaller one underneath. "Wow. Two people died together here. That's romantic as s**t." She gestured with her head that he come over to where she was. "Come get this other one, I can't lift two. They're heavy!"

inle-roo

 

[Inle-roo]

Evan huffed a laugh. "Always happy to make your day a little better," he replied, climbing up to help Chel move the rubble out of the way.

He quieted at the sight of the second tablet. He didn't know anything about the Hunters these tablets belonged to, of course, but if they had died here together in the way that Chel meant, then yeah, it was romantic, but it was also really, really sad. He picked up the other tablet and tried not to think about it too much. At least there only seemed to be the two tablets, and the rest of the corpses looked like monsters; at least these two had gone down fighting. "Looks like we got what we came for. Let's head back."

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