[QUEST PRP] Scavenging Team - (Cami/Evan)

[nessy]

Camille wanted to go home. She was aching, tired, hot, and missed her bed. Mostly she missed her shower. Nothing sounded better than a lukewarm shower to wash away the dirt, the sand, the aches in her bones. She was blessedly happy that there had been nothing much more serious than the manticore that had nearly done them in but that didn't mean she was happy to be here in general. Especially considering that she'd maybe gotten a whole two hours of sleep before being put through these rigors.

Of course even getting your head nearly taken off by a beastie didn't mean you couldn't work. Already another assignment was getting pushed her way, a hunter she didn't yet recognize. Rubbing lightly at her eyes she smiled in introduction. "Hey, I'm Cami. Sun trainee. We're supposed to go scavenge some tower?" Casual scavenging, not unlike what she and Hanna had done first off. That wouldn't be so bad, right?

Quote:

When you are ready, have your team start searching by rolling 1d10. There are lots of unusual shaped fossils to encounter, mostly blackened masses with mutated skulls, but none of them radiate Fear. If you roll a 10, you encounter a weapons tablet to bring back. When a 10 has been rolled 2 times your lime limit is up and you can head back. The quest is considered COMPLETED. Mark the title of the thread as so.

Inle-roo

 

[Inle-roo]

Evan was liberally spattered with grey ichor from his earlier adventures in insect extermination with Nora. His weapon was still sulking, but at least he was quiet. Caelius was probably still around, but Evan couldn't see him, and out of sight was out of mind. Today was a good day, all told; this was a better start to the morning than killing training dummies, anyway.

He rolled his shoulders to work the light ache out of them as he was given a new set of orders by another hunter. Back to the tower to look for more remnants of the fallen, like he'd done with Chel. He smiled and nodded at the trainee he was paired with, happy for the new company. "Nice to meet you, Cami. I'm Evan, also in Sun. Tower's this way," he said, starting off towards it. "Don't recall seeing you around. You new?"

nesshime

 

[nessy]

Cami was tired but she was not that tired. Interest and renewed energy lit up her eyes as she got a better look at the man she was paired with. "Mmmhm, new-ish I suppose. Been awake since the end of March, June now? Three months give or take." Bending down to touch her toes for a minute she was happy to follow Evan's lead. He seemed to have a pretty good idea of where they were going and what they were doing. "You? I feel like I need to meet more Suns. I know Otto, and Pey, and Nora..." Mentally she listed the hunters she knew, tried to place all their divisions, failed slightly.

Shrugging her shoulders she grinned at him. Handsome. Standing outside the tower ruins she surveyed the area. "Do you remember what we're looking for? They didn't...tell me."

Inle-roo

 

[Inle-roo]

Three months was still fresh enough out of the pod to be considered new, Evan felt--it was somewhere between the blatant physical trauma and the less obvious mental torture, and you couldn't really count yourself as any kind of experienced without having gone through the full spectrum. "Well, welcome to Deus," he said, watching with obvious interest as she bent down.

He was so distracted that it took a second for him to register that she was still talking. "Me? I've been here, oh, a year, year and a half. Feels like longer, though." Something like that. Time on Deus seemed to alternately drag on and fly by depending on the crisis of the week. "Sounds like you've already met a good few. Bix and Chel are good to know, too. There's more of us hanging around, but Suns tend to have a high, uh...turnover rate." He didn't want to scare her off, but he wasn't going to lie to her, either.

Evan met Cami's grin with a brief smile of his own and took a quick look around the base of the tower. "We're looking for weapon tablets," he replied. "Squarish and about as big as a regular tablet, give or take. Sometimes they're all that's left of a dead Hunter, so you may want to try looking around the biggest bloodstains," he said, apologetic.

nessuhime

 

[nessy]

Cami could hear the distraction in his voice with the welcome and wondered if it was because he was looking at her (she could hope) or looking at something else (likely). Looking about the carnage of the tower she sighed sightly. "Bix is the one who helped me outta my pod. I've been wanting to get to know him a bit better but things just haven't lined up for that. He's only like three rooms down, though, I should just knock one day."

Evan's blunt, but not unkind, honesty didn't bother Cami. "It makes sense. Front of the line doesn't usually spell for longevity but I'm hopeful. Working hard to make sure that I'm around at least as long as possible." Possible being, she hoped, somewhere around a hundred years or so. Not as a hunter, she hoped, because she didn't see anyone much older than forty on the island. Which, interestingly, she'd never asked about because she didn't really want the answer. Deus was a bit like the mob more than it would have been any military.

Looking down at the blood around them she blinked. "Uhm...do you mean like that one?" Pointing about three feet away from them she saw the tablet, not unlike what Kidana had been in that cave room the first hour she'd been out of her pod.

Inle-roo

 

[Inle-roo]

"You should, absolutely," Evan agreed. "He's a nice guy. Definitely a good example of how to keep your chin up here." Because it was far too easy to let little things like shared dream states and group immolation get one down.

Evan was pleasantly surprised to hear that Cami was actually planning to work at being a Hunter. "Wish everyone had that kind of work ethic," he said. "Too many kids come in thinking this is some kind of video game and just don't make it. Glad to see you're taking this seriously," he praised her, mentally bumping her up from pretty girl to pretty girl with a purpose.

The bloated corpse he was inspecting didn't yield anything other than a terrible smell. Evan looked up, his gaze tracking to where Cami pointed. "Yeah, just like that," he said. "Good eye. We should just need one more before we can get out of here."

nesshime

 

[nessy]

Video game? Who in their right mind would think of this place like a game?! Cami wondered if her face looked as shocked as she felt. "A game? Who could ever go through any of this and think it was..." She trailed off, inarticulate with how utterly stupid that seemed. Yet she remembered the dreams where it was like a big game, where nothing mattered even though it felt somewhat real. Wonderland. But more than that she remembered how it felt to be burning with fire, to tumble into a dank, bloody pit full of bugs that you didn't think you were going to escape from, how it felt to grow back the nerve endings in most of your body.

Clamping her lips together she pulled the tablet out of the ground and kept looking. "I admit I didn't start with such a good work ethic but you get your a** handed to you enough times, in enough spars, you start to think that you won't do so well out here in the real world otherwise. I want to see as little of the infirmary as possible, thanks." Tucking the tablet under her arm, caring little about the assorted fluids on it because her jacket was ruined anyway, she was all smiles at Evan.

"We should spar sometime. I've got a bow so they get a little awkward with weapons but I wouldn't mind going unarmed against a weapon to see how it works out. I'm working up to try to figure close-combat with a bow. Peyton made an idiot of me the first time." Was she rambling? Well, it was nice to meet someone new, someone who wasn't grouchy, someone who was devastatingly attractive.

Why not babble a bit?

Inle-roo

 

[Inle-roo]

"Yeah, I know," Evan said, resigned in the face of Cami's surprise. "They seem to recruit a lot of kids," he explained. "You think the recruiters tell them all the gory details beforehand? I don't know about you, but no one told me that getting set on fire by an SO was in the job description." Although even if they had, Evan would have signed up anyway.

Evan followed a likely-looking trail of blood to a pile of rubble, throwing and shoving rocks out of the way to get to the bottom of it. "That's a good way to look at it," he agreed. "As a Sun, it's doubly important for us to be at our peak as far as combat abilities go--not just so we don't get hurt, but for the other divisions that are counting on us to hold the line."

There was nothing beneath the stones but bloodstained sand and hard-packed earth, and Evan idly brushed his hands off on his pants. "I might take you up on that, but you don't want to face off against us unarmed," he said, smiling apologetically as he tried not to patronize her. "If you want, I'd be happy to show you some hand-to-hand combat techniques, but if you're looking for advice on close combat fighting with a bow, you should definitely find Chel. She once smacked Peyton with her bow so hard that Peyton rolled all the way down a hill. Probably the funniest thing I've seen on the island yet."

nesshime

 

[nessy]

Gosh he was cute! If they had lived in an anime there would have been stars floating behind Cami's head as she stepped carefully around the remains of fallen comrades, using a long stick she'd found in the ruins to push through pools of blood. Tablets could hide pretty easily in puddles of the stuff but she didn't want to slosh her hands through blood unless there was going to be a damned good reason.

Shaking her head and laughing at herself a bit, Cami had to admit Evan was right. "Nobody told me anything. I mean the poor hunter I accosted was like 'Woah hey don't you get this job is dangerous?' but I didn't think it through. I just wanted to fight back. Roughly five months in a pod, out for a month, set on fire." She blew out a breath, standing up from where she'd been squatted digging through rubble. "Didn't think that was what I was volunteering for, let me tell you."

Hearing about Peyton being knocked down a hill with nothing but a bow had her grinning from ear to ear. "I would've paid to see that. Pey's harder to knock around than she looks. I'd love to go hand-to-hand with you though." Was she flirting? Had the sun risen that morning? Then yep, she was flirting! "I've been trying to polish my technique which was initially nonexistent. Different opponents provide insight on different weaknesses." The intelligence that was so abundant in her semi-sister was showing itself now in Cami's work ethic, the way she'd planned out her physical regimen so that she got as hurt as little as possible.

Pausing over another corpse she looked down and had an incredibly morbid thought. "These are probably a decent sampling of our division. Were. Huh?"

Inle-roo

 

[Inle-roo]

"Can't blame your reasoning, though," Evan said, of the opinion that they needed more people in their ranks just like her: hardy and driven and easy on the eyes. "Just use it as your threshold. If it's not as bad as getting set on fire, it's not worth worrying about." He was joking, mostly. Kind of. "Though I've got to say, that was probably one of the worst things I've gone through since I've been here, and I've been shot, blown up, and poisoned--and that was just on my first mission."

Evan idly kicked away a blackened skull that lay in his path as he looked for spots that looked likely to yield a tablet. It was twisted in ways that obviously weren't human, so he didn't feel at all bad about it. "Peyton's tough, but she's definitely beatable," he said as he peered over a low wall, rummaging through a pile of debris. "She's quick, but you have a longer reach. Use it to your advantage."

He looked up, an eyebrow raised, as she seemed eager to accept his offer for weapons-free training. "You just let me know when and where," he replied, giving her a warm smile. "I'd be happy to clear my schedule for you. Anything to help another Sun out." Evan loved his division--and all of the pretty, sassy girls in it--just so, so much.

Evan's attention was pretty obviously only half on looking for tablets at this point, the rest of it reserved for getting to know Cami better. He knew their mission was just as important as wandering out into the desert and killing everything that didn't look human, but he wasn't made for this kind of inaction. He could talk battle strategies all day, though. "Let your weapon help you out, at least at first," he advised. "They know what they're doing, kind of, and once you get to their level, it's easier to move on together. The Sun run is a good place to try out different things, too."

Cami's observation brought the importance of their task into sharper focus. "Yeah, they probably are," Evan said, suddenly somber as he looked at the carnage and saw the aftermath of another battle in a different desert. "Take a good, long look. There's your incentive to keep on training. There's your reason to fight back. Every one of the monsters that we take out is one less that can do this to you."

nesshime

what where did all these words come from i dont

 

[nessy]

Cami could absolutely understand why Deus was recruiting boys like this one. Not only were they muscular and driven, they were so easy on the eyes. Why look at people not conventionally attractive all day if you didn't have to? She hadn't found anyone physically unattractive, though her mind immediately snapped to Mark, and she winced a bit internally. Taym, even, while skeletal probably would be fairly handsome once he got over whatever was making him sick. He had that (and there was no pun intended) starving poet sort of look that girls got all thirsty for.

Evan's description of his first mission seemed about as bad as her first mission without the fire. It actually would not have been so terrible without the fire. Knowing that she had survived something that someone who had been shot, blown up, and poisoned considered worse than all three gave her a bit of a boost. She'd survived the worst so far hadn't she? She'd go on surviving. Camille was going to end a strong Sun Hunter who could take down three of those Halloween monsters with a single arrow. Kidana approved. Heartily.

Looking out over the wreckage, hearing Evan's pep talk, the Antiguan turned back to look at him instead. He was much easier on the eyes. Hell, he was alive which, sadly, was an improvement on everything around them. Cami wondered if he'd be willing to clear his schedule for a more intimate kind of hand-to-hand one day. Her own was a little full these days but it was never a bad idea to make new friends!

Taking his offer at face-value for now she beamed. "Fantastic! Mornings are generally structured for me but after lunch every day I'm open to flexible sparring arrangements or more training of random sorts. I usually stop at about 3pm though, I need the time before dinner to settle or I won't be able to keep it down." Thinking back to earlier she kicked at a pile of gravel to see what was underneath.

"Have you gone on a bunch of missions?"

Inle-roo

YAY WORDS

 

[Inle-roo]

Evan nodded approvingly as Cami gave him an idea of when she might be available. Keeping to a schedule displayed a sense of discipline, which would certainly serve her well in the long run. "I'll text you when we get back, and we'll work something out. There's no bad training, it's just a matter of where you want to start first."

He saw the edge of something black sticking out of the ground and pushed away the debris that covered it, disappointed when it turned out to be part of a bone. "My fair share," he replied. "These missions in the desert never turn out well. Just a head's up."

nesshime

 

[nessy]

Cami nodded, rooting through a pile of debris and finding more gore than anything particularly useful. Where before she'd been wanting food now she was glad it hadn't been in her stomach -- she wasn't quite yet suited for work this messy. Bugs were bad enough with their oddly-colored guts and parts. Human guts? Human parts? A white, tattered reminder that one day this would probably be her? No. Not something she wanted to deal with.

So for a moment she just gazed at Evan and drank in how nice he looked before letting out a long breath. "Yeah, ain't that the truth. I've only ever been to the desert so I have a lot to look forward to. Do we even go out to anywhere else or is this just the hot zone?"

Inle-roo