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 Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2015 10:37 am
Less Trustworthy Than Long John Silver
There were a great number of things Lawrence disliked doing, anything involving physical effort or getting messy in any way was generally off the table. His only exception was cooking, cooking of all things was something Lawrence didn't mind doing and in fact on his scale of decadence to effort (which was very heavily weighted on the effort side of things) it did not even count as work. Taste was a quantifiable thing in many respects, recipes existed as points of reference back into antiquity with a hundred thousand books written on the finer culinary arts and it rendered the whole thing a research exercise. It was comforting in a way, he did not feel out of his depth on this particular subject, his ability to taste was almost completely functional (barring that little shift in his sense of smell which had happened in the last few months). Even when individual tastes differed in those he cooked for these could be accommodated and the very act of accommodation itself taught him more about the individual. For instance, a taste for salt and charred flesh was the taste of British poverty and often poverty in general. It had been a taste one he'd known exceedingly well as a child and frankly never wished to again. The more obvious nuances which gave a hint about the people he cooked for were facilitations for allergies which may or may not exist, recipes for intolerances and - in his opinion most heinous of all - changes due to moral dietary preferences.
It was a task which allowed him to take the first steps in understanding the people he found himself around in a way where error was not immediately catastrophic, if someone didn’t like their dish he could offer to make something else and apologise while always tying himself mentally with the positive endorphins which came from satisfying one’s hunger with good food.
The limited ingredients at the base were not too much of an issue, he had thought ahead at least far enough to bring his own spices for his own use (even if he ended up stranded in the wilderness meat could be flavoured) He was not known for his generosity but ingratiating himself was always an excellent cause. And so it was that through a combination of careful preparation and seasoning he made the food just that fraction better and sought to prove himself amenable and friendly to any and all suggestion and request. Whenever he had the chance he would rope in someone or other to give him a hand, helping him around the - occasionally exaggerated - limitations of his disability. He was playing it safe regardless and was careful to avoid enlisting the aid of anyone in a bad mood or who looked weary from a long day but instead was quick to help someone who looked like they needed relieved from some other tedious task around the base.
He carefully did not complain about his task or the base's limited provisions, maintaining a stubbornly positive and smiling front even when he was physically exhausted. This at least was the easy part, what he wore on the outside had always been optional.
Besides, apart from gaining the trust of the base's inhabitants, gaining some traction around the control of mealtimes meant he got to know exactly when America stopped by to eat.
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Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2015 11:11 am
Making Amends
When he wasn't enlisted into cooking, Lawrence found himself helping bring the base's medical facilities up to par and responsible for dealing with whatever scrapes and injuries resulted from forays into what amounted to a large and horrible trap loaded maze. In this place it was more satisfying and challenging to try to help the humans in their plight than to find ways to destroy them, his internal scales which were less morality and more a desire to balance swayed in the direction of order over chaos.
Still, he enjoyed it when people came to him bleeding or cut, their wounds telling a story of their folly or ill luck and the power he felt in being able to repair those flaws in their physical shell. The weapons were responsible of course, but he aided them and if knitting injuries with invisible powers was not as close to magic as humanity got then he could not imagine what was.
One of his natural inclinations was that of hygiene and a very strict set of checks were imposed for sterility and maintenance of emergency stocks alongside keeping people up to date on what triage meant for this particular base.
While he worked and interacted with people he felt a constant thread of discord, expressed sometimes in wary glances or wry and often pessimistic comments about the prospects of those who lived here. From the scattered comments and opinions he began to weave a shape around the void which the previous red-eyes outbreak had left in the midst of those who found themselves stationed there.
It took a chance conversation over a set of stitches to enlighten him that the fear he had initially assumed to be directed at him courtesy of a bit of slander on America's part was actually directed at the woman herself. It had taken every scrap of self control he had not to laugh, not to outwardly show the satisfaction he felt at learning this and the sheer opportunities it presented.
It took a little more enquiring to find out that the security video of the initial outbreak was still held within the base, and when he did he smiled in a way that was as close to genuine as he got.
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Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2015 1:10 pm
Breaking the Rules
He wasn't sure why he expected the base to have been sanitised of all trace of the horror which had cast its shadow across it, Deus was so numb to horror already, treating nightmare scenarios with all the banality of a group of people to whom horror was essentially everyday. A bit of bleach and a few body bags and everything was good as new. People tried to forget while holding onto the facts and the images of disaster, torn between the terror of looking their own nature in the eyes and of being left unprepared when it returned. Perhaps he thought, that was why he was not afraid of the red eyes affliction, because he was not afraid of his own nature, treating his personality and self with all the familiarity afforded any other part of his body. He was capable of things people who did not understand would think monstrous but he was in his essence the least monstrous creature on earth because he was not afraid.
The fact that it had all been recorded and preserved on neatly labelled security footage did not surprise him and he had an excuse to revisit it, citing the need to understand the threats they might well face in order to maximise their preparedness should it re-occur. It was only a half lie really, he would use what he learned in how he approached the situation on the base, but his true motivation was to admire the searing core of human brutality and to see what left Franklin so wary around the red haired huntress. He wanted to know everything about America, half starved physically but always hungry for more of her.
He had made certain to leave himself a window of time, checking the rosters that everyone was well fed, well tended and not on any particularly dangerous sweeps of the maze and city, and then had settled down to watch, the flickering light from the videos dancing across his pale and gaunt shape. He had even indulged himself and had brewed himself up a warm drink to keep him from getting chill in the cold room.
He enjoyed the mundane tapes initially, the glimpses of trenches humour in the way the hunters interacted, jesting and playing in the darkest of situations, the glimpses of the stories of a life which flashed a fin whenever someone passed the camera, a fixed moment and no more. Whenever America appeared he found himself holding his breath despite himself, always enraptured by her in ways which seemed to close a tight hand about his throat and settle across his chest. It was almost pornographic and he remembered once again with a lance of sharp determination along his spine why he pursued her so relentlessly.
He did not know how many tapes he had watched when at last he slid one into the player and something had changed about the interactions between the people on screen, something subtle, something at first he couldn't define, left only with a faint animal incomprehension of the veiled danger in the way the interactions had changed, a discord he couldn't place.
When the violence began it was unmistakable for what it was and his eyes went wide, the hunger becoming all consuming and everything else shrinking back to utter irrelevance.
His drink was cold by the time he regained any semblance of his senses, having been utterly transfixed by the unfolding nightmare, sometimes on the verge of summoning his talons in sheer frustration when some bloody act of viciousness was too pixelated or obscured by the frame's edge, drinking in every splatter of blood and every contorted abuse of the human body. He yearned to have been there, to have been able to smell it, to feel it.
Butch strangely did not like it. Normally all too eager to roll in blood and guts and encouraging him in every extravagance of violence, he shirked now with a whine and a whimper. Lawrence did not understand his fear and when interrogated about it the canine would only incoherently burble about how he was a good boy and make unbearable noises of plaintive apology.
Watching America defy weakness and twist the weak in her hands had positively been art and he went back time and time again to replay it, to simply bask in what she'd been capable of and what they had all been capable of, trying to decide if what he saw was their core anger pulled to the surface or something even more primal than anger, something even he might possess. The thought was strange to him and he turned it around and around, trying to imagine how it would feel to lose control in that way, to be a creature of feeling and rage, but he could not grasp it, managing only to conjure childish and abstract images of himself victorious or immune.
He found himself caught in a loop of watching the videos, fixed and obsessive for many many hours and only realised how long he had been caught up when one of the patrols were sent out to make sure he wasn't actually dead. He shut off the player hurriedly and hurried back when he heard their voices and endured a bit of amused joking at his expense, telling him to stop slacking off when he was supposed to be researching. He let them think he was watching bootlegged videos or smutty videos or whatever it was they wanted to assume because he could hardly hear them, his mind hooked on the brutality and thinking over and over and over how their entrails might look and how wonderful it would be to see America unleashed on them also, reaching up to touch his throat idly even as he maintained a superficial and detached stream of banter that was even more disjointed than usual from the yawning void that loomed underneath.
It would be harder to think. It would be harder to think for some time and he would find himself visiting the spots on the base where the cameras had been fixed only to stand, staring distantly at where the violence had happened, breathing slowly and carefully and completely immobile as if it was possible to understand what he had seen through scent, sight or some other sense much, much older than either.
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