TDM #1

[thequietmods]

The ice isn't the only thing cracking right now. Spring storms can be violent, and the thunder is strong enough to reverberate in your chest. Outside of the chilly cave, a torrential downpour makes it nearly impossible to leave the cave and get your bearings. However, through the weather, and past the giant things that seem to be moving in the weather, something large looms in the distance.

The rain and the moving things make it hard to be sure, and you can't even see the horizon line, so it's either a very large body of water, some sort of man-made structure off in the distance, or both. Until the storm clears, no one can be sure which it is.

1. Someone, though, their voice just barely echoing off the walls, seems to be coming up with theories. Is it you? Do you think this is a waste of time?

2. Are you trying to go out into the hostile weather, risks be damned? Is it because you don't care? Do you think you can survive it?

3. Being trapped in a cave full of people stuck in pillars of ice is weird, isn't it? Isn't it even weirder that you used to be in one and now you're not? Are you going to help the others trapped in the ice? It should be warned that trying to break someone out when they're not awake to help will shatter the pillar, and the person inside.

4. As the storm clears up, night has fallen. Thunder booms in the distance and the sound of insects and wild animals picks up. Wolves howl in the darkness. Is now the time to make a move, or are you going to stay in this uncomfortable, but untouched, shelter?

Comments

[trainphreaking]

Hope she doesn't mind this old woman giving a sort of thoughtful inspection to her when she returns, but she doesn't seem of the temperament to care, particularly.

For a while the woman keeps tinkering with whatever technological device she's got in her hands. Then, she glances up, just slightly.

"So it didn't do what you expected."

Like, most people would introduce themselves or something, but who here is a normal person?

[tuckedinyoureyes]

There's a slight, jittery jerk of her head in the old woman's direction, and her jaw works, but beyond that, possibly that impression of her as "not having the temperament to care" is still intact.

It would be wrong, but the White Girl - and it is rather difficult to think of her as anything else - isn't very forthcoming with her internal thought processes making themselves into external, outward expressions, exactly.

Which is why the almost comically put-out, completely silent yet so eloquent it may as well be a noise like "?!", facial expression she turns on the older woman has such sharp affect to it, probably - there's like three hundred thoughts whirring around in that head of hers fighting for the dignity to be the one that actually does express itself to the outside world.

(Amazingly, she makes this expression without ever once so much as opening her eyes to "look" at the old woman.)

"Not - quite," she says, with visible hesitation, as she breaks 'eye contact' and looks away.

[trainphreaking]

"Yeah, it'd be just too convenient, wouldn't it. Probably someone out there thinks it's—educational, or something."

She taps her fingers on her knee, and then shrugs. Whatever. Sometimes you're not bothered by people who can't communicate well on account of you've been uhhhhhh mostly making turtles for thirty years. "Seeing if you can leave, or seeing what's out there?"

[tuckedinyoureyes]

The White Girl - White - pauses, makes another extraordinarily over-enunciatory face where she's like why am I talking at all with you, more or less. It's not clear, though, whether she's expecting a "why" to be forthcoming, or if she already suspects she has an answer and the expression of peevish bemusement on her part is wholly rhetorical.

After a moment of furious - if placid-looking, at a glance - consideration - she makes a gesture like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but with her eyes closed. "Not worth it," she says, after a long sigh. "Everything - is waiting."

Her mouth twists. "I could go. Alone. But I saw ..." She throws up her hands again, groaning. She did not ask to be 'reincarnated' into someone else's fucked up twist on Animal Crossing, after all that she's been through, is a thought she absolutely has and does not say. "So not ... leaving. Waste of options."

[trainphreaking]

She also has some thoughts she does not say, such as plenty of people are perfectly content to leave even when infinite possibility is waiting for them, but she's not one of those people, so it seems like a stupid point to argue.

"Right." It's really a competent job, she has to admit, if kind of empty. Realistic, even. She gives a moment of thought to who might care about options. She jerks her thumb at the rest of the group. "Think any of them are farmers?"

(Obviously neither of them are farmers. That would be ridiculous.)

[tuckedinyoureyes]

A snort, a groaning, insincere smile. These are the easy tells for a larger response, when conversation escapes a person, and they're here for sure, as she simply answers, "No."

It's a less easy tell for what it means when she comes back with, "Other things are," a short while after.

[trainphreaking]

She'd almost thought the conversation was over (like, she knows she's not much of a conversationalist or a people-person anymore, okay, she gets it) and there's surprise in her posture as her chin lifts again, jerkily turning her ??conversation partner's?? direction.

"Other things. Other things like what?" An arch of her eyebrows. "You seem like you don't talk to people much. Neither do I. But obviously I'm going to have some follow-up questions."