zenderael_rl | [EVENT]

Jordan was so focused on getting the fuck out she didn't even notice the fact that Duncan was pretty useless right now.

Her tenacity was rewarded when her hands finally made contact with the portable stove ~~that Mini meant all along, whoops~~. She pulled it down, forcing herself to ignore how her fingers were basically numb now, and placed it on the floor.

The expected blue ring of flame did not show up. She clicked the dial several more times, but the output remained the same: nothing.

Jordan buried her arms between her thighs and torso and rested her forehead against her knees. "Shit."

It was too cold to stay like that. She forced herself to straighten, stove forgotten. "Are you going to sit there and freeze to death?" she asked, a twinge of annoyance in her voice, except it was kind of lost by the chattering of her teeth. Jordan was accustomed to Fall City weather and so her clothing was light.

She recalled how Duncan was from Texas.

Maybe he was already dead? She didn't turn around to look.

"What the fuck else am I supposed to do?" he shot back, not lifting his head.

It wasn't cold enough to die of hypothermia. Probably. Fuck, he didn't actually know, 60F was freezing to him let's be real. He had no concept of cold.

Edited 2012-07-11 09:41 (UTC)

"Look for a way out?" she suggested, tone clear she thought his answer was stupid. "You're supposed to keep moving, you know."

Moving to find a way out because Rhys.

"Fine." He forced himself up, hefting his rifle by the strap and sliding it over his shoulder. If he found an exit, he wasn't going to come back to tell her.

He walked the perimeter of the room, checking for side doors, windows, reasonably sized ventilation shafts, but there was nothing. He swung wide around Jordan to continue looking on the other side of the room.

Finally stopping again at the door, he wrapped his arms around himself and squinted up at the ceiling, past the florescent lights. "There's a dropped ceiling, if you wanna try that." He didn't sound hopeful about it.

Jordan followed his line of vision.

It was something.

She looked to the chairs, then to the tables. No, girl, use a fuckin' ladder like a civilized person. It was a supply room, she'd already passed them once before.

Though she'd more or less told Duncan to help, Jordan was unwilling to ask him for assistance unless something was impossible for her. Moving and setting up a ladder was not one of those things. She did it with little noise, mostly because it was too cold to make noise. The ladder would sometimes strike her firearm, but she was past the point of noticing beyond a mental damnit.

He didn't offer to help, either. Maybe if it hadn't been Jordan, or if she hadn't been a huge fucking bitch to him a few days ago, he might have.

As it was, he just watched her set up the ladder, feeling like her efforts would be fruitless.

If Jordan managed to get into the ceiling, she'd find it too dark to see much, full of wires and metal ventilation shafts much too small for either of them to crawl through, and ending at the walls of the room so they couldn't even use it to drop into a different room with an unfrozen door.

She hung up there for a bit anyway, coming to terms with yet another roadblock. It was easier to hear the sound of battle there, and if she really strained, she thought she could pick out some of the words in their shouts, those who were fighting. Did Noelle find materials to craft fire arrows? She hadn't had them equipped when she last used her.

Were any of them even support builds? Not Noelle or Nadir, definitely not the berserker, not Rhys. She wasn't sure about the kebab boy.

This was fucking ridiculous.

She kicked the ladder down, then dropped to the floor. The shock of landing traveled from her feet up her legs, to the rest of her body, and it did its job of jolting her back to full awareness.

"I'm sorry," she started, firm, turning around to face him. Her arms crossed over her chest again, but that was to keep them warm. There was stubbornness, yes -- a stubbornness not to have this stupid, petty shit on her record if they actually froze to death here. "For picking on you on the forums. I'm frustrated with everything that's happening and you were a convenient target."

He waited, and for a moment he started to worry that she'd pulled what he'd been thinking and found a way out without coming back to tell him. He took a step toward the ladder, wondering if he should go up after her, but the decision was made for him when she finally reappeared. He forced himself to look like he hadn't been worried.

The look he gave her when she gave that apology was annoyed, exasperated, resigned, also maybe a little stubborn. "I'll be honest, I don't really want to forgive you. That was a really shitty thing to do."

"Then don't." It wasn't a sassy remark. She didn't care if he forgave her or not, only that she apologized.

That was just frustrating. He didn't even know how to respond to that besides with a childish 'FINE I WON'T.'

He knew he was just being irrationally angry. That didn't help much.

He turned away, pondering kicking the door again to blow off some steam. He decided against it. "And fucking Lindsey, accusing me of goading you," he muttered. "How the fuck did you get so deep in with her that she'll misread a fight for you?"

Yes, maybe he was a bit bitter that his best friend would not stand up for him and accused him of being an aggressor when he was the one getting picked on.

She frowned. Deep? They weren't deep. It wasn't something she felt strongly about enough to correct him, though, so she said nothing.

He snapped back around to shout, "And where the fuck do you get off telling me skepticism is unfuckingscientific!"

She jumped, visibly startled by his outburst. Then she crossed her arms again. "Your brand is, yeah."

She may not have shouted back, but her temper was beginning to rise.

"We don't have the same fucking evidence, Jordan! New species cropping up in town is not a reasonable leap to 'they're from a fucking video game'! And I don't know if you realize but I have basically been in radio silence from the world the whole time monsters were showing up."

Floodgates: opened.

"Even if they look and sound like the ones in Zen? Have the same offensive capabilities?" The look she gave him was irritated-skeptical, but there wasn't much bite behind her words. She'd more or less passed Duncan off as impossible to convince, so she wasn't even going to try.

"Plants and insects don't have offensive capabilities in the game! You're talking about the monsters and I just said I didn't hear about those until one attacked me!"

"Whatever." It was all a blur of what-the-fuck to her with few time points to stand out -- namely, Rhys felling that tree, finding out Alex was moving on his own, trying to and failing to kill him...

She looked up at the ceiling again, desperate enough to consider what would happen if she climbed back up and shot through the vents.

That was dumb.

Whatever. Whatever?

"Fuck you," he shot back, lowering to a normal volume again. He walked back to the door, glared at it, and then turned on her again suddenly. "I think I know now why you didn't want me to know you in real life. Because I'd figure out what a bitch you were."

Duncan did not normally use gendered insults. That particular one very rarely made it out of his mouth. But his social justice muscles were not caught up to his anger, so there it was.

He'd regret it later.

She bristled, then turned to face him. "Yes, that's exactly it," she hissed, fingers clawing into the sleeves of her jacket. "I'm a bitch. Anything else you'd like to get out while we're here? Make yourself a little less useless, maybe?"

"The fuck do you want me to do?" He swept his arms out at the room. "There's no fucking way out, and even if we did get out, there's a level 100 raid boss in the next goddamn room!"

That Rhys was probably fighting, if he wasn't already dead.

"Aren't your friends out there? Try a little harder."

"You think I'll help them by making myself a target?" he demanded. "I'm about as useful on either side of that door. I can't fight that fucking thing."

But he did pull out his cell phone and start typing out a text to send Mal, Gabe, and Rhys (not Theresa, she didn't have a cell), to ask if they were safe and someplace out of the line of fire.

"Anything's better than sitting around waiting to die." Fuck, he was such a defeatist. How much of Ravi was actually him?

She noticed his phone and said sharply, "Don't text Rhys."

If a) this wasn't Duncan and b) he wasn't pissed at her, he might have noticed how out of the blue it was for Jordan to refer to Rhys by his name rather than his online handle.

"We're not." If they were in here, they were relatively safe, and there was nothing to draw Kharveryos's attention to them. They weren't waiting to die so much as simply...waiting. If you asked him, he wasn't defeatist, he was just being practical.

His head snapped up when she said it, his face confused, but he obligingly deleted Rhys's name from the list of recipients before sending the text out. "Why?"

Depending on how long this went, they might die from hypothermia.

"It might distract him," was her minimal answer, glare averted.

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