zenderael_rl | [EVENT]

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.

Gabe responded first, and Duncan typed back an answer right away. "Okay," was all he said, kind of skeptical in tone, like 'okay whatever you say buddy,' but he didn't press or question any further.

Satisfied with his response, she started to pace the width of the room to keep as warm as she possibly could, leaving Duncan to his phone in silence.

She did want to text Rhys, to see if he was all right, but there was no point. If he was fighting (he was totally fighting) he wouldn't be able to answer. Most likely he wouldn't even notice receiving a text in the first place. Noelle, too. How useful were arrows in this situation? Was she struggling with the cold, too?

Well both of his friends were okay out there, that was a relief. But he was certainly not, he realized, as he noticed how difficult it was getting to type thanks to the cold turning his fingers stiff. He sent off the text he was working on and let out a slow breath, watching the condensation form in the air.

He hated Kharveryos, he decided.

He also decided that Jordan was right, he did need to do something, because he was not properly equipped to do nothing in weather like this.

The tables outside had tablecloths. Did they keep those in here? They'd be thin and cheap, but it was better than relying on what he was wearing to keep his own body heat in. He started moving, scanning the shelves, pausing to answer Gabe and Mal when his phone went off.

He found a plastic tub nestled between a shelf and a stack of folding chairs that he probably wouldn't have seen if he wasn't looking as closely as he'd been and pried it open to check the contents. He dug through cheap centerpiece arrangements until he found a corner of white that led to a small stack of folded tablecloths.

"Hey," he called out to Jordan, as he dug them out of the tub one at a time, dropping them to the floor beside him. He wasn't petty enough not to give her something to keep warm with; he'd worked out most of his anger by calling her a bitch. "Come here."

Meanwhile, the opposite was occurring in Jordan; her worries and frustration were steadily rising, each feeding the other into a silent anger that chipped at her ability to keep a cool head. She'd eventually stopped pacing and crouched down in front of a folded table, holding her knees to her torso as she ignored the childish urge to scream and physically lash out.

Duncan's voice snapped her attention away -- at least, for the moment -- and she lifted her head to look at him. Her eyes narrowed at the cloths on the floor, but she got up and walked over, looking as if she might cry at any minute. (She wouldn't.)

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