Something beautiful happens in this world [Open]

[theweakhavepurpose]

Who: Deputy Pratt and YOU!
What: Cake decorating, showing off his artistic prowess, shovel knight time
When: Later half of January
Where:Sand Dollars, the Library, Upper Deck
Warnings: None! (Well that's rare for him)


1. Sand Dollars
Pratt has completed his scientific research (having Sharky eat various cupcakes while naked) and has taken actual notes which are in the little notepad next to him while he sits at a table in Sand Dollars. He has one of the plastic trays from the buffet and has assembled a circle of cupcakes onto it to resemble a cake and is using a plastic butter knife to spread the frosting around so it looks like it's all one piece.

The wrappers from all of them are on the table nearby, along with some colorful other cupcakes that he's going to scoop the frosting off of in order to write out a message on this cake.

Yes, he is making the Captain a "Congrats on the Sex" cake. Sure it's been a few weeks but his memory is trash okay. He's trying.

2. The Library
Well, the binder is gone, which sucks because Pratt has already forgotten 80% of the contents. He assumes one of those people obsessed with blowing the place up stole it. So he will add his contribution to its recovery.

In its place is a Serena Eterna spiral notebook with a ship on the front, the ship is crossed out and instead there's a reproduction of Ryan's original cat drawing of Guatauva, but every page afterwards also has a cat drawing. He has faithfully recreated every cat internet meme he can think of. There's space above and below to make them into ship-centric memes. So have at.

His drawings look like this because I'm not going to draw 30 cat memes.

3. Deck
Pratt picked up the best package from home he's ever gotten. It was huge heavy and when he unwrapped it he squealed like a school girl because he's so damn excited. Friday is his favorite person for the next few hours because he has his shovel launcher now. Which is exactly what it sounds like, it is a rocket launcher, that shoots shovels.

He has a pile of shovels next to him, as he stands on the deck, aiming at the hull of the ship and then KUHTHUWNK the thing embeds itself into the metal siding and Pratt straight up cackles. Oh this is fantastic.

On the other side of him is his Christmas present he never opened which is 99 cans of Pabst in an absurdly long box and he's about to have the best day. Drink some beer, launch some shovels, spend way too long prying shovels out of the ship to do it again.

Montana's finest, right here.

4. Wildcard
Hit me with anything. He's always in the buffet or arcade or around the deck doing random patrols.

Comments

library tho shovel launcher calls to be so bad...

[skaikru]

( she enters the library, passes his table, and —

...wants to ask, but also doesn't want to know? yanno how it goes, when you're in a funk but are struck with a weird tableau of humanity doing its best work, with a limited number of emotional spoons with which to bury in other peoples business?

pratt just lucks (or unlucks) out by not just being anybody. and a lot like the morning after halloween, it's so much easier for clarke to focus in on someone else's issues. at least doodling in a notebook isn't promising atrocities, and after staring at some book titles without really seeing them, she gives up and drifts across the room to look over his shoulder. huh, second person she's come across doodling kitties in a limited amount of time, weird odds. )

I didn't know you could draw.

[theweakhavepurpose]

I can't but... I'm suffering here for the team.

["The Team" being the entirety of the ship. Pratt over here slaving away to bring the memes to the people.]

You uh, have memes in space? Like funny pictures you send each other in response to shit?

[skaikru]

No, we didn't.

( but she's not so uncultured and awful as to pronounce it "me-me" or "mem". meme — a new old-world word, not committed to memory. and here clarke pauses to watch pratt work, quietly reviewing the checklist of things they did have in space.

books from the original grounders, kept behind glass. a small tree, with a cult following. a few media clips left over from their ancestors, including a fifa match she'd watched over and over with her father, always pretending not to know how it ended. the equivalent of digital textbooks about earth. and, oh yeah! )

I mean, we had vandalism. Little stick figure paintings of people being sucked out of an airlock. I guess in hindsight that was ( not very, not at all ) ... funny.

[theweakhavepurpose]

That's just human nature. Graffiti gets real weird when people are hella stressed and living through the apocalypse. Or after I guess.

It's like... not funny, but it is. Because everything is so batshit that it becomes absurd or something. I'm sure there's a reason for it other than our brains are stupid.

[Something they could find out if they had a psychiatrist on the boat. Alas.]

What do you think happened to that binder full of info?

[skaikru]

( hannibal lector when???

she can noncommittally agree with pratt by making a vague noise in the back of her throat while still spending most her energy fixating on the way "first son, first to dye" had been etched into the side of the dropship. at the time, laughable because john murphy couldn't spell "die". a few days later, more of a tragic, unheeded warning once they'd found wells jaha with a hole in his throat. graffiti as an outlet and graffiti as a threat...

then, oh, subject change. )

I think Skulduggery's a little bi — ( ... ) ...protesting. Sulking. Whatever.

[theweakhavepurpose]

I'd be sulking too if my boyfriend had to kill me in front of like fifty people cuz I went into a psychotic rage. That shit sucks.

I basically went into hiding after I did that and I didn't know you and you didn't kill me in front of anyone... at least I don't think you did. [He doesn't know, Pratt wasn't there at the time.] So he gets a pass on whining for a while.

Was kinda thinking one of the people who wanna explode the ship stole it. Maybe it finally had some super useful info and they're gonna exploit it. Man, I hope they don't explode reality or something. Especially that dude who lightninged the fuck out of the deck during the halloween party. I saw that even through the fucking haze I was in.

[He means Jade.]

[skaikru]

( the lack of skulduggery sympathy on clarke's end is suffocating and flat. is the idea awful? yes. did she do something similar in front of well over 400 people? yeah. does she vindictively hope it hurt to be shredded down to individual bones? you betcha. does she care how much the captain wept over it? not in the slightest.

but. internal monologues are internal for a reason. and they stay that way. )

...no one else was around. ( back to that rainy night on the deck, with the quiet thought that — if anyone else had been around, would she have just stopped strangling him when he was unconscious? there'd been a solid minute after he'd stopped moving that the cord of bracelet had still been biting into her palms...

then a sigh. ) No one I know ( ie, none of my people ) took it. And you don't need to worry about Jade, ( she'd been dead by that point on halloween, but stalked the shit out of the photos at sea pictures after the fact ) He's not the type to do anything proactive.

[theweakhavepurpose]

I know everyone wants to get the fuck out of here but uh... I dunno if reality imploding is a great idea. I kinda like being not dead. Wanna keep it that way.

[ He puts down his colorful markers because this conversation is a little too heavy for him to be drawing cats making faces.]

Jade. Right yeah.

You talked to him since? Not Jade, the skeleton.

[skaikru]

( r.i.p the mood, but that really just comes with the territory when talking to clarke in general.

a beat of silence on her end, then an almost careful: )

I have. ( and there's only about 30% of that conversation she's willing to share about. )

[theweakhavepurpose]

[Hm. That silence is a little concerning.]

Do you need to borrow my shovel?

[skaikru]

( hemming, hawing, considering, redacting her own thoughts, weighing the pros or sharing with the cons of potentially over sharing. but.

in the end. it's pratt. who feels like the last person who would or could judge her for being a little crazy in this situation. )

To beat or bury him with?

[theweakhavepurpose]

Either. Both. I think you should all be entitled to one free skeleton bashing. Only fair.

[He'd have been fine if anyone he attacked beat him to death with a pipe. It doesn't occur to him that maybe that's not the normal reaction.]

[skaikru]

( the sentiment is strongly appreciated, and thoroughly considered. but by this point, it feels like the moment for righteous vengeance has passed and clarke skipped over most of the brutality — namely because she was scared of how much she'd wanted to wrought upon skulduggery.

a beat, then a near dogged shake of her head. )

That's okay. I'm fine. I took one of his bones.

[theweakhavepurpose]

Like... out... of his body?

[He's imagining some Mortal Kombat spine-ripping fatality right now.]

Does he know or is this how I find out you're the world's best pick pocket?

[skaikru]

( the snort that exits her nose is a vague attempt at humor, but it's hollow. like the victory had been. )

It wasn't anything spectacular as that. He let me take it.

[theweakhavepurpose]

Is he giving them out? That's.. very fucking weird. What are you even gonna do with it?

[skaikru]

Undecided. Might put it on my wall, might shove it in a drawer, might just throw it overboard. I think I told Skulduggery I'd make it into a headband.

I... wasn't really thinking ahead when I asked for it, though.

[theweakhavepurpose]

Okay let's.. back up a sec here. You just waltzed up to him and asked for a bone and he handed it over because he thought you were gonna use it for a fashion accessory?

Way to shoot your shot man. Nicely done.

[skaikru]

I mean, there was some build up.

( build up", a lovely translation of "being visciously murdered then denied what she'd demanded as recompense". absolutely not about to share that she'd first asked skulduggery to brand protection sigils onto her arms, or engrave them into her bones. that's just a little too much crazy.

the end result of wrenching a rib bone out of the skeletal man hadn't been nearly as satisfactory to the boiling need for revenge as clarke had hoped. and pratt's postmortem praise tickles, but doesn't quite sate either. )

But that is more or less how it played out. ( ... ) He owed me.

[theweakhavepurpose]

Yeah I guess he did. But that's just kinda... I dunno. Is he lopsided now? Do ribs grow back if you're a magical skeleton?

[He has so many questions about this.]

If nothing else you can probably use it to make a weird voodoo doll of him and like.. set it on fire. Sharky would say fire is cathartic so you know, worth a try.

[skaikru]

I hope so and I hope not.

Fire was my first thought too. Yuuki even let me take his flamethrower for a few days. But I figured it'd take too long. ( she doesn't just carry the bone around with her, but if she did this would be the point clarke looked at it thoughtfully and scraped her fingernail along the compact tissue.

thoughtfully: ) I don't know anything about voodoo yet. That sure is a thought tho.

( everything's fine, no one worry, this conversation is completely normal. )

[theweakhavepurpose]

[Pratt here has no idea that he's joking and Clarke is deadly serious.]

Someone probably knows more about that then me. Bash I'd guess. [Is that racist? New Orleansist? That feels a little racist, moving on.] It would take forever to burn, even when you cremate people at crazy high temps the bones stick around and just kinda fall into bits. They just don't want anyone to know that chunks of their grandma's spine are in a bucket at a funeral home waiting to go out with the trash.

I guess it's cool he let you take it though. Hopefully that shit is all dealt with and no more evil armored skeleton.

[skaikru]

( and just like that there's a New Bit between them. )

...yeah. ( spoken re: bone remains. and that's about all that's gonna be said on that, because the natural continuation of that yeah is i burnt 300 warriors with the thrusters on a rocket and still walked out to find their intact, slightly overdone skeletons covered in ash and that's just... too much.

so, moving on. )

Maybe. We can hope at least. I won't be betting my life on it, but... hope.

[theweakhavepurpose]

I don't think you get a choice, not like we can get away from people, all stuck in this weird bubble of a reality.

But like.. if we don't have hope what do we have? I spent my whole damn life being fucking miserable and I don't wanna do that here too so.. trying to be more optimistic you know? Turning a new leaf or something.

Anyway, I made you a meme to explain them to the Demon King.

[He grins and flips some pages to show Clarke his beautiful drawing of the captain as a cat with a lot of Clarke threatening him with knives.]

[skaikru]

( "you still have hope?" "we're still breathing". sometimes it's almost funny how clearly she can hear bellamy's voice ringing in her ears, like he's not gone to the nothing or drifting around in dead space on board the go-sci ring.

but, more immediately, she dips her head down and doesn't respond. doesn't really want to acknowledge that pratt's the second person she thinks about (natsuno being the first) when reminded that the dead are better off on this boat than back home. that line of thinking threatens the resolve she has for finding a way to kill or incapacitate the captain, and is not allowed right now.

so, meme shift.

clarke blinks at the picture. ) That's not what hap— ( and all of a sudden she gets it, and snorts so hard a hand raises to her mouth on instinct. a second later, a bit wryly: )

I only hit him once.