come_sailaway | AUGUST EVENT: DRAGSTRIP RIOT

[it begins with a PA announcement on the morning of the 12th, Friday’s voice coming through clear and cheerful.]

Any passengers that wish to debark to our latest port of call can exit the ship through the metal detectors on deck zero! Please be advised that all alcohol will be confiscated prior to your exit!

[and whoever heads down to the lowest deck will find that what she said was true: there is a metal detector set up there, with Friday manning it. after placing all metal objects (including weapons, and all your weapons) onto the tray, she gestures for the passenger to step through the metal detector.

they exit in an entirely different location. suffering from a splitting headache, and wearing an entirely different outfit than they had put on this morning, but unscathed. they even got their weapons back!

the interior of the diner is essentially your average jonathan rockets establishment. the narrow lane between booths and counter is manned by an entirely mute Friday clone, who cheerily takes orders and serves up food (cooked??? somewhere???) with an almost unnatural talent for roller blading. there is a jukebox in the corner that can be fed with quarters passengers will inexplicably find on their person. the available songs range from the 50s to the 80s, with a particularly wide selection of songs from the platters.

outside, the diner is a great chrome boxcar, circled by a small parking lot. a large neon sign proclaims it to be GIL’S; it buzzes and flickers on and off often. passengers who have regained vehicles will find these vehicles parked outside. there are also a handful of midcentury American cars; none of them seem to require keys, and the gas tank seems set at full.

past the parking lot is a seemingly endless expanse of desert sand and scrubland, bisecting by the empty highway that the diner abuts. a few miles down this highway, the road forks into a smaller one, which winds its way up a steep, ragged mountain until plateauing into another parking lot, with only a small, old wooden fence between the cars and the edge of the cliff.

should they wish to return to the ship, passengers can leave at any time the same way they entered: walking through a doorway that now claims to be a mop closet. passing through will leave them on deck zero, again with a splitting headache. it’s probably fine.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There is no real right way about it. I'm sorry always ends up feeling cheap, same as it does after someone's told you they've died. But for what it's worth, the end of the world 100 years ago is just regarded as history. Something distant, a long past event that Clarke's generation had no hope of doing anything about so they turned their attention towards surviving in the long haul. They'd been meant to just be a transitional generation, one step towards humanity returning to the Earth's surface an additional 100 years down the line — until everything'd gone wrong and the Ark started dying.

It'd been the second coming of the deathwave that felt personal and truly tragic to live through, then die at the end of. And it's the retelling of that which usually sticks in Clarke's throat unless asked outright but, hey, they have a Rover to focus on.

"Yeah, it was pretty wild. Anyway, we found this —" Absolutely patting the side of her car, this is her emotional support military transport right now "— in the basement of a mountain bunker. It was a relic, but perfectly functional and the first thing I ever learned to drive."

"Cool," Darcy leans against the rover all cool and nonchalant with her arms folded, "it's a cool truck. Maybe you could take me for a drive in it or something."

Wait that could be seen as flirting- abort mission abort mission- "if you wanted or whatever, it's not- it was just an idea, you know, so you can show it off or something."

Nailed it.

"Cool truck," she repeats, patting it again.

You know what else not coming from a normal world gets ya? After the PTSD, predisposition for grime, and horrible bedtime stories that are just loose allegories for genocide? An absolutely not normal metric for flirting. Watch Clarke and Pal talk about the people they'd sacrifice internal organs for a few days from now, a simple ride in the Rover could never compare...

And as such, she doesn't track the reason behind Darcy's sudden and immediate back tracking, but weathers it and blinks extensively before offering the shell of a smile. Eyes still too swollen for any measure of levity to reach them, voice still scratched from swallowing sobs. But an attempt.

"Are you busy right now? I've gone out that way —" Pointing towards the cliff. "— already, but not over there." Another point, this time towards and past the diner, to whatever is to be found in that stretch of desert at Gil's back.

Another feature of this cool truck are the oversized wheels, tread large and wide, meaning:

"We wouldn't have to stick to the roads, either."

"I think my schedule just cleared up," Darcy answers with the levity that Clarke herself can't provide right now. She's not sure when exactly she of all people became so lighthearted- probably around about the time she made friends with the sort of people who weathered their families dying and surviving in the cold void of space. Bit hard to be self-pitying about dying a couple of times in the face of it, especially when her own world seems more and more distant by the day.

Darcy indicates with her head that she's going to the passenger's side and trots over to the door, climbing in with some restrained eagerness.

"I've done the loop of the roads with my girlfriend and a couple of the others, but I haven't gone off-roading yet."

Action is so much easier than thought. Clarke's still clinging to Jasper Jordan's goggles in one hand, but with the other she's wrenching open the drivers side door of the Rover and hauling herself into the seat. It feels —... wrong. Some measure of wrong, at least, to go from openly weeping over a dead friend to a joyride through the desert. But it's ultimately another exercise in compartmentalization. His face may haunt her dreams ("You're not god, Clarke. You don't get to decide who lives and who dies.") for the foreseeable months, but there are other crises to deal with on the immediate horizon. Nothing to be done for the dead unless they show up on the ship.

Settled in her seat, she'll lean over Darcy to gently deposit the goggles in the glove compartment. A few old-world maps may flutter out onto the floormats in the process, but they don't matter. Then it's seatbelts on, a dutiful sniff to section off mourning from moments ahead, and the vehicle gutters to life under the turn of the key.

"Let's off-road, then," she says like a ready-set-go, pressing the clutch and egging the Rover from the asphalt of the parking lot directly into the sandy dirt in front of them. No reverse, no navigating to the open road and taking a sudden turn into open land. Just the bumpy lurch of driving directly over a parking stop.

Darcy sucks herself to the seat when Clarke reaches over, eyes glued to the goggles as if they'll just reveal their secrets if she stares intently enough. The inanimate object remains mute, and then Darcy's got bigger issues to worry about because the rover lurches into life and she grips onto whatever's within arm's reach to try and steady herself.

"Jesus Christ- okay-"

The levity of her earlier joyride with Jade Curtiss and Natsuno Yuuki is gone. There's no ecstatic smile over a remnant of her homeworld showing up, no eager and willing offer to teach or let Darcy try out driving the Rover, no age appropriate — if not personality appropriate — giggle fits when they hit higher speeds. Clarke doesn't even floor the accelerator for the rush of adrenaline that comes when inertia throws them back in their seats, she's just getting up to a healthy 20mph and weathering the bumps like a practiced stunt driver.

Darcy's reaching for the oh-shit handles though, and with no off-road traffic, Clarke can afford to look at her sidelong and register that's funny even if she's in no mood for laughing.

Dryly, an attempt at bemused, and not unkindly: "You're fine. I'm not going to roll us. And I'll avoid the bigger rocks, if you're scared."

"I'm not scared," Darcy snaps back like she's not still gripping the oh-shit handles.

"I just haven't really done any off-road driving, that's all."

She's a city-slicker at heart, and driving old cobblestone roads is absolutely not as stressful as this. She looks pointedly out the window and huffs.

"I've never been to a desert before."

"Me neither." It's the chill of space or the lush green dampness of a forest for Clarke. She's been to a coast exactly once, and the delight of seeing the ocean for the first time was undermined by a thick, suffocating fog and the hounds of destruction nipping at their heels. She's never seen snow, either, though the ash that fell through the sky and blanketed the ground near the end of the world had done it's best to imitate.

"I knew it'd be warm and arid, but I didn't expect it to be so hot it almost hurt to breathe. Or for the very air to shimmer."

"It's humid when it gets hot back home. 'm not used to how dry the heat is. It's... almost nicer. When it's humid there's nothing you can do to cool down, it just... sticks to you."

The heat here of course is a presence all on its own, overbearing and looming as a prison warden, with precious few ways to escape it.

"I think it's kind of pretty. If you're inside the diner and not out in it. I'd hate to have to walk through it. Hiking is bad enough normally."

AUGUST EVENT: DRAGSTRIP RIOT

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