→ it is a lovely thing that we have.

[lupa]

Who: GG and YOU. GET IN HERE.
What: Fun with a warwulf.
Where: Everywhere! Particularly Mafaton and in and around Flag Hill, but she really is exploring everywhere.
When: All week and more.
Notes: Specify when and where in the header. Feel free to meet her in human or wolf form, though be aware that she doesn't speak when wolfed; if she's on all fours, she'll be either in Mafaton or in a fairly rural, isolated area, particularly the forests and mountains around Flag Hill. The write up here is just a prompt or an infodump, don't feel you have to base anything on it. And feel for to PM me for more stuff. /jazzhands
Warnings: TBA.

The question is this: what to do first?

Food. Shelter. Medical attention. They repeat themselves over and over in her brain, a mantra of survival. Except the first two, at least, come easily; Lea's already landed herself an enormous stretch of land in Flag Hill, and food is...everywhere. There's prey- lots of it, too, none of it mutated by an apocalyptic blast or hardened by living life in a wasteland, not as thin and wiry as it was at home and not the subject of intense competition between her and any other starving predator.

Of course, while she enjoys the freedom to hunt, the things that happen in the forests around Flag Hill aren't exactly sweetness and light. It's easier as a wolf; she went deep into the woods in her human form once, and very quickly went out again.

Anyway, Baedal has restaurants.

Not that renourishing herself is as easy as that. She ends up throwing up a lot of what she eats, unable to stomach nearly as much as she wants to. Wolves are built to feast or famine, but humans aren't. Werewolves aren't. So: medical attention. The tricky part. Healthcare is free for newcomers- she needs some proof that she's a newcomer- she can get proof from the Valhalla Inn if she stays there and she doesn't want to- she can get proof from the Employment Office but they say they can't sign anything if she isn't working or looking for work- she says she's not well enough to work- they require a note from the doctor- that's not free.

Crisse. Out of the fire and into the bureaucracy. So it is, then, that GG spends a lot of her first week or so in Baedal shouting at people behind desks and eventually starts hanging around one of the werecreature support centres (yes, really). The people in there (it is blissfully dark and cool, though it does smell of frightened animals, which puts GG somewhat on edge) sigh and say things like yes, this happens a lot. Xenians tend to be in worse health than humans, she learns from pamphlets; the unemployment rate is higher amongst them. They are in general poorer, less represented, with a higher chance of being murdered, attacked...

GG puts the pamphlet down (on the floor, where some of them are placed for the ease of clients who find themselves most comfortable on four legs- it's strange, being somewhere that's made with you in mind) and leaves. The service put her in contact with a thankfully sane and capable xenian doctor happy to take charity cases; a blessing, though a charity case isn't what GG enjoys being, so she tries not to think about it and promises to pay once she has a job.

In the meantime, she explores. She familiarises herself with the city- nose first. It's not uncommon for her to close her eyes, all the better to build up the picture in her head; the warm smell of horses, cigarette smoke, mud, cement, cold blood, hot blood, human blood, vampires, a something else and a something else- she can't put names to them, but she knows them by scent. She goes out at night, mainly, though coming to Baedal left her rather jet-lagged, for want of a better word; in her world it had been night, in Baedal, day. She bears the sunlight occasionally. After all, the city, while not sleeping, is rather balanced in favour of those who prefer daylight- apart from Mafaton, where she wanders a lot, conscious of the fact that people here likely know what she is; one only needs a halfway decent sense of smell to know that she's a wolf playing human. Once or twice she shifts, leaves her clothes in one of the discreet changing rooms the were service provides with the dingy lockers operable without opposable thumbs, and gives up on the disguise. She's not sure taking to the streets as a wolf would be a good idea elsewhere, but no one in Mafaton bats an eyelid. ...Except when they do.

She's not out of apocalypse mode just by virtue of washing her clothes and taking a bath, of seeing doctors and fussing about bureaucracy. When presented with food she still catches herself thinking how much of this can I save for later, how much of this should I ration out to the people depending on me- she's still wary of buying things (you can buy things here) because what if she has to move suddenly? She can't weigh herself down. But she tries. She still looks like a soldier- straight back, long stride, unflinching glare, unsmiling mouth, practical clothes, a kind of regimented shabbiness that speaks of a woman who has bigger things on her mind. She has never been party of an army- but apocalypse survival is a kind of fight all of its very own.

Perhaps it's wrong to be so unnerved by a city that works- well, that nearly works, she corrects, thinking about that pamphlets again. There's almost a desire to pronounce it too complicated, too difficult, too alien and stay indoors, or stick to the compound and the forest- but that would feel like giving in.

Comments

[rhinemaid]

It doesn't occur to Ilde to wonder or worry about why GG knows the Sonja she means - it just neatly confirms to her that GG is from her version of reality. Sonja is not exactly an unknown, any more, for some very interesting reasons.

“Sonja,” she confirms, peaceably. If Sonja Garin is an urban legend then Ilde is her storyteller, and there's something like a smile when she talks about her - not exactly a smile, but a warmth, a secret thing, like beckoning someone with a crooked finger and no, there is a smile, and (this is where the monsters are). Ilde loves Sonja the way faeries do, pretty and unsettling, loyalty-as-obsession, and that's what she builds her home and her steadiness around, here. That's where she stands.

“We've been here for about a year.”

[lupa]

There is something about the apocalypse and friendships.

--not that GG's loyalty to Lea is quite so co-dependent, but it is distinctly fire-forged, a relationship informed by the ending of the world; in such conditions, absolute loyalty and substitute family is just what's necessary. GG rebuilt herself after the image, a changed person, a different creature entirely, and Lea was always there, a part of the process of becoming the person she is now.

Which is to say that to an extent that doesn't strike her as too strange, and neither does Ilde's not-quite-human smile because for GG, not-quite-human isn't the same as not-quite-right. It would be stranger to smell fae and see Ilde mimicking humanity perfectly, like a discordant note.

"How?" she says, before she really thinks about it. "I mean- ugh, no, ignore me, that's me not being acclimatised yet." They've both gotten used to more. Haven't they? Well, they both must have done, because they've both survived the apocalypse. "You like it."

Not a question. Well, she does too, in a way that makes her feel guilty, because she had things to do at home.

[rhinemaid]

A shrug. “I died in New York.” --so it doesn't matter whether or not she likes it here (she does, she really does, even for all of its - many - flaws), because she hasn't got anywhere else to be any more. This is not how Sonja sees it, yet, and they need to talk about that, but...Ilde doesn't want to, not yet, and so it goes. So she talks around certain things, because it's easier to do that than to get into something she's not yet ready to express even in the privacy (relative, here) of her own mind.