multiversallogs | → it is a lovely thing that we have.

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.

Threaded | Flat

Not everyone in Mafaton is as understanding about fellow monstrosities when they're werewolves; to some, they're a more tolerated form of other xenian, a step up from the usual 'slightly more challenging food', 'not food and therefore uninteresting' and 'not food but useful' - but then there are those whose close association with the wolf is more along the lines of 'long-standing blood feud', and in their town they tend to be inclined to do more than bat an eyelid.

It's just an accident of timing that GG appears to be following Ilde at just the right moment as she digs in her purse for her keys, headed towards Ivan's building. They're accustomed to her, here; used to seeing her hanging off his elbow, coming and going from his apartment, peering around him in Gutters. The man watching GG so closely knows to wait, for instance, until he's in Ilde's line of sight to speak.

“Get another dog, did you.”

--she pauses.

The implication is not difficult to grasp. She can feel what the other woman is, in a strange way (in a familiar way, almost, but she ignores that for the moment), and xenian social politics are not exactly something to which she's oblivious. (Still, it crosses her mind that she remembers telling Mitchell, you are the horror movie kind of vampire--)

It's an impulse decision. It's probably a terrible idea. It's making herself involved in a dispute that she has absolutely no part of.

It's Ilde saying, “Yes, something like that,” and holding the door to the building open so the wolf can precede her inside. Fuck only knows what she's going to do if she can't take the hint in that form.

Clio's schedule is very different from GG's, in that it involves a lot less going outside. Partly because she's still recovering physically and partly because she's fucking terrified of outside, right now.

Instead, she stays at the Eshtazin compound and keeps herself busy. Today, whatever day it is (she hasn't bothered trying to keep track, it's all too confusing right now), she has decided to bake a cake. Except for how it's not actually a day, but rather 2am in the morning, thanks to nightmares combined with having slept almost all the way through her first few days in the city. Lea is - asleep, probably, and GG left a while ago so when Clio had woken up, restless and scared, going into the kitchen and starting to make a sponge cake had just sort of happened.

Almost two hours later, she's perched on a stool in the kitchen - which now smells like sugar, fresh baked cake and strawberries - carefully icing the cake.

Hal is having a good day.

It's taken quite a while to get to that point, after his tumultuous evening at the swap meet. He'd been teetering on the edge then, but he'd pulled back, and not just back but turned in on himself, holed up in his room at the Inn with a chair against the door until he started to feel stable again. He'd started with to-do lists next, simple tasks like obtaining the necessary means for survival, followed by the materials to carry out his usual routines—paper, pencil, needle, thread, make-shift weights, access to a radio and books. What money he'd been given at the Inn had been carefully allotted for these necessities, and what he couldn't afford, he had omitted from his schedule. It wasn't perfect—he'd written Baby Massage & Stimulating Story Time on his rota at twelve without thinking and had to stop and find a fresh pad of paper and start all over again—but the process of adapting his usual routines to a new context kept him busy, and that was, after all, the whole point. A few days on this schedule, going through the same motions again and again, and he'd finally started to settle.

And so today he is setting foot outside the Inn for what is quite possibly the first time since the party. It isn't actually a deviation from his routine—at six thirty on his rota, it says Five Laps Around the Inn, only he'd been doing said laps in the courtyards and halls to avoid contact with anyone unexpected. But today he feels like maybe the extra precaution is unnecessary. Today he feels almost safe.

Catching scent of a— is that a werewolf? A something decidedly inedible, in any case, comes as a pleasant surprise. Finally an easing, however brief, of the ceaseless pounding hunger in the back of his mind. He slows as he approaches, trying to pinpoint exactly who is giving off that scent, and his eyes land on her when he does.

"Hello." Don't mind him. Just your friendly neighborhood vampire out for a jog.

mafaton;

no subject

mog hill;