how's your engine running, is that bridge getting built, are your hands getting filled

[selfmadman]

Who: Don and Will
What: Heavy machinery.
Where: Tinker's Lot
When: LET'S SAY Veerdi
Notes: I think I did the blockquote right this time!
Warnings: Cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide.

Malfoy had given him a name, a location; there he gets a few more names, days to try the bazaar and rough descriptions of vendors. Shops sell parts and machines that can be cannibalized. He sifts through boxes of scrap, one day runs across a Marlin hood ornament that's been turned into a necklace. Along the way a man with skin that crumbles like rotting leaves fingers the puckered scar at his chin and mentions the lot.

Don keeps track of all this himself. He likes maintaining the truck: it's absorbing work, and the results are right there for him to see. It's good to know it's waiting out there in the barn.

He enters Tinker's Lot for the first time with a list in his back pocket and a hand-drawn map he has to show someone to make sure it's oriented the right way. The place is parts and more parts scattered into the distance, corpses of vehicles that have been picked clean, looming contraptions that move with alarming unpredictability. He hates to gawk, but he has no choice as he picks his way through the yard.

He catches a hint of motor oil in the air.

Comments

[charismatic]

It might be coming off the machine Will's currently ensconced in, a multi-legged thing made of metal and some kind of unidentifiable crystal mineral. Later, he'll be mystified by what's holding it together, but at the moment it's scuttling around the his current overseer's little clearing rather well. It's making a terrible amount of noise, all the bits colliding and clanging as he takes it up a junk heap experimentally, and the controls still stick and lag, but it's working better than anything else Will's tested out here so far.

It putters out right near the top of the heap.

The overseer seems pleased anyway, chattering about resonance and psionic backwash and other things that are above Will's pay grade while he disentangles himself from the cramped cockpit. The quickest way down the heap is sliding, so after he climbs down off the spider thing, Will finds a suitable scrap of metal and goes surfing down the side of it. The rush keeps him smiling all through getting paid and picking his way out of the clearing and back onto one of the throughways.

“Hey there,” he says to someone passing by with what is going on here look that he's already learned to recognize as the trademark of a Lot newcomer. “Do you need help finding something?” Will hasn't got the whole Lot mapped out in his head quite yet, but he's got a good chunk of it down.

[selfmadman]

Don smiles, this side of self-conscious, folds and creases the scrap of paper that's been leading him around like a dog straining against a leash. He slides the map into his pocket. His hand stays there too.

"How'd you guess?" he says, wry. A hollow metallic boom sounds nearby; Don doesn't flinch but for a fleeting moment his gaze snaps away from the other man. Then it's back, focused. "I'm working on a pickup, a Ford F-150. I know this is a little like walking into a zoo and asking where they keep the goldfish food."

But he's asking.

[charismatic]

Will laughs at that, reaching behind him to fiddle with the helmet tether. He should really still be wearing it, but whatever. “Do you know what specific parts you need? That will be easier to find.” He recognizes Ford, but the rest of it not so much. He mostly just remembers that it merged with something or several somethings, during the shift from fossil fuels to solar energy.

There's something collapsing behind them, far off to the left, in an almost musical-sounding cascade of metal, but Will ignores it. The siren's not going off, and that's good enough for him.

[selfmadman]

No sign on the other man's face that the name means anything to him: that's the way it goes most of the time. "Shocks," Don says without pause for thought, "and they're at the top of a long list." He sighs almost in sympathy for the beat-up truck, draws a pack of cigarettes from inside his coat.

"I need an oil pan. I don't need tires but I don't want to wait until I do." He fits a cigarette in his lips, hesitates after returning the pack to his pocket. His eyebrows arch. "Can I smoke or will something combust?"

[charismatic]

Will shrugs, taking a moment to orient himself before he heads off toward the nearest merchant he knows of that has automobile parts, motioning for the smoker to come along. “It should be fine, out here,” he says. “If it sets off anything dangerous, the alarm will start wailing and we'll know to run.” He takes a moment to really examine his companion, curiously, and then sticks a hand out sideways while they're walking. “I'm Will, by the way.”

[selfmadman]

Taking the shrug as his cue he lights up. "Don." Don's grip is firm, practiced. He doesn't have the rough untended hands of someone who makes his living with them: his callouses are elsewhere. He's dressed neatly but practically, in clothes--boots, slacks, a long coat--with their best days behind them. "Good to meet you, Will."

He keeps pace, dragging on his cigarette, glancing at the machines long enough to get a sense of how they move. "So what do you do when you're not busy shepherding newcomers?"

[charismatic]

Will laughs, turning his head to peer up at the tiny speck of a person perched on top of the teetering, three-legged monstrosity they're passing. It's belching black smoke, from its knees, but it seems mysteriously dense, falling straight down and settling somewhere below Will's sight line. He can't smell it, either. “You see that guy up there?” he asks, jerking a thumb up toward the pilot-speck. “That's me, usually.”

[selfmadman]

Don half-turns to look, steps slowing then stopping altogether. "Jesus," he murmurs, the word muffled by the cigarette in his mouth. His eyes travel the length of the machine; he shakes his head, smiles as if he's trying the expression on for size and it doesn't fit quite right. The sight pains him in an inexplicable, elusive way: like breathing in stinging air on a cold morning.

"How's it feel to come back to earth?"

[charismatic]

It's an apt choice of words.

“I'm not really sure,” Will says. “Strange.” Maybe not any stranger than anything else, here, but as a whole – at this point, he's spent a little over half of his life on terra firma, on Earth, but it's not his, he's not part of it. Baedal isn't any different, on that front, no matter how easily he seems to be slipping into it. He grins anyway, squinting up at the sun. “I'm from space.”

[selfmadman]

Three months ago Don would have scoffed; now there's nothing more than a tickle of uncertainty. His smile turns guardedly amused. "That right?" It's a non-question, but too conversational, too light to be a brush-off.

There are no impossibilities anymore, just truths he can't look straight in the eye.

He starts walking again. "I'm from New York," he says. A touch dryly.

[charismatic]

“I went to school in New York,” Will says, incongruously cheerful. This is a good day, as far as days here go, and he's starting to enjoy the way people react to where he's from. He figures it can't be all that uncommon, in a city this size, but maybe he's wrong. “Well, academy. Military.”

He waves at a passing scientist he's acquainted with, all orange skin and purlple eyes and gravity-defying, gently-waving clouds of thready black hair. Will figures he's pretty low on the scale of strange to humans.

[selfmadman]

Don meets the stranger's eyes briefly, gives a reserved nod. It's a gesture transplanted from Ossining, perfected over countless train rides into the city--neighborly but not inviting.

"West Point?" he asks, uncertainty in his tone, the frown that passes over his face like a shadow. "I'm surprised they didn't have you training on the moon."

[charismatic]

“The moon's all R&D. I went to Lasalle,” Will says easily, stepping around a protruding bit of metal, loose gravel crunching under his boots. He's smiling, partially up at the sky, partially at Don, mostly at everything. He's not generally in the habit of unsettling people, and he's never enjoyed feeling like some kind of rare specimen under a microscope, but he figures taking a little pleasure in the absurdity of everything here is necessary survival mechanism. He's always been good at that. “I don't know if that was a thing where you're from – it had some specific programs I was qualified for. But most of my classmates were rich Terran kids.”