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.