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

[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.”