multiversallogs | i wrote this song while i was drunk

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i wrote this song while i was drunk

Who: Jae and you.
What: Sorting his head out, getting back to work.
Where: Various places around town, including bar hopping and slice of life activities in Creekside, at work at the Vault, Anarchy 99, and the radio station, and at a temple in Brock Marsh.
When: Over the next week.
Notes: Would you like to bump into Jae somewhere? Note the location/vague timeline in your tag and it shall be so.
Warnings: Unpleasant thoughts about rape culture, drug use.

In the aftermath of attempting to help Megan and his encounter with Hilmi, Jae has a difficult time processing the series of events as things that happened to him - because things haven't happened to him. Things happened to Megan. Sure, if you hit a vanity with a sledgehammer, it's not just the glass that's cracked, but he's still not the fucking mirror; Jae's reeling from the turbulence. So is everyone else who knows (well, maybe not Sonja) and everyone else who will know - and more people will react to what Jae did, and so on, and so on, like ripples, because every time anyone does something violent or cruel, the whole of their world feels it. Society didn't become soulless overnight. It took a hundred million weeks like these and now, even when people feel the backlash, they don't seem realize it.

It's normal.

(It's horrible.)

Jae buys a couple of tabs at the Vault before his shift and rolls all the way through it. If there's one thing he appreciates about Baedal, it's that so much more is perfectly legal (or at least, perfectly unregulated), and the ecstasy (or space ecstasy) he can get is pure, none of this shit cut with coke or speed like he had to worry about back at home. It's a good night for everybody, which is fortunate; it's always good when he works whether or not he uses any enchantments, but this week, he's not even letting his subconscious do anything - he feels like there's a great gaping wound somewhere intangible inside him, and the stitches keep splitting. He just doesn't want to bleed anymore.

While he's been made one of the floor staff family with ease at the Vault, his experiences at Anarchy 99 have been more - well. It caters to dwarven metal. Still, there's a fair amount of enthusiasm for his style ("Just put some more INXS on it"), and when one of the waitresses asks him what happened that one night with Hilmi (because he hasn't come back), he just shrugs. Jae isn't sure if he should be feel fortunate that she's the only one who noticed they walked out back together, but while some of the girls liked Hilmi, some of them really didn't, and she decides to interpret that shrug as him having done everybody a favor. The notion of it makes him uneasy - but it's not like he can correct her and not lie, so he just stays quiet, and thinks about the same thing he thought about that night. That if somebody comes to arrest him, he'll just go. The notion of being locked up is like a suffocating nightmare at the end of a long and dark hallway on his head, but what's even more terrifying is the idea of becoming the kind of person who wouldn't take responsibility for doing something awful. (He'll ask Ilde for Sonja's number, he decides. He'd rather apologize to her than the police, and he knows enough about the military to know speaking to someone's commanding officer is as good as.)

Too much liquor, long nights, and investing in a pill cutter; Jae almost feels human again, losing himself in work. The radio station is a hilarious disaster, but he likes his boss, as much of a lunatic as she is. That he's at the bottom of the ladder again makes him feel like even more a child, stumbling over himself and his magic and his emotions as he is in this strange place. But there, it's not as bad. He hits the bar across the way from his flat in Creekside, he buys groceries and a new pair of sunglasses, and then he comes home ("home") and lays on the floor and stares up at the ceiling and pretends his head spins because he's been drinking too much.

He doesn't sleep for two nights, and then spends the third up and reading the book that appeared in the arrival room with him. It's the first time he touched it since he shoved it in the back of his closet when he moved in. The next evening, he goes to one of Shada's temples in Brock Marsh, and doesn't do anything beside sit quietly in the back.

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It was after his shift, and Jay, of course, was taking the train back to Flyside. To be more exact, he was on the Sud Line taking his train back to the center of the city so he could then transfer to the train that would take him to Flyside. He had a notebook in hand with detailed schematics of how the train worked, and he was studying them closely. His work day may be over, but Jay could be a bit of a workaholic when it came to a project he enjoyed, and while by now he understood very well how the trains worked, he was, in essence, trying to drum up more work for himself by searching for inefficiencies in the system that he could work on in addition to his usual maintenance duties.

He adjusted his glasses on his nose, then looked up at Jae, noticing the very striking white hair. Normally he'd just assume that it was dyed, but in Baedal, he couldn't be sure.

Jae finds the train in parts useful and frustrating - but that, at least, is familiar. He's not sure if it's funny or sad that public transportation is the same everywhere. (But it's free, so he can't bitch too much.) It reminds him more of the tubes than the Seoul metro; such efficiency is not for just any city, it seems.

And like on the London tubes, Jae has a habit while on the el train: listening to music and ignoring the shit out of everyone around him. His earbuds are neon pink and the device it's plugged into is glowing faintly, powered by some kind of bizarre source he's never heard of - but it's working well enough, so he's properly fascinated by it, intently flicking through the controls and reflecting on the sound quality. The volume isn't up loud enough for him not to hear the station announcements though, and he flicks his gaze up when the loudspeaker pings to check where he is. In the process, he notices some guy staring at him, and he smiles politely before looking back at his not-an-iPod.

While it was the hair that drew his attention, it was the ipod like thing that held it. At first Jay hadn't noticed it, or rather, not thought anything of it. On the New York subway people listened to music all the time, after all, and it wasn't anything of note. However, he remembered from the things he'd worked on so far while he was in this place that most things didn't work quite how he was used to, and so far that was the first thing that appeared to be an mp3 player that he'd seen.

When the white haired man smiled at him, Jay smiled back for a second, then asked, when the stranger's attention shifted away again, "So what is that? I mean, it looks like some off brand ipod, but I've noticed things are different here. Do you know what that runs on?"

It takes him a second to realize he's being addressed, so he misses the first half of whatever the other man says; but the time he hits pause and gently removes one ear bud, he's missed the entire thing.

"What?" It's probably the device so he tilts it, a silent question - did he miss an inquiry about this thing? "Do you have one?"

Since the stranger didn't get the ear buds out of his ears until he'd finished talking, Jay wasn't surprised that he didn't hear him, and didn't particularly mind. That was what happened when you talked to someone wearing ear buds, after all.

"No, but where did you get it? Do you know what it runs on?" If he could get one of his own, he could dissect it and see how similar it was to the ipods of his own world.

"Oh, it's a crystal player," Jae says, looking down at it. "They've got them at a couple places where you can buy CiD add-ons, I think. One of my co-workers gave me this one, though."

They're pretty expensive - Baedal has a vast plethora of odd devices and gadgets, but recording and playback ones are tricky because there's no standardized format. Jae lucked out, with one of the graveyard hosts at KBS taking a shine to him and giving him her old one when she upgraded.

"...I guess it runs on a crystal?"

"I think I'm going to have to get one." Or rather, when he saw the price, he'd have to save up for one. "Sorry. I forgot to introduce myself. I'm Jay, I'm kind of new here, I've only been here a month. Still learning about stuff."

"It's been fine so far." It'll be a trick trying to convert what he has to a format that can get transferred onto it, but such problems are every-day struggles for someone who works in media. He'll survive.

Jae gives a short laugh. "Nice to meet you. I am also Jae."

"Really? Cool! Wait, are you the Jae that was supposed to know about the blue stuff?"

Yes, Jae was, apparently, now famous as the guy who knows about blue stuff. Although Jay was fairly certain that there wasn't much to know about it other than that it may or may not be window cleaner, and that drinking it wasn't advisable. Of course, it was entirely possible that Jae could have a completely different assessment of the stuff. Either way, it didn't much matter considering that the party was over weeks ago.

.. And he laughs, cracking up and scratching his nose for a second, slightly abashed but in good humor about it.

"Apparently," he says. How is it that's gotten around to this extent? (Megan, that's how.) Apparently he seems like he'd know - and, according to someone on the other side of the narrative wall, 'that hair is the hair of a man who knows how to have a good time', so. Perhaps that's the case. "I gotta start drinking less."

"Maybe. And I probably need to start drinking more, since I still can't manage to do more at a party than skulk around the edges and occasionally converse when someone spots me."

He really needed to work on his social skills, but parties and such really weren't his thing. Either that, or he should just resist a little harder when others tried to talk him into going to loud parties like that. The latter would probably be better than risking passing out and turning into a snake. He could imagine ways that things could get very ugly very fast if people found an unconscious seventeen foot long snake at a party, especially if they didn't know who it was.

Honestly, they'd probably just think it was somebody's pet. Baedal's seen weirder shit.

"Hey, if you don't like drinking and partying, there's no harm in abstaining." Which is probably a weird response from someone who makes a living off of getting people to get their asses into clubs, but Jae's never been anything besides mellow. There's not an ounce of peer pressure in him. "I take it you were at Megan's, though."

Now that he's scrutinizing him, Jay looks familiar, but he can't quite place him. Somewhere on the cohort network? Hm.

"Yeah, I was there."

He even remembered the look of this guy vaguely, though he was pretty sure he'd only seen him in passing, which was hardly surprising if he'd been at Megan's party. Jae had probably been the ones more actively engaging in drinking and social activities, rather than lurking around wondering why he was there, like Jay.

"She was the one that let me out when I woke up in that room."

"Yeah, she's really nice."

Thinking on it, where he's seen Jay around before starts to solidify - ah. Hilmi's friend. The knowledge of it immediately puts him on edge, though absolutely nothing about him changes outwardly; he's too good of an actor for that. Fortunately they're coming to the train's central junction, and so Jae smiles, getting ready to go with the flow of the crowd to leave.

"Nice talking to you, man."

"Nice talking to you, too."

Jay also got up and headed out with the crowd, oblivious to any change in Jae's attitude, or anything that might be wrong. Even if he had known that Jae recognized him as Himi's friend, he wouldn't have known there was anything wrong with that. Though Jay had begun to realize that there was something fishy going on between Hilmi and Megan, he hadn't been able to figure out what. After all, Hilmi had asked Jay how Megan was doing, but then didn't seem to want to talk to her when she contacted him. However, he wasn't great at figuring people out, so was oblivious to what Hilmi might have done with Megan. He just figured he had another train to catch, so hurried off to where that train would be stopping.

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i wrote this song while i was drunk

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