multiversallogs | wait a minute little back porch lady

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wait a minute little back porch lady

Who: Megan and yooouuuuu
What: Still spiraling into a pit of self-destructiveness, but with less horrible traumatized feels, Megan could use some distractions.
Where: Specifically mentioned are Griss Twist and Howl Barrow, but anywhere is fine.
When: Ruudary 27-29th
Notes: If you need a specific prompt and don't have ideas PUNCH ME OVER PM we can plot things...
Warnings: Drinking, drug use, will add as needed.

Megan's drinking a lot more than she usually does, but from the outside, to people who don't know, it looks like she's just partying harder than normal. Then again, who's to say that's normal -- she hasn't actually been here that long, maybe she was just settling in before now. Who knows. People do notice that she seems a little off-balance, but Megan has always struck most people as being one of those girls -- high drama. When she's up, she's up, and when she's down...

She goes back to work, though, finally, and gets reamed out for not calling out when she was "sick," but she's not fired, it's not that huge a deal -- they found someone to take her slots for her stage shows and her absence on the floor was noted, but her regulars are happy to see her back. It's much easier to plaster her smile on at work, and to be fair, she really does have a good time, usually. She likes her coworkers and she's acquired a number of regulars who are actually really nice to her, even if a few of them are obnoxiously fetishy about her. Well, that can't be avoided. Megan's stage shows -- intricate, flying pole dance, burlesque routines ending in dusting her audience -- are interspersed with periods of her out on the floor, hustling for private dances, just like Camelot back home -- but better, because people here have money. The Vault is not actually a strip club, which works to her advantage because she can make her private shows whatever she wants them to be; there aren't really a lot of rules.

When she's not at work, she's at clubs or bars -- the former more often because she likes to dance, but sometimes she goes to bars to get drunk and flirt with boys in a less noisy atmosphere. She especially likes anywhere that offers karaoke -- she doesn't like to sing but she does like to goad boys into doing so, plying them with beers and vague promises or else facetiously threatening bodily harm, and then laughing as they stumble through the lyrics of unfamiliar songs, embarrassed, but that's the real point of karaoke -- getting drunk and making a fool of yourself. If everyone's laughing at everyone else, she doesn't have to feel like they're laughing at her.

Although she stays close to home -- in Howl Barrow she can be found at local stores, cafes sometimes, always standing out with her wings and hair -- she does venture out to the rest of the city. She does not feel safe here, but she didn't feel safe in New York, either, and it's still true that she doesn't risk being assaulted every time she goes anywhere in Baedal. Just if she gets on the wrong side of the police, which she is, despite her lifestyle, doing her damnedest not to.

She has never felt so alone amongst so many other people.

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Shrieky glances up as he realizes that he's being addressed, then glances down to his appletini, then back up to the girl, "Well, it's probably not all I'm having. I expect after I've had this one, I'll have several more." Then he glances back to her. On the tip of his tongue there was a question about whether there was something more which he should be drinking, but as he gets a better look at her, the question fades.

Her hair is pink. Pink like... pink like... flowers? Maybe? Somewhere? Only it's more pink than any of the flowers he's ever seen, and her eyes are dark and striking and completely inhuman and he likes that. It's only when he catches sight of the light shining through her wings (and it was kind of really incredible that she had wings at all) that the correct comparison popped into his mind...

"Dragonfly!" He blurts the word out, then blinks, and looks back up at her eyes, "I mean. I was trying to think of something that looks like you, that I'd seen before."

Megan laughs again, startled -- she might be having the worst month known to man, but she does like attention, especially positive attention. And she's tipsy by now, yes, so that helps. "Yeah, I guess! Most people go for fairy, though." She leans forward to flag down the bartender and get another shot and a beer -- she doesn't need a chaser, she just wants something to sip when her tequila's gone. She downs the shot before she turns back to look at him, her dark irises, from this close, faintly visible from in the black; sometimes it's hard to tell where she's looking unless she's right up against someone. "Are you here all alone?"

"Well, I've never seen a fairy before." Shrieky answers simply. He'd seen many, many dragonflies though. He leans against the bar, still watching her as she orders her drinks, because really, what else here is even remotely worth watching? As she turns back to him, he catches sight of her irises, and tilts his head, staring into her eyes and trying not to loose sight of them again, "Yes, I'm alone. I only arrived here a few weeks ago, so most days I just walk around the city trying to get my bearings. Only, when I came past here, I heard the music, so I decided to come in."

He smiles a little carefully, closing his fingers around the stem of his glass. Does that explanation make it seem less strange to be getting drunk on his own? He doesn't really pay it any mind.

"Well, that'll change here, anyway." On fairies, that is -- although she's noticed a lot of them prefer to keep their glamours on, which she understands, in a way, although she prefers to not think about it. That sting of jealousy -- that other people can hide what they are -- has been eating at her for most of the past three or four years, it's poisonous. A large part of her resents that they still do it in Baedal, where people think they're beautiful.

"Oh, you're new! We must be in the same Cohort, then." She digs in her neon purse for her pack of cigarettes -- they're black with red filters, something cherry-flavoured and sweet -- and her matches, which... God only knows where she's put them. There's no real judgment about him being alone, she just seems curious. He's cute, it's inconceivable that no one's come up to harass him yet. Problem solved. You're welcome, Shrieky. "You ever done karaoke before?"

"Really? That's wonderful!" His expression is even brighter than it was a moment ago, because... he's kind of bought into the propaganda about being best friends forever with your Cohort, and he's pretty pleased about getting to be best friends forever with a girl who has pink hair and wings. "You haven't been here for too long either, then?"

It's a pretty subjective question, he knows, too long could mean a few weeks, or a few years, when you came to spend the rest of your life in a place.

His smile fades, very slightly, when she asks him if he's done karaoke before, "You mean, the singing? No, I don't think I'd feel comfortable encouraging this many people to direct their attention towards me. I just like listening."

"Uh huh! Just since, um..." She squints and looks upwards, sticking her tongue out in concentration as she counts backwards. "Eliaderen, I think it's called? November. Whatever, I'm like, total shit at dates anyway and like, it was May where I was from before here, so... that's not a mindfuck or anything, thanks, Baedal." She smiles one of her vague, toothy grins.

Once she's got her cigarette lit she doesn't actually smoke much of it so much as use it as a prop, like it's more something to occupy her hands and mouth when she's not drinking. "Well, but that's the point of it, really! Everyone who's shit at singing gets to get up there and make themselves look stupid, and it's funny because everyone else looks stupid, too." She glances stagewards, where her abandoned date is trying to impress some other girl, and huffs. "Well, that's how it's supposed to go, like. Some people think the drunker they are, the cooler they get."

Although he finds her phrasing a little unfamiliar, Shrieky finds himself following her train of thought quite easily. He takes a little swig of the appletini as she talks about her own, recent arrival, "How did you find it? Settling in, I mean?"

Lighting the cigarette draws Shrieky's attention somewhat away from Megan herself, because... well, because it's fascinating. He'd seen Fish smoking one as well but that had been on camera, and it wasn't the same. Stealing a glance back to Megan, he managed to confirm the theory he'd come up with regarding cigarettes earlier. They definitely made anyone who was holding one look more distinguished and impressive.

"Who says that I'm 'shit' at singing?" He replies, his tone faintly teasing, even as he falters over the expletive, "I may be an extremely gifted vocalist, for all you know! Unfortunately, what I am absolutely certain to be 'shit' at, is... standing up in front of many people and proving it."

"It's --" She has to take a moment to regroup, keep that smile ironed onto her face -- strap a bit of steel into her tone. "It's great, yeah, it's like, so totally different from things at home, y'know?" Baedal has actually been pretty horrifying -- in some ways it's safer, but she knows better. She saw that broadcast, and she sees what they do to xenians here -- they're just better at keeping it under the radar and everyone acts like everything's okay.

Megan is really not good at living with that kind of subtle paranoia, though. She'd rather it all be out in the open, over-the-top bigotry and all.

Leaning forward, she props her chin on the bar. "See, that's the thing. You haven't got to prove anything except that you've got the stones for it. Karaoke is serious business, see." No it is not, Megan, stop that.

He notices the slight pause in her tone, but doesn't feel any motivation to interrogate her on this point. Baedel does seem pretty great to him, and it is totally different from home. "What was your home like? Do you not miss it at all?"

It occurs to him even as he asks this, that he may subtly be trying to coax feelings of homesickness out of her, and he makes a mental note to try not to do that to people. It's not good behavior.

"Well, perhaps I didn't bring any stones with me today." He flashes her another little smile, before glancing up towards the current singer, "Anyway, I don't know any of these songs..."

Megan's not had much opportunity for homesickness -- largely because she really is so much better off in Baedal, totalitarian police state or not. Thus far, none of the Militia stuff she's witnessed has happened to her.

Yet.

"No, it was balls. I mean yeah, I guess I miss New York a little, I lived there for like, ten years, but everyone was mean and everything was shitty and awful. At least if you look weird here, no one like, freaks out and runs off to get the torches and pitchforks, y'know? What about you? Better or worse?"

She knocks back half her beer before she goes on. "Fair enough," she concedes after a moment, although she's already thinking that he just needs to get drunker to get in the mood to sing. She eyes his drink to see how much he's got left and makes a note to buy the next round. "I don't know half these songs either, they're all local. Like, what's a Durian Suicide Pact?"

"You don't look weird." It comes out without him thinking about it, because weird makes it sound like a bad thing that she looks that way, and it's not, "I'm the same, really. Where I came from... may have been a good place for some people, but it wasn't for me. This is much better."

She drinks fast, and Shrieky feels as though he should catch up, so he takes his own drink and tips it back. He's planning on drinking maybe half of it, but somehow when he lowers the glass again, it's empty. He'd had less left than her anyway...

"I don't know what it is!" He confesses, glancing towards her, with a half smile, "Have you tried to sing about it here? Did you bring stones of your own?"

"D'you want another?" Megan asks, indicating his drink -- before he answers she lurches forward precariously, waving her arm at the bartender to get them both another. He did say he was planning on it! She's helping! "That sucks," she adds as a bit of an afterthought, "about where you come from, I mean. It seems like everywhere kind of sucks, really.

"I did a round earlier! I'm a bit shit at it, but I've got massive stones, so yeah. My date," she waves a hand at the stage, where he's flirting with some other girl -- not that she cares or anything, "went all hipster on me and it wasn't fun anymore."

It was also not fun because she's still not ready to be messing around with boys again, nor is she ready to dip her toes into the quagmire of jealousy he's trying to stir up, but she'll never admit it. As far as she's concerned, nothing happened.

He's going to say yes anyway, but she's too quick for him with the drink ordering, so Shrieky busies himself with staring over at Megan's erstwhile date. He pulls a bit of a face at the sight of the man, who has neither pink hair nor dragonfly wings, and therefore there was absolutely no reason why someone who possessed both of these qualities should deign to spend any time with him.

Also why was he talking to that other girl? She didn't have pink hair, "Does he not know that you're over here? Did you sneak away?" He glances back to Megan, his expression mildly puzzled. There is literally no reason why you should come to this bar and want to look at anyone other than her.

"I think you're correct about everywhere being terrible, thought. I mean, I know some people here are sad to have been taken, but they probably just hadn't noticed that where they lived was terrible yet. Humans sometimes don't, I think."

"Nah, I ditched him. He was bein' a big pill." Clearly Shrieky should feel honoured that she decided his attention was more worthy of her time than that other dude. He's nice enough so far anyway, so she's going to take this as a decision making victory.

She slams her next shot before starting on her beer, which she takes a lot slower because she is just sober enough to remember that mixing hard liquor too fast is a recipe for puke soup. Her feet are dangling inches from the floor -- she's rather short, even in her ridiculous heels -- and her wings are opening and closing in a gentle wafting motion, resulting in her taking up a lot more space than she ought. "And yeah, I guess so! They don't really have to until something shitty happens to them, though -- like, they get turned into something not-human and then whoops, pee ess, everyone is totally a jerk all the time to them, wah wah suddenly everyone cares about like, prejudice and stuff. It's, like, ironic, or something." Or something.

Shrieky drinks his own drink at a more manageable pace, taking a long, slow sip of it while she talks. The mention of humans turning into something non-human makes him frown, it hadn't occurred to him that that could be a thing which actually happened to people. He'd heard a story once, about a man who was cruel to his wife, and was eventually punished by being turned into a horse.

It was a perfectly good story, but if it was true, then he couldn't see the recently behooved man being in any position to begin complaining about discrimination, so that probably wasn't what she was talking about.

"Was that the kind of thing that happened a lot? Back where you're from?"

"Yeah," she says. "A few years back, everyone was just, like, normal. Then this big solar flare happened, and a bunch of people got sick and died. The ones that didn't die got all these weird powers. No one really knows if it was like, the flare that did it, or if we were all born this way and the radiation just, like, triggered it. I think we had to have been born this way 'cause it doesn't make much sense otherwise, y'know?" With a shrug, she stubs out what's left of her cigarette. "And then, you know, the human people flipped the fuck out because oh no, people who are different from us, and it was a huge deal, and it sucked. Most of us have been like this since the flare but now and then you get people who find it out months or years after and they make it this huge deal like oh no poor me I can do something totally awesome like read minds and have super strength and am immortal and shit but I look totally normal and no one can even tell a bloo bloo bloo."

... So Megan has feelings about mutant politics, evidently.

If he'd heard about this from a less biased source, then Shrieky might feel more sympathetic towards the recently awakened non-humans, but he enjoys being uncharitable, and the prospect of agreeing with the pink haired girl appeals to him considerably. As it is, his first instinct is to allow himself to agree wholeheartedly with everything she's saying, "That's ludicrous! Why would they object to having been made better than ordinary humans?"

No sooner than he's said it, the answer looms up in his mind, and he quickly takes a slurp of his drink to avoid looking uncomfortable about his stupidity. After the initial moment has faded, he lowers his glass and clears his throat, "And of course, it only becomes a problem to treat those who changed badly once they are the ones changing." He's quiet for a moment, then he offers, "It's strange to think about, but... it must be frightening to be better, where you come from."

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wait a minute little back porch lady

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