Log:Sunny Side Up

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Sunny Side Up
Characters  •   The Athlete  •  The Soldier  •  The Vigilante  •  The Bravo  •
Location  •  The Facility - Hall of Rooms
Date  •  2019-03-02
Summary  •  The Vigilante wakes up for the first time and encounters a familiar face with the Soldier and a not-quite familiar face with the Bravo. The Athlete also wakes up for the first time, as relentlessly optimistic as ever. Stomachs rumble.

The Vigilante's door opens and a dark-haired young woman slips out into the hall. She's a bit older than Mallory was. She's also wearing more gray and black. Combat boots, black jeans, a dark gray on dark purple striped sweater, and a black leather jacket with a curious silk lining. No high ponytail, though. Just hair worn loose, a little tousled. She sweeps a wary glare over the hallway, which is a very Mallory thing to do. She also looks as bitchy as Mallory did. There's something coiled to her, like she's ready to fight.

The Soldier steps out from her room a mere few seconds after The Vigilante. She is virtually the same age as Cassandra, but she looks cleaned up and less militant. Cassandra's hair was shoulder-length and sun-bleached in places from days spent out in the sun. The Soldier's is longer, straighter, and a tidy black. The Soldier is barefoot, in blue running shorts and a black tank top. Cassandra wouldn't be caught dead looking so exposed and underequipped.

Her eyes alight on The Vigilante standing down the hall, and she freezes. There's an odd look that passes over her face. Finally, a careful word of greeting. "...Mal?"

Something more dramatic. Bravo attempted to go to her happy place yesterday, to seek solace, to find herself somewhere to recenter herself. But she failed in the attempt to make it there, so this time she's prepared for it. The blonde that steps out of Bravo's door is dressed to the nines, her hair curled and twisted up, pinned into place with glittery diamond-looking hairpins, make-up done perfectly, tight fitting black leather pants, sky-high black heels, mid-riff black silk shirt and a long black wool coat with fur cuff. In one hand is...a cane? Legit black cane with a silver wolf head topper to it and sunglassed caught in her fingers.

That's a familiar voice. Vigilante stiffens, turning her head toward Soldier and raising her eyebrows. "Cassandra?" she asks, her brow furrowing with puzzlement. Then, "You're d..." Dead. Another door opens, and her attention snaps there. Also familiar, but much less so. The eyebrows stay up, and she glances sidelong at Soldier, probably because she looks like Cassandra, with a questioning look.

"It's you--" The Soldier quickly makes to approach The Vigilante when she calls out her name with a smile beginning to form on her face. But she quickly stops before she reaches fist-swinging distance--perhaps noting the way not-quite-Mallory stands there, muscles coiled and waiting to snap. The Soldier's smile fades a touch, and she simply gives a slow nod to The Vigilante's curious look. "I died. I know. It's me," she tries to reassure, a staying hand half-rising in front of her. "I think." Well, maybe a little less reassuring. "You knew I died. So you made it? You survived the forest? Did it work?" she asks, her voice inflecting high with a touch of hope.

The Soldier looks over to The Bravo when she steps out. Perhaps it's the way that she's dressed, but Cassandra takes a few more seconds to parse out who it might be. "Roxie."

"First time?" Bravo wonders, the sunglasses raised up to tuck them onto her nose, pushing them towards her eyes before she leans her weight onto the cane, "Right..." She decides, glancing back and forth between the pair of them before she shakes her head, letting out a breath, "I'm really very bad at this, so you know. But you're not actually...dead. Probably? You're in a place, where we go between things."

The cane is lifted, the end of it pointed down the hall towards the parlor, "If you go that way you'll find a room with machines where you can get food and things, if that is what you want. You remember Emily? If you can find her, or Ch...Joshua, they are the ones that helped me the first time I was in here."

Stopping short of Vigilante was probably a good move. The look on her face is hella wary. Untrusting. Confused, too. She glances between the other two. "Roxie," she repeats. "The woman with the gun. I remember you. You died, too." Back to the Soldier. "It worked. We lost more people. Ethan, Colorado, and Christine made it out. Some of the college kids, too. I remember Emily a little. She made it out. Which one's Joshua?" A pause, and then she shakes her head. Her eyes narrow. "....What do you mean, between things?"

The Soldier lets out a long exhale when The Vigilante confirms. "Good. I'm so glad." For a passing moment she looks like she may start to become tearful, but it's gone as quick as it came. For now, her attention focuses on The Bravo at her explanation. It's this conversation again. Damn. The Soldier is not looking forward to this at all. If her own reaction upon waking was anything to go by, she'd be a touch afraid for The Vigilante. Cassandra had been fond of Mallory, and she had the niggling feeling that perhaps Mallory might react in anger first, as well. "We lived our lives. They were real. But when you... die, or... something... We come back here," she tries to explain in her own equally confused way. She refrains from noting that not everyone comes back whom they knew.

"This is like a waiting room." Bravo decides after a moment, moving down the hallway towards the pair of them, the cane tapping on the floor with each step that she takes, "Some people have very different opinions, about the....lives." The word is spoken with just a small amount of distaste. "I feel they are roles, stories...Like a grand play, and I'm not changing my mind about that. I refuse."

The cane waves again, pointing down the hall, "Others feel they are lives, and maybe we're living over and over again. I don't know the truth of it, and no one else does either. We've all got theories, some like it here, others want out. It's a mixed bag. And not everyone will show up here, some people go missing, and new faces appear. I was new, before this last story."

The Athlete arrives from The Facility - Parlor.

The Vigilante is still frowning. She crosses her arms over her stomach. "Not everyone?" she demands. "What about... Shit. Warren. Have you seen Warren?" The Vigilante is standing in the hall, speaking with the Soldier (clad in blue running shorts and a tank top) and the Bravo (dressed to the nines with a cane). "Or Bastian? Is Lyle here?"

A door a bit further down the hall opens and sleep tousled hair in chestnut preceeds a very curious and disoriented face from around the frame. The Athlete pokes his head out, neck, bare shoulder, half of a bare chest... he makes a startled noise and closes the door quickly. It will be a minute or so before it o pens again.

"Bastian is here," The Soldier says quickly. "And Lyle is here, or so said O'Neil, but I haven't seen him." She glances to Roxie in tacit question, perhaps hoping that she has more answers. "I don't know about Warren. I don't know about most people. Um. I haven't been in the frame of mind to meet everyone again." The Soldier briefly looks past The Vigilante at the sound of a very startled person, but the door shuts before she gets a solid look. Curious.

The Soldier attempts to close the distance between herself and The Vigilante now, hovering a hand over her crossed forearms. It's similar to how Bastian had attempted to calm her that first day. She's not sure it'll work. "This is a lot. We're in the same boat," she tries to tell The Vigilante in a low voice.

"I don't know who Warren is." Bravo replies with a shake of her head, leaning against the cane in her hand, her other raising to absently rub against the fur of her collar, "Lyle is here, he was here before...Not seen Bastian, saw Kimberly...saw Finn. Laine, she's here, too. More will come out as soon as they are ready, but some never seem to come out except to get food, then run away again."

The opening and closing of the door gets a brief look, but it isn't a door she recognizes, so she doesn't pay it that much attention, looking back towards the others.

The Vigilante glares in the direction of the opening and closing door, uncrossing her arms. She looks like she wants to stalk over that way, but maybe Soldier's hovering hand stops her. "Why are we here?" she demands. "Can we leave this place? How big is the building? How many people live here?" The questions are sharp, agitated. She reaches up to pinch the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes for a moment. "Nobody knows, do they? Fuck."

The Athlete's door opens again and this time he emerges mostly dressed. Barefoot, maroon running pants in synthetic with the kind of stitching that represents a lot of research into what should not obstruct a runner as they sprint, and a racerback tee. On second thought, Warren reaches in and grabs a soft heather fleece, but it's an afterthought that nearly has the door close on a trailing sleeve. He was built like a college athlete before, surprise, but there's something harder and more fluid to him in this distilled form. A decathlete meets basketball center meets... like, Spiderman or something. "Holy crow, I thought it was just me," he says, breaking into the biggest grin.

The Soldier frowns at the question. She can't answer any of them. "I don't know. I really don't." Poor comfort that is. "I hear people come and go. So someone must be taking them out of here and bringing others in."

Then the Athlete re-emerges from that doorway, and The Soldier's eyes widen. That grin is hard to forget. A small part of her is relieved that at least someone is smiling. The Soldier presses a firm hand to The Vigilante's shoulder (not quite caring if that would earn her any repercussions), giving a small prompting push, needless or not, for her to look at the man who looks so much like Warren.

"Nobody knows." Bravo agrees with a shake of her head, "You'll hear all the different opinions if you come out of your room, and wander around. People like talking, some do." She ammends that statement pretty quickly though. There is a glance down towards the newest arrival, then she pushes her sunglasses further up on her nose, "If you'll all excuse me." She offers a quick smile, "There are two doors, by the way. If you go through them thinking about anywhere you want to be...you'll be there. It's not freedom, but it is an escape." Which is where she is off to, it seems, because she heads down the hallway, the hem of her coat swaying and the can clicking on the floor.

The Vigilante is already looking at Warren when she's nudged. Her hand half comes up to smack Soldier's hand away, but she pauses before doing so. The Bravo's given a bit of an absent nod. "OK. Thanks. I think," she says. She looks from Athlete to Soldier and then back. "...You remember me, right?"

"Of course I do," Warren says, all smiles. He waved at everyone, even the retreating form of The Bravo. He is relentlessly optimistic, but not in a dippy fashion. The Athlete is probably just one of those people who lives in the moment. For the moment. His mouth hangs open, as if he were going to say something. Like the details of a dream, it escapes him for just a second until, "...Mallory." Warren spreads his arms to the side, like for a hug, but gives Mallory the chance to escape if she's not having it. This place is kinda weird and maybe she doesn't know who he is.

The Soldier promptly drops her hand away at The Vigilante's gesture, point taken. She steps back for the moment, crossing her arms as she waits quietly to see what unfolds.

The Vigilante glances at Soldier and then trots over to Warren, bumping her head against his chest as she steps into the hug and wraps her arms around him. "Not everyone makes it back here," she tells him, voice muffled. It's a brief hug. She steps back. Another look at Soldier and she says, "I need a smoothie. There are smoothies, right?"

The Vigilante and Athlete hug for just a moment and then they can be a knot of three people. There's clearly something to talk about there, but it's just as clearly going unaddressed for the moment. "I bet there are. This place is great. I've got a bed that's actually my size and the shower head is all the way up on the ceiling so I can wash my hair without hunching over like a question mark." He shows remarkable confidence in the wonders of this place. His stomach, on the other hand, agrees with the Vigilante and makes the most awkward of gurgles. "I am having a lot of trouble with names, though. Cassandra, right?" Warren looks hopeful. "You gave me that pistol. I... used it as best I could." He'd saved someone's life with it, until everything went wrong like it was meant to. You only fight fate so well for so long.

"I'd assume so." I haven't asked the place, is the implication in The Soldier's answer to The Vigilante. She spares a faint smile at the pair, and it grows larger as The Athlete marvels at the amenities, but it flits away as quickly as it came.

"Yeah," she murmurs quietly to Warren at the guessed name. There's a reassuring, kind sort of nod when he talks about what he did. "I'm sure you gave it your best, Warren." It's not sarcastic, how she says it. She doesn't know much of what happened in the forest. But he was a good kid at Beaver Lake. "You couldn't have been more prepared if you tried."

"He made it out, too," Vigilante tells Soldier. "We wound up..." she trails off. "We stuck together," she finally says. She starts in the direction Bravo indicated food was. She does shoot Athlete a look over the shoulder. "It's not great," she tells him. "We can't leave."

The Soldier's words relax a small tension that had been growing in the Athlete, like he had something to prove. "Thanks. Really," he says. The Vigilante's words draw him up, though. "Really? I just caught what, uh..." He snaps, looking for Roxie's name but it escapes him. "She said about the rooms at the end of the hall being an escape. That's no good, though. So it's like being back in that lodge but with better rooms." As crestfallen as it might seem, even that hasn't particularly dashed his mood. "At least we're with people we know, right?" He reaches out and puts a hand on the Soldier's shoulder for just a moment--risky that--but the trust had meant a lot and that seems to transcend to even this place.

Fortunately for The Athlete, The Soldier has calmed significantly since the day of her first awakening. Her shoulder stiffens under his hand, but she reciprocates the gesture with an upnod and gives a brief, firm squeeze of his arm in return. "...Yeah. Familiar faces." It's clear she's not nearly as reassured as Warren seems to be, at least on the outside. She still hasn't gotten used to the subtle changes that mark who these people are in this strange place compared to who they were at Beaver Lake. But they have their memories, so that surely must count? The Soldier briefly wonders at what Finn meant about Lyle, but she'll cross that bridge when they get to it.

"This is so much better than that goddamn lodge. No monsters as far as I can tell." She glances down the hall toward the Parlor, then looks back to Warren and Mallory. "I'm so glad to see you both. And that you made it out alive," she says tightly after a long moment. Her tone is flatter than the words might warrant, but she doesn't seem to be disingenuous in what she says. "You guys should go over for that smoothie. I think I'm going to take a bath. Or something."

The Vigilante slows, then pauses. "I'm glad you're not dead," she tells Soldier. "I was... That was hard. Losing so many Lodge people. We went to the funerals. Ethan punched Lyle's dad." It's true. Every funeral they could. M. Miller signed the guestbooks and everything. Fortunately, hers is a common last name. Beausoleil, not so much.

"Monsters are the worst," Warren agrees. "Thank goodness that's over." There's still a flicker of concern for the Soldier when she says she's going to go, but apparently, there's basically nowhere to go. He opens his mouth to say something else but his stomach interrupts with a piteous guuuuuuuurrrrr of emptiness. "I get the impression we will have lots of time to talk about it. If you want to." Meaningful looks at both. "So... which way is food?"

The Soldier lets out a surprised snort at the thought of Ethan decking Lyle's dad, though the thought of funerals--so many funerals--is a sobering notion. "That was good of you," she tells The Vigilante. "I can't imagine how it must have been."

Guuuuurrrrrrrr. The Soldier bites her lower lip at the noise and smiles. She points down toward the Parlor. "Go into the dining hall. You can't really get lost around here," she instructs, before looking back at The Athlete. "Mmhm. I'd like to. We should." A questioning glance to The Vigilante.

The Vigilante's head bobs in a nod to Soldier. It's a bit weird for her not to have a ponytail swinging. "Yeah. I mean, I have lots of questions. But we should get some food in you." That last bit's to Athlete. She sets off again at a determined stomp.

"Cool," the Athlete says, pleased with the idea. "I better..." He indicates over his shoulder, where the determined stried of the Vigilante is leading the way toward a repast. He gives the Soldier a 'you know how it is' look. "Eat when you can, sleep when you can, you never know when you'll get another chance."

Nod received from The Vigilante, The Soldier gives a knowing tilt of her head to Warren before turning around, opening her door, slipping inside. Whatever had brought her out to begin with--appetite, or curiosity, or restlessness--has subsided for the moment, eclipsed by the need for some time alone.