Westward Ho

[Blair]

Eve considered. "If I'm not holding anything sharp, a pelican could work. But if we're smuggling in ol stabby boi, I'd maybe rather carry it in my talons. Which is definitely more dangerous, but you all could help me hold it properly, right?"

She stretched her arms and yawned. "I'm looking forward to flying again."

[Josh]

"First time I ever flew was in that chopper," Don said wistfully. "The one that took us offa Long Island."

He carefully backed the rig into the defile, then stopped the vehicle.

Rigging the camo nets and properly securing them took a few minutes. Don had begun to get used to basic physical labor, though he still wasn't terribly good at it. Still, he was a willing worker if not a very good one.

"Good, ya think?" he asked when the rig was covered and secured down.

[B4UTRUST]

"I'd like to say we're good with just the shooty stuff, but honestly some silent weapons might not be bad depending on what happens. I don't think we're going to get near Grimm easily or quickly, so we're going to be here for awhile. Better safe than sorry with what our loadout is. And we'll probably need to secure some place to lay low and start working on gaining contacts. This isn't going to be a quick in and out mission, Eve. Assuming you're planning on a scorched earth policy. Which I am absolutely on board with."

[Josh]

Don nodded at those words as he lit a cigarette.

Three months ago he would've looked at terrain like this as though it were footage from a Mars rover, utterly alien. Now he had the eye to gauge how long it would take to walk, how much water they could expect to use, and where the problem spots and good cover were. He pointed. "Good path there, runs us parallel to the road but gives us cover if something we don't want to deal with comes along."

Memories of battles with the Horse Eaters were still vivid, and their fucking land trains. Not to mention the Chinese pirates they'd fought on the trip north.

"Gotta watch for Rattler holes, too," he said. "See them fuckers, we run the fuck away and get off their turf."

[Blair]

Eve nodded. "I need to head in a different direction than y'all, at least for a bit. I need to come from over the water. It'll be less conspicuous. I think if we wrap the sharper weapons, we can toss them in my gullet. I can get away with being a larger than average pelican, I think. And they aren't small birds."

She bit her lower lip, her movements unintentionally broadcasting both her excitement and her nervousness at the upcoming events. Don could see both her confidence.in her own ability and her great fear at the unknowns warring within her. Eve glanced his way once, knowing he could see it all, and gave him a tight-lipped smile of reassurance.

[Josh]

Don gave her a reassuring smile and reached out, hand clenched into a fist to offer her a fistbump.

"You've absolutely got this. You've done a lot harder things."

He went through, getting himself a couple of pistols and a good dagger along with spare ammo. As he did, he realized that she was likely going to be puking this all back up for them.

"Hell of a mama bird," he chuckled as he wrapped the sheathed dagger.

[Blair]

Eve gave him a fist bump back before taking a seat and watching the two men she now considered family begin packing up the items she'd be carrying. She swallowed and nodded to herself. She could, indeed, do this.

Once she was ready, Eve focused on Lanala, and very politely asked her goddess to allow her to turn into a pelican.

[Josh]

As was often the case in this desolate place, reaching out to the goddess through the barren desolation was a harsh challenge. The Deadlands were by their nature utterly hostile to the domain of a goddess of life rampant, and resisted the incursion.

Still, Lanala was a mighty goddess and Eve a favored child of the moment, and struggle though it was, the power came to her. As it so often was here, however, the transformation was a painful process, bones cracking instead of smoothly flowing into their new shape. The transformation was not a joyous turning as it could be in a place more filled with the raw anima of life, but rather a hard act of will to force into being.

[Blair]

Eve's eyes filled with tears of pain as the transformation began, but her body lost the ability for human speech before she could cry out in pain, the sound instead coming across as pelican calls. Still, it was visible to Don how much agony it was for her to turn. When it was complete, however, there was a very large white pelican standing before them.

Eve flapped her wings, her impressive wingspan longer than both Don and William by a few feet. She hopped up and down a bit, waddled in a particularly goofy pelican-like manner, and then opened her incredibly large mouth, waiting for her friends to place the weapons inside.

[Josh]

Don stepped forward with his wrapped weaponry.

He hesitated, then spoke in Jakat with his horrendous accent. "You okay?"

[Blair]

Eve's excitement as Don spoke in the language of her people was unmistakable, but she was clearly trying trying to play it cool. What she actually said was difficult to translate into human language, but the basic translation came to, "This place is hella shitty, but I'm all right for now. Please put your murder tools in my mouth so I can get them to where they need to be and wash taste of oil out of my mouth asap, also your Jakat is getting better."

[Josh]

Don's reply, "The serpent's fangs sharpen with each bite" roughly equated to "practice makes perfect" as he finished loading her down, then gave her head an affectionate ruffle.

[Blair]

Eve's pelican eyes closed happily as Don scratched her head, and she made a joyful honking call before waddling off a bit. She adjusted herself a few times, feeling the weapons settle in her gullet before she took to the sky. She would loop around toward the water, of which her pelican body could already feel the call. Hopefully, she could find an out of the way roof, get these things at least sort of hidden, and then fly back out, looping around the walls of the city and returning to human form to enter the city with her friends.

[B4UTRUST]

William watched the transformation in silence, wincing inwardly as the sounds of flesh and bone breaking, shifting, mending and changing were loud in the otherwise stillness. No matter how many times he had seen it, seen her change her form he was still amazed. Horrified that she willingly went through that every time, but still amazed.

Once Don had loaded their gear into Eve's mouth, something that he was sure he never considered as a viable option or plan in his life prior to this, he rolled up his pants leg and examined the artificial replacement he'd fabricated for himself so long ago. With a few careful movements he began to pull some of the exterior panels apart, revealing the inner clockwork windings within that kept his gait more natural. There was no way he'd ever get his digging equipment through the gates. He'd probably be stopped and his device seized if he was lucky. Some of the things he had heard about the church and how they dealt with those that didn't follow their ways were...unpleasant. But he at least could do this much. Reaching into his pack he pulled out the magnetic control device and began to systematically dismantle it bit by bit until it was just a pile of parts and pieces, springs, screws, wires and weirdness. And that pile he made disappear piece by piece into cavities in his leg until it was gone. Then he replaced the covers and rolled down his pants leg. Standing, he shouldered his pack again and turned to set off with Don towards the city of Lost Angels. When he walked this time though, it was with a noticeable limp in his normal gait.
"Let's get going, daylights burning and Eve will beat us there by hours at least."

[Josh]

Don tossed his cigarette at the ground and stomped it out and took a gulp of water. It was always a strange thing, seeing him drink water, but his treks across the desert had been highly educational on the value of proper hydration.

"Ten bucks on who can make it to that rock first," he said as he hoisted his pack and started walking.

[B4UTRUST]

"Come now, Mr. Klukas. I'm fairly confident that we are professionals here and above such childish grade school frivolities like placing bets on things like a footrace. Besides which, you are well aware the standard bet is $5 for whoever makes the rock shit itself first and I'll thank you to keep to it!"

[Josh]

The hike passed with occasional bits of banter between the two, but with extended periods of amiable silence as well. A month ago this sort of desert vista was a revelation for Don, a whole new world outside the concrete jungles he'd spent most of his life in.

By now he was simply over it and if he never trudged through another goddamn desert he'd be perfectly content with it.

I could've been sitting in a five-star hotel somewhere getting blowjobs, he thought bleakly as he put one foot in front of the other.

At least they were running a light load and his feet had been hardened by the hike out of Arizona. That was a thirsty, miserable, hellish, and downright weird experience that he never wanted to revisit. And hell, it was only six miles.

At least, the boundaries of Lost Angels began to appear through the heat-shimmered air in the distance.

"Well thank fuck," he muttered, pausing to take a drink of water, then lighting another cigarette.

[Blair]

Eve flew the way only a true child of nature could. There was a strange freedom here, in this place, when she was in animal form. It was still horrible, her senses burning and her connection to Lanala weak. But it was easier to stand when she wasn't human. She allowed the instincts of her pelican brain to move to the forefront, and her human thoughts held on by a tether behind.

It wasn't long before she found the sea, and it was not a terrible length of time measured in wing flaps before she saw Lost Angels. It was at this point that Eve allowed herself to take full reign again, and headed into the city. She spent a bit of time casually landing in places before finding something she assumed would be a good hiding spot. She opened her mouth, emptying her gullet. She gazed at the items, and felt bad that she couldn't really clean them up in her current form. There was nothing to be done, though, and she headed back out of the city to loop around and find her companions on the road, stopping on the water to try to rinse the taste of metal out of her mouth.

[B4UTRUST]

The area William and Don were currently going through was apparently named Ghost Town, row after row of shanties, lean-tos and tents of the poor and desolate who couldn't afford to live in the city proper. And of course there was apparently a water issue. Or at least that's what William guessed based on the colorful odors he could discern from people around them. He and Don had sweated a good bit on their journey here but they were practically dipped in perfume by comparison. Hopefully the city proper was better, though if the church was handling the water distribution like they were handling most other things it was probably a case of only the members got clean water and everyone else made do or paid through the nose for what they got. He certainly hoped that Eve's current form had less of a sense of smell than a normal person or else she was in for one hell of a scent sensation.

With that thought in mind he took his eyes off the crowds, the beggars and the residents of this area and started looking towards the skies. He honestly had no clue he and Don were early or late(and for some reason there was a nagging thought accompanying that about arriving precisely when he means to but he had no clue what that was about since he had no way of predicting exactly how long it would take for them to get here to begin with), so he had no frame of reference on how long it would be before Eve caught up to them. IF she caught up to them. How the hell she'd find them in this place was an excellent question to have, just to late to have it.

[Josh]

"She'll find us," Don said, watching William look to the sky and seeing the subtle signs of anxiety. "She always does."

Looking around, he saw what he had come to know in these places- the hopelessness, the sheer waste of people thrust away from any existence other than bare-bones survival by greed.

The many suffered and the few prospered, the wheel of history. A wiser man learned to look past such things, to accept their fortune and station and move on in blissful ignorance, but Don had never found himself capable of such. There was corruption here, as there was corruption everywhere. Not necessarily the wicked corruption of the soul, metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that he'd been forced to accept the reality of, but the simpler, naked corruption of avarice and neglect.

"Same as ever," he said softly.

[Blair]

Eve flew languidly overhead looking for her companions, starting near the gates to the city and following the roads. She'd never tell Don (mostly because she knew he'd try to stop himself if he knew), but he'd picked up more than just the verbal aspects of Jakat, and she could read the language inherent in his subtle movements even from a distance. It made it relatively easy to spot him, especially here, in this world where there was no true soul that she could see.

She found them in a squalid city, and dropped behind a building, swiftly changing form and heading out to meet them. It was apparent that she was moved by the suffering she saw around her, her shoulders slumped and her body radiating pity and empathy.

"Hey," she said as she moved into step with them. "Um... You know we need to help them, right?" She looked to first William, and then Don. Both saw the hope in her eyes, but Don could also read the acknowledgement of the likely hopelessness in her every movement.

[Josh]

"Got to see what the story is first," Don' said. "Find out where the leverage is, where the weak spots are."

He gave Eve a crooked grin. "We'll do something. Don't know just what, yet."

There was no humor in his eyes as he looked past her, though. Like any generalized human suffering where wealth was just a short distance away, there were responsible parties to be found. People who could be made to feel the consequences of their neglect.

"Let's go get our stuff," he said, his restless eyes roaming still.

[Blair]

Eve went to follow, touching William's arm as they moved forward. "I... I could try to give them water, couldn't I? Would that help? Or maybe... Maybe help them to grow plants? Or would someone just... Take that away from them?"

[B4UTRUST]

William was startled when he heard Eve's voice. He stopped looking to the skies and peered over his shoulder, his hand dropping for a gun that wasn't there.
"Damn, Eve, you spooked me. Take it everything went okay?"

He saw the look in her eyes when she started talking about the people around them. He gave a tired shrug in return.
"Find me someone responsible and I'll happily put them under, but this? This is one of those have and have nots sort of deals. I think dealing with the preacherman the way you want to may go a ways to helping, but it won't solve this. Someone else will step in and keep them dancing the same tune, so to speak. I don't know enough of the locals to tell you who or where but it doesn't matter. This sort of thing happens regardless of who is in charge. Best we can do is try to ease the symptoms for a bit and make it a little easier going for them."

[Josh]

Don rubbed his chin.

"Let's sort out the enforcement situation here and how close they're watching things, then we can start making moves. I think it's time for Don Klukas, intrepid reporter to get back to work. So we'll get further in, get us a place to bunk down..."

He paused. Don Klukas of six months ago would never have said anything so fucking rube as 'bunk down', but here they were.

"...then we'll make the rounds. William, you can poke around the business side of things, industry, see what's going on there. Eve, you start working an animal network, the cats and the birds and all that shit. And I'll do what I do."

What he did was go into bars, drink, and meet people. Done with an expense account, it was technically referred to as 'investigative journalism'.