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[burnyoudown]

Hey.

[There was a skinny eighteen-year-old, pale, dark-haired, with white-rimmed sunglasses obscuring half of his face. It didn't matter that he was currently indoors; he wore those sunglasses everywhere.]

Alright, so, I've been here a little while. Felt it was time to reach out since we're all stuck here.

I'm assuming no one knows any way to get home. Am I right?

[He waved a hand dismissively; he didn't really care right now about being stuck here.]

Forget about that. What do you all do for fun around here when you're not rebuilding or whatever? It doesn't look like this place is built for street racing, so that kind of ruins option number one for me. Is there at least alcohol here?

Seems like I'm going to need some new hobby ideas.

[He moved to turn the video off but remembered one last thing.]

Oh, before I forget, the name's Kavinsky.

Comments

video;

[demjiin]

[ Not gonna lie, this guy sounds just like most of the teenagers that are in Kaz's gang back home, The Dregs. ]

You would be right about the first assumption. Fun tends to get pushed aside in favor of not dying in the second question, and it depends on what sort of alcohol you're looking for in the third.

[ The voice sounds like Kaz gargles with whiskey and ground glass every morning; like a grizzled old man speaking from a teenager's mouth. ]

[burnyoudown]

Great.

Is worrying about dying a legitimate concern around here?

[He'd been told a little about the local, uh, wildlife, but he wasn't too worried about things, in general.]

And I'm not too picky about alcohol so long as it gets me drunk.

[demjiin]

[ Kaz shrugged. ]

Stick around for a while and you'll find out. Storms that can do a hell of a lot more than rain, spiders the size of horses, or that one time everything was an order of magnitude weirder and all our memories got scrambled on believing what was real for a month.

[ There's more to all of it, but Kaz isn't going into it right now. ]

Well, I've been told there's some sort of red fruit that grows around Temba which turned out to be alcoholic. I'm not trusting to anything here, so I stick with the whiskey at Caydes place.

[burnyoudown]

Doesn't sound like I have a choice but to stick around. Also, good thing I'm not an arachnophobe.

[But arachnophobe or not, a spider that large sounded pretty damn dangerous. He wasn't a complete fool.

He hardly knew what subject to comment on first, aside from spiders, though.]

An entire month? How bad was the memory fuckery?

[Just in case, you know, it ever happened again.]

I'll try anything at least once. What's the worst that can happen?

[demjiin]

At first? The memory fuckery had people believing they were families when they weren't even from the same world, that they all had jobs they were successful in, or that everyone suddenly sprouting superpowers was commonplace.

[ In short, the memory scramble was trying to make it so everyone was happy. But Kaz lets out a quiet chuckle that had nothing to do with humor on the next answer. ]

That's not a smart question to ask around here. The worst usually doesn't have much to do with death but has everything to do with whatever you can imagine being worse than death. Maybe it will warp your mind so that you forget who you are when you finish drinking it. Or maybe have you hitting on everything you see, even the rocks.

[ Kaz shrugs again. ]

Who can say.

[burnyoudown]

[He'd been imagining a whole lot worse than that. Hearing that the memory fuckery skewed towards making people happy was almost a relief.]

Do people usually sprout superpowers around here?

[He could imagine quite a few things worse than death, and none of them were things he wanted to experience.]

I'll keep that in mind.

[But he was still going to drink the local alcohol. Maybe not until he witnessed someone else safely drink it, but still.]