revivalproject | Not Your Babysitter

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Not Your Babysitter

WHO: Robin Buckley
WHERE: Noth Central
WHAT: Musical Shenanigans, Stalking Aliens, Gift Shocks
WHEN: January 10th thru 17th
WARNINGS: N/A

I. Gift Investigation

Robin is not a nosy person. But you can't just let a girl into a barn house full of presents and expect her to fully keep her hands to herself. Right? Right. It's probably nothing, she's not really going to get up to too much trouble. Except...

"Ouch!"

She yelps and sticks a stung finger into her mouth, as if that will make the pain go away. Shouldn't have tried to open someone else's presents, right?

II. Alien ObservationsIt's official. Aliens. Are. Real. Don't pay any attention to her having met people who weren't human or who were human but weren't from Earth, or were from Earth but not her Earth. Aliens are Real. The Agrii are real.

If this isn't the coolest thing ever, Robin doesn't know what is. And so it's really up to her to study them, right? Are they the 'lay eggs in you' aliens, or the 'hunt you for sport' aliens, or really the 'friendly but lost and wishes they had Reese's Pieces' Aliens?

Someone had to know, and so here was Robin, bundled up in her reclaimed battle gear, peeking around the corner of a cabin to watch a group of Agrii in a snow fort building project.

It would be a shame if someone snuck up behind her, really.III. Let It Blow

Listen, if someone's going to give you a really big place where you think you can get away with practicing an instrument for old time sake without anyone walking in, who isn't going to use it? Most people? Well she's not most people.

Robin makes her way to the ice palace, a big case in her hands. Once she gets into the ice palace's main room she sits down and opens the case, pulling out her French Horn. Takes some time to inspect all of the parts, make sure it's in good working order. Then she finally puts it to her lips and starts doing warm ups with the instrument.

It's not music at the moment, just noise. But it's hers. Some small echo of the more normal days of her life.

[OOC: Robin would be a terrible babysitter. So absolutely throw your children at her however you want because she would just be hilarious to have to deal with it.]

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Okay, that's a good point, but don't even go there. She rolls her eyes. And then stares at him. But hey, he might not be from Earth, so it's fine that the years don't line up.

"You make bingo cards for the years? Seems silly."

“Not actually. I guess you could if you were really bored, but I've never been that bored. Where I'm from is a small town that's less Andy Griffith Show and more dumpster fire, so that level of boredom actually existing sounds like it should be fake.”

Or, you know, for people who have the skill (luck??) of, either intentionally or not, avoiding said dumpster fires.

"Sounds like Hawkins," Robin says, frowning. Maybe he was from the future of Hawkins? He didn't seem to have the right sort of accent, but those shifted over time, right? "Where are you from, if I can ask."

“New York; the town's called Riverdale. The town's most famous exports come from its Northside area and are maple syrup, mobsters, and serial killers.” One of those things is very out of place with the other two. “Other people who don't think you count as a person until you have an eight figure salary would say it's maple syrup and the supposed blight that the much lower income Southside area of the town puts on the place as a whole; gang activity sure is a good enough excuse for people to run with that narrative, though.” He can at least concede that much of a point. But it's still a little more nuanced (despite his own dig there in turn at the higher income brackets of Riverdale) since it is the Ghoulies who want to use the Southside as nothing more than a means to an end for their drug sales, and it's not the Ghoulies who do more traditionally legitimate community work in the Southside - nor is it them that go into the Northside to help protect it too.

(And yet Riverdale will never be as wild as Hawkins.)

“Where is Hawkins?” He assmues that's where she's from. Or at least was last from.

Yeah, that sounds like New York alright.

"Nowhere, Indiana. Few wealthy people, mostly just people trying to get by. Nearly economically destroyed by a mall. Then it burned down. That's just how stuff goes sometimes."

She's more flippant about it than she feels, but sometimes you have to be with strangers.

Small towns getting close to economically wrecked by shit like that is easily in his top three least favorite things. “I wish any of that was a surprising scenario.” And now there's not even a mall somewhere there in an Indiana small town to take the place of everything including jobs that would have closed when it opened — which is something most small towns anywhere couldn't afford to deal with, but especially in a place that sounds like it doesn't have a lot of second options to fall back on after something like that. It seems no matter where the small town is, developers and investors will always just have the audacity. The audacity to come wreck towns for fun, to not stay in their lanes, and so on.

“Just because that's how stuff goes sometimes doesn't mean it should be able to be completely gotten away with. We had one of those mobster-type 'businessmen' secretly pay off the mayor to close a high school on false pretenses so he could come in and tear it down to build a private and for profit prison in its place, so after I got that information, some friends and I chained ourselves to the building for a few days right before it was going to be torn down. They still went ahead with it, but it sure exposed him and the political corruption.” Which had been a lot better than had he and the mayor gotten away with it as silently as he wanted them to.

“It'd be nice if they'd be forced to rebuild in Hawkins, but I'm sure they took that insurance money, left the state, and told city hall good luck cleaning up the various messes their mall made. Had it been there a while?”

Yeah, that's interesting.

"Our mayor probably committed treason," Robin says with a shrug. Like that's a fully normal thing to accept as part of life. "Because the mall was a secret Russian operation. No one was going to force them to fix the town."

Where she shrugs like it's a normal fact of life (it is; it'd quickly feel like there's more examples of her being right on that than not), he falls back on what might as well be his first language of humor in sarcasm and sardonic remarks. “Wait. They're not supposed to be treasonous and otherwise duplicitous? I thought that was part of the job requirements — you know, ‘fifteen PhDs and forty-seven years of experience by age twenty, the ability to create and foster a toxic work culture with zero boundaries professionally or personally, and the willingness to retype all the information you literally just provided in your resume’.” The full effect of the comment may be better appreciated in context of an era of online applications to entry level jobs that effectively require you to be in a crushing amount of student debt and have zero sense of self worth, but the general ideas of grueling, tedious, spiteful, and soulless probably still land well enough to not be missed.

A mall being a Russian operation was among the last things he'd been expecting in a following comment. As far as infiltration and destabilization tactics go, finding a small town and building a mall — and perhaps even intentionally burning it down in a false flag operation — would be a way to do it. Definitely not the best way, but a way. “Why all the time, cost, and effort when they wouldn't have any trouble finding hundreds of anonymous, radicalized, dumbasses on the internet in about five minutes who'd do it for practically free, something cheaper than whole entire mall, and in a quicker timeframe compared to all that? I have three guesses and I'm not sure which one sounds least insane.” A statement that serves as a disclaimer that none of them sound one hundred percent reasonable. (Reason everywhere got tossed out a while ago, though, so, there's that at least.)

The first is someone at the FSB went too hard on the vodka and suggested a retro night — like it was a school dance theme — and wanted to go for a tactic that sounded like it was out of a Cold War era spy movie, the second is that Russia finally decided to really throw everyone off by not using their post-Soviet-collapse strategies for once (since everyone else would be expecting the internet approach), and the third is that there's a few decades separating the places they've come from.

"Um, all of that sounded like a bunch of word vomit," Robin informs Jughead pretty directly. It sounds impossible, so can she pass on it?

In fact, she's just staring at him.

"How else would you expect the 'red menace' to attack America while being subtle? I mean, no one wants to go with nukes. I can't stand Reagan at all for a variety of reasons, but he's right. We're sort of in a checkmate with everyone having nukes."

Sorry Jughead, you're too advanced for this.

Yep, he sure gets that a lot, too. Yet another thing she's so far from the first to do, and equally as far from the last to do. Oops??

Anyway, guess three it apparently is since she's talking about the Reagan administration. “In a world wide web-less era of mutual assured destruction with the world's nuclear weapons supply building up? There'd be much less anonymous — and also in much fewer easily found numbers than you can get on the cesspools of reddit dot com thirty-ish years later — yet still just as radicalized — dumbasses in government agencies to turn into assets and use as sources for sale or trade of state secrets, is probably what I'd still call more subtle. And still very damaging long term, but I guess you really can't expect much from the USSR run on compulsive lying, mismanagement, and corruption, so it checks out. Which, considering the answer to the question of 'when is a good time to talk endless shit about Reagan?', is 'always', the same could be said for him too.” You know, just saying.

“Burnt Russian malls and questionable town leadership aside, what did you do for fun there?” Maybe she had a job she liked, or was taking a lot of interesting classes in high school or college, hobbies and friends, et cetera. Small towns and the decades that separate them are interesting, but so are people.

"Kill extradimensional monsters," Robin says.

Surely she can say something to throw this guy off. Because he seems to take it all in just a rambling stride. And she approves of the rambling, but please don't be in stride! She's used to being out there, being strange!

Nope, that definitely works as strange enough to get him to pause to consider this. And definitely a bigger shift than 'mall equals Russian operation'. “That's a humorous way to refer to KGB agents, right?” Because if so, yes hilarious and much better than actual extradimensional monsters.

"No," she says, smiling. Because she didn't kill the Russian soldiers, thanks. "Monsters without faces, and tons of teeth. You know, horrors."

“Oh, those, yeah I see those all the time. They were going to be my second guess.” Said in a way where it's clear that the exact opposite is true. And even if the tone weren't making that obvious, the expression sure is. Which is also an expression of: Hawkins, are you okay over there, do you need help from 49 more national guard forces?? “This place must be boring in comparison.” After all that, how could it not be?

“So how do you kill them, then?” A slight pause. “I can tell it wasn't by punching them.” A smile accompanies the light but friendly teasing. Yeah, she's already on his 'a cool person here/probably a cool person here' list, ok.

No, Hawkins is not okay. Yes, there are national guard forces there. No, more of them won't help.

"This place is, except for the aliens. And the planet we were on before, well, the monsters showed up there. Had to fire bomb them."

She says it like it means nothing to her. But she had been so shaken when it had happened.

"But mostly they're weak to fire, and psychic powers of course."

Well, at least the method of Light Shit On Fire still works. Which is almost surprising considering how generally 'a lot' that sounds like is happening. And makes coming from a place where the monsters are just humans, and not masses of what sounds like cosmic horrors that can stalk you through universes, sound a lot better.

"Does that mean you have psychic powers?" And hopefully everyone in Hawkins has a flamethrower or psychic powers, but ideally both. Even if a town of psychics might be asking for headaches due to overlapping thoughts. So maybe as long as they could block out some things too. "It'd be interesting to be able to have telepathic conversations with aliens here."

"Me? No. Just a band geek with a decent throwing arm. The girl isn't here."

And god she hopes El won't be. She'd not handle all of this well. It might be traumatizing for her.

"I'm pretty sure telepathy isn't real."

“So, just to recap. There was a whole entire mall that was actually a Russian operation, and then monsters coming through from other dimensions, and you're drawing the line at telepathy?” You know, just for double checking reasons.

"Yep," Robin says, smirking. "Telekinesis? Yes. Portal opening? Check. Possession by evil entities? Totally. Killing across dimensions, absolutely happened. Even long distance observation of people across dimensions or countries. But no telepath."

That wasn't how El's thing worked, was it?

Then again, what was El's memory diving? Or diving into Max's mind...

"Okay, maybe a little telepathy. But only by two people I think."

Welp, all that sounds super (not) fun and (not) great, too!! “So, yes, but not as common as the other stuff.” Since two meant it's technically around in some form. Close enough.

But, really though, really— from what she's said, “Has anyone ever told you that you have, in fact, seen too much shit?” It's one of those questions asked despite being sure of the answer. Because the answer is probably 'yes, multiple times, on a daily basis, for the last (however many) years'. When does Hawkins get its turn to catch a break? Like, uh, maybe sometime before the first Bush administration would be cool?

"Oh yes, that has definitely come up in conversations with Steve. And he's seen more shit. We have seen way too much shit."

And man that could be tiring. But she hadn't seen aliens, thus her interest in what was before her before Jughead had snuck up on her.

"We'll figure it out though. End all the shit seeing by saving the world. Again. Just a hobby. Then run off to college somewhere less interesting, like New York City."

More sightseeing, less shit seeing, yes good plan. “A few hours ago, I would have told people that if they wanted to see some shit then they should go to New York City, but no if you're looking for less interesting, that should do it.” Probably anywhere would be compared to where she's from, but still true.

Whoever this Steve is (presumably an acquaintance or friend of hers), hopefully he's safely moved out of the town or something like that, because what do you mean there's more shit — how can there possibly be more shit??? (Which is more of a thought that's a rhetorical question kind of thought.) Her mentioning the name of another Hawkins resident does also remind him he doesn't know hers; therefore, convenient segue time. “So if he's 'Hawkins resident who has seen more shit' named Steve, that makes you 'Hawkins resident who is a self described band geek with a decent throwing arm' named..”

Move? Out of Hawkins? That doesn't sound physically possible for Momma Harrington. Like he could ever leave his chickees behind. Robin thinks he's going to live there forever. Just in case.

"Robin," she says, not really thinking much of giving her name. "You?"

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