revivalproject | Night at the Museum (OTA)

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Night at the Museum (OTA)

WHO: Kyle Broflovski and YOU!
WHERE: The Underground of Coruscant (Level 4)
WHAT: A very wholesome field trip to the lost Galactic Museum.
WHEN: During the event. (Mid-ish?)
WARNINGS: The foulest of language. Injury extremely likely. More as needed.

Kyle's seen aliens before.

A group of them from the Jannex Galaxy, a spaceship full of greys, the Marklar, and Jeff Bezos. This is the first time he's seen quite so many different kinds in one place, but even so it doesn't take him long to feel comfortable enough to talk to a few of them at the Senate Tour that Obi-Wan had suggested he take. One of these friendly aliens had mentioned in passing that it was a pity that the Galactic Museum could no longer be toured, due to it having been lost and forgotten somewhere down on Level 4.

A lost museum seems to Kyle like exactly the sort of thing the Agrii would want them to find. And even if not, well. Kyle really likes museums.

Is it difficult to get to Level 4? Oh, yes. And extremely dangerous. This doesn't deter Kyle one bit, and so he puts out a call on the Network to let people know that hey, he's putting together a museum field trip and anybody is welcome to come! Provided, that is, that you don't mind finding your way down through huge portals/ventilation shafts into a world where sunlight is less than a memory and dangerous people and creatures lurk around every corner.

But hey, if you decide to come down, you'll find a too-tall ginger waiting for you with some flashlights and a notepad.

You bet your ass he's going to force you to use the Buddy System.

--

[OOC: Feel free to skip straight to the Museum proper of course! Mingle away, create your own TLs, whatever!]

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Kyle, seeing what Clarice is doing follows suit. He figures blind cat monsters won't care about light, but after seeing one it really does make him wonder what else might be lurking in the shadows.

"I dunno, fish can be dangerous," he muses. "Honestly I don't have time for animals, either." He perks up a little. "When we get taken back to Agra? You should go see the glownies. They're sort of like sheep, sort of like ponies. They're cute. I mean, if you like farm animals."

She had already seen the glownies on her first day - the only day she'd had before waking up on the First Breath, actually - but she didn't want to burst his bubble. "Funny thing, actually. I spent a couple months of my life on a farm especially for sheep and horses. Those'd be right up my alley."

She maneuvers them carefully around a corner, gesturing for him to be quiet as she canvasses the intersecting hallway. No strange cats yet, the coast is clear for the moment, and a few quick turns will circumvent the first creature they found and put them back on track, hopefully straight into the part of the museum they were headed for.

"Really? That's pretty cool." He shuts up when she gestures at him, then resumes once they're walking again. "There's a lot of cows where I'm from. I didn't live on a farm or anything, though. My super best friend did, but they grew weed."

Which means he's effectively useless in terms of knowing how a farm runs. "Anyway, I think agriculture is a pretty necessary component for survival back on Agra, and I'm not entirely sure how many people are handling it. So maybe you'd be helpful there." A glance at her gun. "I mean, obviously you have loads of other skills, too."

He pauses to peer into a display case, seeing what looks like some sort of sculpture.

"As much as it sucks to be pulled away from home, you have to admit the chance to sort of rebuild a society is pretty cool."

"... You must come from a time or a place where that's legal, then," she said in mild surprise. Anyone who openly admitted to having a weed farm in Starling's day would have an immediate appointment with the DEA.

"But yeah, when I get back I'll throw my hand in, see what kind of help people need." She looks over another case, finding a manuscript under something that isn't quite glass, and definitely not plastic. "I'm a little worried about how my-" What should she call him? Marriage was out of the question. Partner always felt too formal. "-beau is going to react when he finds out I'm missing, but ... that's a little out of my hands, now. ... D'you have a camera? I bet Mr. Kenobi might like a picture of these documents."

"Huh? Oh, yeah, totally legal in Colorado." It's easy to forget that it wasn't always the case.

He frowns and walks over to peer at the documents. "No, I don't. I thought maybe the communicators had a camera function but it doesn't seem like it. I have a notebook, I could transcribe some of it?" Because he's a champ at taking notes, at least.

"Jeez, you have a partner back home? That's rough, being taken away. I'm so sorry."

"Colorado?" She let out a snort-laugh of amusement. "Of course they figured it out. God-damn."

She moved out of the way to let Kyle do a transcription, holding the beam steady for him so he wouldn't have to worry about juggling notebook, flashlight, and pencil all at once. "You're a peach, Kyle. ... Thanks. He, uh. ... We've only been together a couple of years now, but ... it was just him for so long before this. I hope this won't hurt him."

"We don't have much else to do up there."

Even if he has very little idea what exactly it is he's writing down, he's careful to copy exactly. "A couple of years is pretty long, though," Kyle says in between lines of text. "And you were obviously friends or something beforehand. So... yeah, honestly, he's probably gonna be going out of his mind with worry. But maybe we'll all get back before long, you know?"

Out of his mind. The phrase almost makes Starling laugh. Most people had already assumed he was even before they had started helping each other... she's afraid her absence might undo so much good progress.

"Maybe," she says absently, then forces her attention back to the manuscript in the case. Just because she has to find a way to deal with this new information and the feelings it's wrenching up ... it doesn't mean that she has to do it now. There are other things at hand.

"This doesn't look like any of the languages I've seen on signs around the city. I wonder how old it is... If everything here is from nine hundred years in the past for the folks from Agra, it must be positively ancient to them."

Kyle spares Clarice a sidelong glance; she looks a little upset but he's not about to pry.

Not yet, anyway. Once they know each other better, well. All bets are off.

"No," he agrees. "And yeah, from what I gathered from Ezra and Echo and Mr. Kenobi, this place is way before their times. So we're probably standing in a building as old as our megalithic sites back home. Wild, right?"

He finishes his copying and studies it critically before he nods. "With our luck I just copied an ancient recipe for casserole."

"It's got to be so surreal for them, walking through their own history. What an opportunity. In America, we don't get that quite so much because we raze so much, but in Europe or South America, it's so much more prevalent. This is ... right up there with if we found Stonehenge not long after the stones were raised, you're absolutely right."

She gives him a smile which she realizes in the instant is a fond one: he's grown on her, and quickly. The casserole quip turns that smile into an involuntary hiccup of laughter ... which draws a screech from the darkness.

"Shit house mouse."

"Right?!" Kyle is clearly excited just thinking about it, because he's also just as clearly a huge nerd. "I went to Peru once and saw this temple deep in the jungle? This is like that except it feels like the future."

At the screech Kyle freezes, holding his flashlight like maybe he can bludgeon something to death with it. "Ah, fuck," he whispers. "If we back up will we run into the other one?"

"I've always wanted to see Peru..."

She had asked to go on a day trip from Buenos Aires. They'd been tossing around the logistics of it, just dancing around the edges, when she'd been ripped away. Thankfully, she didn't have too much of a chance to brood about it before the cat screeched again.

"Not sure," she whispered back, lips barely moving, her voice scarcely more than breath in the dark. She reached for the Colt again. "But if you can hold that light and get me a clear shot, I can get it between the eyes if we have to. I'm not going to let these overgrown catnip tweaks keep us from what the Agri sent us for."

"Okay," Kyle whispers back. He moves his light so it shines down the hall, using both hands to steady it in spite of his hammering heart.

Nothing seems to be approaching, so Kyle begins to edge forward. "Maybe it's gone?" he asks. That, of course, is when the creature comes out of nowhere and leaps at Kyle.

Starling doesn't even swear out of surprise like most might. Reflexes from years of training and practice kick in, and she swings the Colt around at the creature's head, squeezing off two quick rounds. The sound is deafening in the enclosed corridor, there's a spray of blood and viscera as her shots strike home, and the animal collapses inert at Kyle's feet, its front paws ineffectively grazing his shirt as it falls to the ground.

She puts one more in its head just to be sure, then holsters the weapon, ears ringing as she jogs up to him, raising her voice so he'll hear her over the tinnitis.

"You okay?"

Yes, they'll have to be loud as a honky tonk dive bar to hear each other, but she has a feeling the sound of the gunshots will keep any other threats away for a short while.

Kyle's not unfamiliar with gunfire; he's from a redneck town, he's been around firearms his whole life. The sound is still shocking though, as it careens off of the museum walls at a near deafening volume. I'm dead, he thinks the instant before hot blood hits his face. Then the cat is at his feet and he's stumbling back, nearly tripping over himself. His hands feel his face and neck, shocked to find that he himself is not injured.

"I'm okay," he says once he's sure that's actually true.

"Holy shit, good shot."

"Good," she says, checking her pockets to see if she has anything he can clean his face with. She comes up empty, and regrets it. No one wants to walk around like that, ever, no matter where the blood might have come from.

"Years of practice and a shot of adrenaline," she says in response to the compliment. "You need a second or are you good to keep lookin' around?" She gives him a little look that plainly says 'don't lie just to be macho, or I'll call you on it'.

If Clarice had started wiping at his face, Kyle would have some intense Mom-themed flashbacks, so maybe it's just as well. He arms blood off of his face with his sleeve instead.

"No, no, I'm cool," he says. "Not my first time." Probably a strange thing to say in response, but it's not inaccurate - Kyle's had a lot of bloodspray hit him in the past. "I feel kinda bad, though. Poor kitty."

The less she reminds him of Mrs. Brovlofski, the better, really. "Okay." She's impressed at how well he handles himself, but at the same time a little sad that he's had the sort of life where he can.

"Yeah, it was just doing what instinct told it to do. But unfortunately, so was I. I guess that's the world for you, when you boil it all down. It just gets a little more complicated when you add innovations like firearms into the mix. Feel like we might find something else in here, or you wanna move on? You're the one leadin' this little expedition."

"Yeah. Nature kinda sucks." Kyle looks around, but his thirst for knowledge knows no bounds. "We can go a little further," he decides. "If we don't find anything worth looking it, we'll go back to the lobby and regroup."

He sets off, looking really no less determined than before. "Have you shot a lot of people? Every FBI agent I've ever seen was a little, uh, trigger happy."

She bristles immediately at the question, the step she was about to take scraping to a stop in the dust and grit on the floor. Jesus God, save my bod, she thought, closing her eyes as the smell of the fish market bursts through the dams of her memory and surrounds her. The sound of a baby crying. She forces herself to remember the other thing that got her through, switching from the copper of blood to clear, copperplate handwriting on fine paper.

You are a warrior, Clarice.

"I have," she says, her voice steady. "But only ever when I had no choice. Some people tried to spin it like I was some bloodthirsty bitch, but ... it was always self-defense." She gave a soft, bitter laugh. "In my time, they gave me the Guinness Book of World Records for the female FBI agent who'd shot the most people. I threw it straight in the trash."

It's hard not to notice the slight pause in Clarice's step. Not for the first time in his life, Kyle curses his complete lack of tact.

"That's... really fucking tacky," Kyle says slowly. "I mean. Wow. So they were clearly giving you more shit just because you're a woman."

Clarice lets out a laugh that, a few years ago, would have been far more bitter. "I got that a lot," she said with a little roll of her eyes. From the little smile she gives him, she's trying to make it clear that she's not upset with him for asking.

"And yet, in their book - pun intended - they'd see it as 'equality'. See, we include women too. Never mind that if that was really the way they wanted to play it they'd have taken women's statistics into mind from the get-go. But we didn't come down here to have a talk about what feminism oughta be, or any of that. We came down here for answers."

She gives him a friendly little nudge with her shoulder.

"Oh, no, I guess we didn't," he says, rocking when he's nudged. "I don't mind, though. Like, for the record. I'm all for equality, like for real equality where it doesn't matter what gender you are or aren't or what you identify as or whatever. And you know, the patriarchy is total bullshit and it really all comes from capitalism? Since it taught us to view everything as a commodity? You know, thousands of years ago and shit."

He keeps moving as he talks. Because boy can he talk. "You know, maybe down here somewhere there's a clue to why things are the way they are up there. I mean, who builds a city on top of itself over and over? And you just ditch your museum, your history? It's spooky."

The bit about gender pings against something old and best left in the dark basement corridors where she found it, but the memory is more like a horse being buzzed by a fly, and just as easy to swat aside. Not only that, but his denouncement of the patriarcy makes her laugh. "Truth," she says in a tone like a Southern Baptist at a prayer meeting, grinning, reminded of the nights when she and Mapp used to stay up ranting about Men and the Almighty Dollar and everything in between, sharing a six-pack of whatever beer was cheapest at the superette yet didn't taste like bread stuffed in weak ginger ale.

His comment about the buried museum, though, that brings her back to the present. She licks her lips slowly, combatting the dust and dryness, then presses them together.

"Unless there's something in that history you wanna forget. Think about it: it makes a sorta sense. On our way down here, it was like ... the further down you went, the poorer and rougher the neighborhoods got. These people literally bury their problems. So doesn't logic dictate that something about their history was ... really problematic?"

The way she says it - truth - makes him laugh. He's never been to an actual Southern revival in his life, but he knows what she's getting at anyway.

Kyle nods, thinking. His flashlight continues to cut shadows apart. "Maybe it's the Jedi," he says slowly. "I went to the Temple, the one Mr. Kenobi said we could check out? And it's got loads of cool stuff in it, of course, but none of it seemed very ugly. Just like if you go to a church, it looks awesome but it's not like... putting any gnarly history on display."

He frowns. "Every side has a bias. Maybe there's other parts to them they'd rather not advertise."

Night at the Museum (OTA)

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no Kyle. no pan flutes for you.

they might be useful!

but these are eyeless cats, not giant guinea pigs. (cw: gore, dead monster cat)

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cw: fatal shooting talk

cw: fatal shooting talk

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