redshiftrp | Video @Pratt

[The video opens with a idyllic shot of horses grazing in a pasture with a barn in the background. Well idyllic if you discount the fact that they're clearly on the agriculture level of Beacon, one of the horses is glowing and the other is Branwen and that some of the other animals in the paddock are mutated deer. It's about as close to scenic as this place gets.]

Kieran and I have been working on getting a ranch going up here. Cho's been doing tests on the deer and they're good to eat so I'm gonna try and get a little herd going. But then over here...

[The camera pans to some cleared areas nearby with the smoothness of someone who has used their phone to film hundreds of Vine videos back home.]

I thought we could start some sort of farm? I've grown tomatoes before but I don't know anything about farming, I'm more the livestock sort. So if anyone wants to work on this, you're more than welcome.

Actually if anyone wants to help with any of this feel free. But don't try to pet the deer. They're not friendly.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

They really are. I dunno what it is about small towns that make people all kind of.. set in their ways and weird about stuff.

[ He felt like he was pretty open minded, though that was probably just in comparison to people who had never even left the valley before. Hadriel had reminded him that he's still just a country boy who has no idea how cities work or anything about technology beyond his xbox and cell phone. ]

Worse, I drove someone else's car into a fence. And then I had to work all summer to pay for the repairs instead of having the summer off.

I guess this is kind of an adventure, but it'd have been nice to know about it in advance. I would have brought different things than a shovel and an empty canteen.

[He also wouldn't have agreed to go on this particular adventure, but that's beside the point. ]

Maybe it's all the boredom. Rots people's brains.

[ He's kidding. Well, mostly. But it's really nice, actually, talking to someone else who feels a disconnect from the way people think in the place he'd grown up. It isn't that the people in his village are evil, or stupid, or anything like that. They just... valued safety above everything else. And they had lost their curiosity, about the world. Reynir had lived amongst them and loved them and made friends easily, but one day it just... wasn't enough. ]

That's awful. So, are cars really expensive?

[ Look... it's not like he's never seen a car! There were LOADS of them in the Silent World, littered all over the place. And he's been behind the wheel of a military transport! But cars aren't in civilian use anymore, so he's got no clue how hard paying off the repairs for that and a fence would be. ]

Yeah, I can see how that reputation wouldn't exactly be fun.

[ He also wonders what kind of joyride Pratt was taking but he feels like he's already asking so many questions that it might be rude to heap another on the pile... ]

That's the thing about adventures. In my... okay, limited... experience, they're pretty much always a surprise in one way or another.

[ Okay maybe just ONE more question because he really is curious: ]

What would you have brought?

That's probably it. Something about being safe all the time and not having to do anything or experience new things makes them stagnant. Or like... stale. I dunno. It was starting to get kinda hard to live with.

Not that I wanted to move because I'd be out of place anywhere else, but I was kind of silently wishing people would change.

Guess they have now.

[This is some sort of monkey paw wish. They changed alright. Into monsters willing to kill each other for a religious fanatic, and ready to destroy their community for the Collapse that no one could prove was happening.]

They can be expensive. It wasn't that much but I was a kid and I didn't have a bunch of money sitting around. My parents paid it and then I had to pay them back. It sucked. And every time I did anything even kinda wrong they'd bring it up. If I ever scuff the squad car it'll come back up. It was over a decade ago.

Food. More clothes. Supplies for farming. Guns. I dunno, I feel kinda unprepared to start a whole society from scratch.

[ Reynir knows that feeling, too - of not quite fitting at home, and not fitting anywhere else, too. The closest he had felt to having a place he belongs had been... on the expedition. With his friends. Gods, he misses them.

And then when Pratt mentions how people changed in Hope County, Reynir remembers about the murder-y cult all over again and says, voice sorrowful: ]

I'm sorry about the cult. As suffocating as my village felt sometimes... I would never want something like that to be the thing that stirs it up.

[ He winces in sympathy when Pratt explains that his parents had had to pay and he'd had to pay them back. If they're anything like his own parents, he can just imagine the lectures. So many lectures. ]

Well, for what it's worth, I promise to never to bring it up ever again.

[ He means that, too. ]

[Aw Reynir, he likes you.]

It's fine, chances are I'm not crashing any cars here. I'm actually a pilot, but I don't think there's a whole lot of helicopters in this place. Would be nice though, we could explore more of what's outside without actually having to walk through it.

There might be huge ravines and stuff out there.

Aren't there any cars or tanks or anything?

[ Then, after a beat, completely credulously: ]

What's a helicopter?

[ In his defense, he at least knows what airplanes used to be! But Pratt can explain it to him; catching up is going to be a long process and it's good to have met someone new, who has a little in common with him, to help him with some of it. ]

Video @Pratt

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject