| An Anticlimactic Afterlife |
| Summary: | Evandreus recounts to McQueen and Trask an odd dream about the afterlife. |
| Date: | 05 Aug 2041 AE |
| Related Logs: | The Gods Must Be Crazy |
| Players: |
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| Pilot Berths - Naval Deck - Battlestar Cerberus |
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| Post-Holocaust Day: #160 |
| The battlestar's pilots call this place home. Bunks line the walls with grey curtains to cover their sleeping areas. Lockers sit between each pair of bunks and a round metal table sits in the center, furnished with simple but comfortable steel chairs. A hatch at the rear of the room leads to a communal head. |
| Condition Level: 3 - All Clear |
First CAP out since Leonis had the Bunbun all tuckered out. He fell asleep in the bottom half of his flight suit, with the top half flopping over and around his waist, his tank tops discarded and his dogtags hung on the divine cock sticking out from the wall at the head of his bunk. Ever since he took that chest shot down on Leonis and had to train himself to breathe shallowly, his snoring's all but disappeared, and he's lying there silently in his sleep until suddenly — suddenly, he's not. There's a noise from him. Not a snort or a yelp, but… a chuckle. Two chuckles, escalating into something more intense. He's -laughing.- Is he even awake?
Amidst the process of toweling off and getting ready for the rack, Trask calls out in mock defense, "It was a /cold/ shower, okay?" As the laughter continues, though, the joking abates, and the mildly damp, boxer-brief clad ECO wanders on over to check on his buddy.
A much more recently-finished CAP brings in a sweaty, rumpled McQueen, with his flight suit sloppily pulled down 'round his waist with the sleeves pulled in a loose bow. His fine hair is plastered to his skull and a few drops of sweat bead upon his brow as he hefts the overstuffed duffel bag over his shoulder and props the hatch open just wide enough to slip through. He makes a beeline for his locker but is otherwise silent and docile. Well, for him. He hasn't really taken notice of anything or anyone in particular, yet.
Evandreus buries his face into his pillow to stifle the laughter a little before he rolls, red-cheeked and wet-eyed, up to his shoulder and smiles kindly down to Boots. "Oh, man. I just had the weirdest of weird dreams, you don't even know," he tells his friend. "You going to sleep? Come climb up here. I promise I won't kick you out," he goes on. "I'll tell you about it. Hey, Queenie," he calls across to the thus-benamed.
"You're only sayin' that 'cuz you have no nugget chicken to choke," Kal quips about not getting kicked out of the bed. "Kinda surprised Lucky's not the one tryin' to get lucky. I'm startin' to think maybe Bubbles is called that 'cuz she goes glug glug glug when going down." Whether or not he'll ascend the ladder up to Bunny's bunk remains to be seen, for he then tilts his chin in a 'sup?' manner to greet McQueen with, "El-Tee."
"Tee Ell." Comes McQueen's hasty reply. "And don't bloody ask me what that is supposed to stand for. We got a staff meeting over there? Don't suppose the Raptor jocks are plannin' general skullduggery, are you?" He drops his overstuffed bag to the ground with a solid *thump* and begins jiggling with his locker as he flips his head over his shoulder, eyeing Evandreus as well. "Is that so, Master Rabbit?"
Another light strain of laughter's drawn out through closed, smiling lips, "Hmm-hmmm." Trask is so charming when he's slandering folk. Especially folk-not-him. He shuffles up to his side, just a little. "Master Rabbit? Been a while since anyone's called me that. No, no mischief over here. I'm not even going to join in the callsign speculation," Bunny declares. He might still be hoping Bubbles will talk to him again, one day. "But no, really, it was weird. I should write it down before I forget it. Either of you played secretary enough to take dictation?" he wonders.
Adopting a quasi-academic tone, Trask reveals, "Skullduggery is one of a Harrier's many ways to harry. An' Tee-El… Ess-El… one letter off isn't fatal. Not like you're mixin' M-I-A with K-I-A." When the word dictation is brought up, the corners of his mouth are tugged into a conspiracy of mischief. "I can take notes for my secretary, every now an' then. You have a notepad? I'm sure I can find a pen perfect for dictation." That, of course, being Psyche's beloved pink feather pouf pen, if his heading towards her bunk's direction is any indication.
"Dated a Mia but never a Kia. Guess that counts for somethin', right?" McQueen's jaw clenches a little as he starts shovelling a few of the bag's contents into his now-open locker and re-arranging some junk. It's funny - he started out with nothing when he washed up on this Battlestar, but has now managed to amass a small collection of odds and ends. "I don't know. 'Master Rabbit.' It sounded more dignified to me, for some reason. So what'd you see? Pink elephants?"
Evandreus gets himself sitting up straight, and he rubs his nose with the back of his hand rather fiercely for a few second in the endeavor of scratching an itch, leaving his nostrils a little red before he reaches back for one of the spiral-top notebooks loitering at the back of his cubby. He tosses it over onto the table, where it lands with a FLAP. "Did Mia ever stand you up?" he feels compelled to ask McQueen, in jest. "No, I dreamt I died and went to Gemenon," he snickers. "No, seriously, I dreamt I was in the rec room, and… I was painting something, and I kind of knew what it was going to be, but I kind of didn't, y'know how that happens? Like it was going to be -really- bad, and I was kind of scared to see the finished product, but had no idea what it was going to be. Anyway, then this nugget's crawling under the table I'm painting on and trying to get into his flight suit or something. And he comes out from under with this box."
As Evan starts regaling, Bootstrap calls out, "More tortoise, less hare." For he's yet to snag the pink feather pouf pen. Once acquired, he's back to the table, flipping the notebook to a clean page, completely disregarding that there already was a pen tucked into the spiral. "Rec room. Painting something nebulous. Fear of committing to an end result…" Har. Har. "Nugget under the table, comes out with a box…" In his hasty, thus not all that legible scribble, he jots it all down, not bothering to even sit. "The nugget have a name?"
"Mmmm. Something told me /that/ was comin'." McQueen states without really turning back, continuing to remain absorbed by stowing away his goods. "And as to whether or not she did? That's a closely-guarded secret, yeh?" Having stowed his goods, he starts wrestling out of his boots before shoving them in the locker as he falls dead-silent, listening in on this story.
"If you want me to shave, just tell me so, Bootsies," Evan calls back to the request for less hair, only to roll his eyes and fling his arms up overhead at the commitment comment. "You're going to psychoanalyze this for me, aren't you." This isn't even a question, at this point. But onward he trudges. "Name. Aa—- no. No, I -asked- him if he knew Alex, because I didn't know him, and I thought that was weird. And -he- asked -me,-" Evan squints, "Ugh. He asked me if I know my father." The wince is even audible, there. He even pauses to let Dr. Freud get off some shot about his evident daddy issues.
"If you shaved, then you wouldn't be a fluffy bunny," Trask points out, continuing to write. A beat. Head still dipped, those brown us of his drift upwards almost slyly. "/Do/ you know your father?"
McQueen just stares at /something/ in disbelief for a moment as he eyeballs the exchange. It's that pink pen, most likely. This complete, he starts to meander towards his rack after slipping the locker door shut gingerly, and hauling the duffel bag up with him, lobbing it up upon the mattress before he himself ends up on there.
"Oh, no no no," Evan holds up his hands, warding off the topic. "This is not a conversation I'm having right now. I just got -done- having my head shrunk. Anyhow, so. Nugget's got a box, and he opens it up, and it's, like, this bomb, set to go off at seventeen hundred hours. And the clock strikes seventeen hundred, and the whole… like… the whole ship blew up, I guess. And a bunch of us. Uh, Splash was there, and Macer was there, and a couple of Marines. We woke up in this… like… woodsy plain. And we all figured we were dead, y'know."
"You'll need to find another fluffer," Evan is told, for the ECO is cracking a joke about shrunken heads and, well, he hearts the Bunny but Not That Way. The topic of fathers, however, is discarded. "Splash… Macer… Marines… Explosion… Woodsy plain…"
"Yessir," Evan mocks military obedience back to Boots. "So we were waiting around for directions to the River or whatnot and it turns out the afterlife is this… Gemenese tourist trap." He shakes his head, scouring his sleepytime memories for the name. "Lampridis Falls," he finally comes up with. And this nice old couple comes along and takes us back to camp to save us from the bears and feed us lotus kabobs." He veers from jovial and joking to something more dismal, suddenly, at the end. "And that's it."
River, eh? "Not the Styx, I hope." Wry, that. "Gemenon, huh? You ever been there?" Gememon, he means. "Are there even falls named that?" Kal spells Lampridis phonetically, not being familiar with the place. Being told that's it, it's almost incredulously that he asks, "That's it?" Talk about anticlimactic.
"No, the Styx, exactly," Evan pipes up. "We all died in the explosion. And the afterlife turned out to be… Lampridis Falls. Yeah. Yeah, it was a real place. I never went there, myself, but. A lot of people did."
Fade for need of RL sleep