| Ears to the Ground |
| Summary: | The Eidolon Bravo crew sets up communications with the mothership. |
| Date: | 2041.05.19 |
| Related Logs: | none. |
| Players: |
      |
| The Eternal Bridge — Leonis |
|---|
| Despite its well-augured name, the Eternal Bridge did not emerge unscathed from the recent Cylon assault. The four-kilometer span that connects both banks of the city is now no more than a broken ruin, its brilliant steel towers jutting up from the riverbed while its deck lies crumpled and sagging. Carved stone casements once held aloft by decorative caryatids are now blackened reflections of their original selves. Bits and pieces of those statues lie with exploded sedans and smashed asphalt on the corpse-covered shores, caressed by softly rolling waves that reach almost to the cliffs. |
| Post-Holocaust Day: #81 |
Another humid Leonian day - so much so that Kulko has foregone his body armor for his toil in the sun. The LTJG, along with a pair of marines, is digging a small, 6-inch deep trench along the riverbank, crouched down under the early summer sun. Elsewhere, pilots are melting together bits of wire to form a continuous circuit, to eventually be laid in the trench. The work proceeds wordlessly, with occasional nervous glances up to the cliffs - which have yet been silent.
Covington's armor has been in a pile since the bridge incident, along with the helmet. She wanders along the bank, headed in the direction of Kulko, using a crappy purple ballpoint pen to complete a crossword puzzle snitched from somewhere. Potty breaks come with brain benders, don'tcha know. Dallas, seeming too restless to join the wire bits party, turns and makes her way over to where the tactical officer and booties are shoveling. "Ya know," the blonde observes, "Y'all look about ready t'be served up, all sunbaked an' glistenin'. You," she points to one of the more exhausted looking marines. "Go take a smoke break. Gimme that shovel." She doesn't invoke rank, but she does use her Momma Voice (tm). "Scoot." Then she hops into the trench, and trades her crossword for the shovel. "26 down is kickin' my ass anyhow."
"How you holdin' up, sir?" queries Kulko after a brief glance up to the new arrival. He continues scraping out the tiny trough with the stolen gardening implement. "If you're gettin' curious, Cerberus made contact last night usin' a burst packet. Nother message scheduled for 1900 tonight, if we can get this antenna laid."
Thump. Covington glances down at her boots, the toes of which now occupy the trench. "Hot damn. Mama needs a gen-u-ine shower." This is what Cerberus means to her. She glances over to Kulko. "Nice trench ya got here." She brandishes her shovel, patting it against her thigh. "I figure bootie's gonna get mocked by his friends for gettin' relieved off trench duty by an officer, but I'm a farmgirl, not a solderin' junkie." She considers the furrow in the earth. "Great, now'm hungry. This makes me thinka plantin' taters, which makes me thinka eatin' taters." Grrrooowl goes her belly. She hops, feel out of the shallow gully, dramatic gesture complete. "Maybe it's the Southerner in me, but when I go visitin', I 'specta ta be treated, not shot at an' blowed up. I think I'ma send a nasty note." To the cylons. And, finally, she addresses his question, "Aw, sugar, I'm doin' just fine. I ain't been show yet. Couple bruises. Still look pretty, feel great. You're upright, life's good." She smiles, "How you doin'? It's a lotta leadership got strapped ta that wagon." Her small shovel bites into the earth, as Dallas crouches to assist. She's really quite good with shovels from beach sand size, through trowel, all the way up to intruder whackin' models and snow shovels. "Maybe we get the antenna drunk first," she flips some earth aside. "It'll go quicker."
"Godsdamned right about that. Thought I'd be executin' orders, not givin' em. But." The leadership, that is. Tiny shovelful of dirt, away. "But I got orders from the Major afore she expired, Gods bear her swiftly 'cross the River, and I'mma see to it we see those cold steel bulkheads sooner rather'n later." Kulko's spade catches on a particularly deeply embedded rock, and it takes a bit of prying to get the thing loose. "As for the welcomin' committee? They knew we were comin'. No two ways about it. Knew just where to target our ship, when we'd be landing, what force we'd be in. We suspected a leak up in CIC right from the beginning, but this just about proves it." The rock is tossed away from the river - no loud splashes to attract attention - and he returns to digging.
Dallas digs in, glancing over now and then, a stray lock of pale hair falling into her eyes. She keeps digging as she talks, which is a boon, cos she talks a lot. "Sooner's good, petal. I think we's all just about had our fill of these trees an' shit. Sunshine ain't all it's cracked up ta be." Even a farmgirl from Aerilon gets tired of getting shot at, sooner or later. "Course they knew we was comin'. Question is do we suck that bad at stealth, or'd somebody tell 'em. Last time I saw a body get hit that hard by a hostile welcome, somebody snitched ta the boys down the block when my brothers was gonna go set fire ta their fireworks store. I'm with you. Leanin' ta snitch. Which begs the question, who's stuck on stupid so hard they'd risk theyself ta pass information to them that tried to nuke us all? Blood runs cold at the thought."
"Ain't just that we was loud. Look at their targets," Kulko offers by way of explanation. "Knew where we kept the supplies, took them out, left the crew quarters intact." He too keeps moving down the line as they dig - the pair are making decent progress. "As to who'n why? Can't hardly guess. Suppose some folk'd prefer rulin' Hades to servin' cocktails on Olympus." A wry smirk at the bastardized colloquialism.
Dig, dig. Dallas flips more dirt out of the mini trench being dug for their communications endeavor. She smiles slightly at Kulko's observation, though the topic of conversation is far from amusing. "Dead is dead. There's one thing I can't cotton ta, it's shifty an' traitorous behavior." No proper Southern woman abides such shifty and unbecoming activities. "I really take it personal when folks try ta kill me'n my friends." Dig, dig. "I got a proper whuppin' stored up for that person."
Scuff-scuff, scuff-scuff. Tisiphone's limping her way over from the direction of the larger group, head canted slightly to one side. The greenish bruise smeared down the side of her face is smudged over with dirt — the last of the clay compress she was using against it, last night. She has an opened tin of canned pears in one hand. "S'up?" she asks as she nears, while chewing. Manners, wot?
"So say we all, sir." If ever there was a proper time for that most ubiquitous of Colonial phrases, this is it. "Fraid you'll have to get in line. Charge five cubits a punch, might well be able to finance the whole damn war. Don't go losin' sleep over it. We'll flush em' out and hang em to dry." He offers Tis a smile at her arrival. "Grab a trowel. Gotta set up a VLF antenna so the XO can whisper sweet nothings in my ear from a star system away."
Dallas glances up from the shoveling as Tisiphone approaches. "Howdy, doin' some meditation through diggin'." She continues to dig, inching along and chucking dirt as she goes. She swaps to the left hand, and progress doesn't so much as slow. Ambidextrous shoveling! "I could fall asleep jus' about anywhere in any position, sugar. Ain't likely I'ma lose any over that. Provided we get off this rock in…" She waves a hand a little, side to side, "Y'know. More or less one piece. One real big piece, a couple littler ones could be sewed back on, maybe."
"M'okay. Sec." Tisiphone fishes the last pear slice out of the can with her fingers and hastily polishes it off before draining the syrup. It's a good thing Trask decided toothpaste was worth scavenging from the supermarket. "Whaf's-" she starts to ask, while licking her fingers clean. Pause. She finishes cleaning her fingers off, wiping them on her pants, before trying again. "VLF antenna? What? Knew you were lonely but- Boots found coffee, can't you just dip a sandwich in some and pretend it tastes like his mouth?" Grin. She casts about for a spare trowel.
"You're real funny, y'know that?" Kulko doesn't look up at the quip, quite intently focused on digging the small trench. "Works the same as that handheld I got - uses the same receiver, n'fact. But the frequency is so low - Very Low Frequency, VLF - that the antenna has to be near a kilometer long. Nice thing about it is, it works underwater, underground, in space, wherever. /Nicest/ thing about it is the data blends in with the white noise comin' from Cyrannus. Toasters won't even know we're transmitting. Only downside is we're limited to a hundred sixty alphanumeric characters, so we gotta keep it short'n sweet."
There's a glance from Dallas to Tis, which flicks to Kulko. There's something she's missing, but the blonde is more than capable of filling in the blacks with fanciful elaborations. She grins, shovel chunking into the earth with stabby authority. Flick, flick goes some dirt. "I guess 'Bubba, rescue our ass' ain't proper protocol." She leans forward, a few more wavy strands of blonde hair slipping free of the loose and failing ponytail. Her hair almost drags the dirty when she's tipped over as far as she is. She reaches up to brush it back, and pretty much succeeds in only smearing dirt across her brow. "I'd kill for a moon pie." Moon pah.
Tisiphone's grin just gets wider when Kulko doesn't look up. "Thanks. I try, you know?" Blame the cheekiness on the sugar rush from the pear syrup. It's her current excuse. She crouches to retrieve a trowel, then limps over toward Kulko and Covington, kneeling down about twenty feet ahead of them, on the Petrels' side of the trench. Trench-digging, Leapfrog Style. "A hundred and sixty characters. If it blends in with Cyrannus's radiation, how will the Cerberus pick it apart?" she wonders. After digging in silence for a few moments, she looks to Covington and adds, grin returning, "Boots brought chocolates back. There might still be some left."
"There's a specific prefix the receiver looks for, or somethin' like that. A not-random spot of randomness. Ask Specialist Mercer when we get back. Kinda neat, when you get right down to it." Kulko rises, stretching his legs and wandering ahead a few meters. "Expecting some more specifics on the exfil plan. Hopin' for it, at least. We'll see how much they can cram into that character limit."
Dallas' ears perk up at the mention of chocolate. "Now that's what I'm talkin' about." There's a momentary pause in speech, then she shoves the trowel into the ground and reaches up to run her fingers through her hair, and pull it back into a proper tight tail. "Too bad we ain't got a thirteen year old with us. They cram entire exchanges inta code I don't understand."
Making his way over to the people doing the work now, Samuel looks around for a few moments. "Room for one more person doing the digging work?" he offers, a bit lightly. Prepared, and with the equipment needed for now. He also looks to be back to his good health again.
Tisiphone looks up from her work, sleet-blue eyes suddenly intent on Kulko. "Yeah, no kidding? My- one of my profs back in Academy was involved in a pseudo-randomness project on the deep digits of pi. You know there's a point- uh." Whoah there, little Ensign. She gives an odd, crooked grin down at the furrow she's digging, then shuffles along a little further without finishing her sentence. "Knew someone back in Academy who wrote like that, Dallas," she says instead, with a glance to Covington. "Think she even abbreviated 'a', somehow."
Kulko heads back towards the camp a bit, leaving the conversation to continue on its own momentum. He passes off the trowel to Samuel as he passes. "All yours, Corporal. I'm gonna grab the wire and start burying this puppy." He heads off in the direction of the rubble.
"Always room for one more, darlin'," Dallas assures Samuel. She continues on in a little crab walk, moving along, low to the ground, doing her impression of a gardener. "It's amazin' the lengths folk's go to just a shorten up a sentence needs no shortenin'. Terminal laziness, I say. Ya can't 'ppreciate the flavor of words rollin' off your tongue, ya ain't alive." Says the woman who could take a minute and a half to say howdy.
Samuel nods as he hears that, taking the offered trowel, and moving into position to get to work. "Takes more effort to shorten it than to use it all?" he offers, a bit quietly.
"It's-" Tisiphone starts up another sentence at the end of Covington's and Samuel's words, then falters and concentrates a little longer on more digging. "Depends on a lot of things. Brevity, I mean." Says the one who tends to lurch her way through sentence fragments. "Grew up on great long stories. Prayers so long they might've well been stories." A slight shrug, by way of 'you know what I mean' in pantomime. "Doesn't come so easily in- uh. Standard. Easier to break thoughts off short, sometimes."
"Sure does, Blaine. Sure does." Dallas is silent for a moment, then moves to rise. She dusts off her knees and waves over one of the marines she waved off for a smoke break earlier. "I know how ya mean, Tis. I do. I just value my words drawn out long an' slow. You gotta hurry, I figure you better be under fire. So, I suppose this here tiny transmission counts, seein' as we're in occupied territory and all." Occ-u-pah-d. How many syllables a word is supposed to have and the number of syllables Dallas gives it do not always jive. "I gotta pee again. I swear, you'd think I's pregnant how often I gotta tinkle. I think radiation makes my bladder shrink." Helpful TMI for all. She hops over the trench (ie, steps over), then heads off for the bushes. She'll be back in a few, no worries.
Samuel keeps on working the equipment now. Pausing a bit as Covington heads off. "Looks like she has some bladder problems," he offers, with a bit of a shrug, before he goes back to digging. "Long stories tend to be good ones," he offers, after a few moments of pause.
"Yeah. Yeah, they do," agrees Tisiphone, glancing up to Samuel for a moment as she nods to him. "Just- a matter of how you hear them growing up, maybe. I mean- if you learn Standard only because you have to, learn it for phrases like 'bite me' and 'where's the door', there's a… compactness that stays with you, you know? But. It's- not really what Dallas was driving at, anyway, so." She shrugs restlessly, as if she could edge the topic away from herself. She changes to: "You're looking better. Just stay out of the river, eh? Any pike left, you'll find 'em for sure."
"Will do," Samuel offers, before he adds, "Let's see, I've had the bears, wolves, and centurions. What's missing now is some crazed survivor out there somewhere that'll stab me when we meet." Spoken a bit lightly as he keeps on digging, offering a bit of a grin.
Having just woken-up from his small rest, Jayden makes his way towards the digging duo. "Hey, guys. Need a hand?" He asks, almost sounded thrilled to do some manual labor. The green duty gear he has been wearing for the past weeks is now turning brown from all the dirt and whatnot due to the recent combat activity. He's already setting his rifle down and getting a small shovel to pitch in.
Tisiphone's grin fades at something Samuel says, and she offers him a nod without looking up from her digging. "The newscasters-" Which would be the four people the scouting party found, prior to The Big Bridge Explosion. "-said there were… looters out there who'd gone a bit crazy, yeah. So keep your eyes peeled, eh?" She huffs out a bit of a sigh, probably meant to be a chuckle, though it doesn't quite make it. "Grab a trowel and pitch in, Sir," she adds to Jayden, by way of encouragement. "Stephen says this needs to be a kilometer long."
Samuel looks over at Jayden, offering the man a grin, "We might even need both hands, sir," he offers with a bit of a grin, before he nods at Tisiphone. "Well, if we encounter them, we'll see about how crazy they've gone." He then blinks a bit, "A kilometer long? What's this one for?"
Jayden missed the first part about the 'Sam-bait' conversation, so, he can't pour in any thoughts into that just now. "Copy that, Ensign," he tells his wingmate, and moves into position besides Sammy boy. A small nod given to the /trouble sponge/ before he begins shoveling dirt out. "Sure is gonna be a long ditch, eh?" He has his thoughts on Kulko's leadership thus far, but he won't voice them out. Crap rolling downhill not uphill, and all that jazz
The past few days have been kind to Alessandra although she's still nowhere near full power - the field aid she recieved after being shot and then thrown off the bridge when it was blown up has insured she'll survive but she's not exactly going to be able to do a whole lot that requires physical strength. Having been in and out of lucidity off and on, she hits a spot where she is easily roused by the others' voices and she looks up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes while she looks around.
"Some kind of antenna for getting word back to the Cerberus right under the Cylons' noses, I guess?" says Tisiphone to Samuel, shuffling over a bit further as she continues to dig the trench along. "Think it's above my paygrade to understand how it's gonna work." Snort. She pauses in her work, settling back against her booted heels, and scrubs at her scalpfuzz. Coming on two weeks since the last buzz, it won't be long now until it crosses from 'fuzz' to 'dandelion fluff'.
Samuel nods a little bit, "If it was something like an engine or something like that, I'd be able to understand it, I think." He nods a bit to the others, before looking around for a few moments. Noticing Alessandra he offers a bit of a nod and a smile, before going back to the digging. Work to be done, after all.
Jayden hitches a shoulder at that reply from Money, and continues his digging, "Your guess is as good as mine, ensign, but this beats the hades out of sitting on our asses." Yeah. Watching an irradiated city after a fallout gets old really quick. Is Allie awake? He does not seem to notice.
Alessandra'd been tired of not being able to help and it shows as she sighs, openly frustrated. "Hey guys…" Lucky gets to her feet stiffly, the missued muscles screaming as she tries to stand, her steps lurching as she makes her way to where the others are. She is quiet outside of the quick greeting, not wanting to interrupt whatever it is they're doing.
The two pilots and the Marine are doing what they're best at — digging a long, shallow trench along the shoreline. Wait, what? Tisiphone gives her hair another tired scrub, scratches at the dirty patch on her cheek, then sheds the duty greens she's been stubbornly wearing despite the muggy Leonis summer. She wipes her face against the sleeves before tying them around her waist. "Hey," comes the simple, scratchy greeting to Alessandra, as she makes her way over.
"Hey," is the greeting from Samuel as well, as he works a bit carefully on the digging now. Until he suddenly grimaces a bit, and puts the trowel back into the ground. "Stomach trouble…" he offers, hurrying off for now.
Slowly, steadily, Kulko advances down the trench, unspooling hastily assembled conductive wire into the trench, and covering it over afterwards. Those observant sorts might have noticed him coming - he's not moving quickly, but he is moving faster than the digging group. For once, it's easier to build than to destroy.
Jayden tosses a smile and a 'Hey' to Allie as well. The digging keeps him occupied at the moment. A small glance to Tisi dusting her head off, but he says nothing. Work, pilot. Work. Regardless of how close Kulko is, he doesn't register yet.
"So what is the plan?" Alessandra has missed pretty much all the scheming and resulting letting others in on the plans, that being something she's trying to make up for. The trowel that Samuel discarded before he fled to deal with whatever ails him is eyed and then sat down next to, the intention being to help as much as she can.
Tisiphone, unrepentantly slacking off for the nonce. She weaves her fingers together behind the back of her neck and cranes her head back against then, wincing up at the sunshine. She rolls her head one way — there's Jayden, getting ahead of her — then the other way, toward Alessandra and Kulko. "Stephen's got an idea to get us talking with the Cerberus again," she says. Pushing forward with a low groan, she moves over to catch up with Jayden, and gets back to digging.
"We're gonna find out in about an hour and a half, Gods willing, if we can get this antenna up and running," Kulko answers Alessandra as he gets within earshot of normal volume conversation. "And actually, Tis, weren't my idea. Cerberus sent us a message last night. Told us they'd make contact again tonight using this contraption, then again the next night if we didn't respond. Reckon they've got a plan, and wanna let us in on it." He continues methodically burying the wire.
Jayden is obviously enjoying the work he's doing. For a while, he's aloof to anyone or anything else and just concentrated on getting the trench done. His head pans around when he sees K talking to the girls, "Hey, JiG, better get some more people down here to get this done faster." He figures that if there's a timeframe, more hands will be great.
It's usually not good to get one's hopes up, a fact that Allie's been aware of for a very long time, but even then she finds it frakking hard as hell to keep from doing so now when Tisiphone and Kulko give the nose. "Wait…what? Does this mean they're going to be coming for us?" Almost like a child before their birthday or on the night before the last day of school, she kind of bounces excitedly. Jayden makes his suggestion then and she nods, agreeing with it. "Yeah. Echo's got the right idea. Best to get it down PDQ, right?"
"Digging as fast as we can, Sir," Tisiphone mutters, faintly aggrieved. "At least it's not graves this time." Of course, she also had access to a proper /shovel/ for that, as opposed to these trowels. She seems to be chewing on something else to say, her mouth squirming a bit at the edges, before she finally says, "So it's the XO sending us these messages, then?"
"In all honesty, El-Tee," Kulko muses Jayden's way as he looks back and forth along the trench. "This might well be long enough. Don't have a proper rangefinder, but…" He makes a gesture across the river. "Map says the river's near four kilos across. Ballpark this at a half kilometer, double that to complete the circuit… yeah, we might well be able to wrap it up. And yeah," he offers Tisiphone's way. "He finished the message with 'Leave no man behind, ever. XO. It's Tillman, all right."
Jayden opts not to comment on whether this idea will work or not, specially when it involves a plan to get off Leonis. The task at hand keeps him focused in something, at least. With Kulko telling them that the digging is done, he stands up-right again and stretches.
Alessandra's digging slows until her efforts are nothing more than scraping the tapered tip of the trowel in the dirt, the motions gone through with nothing in the way of results. "I wish I could have been there to hear his voice. Would have been nice." Her free hand is used to rub a bug bite on her left shin, that taking a while before she gets the itching to subside. "But hey. Even then, we still have each other so that's something, right?"
"Security challenge wouldn't hurt. Must be something like that for you guys up in CIC, right? Codewords?" Tisiphone's view of Command and Tactical seems to involve a lot of cloak-and-dagger frippery. She snorts again, then pushes herself up wincingly to her feet when Kulko declares the trench Long Enough. "Safewords. Whatever. Frakdamn, I'm so for all of us throwing in on a tattoo if we live through this."
"It was text only," Kulko clarifies, still unspooling foot by foot. "And it authenticates. Don't ask me how. Could tell ya, but then I'd have to kill ya." He pauses to fill in some more dirt. "Might be fittin. What of?"
Jayden snickers back to Tisi and shakes his head, "Frak a duck, Apos." He presses lightly over her shoulder and quips, "I like your ink, but I'm sure as hades ain't gonna put any on my lovely skin." Don't mind the fact that he's starting to look like a woodsman with that crazy stub he's grown. Still, he dismisses the notion of tattoos with that. He reaches down to pick his rifle, listening to K's input on the message. "Shit, I'm down to my last mag," he offers with a frown.
"Ink, huh? I might…" Alessandra pauses and then shakes her head, the right side of her mouth quirking in a half-smile. "Shit, Jayden. You'll still be purdy so man up and get a frakking tattoo…" Planting her left hand on the ground, she begins to get back up, struggling with that a little as she can't use her right hand at the same time. "Echo, lend me a hand here." Giving up on getting herself upright, she sits back down and lifts an arm, trying to play the 'pity me card' by adding a slight pout to the gesture. "Codewords and authentication. I feel like we're in a spy movie gone wrong. Very wrong."
"You'd have to kill me? Would you really?" So much for Kulko dispelling Tisiphone's fanciful cloak-and-dagger daydreams. Again she laces her fingers together behind her neck and cranes her head back against them, face tipped up to the sunshine. "Man, it's a- a badge of honour. So, y'know, twenty years from now when we're off repopulating some new planet, we've got something to look back on besides frakking bulletholes to remember our stories. Frakked if I know what we should get, though. Me, I'd get a lion's skull. Picked clean, you know? Don't need Leonis's flag twice on me."
Jayden chuckles, "I'll give it some thought." That's all he'll commit to with regards to the ink. Seeing Allie needing some help, he slings his rifle over his shoulder and does his best to pull her up, gently.
"The frak you have it on you for a first time?" Kulko queries, turning his head up to regard the Sagittaran curiously. He's getting near the end of the trench, now; just a few more meters of spooling to go. "Kinda morbid to go puttin' on yourself. Can't figure what a lion's skull would look like, either. Just keep seein' a steer in my head." He shakes his head, grinning.
Not having any ink currently, Alessandra doesn't add anything to the conversation and, besides, she's too busy standing up. "Thanks," she says tightly once she's got her feet under her, it not taking as long as it feels like it does. "We also need to get rip-roaring shitfaced once we're back," she offers although that is said to the others as a whole instead of anyone as an individual. "I think that'll be the first order of business."
Tisiphone opens her eyes, squinting against the sun, then rolls her head to the side to shoot Kulko an odd look and a lopsided grin. "The lion is ninth," she says, the words somehow formal despite her light expression. She turns her head down, touching the start of her tattoo at the hollow of her throat. She counts off to herself, down her breastbone to her bellybutton, then backs up a few inches to the base of her sternum. "'bout- there," she says. The lopsided grin splits her face for a moment, teeth flashing, before she turns her attention back up to the sunlight, eyes closed.
Kulko eyes Tisiphone curiously a moment longer, then rises, the trench finally covered over. "I gotta finish wirin' up the receiver. Then we pray. I'll see y'all in a bit." Then he's off at a trot for the ruins of the bridge.
A bit of dirt's brushed off and then Alessandra's looking at Tis, her expression a bit hard to describe, it being that much of a mix of several emotions at once. "I'm trying…I'm wanting to let myself get excited by the thought of us being rescued. But…" The dirt is gone but she keeps rubbing, the palm of her left hand brused over her opposite arm over and over again. "Do you think it's alright for us to do so?" The rubbing finally stops and her fingers curl around her elbow while the right limb is bent so she can rest her cheek in her palm.
Tisiphone doesn't answer for a long time, though her head rolls slightly in Alessandra's direction, as if to indicate she's listening and considering, and not ignoring the other woman. "Get too excited, and we'll frak it up. Put a starving person at a table of food, he'll eat until he's sick, you know? No- perspective. Restraint. Whatever. But it's either- well." Her mouth prims for a second, hesitating again. "Either we trust that we're gonna make it off this rock, or we might as well kneel down and put a Five-seveN in our mouths. Not ready for the latter, just yet."
"I don't like fatalism," Allie says dryly. "It never has settled well with me so putting a gun in my mouth and blowing my brains out the back of my skull's not really an option." The thoughful pose is released and her arms are lowered, brought to either side of her body. She's trying to come across as being relaxed but she's most likely failing. "It's just getting a bit difficult. I'm not giving up hope. Not yet. Don't think I ever could, to be honest. But even then, it's getting a bit difficult to believe we'll get back to the Cerb."
"Anything worth getting is never easy to get. The Lords and Ladies see to it." Tisiphone finally lets her hands drop, shrugging them down deep into her pockets. She takes in a deep breath, holds it for the count of three, then blows it out heavily. "I'm gonna go see if Boots has any of that chocolate left," she says, turning to go. "You- take it easy, okay? We've got painkillers, now, if you're still hurting." She dips a nod to the woman, and pushes off, limping through the sand back toward the group.