[open] CAPTAIN'S LOG 001

[coefficiently]

Who: Maureen Robinson + YOU!
When: February
Where: Various (noted in prompts)
Open/Closed: Open
Applicable Warnings: TDM Warnings apply; anything additional that comes up will be noted in the subject line.

→HAVEN STREET, BLOCKADED (smoke gets in your eyes)

It's a problem not being able to get to the so-called 'Sector 1.' It's less to do with the food situation—dry cereal and canned food may not exactly shake out to a particularly luxurious lifestyle, but there are worse things—, and entirely to do with a question of power.

Half way through the week, Maureen stuffs her rucksack full of miscellaneous foodstuffs raided from the kitchen, a handful of books scavenged from the household's shelves, and the tube of toothpaste from the master bath's medicine cabinet ('I'm taking this,' she'd informed Jupe, standing in the doorway of the living room with the tube in hand and the rucksack over her shoulder. 'There's baking soda in the kitchen.'), and sets off through the neighborhood.

The last time she'd been driven from the house in search of supplies, it'd been laying down snow and she'd had a so-called husband and a dog at her heels. This time when Maureen shows up on the doorstep of various neighbors, she's alone. There's smoke on the air. She has a scarf wrapped prudently around the bottom half of her face, but pulls it down when the door is answered to say—

"Can I ask for a favor?"

→AROUND SWEETWATER, POST-BLOCKADE

Maybe it's the clear air, the smoke from the fires having at last drifted away, that inspires her to clamber into the household car and go for a drive. After all, after a week stuck inside the blockaded 'sector', just buzzing around from point a to point b is a thrilling luxury.

Or maybe it's work. Certainly there's a distinct air of a woman on a mission about Maureen over the next week as she appears around town: at the hardware store, making doe-eyed apologies to the clerk helping her decipher her 'husband's shopping list', and at the library where she casually cycles through whatever city planning documents may or may not be on file, or can be found copying down the Morse Code alphabet. And here, late one evening in a diner, where Maureen has a table in the back to herself. She'd finished her dinner some time ago. By the patina of the coffee cup's interior she's been here long enough to have been on the receiving end of more than her fair share of refills.

But she needs to work something out and the confines of the house on Haven street make her want to lay down and stare at the ceiling instead of doing this: presiding over a series of little notes, presently scribbling calculations in a little booklet.

→MARJORIE'S NEOCOLONIAL (everybody's somebody's fool)

She's bad at this. Not the getting dressed part. That part she can and has done. Maybe the hair isn't quite right (who the hell designed curlers?), but the rest of 1961 house cocktail party chic Maureen has more or less managed to achieve thanks to the contents of a closet she's had almost no hand in stocking. It's the pretending part that doesn't work. It hangs uneasily about her shoulders like an ill-fitting coat. Smiles that are too briskly produced, and evaporate a shade too quickly off her face. She doesn't drink the right amount; she drinks her cocktail too quickly and has nothing to do with her hands afterward, loathe to pick up a second (overly strong, Jesus Christ) drink to replace it too soon lest it either somehow be socially unacceptable or just because the idea of being more off her game than she already is makes all the little hairs on the back of her neck that she's failed to capture in her up-do stand on end.

And when she feels moved to step outside, the excuse she gives is 'Smoke break'. It only occurs to her after she's standing in the February cold, wrapped tight in the coat wrestled back out of wherever Marjorie had stowed her guests' outerwear, that no one really cares about smoking indoors.

But the air is refreshingly biting, and the sky overhead dark and full of stars. Maureen lets herself stand on the little shadowed back step for longer than she should, her head tipped back so she can observe the sky. There is Jupiter—a bright dot in the blanket of stars—, and Auriga the chariot driver, and Canis Major, the big dog chasing Orion, with Procyon burning bright in its lesser sibling.

→WILDCARD

[ooc: Prose preferred, but brackets is also aokay with me so if you prefer to use that then go ahead and I'll reply in kind. Nothing here hooking you and/or want a custom starter? Hit me up via PM and we can plot something out.]

Comments

[coefficiently]

She starts.

But only by a fraction, her attention falling out of the sky like some errant chunk of stray meteorite. The flicker of alarm—probably a good instinct to have in this place, given the givens—has burned away by the time it actually lands on Sans. What moves in to fill its space is a brief, tight smile absent of teeth but not completely of warmth. There's a speck of humor there in her bearing as she twists around. It's the self-deprecating 'caught red handed' kind.

"It is, yeah."

The line of her attention flits just briefly to the house beyond him, a check at the glow of the curtain across the little window in the door, and then back. Maureen shuffles a little half measure over on the step she's occupying. There's not room, exactly, to share it with him, but the implication is a welcoming one.

"I've missed seeing them from this angle."

[ribticklers]

"It's a pretty good angle." Sans wishes he could ask more about seeing stars from a different one. Not here on Marjorie's back step, though. Really, he still can't help but be excited to see stars from any angle. He didn't think he'd be able to. Something else he can't talk about. Won't talk about.

"When me and my bro were kids, I'd talk his ear off about stars. Memorized all the constellations. You know that kind of stuff?"

What Sans is trying to ask is if constellations are still a thing when you've advanced enough to completely ruin the picture by flying to another planet.

[coefficiently]

This mention of constellations, his brother—it prompts the barest flicker of good humor out of her, a heretofore rare spark of something other than the drawn, (over)thinking quality of her bearing that seems to have defined her both in that department store and at the, quote unquote, dinner party. It's possible that in circumstances that don't involve being trapped in a malevolent 1960s Coca-Cola ad that Maureen is fun.

(Maybe. No one ask her kids' opinions on that.)

"Yeah." A fine web of wrinkles flex briefly at the corners of her eyes. "I did the same thing when I was a kid. Drove my mom crazy. I think she regretted getting me the telescope for Christmas."