[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]

[Does she have to? Yes. Every minute she hasn't yet feels wasted.]

I don't know. It's a small area. Even if I take it out to town, I can't really get that far and it's not something I can just trigger remotely— [Threatens to dip into the semantics. She makes herself stop. Adjusts course, the shape of her crossed arms shifting in more tightly about her.] I think the chances are slim.

So [it's fine. She knows what she's doing. Doesn't she sound like she has a plan?] You need to be on board with this so we can work out the best way to handle what could happen. If my kids get the message and turn up, you might need to be responsible for them.

[yupe]

[ He's working up to saying something (no, for real) when she just drops her kids into the conversation, turning it into a completely different conversation. They're disturbingly easy to picture, thanks to the TV's occasional psychic transmissions—but the rest of it's a smoking crater, a rippling hole.

Okay, okay. He's worrying over nothing, he soothes himself. Summoning her kids from another galaxy? What are the chances? ] Yeah. [ Jupe says eventually, like he hasn't been staring at nothing for the past...hopefully thirty seconds, max. ] We should figure out somewhere safe to hide them. We should probably be doing that anyway. [ Somewhere far away from Openly Plotting Torture and Murder Boulevard.

He pauses, takes a breath and a calculated risk: there's no way she'll let him, even if she could. ] How complicated is it gonna be? Once it's all set up. [ With a no-big-deal shrug, he ventures: ] I could...

[coefficiently]

No, [is as reflexive in her as that shell shocked look is in him. She has to gather herself after for a moment after, stood there in the hazy light of the tv's static. To rationalize what is knee-jerk.] It makes more sense for you to have some [—what, exactly? None of this makes sense if she thinks about it too long—] plausible deniability that it does for you to try helping.

[But that he'd offer— there's something tight in her expression that eases just faintly in response.]

You can do that, right? Act like you don't know anything if someone comes asking questions.

[It's a soft ball of a question. She has a feeling she knows the answer.]

[yupe]

[ The tiny victory barely has time to register before she's barreling on. ] Well, yeah... [ Jupe says, unhesitating but reluctant. This is feeling less and less like a plan and more like a whirlpool he's getting sucked into. ]

Have you thought about— [ He runs a hand through his hair, and then he's gesturing with it. ] What you're gonna say? [ When you're tortured. When they take you to a basement and torture you. He shrugs, exaggerated, like the thought's a soaking-wet coat he's trying to struggle out of. ]

Maybe there's something you could give them? [ Deliberately casual, he looks at her, eyebrows raised. Ready to shut this down if she takes it wrong. ] Nothing crazy, just a little bit of what they want. What they think they want. You know?