DE: Arrr, Late Morning

[bjornwilde]

 Running late so I'm going with a classic today, Prompts! Tag in with what pups you'd like to play with and we'll give you prompts for a writing blurb of whatever length suits your muse. Can't think of a prompt? Set your MP3 player/program, radio or internet streaming service to shuffle and give us a song title!

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[wanderlustlover]

Playing Shuffle Title roulette --

Ellen: Now Comes The Night
Gordon: Sun Keeps Shining on Me
Adrian: My Maria
Medic: Homecoming

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

The clock in her Pip-Boy says it’s been sixty-four hours since Ellen last slept. (Really slept. Chemically knocked out doesn't count.) She should know; she’s checked it five times in the last twenty minutes. After a certain point, she loses all sense of time herself, but the Pip-Boy just keeps rolling along.

She kind of envies its ability to keep on going so smoothly.

She’s been awake sixty-four hours and she’s not happy about it. Nobody would be. But when you’ve had a head injury and you’re out of stimpaks you don’t dare lie down and sleep. That goes double when you’re in a strange land and separated from home by more miles and more water than you would like to think about. Triple, when the others you were sent with are dead or-

The point is that she’s been awake a long time now, and she’s far from home and things are really, really bad. Until she can find her way out of the damned Maryland swamps and onto dry land they’re not going to get much better. But at least she has a chance of letting the Citadel know what’s happened, just as long as she stays on reasonably high ground. The radio will work, once the ionosphere cooperates. Once the D-layer fades into insignificance. Once it gets dark.

She’ll be all right a little while more. The night just has to come, that’s all.

[acts_of_gord]

This isn't the desert near Espanola. For good reason- Gordon's not ever going back there. Some people find psychological closure by returning to the place where terrible things happened. He doesn't. He knows that and he's fine with it.

But it does feel like the desert near Espanola, a little bit. If only because he's remembering the day before he started at Black Mesa, taking the bike he had at the time all the way up to the top of one of the more promising-looking rock formations for one of his best downhill runs in memory. It was cold that day- it might've been New Mexico, but it was still January- but it wasn't bitter. It didn't bite into him like proper cold weather did. He could still feel the sun shining on him, on his way up to the top.

This is a piece of singletrack up in the Appalachians, and it's coming up on summertime, and it's a different bike; but the sun keeps shining on him, and as far as he's concerned that's continuity enough.

[hecu_marine]

"Okay," said Shephard cautiously, "now, uh... you understand I ain't criticizin' you or your life choices'r nothin' when I say this, mister, but... you got to admit there's somethin' just a little bit unusual 'bout a fella who feels the need to name his pet sledgehammer Maria. I ain't even gon' give you shit 'bout havin' a pet sledgehammer in the first place. I'm just sayin'."

[hands_of_blu]

A man can get used to awful food rather quickly if he has to, and when one travels the world doing horrible things for Builders' League United, one has to. There has never been any question about that.

But next week they will be slugging things out in a small town with an unpronounceable name in one of the more forested parts of Europe that still remain, and when it's over there will be time to peel away from the company lodgings and head to Stuttgart. And if the Medic knows his Grandmama at all, she's already started cooking in anticipation of his temporary homecoming.

So hopefully his reluctance to deal with the stuff served in the mess today can be excused. In his head he's already at a proper dinner table, and no mess hall can measure up to that.