Howard Bassem (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
iselldrugstothecommunity) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thearena2013-03-19 12:44 am
iselldrugstothecommunity) wrote in thearena2013-03-19 12:44 am
Entry tags:
I Sleep Beneath the Golden Hill [Open]
WHO | Howard Bassem and anyone
WHAT | Howard builds himself a hidey-hole in Thunder Mountain, steals a bunch of prop guns.
WHEN | The day after the Conucopia.
WHERE | Frontierland
WARNINGS/NOTES | None yet.
Howard finds shelter in the crannies and nooks of Thunder Mountain, but he doesn't sleep for a while. Instead, he works through the night, replacing solid boards on the bridge with rotting ones from down by the water and the fake dinosaur skeleton. It's difficult work, especially without any tools, but it's manageable. He undoes screws with his hands and with broken pieces of the anamatronic wildlife and some of the remnants of the 'saloon'. He uses some of the wires scavenged from the decapitated fake goat to tie himself to the rail while he works, but even with that there are a few moments where he's convinced he's going to fall in the dark and break his back against the hard cement ground.
By morning his hands are throbbing from scrapes and splinters, but he's managed to isolate a section of Thunder Mountain for his own safety. One of the little peaks the train goes through has a rail bridge on both sides, and Howard's made sure that unless someone knows where they're stepping - someone like him, who rigged the boards - it'll crack underfoot. It's also not a terrible view. He can see that there's still work to be done, he still needs to take the good track boards and hide them so his trap isn't deducible, but he's exhausted.
He's taken all of the prop guns from the shooting gallery and thrown them in the water, except one, which he takes up with him to his hideout. Not everyone will necessarily know that it's a prop. He has a stick of dynamite, too, possibly a prop, although he refuses to sleep near it. It's left out on the track, where he can run and get it but where he doesn't have to worry about rolling onto it when he rests. And he's broken off a sharp piece of wood from a rotting crate, and it'll serve well enough as a stake.
He sleeps fitfully through the morning and wakes around mid-day. He slinks out of the hideout, standing up a good twenty feet high on his little peak, and surveys the surroundings. He knows this makes him visible, but for the moment he feels safe enough that he doesn't mind being seen if it means seeing other people first.
Once he's satisfied the coast is clear, he walks across the track like a cat on the skinny edge of a fence, both arms held out like a tightrope-walker, until he's back on solid ground, and goes to the water and drinks it with his hands.
WHAT | Howard builds himself a hidey-hole in Thunder Mountain, steals a bunch of prop guns.
WHEN | The day after the Conucopia.
WHERE | Frontierland
WARNINGS/NOTES | None yet.
Howard finds shelter in the crannies and nooks of Thunder Mountain, but he doesn't sleep for a while. Instead, he works through the night, replacing solid boards on the bridge with rotting ones from down by the water and the fake dinosaur skeleton. It's difficult work, especially without any tools, but it's manageable. He undoes screws with his hands and with broken pieces of the anamatronic wildlife and some of the remnants of the 'saloon'. He uses some of the wires scavenged from the decapitated fake goat to tie himself to the rail while he works, but even with that there are a few moments where he's convinced he's going to fall in the dark and break his back against the hard cement ground.
By morning his hands are throbbing from scrapes and splinters, but he's managed to isolate a section of Thunder Mountain for his own safety. One of the little peaks the train goes through has a rail bridge on both sides, and Howard's made sure that unless someone knows where they're stepping - someone like him, who rigged the boards - it'll crack underfoot. It's also not a terrible view. He can see that there's still work to be done, he still needs to take the good track boards and hide them so his trap isn't deducible, but he's exhausted.
He's taken all of the prop guns from the shooting gallery and thrown them in the water, except one, which he takes up with him to his hideout. Not everyone will necessarily know that it's a prop. He has a stick of dynamite, too, possibly a prop, although he refuses to sleep near it. It's left out on the track, where he can run and get it but where he doesn't have to worry about rolling onto it when he rests. And he's broken off a sharp piece of wood from a rotting crate, and it'll serve well enough as a stake.
He sleeps fitfully through the morning and wakes around mid-day. He slinks out of the hideout, standing up a good twenty feet high on his little peak, and surveys the surroundings. He knows this makes him visible, but for the moment he feels safe enough that he doesn't mind being seen if it means seeing other people first.
Once he's satisfied the coast is clear, he walks across the track like a cat on the skinny edge of a fence, both arms held out like a tightrope-walker, until he's back on solid ground, and goes to the water and drinks it with his hands.
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It just wasn't happening.
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"You ever get shot by an arrow? That'll put a hole in you right quick." Then he glanced back at the gun. "Looks more like a grip for one. So what's the difference between a 'gun' and a 'bowgun'?"
Maybe it was like the difference between a ladder and a stepladder.
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Pyew pyew."I mean tinier holes. Usually without arrows actually sticking out of you afterwards." Howard reluctantly holds the gun out from his body to look at the stock, thinking of those silly hats that people who think they're clever hipsters wear. "Guns shoot little metal bullets and...hey, don't you blow darts out of a bow gun?"
They really just need a catalog of modern weaponry or something.
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"Nope. A bowgun's a crossbow. You know, one of those wood-and-metal contraptions? You load up an arrow, and fire it using a trigger. I prefer longbows and such, myself."
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"I know what a crossbow is, dingus." Howard rolls his eyes. He guesses he can maybe see how the gun's stock looks like the handle for a crossbow, but as it's missing the bow part (the frame, he guesses?) he thinks it's a bit of a leap to get there. Then again, if guns don't exist wherever - whenever - Gaius is from...
"Do you know what electricity is?"
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"Just trying to be helpful," Gaius said, shrugging. "Sure I do. Lightning and all that. Why?"
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"I was just wondering if you came from, I don't know. The Stone Age."
Prepare to be amazed at Howard's complete lack of historical knowledge! In his mind, the course of the world's history goes like this: dinosaurs >> no more dinosaurs, but sabre-tooth cats >> cave paintings >> Egypt? >> plagues and general misery >> America! >> Hitler >> something about Iraq. Which probably doesn't overlap even a little with Gaius' world history.
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"Never heard of it. Sounds kind of uncomfortable, really." This knowledge did not especially alarm Gaius, who was rather used to the idea of the various outrealms and their vegetarian zombies and phantom heroes of old. He did, however, make a note to himself to learn more about this particular outrealm.
"Maybe the folks where you come from should come up with more interesting names. Like the Golden Age, or the Heroic Age."
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"The Golden Age is something for comic books. Heroic Age sounds kind of cool, though." Howard finally rests the gun against the cement wall of the tunnel. No need to even pretend he's going to use it. "So what Age are you from?"
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"I guess I'm from... the modern age?" Gaius shrugged. "I don't think there was really a name for it. I'm not a historian by trade, though, so I could be wrong. What about you?"
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"Digital age. I think. I guess no one ever really has a name for the age they're in, right? It's always retroviral or whatever." He bites at his fingernail. "Before I got here I was um, a merchant."
He'd lost his position as a Councilmember over the whole 'letting Drake get loose' thing. Whoops.
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"Anyway, I thought you said you were a thief. Or was that just a side job?" Maybe he'd taken a page from Gaius's book and stolen wares to sell off. The thought put a faint smile on Gaius's face.
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"I can do both," Howard says. "Maybe one of them pays the bills better than the other. Or one of them is one I can tell people I'm around without them locking up all their things."
Not that there were any locks in the FAYZ he couldn't get past. The lack of videogames and TV gave him plenty of time to practice, and he can get past nearly any non-electronic security system now.
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"Besides, locks? Keeping a thief out?" He laughed. "But I guess I did have the occasional stint in business. Someone came by looking for books, of all things, so I had to go swipe a few to meet demand."
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Seriously, does Gaius moonlight as a circus performer?
"Books don't need batteries, so they get my approval." Not that Howard really enjoys reading for its own sake, but it's practical for learning stuff. You never know when you'll lose all power and not be able to google basic stuff like "how do you identify botulism" and "how do you purify water".
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"Books are definitely useful in the right hands. It's just that those hands generally aren't mine. I know some people who can cast a pretty sweet Thoron spell, though."
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"Wait, are we talking magic here? Because if we're talking magic, we're like, from totally different spheres here."
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Gaius paused. "Wait, so in your outrealm, people can't do magic?" That was so weird. "Then what do they use to fight dragons?"
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"I guess if we had dragons, we'd use machine guns."
Or Cerebro."Or tanks."no subject
Gaius thought, not for the first time, that this would all be made much easier if the people in charge had sat down and explained things to everyone over a nice crop of jam pastries. Or not brought him here at all, really. "Does your realm not have professions or something?"
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It's strange to Howard; there are only two of them, but they're talking about three different sorts of worlds. Modern Earth, whatever Gaius' world is like, and the FAYZ.
"Machine guns and tanks are like...gigantic crossbows that shoot really fast, I guess."
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He tried to envision what Howard described, and: "Oh, you mean a ballista! Kind of awkward to cart around, though, aren't they? If it was a fast flier, you'd be toast before you could even fix your aim." Then again, the same could be said for most approaches. "I could probably work one of those, but I don't much like being a sitting duck."
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He gestures with his hands, "throw the projectile, it like, shoots it. With gunpowder. Um, an explosion. Boom. And you don't have to spend forever reloading."
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He paused for a moment. "If you could armor it well enough, it'd be a real menace. Except for the moving it around part. I don't care how fast you can reload the thing; those things weigh a ton."
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