After spending thirty years of my life hiding my association with the Enclave [open]

[taediosum]

Who: Arcade (taediosum) & OPEN
What: Arts & crafts (or some long overdue vehicle maintenance)
When: Some activity during the morning stop & early evening 
Where: His truck
Warnings: TBD but nothing likely

Note: I have an opt-in here for Arcade's vital sense ability, please leave a comment if it's something you're interested in coming up here or in future threads! Otherwise, no worries, it just won't work on/around them.



[ Ordinarily, Arcade only looks for salvage of practical things, at the intermittent garage stop. He doesn't know much about vehicle maintenance beyond the basics, and even that's mostly still only in theory. (Luckily, he somehow hasn't had to field a flat tire or an overheating engine, yet.) But he knows plenty about surviving in a post-apocalyptic waste with little to live on, from place to place. He also knows too much about personally handling triage, in those same circumstances. 

So it's really no wonder it's taken him this long to start picking up things that aren't necessarily needed but still... Well, probably should have been considered, at least, a little sooner. (But he's had a whole host of other things to worry about, these past few months, unsurprisingly.)

He's already started a small collection of patchwork canvas, wherever he can find it. It's going to take a while to actually completely enclose the back of the truck, again, so that it can serve as somewhat more suitable shelter - so he'll be around crudely stitching together the various pieces of cover that he's managed to collect, thus far, both in the early morning hours and at night. He's not quite as good at sewing as he is at suturing, and it's kind of obvious.

Or maybe he's trying to flag someone down to lend a hand with actually fitting his makeshift tarp over the top of the truck's trailer— ] Hey, do you have a minute? I could use some help, here.

[ One particular evening, he can also be found with a small collection of old paint cans, painstakingly hunted down in the latest set of ruins. He's set up alongside the truck's cab, eyeing the faded spray paint stenciled logo on the door in front of him - before unceremoniously dashing a swath of old beige paint over it.

Maybe it's because he hasn't made a plan until now to actually get rid of it (despite all the trouble it's already caused), but covering it up feels better than expected. ]

Comments

[taediosum]

[ It isn't the first time Arcade has been hit so abruptly by a wall of unpleasant air, the second someone steps too near. He doesn't answer the question, at first, hands fumbling the length of rope he was attempting to knot securely to the wire cage over the truck's trailer - that electric, coppery taste invades his senses, instead, turning his stomach as he turns an ever so mildly horrified look toward SecUnit. ]

...I was going to ask if you'd mind helping me tie this down. But I'm not so sure you should be helping anyone, in your condition.

[ Dropping the line entirely, Arcade climbs back down off the truck, dusting his own hands off on his coat. ]

Where are you hurt? [ He's not going to ask if it's hurt, because he can taste that reality every time he opens his mouth. ]

[serialmurderbot]

[SecUnit draws up short, its face going blank behind the mask. The hand tucked into its jacket pocket twitches, like it's about to try and turn to make sure that side of its body is less visible.]

What condition.

[Okay so the buzzing that accompanies its voice now is at the more intensive end of the spectrum when it responds, and the response is more of a defensive snap than genuine confusion. But in its defense, it thought it was doing a pretty good job of being casual! It figured out what to do with its hands and everything.

81% performance reliability is... not great, but Arcade wasn't asking it to shoot something. It would have been fine.]

It's not - it looks worse than it is. [Great start, Murderbot.]

[taediosum]

It's bad enough. I can tell just from— [ Arcade falters for a half-second, then thinks better of something before he amends, ] ...Looking at you.

[ Because that's all he's doing, definitely. Just. Noticing that awkward stance and having some kind of normal, medically knowledgeable insight. Sure.

That buzzing sound doesn't exactly inspire confidence, either. But one thing at a time. ]

You don't have to let me have a look at it, but I'd appreciate it if you did.

[serialmurderbot]

[Did it catch that hesitation? Yeah, but that doesn't mean it can process why. Arcade and the rest of the humans here don't usually have the kind of scanning capabilities to know that it got damaged, but humans who know it well have caught it off-guard before by reading something in its posture or expression that it didn't know was there.

... Does Arcade know it well? Weird thought. Time to ignore that.]

I already told you it looks worse than it is.

[But that's sign enough that it's capitulating. The reasons for the warnings become clear the moment it lifts the arm it's been hiding, because even with the sleeve pulled over its forearm, its hand and fingers are torn up with what has to be bite marks. The wounds are strangely bloodless, barely scabbed over and exposing not muscle and bone but metal strutwork at the core. At least some of the jagged bite marks carry up its wrist under the sleeve.]

[taediosum]

Worse is a pretty broad spectrum, when we haven't even established where bad should fall, yet.

[ Or good, or even just okay, for that matter. He really doesn't want to risk irritating it into taking off without at least giving him a chance to assess the damage he can, unfortunately, taste radiating off of it, though. So he leaves the petty needling there, stepping forward to examine its offered arm, instead.

Not that it takes him long to measure the extensive damage and find it sufficiently alarming. Arcade glances between its arm and face, plainly horrified as he grimaces. He supposes, on some level, he must've known it was more metal than bone under there (how else would it have guns in its arms? honestly), but the bloodless, barely scabbed-over look of the wounds is still jarring, awful. ]

...Yeah. This is bad. It doesn't even look like it's begun to heal.

[serialmurderbot]

The veins sealed and I barely lost any body mass.

[... Yeah so it's perspective on 'worse' is maybe different than most people's. It almost jerks the arm away but stops, holding stiff and not looking either at the injuries or at Arcade's face when he starts trading incredulous glances between the two.

And here it has to admit;]

I don't know how fast it will repair without a medsystem.

[taediosum]

This is barely losing anything, to you?

[ It looks massacred, that arm, and Arcade isn't letting up on the insistence that it is, actually, as bad as it looks. There's just no way it can't be. And he knows that it hurts.

But that's not a productive avenue worth pursuing. ]

What do you need? We've got plenty of medicine and even some extra equipment, from that hospital. Maybe I can put something together, to help fix this.

[serialmurderbot]

[It wouldn't hurt if only SecUnit could get turning down its pain sensors to work the way that's supposed to, but instead, yeah, it kind of sucks. It's not going to say that, though. Nor is it going to talk about the time it lost basically all the organic material on its back. If this is how Arcade reacts to a chewed arm it doesn't want to see what colors his face turns at that one.

Mostly, though, it's because it's looking entirely blank about being asked what it needs. The arm drops a few centimeters.]

You can't just patch it?