spin_kick_snap | The Mount, Ex-Los Angeles

Entry tags:

The Mount, Ex-Los Angeles

The last time anyone from Fandom had been in Kathy's LA, the heroes had been living inside the walls that surrounded Paramount Studios, with the exes and the South Seventeens laying claim to everything else. Since then, they'd expanded; the Big Wall pushing the borders out almost a mile in all four directions. In some spots, it was hard to tell that there had ever been a zombocalypse; the streets were clean, the buildings repaired, the blood all scrubbed away. There was a proper school, lots of farms and gardens, several churches, and even a small library. The studio was still the heart of the community, but people had started to spread out and settle. It was still a tight fit, several thousand people into one square mile, but honestly not much worse than Los Angeles used to be, back before the world died and reanimated again.

Life had fallen back into a rhythm again. People got up, got ready for the day. Kids were sent off to school, adults took themselves to various jobs, though there were fewer sales people, baristas, and aspiring actors and a lot more guards, scavengers, and farmers these days. There was a brewery down on Larchmont and a still over on Monroe. Burns Park let people enjoy a bit of nature where the kids could run around and burn off steam and a Gold's Gym practically against the Big Wall. That was where the Unbreakables spent most of their free time, with curious gawkers watching them put more and more weight onto the machines.

It was a bustling little community of survivors, as safe as a place could be, surrounded on all sides by millions of undead waiting to find a way inside to devour them all.

[For them that are there! NFB, and ~~please wait for the~~ OCD is up! Previous entry Next Entry]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dante caught himself snickering at that, and quickly tamped back down.

Dammit, Max. Stop being likable.

No could do, buckaroo. That was the worst kind of asshole; the one that made you like him, in spite of your better judgment. Because then you were mad at him and yourself.

"We're gonna have to sneak in," he said as they made their way along. "Unauthorized excursions are frowned upon."

"You couldn't have told me that two hours ago?" Dante asked.

He probably still would've done this. "I guess jumping over the Wall isn't gonna work."

"Why do you think we went invisible when we went over the Wall?" Max asked, rolling his eyes. "I could have just had you go all disco-seizure-warning on them if I were just worried about the exes."

Dante rolled his eyes. "So what's your plan?" he said. "You know this place better than I do."

"We could rile up some exes on one side of the Mount, then run around to let ourselves in on the other?" Max suggested. "Fewer eyes on us that way."

Or he could just make them invisible again, but where was the fun in that?

Dante rolled his eyes. "I'm not getting bit by exes again because you're a fucking drama queen," he said.

Hey now. Don't throw stones there.

"Oh, I'm sorry Pot, I hadn't realized it was Hypocrisy O'Clock already!" Max said, pitching his voice high and fussy.

Drama queen indeed.

"Hey, you can always J.K. Rowling our way over that wall again," Dante said, rolling his eyes.

Edited 2018-10-06 19:41 (UTC)

"That's it," Max said, stopping dead in the middle of the street. "We're going to get caught by Murrain and eaten by exes and it's all because now I need to school you on what bullshit those books are and how I don't care how bad Jo-Jo's divorce was, the solution wasn't to make everything she'd learned sound twee out of pique."

Dante blinked.

And then snickered. Loudly.

"Holy shit, do you have a vendetta against the chick who wrote all of those teen mage books?" he said. "Oh man."

"Jo-Jo knows what she did," Max said, crossing his arms over his chest. "And she did it deliberately."

"Jo-Jo?" Dante snickered. "You really on first-name basis with her, man?"

"Her first husband, Jorge, is a sorcerer." Beat. "And an asshole and this is from me."

"Are you fucking with me right now?" Dante said, squinting. "Seriously?"

Max just looked at Dante, shrugged and smiled.

"Holy shit," Dante said, and made a faintly amused noise.

Then: "Does that mean you can do the invisibility trick or not?"

"Jesus Christ, you're like a little kid," Max sighed. "Fine, I'll make us invisible again. Though that's not quite how it works. At least, not the spell that I use."

"So how does it work?" Dante said, ignoring the insult (Max, you'd been hitting on a 19-year-old, don't even). He walked between a large stack of debris, looked up to find the remains of an old sign for a... sex shop?

Okay then.

Hey, people had needed to get laid in Koreatown, too!

"Interested in what's inside?" Max asked, nodding to the store. He'd get to the explanation in a minutes, but this had the promise to be interesting.

"Nah," Dante said idly. "Pretty sure Kathy would kill me if I shopped anywhere other than hers."

The sign was just... big. And somehow not what he'd expected to see in the debris of a post-apocalyptic city.

"Hers?" Max asked. "Her what?"

Sure, context clues suggested Dante was talking sex shop, but this was Kathy they were talking about, so clearly Max had missed something.

"Her sex shop?" Dante offered.

Was that giving Max too much information? Ah, well. ~~Max was going to be dead before he could do anything with it anyway.~~

Was his hearing going?

"Her what shop?"

"Her sex shop," Dante repeated, and had to snicker. "Dude, she's in her twenties, she's not some 11-year-old in bunny pyjamas anymore."

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday

Re: Thursday