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

Max gave him a smug smile, making the quarter Dante had thrown dance across his knuckles. "Good question."

Dante shook his head. "Magic junkies," he muttered, thinking of Arkham.

That wasn't at all what Max had meant, but he was amused enough by Dante's interpretation that he didn't bother to correct him, just shrugged his shoulders and kept walking.

At least the path ahead was mostly ex-free. They got to walk for several minutes without anything bothering them, or lunging at them, or... something.

And that wall just kept coming in closer.

"Maybe we should've just brought something to bribe the guards," Dante mused.

"That would have been a good use of the booze we didn't go after," Max said regretfully. "There are only a few bottles of the good stuff left inside and to get to 'em, you've gotta know somebody who knows somebody. There's a still inside, but it still tastes like the bottom of somebody's bathtub."

"I know," Dante said.

The only reason he didn't cough or something to downplay that was that, well, he didn't have all that much shame to begin with.

"You've been here a day!" Max protested. "When the hell did you get a drink? How did you get a drink! I was here a week before anyone told me where to even go!"

Hello, Max. Meet the guy who, even after all this time, was still kind of a functional alcoholic on steroids.

Dante shrugged. "I asked around."

"Jesus fuck, kid," Max grumped. "I worry for your liver."

"Don't," Dante said cheerfully. "Healing factor."

"You're a pain in the ass a lot, aren't you?" Max asked, but he was chuckling.

"About every other night a week," Dante snarked.

Hey, couldn't let Max hog all the dirty jokes.

"And those alternating ones, your boyfriend is a pain in yours?" Max asked, smirking.

"Why stick with just the boyfriend?" Dante joked without thinking, then immediately regretted it.

Yeah, because Max was pausing again, this time to laugh hard enough to need to bend over with his hands on his knees. "That's the best thing I heard all day!"

"Yeah, you're welcome," Dante said, rolling his eyes.

Look, he felt bad about slipping up and sharing detail about Kathy. He didn't have a whole lot of shame about the whole thing otherwise.

"Bouncy little Banzai has a sex shop and a strap-on," Max said, shaking his head as he regained control of himself enough to continue to walk on. "Oh, Nick's expression would be priceless."

"Well, maybe it'll stop him treating her like she's still a fucking school girl he can drool about," Dante said irritably.

"You think knowing she's secretly kinky is gonna stop the drooling?" Max asked. "Or is the appeal all in the schoolgirl thing."

"The first time I met the guy, he was in, what, his thirties? Chasing after a high school girl by talking up how mature she was for her age?" Dante said.

He shot Max a dry look. "What do you think?"

The answer Max gave was surprisingly serious. "I think by this point, Nick has, at the very least, convinced himself that he loves her. He doesn't even look at other women - including schoolgirls. Danielle, the chick inside that big mecha suit, practically pants after him and he doesn't even notice. My guess is that he's fixated on her specifically and nothing either of us do or say is gonna change that."

Dante groaned, rubbing his forehead.

"He doesn't even know her," he said.

Max shrugged. "You don't see me arguing. Of course, you didn't see how he jumped on the chance to get her outside the Wall, either. If Cairax Murrain wasn't out there, I might've wondered if he had any plans on bringing her back."

"And do what?" Dante asked flatly.

"I dunno, play a creepy version of house with her in his apartment?" Max said, shrugging. "Keep her unconscious while he dresses her up like a doll? Fucked if I know, man. I just know that when he looks into your eyes, you can't move, and if he looks long enough, you black out. And then he gets powers from that. And Kathy is like fuckin' meth to his system. She's a superball, so whatever, like, life-energy he takes from people, it's concentrated when he takes it from her."

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