Logs:Tomorrow will bring / whatever, really. who knows. / I know we'll have jokes

Tomorrow will bring / whatever, really. who knows. / I know we'll have jokes
Dramatis Personae Natsumi, Roscoe	2024-05-23 "Gigantic bug zapper. Buy one get one fifty-percent off."
Location <NYC> 5/20 Relief Pantry & Soup Kitchen - Lower East Side
There are a hundred such drives all over the city -- for food, for clothing, for blood, for whatever it takes to get those hurt and displaced by the attack reasonably back on their feet. There's been a huge meal cooked and now it's being served, but that is a duty that might bring Natsumi in contact with God-knows-how-many homeless poors -- in this neighborhood especially probably some of them might have scales or tentacles or something else repulsive. So, the very moment one of the more In-Charge volunteers lamented that there were not nearly enough people to do the tedious and thankless work of Sorting Donations, Natsumi totally selflessly volunteered. She's here now, well away from the unwashed masses, sitting on a box of cans she should probably be sorting and peeking at her phone while she holds a jar of tomato sauce in one hand. Nominally she should be checking its expiry date and she totally definitely will, though after she checks the far more important, "-- oh my gosh. Did you see these videos Nahida uploaded, that's terrifying." Roscoe has been on Sorting Duty for a while longer than Natsumi, but with only his non-dominant arm wholly functional perhaps this is for the best. There is a thick white dressing taped around his arm, neat and clean and somewhat at odds with the heavy bruising that still surrounds it, mottling his arm with yellow-purple blotches. Though he has been working pretty diligently, he has not been working fast, taking about three extra steps per unperishable as most of the other workers. He's in a low squat checking the expirations in a pile of canned green beans, but he lifts his head at Natsumi: "Shoot, she was filming? Smart." He doesn't bother to stand up all the way, just shuffles over, only puts one knee down to rise half-out of the crouch once he is close enough to see -- "Show me?" Natsumi obligingly tilts the phone Roscoe's way. Her eyes are still wide. There's a striking close up, here, of a couple of the bugs -- it looks very much like one of them is going to come eat the girl behind the camera for sure, but then it slams hard into nothing at all and scrabbles, futile, at a barrier not visible to the camera. Its chittering is still just as audible as if there were nothing between Nahida and the bug. "There's a lot more, too, from -- like inside where they were holed up. I haven't seen almost any videos that get this close." Her nose wrinkles, head bowing. "'least not from anyone who made it out. It still seems so fake, kinda. Like we'll find out soon it was all the worst viral ad campaign ever." "Jeez." Roscoe twists his mouth with disgust, shakes his head. "I'm glad there's video, though, imagine if everyone just thought we were exaggerating. Or just lying." He settles back down into his squat, turning his head deliberately away from the video back to the green beans in his hand, his shoulders hitching up. "They were real all the way through," he says, "but, yeah, it doesn't feel real. I barely even trust my own memory, I bonked my head pretty good." This is with a sort of sheepish ruffle of his hair and a sort of furtive glance aside at Natsumi, but then both get shrugged casually away. "Bet we're gonna start seeing a ton of weird targeted ads soon anyway," he says. "Gigantic bug zapper. Buy one get one fifty-percent off." Natsumi giggles at this. She waits until the video has finished to set it aside, only now looking at the tomato sauce (long expired) and setting it aside in the Trash section with a wrinkle of her nose. "Okay if they made a giant size of one of those --" She's miming a kind of tennis-racket swipe. "Electric swatter kinds, I bet people would pay to see, like, Leonidas vs. Giant Bugs. How many can you swat in one minute." Though this amused thought is shifting into a contemplative: "Maybe by the time we're seniors we'll be telling the new middle schoolers how we totally used to go to the city without even carrying our fumigation sprayers and they'll be like, sure, Grandma, next you'll say you could actually see the sky and not just the huge electric bug-net." Roscoe's posture eases very slightly once the video stops playing, the corners of his mouth quirking up with amusement. "Nooo, how am I gonna feel superior to everyone in my old age if everything keeps getting worse? Gonna have no material left to guilt my kids with, at this rate." Now he does pull himself back to his feet, goes back to sorting green bean cans. "I'd be chill with a huge electric bug-net if that's what it takes," probably it is not the dingy ceiling Roscoe is tilting his gaze up toward, now; his eyebrows twitch inward after a moment, and he looks back down. "Oh well probably your kids will be getting whatever food they like on demand in a replicator and all doors will be able to teleport like Sriyani's so they'll still think the old days sucked, like, woah, you just had to eat the food the cook made that day? Take the train in to town?" Natsumi's eyes flick up immediately when Roscoe looks up, though she can't see anything but the dingy ceiling. She's still a little more tense until he looks back down without getting ready to flee or anything. "They'll still think our lives sound totally garbage, probably." "I don't take the train into town," Roscoe points out. "And I can get food from a replicator any time I want, her name is Nahida." But he drops the smart-aleckery a moment later and just huffs out a sigh -- "Well, we can always hope," he says optimistically, glancing down at his bandaged arm now. "I don't really want my life to be garbage, anyway." "One day you'll need to go into town on a Saturday and Sriyani will be off in Korea or somewhere having crazy adventures and then you'll have to suck it up and slum it with the rest of us." Natsumi is slowly returning to picking through the items in front of her. "What do you want your life to be? Like. What does the not-garbage-life look like? Aside from aliens-free." "I'unno, I think I have a better handle on what I don't like than what I do. Not like this." As Roscoe carefully unstacks a tower of cans of chili he tilts his head from side to side consideringly, nudging the cans into more precise alignment -- "Live at home without making my family --" he flops one hand, not exactly illustratively -- "insane. Maybe have a couple less roommates. Better grades." He glances back over at Natsumi -- "And aliens-free, I think that covers me. What about you?" "Would your family be less roommates or more roommates than now?" Natsumi is considering this Want To Live At Home thing pensively. "I guess if we're talking whole-school and not your dorm it'd be hard to be more." She crooks a quick grin at the question of her Better Life. "Aliens-free," she's echoing pretty much immediately. "Or at least if there are aliens, like, big hot ones like that god or whoever. I don't -- know. I kinda just want to get to travel and not think about weird stuff all the time." "Less," says Roscoe, dragging a new box of donations in front of him to sort through. "Just me and my parents. I get my own room." He clunks a can of green beans with the others without checking the expiry, before remembering and taking it back, eyebrows drawn. "You think that Thor guy is for real?" he says. "I feel like he might be a hoax. What are the odds aliens would look just like us, I wanna see how he looks like all the way through before I believe him." The green beans go in the green bean pile; he holds a can of tomato sauce out for Natsumi to take. "Where would you go?" "Switzerland, Austria, France --" Natsumi starts to list before cutting herself off with a faint blush. "-- I really like skiing. And I've never heard of any weird mad scientists making freak jails in any of those places. -- oh!" She looks kind of excited now to be saying: "We're 5/20 victims. And plus Sera's zombie brother could probably make sure we get slots, you could totally eyeball him for real. What do you think viking aliens have on their insides?" "You can ski? I thought you were from Hawai'i." Are these, in fact, mutually exclusive? Roscoe has moved on, perked up -- "Oh we are! I got the marks to show it too --" he waggles his bandaged elbow at her. "I know Sera's other brother too, the human, he was my cellie in Lassiter for a minute," this is somehow not a brag, Roscoe says it like it's kind of embarrassing. He taps his fingers on a can of succotash as he thinks -- "Lightning?" he suggests. "Glowy sparkly blue goo. Multiple stomachs like a cow. I'unno but I need to find out." "You were roommies with the Token?" There's a kind of giddy glee in Natsumi's voice when she discovers this. "Somehow that is weirder than a lot of the other weird things I've heard around here." She's shaking her head and checking the expiry on the tomato sauce before stacking it with the actually edible sauce jars. "Okay it's settled, I'm gonna ask Sera. You can have a weird Lassiter Roomies reunion and we can find out what's inside a Lightning God. I hope it's hideous." Roscoe nods, regretfully -- "He wasn't so bad, he was rolling in commissary cash," he informs her. "Easily in my top fifteen cellies. I could talk to Sera too, I went to the Halloween dance with her. By the way." (This is a boast.) But he's going back to sorting now. "Don't worry, if it's not I won't tell you." "Sera? Really? Wow." Natsumi is looking dutifully impressed at this, probably mentally adjusting Roscoe's High School Value a tick as she looks him over again. She's returning to her sorting, too, but not without a playfully amused: "See, that's what I like. A guy who knows when to lie to me."