[OPEN] Fatality Is Like Ghosts In The Snow

[speakveryclearly]

Date & Time: December 8th onward
Location: Snowsilium
Characters: Kanaya Maryam and you
Summary: A day in the undeath: meandering through the snowy landscape hunting for prey; work at the seamstress's house where she wrangled residence for herself, Mami, and Alice; evening gun lessons in the Mekakushi Dan mansion; and night shift in the Transporter facility.
Warnings: Noon prompt has potential vampirism; closed McGill-Brown prompt will lead to discussion of war, death, and such intersections as erasure phenomena


[Closed to Mami and Alice]
She "gets up" early to "help make breakfast", a convenient reason to never take meals in front of her mistress. Though Kanaya derives a little pleasure from doing chores for the woman that has accommodated herself as well as her two friends, the hologram she has on practically twenty-four/seven is not one of them. Here her short black hair "is cut" more conventionally, her skin is a less sparkly sort of pale, and her teeth are supposed to be flat. She practices expressions in the mirror for a few minutes a day, to make sure that the physical presence of her fangs doesn't interfere too much with the purely visual illusion. Then she turns away and places her empty plate on the countertop, ready to engage in conversation with her coworkers.

[Open: Outdoors]
By noon she's gone out "for lunch". It's an opportunity to explore, the only one she really has during the day... though sometimes as she glares at snow hares or penguins with blood thirst in her eyes, it seems like she wishes her excuse were true. Maybe if she went far enough into the forest nobody would notice. God, though, does she hate the cold. At least she has a practical black coat from Christmas last year. Soon she'll have to go shopping - her midday socializations are a little tainted with this anxiety, whom to give gifts and whom to ignore.

[Closed to Saul, Steph, Ahiru, and Dick]
On the 10th of December she has a destination in mind. A quick phone call has verified for her the location of Saul Goodman's current sanctuary. She knocks on the door and a dusting of snow falls off her black gloves. Who'll answer? Who else will be there? She doubts, upon thinking, that Saul lives alone...

[Open: Clotheshop]
And in the afternoon? She's back to work, of course. The future sewing machine is a different model from what she bought with her first paycheck in Exsilium, and she's never seen a future loom in person at all. The smile on her face as she works behind these machines is a decent approximation of happiness, less artificial than when she's selling clothes from behind the counter.

[Closed to Mekakushi Dan]
When she "goes out for dinner", her dining establishment of choice is the Mekakushi Dan's mansion, and she's glad for it because this is the only place where she keeps the hologram off long-term. In their common area she takes up as much space as she likes on the couch, wearing a T-shirt and loose skirt, and dismantles firearms blindfolded. "This is how Kano should learn," she insists with a good-natured imperiousness, "aren't you part of the blindfold brigade anyway." Part of the pretense is to delay the progression to outdoor practice, when her holographic facade will have to go back up.

[Open: Transporter Central Building]
Only at night, sneaking out of the shop when she's supposed to (need) be asleep, can she log her hours of temporal programming. Inside the complex, too, she retains her supernatural appearance if only for increased recognizability. The terminal where she works is separate from her tablet; both devices see a lot of use, though, as this is the place natives are least likely to look over her shoulder.

Comments

[speakveryclearly]

Yes, Christopher, she is having a snack. Of course, her mouth is preoccupied with the snack consumption process. She can only make a brief affirmative noise at him.

Eventually the penguin's wings stop pinwheeling. That's an earlier stage of blood loss than complete emptiness, however.

[inhumanity]

Christopher waits quite patiently, humming softly and swaying his head back and forth.

"Erythrocytes! Leukocytes! Thrombocytes!
An aqueous solution of all the nutrients you need!
Nature's gift bursts and flows like her abundant waters!
Stain it with the pain of innocents!"

[speakveryclearly]

Eventually the supply of penguin blood is exhausted, leaving Kanaya with one (1) penguin corpse and looking up at Christopher a little more baffled than she'd like to admit.

"...I'm going to have to pass this on to Kano somehow later. What do you know about preparing meat."

[inhumanity]

He flashes her a grin. "I always do Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for my family, and in this economy? Why, sometimes, you just can't get the turkey from a local store."

So you have to steal it from someone's farm. And then kill the farmer. And use their farmhouse as the place for your family dinner.

That aside, he extends a hand for her to hand over the penguin. He'll prepare it right there on the spot, watch if he doesn't.

[speakveryclearly]

"Thanksgiving still escapes me... not the appeal, just the execution."

She's stalling for time as she considers whether to hand the poor bird over but then obliges.

[inhumanity]

Christopher starts plucking away at the feathers with the efficacy of a trained farmhand. "It's really very simple. All you have to do is gather all of your family together in one place, feed them, and watch the arguments break out."

[speakveryclearly]

"How do you do that when you don't have family, though?" The word she spits out as she watches him work indicates the concept was at one point entirely foreign to her.

[inhumanity]

"Oh, that's no trouble at all. You simply have to make one up." Christopher smiles at her with a childish innocence. He has never had a family, not really, so for him, it is a problem he has been ignoring for decades now. A problem like that is only a problem if you accept what it's premised on, and Christopher never does.

[speakveryclearly]

Fictive kinship makes her lip curl in disgust - or pain, maybe. "That sounds like a terribly precarious premise," she says, not looking directly at him, as she reaches for some of the plucked feathers to organize them into a neater pile on the ground.

[inhumanity]

Sunny, continuing his work on the penguine, he answers her, "That's why you just have to overcome its precariousness by holding on to it anyway," as if it is nothing, as if the sensible thing to do is ignore all sense and follow your own will.