Close Encounters

[Isabelle]

There was a faint trembling throughout the mortal form as she sat curled quietly against vampiric form, not even aware of the lack of beating heart to match her own slightly quickened pulse. She knew Solene was talking to her, making gentle promises of safety and comfort, but she paid heed most of al to the simple sensation of being against another body, of having someone to hold her and tell her it would be alright – even if they had no way of knowing it wasn’t a lie.

She nodded, though, murmured something to the affirmative that, yes she’d stay put and yes, she was safe and wouldn’t be hurt. A small sniffle followed and the moisture of a tear escaped, but its progress down her cheek was halted by the soft skin of the other’s neck. ”There was a mugging, too…” She mumbled quietly, reluctantly lifting her nose from its chosen spot to blink wide eyes at Solene. ”Just round the corner. I wanted to get away, but then there was this guy with a gun and he was taking this other couple’s stuff. I called the police and they got him, but they said he was some… Some big gangster or something…” She trailed off, catching her lip between small white teeth and seemed to think about something for a moment. ”What’s happening? It never used to be like this here…”

[Solene]

A fit of anxiety began to crawl along Solene’s spine. Belle wanted answers that she was forbidden to give… She couldn’t tell her a word of truth. Inwardly, she cringed… but outwardly she feigned a shallow breath and ran her fingers through the other’s hair.
“I think its just the evolution of time… Places get less and less safe as the base population increases… There has been a lot of growth in business as well, which puts others out of business and…” She pauses, leveling gentle hazel eyes on the woman’s doe eyes. “It is just scary out there… People go crazy, the government sucks, and there aren’t enough booze to make the criminals chill… It’s like any other big city out there. We just get the bonus of watching Harper Rock grow. Did you grow up near here?”
She felt bad and hated for the ‘truth’ to be such a watered down child’s truth… but the humans who knew found themselves to be part of the greater truth.

[Isabelle]

“There are cops everywhere,” she said, half agreeing with the idea that population alone made things more dangerous. It made sense that more people would mean more criminals, but there also seemed to be more police, so surely that should deter many and capture most of the rest? Then again, there were a lot of stories of police being injured or killed in the line of duty over the last couple of years, too; of responses to break ins all over the city turning into ambushes and shoot outs that rarely, if ever, seemed to go in the poor officer’s favour. Belle shuddered in her own mind to think of how many widows and orphans had been made by the rocketing crime numbers.

Outwardly though, she simply nodded, mutely at first. She had grown up here, in Harper Rock, when it had been little more than a four-district town, not the sprawling metropolis it had rapidly become. ”In Honeymead, near where the woods start, then here later” she offered by way of explanation. It wasn’t too comfortable being deeper into the city – loud and dirty and Honeymead had never seemed to experience so much as a car stereo being stolen when she had lived there as a child. She wondered if it was still the same way out there, removed from the criminals that roamed Wickbridge and Newborough, but rent out there was higher, perhaps because it was safer. She’d perhaps look at her budget one day soon and see if she could afford the move.

”What about you?” She asked, quietly curious, ”Are you from here too?”

[Solene]

“Honeymead… That’s where I live. What are you doing all the way over here if you grew up in Honeymead, Belle? It is no wonder you’re seeing more crime than you’re used to.” With the knowledge of the vast difference in safety and society between point A and B, Solene wasn’t shocked at all about the level of trauma.
Not too long ago, Solene was just as naive about the areas of Harper Rock and their potential danger. She recalled the horror of mere thought of Canada and laughed quietly.
“Me? I’m from Manhattan. I’m used to eating lunch next to much worse than what we see here… so I think I might have a skewed view of the dangers here. I am, however, eternally sorry that you had to see what you did. You are pretty observant, it seems… would be difficult for you to miss something like that.”

[Isabelle]

"The rent's better here," she offered by way of explanation, one shoulder lifting towards her chin in the beginning of a shrug. It was true that there, in the heart of the city, rent was lower and it helped that her apartment was convenient to her main source of income and the train station when she needed to go a little further afield for work. She missed Honeymead often, but told herself time and again that it was better, more practical, to remain where she was. The theory was that she could save up more easily here, but she so often had to repair or replace something that it rarely seemed to quite work out that way and her nest egg grew only slowly.

"Is there much crime in Manhattan? I've never been anywhere but here... " She asked and explained all at once. Some people seemed to think it strange that Harper Rock and the occasional day trip to Toronto when she was a child was all that Isabelle had seen of the world, but what else was she supposed to do? It would have been nice to see the world and explore, but not everyone could do that and it wasn't meant for her. Someone else would undoubtedly make better use of the chance than she could with her meagre existence; no, she would simply concentrate on being as safe and comfortable as she could where she was while she worked on that nest egg of hers. Then she could look further towards the future. "The... The man was in Newborough. That's nowhere near the Quarantine, is it? I wonder how he got so far..." She mused, only then beginning to realise how far he had walked since his escape and yet only Belle had thought to report him. Only she had been foolish or ignorant enough to get the poor man killed.

[Solene]

Solene laid her head against the back of the couch and let her eyes close for a moment, thinking on the details of Manhattan. There was never anything glorious about the city until night fell… but those memories felt long dead. The scent of booze, perfume, and everything that once mingled with it was masked by the familiar scent of dust. It was like opening a tome that had been shut up in a temple for 500 years, and it didn’t feel good.
She made an effort to take another deep breath before she lifted her head to deliver answers… answers that wouldn’t drive the Harper Rock native insane. “There was a decent amount of crime, yes… but nothing like the crime in Jersey. Or Oakland in California. I wouldn’t wish either of those places on anyone.” A cringe twisted her lips at the mere thought of Jersey, and unfortunately those memories weren’t as far away.
The girl turned back to the zombie so far from the contained area and instinctively, Sol kissed the top of her head. “Don’t worry so much, hm? Maybe he was reported before… when he wasn’t as sick and they lost him. It is very strange for the ill to be out of their designated areas… but don’t take the weight onto your shoulders. It isn’t your fault. It was either them or a bear eventually… you saved him a fate much worse.”
She looked down at her, in study of the human emotion…

[Isabelle]

She let out a small sniffle, having the good grace to look embarrassed about it and lifting her eyes to look uncertainly up to Solene, working her bottom lip between teeth while she decided on the merit of words meant to provide comfort and reassurance. ”What about a cure? Don’t they keep talking about finding a cure? He could have got better…” She began, not sure she believed her own words entirely; they’d been talking about a cure and 'positive progress’ towards it since the first infected had been discovered, even before they’d cordoned off the part of the city that everybody now knew as the Quarantine or QZ.

With a small sigh, she tucked herself back in against the woman, returning her nose beneath Solene’s jaw and carefully, hesitantly extracting one hand from her blanket to tentatively reach for the tips of blonde hair, investigating the texture between the tip of finger and thumb. “I don’t want to go back to work tomorrow… How am I supposed to go there again?” She asked, whether to herself, Solene or simply to the universe at large… Or even if she expected any kind of answer, she didn’t quite know.

[Solene]

A cure... they really do tell a lot of lies to humans. She thought to herself as she felt the light tug of fingers at her hair. It sent little tingles down her spine and it was all she could do to focus on words instead of affection.
"I don't know about the cures or potential cures... I would like to think that they're working on helping them, but if you think on a virus... it evolves. They have to tackle potential problems before they present themselves and attack the core of the issue without killing the host. That'll take a lot of time. If he had a strain that was advanced or problematic... well, they would have to remove him from the others so that things didn't get out of control I guess. It is awful, but that's a possible reason as to why they... handled the situation the way they did, yes?"
Work. Now that was something she hadn't had to think on in a long time. "You work over there? May I be overly nosy and ask where? Maybe you could let your boss know that you experienced some trauma and need a personal day?"
She would have offered to keep her company, but the necromancer couldn't risk the daylight. She was fortunate enough to not look like a walking decaying pile of flesh, but sunlight would raise question and she would be sure to lose what friendship had blossomed with Belle.

[Isabelle]

”Is that what it is, a virus?” She asked, her attention sharpening as she grabbed onto the vaguest possibility that someone, anyone knew what the illness even was. It didn’t occur to her to wonder why Solene might know it as a virus when Isabelle herself wasn’t sure they had ever given out that sort of information to the public; maybe she had a relative who had been affected. It would certainly explain why she’d come from the bright lights of New York all the way to Harper Rock and the middle of nowhere. Or maybe she had a friend who worked in one of the facilities and had gotten some inside information that way. It didn’t matter at all to the petite blonde how Solene knew, only that she did know.

The subject was changed, though, and Belle didn’t have it in her just then to pull against the tide of discussion, instead simply allowing her focus to drift from one topic to the next. ”Sometimes,” she began hesitantly, always finding work a tricky topic of discussion. It was, usually, imperative that she approach the nature of her employment… Diplomatically, but doing so wasn’t always the easiest for the girl; she was never quite comfortable with where to draw the line between half truths and how much was the right amount of information to give out and how much to withhold. ”Most of the time I work in a… A bar, over at 8th Dimension, but sometimes I pick up some secretary jobs in Newborough. Just temping when people are off sick…” She explained quietly, hedging her bets a little on the description of the bar and hoping against hope that it wouldn’t inspire questions about which bar; there were plenty out there to choose from, after all.

[Solene]

“The illness? I imagine so… Viruses are the only things I know of that cause such a lack of… function and controlled mobility.” Lie. “I mean, I suppose it could be something else entirely, but who can be sure? They most assuredly are working toward helping them.” Another lie. “It could be like the flu… or some sort of military thing gone wrong?” At least a fib. Vampires and zombies and every other sort of monster were far older than the paranoia. “But really, what can we do but research? People drop dead of strange and unexplained stuff every day… We build theories and try to help. You taking on guilt over the way a single man was handled, though, will do no good… What are you meant to do? Take him home and feed him soup? He’d only give you what he has and we’d be no better off…” She paused, then kissed the crown of her head. “Besides, I’d have lost a friend… and friends aren’t easy to come by these days.” Ok, Sol… now shut up. Stop talking about the undead before you cease to be one.

“A bar? Well, that’s easy. Bars are prone to trouble and drama. I could even come assist in getting you ‘out of town’ for a few days. I don’t know exactly which it is, but I think it might be good for you… Do you bartend? Or do they have cover for you?” The girl was unabashedly nosy. Being from the hustle and bustle of the busiest and most lucrative city in the United States, she didn’t bat a lash at the less than glamorous or morally upstanding jobs. A + B = C and C was money. Money was a necessary thing in this world and Solene liked to think that she understood that well enough to not be judgmental about how it was earned… unless said individual hurt children or resided in Jersey. Some things were simply unforgivable.