DIRK: [ARISE]

[evenindeath]

Of all the places to wake up, 'dumpster' had not actually been in Dirk's top thirty list. Of course, once he realized that's where he was he considered that had been an error in judgement on his part. It was where he belonged and thus should have been number one on his list.

"HAL?" he said, his voice a raw and rough croaking to his own ears, but his sunglasses skewed on his face showed nothing but the sky above, a bright night lit by a moon and too much light pollution from the city around him for any stars. He brought an aching arm up to right his sunglasses and give them a tap, the the bare bones of his Heads Up Display on them became visible, flickering in and out of focus. "HAL?" he asked again, but there was no answer. It said he was offline with no signal available.


The past - however long it was came back to him in flits and flashes, what lead them here. Him here, anyway. Finding our that what his friends went through was a beta run for the whole thing, that it had already failed once and they were an attempt to restart under more favorable circumstances. That their game was a null game too in different ways but unfortunately just enough overlap that the plan to make a working game between the two of them wasn't going to work. What was there left to try, a third attempt where they would likely once more end up with more problems and no solutions?

Dirk had been careful who he proposed the plan to and how he said it. Jake was the driven type, charismatic - it didn't matter he couldn't figure out how to pull it off himself, if he suggested it people would be more likely to listen, to try.

"Do you think there's a way to get out of the game entirely?" Dirk had asked Jake in what passed for late one night on a meteor where they'd taken refuge, time and day having no meaning.

The question had been posed seemingly carelessly, but it had stuck in Jake's mind like Dirk knew it would. Soon enough they were all working together on 'Jake's' new plan to try and find a universe beyond the games entirely.

There was no guarantee it would work. No guarantee they'd go to the same place, or even... anywhere.

But what other option did they have?


And now Dirk was here, in a dumpster.

It smelled terrible in a weirdly unfamiliar way to him. It was the kind of terrible that came from cramped living conditions of too many people in one place, and he had literally never experienced that before. When he managed to push himself up and crawl out of it (and get all the ... leavings... off of himself) just looking to the other end of the alleyway where cars went back and forth gave him pause as he thought that every single one of those had at least one person in it. Watching for just a couple minutes, more people walked by without a glance in his direction than he'd ever seen in one place in his whole life.

Wherever they'd landed, it wasn't his home. Not when he knew it.

Distracted by that utter culture shock, he managed to miss the sound of someone coming the other direction until they spoke.

"Hand over your money - anything you have on you," the gravely voice ordered, and Dirk turned slowly to see the barrel of a gun staring him down, and attached to it a man that could either be twice his age or a little younger with a hard life behind him. Dirk was guessing the second was more likely.

"Are you fucking deaf? Hand. Over. Your. Cash. Fucker!" the man repeated when Dirk just continued to stare at him.

Oh, this? He'd seen this in plenty of movies. He knew how to handle this.

"Yeah, no," Dirk said, with a careless flick of his wrist his clothing glitched and blurred into a different but similar set, his pointed sunglasses doing the same to be a fully face covering gas mask. The people who fought crime always wore masks in those stories, right? From the same place his new clothing came from he drew his katana.

He was used to enemies that put up a fight to someone on his level, and maybe would be over-estimating this guy's abilities.

Comments

[evenindeath]

Dirk understood how easy chaos could seep in all too well. Especially if it wasn't like you ever had anyone else over to worry about seeing said chaos. Privacy made such things so very easy to take over.

"Nice place," Dirk said after a moment, like he wasn't sure if that was the appropriate response to being introduced to someone's home or not but it seemed like something he'd seen before, so... going with that. Not like Dirk had much in the way of standards - it had necessities and was far cleaner than anyplace he ever lived, so there was that. "You life with anyone else? Family? Girlfriend? Boyfriend?"

Totally casual, making a point to take off his shoes at the entrance. He might have been raised in a gutted, flooded high rise 400 years into an apocalypse but it wasn't a barn.

[lazarusinred]

Enough time living in the manor and then living the life he did, yeah boots off at the door.

"Uh, no," Jason replied feeling the threat of a blush at the word 'boyfriend.' To shake the feeling he shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it onto the kitchen counter. It needed to be cleaned and mended, just like his body armor. "Sometimes family shows up unannounced, but no... no one else. Just me."

Now that the jacket was off he could see how much he had bled before it stopped. It was a fair bit. Damn that blade was sharp. "Do you mind if I get cleaned up first?"

[evenindeath]

"Yeah, you probably should huh," Dirk commented without apology. But he didn't expect one for the awful bruise that made his right arm ache when he moved it from the shoulder at all, and wouldn't have expected one if he'd actually gotten shot. Injury happened when violence was involved and no limbs were lost.

"I'm just gonna…" he nodded toward what he guessed the work bench was given the few tools visible. "Let me know if you need any help with bandages, I've done it on myself enough."

[lazarusinred]

It would have been weird if Dirk had apologized. You apologized for things you did not intend.

"Yeah go ahead... and thanks." It was not like Jason lacked his own skills in patching himself up in the times where it was needed. It was the offer given that mattered.

Entering the bathroom he pushed the door shut and started to remove his armor. It was all cleverly designed to fit tightly, but still be easy enough to remove. If you knew what to look for. Guns, knives, and armor to the side he considered a full shower. Honestly that could wait so he just ran a tap. Using much less care than would be expected for someone with a wound like this he held his arm under the water and rubbed at the dry blood. It came away in rusty clumps revealing an angry looking red line of a fresh scar.

The scars, they always stayed. He glanced up at his reflection, seeing the marks of past battles written there. The kindness of a sharp blade was that the wound it left healed quicker than most.

Good enough. He fished out the blood cleaning supplies he would need and added them to the pile.

Exiting the bathroom he stopped to drop the same pile with his jacket on the counter. Just one more minute he promised the mess before going to his room to grab a t-shirt. Now somewhat decent he gathered up the whole mess to transfer it to the coffee table.

"Finding everything okay?" Jason asked.

[evenindeath]

Dirk made himself comfortable at the work station - well, as much as he ever could be in unfamiliar places.

The first order of business was taking out his sword and grabbing one of his spare shirts from his sylladex to wipe it down clean enough for the time being, both being stashed away again. After that he had to get prepared to do actual repairs.

For Dirk this was simple, common technology. Same with his inventory system. A light grid was deployed across the work station along with his various tools to work on microscopic technology like involved with the glasses, the light grid functioning as a standing hologram to zoom in and manipulate as needed, the corrections and changes he made to the hologram being done to the glasses themselves when he indicated to implement the changes. Along with the light grid out came the laptop - as opposed to the slim and sleek look that was common in 2020 here, Dirk's was a tank of a machine that only existed because he used the same unreal tech to basically make his massive behemoth of a desktop into something portable when he had to abandon the proverbial ship of the Earth.

He'd tinkered around with his sunglasses enough that basic fixes were pre-programmed. Taking them off, he tossed them carelessly onto the grid and programmed in the most thorough if basic debugging and repair. If it ran into a problem it wasn't already programmed to fix, it would stop and alert him where the problem was. Until then it could run on it's own. That taking over the corner, he brought the laptop up next to it, booting it up while also bringing up the full display for his sylladex. He had the important parts of his inventory memorized, and as such rarely needed to actually call up a visual of it. Given how much random crap he'd stored in that infinite space in the last few weeks, months... the visual display was a lot like a light projector, except it didn't matter the room was already fully bright. He scaled it to take up several feet of space on the wall, a grid of White semi-rectangles each holding an image of something in them. Some were obvious - rocket powered skateboard, a CD wallet (he liked the irony of storing things inside storage), a truly stupid amount of swords- he moved his dirty clothing into the 'laundry' square to free up some space so he only had to empty out one part of it when he needed to do it -

Which was about when Jason stepped out of the bathroom. Of course Dirk looked, it was human nature to take notice of sudden sounds, even expected ones.

... and maybe leaned back in the chair a little to watch Jason go back into his room.

Scar study. Yep. That's what it was.

Dirk had his own, of course, though it often felt like there was little rhyme or reason as to what scars stayed and which ones were his forever. Except of course it was the ones that mattered that stayed. The line around his neck would likely never go away, while various other intense injuries that happened after no longer left a trace behind because they were just from random battles that had meant nothing to him. By the time Jason came back out for real to check up, Dirk had a neat little pile of various electronic components piled next to his open laptop (a chat program was open on it - and while it was full of a dozen technicolor usernames every single one was marked as offline, the space where a message would be simply saying 'no signal'. The wallpaper appeared to be a high resolution vector image of rainbow dash from my little pony) along with a scattered array of cards roughly the size of playing cards spread out in front of him. Some were punched like those old time cards you would shove into computers, others not, the images on them didn't always make sense but it was clear there was some logic behind the semi-piles that Dirk had them in.

"Yeah - you got anything to drink?" he asked, glancing up from his work. Dirk didn't want to go snooping without permission (lie, he absolutely wanted to go snooping but he didn't want to get caught snooping) and most of the stuff he had cataloged, well. It was food and drink to be endured to keep you from starving to death. If he didn't have to use it, that would be ideal. With the time passed the bruise on his shoulder was a truly epic shade of purple-black by now.

[lazarusinred]

A very striking purple-black. Purple and orange were split complementary colors after all. Jason shoved the thought aside.

"Plenty," he answered. "What do you like to drink?" Maybe he would get an answer he could work with.

[evenindeath]

There was a pause far longer than would be normal.

"... Soda?" he eventually settled on, like it was a question. That seemed safe. This era definitely had soda.

[lazarusinred]

"Soda. I can do soda" Jason turned and padded into the kitchen. His fridge was fairly well stocked. For someone who was not always up for the task of cooking. Take away was a regular feature in his life. He grabbed a couple cans of cola.

Not yet closing the fridge he leaned back to look at Dirk. "Are you hungry?"

[evenindeath]

"Oh, shit, yeah, probably should eat something," he said, thinking aloud. Given he didn't know how much time had been spent between attempting the escape and waking up in the dumpster... and it wasn't like they'd all sat down and had a nice filling meal ahead of time. "No idea if starvation can kill me now but I can still feel hunger and that's not a fun feeling."

[lazarusinred]

That was an interesting thing to know. Rather than ask what to bring Jason settled on a few items. Some peperoni sticks, little cheeses, and from a cabinet; a crinkly container of cookies.

Finding a clear spot on the workbench he put the snacks down and one of the sodas. The other he opened for himself. "We can get something more substantial later."

[evenindeath]

There was thankfully still a little clear space. Dirk sure knew how to take up room he was given, though. Everything looked simple enough that it didn't set off any alarm bells, not that Dirk was concerned about being poisoned. More like... unfamiliarity.

Like so.

He'd been intending to casually ask about Jason's family, but all he got out was "So," before he cracked open the cola and took a sip, promptly almost choking on it. "That's what that tastes like?"

It wasn't bad - hell, it was good, even, but absolutely unexpected compared to what Dirk had been used to for soda before.

[lazarusinred]

Jason could not help the real laugh that was startled out of him. It was good natured, which was strange in its own way.

He took a sip of his own to be sure. "Yeah, cola at least. There are other kinds we can expose you later."

[evenindeath]

Dirk eyed the can with some suspicion still, turning it around in his hands to examine all of it before taking another more cautious second sip. He did NOT choke this time, prepared for it.

"That's so fucking weird," Dirk said, shaking his head. He was extra cautious when trying some of the snacks, too - a little of each. These were mostly similar to what he was expecting, if slight variations on milder or stronger flavor than what he was used to.

He wondered if it was a matter of different universes and this was what Jake was used to, or the whole 'four hundred years after earth has been completely dominated by an alien force' thing. There was possibly no way to know.

"How many kinds?"

[lazarusinred]

"That is a difficult question to answer," Jason said. He pulled out his phone and sat on the edge of the table next to Dirk, showing images as he spoke.

"There are colas, like this one. Lots of minor variation there, but generally they are also the ones with caffeine. Of course there are exceptions. There are sub categories of cola that are so different they aren't quite cola anymore, but not so different to be a whole category. Then you have your citrus sodas, usually lemon and or lime. However, orange soda is usually more in line with the fruit sodas like grape. Then you have root beer and ginger beer, not actually alcoholic. Finally the crazy stuff where some soda company is hell bent on making soda taste like fucking bubblegum or something. There is at least one store in Gotham that sells nothing but sodas."

[evenindeath]

Dirk leaned in, and even with it being his injured shoulder on Jason's side it didn't stop him from being close enough to bump shoulders as he looked at the images scrolling by. Some were familiar because he'd seen them in movies and television shows recorded ages ago. Out of all of them the only two that seemed familiar beyond 'I've seen a picture of this can before' were, oddly- "We got Tab" and "Oh, yeah, Faygo, we have Faygo still."

Then, because sharing was caring, he grabbed one of the stacks of cards and quickly sorted through them until he found what he was looking for. The image on it was of a six pack of at a glance were soda cans.

He tapped the edge of the card against the work bench, and just like that, the card was now blank but there was a real life six pack of soda cans on the empty space he had hit the card with. They had the general size and shape of soda cans, but... that was where the similarities mostly seemed to end.

The label design was all super high contrast flat back and white, with some kind of horned monster on it. Pops of eye-searingly bright orange, yellow, and red were used here and there, the monster's horns having a gradation of them that made it look like it was made of candy corn. All over it was also some kind of test that could generously be described as if someone threw the font they used for the Klingon alphabet in star trek into a blender.

The monster on the can was also wearing sunglasses.

Dirk took out a pair of wire cutters from the tools he already had out and snipped one off the six pack because as it turned out that was thin metal rather than plastic and tossed the can to Jason before he tapped the cans on the now five pack with the blank card. They vanished, and the picture on the card now reflected five instead of six.

"Careful, it's ... sweet?" he said, not sure how else to describe it.

It tasted like drinking liquid funfetti cake was what it tasted like, the syrup about twice as thick as the cola.

[lazarusinred]

The whole process of retrieving the soda and putting the pack back, it was interesting. Given the tech Dirk had also produced... some kind of techno-magic? It was not unheard of, especially when alternate realities were at play.

Sweet huh? Well if the soda that Dirk just had did not qualify, best to be gentle. He took a tentative sip.

"It's like," he said and made a face before taking another sip, "like drinking a- a birthday cake." Another sip, because reason was no longer part of this equation. "No, like the icing on one of those white frosted monstrosities with the- the sprinkles." It was a lot, but he would make a best effort to finish it eventually. It had been a gift after all.

"I can see why the cola was startling."

[evenindeath]

"That's the Batter Witch for you. There's chocolate and red velvet in there," he gestured to his projected sylladex on the wall, "somewhere too. Just had to make do with whatever the drones I shot down were carrying or what I was able to replicate. No supermarkets in the middle of 300 miles of ocean."

He said it like it was a fact of life everyone had to deal with.

"Really as long as it wasn't grub chips it wasn't bad. Those are salty as fuck and mildly hallucinogenic and that green powder on them gets on everything."

Not that Dirk was the most fastidious of people, clearly, but his mess was clutter over dirt. Before he could complain further, there was a soft chime from the light grid setup, a robotic sounding mimicry of his own voice stating "Process interrupted - corruption discovered in base code."

Ah, yeah. Back when Hal's code was locked into the sunglasses, he'd disallowed the base code to be messed with - both because Hal was a shit, and because Dirk didn't want to risk him being seen as a virus and deleted or harmed. It was easy enough to manually fix when there were problems there, so he attached the light grid to his laptop to access the code there.

[lazarusinred]

Dirk's casual complaining about what his apocalypse had been like made Jason very grateful for his selection of supermarkets and bodegas. The chime, however, brought an end to whatever moment they were having.

"Right. I'll leave you to it." There was gear in want of a cleaning. Grabbing both his sodas he made his way to the other side of the room. The couch and coffee table would do just fine for this work.

When he set himself to a task and actually started it, it was easy for Jason to get lost in it. He was not sure how much time had passed while he had cleaned his jacket and armor. He had not noticed the time when he had sat down, so the clock was a useless metric. Anyway he needed his repair kit. Which was on the work table.

The thing about Jason was that he had to put effort into making sound as he moved around. Effort that he did not like to expend. So when he came up behind Dirk, Jason placed a hand on his upper back. No longer gloved fingers thoughtlessly finding skin there. The repair kit was just right there, a quick reach and grab.

[evenindeath]

Dirk was more than familiar with hyperfocusing on a project. It was why Hal came about in the first place, originally created as an auto-responder for when his friends messaged him while he was too busy with his own work to chat with them.

While there were some things that seemed inherently out of whack with the new universe, it wasn't the first time Dirk had adjusted for that. It looked like most of the garbage in the code came from attempts at automatically adjusting going haywire and leeching back into the source. Easy fix, mindless and meditative work. Checking the laptop as well he found a similar corruption and fixed it.

Instead of saying 'no signal', it asked if he wanted to attempt to reconnect. He stared at the question for some time.

He wanted to know if his friends were okay. He wanted to know if they made it out - if not here, then somewhere. But…

If they had a chance to make a clean break from him, wouldn't it be better if he let them have it?

He had just resolved to close the chat program when the unexpected touch to his back had him jumping, scattering cards and a thankfully now empty soda can.

"Jesus-!"

[lazarusinred]

"Sorry," Jason said. You apologized for things that you did not intend. "I just needed-" Grabbed up the kit from the far side of the table and sighed soft enough that it was only noticeable at this close range.

"Uh, how is it going?"

[evenindeath]

Dirk brought a hand up to touch where Jason had, an unconscious motion, heart beating rapidly from more than just surprise.

"Fine. Uh, fixed. Got it figured out," he said, quickly grabbing his sunglasses to slide them back on. He'd already closed the chat on them, too. Might reopen it in invisible mode later. The program they all used didn't technically have an invisibility mode, Dirk had hacked his own.

He closed his laptop, picking it up and tossing it carelessly at the projected sylladex. It hung in the air right in front of it for a brief breathless moment before turning to pure light and shrinking - sucked up onto a previously blank space like a comical vacuum effect, the former blank space now showing the image of the laptop.

"What about you how's the - whatever going?"

[lazarusinred]

"Repairs. Still going." Unconsciously he rubbed his forearm. The new scar still ached. That always took more time.

From his vantage point the bruising on Dirk's shoulder was prominent. He had not thought to ask before, but no time like the present. "Did you want something for... your... shoulder?"

The question stretched out as he had caught a glimpse of an unfortunately familiar shadow outside. Faster than what could even be considered casual he reached around the other side of Dirk to twist the blinds closed.

"Ice, aspirin?"

[evenindeath]

"Sure, ice," Dirk said with a nod. Facing Jason as he was, the window was to his back and so he missed the shadow there - he'd have looked anyway with Jason closing the blinds like he did, but reaching past Dirk meant he had to get up in his space again and…

"So when I say humanity was effectively wiped out I mean literally me and my friend Roxy were the only two humans left alive and her hive was on the other side of what was left of the USA. I didn't see another human being in person until I was sixteen and the world was finally dying for the last time - red miles, meteors, raining fire, oceans burning, whole nine yards," he said quickly, before he could stop himself and gall back on silent indifference that was his go-to.

That had ruined things with Jake, holding back all the time, only giving away information after he had carefully weighed what kind of reaction he would get for it. He wasn't going to do that anymore. He wanted to be better. So fine, let Jason know why he's so fucking weird when Jason gets close.

"So if I'm- if I act weird just say something so I can fix it."

His heart was still pounding, a flush creeping up his neck.

[lazarusinred]

Oh that, that put things a new perspective. It felt like something given, and something that deserved more than an agreement.

"Hold that thought," he said and went to the kitchen to get an ice pack. Just as he entered the kitchen his phone gave a chime, followed by another. Great.

Fishing his phone out he was greeted by a secure group text.

Damien: I think we are in trouble. There is a strange man in Jason's apartment and it stands to reason they would target our weakest member first.

Hey.

Dick: It could be a new friend.

Tim: That seems unlikely.

Before it could spiral much more Jason hastily sent:

Jason: I'm fine. If you can manage to not be assholes I'll tell you later

And promptly muted his phone before shoving it back into a pocket.

Returning with the ice pack, Jason broke it up a little so it would rest better on the curve of a body. He sat on the edge of the table to face Dirk. "May I?" he asked gesturing with the pack. When he got approval he placed it where it would do the most help and continued to hold it, even though he did not strictly need to.

"My mom ODed when I was young. My dad went to prison not long after. I... ended up on my own. Until I got the attention of the man who adopted me. By stealing the tires off his car. He is a very intense person and when something bad happened... we had a falling out. My adopted brothers are also a pack of weirdos, but thanks to them it sometimes seems okay. What I'm trying to say is I can be hard to be around. Tell me if I make you uncomfortable, and I'll fix it." Echoing the same phrase from Dirk. "And I'll tell you if I think you are acting weird."

[evenindeath]

He had been briefly worried that it had been Too Much - Dirk was frequently Too Much when he let his emotions get the better of him, and this certainly would be setting new Strider records from 'hello' to 'FUBAR' but let it never be said that Dirk wasn't always working to surpass his own abilities when he had no competition to offer a significant challenge.

But Jason was just getting an ice pack, like Dirk had asked for, and when he held it to Dirk's back himself Dirk held very still to not jostle Jason or give any indication however accidental that he would rather do it himself.

Even before this, Dirk had suspected that for all the superficial similarities to Jake, Jason was more the same type as Dirk. The confession that felt like truth for truth made it that much more certain for him.

"You don't think I'm weird yet? Guess I'll have to up my game. Can I get an indication of my current standing?" He asked, half joke, half challenge.