Multiple Settings (Closed) Pain is temporary

[ScatheAriiasqDrayceon]

Jet hummed as he cooked. It was a habit; one he had yet to break... not that he really wanted to all that much. Of course, even his own humming couldn't disguise the sound of screaming from where Whipporwill had gone to sleep.

He huffed lightly, sparing a glance to where he left Arii (who had taken to lying on the floor in his absence, hugging their tail) before dumping the eggs and hashbrowns onto a few plates and turning off the stove (he wasn't that much of an idiot). Insurance against housefires secured, he carefully stepped over a cattarpillared Yora and toward Whipporwill's room, calling a warning not to eat the food, yet over his shoulder. He really, really hoped that they'd follow that, all things considered. He wasn't in the mood to deal with a whiny Baba... or Yora, for that matter.

As .13 entered and called out a good morning, he chirped a response back, pausing by the guest bedroom door. A pause, and a listen later, he knocked lightly on the door. "There's food, if you want—Baba, don't you dare—it."

 

[BittyBobcat]

A flicker of semi-opaque white enveloped a corner of Dia's vision, too large to be another one of the almost-too-faint-to-see specks dotting the room (miniscule structural weaknesses, there were a few in every building, and she was yet to find any large enough to be notable). She got up carefully—pausing for a short moment with her feet just above the floor to wait for a warning in case there was a creaky spot on the ground—and had just stepped out of bed when a gentle knock echoed off the door.

Her back straightened—you were supposed to stand at attention when a superior entered the room—but no one came through. Instead, a voice (NightOwl's, she assumed) spoke through the door.

Food? Again? It couldn't even be noon yet (at least, she certainly hoped it wasn't).

The offer set her nerves on edge. It was too simple, too easy. But Dia never took the promise of food lightly, and her thinking slipped back to the conclusion she came to last night; if they wanted to hurt her, they could've by now. The most logical reason for it was that they were trying to build a rapport—which was harmless so long as it was known. And, though she knew she could last quite a bit longer without food, it certainly did sound good, if the meal from last night was anything to go by.

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," Dia called—the words coming out automatic and toneless—as she opened the door and unconsciously shielded herself by standing halfway behind it.

 

[Chronically Caustic Cat]

While Jet went to offer food to Whippoorwill, Yora and Baba were locked in a staring contest for dominance. Yora had emerged from her blanket and was crouched on the floor peering over the edge of her table as Baba sat before a plate of hashbrowns. Still maintaining eye contact, Baba leaned down to steal a bite, eliciting a viscious hiss from Yora as she batted at Baba's nose. Jet's warning tone had Baba scampering off to go harass him for attention while Yora got up to pour herself some coffee.

Well, can't eat yet, might as well work she grumbled as she pulled out 7.13's files. Under the dietary restrictions section, she began copying down recipes from online cat moms and calculating how much of a certain ingredient 7.13 could have without causing serious harm in case she ever wanted a treat. Actually...

"7.13, what are your preferred pronouns?" Yora asked without looking up from 7.13's files, writing out ideas for charms that would shut off the control spike temporarily. The best way they had for suppressing it right now was keeping 7.13 well fed. It was probably safe to say that she needed close to 3,555 Kcal a day, maybe double that if her healing works the way she thinks it does. Her cooking would maximize the calories and nutrients 7.13 can get out of food, but then they ran the risk of over-consumming certain vitamins and minerals....

Yora continued theorizing, absent-mindedly reminding 7.13 that eating the eggs would be inadvisable until Jet took away her pen and set a plate down in front of her.

 

[Technicolor Cat]

Venna observed her team’s morning activities with a studied military blankness, the only let-on to her increasing nerves being the way her posture slowly grew more similar to a parade rest. It was subtle as she watched Jet move around the kitchen and offer food, but grew pronounced more pronounced when Yora’s attention focused on her, and became rather sharp when she was asked a question.

She had to suppress a few instinctive trained responses, and even past her automatic agitation once she thought about it she didn’t understand why Yora asked. With the scientists it would have been some kind of test, or more likely wouldn’t have come up at all, with the assumption that she wasn’t human enough to count. It simply wasn’t a question she had much context for at all. Old anxieties and old memories stained her thoughts, but nothing showed on her face. Her ears however flicked down and pinned.

When she spoke her voice was simply neutral, “I use she/her.” As to the meal, and Yora’s further aside about it before she had spoken, that was simpler. She wasn’t anywhere near full or overloaded, but she had hunted enough to be comfortable for a little while even through significant damage. She had no need to draw on other’s resources. Her voice remained much the same in her immediate followup, “I hunted well enough in the night, and sustained few enough injuries, I have no need of it.”

 

[ScatheAriiasqDrayceon]

Jet let Baba up to his shoulders as Whipporwill emerged. He gestured over to the plates of food, ears flicking at the honorifics. "Just Night's fine," he replied, drawing his wings back and folding them a little tighter along his back.

He moved away from the door as the sound of hissing and shifting cloth reached his ears.

Seven, as it seemed, had taken this moment to wake up, barely aware and grumbling something about weird dreams. Their tail twitched, paint flaking off as it moved. He dropped a plate of eggs and hashbrowns next to them without needing to be asked in the same movement he used to replace Yora's grimoire with the same fare.

"Right, so, hate to bring this up at breakfast, but we have a hundred-story tower we need to do something with."

 

[BittyBobcat]

"Oh— er, alright," Dia mumbled. "I'll keep that in mind." Her sense of decorum was rapidly corroding—and, with it, any sense of knowing what she was doing. There was no protocol to this. No procedure. It left her unsteady—like the first time she'd looked down while scaling the side of a building. In that moment, it didn't matter how many times she had done something similar; a single glance from the wrong angle made the entire operation feel off.

It seemed the only angles she could look from these days were the wrong ones, though. Maybe Dia would just have to adjust.

She trailed behind Night at what she deemed a safe distance (just barely within arms' reach—far enough that she could step out of it the instant she saw any sudden moves) as they entered the kitchen. Her head was angled downward, but—beneath the blindfold—her eyes locked on the waking figure that was Seven. Their presence still made her skin crawl with what Dia wouldn't call fear—only a... healthy amount of caution.

That being said—once she grabbed a plate of food—she sat in the furthest possible seat from them. Just in case.

There was already a bite of food in her mouth when Night brought up the problem of the tower (though, what exactly that problem was, she didn't quite understand). She swallowed and hesitantly searched for the words to ask what it was he meant exactly without seeming too oblivious. "Do you... need help with something...?" Already, they had a decent amount of furniture more free access to food that Dia had ever seen in her life. Beyond that, she assumed that only left the problem of private purchases—something that she had been planning on doing alone (when she got to it at all, that was).

 

[Chronically Caustic Cat]

7.13 needed to eat more, Yora decided.

"Are you sure? You could eat for fun," she wheedled, only to be thwarted by Night and his stupidly sensible priorities. The nerve.

"I've got plans for the second and third floors, so dibs. I propose we put a landing pad on the roof and a hangar somewhere up there. Also a greenhouse. We can save a lot of money if I just make our drugs instead of working out deals with pharmaceutical companies. I also need another floor for our in-house ER/clinic/medlab," Yora anxiously interjected after Whippoorwill. She knew the tower had more floors than they probably knew what to do with, but she had plans and she really needed a fully-stocked medbay if she was going to be moving her operations to the tower. The second and third floors were admittedly for selfish reasons and she glanced around almost guiltily, trying to gauge everyone else's reactions as though she thought they would sense this and judge her harshly for it.

...were those eggs on her plate? Whatever. She could just feed them to Seven.

Turning to Whippoorwill while pushing her plate Seven's way, Yora inquired whether there were any facilities she might like built for training or storage or hobbies. She got the sense that Whippoorwill and 7.13 were unused to thinking of longterm facilities or having access to resources one typically requires in the crime-fighting business. She privately hoped that having a stable and fairly secure place to keep gear and rest would help them. It was becoming increasingly obvious they needed therapy, but getting them to the point where they would accept that would probably take a lot of time so, in the meantime, supportive teammates, reliable access to food and medicine, and a warm place to sleep would have to do.

...I wonder if we could buy an ambulance?

 

[Technicolor Cat]

Venna slowly calmed as the topic turned away from her, and to the tower they had left behind after her brief bout of poisoning. Her hackles slowly fell until her posture was about as close to a parade rest as someone with her spine could get. Yora tossed a comment about how she should eat out before her attention too turned to the conversation about the tower. She supposed it was a topic worth thinking about, but she didn’t really have much of a stance on it. She didn’t trust it’s nature, the people who had given it to them, nor the people she shared it with, the latter not yet at least.

Whippoorwill seemed to draw a similar blank to her. Yora on the other hand clearly had a lot of plans and intentions. Venna glanced at the clinic around them, remembering what she had seen of it outside. Yora presumably intended to continue the work she had done here in the tower. Venna had no intentions to get involved in a doctor’s work, but she saw no reason to interfere. She still didn’t trust the doctor, but it wasn’t personal, and she no longer automatically disliked her.

As to her own thoughts, she had a few on the subject. There were a lot of problems, and a lot of aspects she didn’t trust, but ultimately she was a soldier and she knew what would be good for her to have as basic utility. She spoke up, quiet as ever, but for once with her tail calm too, “Training rooms, weapons and bodies. Emergency monitoring area. Armory. Meeting and debriefing rooms. Since we are going to be operating as a public body we should likely also have a media monitoring room. From a purely strategic military standpoint I would say a command or comm room would be a good idea, but I have little interest in such myself.

 

[ScatheAriiasqDrayceon]

Seven, voice still heavy from waking up, spoke. "I agree with 7.13. Training rooms, media rooms, possibly personal offices, as we are now in a spotlight-heavy position." Their wings stretched and spread, taking up a good portion of Yora's wall in an attempt to relieve the soreness from their muscles.

"The training rooms would have to be fire and electricity retardant at the least, depending on the specification of your abilites—" they gestured broadly to the spectrum of people in front of them—"maybe more."

Jet's feathers ruffled. "Okay... what's not used—if any—by the modifications I'll set aside for a communal bank."

With a flick of their tail, Seven added "I, personally suggest stashing weapons, rations, or what have you somewhere outside of the tower, just in case we can't go back to it, at any point." Paranoid, but from experience.

 

[BittyBobcat]

Dia relaxed a bit as they began to trade ideas. Well... relaxed was a relative term. She fell into the familiar rhythm of planning and optimization (even if it was one that had become slightly off-beat due to the open format of the conversation), which meant slipping into other familiar mannerisms as well. Sitting a bit straighter (at attention), keeping careful track of who was leading the conversation when, and noting which points were most firmly pushed (which ones not to push back against). In the absence of permissions to speak and other formalities, she waited patiently for the others to speak before giving her thoughts in one long, flat-toned statement—hastily spoken to save time.

"If we're getting a landing pad on the roof, it may be best to put at least minimal clinics in multiple locations. One near the ground floor and one on an upper level so—regardless of the entrance taken—patients are able to be stabilized without need to wait for the elevator or get moved through the stairwell." She sent a stiff, acknowledging nod toward Yora. "Of course, the floor-wide main clinic you wanted could account for one of those. And the secondary could be made as an addition to the hanger so as to cut costs—just a well-stocked med-tent would probably do the trick."

"I won't need any extra accommodations in the training room. A few distance targets would be helpful if they'll be of use to everyone else as well, but I can make do with training dummies or anything else we supply it with." Her mind skipped over the talk of media monitoring and personal offices. Throughout her life, any thoughts Dia had toward the public eye were for the purpose of keeping out of it, and so she had no expertise in such a field—her opinions there held no weight, and therefore had no reason to be voiced.

"I can set up my own emergency stash outside the tower, but it might be a good idea to make similar ones throughout the building as well. Assuming our living situation is going to become public, then it's feasible that we could get cut off from the armory—or any other room—if security were to be compromised."

 

[Chronically Caustic Cat]

"Do we know if we're responsible for utility bills? I don't remember that being in the contract. I know I can get ahold of the medical equipment we'll need for a sizeable discount, but we'll need a comprehensive list of all the gear and equipment everyone else needs so we can determine approximate costs. As for emergency stashes, Seven and Whippoorwill make a fair point. We should probably make several contingency plans for as many situations as we can reasonably expect to be prepared for. On that note, can we buy an RPG? And an anti-aircraft turret? I've always wanted one of those," Yora turned pleading eyes towards Jet for her last two questions without seriously meaning it. She didn't think they could afford it right now. Set-up costs were always more steep than maintenance costs.

"We also might want to hire a lawyer. No matter what we do, we're going to be sued by someone. We can't rely on our new employers to help us in court when they might find it easier to cut their losses and cut us," Yora mused, remembering the daily list of lawsuits Jet's hospital fended off. "And since you're going to be in the public eye more, you all might want to consider wardrobe updates. I'm a doctor. All I have to wear are scrubs or a lab coat and no one will think twice about my qualifications. But if you're on camera and look like you got your clothes from the trash, people won't be as willing to trust you. Honestly they might think you're there to murder them or, worse, they'll sue you for endangerment through incompetence just because you don't look the part" she said, looking over Whippoorwill, 7.13, and Seven critically.

Sighing, she slumped in her chair, preemptively exhausted from all the work the tower would need and already dreading the PR nightmare she could just see coming. She was in the states illegally, three of their frontliners were probably minors, and Jet had a full-time job.

Blegh

 

[Technicolor Cat]

Venna listened to her apparent new coworkers mostly neutrally. She winced slightly when Yora made a point to discuss bills. She was prepared for a great many things, but the economics of the outside world was not one of them. She mostly hunted for herself and scavenged her own clothes because she had no money, but if she was honest it was also a little bit because she didn’t want to deal with it all. The fact that as she was thinking about this Yora followed up by saying they should update their wardrobes managed to provoke a softly displeased hiss. She covered it swiftly afterwards with the ease of long experience, her expression going neutral and only the tick tock of her tail marking any lingering discomfort.

Rather than deal with that, she turned her focus back to the practical matters at hand. She spoke rather flatly, having decided to put off emotions till later, “No armory. We don’t have a big enough team to need one, and as you said there, it would be a target we would have to be concerned about and guard. I can’t think of a purpose a singular armory would serve. We all have some inherent ability anyway. Personally I can additionally use most any weapon to varying degrees of proficiency, but I do not necessarily need them. The spread out caches might still be a good idea, but relatedly we probably need to get a feel for each-others proficiencies in this and other areas if we hope to work as a coherent team.”

She paused for a moment as if considering whether to speak further, before nodding to Seven and beginning to speak, “I can’t speak to your choices in this regard, but personally I will only be loosely basing in this tower. It is at best a workplace in which we are employees in my opinion. I very likely won’t be there often.” Lastly she turned to the point raised by Yora that she had been avoiding, unable to contain a slight grimace as she turned to her and spoke, “Happily, I personally legally don’t exist or technically count. Technically speaking I can only be sued in the sense that a pet cat could be sued last time I checked.” She paused very briefly again, and when she spoke her voice was firm, “My costume should be fine. People already know me well enough like this, and looking like this is useful for dealing with the less strong-willed criminals anyway.” To demonstrate she let herself stretch without trying to hold to any human shape, baring her ample fangs and making obvious the ways her skeleton wasn’t really all that related to a human’s. Sure she was standing in a room with other people with similar traits, albeit perhaps not quite as skeletally odd, but she was mostly hoping to change the subject from costumes.