filleauloup | Abandoned Warehouse District, Saturday Evening

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Abandoned Warehouse District, Saturday Evening

There were easier ways to go about acquiring a pet, really, but for one thing, Éponine would feel much better about not hearing the litter of stray kittens mewling pitifully every night outside her window. For another, she'd been raised to understand that if you could get something without having to pay for it, you avoided having to pay for it, and she still saw nothing wrong with that approach to life. She also found the idea of rescuing small animals from the streets vaguely appealing in some way that she couldn't articulate.

Having rounded up a crate lined with a towel, a can of tuna, and a flashlight, and then spent most of the afternoon prowling around her section of the warehouse district to determine where the cat and her kittens were, she was ready to put her plan into motion.

It really did seem like an excessive amount of work and planning to do to acquire a pet, but she suspected it might be worth it. Besides, as far as laying extensive plans to accomplish something went, this wasn't even close to being her most elaborate.

[OOC: For the cat-rescuing accomplice!]

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"I don't remember; I picked it up somewhere," Éponine said carelessly, emerging from the bathroom with a bowl of water. "The boxes and crates were here, so I said, well, I may as well use them. It's stupid to leave them lying about otherwise."

Two of the kittens came over to sniff experimentally at the water when she set the bowl down.

"D'you know which one you'd take?"

"The black one, I think," Kenzi said, pointing to the ball of fluff currently sniffing at a random industrial carpet square, and kneading it with its teeny claws. It did actually make a tiny motor-boat sound when Kenzi petted it. "You? Which one do you like?"

She immediately reached down to scoop up the kitten with patchy fur and white paws, who mewed in protest and wriggled in her hands.

"You don't much look like the others, do you? In that case, we ought to stick together, you and me," Éponine told the kitten solemnly.

"What are you going to name her? Him. Her?" Kenzi paused, and the decided, "We'll let the vet make that verdict, maybe. They don't look sick, at least. Just teeny. And that one is cool, all the different colors."

"I don't know yet. It hasn't come to me," admitted Éponine. She patted the kitten on the head thoughtfully. "You don't mind terribly, do you, not knowing your name yet?"

The kitten just blinked at her, which she decided to take to mean no, it didn't mind.

Kenzi grinned, patting the soot-colored kitten. (Shadow? Nah. Gothika? Ooo.) "Cool if I hang out for a bit, before heading back?"

"I don't mind at all," Éponine said promptly. "I've never really had company over before, you know, and you won't mind leftovers for dinner, will you?"

It was possible she was excited about this.

"Nah, sounds good," Kenzi said, scritching behind the mama cat's ears. She didn't stop complaining, but she allowed it. "People aren't allowed upstairs in the dorms, or I'd let you see my place. But since I'll be moving out in two months, you're not gonna be missing much."

Good thing Éponine was reasonably certain Kenzi wouldn't wonder or much care where she'd gotten the microwave, but she set the kitten down and darted back toward the office area to start reheating takeout containers of chow mein and broccoli beef.

The kitten, after a moment, followed along after her.

"But you can tell me what it's like. How big are the rooms? Is it awfully noisy all the time with so many people living there?"

"Hmmmm. The dorm rooms are--" She looked around, trying to decide, and said, "About a fourth or a fifth the size of this room? Not big, really. Big enough for two beds and two desks, and two closets, and that's about it. But they're pretty nice, and they let you decorate them however you want. The girls and boys bathrooms are down the hall. Sometimes it can get noisy--" Said the person who used to blast her music just to annoy the girl across the hall. "Usually it's quiet enough to sleep when you need to, though."

She petted Gothika and grinned as it attacked her boot laces. "Sixth floor isn't dorm rooms, it's stuff like the party room, and some private isolation rooms for the kids who need that." She sniffed at the boxes, smiling. "Yay, Chinese."

"It sounds nicer than anything I've ever had," Éponine admitted. She carried the takeout boxes to the table, along with some plastic utensils (she tended to "collect" them from the various eating establishments in town). "Before monsieur l'inspecteur came along and carted us all off to prison it was my sister and me and our parents in one room about the size of your dorm rooms. It was in the attic, and drafty as hell besides. I didn't go home at all, if I could help it."

Kenzi grabbed a plastic fork when she got up, and sat down to join her. "Sounds sucky. I used to crash on friends' couches, when I didn't want to go home. Or with my Aunt Ludmilla. She had a trailer-- uh, like a camper? Like the size of that cargo container down the street," Kenzi explained. "Hooot in the summer. Not too bad in winter."

She tilted her head as she dug into the rice. "To be honest, yeah, the dorm's the nicest place I've been in ages. It was the whole reason I stayed when I first got shipped here. There's a common room on each floor with a kitchen, and I'd scavenge food there all the time. People didn't care."

"I'd have done the same," Éponine agreed. "Good lord, it beats sneaking into some stable for the night, or a ditch reeking of god only knows what. I'd stay up all night in wintertime and just keep walking to stay warm. If I really had to, there were a few --"

She shut her mouth mid-sentence so rapidly it was almost as if she'd literally bitten the words off.

"My brother," she said after a moment, forcing a lighter tone, "had his digs inside Napoleon's old elephant in the Place de la Bastille, the little devil."

Kenzi snorted through a mouthful of broccoli beef, snickering at that mental image. And knowing better than to follow up too hard on the sentence before it. "Your brother sounds like a trip. Kinda makes me wish I'd had any sibs." She stabbed into her food a little, thinking. "I used to get a tent set up in the subways." Her voice was quieter. "There were some creeps down there. But. Some guys my age, nice. Into each other, not girls, so... They made sure nobody snuck up on me."

"Montparnasse was good for that, sometimes," Éponine said slowly. "If it suited him, but it wasn't something to be relied on."

She smiled mirthlessly. "Another reason to stay up all night. I still do, sometimes, because I'm used to it, only walking about the island all night is nice."

"It is, isn't it?" Kenzi looked kind of weirded out for a second. "It's so quiet. I used to think it was just no traffic, you know, aside from rickshaws, but... No gangs. Nobody causing scenes." She shook her head. "I mean, when the island isn't giving you hell and throwing monsters or crap at you, it's a pretty nice place. Maybe that's why future-me stayed."

Éponine burst out into a half-bewildered laugh. "Yes, yes, exactly all of that. God, why d'you think I still can't quite believe this place is real?"

Kenzi snickered, and pulled her feet back as Gothika the Black attacked her toes. "So it's not just microwaves and electricity and running water?" But no, she got it. "I seriously thought this place was gonna be a prison camp. Why would they send me somewhere nice?"

Éponine nodded her agreement as she dealt with getting a forkful of chow mein into her mouth. "You'd think," she said through the mouthful of food, "that it was like some kind of reward, and what kind of sense would that make? There had to be some mistake, hadn't there?"

"Too late for them to take it back now!" Kenzi snickered and picked out a pepper to eat with her fingers. "Or like, consolation prize, maybe? 'We know you were living on the streets, here's an awesome place where if you live on the streets, it's still pretty cool?' Heh."

If she ever found out that the Light Court had set her up here, she'd have to send them a fruit basket. After she yelled at them about manipulating her.

"What made it super-weird for me was meeting Bo again about ten minutes after I got off the bus here."

And now Éponine looked envious, even if she tried to hide it right away.

"So you knew each other before?"

"For like, an hour, a month before." Kenzi put down her fork for a second to gesture as she talked. "So, one night, I'm going through bars, picking up wallets, keeping moving, right? And this skeevy guy buys me a drink. I'm all 'sure, right, I'll go somewhere with you just for one lousy drink', but I suck it down, and then I leave, right?" She grimaced, pointing towards the door. "The dude follows me into the elevator-- have you seen those yet?" she interrupted herself. "Little tiny rooms, um, like dumbwaiters? Go up and down tall buildings?"

"No, but I think I've the idea. Do go on." Éponine twirled her own fork to punctuate the request, the slight twist of her lips suggesting that she had an idea where this was going.

Some things didn't change with the centuries, at all.

Not even a little. Unfortunately. Although this story was one of the happier exceptions....

"So, he gets in with me, I'm all, whatever, and then I start getting woozy. Can barely see straight. Bleeeah. And it's not helping that he's all up on me, breathing on my face, wanting a kiss, and I'm thinking, 'oh shit, he doped the drink! I'm so screwed!' Just about literally." Kenzi paused to take a drink of water. "The elevator's still going down, and the doors open on a lower floor, and there's Bo. She'd been the bartender in the lounge I was in, right? And she saw what happened, and she was worried. So she ran down like three flights to stop the elevator car to check on me."

Éponine's expression had gone from suspicious to sympathizing to slightly incredulous as she followed along. "Worried about a complete stranger?" Everyone in the modern world was clearly out of their mind, she decided. Clearly. But her curiosity overrode her disbelief, and she burst out, "Well, then, what happened after that?"

Abandoned Warehouse District, Saturday Evening

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