TDM - OCTOBER 2020

[robbies]

TEST DRIVE MEME - OCTOBER 2020

Everyone's entitled to one good scare.
CW: Violence, death, mouth trauma, vomiting, needles, razors

---

“Help me. Please, help me…”

A child’s voice, calling out for aid. There’s no rhyme or reason for when it comes to you. It’s so quiet, a whisper in the deepest, darkest corners of your mind. Were it not for the sharp, stabbing pain it pulls out of you, you could ignore it. You could even pretend it’s just your imagination.

It all happens so quickly and powerfully. Left in the dust, your brain struggles to process it all. Blacking out is the least it can do, but it’s also all it can do, and it does so before you even have a chance to fully register just how young the voice is, and how deeply, heartbreakingly lost it sounds.

When you finally awaken with your bare feet tangled in soft sheets, a layer of fuzzy fleece or slinky silk clinging to your body like another layer of skin, the sunlight pouring in from the window next to your bed momentarily blinding you, and the cries of happy children playing baseball outside of it carrying faintly, it all becomes very clear—

Something is horribly wrong.

---

OCTOBER 1st.

It becomes very clear very quickly that this isn’t a simple kidnapping. If you’re twenty years old or older, the bedroom you wake up in is very clearly a couple’s bedroom — with separate beds like a modest, modern couple of course! A similarly lost and confused stranger is in the other. They are your counterpart, for everything in this room has a matching counterpart — the nightstand and lamp each of you have beside your beds, the framed pictures on the wall, even your pajamas. If you’re under twenty years old, your room is smaller but more personalized, filled with comic books, model kits, stray baseball cards littered around the floor. Dolls, fashion magazines of people dressed from a bygone era, stacks of vinyl records neatly arranged next to a record player. And then there are the pictures. They’re everywhere in the house — in a frame on your nightstand, hung on the walls, stuck in the photo albums and scrapbooks lying on your desk or tucked away in drawers. Here you are on your wedding day, exchanging vows with your partner. Here’s you sitting in a fishing boat with one of the younger members of your house. Here’s a picture of you at ten years old getting ready for the first day of school. All of the photographs are aged, sepia, even yellowed and dusty in frames hung for a long, long time. By the time you make it down to the living room, you’ll notice that the television is on; someone must have forgotten to turn it off before they went to bed. On it, a cartoon pack of cigarettes and accompanying cigarette dancers prance around a black and white pumpkin patch, joined by dancing skeletons, ghosts and witches as a cheerful little earworm blares: ”Thirty days til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween, thirty days til Halloween—“

---

GETTING TO KNOW THE NEIGHBORS.

As you get acclimated, you gradually begin to learn more about this strange new world you’ve found yourself in. You’re in a neighborhood on the east side of a town called Santa Rosita located… somewhere in California (wherever or whatever that might be). The year is 1961. If it wasn’t clear enough, your neighbors are more than willing to humor you if you ask. Even if you accost them with questions and demands. Sure, you and your family are a little kooky, and you have a very overactive imagination, but the key to any good joke is playing along! And how could something like “I’m from the future, from another world” be anything but a joke? A. AUNT MYRNA'S PARTY CHEESE SALAD. Over the course of the week, your neighbors will come by unannounced, each with a new homecooked meal to welcome you to their cozy little side of town. Meatloaf, potato salad, lamb chops. Gelatin molds — lots of gelatin molds. Someone even comes by to drop off a gelatinous yellow lump of pineapple, green peppers, celery and yellow cheese swimming in a soupy mixture of sour and whipped cream. “It’s my aunt Myrna’s recipe!” they gush once they drop the casserole tin into your hands, proceeding to rattle off every ingredient. Well, at least you won’t be starving anytime soon. When you bring it back in to your kitchen - and its cheery wallpaper and its floral patterned Pyrex dishware, you and your new...family(?) all stare at the cheese salad, the gelatin, the curiously frosted meatloaf spread. A smorgasbord courtesy of the insistent generosity! Who will take the first bite?

B. DON'T BE A SQUARE!

You can only avoid the cheer and the neighbors for so long, even as you sit inside enjoying all the amenities of your new home. The television can only turn its volume up to five, after all! One bright and sunny Saturday, the weather crisp and clear, news broadcasts and reruns of The Ed Sullivan Show are drowned out by the music in the neighborhood. Eventually it’s too much to bear — you simply must put on your shoes and go discover the source of that infernal racket.

Why, it’s the block party! Haven’t you seen the invitation — with instructions — sitting in your mailbox, silly? Wear a badge so everyone on the block can know you’re new and welcome you to their extended family!

Well! Each neighbor was supposed to set up a table with snacks and drinks and entertainment on their front lawn. Carter Mayhew, one of your Robbie neighbors, has a whole ring toss obstacle course set up for boys to play with, and his wife is cheerfully and blandly instructing a group of girls on jump rope rhymes. Colorful streamers hang from every lamppost and mailbox, balloons and party favors galore. Like you, there are even a few newcomers to Santa Rosita that are caught just as unaware of this event — though others are being welcomed in by husbands and wives and children, caught in conversations about building decks and the upcoming Halloween festivities.

Before you can decide if returning home or joining the party is your choice, a plate with chips and dips and yes, more gelatin is shoved into your hands and a party hat snapped on to your head.

“The guest of honor has arrived! Come and meet your neighbors, neighbor!”

---

THROUGHOUT OCTOBER.

Life falls into a peaceful haze for the next several days. Dull, unassuming, tranquil. As the month drags on, the spirit of Halloween begins to manifest in Santa Rosita, from the pumpkins people start putting out on their doorsteps to the smiling faces of paper skeletons pressed against their windows. And then, towards the end of the month, something terrible happens. You hear it first through word of mouth, rippling through Santa Rosita like a wave, dark murmurs accompanied by sad sighs and downturned eyes. Soon, you start to read about it. Grim business, they say. A tragedy. How could something like this happen. People stop talking about it by the end of the week. Best just to forget about it. Every day, that cigarette commercial comes on. It’s impossible to escape it. And every day, the number of days in the song changes, counting down. ”Thirteen days till Halloween—” “Eight more days til Halloween—” “Three more days til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween…”

---

HALLOWEEN.

CW: Violence, death, mouth trauma, vomiting, needles, razors

October 31st. It sneaks up on you whether you like it or not. When dawn breaks on Halloween day, things are as serene as they’ve ever been as men do yard work, raking leaves as their wives bake fresh pie and cookies in the house, the spicy scent of cinnamon, apple and pumpkin wafting through the neighborhood on chilly October wind. There’s a smile on every child’s face as they skip off the school bus in the afternoon, running into their houses to get their costumes ready. As it begins to get dark, the residents of Santa Rosita start lighting their jack-o-lanterns. One by one, little balls of light flicker to life on every porch and doorstep, jagged smiles grinning in the dark. For the entire night, nobody blows the candle inside their pumpkins out. It’s a tradition, a very old one, and traditions are just another way of saying rules. And Halloween in Santa Rosita, as it turns out, lives and dies by the rules.

A. ALWAYS CHECK YOUR CANDY.

Halloween isn’t just for the kids, although they certainly make up the bulk of who you’ll see out and about on the streets. Walking through Santa Rosita, your neighbors are as generous with handing out treats as they are with handing out gelatin molds and pot roasts, and they don’t discriminate. Adults are received just as warmly as children; the worst one can expect is a quirked eyebrow if they show up to a house without a costume.

Apples, packs of gum, homemade cookies. Chocolate bars, nickels, popcorn balls. Your neighbors hand out all sorts of treats, most of them homemade. The Robbies are no exception, and it’s their treats that seem a bit more high quality than most, some of the candy they hand out being obviously expensive, brand names. The good stuff. They drop each treat into your bag with those same pleasant, mild expressions and too-tight smiles you’ve grown used to in your short time here.

Eventually, as everyone winds up doing at some point in the night, you decide to start digging into your treat bag to sample some of your well-earned goods — maybe in the comfort of your home, maybe outside on the streets. And that’s when the fun begins.

Maybe you bite into metal, the razor sharp end of a blade embedded into the apple or candy bar you’ve picked out burying itself in your gums, or splitting your tongue. Maybe it’s a needle, impaling itself straight through the roof of your mouth or a cheek. Or maybe it’s nothing that obvious. Maybe the realization that something is wrong comes moments after you’ve devoured that chocolate bar or cookie, the bitter aftertaste of rat poison hitting the back of your throat along with bile and the rest of the contents of your stomach as they rise up and out of your mouth.

Or maybe you’ll bite into plain, sweet chocolate or fresh fruit. That’s also part of the surprise. You really don’t know what you’ll get until you start eating.

B. ALWAYS RESPECT THE DEAD.

At ten o’clock, all the television sets in the neighborhood turn on, blaring to life right in the middle of that omnipresent cigarette commercial. The volume begins to rise of its own accord as your television starts to pick up interference, bursts of static squealing amidst the rising, screaming chorus of ”HAPPY HAPPY HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN!”

Breaking through the static, garbled and tinny, a child’s voice cries out.

“Can’t— I can’t hold them— back— Pumpkin— don’t blow the— out—”

And just as quickly as it cut in, the voice cuts back out. Commercial jingle notwithstanding, you’re alone once more. But not for long.

The doorbell rings. You can see them outside from your window: costumed children. Their masks and clothes are grimy and ragged from the muddy, slimy water they’ve been decomposing in for over a week. When they come to your door, squelching wetly as they shamble up the porch steps, they ring the bell or knock, as all polite children do. If you don’t let them in, they’ll find their own way, always by force. And once they find you, all they can gurgle in their reedy, waterlogged voices is, ”Trick or treat.”

From there, they attack.

With superhuman strength and speed, they tear and rip at anything they can get their hands on — clothing, skin, muscle, face, eyes. Being short and small, despite their strength, they're at a distinct disadvantage. They can even be thrown off, with some effort. But they don’t stay down for long, and attempting to hurt or mortally wound them only stalls them for a few moments, if that. How can you kill something that’s already dead?

Some in the neighborhood are willing to try and find out.

The only houses they seem to ignore completely are the ones with lit jack-o-lanterns still outside. They’ll loiter outside these houses, staring straight ahead at your door or window like they can see exactly where you are. But sooner or later, they’ll pass by and move onto the next house.

As long as the candles in carved pumpkins stay lit.

---

OOC INFO

Hello, and welcome to We're Still Here's first TDM! Here's a few things we'd like you to keep in mind:

The TDM is canon. You can treat this as the game's first real event and pick and choose what threads you would like your character to remember when they enter the game. For characters who app into the game, the events of the TDM will be treated like a dream. Upon awakening from it, characters will find that time has jumped ahead to December 1st. You may also feel free to use similar reality and/or time distortions to explain why the family members your characters have in the TDM aren't the same as the ones they may be assigned to in the game proper.

If you would like to have Halloween content in your relaxed housing prompts, please feel free! You are not beholden to follow our prompts exactly so long as the spirit is maintained.

There is no Network prompt listed, but feel free to wildcard one for your characters anyway.

Although the TDM is canon in the sense that characters are free to remember its events when they app into the game, it does not count as an official plot heavy event, meaning that characters will not receive regains from participating in it.

With regards to the dead trick-or-treaters: you may NPC them however you'd like, but keep the details we've listed in their prompt in mind. They are supernaturally fast and strong, will ignore houses as long as they have a lit pumpkin on the porch outside, and will try to enter each house the moment the candle in the pumpkin goes out. Additionally, they can't be killed, but they can be momentarily stalled by injuring them. By November 1st, 6AM, they will disappear the moment the sun comes out.

---

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Comments

ray gillette | archer

[handycapable]

🍸 october 1st

[ It's not the room isn't nice. Ray's own bedroom, of course, is nicer (he's spent years getting it exactly how he wants it), but the wrongness of it all is so obvious from the jump that he sits up in bed with a yelp. The person -- the woman -- in the bed next to him inspires another yelp, although Ray covers his mouth that time once he's aware he's not alone in the room. ]

What in the--?!

[ Then he's out of bed, wearing an absurdly plain set of flannel PJs, cautiously exploring the room, but the pictures in the bedroom don't put him at ease any. Weirdness is enough of a fixture of his daily life that he isn't panicking, but-- ]

Er... [ He'll look over at his "wife" awkwardly. ] Sorry, have we met?

[ Downstairs the first thing he'll be doing is checking the house for liquor or cigarettes, and that infernal commercial jingle will only make him crave his nicotine fix all the more. Is this a dream or a psychotic break? Time will tell. ]

Dukes, I thought they discontinued these. [ Well, better than nothing. He lights up, wandering over to the TV. ] My therapist is gonna have a damn field day when she hears about this.

NOTE | Hit him up in the bedroom or living room! Open to any number of potential "family" threads here even if obviously the grouping will likely be different when the game actually opens, but since who knows where the chips will fall on that one might as well have fun with it now!

🍸 don't be a square!

[ A block party in Goddamn Pleasantville is not Ray's ideal choice of how to spend his afternoon, but it beats chain smoking and/or binge-drinking when clearly seeking further answers about his situation keeps leading him to deadend after deadend so far.

So, fine. He'll socialize. Make conversation, ask questions, do his best to seem as inconspicuous as necessary and not to get hate-crimed. Food is shoved into his hands, a party hat on his head, and Ray allows it with a flinch and extremely pained polite smile. ]

Uh, thanks?

[ The fuck does he do with this disgusting gelatin? Actually, he's kind of curious how it tastes, though... but plenty of time for that later. Ray sets the plate of food down awkwardly on the first place he can -- Southern hospitality is all that keeps him from just tossing it into the hedge -- and finds one of the people on the block that looks about as confused as he's feeling. ]

The hell do they mean, guest of honor?

🍸 always check your candy

[ Advertising works, that much is true: Ray's been an on-and-off smoker for years, depending on his willpower at any given time to stick to quitting, but since he woke up in this town and had that damn cigarette jingle in his head, he's been going through about half a pack a day. Probably would be a full pack, too, if not for the expense.

Enough time has passed that Ray's about as calm about this whole mess as he can be -- and oh, sure, he has his moments, but it's easy enough to recover from those by dissociating neatly into this twisted suburban farce -- so late October usually finds him sitting at the breakfast table or on the porch with a newspaper and a smoke or a bourbon when he isn't busy with whatever else, and then before even he knows it, Halloween's upon them.

He has an enormous sweet tooth, but Ray isn't the sort of grown ass man to go out trick-or-treating; he'll just swipe some candy from his "children's" loot, and then holler when inevitably the blade cuts his mouth or he has to run out into the yard to vomit horribly. ]

Who... the hell... would do this...?!

[ He miserably clutches the candy bucket, refusing to surrender it as he lays there dramatically in the yard. Anyone that tries to take it from him will get a slap to their hand, regardless of his condition. ]

No! No! Back off!

💣 w i l d c a r d

[ Choose your own adventure! And/or PM / plurk me @ reggiemantle if you'd like to figure something out. ]

always check your candy

[handosaurus]

[He manages to swipe at the foot that had been poking more at his arm than the precious candy bucket, and Lana steps back with a sigh to the clearly-absent-of-a-God heavens.

Of all the people to pull into nightmare on bland street, they picked this team.]

Are you ODing? Sob twice for yes.

[handycapable]

[ Oh, thank God it's Lana. It takes her speaking for him to notice, what with all the pain and blood and retching, but Ray has survived worse than a mouth of full of rat poisoned candy, so being contorted on the ground in a crumpled heap is just another Tuesday for him. ]

I wish I was ODing. Feels like I just swallowed a stick a' dynamite.

[ He turns away from her so he can puke again, into the candy bucket. ]

Ugh. Lana, tell me the truth. Are we in Hell?

[handosaurus]

I'd say yes? But Malory's not here, and it's not Hell without the devil.

[She crouched down to try and help him, but ends up just kind of awkwardly hovering there and offering an uncomfortable pat to his back.]

Did you take drinks from strangers?

[handycapable]

[ Ray groans, reaching up shakily after he recovers a little more to accept whatever help up to his feet she'll give him. ]

It'd be just like that old prune to outlive us all. Mark my words. [ But he shakes his head, hand still hovering by his mouth. ] Think some of that candy didn't agree with me so good. Serves me right for eating chocolate.

block party / finally touches this....delighted to see a ray!!!

[m1895]

[ The expression of misgiving is the first truly relatable thing Vasiliy's encountered since setting foot in this bourgeois dystopia, an outward echo of his own thoughts (albeit in English, not Russian, and an incredibly strong accent at that). Not that he's actually had the dubious privilege of being addressed as such—this kind of event seems to be where the good conformist citizens of Santa Rosita draw the line in relation to fraternizing with the enemy—though it does raise red flags to hear it in reference to another, more normal person. Who talks like that? ]

Hell if I know.

[ Vasiliy punctuates the remark with a slow sip from the weak canned beer he snatched off one of the refreshment tables, deliberately withholding a grimace at the flavor. It tastes like this place looks, but at least it's alcohol. It'll be another two or three before he feels anything, so he might as well start making headway; this isn't a gathering he'd like to be sober for.

Two things are immediately obvious to him about the man, or three, if his Southernness counts:

One, he's clearly gay, in that specific "modern" American brand of open homosexuality—something in his voice, in the put-together outfit he's assembled from the garish ingredients he was given to work with, in the general energy of the remark. It's laughably different from what Vasiliy had grown used to by the time he joined the NKVD, so unabashedly feminine, though he supposes, what with this guy being from Mississippi or Alabama or something, the climate they came up in was similar enough.

And two, he's a smoker, judging by the faint smell of nicotine on him, and given that these presumably aren't the clothes he showed up in, that means he likely found some cigarettes somewhere, which is more than Vasiliy's been able to do. ]

Have a cigarette?

cr I didn't know I needed 👀

[handycapable]

[ The man who approaches is a breath of fresh air amongst the crowd of vacantly smiling neighbors, all of them of them offering one perplexing answer (or plate of food) after another until Ray can only force a painful smile in response.

Better, then, to latch onto whatever conversation he can get with someone else who doesn't "belong"-- the reaction, the manner of speech, gives this man away as at least that much, because the alternative is so, so very unsettling to be surrounded by.

Ray nods, pulling a pack of Lucky Strikes from his vest pocket and shaking one out to offer. ]

Not normally my brand, but they ain't half bad, actually. [ He pulls out one for himself, too, as well as his lighter. ] I take it you're also "new to the neighborhood?"

[ Spoken wryly, of course, because so far Ray doesn't know what other vocabulary to apply, but whatever's going on at least he isn't alone in it. ]

two dysfunctional kings walk into a bar(beque)

[m1895]

Not mine either. [ They're not even filterless, though he'd probably be thrown into prison for so much as breathing the name Belomorkanal in a place like this, so he'll take what he can get. It's been too long since he smoked last, anyway, and the first drag—which he takes before addressing the second part of what the American's just said—washes over him like the first breath one takes after staying underwater too long. ] Yes. I woke up here in ugly house with wife and child I did not have prior. There is so much plaid, it is like L.L. Bean's catalog.

[ And it's all garish, an ostentatious, undeniably American display of having that makes him feel sick every time he so much as thinks about it. Everything brand-new, a house full of shining chrome and enamel and glossy covers of Redbook and Vogue urging the woman of the house to buy: ease the pain of your humiliation with this serving platter! Shove yourself into this maidenform bra! Stick your head in this deluxe candy-pink General Electric stove! He'd throw the whole kitchen suite out on the curb in an instant just to shake the guilt of allowing himself to be surrounded by such pointless frivolity, were it not for the fact that he presently lacks the money to replace it with something more practical.

Vasiliy pauses before returning the gifted cigarette to his mouth, raises it slightly. ] Thank you.

[handycapable]

[ They do the job, anyway, even though there's a number of brands Ray would vastly prefer that probably still exist here-- he just grabbed what he saw around the house, just grateful they were there.

He takes his own drag slowly, luxuriously almost, breathing in the smoke the way some people would breathe in mountain air. It's comforting, and he doubts he's going to find many other things around here as quickly calming as a cigarette any time soon. ]

Plaid, pastels, and don't even get me started on all the damn florals. My wife's wardrobe looks like what you get when you cross a romance novel with a garden party.

[ Meanwhile his own closet is quite monochrome in comparison. Sharp, but bleak. He might have stolen a scarf from her side just to give his outfit a splash of color, flung around his shoulders like how well-to-do preppies like to tie their sweaters.

He nods (no problem, happy to do it), enjoying Vasiliy's whole demeanor already-- the accent, the manners, really his whole vibe, it makes Ray feel like they're partners in some old spy movie, but in a good way. Plus he's not half-bad to look at, either.

Still wry, Ray gestures around them with a sharp, flamboyant sweep of his arm. ]

Behold, the American dream.

[m1895]

I am ready to wake up.

[ Truth be told, he'd had enough after about a week, before his B2 visa had even expired, and that was in 2017. This is infinitely worse. Vasiliy takes his cigarette out of his mouth for a moment, watching the wisp of smoke that gradually climbs from its glowing end, then the men in chinos standing around the grill, the kids eating hot dogs slathered with mustard and ketchup. None of them seem aware of the luxury they're surrounded in. He turns his head back in Ray's direction before speaking. ]

None of them are happy. They tell themselves yes, they are happy, look at these refrigerator they have, the dresses, the nice yard, but it is just band-aid over suburban misery. They have no rights.

[ Normally, he wouldn't be so hasty in sharing opinions with a stranger, especially divisive ones, but they're on relatively level footing here— if these people weren't so busy being afraid of the Red Menace they'd probably be pissing their pants at the sight of the lavender one, so it's not like he could tell anyone without putting himself in danger too. Besides, he seems to share a similar level of disdain for the arrangement of Barbies and Kens occupying every house on the street.

A beat, then: ]

I am Vasiliy Yegorovich. Call me Vasiliy.

[handycapable]

You an' me both. [ He takes another drag from his cigarette, shaking his head. ] As much as I'm glad to have this nightmare set in nifty-fifties California rather than deep in the Confederate Heartland.

[ Okay, they're technically not in the 50s anymore, but '61 feels a little too new to consider properly "60s."

Ray nods as Vasiliy goes on, because even if his reason for disdain are pretty different from Ray's own -- Ray, for example, isn't entirely opposed to bandaiding misery with what he can, be it food, alcohol, material goods, and so on -- he can understand the sentiment just fine. Things could be worse for them, sure, but to be a gay man and a Russian (immigrant? Maybe? Not that it's likely to make a big difference to these people either way) in this environment isn't going to be a picnic, either. Ray's not sure he'll be able to hide his gayness any easier than this man could hide his accent. ]

Maybe they're just happy cuz they think this is as good as it's gonna get. Y'know, if I didn't know any better-- well, even I grew up thinkin' this is what anyone was supposed to want.

[ Except this is downright decadent compared to whatever he could have imagined back in those days, out in Bumfuck Nowhere West Virginia. But it always looked like a nice way to live on I Love Lucy reruns. ]

Gillette. Ray Gillette. Nice to meet at least one neighbor who's not a robot.

[m1895]

[ So he's self-aware—that comes as a relief, because it means he's less likely to be on the conservative end of the American spectrum, closer to a human being. (They're all conservative in the grander scheme of things, of course, but Vasiliy's able to be realistic enough to recognize that the likelihood of encountering another Communist here of all places is next to none, so he'll take what he can get.) ]

I agree.

[ Vasiliy finishes his cigarette, then grinds out the filter tip under the rubber sole of his loafer. He can't relate to the previously-mentioned expectations, of course— until 1917, in the limited way a child is able to think about the future, he supposes he'd just assumed he'd spend his days behind the electrode of an arc welder until he died. Such had seemed their lot in life as much as it was a horse's to be ridden. ] Jesus. These people don't know about Vietnam War yet. Or Kennedy.

[ It's a strange feeling, to be a visitor from the future this time, at least in a manner of speaking—while the technology is still quite a novelty to him, at least this time he knows things they don't, instead of being stuck playing a game of 75 year catch-up. Not like they'd listen even if he was one of them, though; the arrogance underlying their pseudo-utopian bliss wouldn't allow for the mere possibility of a disruption to their systems of power. ]

[handycapable]

[ It's definitely a complicated thing to grapple with, growing up and even sometimes now-- how much easier it probably would be to just live your life knowing that you'd graduate, get a job, get married, have kids, and accept the direction that steers the rest of your life toward, so Ray can relate to that particular social pressure of the era, given that it never really went away everywhere.

Not surprising that it might be different in Russia, though, but it's hard for him to imagine what the alternative would look like. ]

Gonna be hard not to let that one slip when surrounded by all the housewives who probably can't stop gigglin' about their handsome new President... unless this isn't that sorta town. Maybe he's much too Catholic for their tastes.

[ Now Ray wishes he had Google, though, to help avoid making anachronistic references to anything that happens in the "future." He's not exactly got the encyclopedic knowledge to be able to fact-check himself on everything.

He crushes his own cigarette out under foot with a bit of a sigh, but then regards Vasiliy again. ]

Say your name again? I wanna make sure I'm not gonna say it wrong.

[m1895]

[ Vasiliy's about to comment on the overwhelming WASPiness of this place when Ray's request for clarification throws him momentarily off-balance. That level of basic consideration isn't anything he's come to expect from his interactions with Americans, and while he still doesn't know that much of their geography, he knows enough to recognize that that kind of question is even more surprising coming from someone with a Southern accent like that.

It's a gesture of respect, an acknowledgement of the importance of something as fundamental as one's name, and it doesn't escape him—as someone who's gotten used to mispronunciations as a form of direct address, as someone whose world, for four years, revolved around creating the illusion of equal footing in a dank Moscow basement. ]

Vasiliy.

[ A shockingly difficult name for Americans to pronounce, apparently. ]

My family name is Ardankin. [ He doesn't feel any compulsive need to comment on the obvious: yes, it's a very Russian last name, and yes, it's a very uncommon Russian last name, but that's hardly remarkable enough to be worth conversation: it simply is. Instead, he simply returns the favor: ] And you said you are Ray Gillette.

[handycapable]

And you can just call me by either: Ray or Gillette, I'll answer to both.

[ Ray smiles, some mixture of pleased and relieved, and he nods in confirmation. This sort of consideration is, admittedly, not necessarily something Ray always goes out of his way for, but he'd like to make a good impression one of the few actually sane-seeming people he's encountered here so far-- one he could see himself speaking to again in the future. It's worth the effort. God knows being a spy gets stupid lonely, the only friends he's had in years have been literally just his coworkers.

And he doesn't want to look dumb, either, like he's subconsciously become determined to set a good example for whatever Adjective-Americans he's probably representing in Vasiliy's head so far. ]

Ardankin. [ He repeats it carefully, adequately, even if his accent blunts some of the nuance. ] Has a nice ring to it.

[ A lot of Russian names (well, not exclusively, but names from various European countries) have a sharp, vaguely romantic ring to them, in Ray's opinion; his own family name is certainly not 'Gillette,' but something close to it but significantly more redneck-sounding he still feels no regret giving up. No love lost between Ray and his heritage. ]

[m1895]

[ It's evident that he's trying, and the pattern of emphasis is right even if it doesn't sound quite natural coming from the mouth of an American. It's still closer than most people get, and the comment that accompanies the attempt isn't one he's used to hearing. ]

Thanks. My friends used to say it sounded like author's name. [ He inwardly cringes a moment after the comment leaves his mouth—it sounds arrogant, like he's trying to make himself sound important when he most definitely is not. Hell, he didn't even learn to read and write beyond maybe a primary school level until he was in his twenties.

Vasiliy breaks eye contact and shakes his head slightly, starts to reach for the space where a cigarette case should be weighing down the buttoned breast pocket of his uniform shirt before he remembers that there's nothing there but pocketless linen with a repeat motif of a jumping fish. ]

Obviously I am not author. My handwriting, terrible. The things I write, worse.

[ Still further than his father ever got, or his father's father, or any of his ilk prior to the Revolution. He's proud of how far he's come, at least as much as it's appropriate to allow himself to be. ]

Don't be a square

[cuttingremark]

[Loki raises an eyebrow at the man who's approached him.]

Apparently it's been happening to all the new arrivals. [Tapping his own 'new arrival' button] There see to be quite a few of us.

[handycapable]

[ Ray wrinkles his nose a bit, nodding though, because that does seem to be the case. Weirdly that makes him feel slightly more at ease, a little less on the spot as it had felt before among all these overly friendly, slightly robotic neighbors. ]

Least they're not playin' favorites, I guess. Not so sure I'd want that much extra attention around here so soon.

[cuttingremark]

Yes, I can't imagine what it would be to be the center of all this. [He gestures at the party.]

I take you just woke up here as well?

[handycapable]

Sure did. Look, I even have the ball n' chain to prove it.

[ He holds up his hand, finger wiggling back in forth slightly to show off his wedding ring. ]

I mean what is this, Candid Camera?!

[cuttingremark]

[Loki looks down at the new ring on his own finger. So that's what that meant.]

Candied Camera? [He knows what a camera is, but why would you want to make it candy?]

[handycapable]

Oh, um...

[ Damn, Ray's never met anyone who didn't know Candid Camera before in his life-- kids, probably, but not any adults, at least. Although, not that he regularly discusses Candid Camera, either, so... ]

Candid Camera. Y'know, the reality show with all them hidden cameras? Kinda self-explanatory, I guess.

[cuttingremark]

[He still looks a little confused.]

I take this is an Earth thing?

[handycapable]

[ That makes two of them. ]

As opposed to... the alternative?

[cuttingremark]

[Loki raises an eyebrow.]

Any of the other worlds in the galaxy? Asgard? Xandar? Hala?