Jeep Wrangler

RETRO Slice of Life - 1988

Hey guys, sorry to break it to yah but with the fact I've gotten the super cold here atm and my uni schedule absolutely dogpiling up now, I might have to take a break and return to the RP at a later date, if that's okay?

NEOTOKYO: State of Disarray [Open]

@LetMeDoStuff

@labarajara

Ah, well hello there. This is a bit of a dead thread unfortunately lmao.

Last post was 2 years ago, but I thank for the ping lol

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH

~ Valkyria Chronicles - Changing of the Guard [Pt. 2 - Open] ~

---

<sub>December 30th - Frontline Trench

Conversing with: @TGM & @CFProxy</sub>

---

There was something ever-so soothing about the native tongue of another. Her words had often flowed like the rivers once untouched by war, but it held that mental preparation seen in those that had tasted its wrath before. She was an experienced soldier, no doubt. And as a Corporal of four years, he could have only imagined the true grit she'd pieced together to speak of such blissful indulgences. Behave normally, she uttered, as if he could have sensed any sort of normalcy. At the least, it brought upon the great question to his focus. What was his normalcy? Had it been the innocence of a child long passed, but to which way could he act similarly when all that came before the war, all that was normal to begin with, had been reduced to ashes and dust. Olivia was dead. His parents were dead. His comfort-sense of normality, of neutrality, in which he'd sit there and know that at least he had those basic needs in life covered, was a mere memory. And it wasn't that he didn't want to do what she suggested, for it was the most sound advice she could've given to a stranger she most likely didn't care for. Well, not in a way he understood at least. The intimacy of war had bludgeoned his comprehension of all that surrounded him, and so he - at first - nodded to her advice.

Truth be told, he was uncertain when she stepped closer to him. The words she said were true to all optimists, or those who still had the heart to soldier on - as soldiers did - but that soldiery was all but deafening for his faint hearing. It encompassed that entire cloak that he warmed himself up in. She then, still close to him, drew a comb and made best for her appearance. Before, she had stood out to him amongst the soldiers simply for the fact that she at least had an eye for natural prettiness, but the moment she tidied herself up, it sent an odd signal to himself. He saw great confidence in that she, a soldier of great experience, had smoothened her hair moments before she was to crawl back in the mud. Maybe that's what a good leader was. He looked in on himself, internally, and remembered just how disgustingly horrendous he must've looked, with all but the daily shower he was allowed in Trebin and the scraggly facial hair that the officers had given up on suppressing. And in his group, he looked around and felt ever the more different, even as a Darcsen, for that sheer factor of being the inconsequential leader.

Her final words were bittersweet to him. She said something so dearly and kind that he hadn't believed it came from actual understanding or reason, but as a method to refocus his mind back on the prize - if not to grant him that tiniest bit of confidence. And it had worked, somewhat, and he loved hearing such a thing. It was undeserved, at least in his mind, but he still relished in the beauty of its curled tongues, the soft velvety feel to each pronunciation and the brilliant temper that came with it. But it had to be artificial, he reminded himself in bitter gloom, for that was how the world treated the faint and forgotten.

"Well - I...I definitely see you've mastered it. Initially, he staggered on his words just a tiny bit, but it was enough to notice he needed a correction. He hadn't moved away from her, nor the smile she made or the glisten of her eyes, but he had drifted back into the mindset of that soldier people wanted him to be, not the man he was supposed to become. "If I become normal now, I won't have any normalcy to strive toward. I - well, I thank you, though, for what you've said."

But as he finished, he was granted the sight of the angel of the frontline - the well-recognised queen of ice and hearts; Senja had joined his side for the first time in what felt like forever. She brought a hand forward, and clasped it with another, as she unleashed a heavenly smile unparalleled by all of her God's other servants. Jean hadn't seen much of her since her arrival back at Amone. She had been an addition to all of the regiment, and the company, but especially to those like Franz. She was the beacon that sat on the peninsular, guiding ships and rafts to the ports they were destined to sail to. She had a beam fixated on her brow that had played with the hearts of a thousand sailors, all for the sake of rest and recovery. She was the rehabilitation to the soldiers of the night, those that were the rats in the mud and those that were the knights on the prairie pastures. In essence, she was their heaven.

So much time had been dedicated to Franz, the lost soul who needed love, that Jean's central position in the platoon had once again faded, for the betterment of the company, of course. His centre-line figure simply drew attention from the superiors onto soldiers who were already burdened by the weights of survival and sanity. And when Franz had secured the love of his life, so he had thought (and heard in the inn) then Senja had worked wonders. Not to fix the poor fellow, but to place him where he could do it himself. And truly Jean had been jealous of Franz. The man was one of the few he could have truly related toward. He was down, brow-beaten and had a hard time accepting the flowers that many planted for him, but he was that little extra step closer to heaven, whilst Jean still fought in the fields of hell. But that was just him pitying himself, and that was entirely the problem many had suspected of the man in the first place.

Those like Senja were to be yearned for. They were the craving of any cursed man, of any silenced soul that had felt nothing but the grimacing reality of war press against their throats. And he couldn't have been happier, right then and there, to have seen her approach him, and to have held out her hands in prayer. What she said was hard to believe.

"The...beloved?" His mind stumbled at who she could've meant. Those who dearly love are family, and Jean needn't have reminded himself of where they were. It could have also been the lovers that held on to his hearts, of which none he knew existed. And finally, it could've been the dear friends, but in truth he couldn't have felt more distant to this fellow soldiers as he had ever been before. She meant it, it seemed, and that placed him in a somewhat uncomfortable spot of confusion. "I'd...love a blessing, please. If you can settle it in before we-...well, do our job, as we should."

Many had bigged up Senja to be something of an angel. And it could've been cruel to have placed her on a pedestal. A thousand more hearts would ache if she were hurt, let alone murdered in cold blood by the Imperials she resisted through duty. A million eyes would weep for her desecration. And Jean, in that moment, felt that maybe she could've been all of that. What saddened him the most was the fact that after all these times, and in all those days of yearning something so pitiful as affection, he received it moments before he went out to die again, instead of where the soldiers scattered to enjoy their brief freedoms.

~ Valkyria Chronicles - Changing of the Guard [Pt. 2 - Open] ~

---

<sub>December 30th - Frontline Trench

Conversing with: @TGM</sub>

---

From the corner of his eye, he made clear the intrigue of one Corporal Romijnsen. The split-second takeaway that he'd forged in his mind was that he had zero clue to her question. She stared at him with some sort of intrigue, yet he felt as it were simply the routine check of a far more experienced and developed soldier among incredibly unscathed soldiers by comparison. Sure, the 15th Atlantic Rifles had been dragged through shitter-after-shitter: an important, concentrated geographic assault and a pivotal offensive that sliced the scalpel blade over the frontline, casting the shadow of the Federation across the liberation of Essen. She, by word of mouth, had been here for as much as the start. She too was a Valois-born soldier, but if she were a warrior, a professional conscript at worst, then he was nothing more than a young man playing dress-up in her company. At first, it discomforted him to have someone of equal rank when they'd taking hit after hit for so long, as he assumed she had, but at the same time it gave him a sense of comfort. She at least knew what she was doing, and the pitiful misfortune of getting killed that far into the war made it clear to him she'd likely had no intention of dropping dead so early. If only he could've said the same for himself a month prior.

Her question was perplexing. It was so very simple, yet that little, poetic, nonsensical tangent that came about in his head did so at a lion's pace. To ask such a question that was so simple had always unpacked a thousand questions: was one okay, or was one in dire need for comfort yet again? Had the loss of his obsessive source for warmth in a time of winter's blight done so much damage that he had rejected all prospect of granting himself security, all in the name of appeasing his subordinates as a soldier over a coward? He thought of his answer with a deep and overly pondered weight, before he slipped out his answer.

"Uh, yeah - sure, I'm good." He lied as he breathed. Worse still, he could almost imagine she knew he was lying. But that did little to dissuade him from talking. He simply recited the confidence as everyone had asked him to, because that was all he had been good for in the last two or three months - reciting the wills of others. Though, he did walk closer to her as he lowered his voice, lest those like Lucia would hear. "They say it's routine but - god, I don't know. Something might be on the way, and I heard a Sergeant - uh - a Sergeant McDuffery mention there was something coming."

Her remark, though done in the most passive of ways, of his paleness did sharpen his self-disappointment. He looked around and fiddled with his rifle for a bit, before doing one last check of the barbed wire pack of one of his engaged associates. It was so bitterly in-jest that he couldn't help but smile, genuinely for once, if but a little curl of his cracked, dried-up lips. The frost on his scruffy appearance danced as he, for once before a horrific event, gave a prod and pride in wit.

"I'm pale? Compared to all the well-groomed imbéciles we all are?" He hadn't quite noticed how much of a difference such a remark had made to his mood. Were he to pay attention to his health in proper, he would've thanked her then and there with the most a man could give in gratitude. "You could say: Je me sens comme le gel. I feel like frost."

RETRO Slice of Life - 1988

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Someone took the immediate call of response towards Sid's arrival. It was always that little bit extra of flattery whenever he was served prior to seating, simply for the fact he still hadn't gotten used to it. It was never often that he went out to eat at something that wasn't anything he'd cook in his small and compact apartment. At first glance of the Sushi bar, he wanted to snap a photo that'd likely been taken a million times by other eager advertisement firms, but the rapid arrival of a staff member shooed down that idea. So, he wandered in, with his own in-the-moment dedicated staff member pretending like he was the main event; just another customer, he thought to himself, and soon enough he was seated in a relatively close-to-the-till chair on his own.

On his mind sat the eagerness of his handler's last conversation. Langley had been that sort of pain-in-the-ass, relief-in-the-cheeks sort of fella that'd done a lot for him where others hadn't. At any other point in time, a dressing down from a newspaper boss would be another day at the office, or where a reporter might've bumped past him were he the photographer who'd killed their parents, yet that time around he felt a strange mix of urgency and embarrassment. Nothing he'd delivered for two months had any worth, apart from the odd mid-page article about peculiar portions of the midnight hours. His income rate had somewhat plummeted as such, and the occasional odd-job freelancer gig had been more likely to scathe past the rent margin he'd done so little to meet. Everything had spiralled out into a cycle of disappointing clients, disappointing handlers, disappointing himself and thus disappointing the balance of stress he had been tight-roping for the last year.

And that had found himself there, taking an order of food he shouldn't have been taking for the sake of money saving. But he was an adult, and the best part about that had always been disregarding any sort of self-control over minor, menial things in the pursuit of a good meal. Sidney twirled a pen between his fingers as they came by once again to ask what he wanted. He never properly checked the restaurant's name for it, but it had shrimp in it, and that alone was enough to catch his attention. And so, with the flick of his wrist, and with the usual planting of his freelance business card into the worker's pocket, with a wink that told them: tell someone higher up the chain if they need me, he sat and waited for the meal that had given him lots to desire for. Perhaps the day could've snowballed into something wonderful, or dangerous, or exciting and beyond all things he could've experienced; perhaps there was someone waiting to greet him, or to come into his life for either positive or negative effect, but for now, he simply waited for that order with a rumbling stomach and a mind focused on what his next lead was for the best photo he'd give that month.

RETRO Slice of Life - 1988

Very sorry to see you leave, @Xandrya.

I have been absent the past five days. It has been the first week+ of getting the kids back to school and then Dad's Taxi after school has been hectic. hopefully, I have fallen into a workable schedule that will permit me to continue this hobby. I work as a substitute teacher and thus far they have not used me. I am working Thursday. I don't see that as being a problem still if I can at least post on the weekends.

I would like to do a collaboration with GiGi @Almalthia & Sid Sharpe @LetMeDoStuff. Our characters are all employed by Delta Times. I'm sure we can produce something there.

@Landain

I'm coolio with this. I'm having a really busy week because I'm in the build-up to returning to university, but I'll try and get another post out this week. Already put myself somewhere on the map though

RETRO Slice of Life - 1988

---

Drip. Drip. Drip. He glared at the partitioned waterfall spit from the mouth of an iron tap just off to the room's corner. Each interval of droplets casted a shallow ambience to the main melody of paper shifting, document opening and the dissonance of busied bodies in adjacent corridors and rooms. Before him sat the paintbrush moustache-wearing, tie-too-tight looking, tobacco scented, blue-button shirt dressed concentration of his department handler: Paul Langley. He was everything that Sidney had imagined of the Delta Times back in 1985; there was an eerie stain of disdain wherever his eyes glanced, lest what he glared at was an opportunity to move from a crummy office to a less-than-stellar upgrade. Sure, Sidney had known him for a while. Paul was originally a department manager for schmucks like himself in the present day, so he'd say, but something between the firing and rehiring of the Scot had pushed him down a step or three on the Delta Times ladder. Sanctions of misconduct, misdemeanour or simply the in-and-out culture of some backdoor job roles within the company could have been any of the three explanations, but with people like Paul Langley, there was never a good reason to ask.

In the handler's hands were the recent additions Sidney had made to his collection: three images, two of the same potential story. Neither were particularly wild or encapsulating, but he knew that from the moment he took them. Wherever he'd gone, for at least two months, there hadn't been anything other than a scrap on the neighbour's lawn. The types of things he'd once been present for had gone off in the wind to be caught in another photographer's net. But the thought was interrupted by the loud and gruff sigh of Paul Langley - note, it seemed fitting to always refer to him in full name - and when the white-still photos were slammed against the table it really unsettled the nerves of Sidney.

"Jesus, Sharpe, what is this crap? I mean, two drunks fighting over a wristwatch outside isn't news, it's the alley behind my daughter's daycare on a Tuesday afternoon. And this," he wafted his hand over the second story, "I don't even know what this is. Like I see the image, I see it clear as day, Sharpe, but I can't give you a headline on the spot. Not that it's my job, but you know?"

"I don't know, Sir, but it's been a bit of a hard time for being in the right place at the right time." Wasn't the best of excuses, but the strain of bad luck had infected his ability to impress any sort of handler. Those like him, who were more or less on lease for their services instead of a secured and renowned photographer for the large-city paper, were in a position to be dropped on a dime. Walking the line for as long as he had wouldn't suffice. Of course, he knew that better than anyone else, for he'd been fired for that very reason the couple years back.

"Well, that ain't gonna cut it, Sharpe. You're good at what you do but you need to do better at finding things that matter. Venture into the political scene, or sports, or maybe go back and do all that big-crime snapshotting you did months back."

"There hasn't been much big-crime going around though."

"Come on, you're letting me down, Sharpe. Anything - at this rate - to get the light from Clarendon for us." There was a long pause for a while whilst Paul dragged on the largest stress-puff of a cigarette he'd seen since. It wasn't just Sidney who'd put him in that position. His own turn of bad luck had brought in at least five other part-timers who'd done so little as to provide him with good material for the reporters. Due to the scheduled timetable complications, most of them were unable to tag along with a reporter in the field, but those like Sid had the chance to do so if they'd commit at full capacity. Sell the soul to the lad with the notepad and questions, he thought. "I like you, Sharpe, but not enough to kiss your ass. You're my - our - best shot of getting out of the basement of the Times and back onto real stories. Find yourself a reporter who'll take you on or grab the writers a story worthwhile, even if small in scale, and then I can pay you."

With that, he left the office in a sort of drudged state. There was little energy to be had after a dressing down from the same Paul Langley that had once invited him to his family's neighbourhood barbeque back in '85. The man had aged a thousand years from the stress of cramped corner spaces and unremarkable photos. He'd mastered the art of making the photographers feel bad for not giving him what he wanted, and by crumb and crust had one Sidney Sharpe felt all the guilt in the world. More so toward himself, though. He was a bit of a downer when it came to missing out on the needed paycheck. And what better way, he thought, to wallow and think about his next move than to go spend his dimes on a hot meal.

He escaped the confinement of the Delta Times and took off on the long walk. He needed it, though the cramped streets and neatly organised buildings still made it hard to properly jump into his muse. The walk at least built up that appetite lost by the smell of Langley's office, but not so much that he'd spend thousands on the meal he'd been searching for: Sushi. Always that one place that everyone always talked about, but never the place he'd ever gone in and ordered anything from. Fuck it, he thought as he found the aimlessness of his trudge led to the arrival at Shogun Sushi. And without so much as a care of what he was doing, just out of the sheer need to clear the bile and stress from his battered mind, he walked on inside expecting just a normal in-and-out meal.

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