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13: Spam: Man got to live what he know.
[Open spam]
[Omar is a roamer. As long as he's not forced to stay in his cabin -- in his cell, comfortable as it may be -- he spends very little time there. He's just as likely to sleep in an empty cabin, or even once or twice in the Enclosure. He keeps bizarre hours, and he keeps them largely to himself.
None of this is new. This is how he's been since he got here the first time. Since his last death toll, though, he's become even more erratic in his efforts to stay unpredictable, and the recent spate of unwarranted brutality has him feeling especially restless. He can be chanced upon at all kinds of odd times and places: at the library early in the morning, in the showers and the laundry room around noon, eating in the dining hall in the late afternoon. In the evening, smoking up on the deck with so many of his fellow passengers, because it's not actually that he's antisocial -- just very, very careful.
Careful enough that he takes data, and so some of the newer passengers may or may not be surprised to glimpse him out of the corner of their eyes every now and again. Maybe even writing something down.]
[Spam for Cold and Dark]
[But there's a predictability even in unpredictability, and he does from time to time spend the night in his cabin, if only to keep up the illusion that he does so much more often. It might take a more careful observer a while to figure out when he's likely to return, but the time comes around eventually.
It's late in the evening, but he's been up for the last 36 hours, and he's tired -- and therefore both baffled and a little annoyed to hear a knock on the door right when he's about to lay his head down.]
Man, who is it?
[Edit: Voice to Ricki, post-Tiffany spam]
You know what? I remember a time this place didn't feel like a cross between a day care and a circus.
[Edit: Spam for Luna, post-pairings announcement]
[Omar's been playing the warden shuffle for a while now. At best, it's been ineffective -- the closest thing he's gotten to a decent temporary warden, in Horatio, got ripped away from him halfway through the month. At worst, it's been disastrous. So he's not inclined to pay much mind to the announcement, not anymore. He goes about his day. Let Luna Lovegood come to him, if she likes.]
[Omar is a roamer. As long as he's not forced to stay in his cabin -- in his cell, comfortable as it may be -- he spends very little time there. He's just as likely to sleep in an empty cabin, or even once or twice in the Enclosure. He keeps bizarre hours, and he keeps them largely to himself.
None of this is new. This is how he's been since he got here the first time. Since his last death toll, though, he's become even more erratic in his efforts to stay unpredictable, and the recent spate of unwarranted brutality has him feeling especially restless. He can be chanced upon at all kinds of odd times and places: at the library early in the morning, in the showers and the laundry room around noon, eating in the dining hall in the late afternoon. In the evening, smoking up on the deck with so many of his fellow passengers, because it's not actually that he's antisocial -- just very, very careful.
Careful enough that he takes data, and so some of the newer passengers may or may not be surprised to glimpse him out of the corner of their eyes every now and again. Maybe even writing something down.]
[Spam for Cold and Dark]
[But there's a predictability even in unpredictability, and he does from time to time spend the night in his cabin, if only to keep up the illusion that he does so much more often. It might take a more careful observer a while to figure out when he's likely to return, but the time comes around eventually.
It's late in the evening, but he's been up for the last 36 hours, and he's tired -- and therefore both baffled and a little annoyed to hear a knock on the door right when he's about to lay his head down.]
Man, who is it?
[Edit: Voice to Ricki, post-Tiffany spam]
You know what? I remember a time this place didn't feel like a cross between a day care and a circus.
[Edit: Spam for Luna, post-pairings announcement]
[Omar's been playing the warden shuffle for a while now. At best, it's been ineffective -- the closest thing he's gotten to a decent temporary warden, in Horatio, got ripped away from him halfway through the month. At worst, it's been disastrous. So he's not inclined to pay much mind to the announcement, not anymore. He goes about his day. Let Luna Lovegood come to him, if she likes.]
spam
That's cold, yo. I once--
[But no, he's not yet ready for the story of Bird and Brandon. What he would say if he were is that he'd thought he'd been pretty hard with that, smirking at Bird from the stand and watching him get put away for life, but this is hardness on a whole new level. He shakes his head.]
That's cold.
What happened to Leamus?
spam
[Ricki is looking at his hands now, two fingertips tapping a little against the edge of the ashtray. None of this is Ricki's story. It was nearly ten years ago, his name isn't a footnote anywhere near here. He has actually told Omar almost nothing, and yet a great deal, at the same time.]
To answer your question, I am an inmate because there are whole weeks at a time where I can't remember why anything that happened in that was wrong. But then, part of trusting your life to someone like Peter Guillam is remembering that if he deems it necessary, he's allowed to spend it. Part of taking orders from him and not asking any questions is knowing that this is the kind of plan I am obligingly making myself a part of.
I am routinely a very good boy. I have gotten to a point in my life where I am a more effective tool if I do not pause to ask questions. I think there's something a little sick about that, knowing what the Circus is capable of, and letting men like these use my deliberate ignorance as another kind of knife.
[He stretches his feet out, and crosses them at the ankle. Reaches for the pack of cigarettes; his has burnt down while they've been talking.]
But that's where we are, isn't it?
[That's what Ricki is, he means.]
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Some of it, Omar even wonders if he already knew a little bit already, if he had somehow picked it up beneath the skin. The surface version of Ricki Tarr isn't someone he'd normally have all that much to say to, but he can't deny that he's felt a pull to him. Some of that is the inevitable Barge mixing-pot-slash-pressure-cooker doing its work, but some of it...
Well, Ricki is a good boy, and Omar has always liked good boys. Ricki had wanted to put his loyalty in someone, it seems to him, and Omar has always been good at inspiring loyalty. Even now, here, him saying all of this tugs at something in Omar. It makes him want to steal from Peter Guillam, a little bit.
He bites it back and draws deep on his own cigarette, looking down at the ash as it falls into the cup.]
Y'all play some real twisted games out on your side of the pond, don't you?
spam
[He promises, trying to decide whether to light up another cigarette.]
I'm a reasonably hardened man, but some of that whole game is completely, completely fucked.
[Technical term, that.]
spam
Y'all got yourselves stoned, man. I told you -- that ain't how Omar play it.
[He glances back up at him, raising a brow.]
Never saw the point of all them dirty words, neither. Especially not in a man with such a... versatile vocabulary.
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I like to paint with every colour in the vocabulary box, and sometimes the situation just begs for a fuck.
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Oh, do it, now.
[He purses his lips and shakes his head, tsking softly.]
Such language, Mr. Tarr.
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[He decides no, on the cigarette, and sinks back against the headboard, looking ever so faintly self-satisfied. It's saved from being smug by the genuinely goodhearted air about him. He knows he almost made Omar laugh.]
If I can get my hands on a typewriter, maybe I'll go for it. There's nothing else to do around here, in between the bits of spates of gore and murder.
spam
Why not? My old warden had me working the library and running book club back in the day.
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[He just. This is important. It sounds hysterical.]
Good grief. What did you read? Who came? Were there fights? I need to know everything.
spam
Don't think you'd know any of the membership -- they all gone now. First book still be there in the library, though...
[With everything that's passed between them tonight, said and unsaid, can he really send Ricki off after this particular book?
...Yes. Yes, he can.]
Something I picked out from a few years in my future, name of Fifty Shades of Grey. Y'all should check it out sometime. Let me know what you think.
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I'll look it up. I'm in there all the time, anyways.
[Oh.]
You should absolutely reinstate this tradition. Please?
spam
[Or to troll her. Mostly that.]
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[He's chewing on his fingernail, while he imagines- this is the face Ricki probably gets right before the most gleefully diabolical foreign operations.]
It's practically an emergency morale situation. And imagine everyone's faces if you announce you're organizing it?
[The phrase 'trolling' has not been invented in Ricki's day and age. However;]
We can make all the wardens squirm reading Wanda June.
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[And that, obviously, is what is important about this.]
If I make Eggsy come, and we pick first, we can have them reading- what, three months of seventies incarceration literature? A Clockwork Orange. Ken Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest. [Absolutely taking for granted that his young friend will be bullied into this.] I've been flying through this library and one generalization I will make is that my generation's authors feel a lot more traumatized than yours.
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Re: spam
Point conceded. The seventies published almost exclusively white and drug addicted paranoiacs lashing out against the American Dream. It's one of the things I am glad is changing.
spam
[He does still go to the library, and he has been getting a lot of reading done in there. It's just been of a largely singular nature -- he's been devouring the kind of literary history they never thought to give anyone in public school in the 80's, not even in Baltimore.
...which runs him up against an odd thought, and he cocks his head, squinting sidelong at Ricki.]
What year was it before you came up here, again?
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[He admits though he's deliberately shifty about that. That's a silly thing to hold on to.]
It sounds like a very different future.
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Year I was born. Guess I picked up where you left off, in a way.
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[That does strike him as strange. He pegs them at around the same age, does some quick mental math.]
What's the future like?
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Same in a lot of ways. Technology gets better. So does TV. People still people, though.
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[He wants to know. Even if they don't have a book club.]
If I want to know.
[Getting past his drug addicted white cynicists.]
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Why don't we start with the one, a'ight?
[Because Ricki may just never ask him for a book recommendation again after that.]
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