OPEN LOG

[nitrodamus]

Who: Sollux and ANYONE.
Where: Around downtown Los Angeles, whoops.
When: Twilight on January 28th.
What: Karkat makes the mistake of leaving Sollux alone in the TB dormitories, which results in Sollux fuguing out and having a wander and upsetting a lot of people.
Warnings: Mental trauma and probably references to body horror.

It's so loud in the empty dorms that it wakes Sollux up. Karkat isn't there, and he doesn't know how long it's been since he left. He doesn't even think about it. He doesn't care - reality outside of the present is only a faint glimmer in the back of his mind.

The voices in his head are loud and clear. The voices of the dead and the dying. They were more frightening before, when their deaths had been imminent and unavoidable. Now they just linger like pedestrians waiting to catch their ride out of town.

The light looks dimmer than before, outside. Night. He decides he wants to leave.

Sollux leaves the Trailblazer dormitories without thinking to put shoes on, and wanders without direction. His appearance and identity as a troll are unconcealed, with him wearing nothing but an oversized t-shirt and jeans. The metal plugs and machinery built into the back of his skull is fully visible, and for once, he isn't thinking about it. As is the metal collar around his neck. He's decided that he's going to go somewhere, and do something, and he doesn't know what.

His ears flick at sounds that remind something in his ancestral subconscious of prey. Humans who see him on the street react negatively, and when he shows minimal or defensive response, they become afraid. Alternians are never especially welcome, but with one acting like this, they have no reason to believe he's actually a citizen. Especially when the only language he uses are threateningly insectoid hisses and clicks that resonate unfamiliarly from his throat.

Comments

[bombsheltered]

Day shifts are the absolute worst, and Milly would like to locate the person responsible for having come up with them and sue their pants off. She didn't get a part time job to work during the day; daytime is designated superhero time. Daylight is when all the stuff happens! But more often than not, lately, she's had to work through peak hero action time,

Her bag is slung over her shoulder as she walks home, a colorful, lightweight scarf wound draped around her neck. She's mostly fixated on her phone as she cuts down the sidewalk toward her apartment, checking her favorite pegasus fan forum and going through her likes on Tumblr. She isn't really paying attention to what's going on around her, so when she hears an eerie, insectoid clicking that only gets creepily louder, she gives a start and whirls around to see where it's even coming from, and -- whoa.

Milly's seen Alternians before -- she doesn't live under a rock, okay -- but usually they look at least a little more...well, civilized. She's taken aback by his manner for a long moment, not quite frightened but definitely on guard, until she realizes, looking at him in the dim light of a nearby street lamp, he doesn't really look threatening, he just looks...lost.

Still, she maintains a defensive posture, just in case she's wrong. One hand held up in a gesture for hey, don't attack, she tries talking to him. Can he even understand her? Man, she barely paid attention to French class in high school, she doesn't know any alien languages.

"Whoa! Hey, um...are you okay?"

[justkiding]

He's out doing his usual nightly hero activities, and by hero activities he of course means threatening people for information and occasionally actually stopping crime to improve his image. The commotion in the streets attracts him to the scene at first. Startled frightened citizens usually mean some kind of villainous activity. He thinks for a moment, he might get lucky, and finally find who he's looking for.

When he sees a troll is the cause, it's not quite what he expected, but it's definitely not an unwelcome surprise. He tries to shadow him for a bit, hanging back in the crowd as Sollux mindlessly ambles, but it's sort of hard to look inconspicuous when you're 14 and in a poorly made super hero costume.

[liberaition]

Kit is doing what she's usually doing when she's out of the house - snooping on other people's internet activity. This time she's perched across the alley from the back entrance of a small hotel well known for its high profile clientele, elbows deep in its wifi network. The pickings tonight are slim, mostly just a few senators sexting their mistresses. Nothing interesting.

What is interesting is the troll shuffling along looking half dazed. Even more interesting is the hardware it's sporting. Kit stares for a long minute, and finally hops off the low wall she's been sitting on and approaches. She's also barefoot.

"Nice evening for a stroll, hmm?"

[nomorepantiesplz]

After work, Apollo had pretty much been forced to go grocery shopping. He'd already been eating nothing but sandwiches and cheetos for two days, which was getting old far faster than it had while he was still in law school. So, he opted to take the metro to the store instead of his bike, and then went go through the whole slightly-frustrating process of picking up necessities at the same time that seemingly everyone else in the whole city was trying to finish their errands, too.

It was when Apollo was walking back to the station, a couple of grocery bags in each hand, when he saw... well, at first he thought it was a punk kid with an interesting hat, until the figure got close enough for him to see that the grey skin wasn't a trick of the light. Was that a troll? Granted, living in LA meant coming across all sorts of people, but it wasn't like Apollo got to see aliens very often. He had friends that would jump at the opportunity to ask a troll about space travel, but he was personally a lot less inclined to approach a stranger with annoying questions like that.

Still, that troll was on his side of the sidewalk, and getting closer. Everyone else was giving him a wide berth, but Apollo wasn't - a polite one, sure, but he didn't see the point in resorting to full-out avoidance. All that metal on the guy might've looked alarming, but for all he knew, it was some sort of weird fashion statement. Apollo can't quite stop staring, though, with an expression of open curiosity.

[chapterfiveversenine]

Wikipedia defines "people watching" as "the act of observing people and their interactions, usually without their knowledge." Numerous CONDOR operatives have suggested that Legion attempt to people-watch in order to further understand human interaction. A pair of loose pants accompanied by boots and a hoodie with the hood pulled up generally serve to mask Legion's identity to anyone who isn't paying attention, and at peak transit times, no one's really paying as much attention to Legion as they are to everyone else.

They are sitting on a bench when they see him. The consensus recognizes Sollux Captor from CONDOR files, and he appears delirious. Seven cycles are spent deliberating, and ultimately they decide to engage him in conversation. Translation updates from the collective's last check-in, the result of cyberwarfare attacks during the last skirmish with the Empire, enable them to communicate fairly well in Alternian, although their synthesized voice is more stilted than normal.

"Sollux - Captor," they say, getting up from the bench as he passes. "What - is - your - status?"

[monkeyseemonkeysmash]

Sun Wukong doesn't have much to do with the time allotted to staying on the mortal realm. Granted, there is no longer the soul (and body) crushing boredom of being trapped under a mountain, but freedom no longer tastes as wonderful as it used to be. The Monkey King now knows how freedom can be boring. At least, the simulacrum of freedom he is afforded here in the busy city, which extends to staying in one place and one place wander. How can a place be both too noisy and too quiet? The flashing lights, tall buildings and noisy vehicles still startle him, but as he watches he notices the same old stories playing out with different people in different roles.

"No wonder heaven stopped getting so involved," Sun Wukong mutters to himself as he skirts around the tops of the brightly lit buildings and mall complexes. "There's only so much good you can do before it becomes a hellish chore."

He notices how the people (who look like ants from the height) are continuously shying away from a single figure, like a wave parting when it meets a cliff. Intrigued, Wukong descends from his cloud and takes on his general human disguise. Granted, a zookeeper janitor is not a very inconspicuous guise, but the Monkey King has better things to do than styling different human faces for different occasions. And anyways, he kind of enjoys being an old man. It surprises people when he comes out of the disguise, and it comforts him to know that there are other relics of the past.

Speaking of relics, but not the past, the individual causing the great parting of people, is a gray demon-like creature approximately the size of a human. Sun Wukong doesn't know whether to be angry or glad.

"You there!" he cries in English, pointing at the demon with his gnarled old man hand. "Who do you claim to be?" The implicit question, are you friend or foe, hangs like a spider's web in the air. And, not far behind, is the overwhelming desire to meet someone like him, suffering from nostalgia for a bygone time.

[usedhammerarm]

Even in the relative safety of the night, Amanda knows better than to go around undisguised whenever she needs to make a trip anywhere. She's on foot, wrapped in a long black coat with leather gloves that cover her hands and a hat tall enough to hide her horns. Her face is covered in flesh-tone makeup and she's wearing dark glasses to hide her strangely-colored eyes; for all intents and purposes, she's probably passing pretty well.

From around a corner, she hears what would sound to most people like a hiss or a click or something inhuman, but she absolutely recognizes it for what it is. She plays the role of a frightened human as she looks around the corner—keeping herself away from the "horrible alien menace" and trying to plaster fear on what parts of her face are visible. It's easy enough for her to make out his blood color and, just for a moment, she finds herself quashing the urge to let him run free because he's a yellowblood and they deserve what happens to them.

But that's not how life on Earth works. He's the only other troll she's seen since she arrived here, and he's not higher up than her, so he can't exactly call her in. He's as much of a fugitive as she is. Unless he's being used as a trap. But she's willing to take that risk. From the shadows, she hisses out "mustardblood!" in Alternian, hopefully loud enough for him to hear. Some habits die hard.