maskormenacelogs | OCTOBER CATCH-ALL

[When it comes down to it, Heropa's a pretty tight-knit community. That means one thing: job fairs. It's only a small, community affair, something that some local food vendors are taking advantage of as well as the local businesses, but as the youngest and least experienced among them, Jaime's been sent out to man the stand for Heropa's local garage, both soliciting for more help and encouraging others to give the garage some more business.

It's not a terrible way to spend the day, all things considered. He gets to sit on his ass all day and hand out brochures and business cards and people watch in the sunshine. Once there's a lull in what couldn't have been described as a crowd in the first place, he looks beside him and spots a stand for the local Animal Shelter, complete with pictures of adorable animals.

He props his elbows up on the stand, looking curiously at it, and asks Carl,] Did you guys bring any animals too, or just pictures of them?

Edited 2015-10-05 08:07 (UTC)

[ Carl is the least experienced in the shelter as well, but usually they sent people out who are good at convincing others to try to adopt animals in these kind of events. Carl is sent in their stead because 1) he's an imPort and thus attract more attention 2) he recently did an interview with imPort Beat that is apparently very popular among his demographic and 3) he has a nice face.

(No, really, those are the list of reasons his boss - a forty-something woman who looks like she would wear kitten sweaters regularly - gave him. Carl is less impressed with that logic, because most of it is completely shallow and superficial in his opinion. While's better now, he's still not very good at crowds. )

Carl looks up when someone asked him a question, a boy who looks around his age or older, he points at his table. ]

Got a dog and a litter of kittens cooling off under the table. How is it that it is October and it is still hot in this place?

That's just how it is in Florida. If we're lucky, we might graduate to long sleeves by Christmas.

[Luckily, Jaime's acclimatized to the weather here, and more than that, it didn't take him too long to get used to it. The weather's different than it is in El Paso, but it gets equally as hot; it's all the people from the North or the East Coast that tend to walk around complaining about the heat.]

Mind if I say hi to them a little later? I can't actually adopt any animals, but... well, it's not like we're getting much foot traffic anyway.

I grew up in Georgia and it still stayed cool when it supposed too.

[ Carl shrugs. ]

Sure thing. The kittens and the dog love to be handled, and I only have two hands.

[ Carl lean back in his seat, so far back that the chair's front legs start to lift off the ground. ] So you work in a garage?

[Jaime nods, privately hoping to handle the dog. Cats are okay, he supposes, but after dealing with Gunther, Koromaru and Mako so frequently, he's a heck of a lot more comfortable with dogs than he is with cats. All he knows is that the twins - or just one of them? - sneezes kittens, with disastrous, cat-lady results.]

Yeah, I've been working here for a while. They want more business and more help, so they sent me out to see if I could get anyone interested. Apparently me being an imPort was supposed to be the big selling point here, but... [He frowns, looking dubious.] I don't think anyone can tell? I mean, it's not like I'm green, or whatever. People walk past me the same as they'd walk past anyone else.

It's the same excuse they gave me at the shelter. But unless I show off my imPort tattoo or, I dunno, grow horns in the next five minutes or lose an eye, no one is going to look twice at me either. I mean, I gave that interview with imPort Beat - [ and boy does he regret it, he didn't quite realize how much of a tween magazine it was until he saw the cover. ] - but it doesn't seem to do much.

But I hang around at Xavier's most of the time, and I don't go out as much as I used to.

[ Mostly in thanks to the disastrous swear-in in August, with the gas. ]

Yeah, see, I had no way of telling whether or not you were an imPort too. Not that it would matter that much, but... you know. It's easier talking to other imPorts sometimes.

[Jaime gets along with most natives well enough, truth be told. It usually starts off with them trying to hunt down what's interesting about him, but after hearing about a boring power, and then getting nothing out of his home life besides a happy family, a part-time job and aspirations for college, they usually gave up and decided to just get to know him for him instead.

It's for the best, he thinks. He has a feeling that natives will understand them a lot better if they realize that a lot of the time, they're not so different.]

I'm Jaime, by the way. Nice to meet you! I'm afraid I must've missed that interview with imPort Beat.

[ Carl is an awkward turtle with people in comparison. He's pretty blatant and honest, but introverted in some ways, especially toward strangers. It makes talking about himself and his world very awkward. It's somehow easier to talk about it on the network, but it's doesn't give the satisfaction Carl wanted out of it, he finds. Most reactions of it tended of people becoming disturbed about it. ]

You're not missing anything, trust me. It's not TIME magazine material.

I'm Carl.

[He snorts.]

Yeah, well, it's called imPort Beat, so I kinda figured. Whatever people print about us is usually just sort of... celebrity gossip, I guess you'd call it? Even if we haven't actually done anything at all to attract people's attention.

[He leans back in his chair, which isn't putting on a very forward front for his garage, but he doesn't really care. There's so little foot traffic here anyway.]

Did you wind up at the imPort con that happened a little while ago?

No? I don't think so. ~~[ Mostly because the mun really doesn't remember ]~~

Are you talking about the registration parties? Although those aren't cons, more like . . . fancy parties with paperwork. I hadn't really gotten into anything big these past two months though.

[Jaime wrinkles his nose, grimacing a little. The Swear-Ins definitely aren't events he's fond of in the least, not least of all because of how frequently they get attacked. Of course he's present for every one anyway (or, more accurately, because of that reason), but it would be nice if it weren't necessary in the first place.]

Nah, not the Swear-Ins. Those are less about people drawing fanart and stuff, and more about, well... propaganda? Anyway, there was this big convention where you got to see a bunch of people dressed up as different imPorts, and they drew pictures of us, and made dolls of us and all that stuff. It was really, really weird.

[But he totally got a couple plushies. How could he have resisted?]

I don't think I want to see plushies of me.

[ It was bad enough there are already contests of getting knock offs of Carl's hat. ]

Did you see plushies of yourself?

Nah, I'm not famous enough. I'm pretty sure most natives don't even know I exist at all.

[From the sounds of it, he's pretty darn pleased about that fact. Jaime as Jaime can still easily slip through the crowd unnoticed, and most natives who know him as an imPort also know him as woefully ordinary, from his former classmates to the ladies at the local grocery store.

They know the Blue Beetle, of course, but that's an entirely different story.]

You gave an interview, so they proooobably know enough about you to make some of that stuff about you, but most people at the con couldn't even tell I was an imPort. It was pretty funny seeing it all, though, so long as you got a sense of humour about it.

Yeah. I mean, I got fans . . . of a sort. Have you ever heard of doomsday preppers? Because apparently they like me a lot. Ask me about stuff, about home.

[ It started after Carl turned in a biographical essay of his life for an English class, back when he was still in Maurita Falls High. ]

I guess I'm not a naturally funny guy, but it was just weird to me.

Eh, that makes sense too.

[Not everyone has the same sort of gleeful reaction as Jaime does with this sort of thing, after all. It helps that he's used to it, to a degree; people dressing up as superheroes and creating merchandise based on their image is just matter of course back home. As long as his name isn't put on anything bad, Jaime's never minded too much.]

But doomsday preppers... I've heard of them, but I haven't talked to many. Are you from one of those, uh -- [worlds that have gone to shit is a little too crude] -- worlds that had something big threaten them, then?

Yeah, pretty much. End of civilization, that sort of thing.

But coming here . . . it's like a fantasy to some people. Kinda nutty. So I try to keep my distance from that.

[ He doesn't think he'll say very nice things about them while within their vicinity. ]

[He winces. Not necessarily from Carl being from the end of civilization - though that is an unhappy place to be, Jaime knows several people who have had to deal with the same fatal world - but from the idea of people idolizing a vision like that.]

I think I can understand wanting to prepare for something big, if you know something might happen, but... I think I know the kind of person you're talking about. You gotta be a little sick to want that kind of thing to happen. I'm sorry you gotta deal with them.

I tend not to, nowadays. I sort of accidentally became a weird sensation in Maurita Falls High, so it didn't take long for me to realize that I attract the weirdos of this place.

[ So there's that. Carl hears a little squeaking underneath the table and he leans down and sees a kitten reaching out and trying to grab his pants leg between the container's bars. He opened the cage and grabbed the kitten, holding it up and securing cage with one hand, while propping up a white and black kitten against his chest. ]

Gotta say, I like this job better than my old one. Selling magazines at a stand was boring.

[Jaime has to wince.] Yeah, doing the whole celebrity thing is never a good idea. Not that I'd know.

[Ah, sweet, sweet mundanity. Jaime loves it so. The kitten gets Jaime's attention, though, and he takes the opportunity to straight up abandon his own stand - sorry, bosses, he's got the attention span of a gnat if there's something else he'd rather do - and leans over to say hello to the kitten.]

Have you ever taken any of these guys home?

I'd like to, but my dad said no. We aren't used to living with animals actually kept as pets. [ He said no to a dog, he might say no to a cat. ] We live together in a dorm in Xavier's.

Wait, your Dad got ported in with you? That's great! I'm glad that you don't have to go it alone here.

[Would Jaime want his Dad here? No. Not really. But that's a different case; he knows that this place is more dangerous than the alternative, and while he can take care of it himself, he worries about his Dad. His Dad still seems to think he can take on anything, but he walks with a cane now, and he's done his time. He deserves to rest.

But for anyone like Carl, from a world where everything's at an end, this must seem like a sunny reprieve.]

You don't hear about many parents getting Ported in here with their kids.

No, he got here a few months ago. I've been here since November. But yeah . . . it's good to have family here. I've noticed I'm one of the more lucky ones.

[ Although he suspects most parents wouldn't dare to imagine about breaking in their own kid's apartment and nearly got into a shoot-out with their kid who mistaken them for a burglar. ]

So I guess that means that you had to show him the ropes, huh? [Jaime says, smiling faintly. It's difficult for some people who come from hard worlds to truly adapt to this place, but like everything else, it just takes some time and hard work.

A friendly face and a helping hand can only help with that.]

Your world, um... did he know a civilization more like this one way back when, or has civilization been over for a long time now?

Yeah, we knew what it used to be. I was only twelve when it first hit. My dad used to be a sheriff's deputy back home.

Oh -- I'm sorry, that's gotta be rough. Most people I know just got born into it.

[Being twelve at the end of the world? Jaime can't imagine it, and he has the good fortune to never have had to experience it. He doubts he ever will either; that sort of thing seems to be what happens to other people. Between people like Bart and Armin and now Carl, he ought to be counting his lucky stars.]

I guess that helped prepare him, though? With these sorts of things, it always seems like a good idea to know how to use a gun.

OCTOBER CATCH-ALL

FOR CARL

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