tushanshu | 10 → Video

[Stiles appears on the feed, after giving his console a good solid thumping. He's peering into it like he can see right through the screen, trying to fix the unfixable. There's one momentary ghosting, a doubling of his image, but then it stabilizes.]

Hah! Percussive maintenance saves the day again.

Okay, got some stuff to talk about, and I can't give three ripping farts as to who or what is listening, so suck it. I'm gonna start making, like, World War Two style propaganda posters and sticking them up all over the place. Victory Gardens and War Bonds, guys. Let's make it happen. Bonus points if we can all dress like Gene Kelly and Ginger Rogers for the duration.

One! Late Memorial Day barbecue. Bring your own grilling goods, communal shared style. Pot luck style. Low on food so let's all share style. Thanks to Darcy for coming up with the idea, seriously, that girl is super awesome smart. And appropriate theme, because Jesus Harry Christ on a bouncing kangaroo, memorials all over.

Two! Had a really interesting dream last night involving a little boy, named Rio'era. Aaaaaand I've been led to understand this is a thing? Anybody else having weird dreams about little kids popping up and giggling a bit at you? Because wow it's borderline creepy. More than borderline, if I'm one hundred percent honest.

Three! Who put the ram in the ramalama ding dong?

Important question for the ages.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Whoa, no, not that bad. Yipes, dude. If we start having Shining-level dreams, I'm gonna nope the fuck outta that so fast and never mention it again.

Nah, this is just sorta like, run of the mill giggling child. There might have been a playground, but it wasn't an abandoned Soviet-era Russian playground or anything.

Okay, no, I haven't seen anything like that. [Besides, his dreams are usually a lot more relevant to his life...but he hasn't had any of those kinds of dreams since being dragged here.] Not really part of my frame of reference.

Oh man. You're definitely not missing out. There is nothing creepier in this world than an abandoned Soviet-era anything. Pictures of Chernobyl give me the crawlies, seriously.

I don't know, I've seen some pictures. I think they look kind of cool. Creepy children are where I draw the line, though.

Yeah. Right up until you hear about what the workers there call "The Medusa." It's a hundred-ton slag of melted plutonium, about the size of a car. And the reason they call it Medusa is that if you look at it in person, you're dead.

That's some serious Godzilla shit right there. I expect him to rise up out of the forests of the Ukraine to punish us for our hubris, seriously.

...yeah, I'd rather not see that in person, if it's all the same to you. Dying of radiation poisoning is not exactly on my to-do list.

Exactly. This is why I said it gives me the crawlies.

Not sure if that's creepier than random children showing up in your dreams, though.

Different categories of creepy. One is unsettling. The other is a real life nightmare.

Yeah, but I find I'm less likely to run into abandoned Soviet nuclear slag in my day-to-day life.

[Okay, that makes Stiles laugh.]

Well, then. Obviously we're doing something wrong. Or maybe something right, I'm not too sure where we're going with this anymore.

Hundred-ton blobs of deadly plutonium: bad. Creepy children showing up in your dreams like something out of a horror movie: possibly less bad. Unless my math is wrong on this one.

No no, you're right on with that one. I'm glad we're all on the same page.

That said, I'm not exactly rushing out to go find either of those things. I'll take slightly radioactive granite and garden-variety nightmares over those things any day of the week.