Artie and Tandy

[x-artie.livejournal.com]

Backdated to October.

Artie takes Tandy to meet a Morlock following this journal thread



Tandy arrived where Artie and her agreed to meet. He had offered to take her to meet some of the nicer mutants that lived in the sewers. The blonde had never heard of mutants living in the sewers, especially in New York, but then again this was New York. Tan blocked the sun from her hand as she looked around before focusing her attention on the boy in front of her.

"Hey Artie." She put her hands into her jacket as she approached the young man with a smile. "Thanks for inviting me along.

Artie gave her a small smile and decided to stick to projected text. Small, unobtrusive text. "Hey. Don't thank me yet. And look, you can only come with if you promise to do exactly what I tell you. It's really not safe." He was selling it up a lot - things were perfectly safe here but who wanted to go rescuing someone who got lost later on?

He was dressed in an old, worn out jacket and a pair of filthy jeans and battered sneakers, a backpack over his shoulder and another one at his feet. He picked that one up and tossed it to Tandy. "Here."

"I promise to follow all and any directions." Taking her hands out of her jacket and catching the backpack. "So, how long have they lived down there? Just wondering." Putting the backpack strap comfortably over her shoulder.

"There's a flashlight in the outside pocket," Artie said and led the way down an alley and levered up the grill covering a storm water drain before pulling out a pair of heavy work gloves and handing them to Tandy. "Ceiling here's about 4 feet high. You'll have to walk bent over. If you need to touch something to catch your balance, go for the wall, not the ground. They've been down here for IDK, twenty years, give or take..."

"Haven't you heard? I am a walking nightlight." Tandy smirked but still pulled out the flashlight. She nodded at his instructions and how high the ceiling was. Putting the flashlight under her arm before taking the gloves to put them on. She was getting both excited and scared, they were going into a sewers. "Anything else? Stay close? Doesn't sewers have multiple tunnels?"

"They do, but we're not going right down there. There's a lot of layers of tunnel under here. We take this one to the first cross tunnel, turn left and then we end up in a sort of abandoned basement thing." It was outside the tunnels proper and that meant that it was a good place to meet Sarah. Less ... surprises. "You ready?" Artie dropped into the drain and landed with a splash in ankle-deep water. There were mounds of trash along the walls of the tunnel.

Tandy tried to create a mental image of the pathway from Artie's instructions but couldn't visual it. "Yes." Tandy followed suit after Artie dropped down into the drain and landing in the water. Turning on her flashlight she looked forward. "Kind of reminds me of Slenderworld. Just less - creepy."

Damn. Slenderworld must have really sucked, Artie thought as he led the way through the tunnels to the basement, the entrance to which had been blocked off some time ago, around the time that the basement wall had been knocked down to make it peripherally part of the tunnels, heading into the much drier room and dropping down to squat against the wall. The room itself had been set up as a house, sleeping bag and belongings stacked against the far wall.

Artie smiled at the woman sitting on an overturned milk crate and waved hello before gesturing 'you good?'

The woman - Sarah - nodded, red eyes glowing in the dim light. As he held up the flashlight the multicolored blotches on her skin showed more clearly in the gaps between the touque pulled down low over her eyes and the raised collar of her coat. "So, who's the girl?" she asked.

Tandy stayed quite as she followed Artie through the tunnels and was starting to be thankful that she wore boots that were waterproof. Soon they stopped and she looked over his shoulder o see a woman nearby, the red eyes and blotches were not missed by Tandy. "My name is Tandy." The teen gave her name being polite but by now her own skin was glowing. "I am a friend of Artie's. It is nice to meet you...." Her voice trailed off as she didn't know the woman's name.

"Nice to meet me? Aww, that's nice. You enjoying your little bit of tourism here?" Sarah said. Artie kept silent, letting Tandy handle it.

"I came here with Artie to drop off supplies." Tandy said and pointed to the backpacks. "I do weekly volunteer work for my Uncle's shelter at his church and Artie told me about how there are others. I wanted to help. See what else you might need."

"Aww, how kind... Little rich girl wants to help. Is it for a school project?"

Artie sighed and tapped "you done yet?" into his synthesiser. Putting his bag around, he began to rifle through it. Under the dry shoes and wetwipes was a second pocket. He pulled out a roll of crumpled tens and twenties, pulling a couple of notes off and holding them up before putting them down on the ground in front of him.

"Tandy, open your bag and put the grocery bag down on the ground," he said, projecting the the text to her.

Tandy didn't like to be referred to as the rich girl but didn't say anything. Her reasons for doing this was because she wanted too. "Right." She took off the bag and knelt down to open it. Taking out the grocery bag and set it down on the ground.

Good girl. He kept that part to himself and ushered Tandy out, a line of text floating behind him in the tunnel. "Just remember, you hear anything interesting, you might want to let me know." Back on the surface, Artie grinned at Tandy and set to changing his shoes.

"So, you've met a tunnel mutant. They're kind of jerks. Did I warn you about that?"

Ah, the daylight and the open air that didn't smell. "I think you did?" Tandy smiled at Artie and kicked off her own boots and changed into other shoes as well. "They don't like strangers do they?"

Artie looked over at Tandy and pictured her as she must have looked to Sarah. Pretty girl. Soft. Nice hair and decent clothes and passed for a flatscan. (Don't say that out loud, Artie-boy) and shrugged. "You lose everything you got up here," he said, letting the text run above his hands as he signed a person standing and falling, only to hit an implied ground and bounce, "you don't feel too fond of tourists."

He stuffed his wet boots into a garbage bag and stowed them in his bag before he swung it back over his shoulder. "You met a tunnel mutant. You want to help them out some more, you let me know. But if I hear that you're heading down to the tunnels on your own..."

Tan nodded before looking back at where they just came from. "I suppose not." The blonde didn't want to act like a tourist, she only meant to help. "Of course I want to help in anyway I can." Turning back to Artie and smirked. "And I promise I won't go down into the sewers without my fearless guide. Should we plan for next time?" She asked as she put on her clean shoes and put her dirty ones into her own bag.

Artie nodded. "Good. You can get pretty lost down there and look, the mutants are all basically harmless freaks who couldn't hack it up here but there are other people living down there too. Junkies who'll roll you for your phone and so on."

"Doesn't the City have a map of the sewer system? Not saying I would somehow gain access to these maps and go exploring but just figured that they might. I think the junkies would scare me more than the mutants. Thanks Artie for bring me down there. You are a nice guy."

"They do but... A few years back when Apocolypse came to town, a lot of the tunnels were moved around by a mutant. They've remapped them all but people don't realise how much they rely on landmarks and visual cues to navigate." He ignored the nice guy comment.

"Apocalypse? I vague remember my step dad mentioning that name." She said more to herself than to Artie. "So people really can get lost in the sewers. That sucks." She looked at Artie in deep thought. "Question. Do they have a leader? Or is it majority wins? Out of curiosity. "

Artie shook his head. "Think more, a group of individuals, all doing entirely their own thing, all the time for half of them and the other half... fucked if I know."

Tan shrugged, "Just curious that is all. Hungry?

Artie replied in pictures, with a stick figure person opening a mouth that split its entire head in half and swallowing a burger, bucket of fries, milkshake and then a car into its mouth.

Tan laughed, "I didn't know you could do that. Impressive. But I do know a hamburger joint that has great food. Wanna go?"

"Yeah. Sounds good."