Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-5543592-20190326124223/@comment-5543592-20190326173543

The sun rose. It was, after all, and inevitability.

Tanner Collins stood beneath it, tipping his head back and closing his eyes, feeling heat on his skin steadily increase as the sun grew higher. The morning light was orange, and warm. Summers were hot in California, which Tanner welcomed. Growing up in Chicago, he hadn't seen the sun much, hadn't even experienced it all that much. A Brotherhood bunker was just that. The first eighteen or so years of his life he could count the amount times he'd seen the sun on his fingers and toes.

When he'd left that place behind to travel with the Boss, he'd felt like he was in danger of falling into the sky. And the sun? It was a giant eye, watching everything they did without fail. Tanner, the boy he was, had stared at dumbly, with an open mouth. The Boss warned him that if he had kept at it he'd end up blind and stupid.

Tanner hadn't cared. The Boss' scorn was a small price to pay, for this kind of appreciation. How many often did anyone else look up at that star above them, something so impossibly large and power, and marvel at it?

Very rarely, Tanner thought. There were more immediate concerns than the stars in the sky.

"Er, boss?" Tanner turned his back to the sun and faced Cable, who was leaning against the warehouse's clean steel wall. "What're you doing?"

Tanner almost made a joke about recharging his powers with the yellow radiation of the sun, but Cable would've taken it to heart as something spectacular. "Thought I'd appreciate the small things." Tanner said, smirking slightly at his own humor. "How often do we appreciate a sunny day anymore?"

Cable didn't reply to that, only giving him a funny look. Cable didn't know how hard it was for Tanner to get up in the morning, to slog through a day, how grateful he was to lay down again at it's end. Cable just thought Tanner got oddly philosophical at times. A warrior poet, the hero facing a moral-dilemma. To Cable, Tanner's character wasn't deep. He was a cartoon, someone who was endlessly and willfully good because he had to be. Cable thought there were no complexities to what drove Tanner.

Tanner would keep it that way for as long as he could. The instant your heroes became human they stopped being that. It had crushed Tanner when he'd come to realize the extent of the Boss' failings. He didn't think Cable needed to suffer anymore than he already had.

"You see the run of this place yet?" Cable said. "They've got everything in here. I saw Frank Horrigan's head. His head"

"I haven't looked." Tanner said absently. There was a whining noise on the far side of the warehouse, and Tanner looked up as a vertibird lifting into the sky, its jet engines exhaling streams of air. "There goes Miller. Wonder who he'll bring back."

Cable backed away from the warehouse to watch as well. He looked over his shoulder at Tanner. "Expect to see anyone you know?"

If Kayleigh showed up right now, after fourteen years apart, would she recognize him? Tanner chuckled at the thought. How could she? At times, Tanner had trouble recognizing himself. The smile he showed Cable was not one the boy was capable of interpreting. "Undoubtedly."

The Vertibird shot into the sky and took off across the wasteland, searching for those had answered it's message.

Josey stood in the primary room the warehouse turned headquarters. It was brand new, not some repurposed, ancient structure. Sparkling, even, if such a thing still existed. The warehouse had many different sections--living quarters, armories, storerooms, kitchens, the artifact hall Cable had been geeking over.

But now he stood over what Miller had dubbed the “common room.” It wasn’t a sitting or relaxation area, as the name implied, but a large open area that could be used for an number of things, such as training, or setting up displays. At the room’s center was a round table surrounded by four glass walls. The table was for sitting or standing around, maybe for discussions or even group meals, Josey imagined. The walls were for writing or maybe to provide a sense of completeness to the otherwise empty room--they were low, not even reaching halfway up to the hanger-like ceiling of the warehouse.

Josey didn’t like it. Reminded him too much of the set-up he had had back in the Lucky 38.

But at the same time, he couldn’t pull himself away. So here he stood.