nebulochaotic | {Another day won't stop the tide

I. Immediately post-arrival

A. Outside the government housing building

She got her packet. She got her bracelet. She demanded whatever poor bloke that was in the conference room to fix the settings on the blasted thing so she could actually use it. Everything was explained to her as succinctly as possible and she was escorted to her new apartment. She didn't even allow them to escort her to the door of it-- stubborn and determined to learn what would apparently be her new home on her own, she made them drop her out front and she'd bloody well find her way, thanks.

This quickly proves to be an awful plan. Her steps are glacier slow and careful, one hand outstretched and searching for anything she might gain purchase on to guide her. But the real problem isn't even that. Once she's on the street, seeking the front door of the building, the onslaught of ambient noise is loud enough it feels like it's rattling inside her bones. She doesn't recall her ears being so sensitive before, maybe it's--

No.
No, that bloke had said something, hadn't he? About her hearing...
Bullocks.

She winces and shrinks down onto the front steps once she finds them, clamping her hands over her ears with her head tucked toward her knees. She can hear everything, it seems-- sirens in this distance, though she couldn't say exactly how far; conversations from who knows where, dozens of them and she can't make out any of it except the equivalent murmured sound of a busy market somewhere; car horns and feet pounding pavement and heartbeats. She has no idea how to make it stop or turn it off, and it's just so loud. "God, make it stop." she mutters against her knees.

B. Apt Building #2 Hallway

Eventually, Melanie makes it to the lobby, finds the proper way to go to get to the right building and makes her way carefully down the hallway, feeling her way along the wall and when she comes to the door, she reaches up, tracing the numbers against it. "Yes," she mutters to herself, pulling the key from her pocket to unlock the door.

Except, wouldn't you know, putting a key into a lock on a door you can't even see is actually... not as easy as it sounds? After everything else she's been dealt today, Melanie is at a sort of breaking tipping point. She tries multiple times to get the key in the door and just... can't. Are door locks different in America? Or perhaps she's just too stressed to keep calm enough to do such a simple task. Either way, she's at her wit's end for the day and presses her forehead against the door. "Helen, if that's you, just let me in my bloody apartment," she mumbles. And even if she'd severed her connection to The Eye, there were plenty of other entities to try and prey on her. And this really would be The Spiral's sort of game, wouldn't it?

She sinks down to the floor and presses her back against the door. She doesn't think they said anything about roommates, she's not sure she has any, or if anyone else lives in the second building at all. She could be stuck out here for... an unreasonable amount of time. Or it could be Helen, in which case, the thing might just open without warning. Either way, the stress of the day has caught up to her and she feels the sharp sting at the corner of her eyes. But if she starts crying, she isn't sure how long it would be before she stops, so she tries to force it down.

Probably an odd sight, really; a heap of a girl sitting in the hallway outside her apartment, key in hand staring blankly at nothing and doing her damndest not to cry.

This is bullshit. This is fucking bullshit. Because, sure, it wasn't bad enough getting sucked up out of his own perfectly good reality and dropped into some fucked up nightmare full of zombies and apocalypses and sharing terrifying memories with a kid who was thirteen before Caleb was even born and fucking switching bodies with random dudes he's talked to all of once online. Might as well drag him out of that one and instead of sending him home where he belongs, drop him into another world. What was it? Earth eight hundred something, who gave a fuck?

"Yeah, thanks," he snaps irritably at the guy behind the wheel of the car dropping him off in front of a lush apartment complex that, okay, to its credit, does look a lot better than the government housing in Nonah had. But still, come on! Caleb slams the door behind him and stands there on the sidewalk for a moment, Information Packet hanging loosely between two pinched fingers of a hand at his side and he stares up at the hulking structure with its palm trees looking all unfuckingassuming for a moment. It's hot as Satan's asshole in Florida. Fuck literally everything about this.

It's maybe only the upset off to his left, the rolling waves of something dark purple and heavy but also kind of...buzzy?...that distracts him from his teenage moping and has him looking around for the source. It's strong and though the color is almost like a moving gradient, it's all in purple, so he knows it's just one person. There's a woman sitting on the front steps of the building, curled into herself and muttering, her hands over her ears and her head tucked down. She's really upset...

All right, Jesus fuck, he can complain about this new set of circumstances in a minute. Caleb sighs softly to himself, casts one last shitty look at the apartment building, and then moves to the front steps to sit down beside her, leaving a foot or two of space in between them. "Um...ma'am...are you okay? Do you need help or anything...?"

"What?" her head snaps up in the direction she thinks she closest voice is coming from, a frown creasing across her face. "Honestly, do you have to shout?" she winces and keeps her hands over her ears. "I don't-- they did something, I think. To my- to my ears or something." She should have paid more attention when they were going on about the nonsense earlier, but-- well. She was mostly just mad and wanted away from them at the time. She might be regretting her previous rash decisions now.

Caleb is thrown for a second when he sees her look up but not at him. She's looking sort of in his general direction and it takes him a second to focus on what she's actually saying.

"I'm not..." he stammers quickly, but he lowers his voice all the same. "Sorry. I'm not shouting, though. But they might've given you a new power. That's a thing that happens, sometimes. I didn't get anything new, I don't think," he says, and he might sound a little disappointed at that because he is. He'll feel better about it when he finds out that he did, in fact, gain a new power. He hadn't been paying a ton of attention, either, because he'd been to mad about not getting sent home if he was going to get pulled out of Nonah.

"Uh, but I said, are you okay? Do you need help or anything?" he repeats himself, conscious of his volume and trying to keep it especially low for her.

"No," she skips straight over his blundering apology and explanations about powers, God, she feels sick at the idea of it. Powers don't come from nowhere, nor the government, in her world and the only way she knows they come to exist? Well. She'd rather not think about it right now. "I'm not okay, it's too loud."

Even if he'd said he wasn't shouting before, it had certainly sounded like it and she does appreciate him lowering his voice all the same. As much as that doesn't help the onslaught of noise everywhere else, it does help, just a bit. "Er- yeah. Probably? I don't know where I'm supposed to go. I mean. I know I'm at the right building, but I can't..." She huffs and takes her hands away from her ears, only to cross her arms over her chest. "I can't see." Admitting anything shaped like helplessness is hard for her and she hates it. But it would really go much better if she could just... get this boy-- he does sound so young, honestly-- to show her to an elevator inside and she could do the rest on her own.

Caleb's stomach turns a little suddenly and he tries to ignore it and the frustration bubbling up within him because he's pretty sure that's not his; he's pretty sure that's hers.

She says she can't see and for a second, Caleb looks confused, but then he puts it together. She's not looking at him; she's just looking toward him. Shit, she's blind...

"Okay," he says quietly, nodding. "All right, well, look, I live here, too. Which apartment do you need? I'll walk you there," he offers. It's the sort of thing he thinks anybody would do, but then again, Caleb's never really met terrible people. Maybe that fucking Joker douchebag or Damian would leave her there, but nobody else he knows would, so he's not gonna, either.

Caleb moves a little closer to her and leans down, taking both of her hands in his to help her to her feet. "Here, it'll be easier if I can just lead you until we can get inside and to the elevator and then if you want to just hold onto my arm or something?" he suggests.

"Oh, right, uh-- it was..." She tries to remember and curses herself for not paying more attention back there. "Two-oh-one. Yeah, that was it." She nods a bit.

His hands on hers cause her to tense instantly and the sharp, knee-jerk response is, "Don't do that! You can't just-- touch me, you have to warn me or something!" Still, despite the stern protests, she does takes his help to her feet and grips his wrist in one hand, using the other to, well, sense where she is, and where they're going.

"Just... get me to the elevator, I'll be fine from there." She probably wont, at least not on the first day, but it doesn't matter. Melanie is just that stubborn.

The tensing doesn't necessarily surprise him because someone is touching her and Caleb doesn't really like being touched, either, but when she yells at him, his instinct is to freeze. He's not sure it's really his instinct or if it's tied to what she's feeling when she does it, but either way, until she actually moves, he doesn't, his eyes going wide and jaw flapping wordlessly as he tries to figure out how the fuck to respond to that. He's never been around a blind person before. He doesn't know the rules.

"I thought I kinda did," is all he can come up with and it comes out dumbly, his shoulders slumping sheepishly. "I'm sorry."

He's taking it at a slower pace than his normal walking pace, dictating to her when there's a step to go up or anything she may need to step over, like the weird little metal line in the threshold of the building that he figures is probably a part of the doors but probably could've been lowered below the ground level if they'd tried.

Because he's seen her other arm out to try to feel around, he tries to stay close enough to a wall for her to touch it so that she can orient herself. "Um, so, here's the elevator," he says awkwardly, pressing the button to go up for her. "I already pressed the button. ...are you sure you don't want me to at least get you to your floor and let you know which direction to turn down the hall?" Do those signs have Braille on them? He never bothered to look because it's never been relevant to him. "...or no...?" he asks as the elevator dings and the doors open.

Caleb reaches one hand out to hold the door open just in case. The last thing he needs is to be That Guy, the one who unintentionally let the elevator doors shut on a blind lady. Holy shit, just the thought of being That Guy makes his stomach tumble nauseatingly.

She hadn't meant to startle him, exactly, and he's not wrong that he technically warned her, but-- well. She's not very used to this yet, either, and it's all so compounded and worse being thrown into some new place with no one she knows around. She'd even be more comfortable with Jon around at this point, just because it was at least be someone familiar.

"It's fine." her words are brusque, and she pushes the moment aside as he guides her up the steps, over te threshold and toward the elevator. She pauses, debating for a second if he has a point. God, she hates this. "Er- yeah. I guess... at least the direction to go, yeah."

He's assuming that the different floors are laid out the same way and that when they get off the elevator, she's going to need to take a left and go to the end of the hall, since she's exactly a floor above him, but he'd rather be able to know for sure. So, needless to say, it's kind of a relief when she agrees to let him go that far with her.

"Okay, so there's a little trick to this elevator. Most of the time, it doesn't do it, but I've tripped a handful of times when it kind of drops the car down about an inch while it's waiting for you to step in, so I've gotten into the habit of just stepping high when I get in so I don't trip again. So, when you open the elevator, you might want to try doing that so it doesn't trip you up when it's being fuckin' weird," he offers as he guides her in. This time, the elevator stays put and it doesn't cause the issue, and hell, maybe he's just really unlucky but just in case, he'd be kind of a dick if he didn't mention it at all.

Instead of pressing the button for her, Caleb guides her to the right side of the car where the buttons and emergency phone are located. "It looks like the buttons have bumps on them so that you can tell which floor is which," he says, relieved that there's that, at least. He can't imagine trying to just guess which button to press when there's several options. "I can do it if you want since I'm right here, but I figured you'd probably want to get a feel for the interface or whatever..."

Or maybe he's just being a waste of space right now, who even knows?

Once the elevator starts moving, though, after they've selected the floor, Caleb leans back against the far wall and closes his eyes in a slow blink. There's a lot of feelings in this elevator and he's having kind of a hard time telling which ones are his and which ones are hers because, weirdly? Her feelings are the same color as his are.

"Oh, great," she mumbles, letting out an annoyed-sounding huff as she carefully steps a little higher than average to avoid tripping. It feels awkward and she's certain she looks like a bloody idiot doing it, but she'd rather that than faceplanting into the elevator. "just what I need, a bloody trick lift."

She feels her way inside, following him and sliding her fingers across the wall and the buttons where the console is. She feels the small, raised points, but she'd barely just started learning Braille before she ended up here. Still, at least she can eventually figure it out.

She leans against the wall right there beside the console with her forehead pressed against the wall. She hates this. She hates being here. She hates being away from all that she knows. She hates being in America. She hates being helpless. But the silence inside the lift is nice and for those few moments while they ride it up to the proper floor, she just stays like that.

"Yeah, it's fucking annoying," he agrees, although he knows it'll be more annoying for her than for him, probably. He can at least see if it's happening and skip stepping high. Granted, he'll forget more often than not to look and he'll trip, but at least he can see to catch himself when he does.

As they move up to the second floor, she's quiet, too, and she looks — and feels — stressed out. He can feel it buzzing around him, crawling under his skin, the kind of yellow that's burnt around the edges. Caleb wishes he knew what to say to make it better, but he doesn't know where to begin.

A moment later, the elevator dings and the doors open. The sign is on the opposite wall and Caleb's right, the rooms are set up the same way. "Okay, so you're going to go to the left. Your apartment will be at the end of the hall on the left." He almost offers to just walk her there the first time, at least, but he decides he ought to wait. If she wants to have him do that, then she'll ask, he's sure.

When the elevator dings and the doors ease open, she stands up at her full height and pulls away from the wall to step into the hallway. She listens to his instructions and nods a bit in understanding. Would it be easier if she simply had him walk her to the room? Sure. But Melanie is too stubborn and she's already had him baby her up to this point. She's going to have to get used to it on her own for as long as she's here, anyway.

"Thank you. I appreciate it." But she doesn't have anything else to say, and obviously isn't requesting any more help, so she simply turns away from the elevator and starts tracing the wall to her left with her fingers.

"Yeah, no problem," Caleb replies and he waits, just in case she decides she wants more help. A soft sigh escapes him because he can feel pride bubbling up and he has a feeling that that's his sign that she's done with him for now. That's fair enough, he knows the feeling.

And, sure enough, she wanders off down the hall after that and he nods to himself, moving forward to press the button to send himself back down to the first floor. He hopes she gets to her place okay, at least.

Matthew's spent a decent amount of time exploring the block safely, the shock of being suddenly displaced was wearing off over time. Familiarizing himself with the street would be the first step, then the rest of the city afterwards. So up and down the block he went on a brisk walk, memorizing every uneven block of pavement, the white cane provided (as he wasn't exactly well packed for this sudden relocation) dragging over the cracks and swaying from side to side with gentle taps to help orientate himself, as well as providing a base for his cover.

He could somewhat see, but the lack of familiarity was incredibly disorienting.

Matthew finds the complexes...noisy, so far. The first one was rightly full, the walls wafer thin, and the roommates minding their own business was already noisy enough, so the walk allows him to parse through the feedback.

One string of sounds present themselves, and it's an all too familiar one. The sound of skin on stucco walls, the championing of finding their own way, the flapping of a key card that couldn't just fit where it was supposed to. He's briefly reminded of having to stay in a hotel by himself. But even as she mumbles to herself, Matthew puts two and two together, and decides to turn the next corner. From one blind person to another, he could manage well enough. The sound of this person sinking to the floor in defeat solidifies his decision to at least offer to be Good Samaritan.

Some verse in Luke echoed in his mind. About being a neighbor.

He mimics the motion, hand following the wall, but by sheer sound of breathing, heartbeat, the echoing of the cane's end skimming the linoleum, he could tell where she was.

"Do you need some help?"

Melanie isn't sure how long she's sat there on the floor, it could have been twenty minutes or two hours and it all felt the same. No light and dark or anything else to tell the passage of time makes parsing how much of its passed much harder than she'd like. Still, she's been in the hall, alone, long enough that the sudden presence and voice of someone else makes her shoulders jolt and her head jerk in at least the general direction it seems to be coming from.

"Uh- yeah," she mutters abashedly, pushing herself up to her feet unsteadily. She hates feeling so damn helpless and her accent come a little thicker for all of her annoyance at the feeling of it. "that'd be great, thanks."

He can tell he's spooked her, which is saying a lot more to him than he first observed.

Matt's hand reaches out to drag against the wall too, just until the doorframe. He then closes the cane up, and offers her his hand.

"They always make these so inaccessible. Makes you wonder why they don't just figure out how to use all the same stuff for unlocking phones for doors, you know?" he jokes.

"Are you new here?"

She's adjusting to the weird way her body can just... sense certain things more. There's a presence people carry by existing in just the right space near enough to you and while she'd been well enough aware of that before, it's so much more obvious now. So it's easy to reach up and take the hand he's offered her and pull herself to her feet.

She ignores the joke, and instead breezes directly toward that question, her tone sharp and bitter at the admission of, "Yes, and I'm honestly not pleased about it."

"I don't think any of us are." he replies.

She'd taken his hand with relative ease, and suddenly, he's wondering if he even gauged her abilities correctly. Perhaps he was too soon, too quick to think that she was just like him. Maybe he just got his hopes up, and all the problem was that she didn't understand the keycard reader.

Maybe she was trying to break in? No, she was upset, but not hurried, rushed or frazzled. Who knows. He's still resolved to help.

"Well. Either way." he smiles, somewhat genuine, the tip of his finger feeling just where the key card reader was, his other held out for the card itself.

"May I?"

"It's only fair... being ripped from our homes out of nowhere, treated like it's nothing." Her voice is sharp, and gets a littler higher, angrier, toward the end.

She pauses in the brief silence, not sure what's happening or what he wants until-- the prompt. The keycard. "Right. Sorry," she mumbles, and fumbles a second before getting the thing in his hand. "I think they need a better system."

{Another day won't stop the tide

{It's a whole new world and I already hate everything » Government housing building, Eglaf » Jan 1

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