[meme] test drive

[citycouncil]

A bit late. Sorry, folks!

Tag into this post with characters you're thinking of apping to the game (characters who are not currently in-game or currently reserved by someone else). It can be just a tag, a brief EP, whatever you want. You can be new to the game, or simply want to test out a fresh pup. Tag each other with these characters or those already in game, and have fun.

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[auctionofinnocence]

The girl is entirely underdressed for the weather, and Larita feels comfortable guessing that she's new. The alternative is that she's stupid, and for all that Lari can't deny that it's a possibility no matter who the person is or how old, she isn't especially prone to thinking ill of someone out the gate. In her opinion, everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt at least once. Even teenage girls in cutoff denim shorts and a-line shirts.

Lari brakes, slowing the car so she can pull over, and she throws the shift into 'park.' The car's top is down, the windows open, to enjoy the fresh breeze, but it's still just chilly enough that she's glad for the hat and light jacket she'd donned this morning.

And doubly glad that at least one of these, she can offer the girl.

"Where on Earth are you from that wearing that was seasonably appropriate?" she asks, draping her arm across the back of the passenger seat.

[roadside_rose]

Women don't often stop for her. Some combination of stranger-danger paranoia and a fear that whatever put her on the road might be contagious, that they'll end up in the margins by association. They especially don't stop for her in a 1937 Frazer Nash BMW, and Rose forgets herself enough to actually gape for a moment. It's a spectacle so far out of time that she really ought to be looking at a phantom rider, but no — the woman behind the wheel isn't a road ghost. And while the car looks well-loved enough to leave a ghost of her own, her tires sit firmly on the daylight asphalt.

Rose blinks, then looks down at her outfit as if she's only just realized how inappropriate it is, taking the moment to gather herself. "Not here," she replies with a small, sheepish shrug. "I was on my way to..."

She trails off, her smile fading and her gaze going distant. All she'd done was reach for the road, trying to gauge where she was and where she might reasonably be going to, to spin a quick lie about her last ride and why they'd left her here, but this road has next to nothing to tell her, terminates in nothing a few miles in either direction. She stands on a little orphaned tributary cut off from the rivers of asphalt that cross North America, dwindling too quickly into thick-baked mud.

Where the hell is she?

She tries to drop into the twilight, to find the nearest ghostroad and run. She doesn't go anywhere. The woman is staring at her in clear concern.

"I, uh," Rose balls her hands into cold little fists and loosens them, veering unsteadily off-script. "I think I might be lost?"

[auctionofinnocence]

"I should say so," Lari agrees after the girl's verbal stumbling. She gives her a sympathetic smile, then reaches over and opens the car door. "Hop in, won't you? Goodness, you look frigid."

She leans back into her own seat and unbuttons her jacket — a lightweight enough thing to weather the ups and downs of Darrow's uncertain spring without being too overwarm should the sun come out in full force — and offers it over by the collar.

"Put this on," she instructs. "It isn't much but it's more than you've got on now. I'm Larita. And this is Darrow. The city, not the car." She winks; the admiring gape hadn't escaped her notice, but it has done wonders to ingratiate the girl towards her. Anyone that can appreciate a car like Larita's is someone Larita is just fine knowing.

[roadside_rose]

This isn't quite how these scenes are supposed to go. Rose isn't above accepting the living's pity, and she can't deny it now; if the twilight won't have her, then this is what she needs to do. Hell, she's already doing it: sliding into the passenger seat and taking the coat with soft but sincere thanks, feeling mortality settle into her limbs as she pushes her arms through the sleeves. The upholstery is warm beneath her — the car, like its driver, inclined towards sympathy — and it begins to thaw a little of the twilight chill out of her bones.

But she doesn't do lost, is the thing. It sits a little too close to 'pathetic' for her liking. She's supposed to know where she's headed, or seem like she does... but there's no scent of lilies and ashes on the wind, no sense of direction from the ghostroads. And while 'Darrow' sounds like it could be anywhere, she can't say she's heard of it.

"I'm Rose," she says, managing a smile, trying to claw her way back into an approximation of confidence. "Does the car have a name, too? She's pretty enough to deserve one." Loved enough, is what she really means, and she briefly rests her fingertips on the polished wooden window frame.

[auctionofinnocence]

"You know, I haven't thought much about it before now," she admits. Her eyes soften a little. "You like cars, do you? It's not often I meet a like-minded girl." She grins and checks her mirrors before getting them back on the road.

[roadside_rose]

"I do," Rose says, an easy admission. "I used to fix them up after school, or over the summer — when I had the time." Which wasn't always. She'd grown up poor, and tinkering with cars was more of an indulgence than anything anyone in Buckley was prepared to pay her for. She'd had to turn to more appropriately feminine chores if she wanted to earn money.

[auctionofinnocence]

"Hm," Larita agrees, her tone fond. "That's the way of if, isn't it? Finding the time." She has a lot less time to tinker for fun than she used to, but she wouldn't trade a bit of it. The racetrack, Greta, the girls, it's not something Larita saw for herself when she found her feet leaving Surrey and landing in Darrow, but it's all so lovely and domestic.

"Where are you headed, anyway? Or where were you headed before you found yourself in Darrow?"