bigapplesauce | he's baa-aaack [open to all]

Sam has always been the kind of guy who, when he's sick, will mulishly insist that he is fine, he can keep going until he's blue in the face. Not even just when there's the fate of the world on the line, he was like that in college too; he distinctly (and with some embarrassment) remembers an instance in which he passed out in a philosophy lecture because he was too stubborn to admit he had the flu. This time, though, there was only so much bull-headed denial he could really work with. He point-blank refused to go to the hospital, because a) whatever he's sick with, they aren't likely to have the cure, and b) he's probably not registered in any system in this universe, and even if there is some other Sam Winchester running around, he doesn't want to get mixed up in that.

So he's spent-- how long? A few weeks?-- holed up in a room in the shittiest (and therefore cheapest, 'cos it's not like he's gonna be running card scams at any dive bars, the state he's in) motel he could find, drifting in and out of consciousness, having really weird fucking dreams, and healing. Slowly.

But finally, finally he feels well enough to go out again. No fever, no visions of dead angels, none of the dragging lethargy that had made getting up some days basically impossible. So today, this day, Sam gets up, determined that he's gonna take a shower and go get some necessities. He stops short, though, after he heaves himself out of bed, noting with some alarm that there's stuff all over the floor. Not just most of the bedding, but the pens and notepads that live in motel drawers, a few little bars of soap, the entire contents of his pockets. Some of the furniture looks like it's been wrenched out of place as well; there's little indents in the carpet where the TV stand used to be rooted, and a tall floor lamp is leaning crazily against one wall.

Weird. A shiver wraps itself around his spine as he steps over the stuff and goes to shower.

His reflection in the mirror, once he's clean, is kind of pathetic. He looks-- well, he looks like what he is, like a guy who's been sick; Sam's not sure how much fat or muscle mass you can lose in the course of a few weeks, but he's definitely thinner than he was, his face noticeably gaunt. Possibly most heinous is the full beard covering his jaw. For a few futile milliseconds, he gropes for a razor, as if one will magically appear on the sink countertop. It doesn't.

Once he's dressed, he collates all the shit-formerly-in-his-pockets-but-now-on-the-floor. He's got a few hundred bucks in cash, as well as several credit cards under fake names. No guarantee those will work in this reality, but he guesses he'll see. He can buy a razor to take care of the beard, and some new clothes, at least, and then-- Fuck, and then what? He supposes he could try to find that Lucy woman again, find out more about what was going on here. Or else do some research on his own, though he doesn't know exactly how secret all this Rift and ROMAC stuff actually is.

Several hours later finds him with a Kmart backpack filled with a few necessities; deodorant, plastic packs of cheap t-shirts and underwear and socks, and a new smartphone in his pocket. At least one of his credit cards worked, for now, so he'll have internet access at least for a bit. Sam doesn't know New York very well, so he wanders until he finds a coffee shop with WIFI written in the window in bright neons. He orders coffee with an extra shot of espresso, and sits down to try and do some research.

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A bleach blond, leather clad man is one table over when Sam sits down to begin his research. Spike had also been taking advantage of the coffee shop's wifi, but since then has discovered that he can put video games on his new phone.

"...stupid cunting..." He groans loudly in frustration as he entirely misses killing any pigs with his Angry Birds slingshot. He hasn't got any coffee or food in front of him, and it seems like the staff are rapidly getting very tired of him. One of them sighs loudly and glares at him pointedly as he curses in triumph. He's managed to finish the level he'd been stuck on. "Ha! Take that, you fuckers."

When the next level pops up, he frowns down at it. "Okay, that is just cruel. How am I supposed to get over there." He glances sideways at Sam, wondering if this is the type of guy with video game skills. But whatever, it doesn't hurt to ask. He leans towards him, raising his eyebrows in question. "Hey. Brawny Man. You know how to do this?"

Sam more or less tunes out the noise of British cursing from the next table over. Tuning things out is one of his great skills; he's had to make it, otherwise he probably would have turned out even more nuts than he has, growing up with Dean constantly in his space. Instead, he sips his coffee with grateful absentmindedness, and sets to work seeing what he can find.

ROMAC, rift, New York, he types into Google. Most of what comes up are New York Times articles; Rift Widens Over Mining Uranium in Virginia, Rift in Israel Between Netanyahu and Barak, a Forbes article about some video game. He frowns, flicking through the first few pages of results, but there's nothing.

He tries rift, supernatural, New York, and time-space rift, and a dozen other combinations of potential keywords, but either no-one's writing about what's happening here, or it's being censored. That Lucy woman had said ROMAC was a government agency, he supposes they could do that. Awfully fucking 1984, but, well.

He's racking his brain for the names of the few reliable conspiracy theorist websites he has bookmarked on his own laptop to see if there's anything on any of them when he realises he's being addressed. Sam looks up, thrown out of his concentration, and fuzzily blinks at the guy doing the addressing. It's the English dude, the Billy Idol lookalike who'd been swearing at his phone, and it takes Sam a moment to realise what he's referring to.

'What? Uh-- no, not really, sorry.'

He peers at the phone.

'That's, what, Angry Birds?' He's seen those stupid red birds on enough t-shirts and lunchboxes to have an idea. 'I don't know anything other than the name, sorry man.'

Edited 2013-10-06 05:25 (UTC)

"Yeah." Spike huffs in disappointment and sinks back into his chair. "Big help you are." It takes him a single try at this new level before the gives up and closes the app. Maybe he'll try again later, but right now he's fed up. He gives a brief browse over other available games. Some of them look interesting, but not anything he wants to try right now.

Instead he leans back over trying to get a glimpse of what the lumberjack is doing on his phone. It's entirely possible that he's playing something that's a hundred times more fun than Angry Birds. "What are you doing? Got anything good on there?"

Edited 2013-10-06 06:28 (UTC)

Presuming that interaction over with, Sam goes back to frowning at his phone, but evidently he's mistaken, as a few moments later, the guy leans back into the space around his table, craning his neck to try and get a glimpse of the screen of Sam's phone. Sam doesn't go so far as to snap a hand up to cover it, though he feels the impulse. Instead, he just turns his hand to place the phone, screen-down, on the table.

'I'm doing some research,' he says, smooth as he can. It's the voice he uses when he's impersonating officials, really, though it probably doesn't have nearly the same heft with him looking like a lumberjack in a Tim Burton film. Carefully, he adds, 'I'm... new in town. Trying to find out what's, uh, going on in the area.'

It is, he hopes, the kind of statement that has the potential to sound entirely innocuous to a civilian, and also significant to someone who's been pulled through the rift too. Because honestly, if anyone might be, this guy doesn't exactly seem like a native.

So Sam lifts his eyebrows in an expression of neutral curiosity. 'What about you? You're obviously not a New Yorker by birth.'

Thankfully, Spike has no such reservations about letting people know he came through the rift. "Yeah, no kidding. London, originally. Not the London in...whatever this dimension is, though. Was in L.A. before the rift grabbed me and dumped me in the middle of traffic."

Spike scoots his chair over in a few short, noisy bursts to join Sam at his table. "Just how new? You fresh off the interdimensional portal?"

Well, that answers that question. So much for subtlety. Sam's caught by surprise by the sheer bluntness, and he fumbles for a moment at an answer. 'Uh, sort of? I came through... a couple of weeks ago, I think, but I've been pretty much, uh, out of commission until now.'

He lifts his phone briefly from the tabletop, giving it a little wiggle. 'That was the research I was doing; trying to find out more about the situation. The woman who found me when I showed up here mentioned a monitoring organisation, ROMAC? But I couldn't find any sign of 'em online. Looks like they're covering their tracks really fucking well.'

"Huh. I haven't thought to look. They told me about 'em too, when I signed up for the room." He's assuming that Sam is another under the wing of the rebel alliance, or whatever the hell they call themselves. He'd said thanks for the room and buggered off, so he's definitely not the well of information that Sam is looking for. He doesn't have any plans to dig into the crusty underbelly of either organization...hence him being here playing Angry Birds instead of sneaking into buildings.

"What sort of out of commission?" Spike is interested in the effects that the rift have had on people, and that definitely sounds like something rift related.

Again with the blunt, wow. 'Um,' Sam says, 'It's... kinda complicated. Nothing to do with whatever's going on here.'

And that, hopefully, will be that. Something else the guy said has distracted his attention, and Sam furrows his brows at him. 'Sorry, you said signed up for the room?' He tries hard to keep his tone casual, but a certain amount of urgency sneaks through anyway. 'Signed up for a room where? Who from?'

Because shit as the motel he's staying at may be, it's still a drain on the money he has only a finite amount of.

Spike raises his eyebrows in Sam's direction. He definitely knows interest when he sees it. Must not be on the roll call, then. "Thought you'd already be signed up. The..." He waves a hand vaguely. "...rebel alliance, or whatever it is they call themselves. I suspect you met one of 'em, if she was goin' on about ROMAC."

'I don't know, we only met the once; she picked me up when I woke up here, got me to a motel. I was-- pretty out of it at the time.'

Which is his excuse for a) having somewhat fuzzy memories of the conversation, and b) not having asked further into the relevant subjects at the time.

'So this-- rebel alliance,' which, really, that's more than a little Star Wars. 'They house refugees? People who've come through the Rift. And what else?'

Really, he'd been making a Star Wars reference. The Rebels are just the Rebels here, but let Sam think what he likes. It's interesting to him that Sam seems to have had a mess of not-good happening in his life way before he fell through the rift. If the people he's met so far have been any indication, it seems like some sort of theme.

"Keeping tabs, I suspect. Easier to do that when you know where everyone is. Provide the roof, keep everyone in check. It's a good game. Keeping tabs on that thing, too. The...rift. The dimensional portal."

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