scheme26

Prompt: what you don't know can't hurt you [third person sample]

2011-03-02T16:58:45Z

alternate title: all of edgar's prompts are about dead people

Who: Edgar Holloway (and NPCs Cutter, Jacques and Buckley)
Where: His Toronto gang-house
When: Immediately prior to this entry, mid-April 2022.
What: Edgar returns home from Cicero and finds out one of the gangmembers has dropped dead for no visible reason, and nobody's sure what to do in the face of the implications it raises.
Warnings: It's Edgar, there's swearing. Also a dead guy who looks like he's sleeping. That's probably it.

~~~

What You Don't Know Can't Hurt You

"What do you mean you just fucking found him like this? How'd he die?"

Medical knowledge: it's so easily taken for granted. Fuck that dumbass doctor for not being able to diagnose me, I have shit to do, I'm busy, I'm late, what a quack, what a waste of med school, what a waste of taxes. Edgar had a dangerous fever and a hospital stay once, as a baby; his mum was scared it was swine flu, but he was fine. There's cancer in his dad's side of the family, or something like that, he can't quite remember. He also can't quite remember the Science classes he took, back before the plague made school kind of obsolete, but there might have been a biology unit or two. That's the extent of it, Edgar's medical knowledge, if we're talking formal training. There's smarter guys out here, though, who finished highschool, even University or College. The problem here is that nobody knows fuck-all about the plague anyway, so it doesn't much matter how smart you are. The people who knew things mostly died. If any of them survived, they haven't come knocking.

They probably know better.

Think, Edgar, what do you know? Think. What do you know?

It's bacteria, not a virus. That doesn't mean anything to him. You don't know you've got it 'til you die and antibiotics don't make a dent. That's not too helpful either. It's better to be around a living plague-victim than a dead one. Something about spores, it turns into tiny spores and becomes airborne, you can't see them but they're infectious. Don't touch the body, don't touch its clothes. Don't breathe its air. Don't dump the body in water. Change your clothes. For the love of God, don't fucking spread the spores.

(But Edgar, what don't you know?)

Edgar's ex-girlfriend's sister was a nurse. Wasn't that girl a nurse? Edgar, wasn't Goldie's sister a nurse?

That's what somebody's saying to him as he stares down at Blue's body, but what he's thinking about is how the fuck this guy could've just died. "Edgar, wasn't Goldie's sister a nurse? We should get someone-- We don't know how he died, man, Blue, he was always complaining about something, always coughing. He could've died of anything, right?" It's Buckley talking, and his question hangs in the dusty air. Four men with crossed arms are warily hugging the walls, and there's one peacefully dead on the floor dead-centre, but not one of them wants to answer him. The Québecois kid, they call him Jacques, is shaking his head, pale, and whispers something in rapid unintelligible French to his brother Cutter.

Edgar whirls on him. "You shut the fuck up. Whatever you're saying, shut the fuck up, 'cause that shit isn't gonna help." The kid is meek, and he shrinks towards the door.

Cutter's accented voice is calm and stony. "He said we need to leave the body. He doesn't want to die. Everyone else left the house, Edgar, they're scared shitless."

"We don't know it's the plague, it could be anything," Buckley says again.

"We don't know fuck-all, Buckley." Edgar rubs his temples a moment. "Jacques, where'd the rest of'em go?"

The kid is silent, and Cutter answers for him. "They went to the old house, took a bunch of the supplies. Said they're gonna wait for us."

(They don't know that longterm exposure to the asbestos that clung to his father's shirts had slowly triggered malignant mesothelioma, and that Blue's death has nothing to do with the plague. His father died of the same thing, but his body was thrown into the underground like the rest of the plague victims.)

"Okay," Edgar says, and then with more confidence, "Okay. You guys go. I'm gonna deal with this, I'll be right behind you."

Buckley stays rooted where he is, but Jacques doesn't need to be told twice, and is out the door so quickly it takes Cutter a moment to realize his brother's fled. He hesitates, stepping towards Edgar. "You need any help? Qu'est-ce que tu feras? If he had it--" Cutter flicks a look to Buckley, who is staring at the floor, "if he had it, we all do."

(They also don't know that they each already are carriers of the so-called plague, which lays dormant in their bodies. They can't see the bacteria sporing off from Blue's corpse, but neither do they realize it will never have an effect on them.)

"Just get out, Cutter, I got this. Don't say that kind of shit to anybody, okay? It's just between us. Make somethin' up, he died some other way, all right? Don't fucking say anything. Make sure your brother stays shut-up too." Edgar grabs a blanket from the bed, kneeling down beside the body of his packmate. "Buckley, if you're gonna fucking stand in here then help me wrap him."

Cutter is still staring at him, jaw set and eyes cold. Edgar says again, "Go."

Only when Cutter and Buckley have finally left does Edgar start pacing, Zanzibar key tightly clenched between his fingers.
"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, what the fuck am I doing?"

extended reality info: wildlife, overgrowth & disrepair in the city

2009-05-10T21:55:13Z

Ever since I first started conceptualizing what Edgar's world looks like, I've been hitting roadblocks that I just can't think past without a bit of researching and writing down. Finally, prompted by someone asking if Edgar has any sort of refrigeration, I asked around and googled about the longevity of iceboxes... and it was all bets off from there. :|

Life After Humans (as well as Dib's help ty darling) helped me tonnes with figuring out how fast things would have fallen apart, though in that discovery channel show, everybody is hypothetically gone instantly, whereas in Edgar's reality, about 94% of humanity died off over six or so years. So I'm not going to try to imagine exactly when things stopped working, because it would depend too much on the circumstances, like who gets sick first, who happens to be immune, etc.

Present-Day Toronto (circa 2021)
General overgrowth/disrepair: Wood-frame brick houses are largely over-run by climbing vines and moss, as well as pests like termites and roaches that rot the frames. Some of them are inhabitable, but many of them are not (unless you like getting cozy with those sorts of things). Rioting and looting has also destroyed many shopfronts and houses alike. Concrete buildings had a better time of it, though the taller ones are uninhabitable on higher levels, once their windows start falling in/out.
Roads in the downtown core are somewhat fallen-in in places. Burst water mains and pipes have further eroded them, but the main culprit in most places is the overgrowth of weeds. The topsoil formed by them is thorough-but-patchy downtown, but has almost completely overtaken roads in the suburbs and outside the city and become genuine soil.
Subway tunnels and stations are mostly flooded [except for the above-ground stations], and are generally disgusting and infested with all sorts of subterranean life, i.e. bats. A few subway stations were used as unofficial dumps to burn bodies after public transit was shut down.

Electricity, electronics, technology: Good luck. Electricity has been unheard of within the city for years. Small communities outside the city (and around the world) may maintain limited electricity, but that's it. Batteries, previously in short supply, are now near impossible to find, due to gangs hoarding supplies. Guns are worth an arm and a leg, and their bullets are hoarded as well, used mostly for gathering food rather than wasted on fights. (Other weapons, besides knives, are often makeshift melee weapons, i.e. pipes and debris.) While cars are still sitting around in pretty big numbers, they're often vandalized, destroyed, and/or rusting/degrading away, and there's no air in the tires (if there are intact tires left). Gas stations are empty and looted.

Wildlife: Once the overgrowth began, the animals rushed in. Entire herds of white-tailed deer roam the city, as well as small mammals and other game herbivores (i.e. mice, rats, squirrels, rabbits, hares, beavers, deer, caribou, moose). Close on their heels, of course, were small predators (coyotes, foxes, bobcats) and large ones (wolves, black bears, grizzlies). The wolf population in particular has multiplied exponentially. There are also packs of feral ex-housepet dogs and nomadic cats (though the majority of smaller stubby-legged dogs didn't make it). Some zoo animals escaped their confinement, but even those mostly died by the end of the first winter; that said, the occasional exotic, out-of-place animal can be seen roaming.

Food, cooking, eating: Meat is actually the most abundant food source, followed by canned goods (which are hoarded, and regularly looted from houses, though the number of unexplored homes is dwindling dangerously). Finding a sick or dying animal is like winning the lottery, except a lot more common. With enough manpower, you can chase off some predators (like dogs) and steal their kills, or else hunt animals yourself. All gangs have hunting parties. Ex-housepets that are still human-friendly are often killed and eaten, though they're more and more rare. Everything is cooked over a fire, sometimes in old cast-iron stoves and fireplaces.

Many gangs, pack included, keep at least some poultry and so have access to eggs. Only high-rankers can get their hands on these. Between other gangs and wild animals, it's hard to do this sort of thing.

While berries are relatively easy to find (just be careful what you eat), fruit and vegetables are near-impossible without trading, because most growth locations are claimed and fiercely guarded. The Pack has an alliance with a much smaller group that lies mostly in the suburbs and runs like a commune on a makeshift farm, with apple trees and berry bushes, as well as some vegetables. Still, there are very limited supplies, and it's a relatively long trip to make, so vitamin deficiency is ridiculously common. To combat this, they often dry their extra fruit and pickle their vegetables for longevity.

Bread? What's bread? Forget about it. Other cooked foods are more common as time goes on, however, because people have begun getting organizes and trading goods for greater variety.