2019-07-26 - Ixnay On The Eleton-Skay

The end of July is pretty much right in the thick of summer and everyone is feelin- actually, not so much. It's warm instead of hot and the humidity has been tapered off by a steady rain. For now, the skies are a little clearer and that means that people have started to filter outdoors to get some fresh air now that they know they won't be instantly drenched. Noah has wandered about half way down the length of the dock and is now sitting on a box. The box undoubtedly belongs to someone, someone that isn't Noah. But it doesn't stop him from using it as furniture or from lighting his cigarette and enjoying a smoke whilst on it. He watches the people passing with an unphased, disinterested and most importantly, bored, expression.

"I don't think this is the way back to the camper," comes a voice from the very end (or is it the beginning? so philosophical!) of the dock. Maddie stands with her hands on her hips, frowning at her companion as she looks one way down the beach and then the other way. "I think we're lost, how can we be lost? This beach isn't even very big!" Indeed it isn't. But she spies Noah there sitting on the box that isn't his, and throws up her hands to wave at him. "Excuse me! EXCUSE ME! Have you seen a camper around here? It's white and brown and has a skeleton in the passenger seat?" Don't ask.

How Duncan manages not to lose all his chill when Maddie just goes around telling STRANGERS about their SKELETON will have to remain a mystery. All he does, after spinning around in a circle in place on the docks, scratching the back of his head in a lost daze, is rock back onto his heels for a second, then put himself in gear and hustle after Maddie. "Ixnay on the eleton-skay, Maddie," he says out of the corner of his mouth, super-subtly. He also waves at Noah, very normal and cool.

Noah smokes on his cigarette and watches Maddie with gradually widening eyes. Well, this was definitely more interesting than just staring off at random people passing him by. "Sure. I think I saw it getting towed away to the police station. Having human remains in the passenger seat of your car is frown upon in this town. Not that I'm passing judgment, I'm not the law." He taps ash off onto the dock with little regard to the mess he's making. He waves his cigarette hand at Duncan. "Sup."

"I didn't know you spoke Russian," says Maddie to Duncan with a blink. Learn something new every day, apparently! But she marches ahead up to Noah and the docks, eyes bulging right out of her head when he says that stuff about the police. "No! Shit, are you kidding? Fuck!" She throws up her hands, "This is fantastic. It's a prop, they can't prove it's not a prop! It's a prop," she lies to Noah, but rest assured, she's a good liar. "This is just great. I knew we shouldn't have come to Washington," she puffs air into her cheeks and exhales in a rush.

Maintaining his earlier cool, Duncan slaps his palm against his forehead with a loud clap and says, "What?!" Which is about as cool a reaction as he'll ever have. "Are you serious?! This is just a complete miscarriage of justice is what it is, I'm absolutely going to - " Get out his phone and start pushing buttons on it, telling the buttons he's pushing about how "there are supposed to be LAWS in this country, laws and due process and chains of custody and even if it's not a prop, they can't just kidnap a skeleton like that. What was the number on the car?" He asks this of Noah like he fully expects that the man is gonna have this answer; no worries, Maddie, he's on the case here, phone to ear.

"Mmmhm..." Noah 'says' to Maddie between puffs of his cigarette. He holds some smoke in his lungs before slowly letting it escape his lips and drift up into the sky. "Yeah, definitely. Like, some kids walked up to it and they were all 'See something, say something!' and they dialed the shit out of 911. Then there were some cops and you know, one of the bomb sniffing canines?" Mmhmm. He smokes again. "It was a whole thing. Then they towed it away." Wide eyes are turned on Duncan when he demands the number of the car. "Of which car? Your camper? Shouldn't you know that? I feel like you guys should take better care of your 'props'. You can't go leaving them all unsupervised."

Maddie leeeannnns forward to squint at Noah, as though she were some kind of walking, talking human lie detector and could just know if he was telling the truth. But alas, she is not, and she's just left kicking the dock with the toe of her sneakers. "I hate this stupid fucking town," she decides, "Something's been weird around here. I mean first we LOSE the ENTIRE CAMPER, and now it's STOLEN by the POLICE?!" Talk about bad luck. Then she realizes Duncan is.. calling the police.. about their kidnapped camper. And their skeleton. And she starts to swat him. "Get off the phone, you can't just CALL the police! We're going to have to go down to the station"

"Kids!" Duncan repeats that noun like that just really kicks this whole situation into high gear. KIDS are involved; NOW it's serious. "Uh hi, is this the police? Yeah hi, I need to report a thing - hold on." He takes the phone away from his ear and blinks at Noah a couple times. "Why would I ask for the number off our camper from a random stranger? That doesn't even make sense. You have to think about things before you say them." He taps the front of his forehead with his index finger, then puts the phone back to his ear and informs Maddie, "Maybe YOU can't call the police, but I just did so. Hi, police person? Yes, hi, is there a supervisor-cop around I can talk to?"

"It's not technically stolen by the police if they're taking it in for evidence." Noah breathes in some more cancer chemicals, leaning away from Maddie when she starts to squint at him. He gives her a look for that and furrows his eyebrows fiercely. "Anyway they're probably scouring it for evidence about the murder as we speak." As Duncan starts to actually talk to the police on his phone, Noah begins to smile. It's such a rare thing. Too bad it's happening because he's BLATENTLY fucking with these complete strangers. He watches on with the kind of intense fascination one might have if they found a really great tv show. "Yeah, you're right. My bad. Seems like you got it under control though." Duncan is given a thumbs up for his fine efforts. "Good man you got there."

"FOR THE MURDER?!" Maddie squeaks aloud, clapping her hands over her mouth when she realizes that Duncan's literally on the phone with the literal police right now. Wide, expressive brown eyes bounce between Duncan and Noah, before she drops her hands and frowns Noah-ward. "We didn't murder anybody. You can't prove anything," she huffs at Noah, folding her arms over her chest and putting her chin up. "And he is a good man. A very good man. A better man than you," so there. To Duncan, "Don't tell them about the skeleton," she hisses.

"Wait, hold on. Some guy is confessing to murder, I think." Duncan pulls the phone away - "I SAID HOLD ON." Ahem, Duncan pulls the phone away. "Who'd you murder? Oh!" His eyes get very big when what Maddie says gets through to him. Holding the phone at arm's length, he shouts, "Haha just kidding, no one murdered anything, you have a nice day now!" (Boring conversation anyway.) "I think we're gonna have to go down there. To rescue Jimmy. And get our stuff back. The lady on the phone was not helpful. Where's the cop shop?" He smiles at Noah, only a little bit manic.

"Hey, hey. Like I said, I'm not here to judge you. If you murdered Jimmy and melted all of the flesh off of his bones and now you drive around with him in the passenger seat of your camper? That's totally your business. If you want to escape the police and need fresh identities after this, you let me know. I've got a guy." That big smile is still fixed on Noah's expression as he watches Duncan get off the phone quickly. "It's that way," he says, pointing in one direction. Is it really that way? Well, apparently Maddie and Duncan won't know until they get there. Or maybe they'll find out when they get lost and google the address and find out it's in the opposite direction.

"Duncan! Ixnay on the urder-may," does this mean Maddie thinks she can speak Russian, too? Anyway, she pulls her fingers through her hair in an exasperated fashion, looking back down the dock before she returns to glare at Noah. "That isn't even how it happened," she says of Jimmy and his melted flesh, "He's a prop. I'm an actress! He's my.. co.. star.." She starts looking a little twitchy, frowning down to her feet. "How much does a new identity cost?"

Sorry, Duncan checked out of the whole rest of the conversation. He's totally tunnel-visioned on Noah right now, leaning toward him like it's important to physically get closer so as not to miss a word of the reply. "Do we get to pick our identities? Like, anyone we want?" Beat. "Dibs on Harrison Ford!"

"Like... $110 bucks." Which sounds like a pretty arbitrary number that Noah may or may not have just completely made up on the spot. He mostly just nods his head when Maddie continues to claim that's not how it happened. It's okay, he totally belives you. He flicks ash onto the ground again. There's a moment where he stares a little blankly at Duncan and his demand to be Harrison Ford, then it turns to a frown. Slowly, "Okay. But that one is going to be $210 bucks."

"A hundred and ten dollars?" Maddie stares at Noah as though he's grown two heads. "Who has a hundred and ten dollars just laying around? That's like two hundred and twenty dollars for the both of us! Fuck," she puffs out another sigh, dropping down onto the side of the dock with her legs dangling over the edge. "You can't be Harrison Ford, D. There's already a Harrison Ford, you can't just take somebody's identity. Can you?" she looks to Noah, as though he were the authority on identity stealing, and then vigorously shakes her head. "No, don't answer that. Of course you can't be Harrison Ford, I don't have three hundred and twenty bucks!"

"A hundred and ten. Plus two hundred and ten." Duncan looks at Maddie while she's talking to him. He never stops looking at her even for a moment. His lips also never stop moving, right up till he reaches the conclusion, "So for three hundred and twenty bucks, I can be Han Solo, and you can be Princess Leia, Maddie. Princess Leia. Think about it for a minute. It doesn't cost any more because Carrie Fisher is dead, right? Like, I feel like we should get a discount if she's gonna be a dead person, since they can't exactly press charges." Just ask Jimmy. "We can get three hundred and twenty bucks, that's easy." He turns in place again, looking around the boardwalk for likely places to find $320.

Noah should probably try and score $210 for Princess Leia too, but it's amazing that anyone is considering giving him $320 for IDs that are definitely not going to work. So when Duncan says it's the discounted price because Carrie Fisher is dead, he nods quickly. "Yeah. I mean, she's not using her identity now. That makes it a lot less complicated."

YOU DON'T KNOW THAT THEY WON'T WORK. DUNCAN CAN PASS FOR HARRISON FORD. FUCK YOUR META.

Excuse me, I need to open up a new peeve on MSB about people hating my meta. FUCK YOU.

Maddie steadies a look on Duncan as he does his head math and suggests they be Leia and Solo, her brows knitting together. Is she seriously considering this? She's seriously considering this. "No," she finally decides, shaking her head. "We can't, because we'll need a new identity for Jimmy, too, and who would he be? Chewbacca? Chewie's dead now, too," she frowns, slumping forward towards her knees and frowning into the water. "This place sucks. Why didn't you stop them?" that question is lobbed to Noah. "The camper's our house! You let the police steal our entire house."

"Or C-3PO." Duncan suggests the droid alternative like it's the Chebacca-thing that's really gumming up the gears on this plan. But also he turns on Noah quick now that Maddie has, making it all the way back around from his survey of the boardwalk (there was no $320 in sight, curses!) and turning a frown on him. "Yeah, man. Super not cool, letting the cops steal our whole house. I would never let the cops steal your whole entire house - not to mention your buddy's skeleton."

Please, everyone appreciate all five-foot-nothing of Maddie and five-foot-six of Duncan dressing down six-foot-two Noah. This mental image is priceless.

"Prop! He's a prop," Maddie chimes in, because she's holding onto this lie.

"Sorry. Your skeleton buddy's prop." Duncan fixed it.

"I don't get involved with the police. I definitely don't get involved with dead bodies and the police." Noah gets to his feet and abandons the box he's been sitting on. It's easy to stare down a tall man down when he's sitting. Once he stands, he is indeed, 6'2 and looking fairly unconcerned with their displeasure. He flicks his cigarette onto the ground and grinds it out with his heel. "When you get your $320 bucks together, you can come by here and I'll hook you up. I'll throw in the corpse's new ID for free." From his wallet he produces a... business card! How professional. Abernathy Ammunitions or whatever the name of his gun shop is called. "I gotta go though. Good luck getting your whole house back."

Maddie makes sure to stand up - and get back to all her five feet and nothing inches - when Noah gets off his box. It is she who will accept the card, thank-you-very-much, flicking it as she looks cautiously from the business name to Noah, then back to the business name. "This doesn't look like a fake ID shop," she frowns, "Do you work in the box?" she goes to nudge said box with her foot. She may be considering pushing it into the bay, seeing as he had their entire house towed by the cops. "Do you sell guns? Or just ammunition?"

Excuse Duncan, he will just pluck that card right from Maddie's fingers, stopping her from flicking it so he can hold it up and consider it importantly. "Hey, how tall is Harrison Ford anyway?" That he asks this after looking from the card to the gigantic Noah is just coincidence, don't read into it at all. Also, authentically, "Thanks, man, I also hope we have good luck getting our whole house back. We'll come park it in front of," glance at card, "Abernathy Ammunitions just as soon as we find it."

Noah fixes Maddie with a serious look again, once more squinting his eyes and borderline glowering a bit. "No, I do not live in the box. There are no fake ID shops, they're- look. Who are you going to trust? Me or the cops who might want to put you away for life?" He starts walking away from them, hands held up in a questioning fashion. He makes the universal symbol for 'text me', which is just him wiggling his thumbs. "I'll hook you up!" Then once he's reasonably certain that Maddie isn't going to kick him off the dock, he turns his back on them and leaves. He shouts as he departs, "You're cool man, you could totally be Harrison!"

Duncan is ready to buy whatever bridges Noah is selling. "I dunno about you, but I would believe him. He never stole our whole house from us." What's going to be amazing is when they find their trailer right over there where they left it... and Duncan still is like "but that guy definitely will get us awesome new identifies."