The rain is wiping off the windshield frantically in the storm but there is no way forward for the time being. As if it would help with the situation at all. He knows not how long he has been sat here, waiting on the storm to end. His forehead is rested against the top of the steering wheel, a neutral expression on his face.
In his mind's eye he sees the first three minutes of Fellini's 8 ½ (1963). He imagines his car filling up with smoke, the struggle to get free, flying out and into the sky. He sees his foot held by a tether to the sand at the beach as he floats there, until with a particularly sharp tug, he falls into oblivion. Much like in the film, it is at this time he wakes with a start from this daydream of magnificently small proportion.
His head cranes about, as if there is anything new to be seen. He remembers the old basement he was sitting in a while ago. Concrete and rust. A distant drip, drip, drip. And what was it for? He stares at the building before him. It is dilapidated. Moreover, it's his time to find somewhere new. To perhaps wear a new face. The past few years weigh on him like the rocks with Giles Corey. He grimaces. More weight. He smirks. It is necessary.
There's three equally spaced out knocks on the window, pretty quickly. Outside stands a woman, around 5'6. Black and blue hair soaked by the rain, but she doesn't seem to mind. Her smile is wide, frankly a little too wide, seeming almost inhuman. She holds some pamphlets close to her chest as she knocks again.
Smile, however infinitesimal, is vanished into obscurity instantly; he has been caught off-guard, to say the least. Dramatically, his head pans toward the lady and she comes into view. His eyes droop with dismay at the sight of this, as they might have regardless of who was at the window. For an unusually long amount of time, Para contemplates whether he should roll down the window. He is not visibly unnerved by the smile. He has never been one to turn down the requests of others, as far as he's concerned.
Well, in this case it is no different. However there is something teeming—nay, utterly relegated to the unconscious mind, where it is so spotless—that speaks to the unfortunate and numerous vicissitudes to come should he remove this barrier, open his mouth whose lips are so dry they are lightly glued together. More quickly than before, Para's head pans away and into the backseat of the car. He looks at the numerous blankets that are piled up on top of one another. Well, it is simply a young woman with a pamphlet or two. No more or no less. Are those pamphlets going to be readable after sustaining the waterlogging? Most likely. He will just have to be careful with them. He turns to look back at the woman. The window is still not open. The woman continues to smile, knocking again, and then gesturing for Para to roll the window down. The pamphlets seem to not be affected by the rain at all.
Without breaking eye contact with the pamphlets that appear to have been rendered water resistant somehow, assuming his continued neutral (if unhappy) manner, he slowly rolls the window down using the manual hand crank. He leans back slightly in the seat of the car. It is torn, filthy. Para's raucous aroma is revealed. The glass that separated them no longer lessens the acne scars; no longer lessens the greasiness of every individual strand of hair; no longer lessens the stains of the flannel and the jeans; the flushed and yet somehow simultaneously pale complexion he carries. He does not make any attempt to speak at first, but eventually releases a flat, dull, uninterested "What."
It is not even laced with the hint of a question being asked. It is simply a statement. Disconnected, even, from the events at hand, as he looks back up, allowing his eyes to meet her teeth, and then her eyes.
She grimaces slightly at the scent of the car and Para's general surrounding, stepping back slightly.
"Hi! I'm just gonna. hand you this." She kind of tosses the pamphlet into Para's car, making sure it lands in the car but making sure she doesn't have her hand inside or making contact with anything inside. "Please read through this! Let me know if you have any questions comments or concerns!"
He doesn't even seem to react much to having the pamphlet tossed at him. He stares up at her. "What is this?" he inquires, now somewhat more interested than he was before. He looks away from her for a second, and into the backseat again, before he releases a dog sigh and looks back at her. "Wh-" he cuts himself off to look down at the ground. It is giving way. He blinks. It is not giving way. He looks back up at her. "What is this?" he repeats, his accent having shifted considerably. "Auh." He snorts. Distantly, somewhere in that mind, he hears the eloquent squeaks and screeches of a late Coltrane, or an early Brötzmann perhaps more accurately for this situation. He almost thinks it is happening. There is a CD player. It is sitting behind her. No there isn't. He bares his teeth for less than a second. They are yellow, rotting, crooked. He feels his eyes shrivelling up inside his skull.
She steps back again. "Pamphlet!" It's bright pink with binary text and various images, there's also a discord link on the back. She continues to look at him, slightly concerned. Not slightly. Very. She's really scraping bottom of the barrel, huh. Para has not broken eye contact. Maybe he has not even blinked. Perhaps this is the source of his physical discomfort. He reminds himself to blink, moisten them.
"Pamphlet," he says, as if a sufferer of echolalia. For a second he bumbles his way into coherent speech, slurred and disjointed sounds echoing out of his throat: "I'm... shhhhh mmmm, uh, not sure if you have, err, uh, if you've have got the right pairson. The right, mm, person. The right."
Most concerningly now, he pulls the handle. The car door opens. A couple of cans of 7-Up spill out and onto the ground. He exits the vehicle, what looks to be a very old vehicle itself, and steps on one of the cans, crushing them. Some fluid leaks out. He looks at the back door of the car, through the window, into the backseat again, before looking back at this woman. "I'm Greg. It's quaint. But the purpose–the, the, the purpose—" he cuts himself off. Is it still raining. His nose bleeds. It is wiping back and forth in the water. "The purpose of your. Information. I want to know. I want to." He looks down. A cockroach is drowning as the water slips down into a crack in the asphalt by his right foot. He picks the cockroach up and holds it firmly between his thumb and index finger, still not breaking eye contact the entire time. Lucille is honestly flabbergasted. She just blinks a few times, smiling again. Whatever this thing is that she's gazing upon, it's weird. She needs this energy in her life. Deity In Death needs this energy.
"The purpose is to.. uh. You ever join a club before? Like, a DnD club?" She is clearly unsettled.
Club. Club. Club. Club. Club. Club. Club. Club. Club. Club? Club? Club?
"Yes, I was in the Act 2, auhh, d–... department," he says, his accent having morphed again into what sounds to be Received Pronunciation as it is taught to American actors, and he isn't even sure if what he says is true or not. Perhaps there is some kernel of truth lost in there, like the 7-Up as it dissolves into rainwater, like memories being lost, descending into the chasm in the asphalt that sits about two inches from the end of his right boot. It is a damned shame that Fran is not here with him right now. He almost wants to laugh, and he even tries to, but his lips have once again become locked together. The muscles that may form a smirk failing him in this instant. A fly lands on his forehead or it doesn't, what the Hell does it matter.
"Club," he says out loud, finally. Then he laughs like a fucking maniac. "If you could, ha! haha! If you could, mm, call it one. Oh, lord. You are funny. A DnD club. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. I don't think I have.
"
But he won't lie
the thought is rather inviting, in such a contradictory sense.
Para remembers being fourteen.
Lucille is fucking horrified. "Okay then! Well, now's your chance!"
Para says nothing more. The pamphlet's meaning is revealed, and therefore the necessity of this conversation has reached its end. Almost instantly, like a liquid himself dissolving into the rain, he is sitting in the car again, staring ahead and up the driveway. Then he is driving.
He can already read the binary. It comes as natural as anything else does now. After all, nothing else is really standing in the way. He wonders where Francesca might have wandered off to in his brilliant stupor, illuminated by some unforeseeable light. He comes to his stop in someone else's vacant driveway. He doesn't even know what time it is, or where he is. Fortunately enough, he recognises the back of the card as a link. It is time for him to search. Using a battering ram he has, he smashes the door off its hinges and walks in. Nobody is home. He looks around and, for some reason he himself doesn't seem to understand, wanders upstairs and into a study. He steals a phone and gets back into his car after a successful attempt to open it. What the fuck is a Discord.