Survival Of The Fittest

Kelsey chuckled at that. Put an extra little edge on it to make sure it was known. Not fake, just... accentuated. Both to get the point across through her mask and as a mark of her genuine appreciation for it. Laughter was a scare commodity these days. Almost as scarce as a half-decent sheet of paper and something to mark it with that could make a proper stroke and not get all over her hands. That the subjects of that levity should be reminiscence on the place where she'd almost fucking frozen to death all alone, and a jab at the notion that some fuck with a stick was probably going to beat her to death sooner or later, wasn't really what she'd have chosen, but any port in a storm.

"Shame. I thought I really spruced the place up with my central heating. Or whatever these things are made of."

She lifted her hand off the sheet of cardboard and twirled the latest of her burnt twigs around in her fingers. The sketch below was well on its way to reaching that point of a creative endeavor where some people called it finished and the artist called it close enough to stop fucking around with. And with it grew a crumbling patina along the outside edge of her little finger. And the tips of the others, where she held her makeshift markers, and on most of the rest of her exposed skin there for good measure. And she should be glad the glove covering the rest of her drawing hand was already black.

"Really wish I had something to draw properly with. I'm halfway to finger-painting here. Back in the Before Times, with my tablet, I..." she paused, blinked, continued on a slightly different tact that she'd expected, "there was—I had this glove, you know, so you don't make extra marks 'cuz it's touch-sensitive, but it's non-conductive I think, so it can't tell that you're touching it."

She stared at the little donut she'd drawn, and decided against trying to spice up the poor, simple filling she'd lent it.

"Anyway, it wasn't a fuckin' mess like this," she stumbled on, just to leave something else hanging in the air.

She got a laugh back, Connie was calling that a win.

Kelsey spoke a little about drawing. The tools she had, and the lack thereof. How rude to suppress art to prevent hidden messages or somesuch.

To reminisce about something like a tablet and a simple accessory. That was very real. Very... human. This conversation was the closest Connie had got to a connection the whole time she'd been here.

Almost comforting. Seductively so. Talk the time away. Discuss plans that had not and would not be. Discuss luxuries that were no longer, and would not come again. Relax. Settle. Turn from a conversation to a companionship, to accompaniment, to... another pair off the conveyor. Something to be examined once, perhaps twice by the truly morbidly curious, and then set back on a shelf, never to be seen again.

Connie wasn't going to gather dust. Not if she could help it.

"Make it out alive and someday they'll be talking about these as your most influential pieces. Talk about whether or not you can really call it art if you're not strapped to a bomb," Connie flashed a grin that was nothing but teeth, picked up her stick, and stepped over to the door. "I have someplace to be. If I find a pencil, I promise I'll think of you. Later!"

With a cheery wave, she was gone.

((Connie continued in Beautiful Dead))

Kelsey watched Connie go. Should have stopped her. Could have. Maybe. At the very least, it would have been nice to hand over the little sketch she'd made, a token of the fact that they were alive, that they could create, that they could do more than sit around and wait for the death of their person or their morals. A message that would get rubbed and scrubbed away in no time on that shitty canvas with those makeshift pencils. Oh well.

She sighed and shrugged and left it where it lay instead, on full display for anyone else who may come wandering through. And then she stood and gathered up her funky axe and left. She, too, had places to be, and things to do before the end.

((Kelsey Brewer continued elsewhere))