20% Angel, 80% Devil

     [  Private : Arthas Menethil  ]

     We need to talk.


     [ Public : Except Arthas ]

     [Letty is outside the engine room.  She'd be inside the engine room, except there's a trio of dead felhunters piled to one side of the door and she's just gathering what little patience she has left to haul them up to the deck from the lowermost level, which means she's currently sitting on the floor with her back against the wall.  The mess is still just visible from the side of the frame.  The feed crackles the entire time she's talking.]

     Did we lose anyone this time?  Is everyone back?

     Because we've got a problem, and its name is Arthas.  What are we even going to do?  What can we do?  Zero would be more a solution to buy us time at this point, but that's as far as I've gotten.


     [ Spam : Later : Lloyd Henreid  ]

    [Letty is tired.  Not the kind of bone tired that she keeps seeing in the people around her, but just the good, busy kind of tired, the kind of tired that means she's been useful today and she'll be useful tomorrow.  She hadn't meant to complain about being bored, but she supposes this is what she gets, and she's going to do what she can now that she does.

     And what that is, is ironically more of the same as she was doing before, only it's grosser now.  There's blood and viscera to clean up and she does it stoically but it doesn't help her keep her mind off all the things it proves really happened.  She really did some of this herself, with a wrench she would've already thrown over the side if it weren't Dom's.  Half her friends really died.  They really had something like a dimension of hell wage a war on them, and they wouldn't have won, not at all, if it weren't for the Admiral popping everyone back up like one of those whackamole games.  If it was the Admiral.  Letty managed to avoid it herself, thanks mostly to Merlin, but she wouldn't have lasted much longer on her own if everyone that went down had stayed down.

    And that was partially her fault.  She'd been Arthas's warden all last month, and she hadn't known a goddamn thing.  She's not accepting full blame for it - that, she's pretty sure, is the Admiral's fault for not giving her anything more than a name to go on if he really expected her to do anything - but it's there.  She could've stopped it.  She didn't.  So she cleans, she repairs, she eats from her own cabinets and she sleeps in Dom's bed and she visits her friends in the infirmary, including her inmate, several times a day.  She never stays long.  She doesn't really know what to say and anyway, no one wants to hear that shit.  Everyone has bigger problems.  But she shows up and if they're asleep sometimes she just sits with them, and she does so dutifully and with her dry, stubborn kind of decent humor, the best she can manage right now.

    But the day she turns up there and finds Lloyd is gone she knows that this is as close to normal as she can really take for granted from the Barge; she doesn't think Lloyd is really planning anything on the scale that Arthas did, but god knows what else waiting too long could let her fail to get in front of.  The way Lloyd was talking, it might just be him that pays the price for her ignorance, and even that would be too much for her to handle right now.  She picks up her last six pack of beer from  her refrigerator - Corona this time, she figured out how to make requests just before the shit hit the fan - and Lloyd's file, and turns up in front of his door.]

     Lloyd?  It's Letty.



     [ Private : Omar Little ]

     [After a disappointing turnout from the ship at large, Letty is still not ready to give up.  It's just going to take a little more elbow grease.  Specific visits, as it were.]

     Was it really two years ago you were here before?  That long?