video; un: shouto

[swellter]

My name's Shouto Todoroki. I'm a student from UA and a recent arrival to Trench. I wasn't in the other place, Deerington, I think they call it, but I'm supposed to be a Sleeper like them. 

[ Not that he understands what that means exactly. Too many questions brew in his head. Too  many new experiences, including waking up as a squid in the ocean which disturbs him less than what he's found out about this place. Blood magic. At least that's what it seems to him. He's still grappling with all the information thrown at him and there's conflict in his eyes, not obvious but visible. Unwilling to reveal anymore he leaves it there. He needed to make himself visible in case someone from his world was here and with that accomplished, he falls back to something more mundane and easy to grasp. Besides, he needs a place to sleep. ]

The abandon homes. Someone said we can claim one for our own. Is that true? 

Comments

[swellter]

[ Right, a cosmic apocalypse that rewrote the very essence of reality, but not much more than that. Thankfully, he has no clue what happened back there, he's happy in his doe-eyed ignorance. Starting with that location. Maine? It's not a country he recognizes... maybe a city? He's not all that knowledgeable of provinces outside Japan but it sounds familiar. ]

Most small towns aren't cosmically haunted.

[ That he knows of! Not that he knows all that much about small towns. He's sheltered, so most things he'll probably accept but cosmic hauntings is a little too much for even this gullible idiot. ]

If money doesn't exist then how do we get things like food and water?

[ He can make sense of the abandoned houses. They're mostly dilapidated. The whole 'one man's trash is another man's treasure' deal is set in motion. But what about the other basics they need to survive? He can't imagine food and water are just free unless there's an organized government and even then he suspects they'd want something in return and in a place like this he's not sure he's willing to pay without knowing the exact exchange rate. ]

[klussy]

Maybe not in general, but trust me, most small towns in the entire New England region are haunted to absolute hell and back. Or cursed. Or both. (The ignorance was fairly mutual. Being from the 1950s and a small town in America? Eddie probably wouldn't be able to name even ten other countries without really thinking about it. Then again, he had stopped going to school after around twelve. That didn't do him any favors.

So high-five for being mutually sheltered from the world.)

Probably a barter system. Or you just take it. This might be one of those weird communities that realizes profiting off of basic necessities like water and shelter is actually kind of fucked up.

(If Eddie hadn't already lived through two mildly degraded societies with depleted resources, he'd be asking the same exact question. Especially growing up poor? Yeah, nothing in life was for free.)

I bet it's a squid pro quo thing. I mean - er. Quid pro quo.

[swellter]

[ New England rings a bell but he can't remember if it's Europe or America he's thinking about, not that it matters. It doesn't change their situation. It's odd though, it's the second time someone from the other place mentioned hauntings. Should he be worried? ]

A barter system. [ He murmurs to himself. ] It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing.

[ It's not like he has any money on him, and even if he did he doubts this place accepts yen. ]

Was there a barter system in place in Deerington?

whoop sorry for delay.

[klussy]

(He absolutely should be worried. But the haunted lifestyle wasn't something that you could just thrust someone into. They'd realize in their own time - unfortunately.)

It can be pretty advantageous for the right person, I think.

(Them, for example, who washed up on shores with next to nothing. Eddie didn't have any cash on him at all either, but he did wake up with plenty of his jeweled rings from before. They were as good as money in the market, apparently.)

No. We used cards that had our money on them. It was basically the normal US dollar system, but there was also a bunch of weird magic shit that would give us a lot of random items sometimes.