Building a House || Part 2 || [Closed]

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

OOC: Weighted training clothes used.

The house was gone.

Lucas was unsurprised but managed to hide the sentiment behind a facade of brutal honesty that others took as a predilection towards sarcasm. Cecilia was generally a little more perceptive but had the unfortunate tendency to make assumptions about Lucas' humanity that were a little on the optimistic side. Strangely, he tried to disappoint her as little as possible. Perhaps she wasn't entirely wrong about his 'heart'.

Then again...

In front of them stood what had once been a day and a half of solid work that had managed to resemble - at least from a distance - an actual human domicile. It had had walls, some basic flooring and what would have been roof. Now it was just a collection of brick and mortar dust arranged haphazardly - clearly someone had been at it with a wrecking ball or something equally powerful.

To its passing, Lucas felt only the slightest hint of regret. And that regret was that he hadn't done it first. He understood, on some level, that this wasn't the usual sense of motivation that people got but that innate violence was, like it or not, part of him.

"Well," he pointed out unnecessarily, "it looks like someone knocked it down."

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

"No shit Sherlock," came the slightly crass reply. Rolling her eyes, she punched him on the shoulder. "Don't gloat now, Lucas."

"I do not gl-"

"Yeah, yeah," she muttered, somewhere between the knife-edged focus that was when she could concentrate through an apocalypse and the raging bloodlusts that she occasionally succumbed to. It was apparently a Hargrave genetic quirk - a tendency towards some form of mental illness, hers was an absolute frothing, useless rage. Lucas would prefer, all things considered, that she didn't, as the saying went, 'fly off the handle.' Life got tricky when she did so. "I know, you never do. Cold as a snowman, that's my brother."

He didn't tell her she was rambling or that she needed to calm down or that he was colder than absolute zero. They would either make her laugh from what she called 'lame-o-suckspeak' or she would 'lose her shit.'

No one wanted her to lose her shit.

He did, however, start going to work. The walls were now completely useless. They'd have to start over from scratch - worse off than before seeing as they had gone through most of their bricks the first time around. After a few blows the broken, fractured walls started to come down and his sister - sighing deeply - went over to help. Between the two of them it was the work of moments to pull the walls down. They had made the damn thing: breaking it was something they could do with ease.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

Ease or not, Lucas could not quite keep himself from feeling an odd shade of what might - for anyone else - be characterized as glee. It was a little irrational - no, a lot irrational - but there was just something intrinsically rewarding about being able to take a structure that existed beforehand and then reduce it to its component parts. Buildings, aliens, animals, humans - it didn't much matter what artifice was being destroyed, only that it was. Destruction set his mind at ease, calmed the twitch in his fingers and the only thinly veiled frustration at the fact that life existed.

Had the world not been taken over by alien overlords he would have probably been locked up in an institute a long time ago. He tried not to hold that particular fact against the world too often. A it didn't matter, B it wouldn't happen. Not anymore.

He chipped through the bricks of what little of the original structure remained, finding the stress lines, remembering where he had been sloppy with his work of bricklaying, intuiting amazingly complicated physics with a simple glance and then putting the theory into practice with a few careful prods and blows. For him - a human who had survived the try-outs of Ginyu force not to mention at twice earth gravity - this sort of energy conservation, even given the presence of weighted clothing, was absolutely unnecessary but watching his wall crumble from gentle kicks and simple pokes was... nice. Elegant. Not precisely how he preferred his work, but a suitable variation nonetheless.

Cecilia, of course, was not of the same mind but her annoyance at having to re-do their work of last week was rising off her in waves of pent-up aggression that sent the walls she had laid tumbling over in giant, thunderous crashes that would have sent the wildlife scurrying for cover. Instead, he distantly - and dimly - made out the presence of several humans disappear from the immediate environs, scattering far - far away from the psycho brother sister pair.

A wise move, probably.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

When the last semblance of a wall had come tumbling down Lucas nearly started on the foundation of the house before realizing that that would be counterproductive given the objective of this particular mission. I.e. build a house. There wasn't much point in breaking the foundation and relaying it: even as damaged as it was, neither of them knew how to relay a foundation. It would have to work as it was. However, that did leave him a little at a loss as what he should be doing - without a steady source of bricks they couldn't very well rebuild the house.

Cecilia though, had already considered that facet of the conundrum.

"Go knock down a few more houses, Lucas. But try to leave the intact pieces intact. We'll... just... jigsaw some horrific abomination of a house - like Dr. Frakenstein!" Some of her old cheer and verve returned with those words; Lucas had absolutely no idea what she had just said but assumed it was a good thing.

Besides, it also gave him an excuse to indulge in his favorite pastime. Occupation.

With a blur of motion he afterimaged to the next half-intact domicile - this one noticeably older and in arguably worse condition. Without even thinking about it he jumped up onto the roof. That turned out to be less than wise, if not for some quick thinking he would have hurtled through rotten planks and tiles when he landed, as it was he got a handful of splinters that he took the time to attend to. After that it was a more painstaking, careful dismantling job. First, piece by broken piece and then larger chunks as he got a feel for the structural vulnerabilities of the damn thing.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

After a few moments of less than efficient destruction from within the attic, Lucas decided that there really was nothing interesting about the roof. It was rotten through and through and Lucas decided that it would not be recyclable, no matter what the circumstances or the skill of the recycler. It was largely more nails than roofing, more moss and various other miscellaneous vegetation that wood.

That this particular observation happened to align with his particular brand of destructive impulse had absolutely nothing to do with his analysis, of course. He was being objective and rational and on-task.

Yes, completely on-task.

Wiping his mouth with sleeve of his coat he kicked out, the force from the air pressure alone hurtling straight through the rotten ceiling and the roof beyond, making the entire structure rattle. There was a small explosion of wood chips and vegetation and old dust; if he had been one for allergies he probably would have started sneezing up a storm. Hm. Perhaps the entire house was unsalvageable - he'd have to see. With the opening made he managed to get his way to the top of the roof again, this time scaling it with far more care and attention so that he wouldn't fall through again.

This time he simply started tearing off roofing tiles by rolling through it, nails popping straight out as he heaved the tiles straight off the rotted frame of the house and then onto the ground below. Given his precarious perch this would have been dangerous to a baseline human but for someone of his caliber the fall wouldn't even bruise so he simply took giant handfuls and tossed them.

[Lucas D. Hargrave]

The roof was down to two supporting struts made more of nails than wood and a whole lot of wiring. Lucas was fairly certain the wiring wasn't supposed to be there but regardless, that didn't make its presence any less true. Perhaps this domicile had once belonged to someone with a flair for home renovation or a fetish for copper.

Just look at this mess! Copper and rubber snaking and tangling throughout the roof like some giant, god-awful architectural cancer. This was probably a statement of some kind. The pervading influence of alien overlords upon the sheep of humanity's brain or some such. Normal people were big on artistic statements, according to Lucas' vague impression of them. Clearly something had to be done.

Not that Lucas cared mind, but it seemed to be the thing to think for some reason.

Giving the wiring a yank, Lucas felt the copper stretch and bite into his palm. Juggling between the structural instability of the house and his lack of proper tools to cut the wiring (and an undeniably irrational curiosity to see what would happen) Lucas slowly pulled at it until the wiring in his hands stretched taut, like before it finally gave way - tearing straight from the ceiling and walls as he dug into the flooring and raised the pressure.

As it finally came completely undone the house started rumbling.