howdy, neighbor!

"Uh." Okay. So, stabbing? Common. Pencils, knives- kids are kids, gang affiliated or not. "You mean...with a BB gun, airsoft, paintgun kind of deal...right?" His brows are up at his non-existent hairline.

Yeah, points to Stan on this one.

   He’s too caught up in his victory to let the true horror of what he’s saying properly wash over him.

"I'm fine, it'd take a hell of a lot more than the shit that happens here to take me down for very long." Guns aside, that is. While getting injured, and going through the process of healing from it, is not her favorite thing to do, it isn't that much of an issue whenever it does happen. Surface wounds, hell even internal bleeding, was far better than having to figure out what would be lethal for her. She does snort at the mention of brain injuries killing her later down the line, telling him, "I think I woulda already gone down from that if that was the case. Once it happens, kinda hard to heal from it, yeah? Dunno if I'd be able to reverse somethin' that happened in the past now, so..."

   He knows Ava is fine, though, so he doesn’t cringe for long and goes back to unskillfully trying to suppress his smile. He shakes his head and says, “Let me guess, it was those loud redneck guys who whip around town in their truck with at least one of them standing up in the bed?” It would be anyone, but that old truck is the one that Stan sees causing the most problems.

   “If it was, I think it’s more of a miracle that they didn’t get killed crashing into you. Sturdy as you are, you probably coulda tipped at least one of them overboard.”

When the bus pulls up, Kenny stands first before turning and taking Butters' hand. Once they get on this bus, everything should be smooooth sailing. The bus driver looks at them with a quirk of her eyebrow, eyes darting around to find the parents that these kids belong to. But if she actually cared otherwise, she didn't say anything. The good thing about this time of night is that the driver is probably too tired and done for the night to give them trouble.

          So, it’s fine to use Kenny’s dad’s bus pass, he tells himself, even as guilt hits the bottom of his stomach like a rock.

          “Okay,” he agrees, plodding along behind Kenny, their hands still linked.  He’s eager to get out from under the bus driver’s gaze.  He doesn’t know what he will tell her if she starts asking too many questions.

          There are two or three other people on the bus at this hour, but all of them are too groggy to pay the boys much mind, their heads slumped against their chests or the windows.

          Once they find their seats in the back and the bus rattles back into gear to chug along down the road, Butters sighs, trying to convince himself that he feels relieved.  He smiles at Kenny and tries to keep his voice hushed so as not to distrub any of the half-sleeping people.

The mental image of Georgie pretending to be scared would be incredibly funny to Jon, he does almost envy her inability to fear. Knowing what he does about her, though, she would not be the type of person to do that just for someone else. He really is glad that it had kept her from being picked up by Elias, lest she suffer the same fate as his and his predecessor's assistants seemed to.

"Local, usually." Did he want to bring up Melanie? Not entirely, but she was important to giving Georgie a little more credibility in Michael's eyes. "Her and one of my, ah... Coworkers, Melanie, have collaborated quite a few times. Melanie ran her own little investigative YouTube channel before she came to work with me, she's prefers to be in the middle of the action." A little too involved, he thinks, given that one of her trips had ended up with a ghost bullet lodged in her body.

And, of course, the lengths she had gone to in order to sever her connection to the Institute.

If it was real. Clenching his teeth together, Jon fights back against the urge to outright tell Michael that, unfortunately, some of what was reported on was very much real. He doesn't want to give the Fears any more influence over people than they already have, and he got the feeling that he would sound like he was pandering by giving either Georgie or Melanie's works the validity they deserved.

          “No way—so you mean all that office shit you do involves ghosts and whatever?”

          He realizes that he is coming across as a little too uncool in the present moment, so he recomposes himself, straightens up and flicks the ashes off the end of his cigarette.  It has started to dwindle quite a bit, which is disappointing.  He probably doesn’t have much left of it.

    "Hope you found a better spot to tuck it away. Like ... maybe your drawer in your dresser." He for sure did not get a new phone after that. At least, it looked the same. Roughly. They lived in different, simpler times then, and having to worry about your phone was the least of your concerns! At least, she thought so.

    "We got to get away with climbing on rooftops back then. Now, it'll be a call to the police station and them being weirdly racist but all for their cult they ... yeah I'm not gonna think back on that whole fight," she muttered, waving her hand. "Times were simple. I can't say better, but definitely way more fun than whatever's going on now."

    A part of her wanted to relive that kind of life for one night. At least experience it with the knowledge she had now. What would it have been like then?

    "If God gave us the ability to murder our teammates after constant fuck-ups without consequence, I think the world would improve so much more quickly," she chuckled. "But ... I don't think I ever really asked what it was like to work on your dad's farm. Did you do night shifts or something like that?"

          “‘Simple but not better’ about sums it up, yeah.”  He really was miserable back then, but it was such an uncomplicated and predictable misery.  And it wasn’t like it was all bad all the time.  Like Fran said, at least it was fun half the time.  “This town’s really gone to the dogs ever since the police decided to get competent and start doing their jobs, pretty much over night.”  Not even the President of the United States could get federal agents out of the Park County Jail now, which was such a downright comedic leap forward from where they had been as kids.

          He rested his chin in his hand and shrugged.  “I mean… not really.  On the night shift thing.  I worked after school until the evening when my dad was too blitzed off his own shit to give a fuck what I was doing.  I still stayed up pretty late, though, and just kinda did whatever.”  Which usually meant getting drunk alone in his room and watching YouTube until his eyes bled or the sun came up, whichever happened first.

    It was mostly a statement. Just something she felt was true about herself, and she was right to a degree—she wasn't anyone's favorite that she knew of yet. She drifted between people and knew everyone, but not everybody knew her. That's how it stood in time unless something changed.

    But what he said was that determining factor. Glancing up at him, she returned a smile of her own. "Yeah, I mean ... everybody was kind of an ass in their own way. You kind of had to be with the kids and adults we had to deal with. Most of 'em I don't know how were able to get jobs. Or vote."

    Fran couldn't really blame him in the end. Everybody was an asshole (in her mind) from what she experienced. Even the kindest kids like Butters or Jimmy were dicks in their own way, but in certain situations; a necessary evil.

    " ... me too. I think if I didn't really have somebody to talk to, I'd have an average of maybe eight or nine words spoken per year," she chuckled. "But you do a lot of improvement in your own way. Being aware about it is the first step, I'm pretty sure."

          “I guess, in a way, I was doing what I felt I had to do to survive in school, but now I’m figuring out that that was all meaningless bullshit.”  It was a flimsy excuse, but it was what he had.

          Stan gave her a small smile and shrugged.  “Being self-aware can be a little annoying on its own,” he said.  “Apparently, it’s not enough to just be that, you also have to, like… do something with it.”  He rolled his eyes as if it was the most absurd thing he had ever heard, but he couldn’t help giving away his amusement.

"And how long are you expecting that digging to take you, exactly?" A manual shovel isn't exactly inspiring confidence, and Palmer's going to ask as many mission-related questions as he sees fit. It doesn't matter to him who gets the kill so long as he gets paid and the job is done. He doesn't pin his pride on that, as much as certain media outlets have gone out of their way to paint him a cold-blooded assassin.

          He shrugs.  “Assuming you can be assed to do your job correctly?  No more than fifteen to thirty minutes,” he says as if it were the most obvious fact in the world, as if someone should just be able to look at his hair and nails and clothes caked in dirt and be able to  figure that out.

    Oh. She felt the grimace in that look. Connecting her gaze to his, her shoulders shook a little, eyes widening for a moment with what felt like fear. Did she hit the nail on the head? Or was it overstepping and assuming something? Either way, it wasn't going to set her off from talking about it ... but she wanted to know more.

    Quietly, she set herself next to him, pulling at her sleeves to cover her hands a little with the cold sending shivers down her body. It was freezing out here, but it didn't really bother her in the moment.

    " ... I get it. Really, I'm ... " She paused, bringing a hand around her neck. "When my parents took me away to move somewhere else-- "as far away as possible", they said-- I didn't get it as a kid. You think with time, you wanna ... go back to where you grew up. Keep it to your heart. But with ... all the shit that's happened in this town, I ... don't blame people for leaving.

    " ... but I guess in ... the way you say it, I kind of do. I managed to befriend you and ... well, practically everybody in South Park, but I never really became ... anybody's favorite. Like, there's so many people to talk to, but it gets ... lonely."

    She shuffled a little, pulling her legs up to cross over each other before looking toward Stan again with softer, kinder eyes. "It kind of gets nostalgic, though. Looking at everything here and missing the times when we were kids. But everybody's figuring out what they wanna do. But hey ... you got me, at least, right?"

          “Hey, you’re my favorite,” he told her, managing a smile, even though he wasn’t sure who he would save if both she and Michael were dangling off the side of a cliff and he could only pick one of them.  “At least, now.  I was kind of an ass when I was a kid and didn’t know a good thing when it was right in front of me.  I guess that’s also kinda why I wanna go back, not only to re-experience the good things, but take advantage of all the ones I passed up.”

          Maybe people were right about him, and he really was too much of a sulky little dickhead.  In many ways, he still was, he supposed.

          “I know there’s merit behind living in the moment, but it’s hard not to look back and have regrets, you know?  I don’t really mean to dwell on them—I don’t think, anyway—but I’m not really sure how to let it all go, either, when it meant so damn much at the time.”  He sighed and dragged a hand down his face.  Talking through all of this had helped him, especially to see that Fran was right, as she usually was.

He is far more content to talk on Georgie and her podcast anyways, nodding and pretending like he doesn't notice the subtle change in Michael's expression. "Between you and me, I think she ends up enjoying the research and editing more than the actual recording sometimes, but she does good work with it. I've heard her recording a handful of times, believes in quality over quantity." The comment on gender and how that effects a podcast to him flies completely over Jon's head, something that is for the better if he ends up thinking on it later. "I hate sounding like a walking advertisement, but on the off-chance it catches your interest, she mostly does thorough investigations of the paranormal."

Jon almost wants to tell Michael that Georgie can't feel fear, but is afraid that him saying that ruin the chance of him believing Jon further. Without the Eye, it was nearly impossible for Jon to convey that he is not lying.

          It is good that he does not know that Georgie cannot feel fear, either, because fear is part of the fun of horror and the paranormal.  While not much scares Michael anymore, seeing as he has been desensitized to most, and a lot of horror is too funny to inspire much dread, the stories that do get to him, he likes to hang onto.  He imagines Georgie doing her research and flinching at the details but persisting, anyway.

          He sniffs, re-affixing his appearance of nonchalance.  “Yeah, it sounds okay,” he says.  “I could listen to an episode or two.  Does she report on real, local cases, or is it, like… stuff she finds on the Internet?”  He likes some of the Internet reporters, the ones who take stories that he likely wouldn’t have found on his own and spit them back out in a more easily digestible format.  But if you watch too many of them, eventually, all of their stories run together as they find the same ones and tell them in remarkably similar ways, all inspiring each other.  With social media, it is almost always a slow descent into conformity, and it helps to break up some of the monotony.

          “If it was real, that’d be cool.”  The minor chalance slipped out of him before he could catch it.

"Raven? That's a bit cliche, huh?" Esau snickered, "I mean... Raven? You couldn't even go a deeper cut like Usher or Montressor?" This "Raven" could say what he wanted, but Esau wasn't too worried about this particular knowledge getting out. At least when it came to his name. What was he going to do? Tell the police that a man was going to tell on them first.

          He earned himself some points by having more than a passing familiarity with Poe’s work.  Stan shrugged.  “Everyone named Usher dies.  And Arthur Gordon Pym doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.  So, Raven, it is.  I do have a friend named Arnheim.”  It was Michael’s last name by pure coincidence, and the guy didn’t go by it, but it had appeared in a Poe story, which was fun.

    She remembered that entire encounter. How angry Shelley was and wasn't even dressed up for that entire session where they fought for a single perfectly shaped stick. At the time, Fran took it seriously like Stan's sister was playing along. She wasn't, but it was a hilarious moment. For Shelley, not so much.

    "She didn't beat your ass afterward when you got home, did she?" Fran laughed, hand covering her mouth. "I think she deserved it to a degree. To a kid, that's like holding back your single piece of treasure."

    Fran gave a teasing grin, nudging him. "I kinda miss the superhero stuff we did. Having a civil war gave so much tension and us going out at night was so dangerous but so fun. For like, a week. Still kinda miss it though.

    "But if you're talking Rivals ... hmm ... " A hand pressed against her chin. "If they added friendly fire, it'd be the funniest feature. I mean, the closest you got for 'friendly fire' is an angry Jeff."

          He never did apologize for calling her an ogre, either.

          “I think going out at night was the least of our problems back in those days.  It kind of sucks, you know?  Like I hear about how free our parents were to do whatever when they were kids, and then the same people who went out every night now wanna keep their kids from doing the same and having fun.”  Anyone with half a brain would say that Stan, king of bad decision making, should have been kept inside even more than he was, but he wasn’t about to agree with them.

          “Living on the farm, that’s one of the things I missed the most about town, being able to go out and do shit.  The only thing I had to do at night on the farm was stare at the weed plants.”  Which he had done.  A lot.  Until he felt like his eyes were going to fall out.