cottoncandypink | Wendigo Hunting in Canada

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2014,
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Wendigo Hunting in Canada

Eight stupid teenagers on some remote mountain in Alberta — nobody cared about it. Wilford hadn’t even heard about this story the first time around, but he wanted in on it this time. There was the potential for some excellent dirt on some very powerful people in this story, but it meant getting to Canada to cover it. And not just Canada. The other side of Canada.

And not just him.

He needed a team. He needed people who could do the job.

Surprisingly, getting the okay to take a team out was the easy part. It was convincing people to go that was tricky. It turned out, nobody wanted to take a trip out to the Canadian Rockies. Eventually, he threatens to break enough arms to gather a decent-sized crew for the trip.

And then comes the next problem: not fucking dying out there on some godforsaken mountaintop. There’s no way they’re getting any amount of firepower through customs, but Wilford had an excellent plan to get around that. As soon as he got home, he gathered up every gun and case of ammo he had lying around his apartment and slipped it quietly into his room at the bar in the middle of the night while everyone was asleep.

Timing is not Wilford’s friend. He can’t figure out for the life of him how time on his world relates to time on Milliways, much beyond the obvious answer of ‘not at all.’ When it’s time to get his guns back through the door into the waiting hotel room, it’s the middle of the goddamn day. Most of the people, Wilford doesn’t care about, but he has to be quick in case some of the people he does care about happen to spot the enormous rifle he can’t manage to cram into his inventory.

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Oh, hey, it's Wilford! With a... pink rifle? Huh. Baze finishes his tea--Egg nog, black--at the bar and stands, brushing his hands off on the thighs of his jumpsuit.

"Nice gun," Baze says, sauntering up with a grin. "How long is the range on it?"

A pink rifle that keeps getting him in trouble whenever he brings it here. He's not going to let that happen this time, so he doesn't exactly stop to address Baze's question.

"Uh. About two thousand meters?" He isn't sure, actually. He only bought it because it pisses people off to get shot with a pink gun for some reason.

Baze sniffles, wiping his nose on his sleeve. Purple glitter smears everywhere on the cuff of his jumpsuit. He's got a killer headache, and squints at the weapon.

"That's not bad," Baze says, his voice somewhat raspy. "You look like you're in a hurry?"

Ew. And he has the audacity to call Buster gross?

"Yeah, there's a dickhead cop with a vendetta," he says, opening the door and handing the rifle through. "Just fucking take it," he hisses before slamming the door shut again. He'll deal with those guys later.

"The hell's wrong with you?" he asks, looking at the smear on Baze's sleeve.

Seriously, ew.

"I have no idea," Baze says, and then sneezes into his arm. Glitter ends up everywhere, in shades of blue and green. He clears his throat and sniffs again. "I just woke up like this. I've been told it's part of the 'bar weird.'"

"Not that I've ever seen," Wilford says.

Seriously gross.

He's been feeling a bit headachey himself, but that could be from the lack of sleep. Or the jetlag. Or the constant hangover. Or the literally dozens of other reasons that give him headaches. Bar-sickness does not even occur to him.

"Wipe your hands and give me a hand, would you?" he says, heading back toward the stairs to grab the rest of his weapons.

Baze asks Bar for a wet wipe, and unsuccessfully tries to scrub his hands of glitter. This is so, so gross.

He sets the crumpled wipe on the counter, where it disappears, and follows Wilford. "What do you need help with?"

Wilford doesn't answer right away. Not until he gets up to his room and grabs two more fairly large weapons to Baze.

"Nobody hates you," he says plainly.

Not like they hate Wilford. There are a few more smaller handguns on the table, which Wilford tucks into his belt before locking up his room.

Baze takes the weapons, one in each hand, blinking. "Um," he says, his brow creased. He coughs once, twice, and then clears his throat.

"I don't follow your logic," Baze says, cocking his head to the side.

"I'm not supposed to have those here," he says. Clearly, he doesn't care. "So I need to get them from here to the other side of the door without getting my head blown off."

Hence his hurry with the sniper rifle earlier.

He starts back down the stairs again, hoping to avoid getting thrown in jail before he can get out of here.

Baze purses his lips. "I might be stopped, same as you," he says, and sneezes again. This time, the glitter is yellow.

"Why do you need all these weapons, anyway?"

"You won't be stopped. Nobody else ever is."

He shoos Baze toward the stairs, as if the man isn't twice his size.

And then he gets an idea.

"Wanna make some money? We're chasing a couple of nasty fuckers up in the mountains, and could use a little muscle."

He could probably even call it an expense and get the station to pay for it.

Baze inches down the stairs, keeping a weather eye out for those people who have stopped Wilford before--and would no doubt stop Baze as well. The weapons are the same, it shouldn't matter who holds them--or so Baze thinks. He's tempted to bolt down the steps, but walks calmly towards the door instead.

"Money, huh?" Baze says, cocking a brow. He has no use for money, but there's no reason to tell Wilford that. "Sure, I could earn a little. What sort of nastiness are we talking about?"

"The kind that guts people alive and eats them," Wilford says.

That's nasty even by Wilford's standards. It's got to be, like, horrific to the people around here, right?

"I could probably throw a couple grand your way." He keeps his eye out for other people looking at them, making sure his jacket covers up anything hidden in his belt.

"Fast, I assume?" Baze says, feeling every eye on them. He hunches his shoulders, trying to appear invisible.

"I don't know how much a couple grand will buy, because I don't know what your system of money is," he says, shaking his head. "But I'll take your word for it that that's worth the job. Let me go get Chirrut."

Wilford gets to the door and opens it, quickly taking the guns from Baze and passing them through. The ones in his belt can wait.

"Rent for a couple of months. Or a cheap car, if you're not picky."

Not that Baze needs either of these things, but it might give him a good idea.

"All right," Baze says, nodding exactly once. "Then I'll go. It'll give me a chance to stretch my legs and use my skills. I was afraid I'd grow rusty."

He pats his repeater cannon, and sneezes into his arm again, with orange glitter. "We're leaving right now, right? I'll be right back. I have to find Chirrut, and let him know."

Baze walks with purpose, looking for his friend. Strangely, he's not in the temple room. Nor is he in the sauna, or on the beach. Baze has no idea where he could be, so the larger Guardian returns to the bar and leaves him a note.

Chirrut, I'm hunting creatures with Wilford. I know you don't like him, and I couldn't find you before we left, so we left you behind. I'm sorry. I'll be back in a few days. -Baze Malbus

"All right. I'm ready," Baze says to Wilford, sneezing again.

God, that is gross. Wilford might actually bother to say something if he didn't have a headache. Still he shakes his head and reaches for the door one more time, but doesn't open it just yet.

"Follow my lead. Probably don't mention the whole 'from another planet' thing. I don't want that getting out."

His crew probably wouldn't care, except they might want to poke him a few times. But people talk, and overhear things, and that's the last thing he needs.

Baze nods again, shifting his repeater cannon in its holster. He's armed to the teeth, with the cannon, knives in his boots, a sling on his back that can stop a lightsaber thanks to Ibani's cortosis core, and a shockstick up his left sleeve.

He's ready for anything Wilford's world can dish out. He thinks.

Unfortunately, nobody thought to bring a flamethrower.

Wilford opens the door to a comfortable, but obviously cheap hotel room. There are two beds and a table with a couple of chairs, and five other people staring at the door. Immediately, Wilford is assaulted with thirty questions at once about where he was keeping the guns, which are obviously his, because he's the only person idiotic enough to carry a pink sniper rifle.

He ignores those as he unloads the guns from his belt, and then the stacks and stacks of ammo from his inventory, because he's also being assaulted with another thirty questions about the great, big brute he apparently had hiding somewhere as well.

"Jesus, you all sound like a bunch of squawking geese," he complains.

The first impression Baze has of Wilford's world is a wall of noise. That's all it is, noise, because Baze can't understand a thing. Wilford's right in that his coworkers squawk, but Baze can't understand that, either. Of all the questions he should have asked before going to another world, how to surpass the language barrier should have been the first.

He immediately whirls, and opens the door, trying to get back to the bar. It opens instead on a cold Canadian parking lot in the middle of the night, out in the woods, on some lonely highway. At least, that's what it would appear to someone from this world; Baze is unsure what the purpose of the flat, black stuff with white lines is, as he's never seen a parking lot. He's also never seen trees that tall. He's completely out of his depth.

Baze turns back to Wilford with wide eyes, and lets loose a string of curses in Jedhan, punctuated by a sneeze, which smears gold glitter all over his arm.

Well, fuck.

Wilford takes a deep breath, and pulls Baze back inside. He would not be where he is now if he weren't able to think quickly and improvise. (He would, quite frankly, be in prison or dead if he couldn't do these things.)

He starts saying some exasperated thing to Baze, pointing at one of the beds. The words he's saying don't sound like the other squawking at all, but that is by design, because Wilford is not speaking English. He doesn't speak Korean either, but he can recite menu items and make it sound like he's actually saying something useful. And if Baze is smart enough, he'll get the gist. Sit down, shut up, and let me figure this out.

Goddamnit, he's going to have to actually learn Korean now. These fuckers won't stay fooled for very long.

Shavit. Baze draws the staff from his back and sits down on the bed obediently, at a loss for what to do now. He curls his hands around the staff in his lap, taking comfort from the familiar object.

He shouldn't have left Chirrut behind. At least then he wouldn't be alone.

This... this complicates things. Wilford's been to two other worlds, and both ostensibly the same from what he could tell. He's brought only one other person to his, from ostensibly the same world as the other two. It never occurred to him that this would be a thing.

He'll learn from this mistake.

His crew are a ragtag group of misfits, and they're all still asking him questions. Another man who looks vaguely like Wilford, except for his electric blue hair which appears to be 100% natural, since he hasn't shaved today, and even that's blue. Another guy who is obviously too tall for the chair he's trying to sit in. A third with a mess of black hair and a dark complexion. And two women relaxing on one of the beds together, both with laptops that don't seem to be doing anything. And they all want to know what's going on. Wilford offers an explanation that seems to placate them as he opens the door again, ostensibly to get some fresh air into the room, since it's so full of people.

It opens to the parking lot. Balls. Wilford pretends that's exactly what he was expecting and kicks the guy with the blue hair out of his seat, making him sit on the floor. Because he's the boss. He can do that.

Baze grunts. It's an efficient grunt, he feels. It conveys a whole range of emotions, from displeasure to curiosity to irritation--two of which are the mostly the same thing.

He decides that, if he can't be understood, he might as well be snarky. "[Bathing more than once a year will not kill you,]" he tells the scruffy, blue-haired underling, in Jedhan.

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