road triippiin'

[apocalypticduality]

He wasn't really sure what Dib expected him to do on this trip, but in his days off, it wasn't like Sollux had much of anything better to do. He couldn't just keep rebuilding the same hardware over and over, and it really didn't appeal much to just get into anyone's space for the sake of company when he got bored. So here he was, in the passenger seat of Dib's Shelby, watching increasingly desolate scenery roll by with possibly the most bored expression ever produced by a sentient being. It wasn't that he didn't think what they would find wouldn't be at all interesting, but the getting there in the first place...

"We are actually going to thtop thomewhere to retht right?" he asked with an arched brow, his head lolling against the seat as he straightened up just enough that his knees weren't quite level with his chin. "Ath much ath I like your car and all, I don't think I really wanna be thleeping in it while we're doing whatever thith dumb deep rethearch thing ith that you're doing thith time around." His tone wasn't as harsh as his words at least, but it still didn't change that he knew he wouldn't exactly be sleeping comfortably in the car, not with his extreme amount of lank.

Comments

[fearofpiggies]

"Yeah, there's a town about halfway between Durango and Moab, we can grab a bite to eat there before heading to a hotel in Moab. You're lucky, you know! Last time I did this, I decided to do this on the ultra-unscenic part of the highway. Salt flats all the way down. At least at the end of this, there's a cushy hotel with wifi, and it's not as purportedly haunted as the last stretch I investigated." Dib had a dark smile on his face, one which by now, Sollux would be used to. That particular smile was grim determination to find something worth looking into. "Eddie's tracking us via satellite, so if anything fucked up happens, or if the stuff that happens to others winds up happening to us, he'll take the proper precautions. Last resort kinda stuff." He turned to Sollux and his expression softened. "Thanks for puttin' up with me for this. I mean, you didn't have to come, but it's really great to have somebody other than the tinman to talk to."

It was almost as if Dib never had anybody around for this sort of thing or something.

[apocalypticduality]

"Dude, I don't put up with you and you know it. Yeah thith ithn't really my ideal vacation getaway or whatever but I'm not exactly inclined to care. I get a firththand look at your particular brand of ghotht bothering." Smirking faintly, Sollux crossed his arms over his chest and slouched right back down again, letting the wraparound shades he'd opted for slip down his nose just a bit. He glanced back at Dib every so often, then added after a bit, "if anything fucked up doeth happen, at leatht you'll have a witneth tho if your equipment doethn't pick up what you thee, you got that extra help." He reached over and shoved gently on Dib's shoulder, then started to rifle through the cd collection that was these days made up of both of their individual collections all slipped into the same large case on one of those nights when they were both too bored to function. He grinned and slid the Left Rights into the player and started it up. "Dead people like Jimmy Urine right?"

[fearofpiggies]

"I'm pretty sure dead people don't care one way or another about the flavor of music that we play," Dib said flatly, but the corner of his lip was still upturned as he nodded subtly to the beat. "Seriously, so long as it doesn't actively summon or repel them, they're pretty fucking ambivalent to music. I mean, there are those who are more connected to one kind of music over others, but that's not stuff we're worrying about here." Once they got to the intersection of highway - nothing near overpasses and turnabouts in flavor, they were on an intersection of highways that were little more than county roads - he rolled the car to a stop on the side of the road and smirked.

"Here we go, you ready for this?" He turned to Sollux and flipped up a hidden panel on the dash, revealing several buttons, which he pushed to activate the shielding, which, not unlike certain comic book millionaire vehicles could do, folded upward from spots in the chassis of the vehicle, marked with sigils and ancient writing that had been thoroughly researched and developed by the greatest Hunting minds from several realities. The rearview mirror lit up with a HUD that displayed the readouts that his glasses normally would, and small screen popped up from the passenger dash behind the airbag with a touchscreen that offered up options for data collection: audio, visual, technical, and the like. A lot of work had been put into this car, Dib had said, but he never once said to what end or extent. And from the looks of it, usually, nobody would even be able to guess.

This was the fucking batmobile of paranormal investigation. Any hunter would be proud, or nervously paranoid over why a young guy like Dib had a car like this. "If we get into any trouble," Dib said, "Fuel runs low, we get accosted by demons or some weird stuff like that, we've got a metric fuckload of stuff in the trunk to handle it. Oh. And if you get bored, I brought snacks, and the screen right there has video games that you can dink around with while we get recordings of the spooky and weird."

[apocalypticduality]

"Dude, you really need to learn how to recognize rhetorical quethtionth and tharcathm. I mean Chritht, look who you're dealing with here." Sollux smirked as he reached over and harassed Dib's hair briefly, then sat back and watched as the car transformed into any given ghost-hunter's wet dream. He tapped a little at the screen closest to him to flip through the various readings that it was taking on the environment around them, forcing his psionics to ease back, self-dampening to give clearer readings without internal interference. He slid his seat back and stretched his legs out, prepared to simply sit there and wait for whatever it was that Dib was waiting for. His specialty was the imminently deceased, not the postmortem end of these things. "I wonder, are ghothtth affected by eletrical currentth? Becauthe I don't know how much uthe I'll be in whatever emergenthy might crop up on that end unleth I can zap thomething and not have it get up and be pithed at me."

[fearofpiggies]

"Oh, I understand them very well. I also find that the best way to be a prick is to not acknowledge sarcasm or rhetoric. Pisses people off way better that way," Dib responded, finally doing one more check before waiting for the hour to turn, which was only a few seconds later. He turned onto the road and wrinkled his nose at the hair rumple, batting Sollux's hand away with a snicker.

"Most of the stuff that's been reported on the road actually is only affecting the vehicles, and not the people within them. Most spirits, whether malevolent or not, can't actually harm a living person. Not unless they put forth a substantial amount of energy, at least. Erm. They'd really want it, I guess is what I'm sayin'. You know, effort. Of course, there's been talks about these not being anything like human spirits, but rather, malevolent forces beyond the dead. Demons, energetics, elementals. That's what I'm here to find out. Those can do some pretty nasty damage, but I don't think your psionics would faze them unless they decided to manifest into something tangible. And by that time, we'd have bigger shit to deal with than worrying about self defense." He shrugged a bit and smiled passively.

"Don't worry, though. I mean, we're in here. Worst we'll ever be getting in this car? Is maybe a spirit. Maybe. If they feel like it. Most people drive this road just fine. They wouldn't like, keep an entire highway open if this sort of thing was a hugely regular occurrence. They would've sealed it off and built another road and denied all reports that anything weird happened here in the first place."

[apocalypticduality]

"Government at itth finetht," Sollux snorted, then returned Dib's smile and went to picking at the knee of his jeans. He'd opted for something looser and more comfortable but still mostly plain for the sake of not having to deal with heavy material and more cumbersome decoration, worn out and fraying here and there. He glanced at the readouts directly in front of him, then laid his head back against the seat. "Tho if you figure out what'th going on, what are you even going to do about it? Jutht exorthithe it and head back out? Theemth pretty thraightforward to me."

[fearofpiggies]

"Oh, I don't do anything but document it. I'm not a hunter and I'm not qualified to do exorcisms or blessings. I leave that stuff to the pros. I mean sure, I can do that stuff in a pinch if I need to, and I've tranquilized my share of cryptids, but I don't go into this with the intent to kill or harm," Dib explained. He reached down to the center console to grab his soda and uncap it with one hand, before taking a drink of it. "Documentation is really all I'm out to do. Y'know, to show that this stuff actually exists. It's harder than you'd think, proving things to people that don't want to believe in it because all they've ever been given is flimsy evidence, and opinions to the contrary. I mean, sure, I'd like to consider myself a pretty hardened skeptic to a lot of things, but that's only because I've never seen them or dealt with them, or have evidence to the contrary of their existence, but I'm seen as kind of a tinfoil hat guy, anyway." He shrugged and took another sip of his soda.

"And if I got rid of them when they're pretty benign, I'd be out of tangible evidence. If they're not, I call in the big guys if I've got 'em, and they take over."

[apocalypticduality]

"Got all of thith pretty well thought out, haven't you." Sollux smirked faintly then reached for his own unopened drink and pulled one foot up to let his heel rest against the edge of the seat. "Tho you keep the actual exorthithtth in buthineth. In a reality thith new, I can't really expect there to be much call for it, but it'th good to konow there'th at leatht thomething for you to do and I know even if it'th thlow going that you like doing thith. Better than thitting at home and waiting for thingth to happen." And honestly, he was grateful to be out of the house, even if he wasn't exactly expecting much to happen over the course of the research excursion.

"Tho... What exactly ith thuppothed to happen along thith particular thtretch? I remember you mentioning that crothroadth in partiular were hotthpotth for activity."

[fearofpiggies]

"See, but with a reality this new, it's going to be great to get a baseline reading before all the really weird stuff starts cropping up. And if the weird shit shows up, it'll give me something to do. Sure, it'll be a facsimile, but it'll still be fun to compare the made up real paranormal shit to the real-real paranormal shit." He shrugged a bit to that, then looked over at Sollux with a fond smile. "And besides, it's a good excuse to get us out of the places for a bit, maybe even, oh, I dunno, get you alone for a few hours and watch you get all twitchy without a decent wifi connection."

[apocalypticduality]

"Great, I'm on a road trip with a huge thaditht." Sollux laughed and reached over to harass Dib's hair again. It wasn't as if he didn't already know about that slight mean streak to begin with. He took a second to undo some of the damage then dragged his sylladex out of his pocket, taking a moment to retrieve his laptop with the hopes of at least keeping himself busy until Dib was done with whatever he was trying to do here. Information collection obviously wasn't the most fun night he could think of. But still, he was happy to be there keeping his boyfriend company while he did what he did.

After a little while of comparative silence, save for the quiet ticking of his fingers over the keyboard, Sollux spoke up quietly to keep from interrupting whatever Dib was looking over. "It occurth to me that with a couple of theorieth on the nature of belief, you could pothibly jutht make shit up ath you go and if enough people latch onto the information, you could eathily make up thome new kind of thpookth. With thingth ath unthtable ath they are here, I have no doubt that thort of thing could actually be a viable."

[fearofpiggies]

"Are you suggesting that we make up some shit? Sollux, dude, I've heard about what happens when a pair of idiot nerd children make shit up and it manifests. It's not pretty. I mean. It can work, it can totally happen. I could even potentially do it." He shook his head, "But that'd be cheating, it'd... it'd really just fuck up my life's work. What's the point of scientific investigation into the unknown if you can just make shit exist?"

That said, he got a dark little smile. "I'll run it past a certain Guardian who's actually kinda behind all the new spooky shit and see if we couldn't get a new whatever you're suggesting." He quirked a brow to Sollux then went back to driving with a cocky grin. He knew that Sollux wrote some damn good creepypasta. Anything he made up would make one hell of a spooky critter for folks to boggle over, and he knew just the guy to get it around.

It'd be fun.

[apocalypticduality]

Sollux's grin mirrored that on Dib's face. "Friendth, countrymen, lend me your Thlendermen and I'll do with it thingth you've never theen before." He chuckled quietly and relaxed back again, his hands laced together behind his neck.

By the time they saw the hint of lights in the distance that denoted a town, Sollux was, in fact, starting to fidget. Yes, there was an assortment of things he could do on his laptop as he waited to get back to a wifi connection, but even then, there was only so much available that could keep him occupied between comments back and forth with Dib on the nature of the things that he'd run into over his time as an investigator, and what might take hold if they were to seed it with just enough fabricated evidence. He had a stockpile of photos from random points around the globe, free use stuff that wasn't exactly traceable and where he did need a source, he'd already asked permission to use the photos in whatever way he saw fit. Very rarely was he turned down. Now, as they drove on, he was tweaking the occasional darker image, making sure that there was something there, enough definition to ensure the viewer that it wasn't what anyone would consider natural, but keeping it just vague enough that it would open up a lot of discussion from skeptics and believers alike. With the right amount of "information" in the story that he was already thinking up to go with it, he had no doubt that within a year, they could have something just for Dib to start tracking. If he had to, he could even fabricate a paper trail, unless there was some kind of precedence that he could latch onto.

"How about greathy diner food before we turn in," he suggested when they slowed down again, figuring a meal would hold him longer than just casually munching through Dib's supply of snacks.

[fearofpiggies]

"No Slendermen," Dib said with a wide-eyed grimace. "You really don't know how freaky those things actually are for real, and they're literal hell to get rid of. Give the thing a really ridiculous Achilles' heel. Something easy to get rid of them, but obscure. Something not commonly found in the usual hunter's kits, but something ordinary." He smiled a little. "Something everybody would have on them or nearby. If this goes well, we can step it up, but you've gotta remember, there's gonna be kids around this place soon. You don't wanna get them caught in this." He shrugged.

Once they got into town, Dib nodded to Sollux's suggestion. "Eddie, pull up GPS directions to the closest diner that hasn't given anybody food poisoning in the past year." With that, he chuckled a little to himself. "You're a fucking douchebag, I hope you know. It's okay, the world needs more assholes with imaginations."

[apocalypticduality]

"Yeah no when it cometh to thingth like thith, I kind of prefer to keep kidth out of the mix entirely. Ath a pupa growing up in the thcary shit, it wath long thinthe dethided that only the adultth get fucked with."

At the announcement of his status as a douchebag, Sollux just laughed and gave Dib a large, toothy grin. "Well yeah, I never claimed otherwithe. You still keep me around though tho I'm thinking you're a glutton for punishment."