The Sun is hovering over the horizon again by the time Jinx gets back to her hideout, every so often overtaken by coughing and relentlessly tormented by a growing headache.
She sticks the key into a padlock that binds the chain she uses to keep an unlikely visitor out of her 'residence'. She deduced that it looks more makeshift this way, a lock would require actual work to install as opposed to simply wrapping a chain around the grip bar and a steel construction pillar beside it. It's supposed to look inconspicuous, putting actual work into securing her place defeats the point of setting up a base here in the first place. Or maybe she's just lazy, maybe both, maybe neither. It's not like she has an actual door anyway, it's simply a tabletop with hinges bolted into it that is covering a hole Fishbones made. She has yet to find a way of closing it from the inside but that's something to consider in the future. She's a light sleeper and in the remote chance that someone does come to the very top of the clock tower, she will just take care of them. There have been no need for that as of yet though.
Temporary solutions do tend to become permanent quite often as far as she is concerned. She only has a door at all because there already was a table here, beside the one in her workroom that is. Dragging a real one up these freaking stairs and through the city would probably not go over too well. The way it is, she only had to find some hinges, grip and bolts along with a hammer to bolt the stuff together. In all honesty it looks halfway ready to fall apart but Jinx is proud of her work nonetheless. It is unique, she prizes that trait above any else.
"I'm back!" She lets her friends know, she left them in the storeroom, on her own mattress to make up for both the fact that she needs extra space to get "comfy" these days, and that she left them alone. They usually sleep together, She is not exactly a big person so they manage. Only with her injuries and the way she always has trouble finding the right position to rest it would not be a good idea for yet some time. Lest she fancies needlessly hurting herself.
The girl closes the oversized plank after her when she enters her home, then makes her way into the makeshift bedroom to check on her companions. As predicted, they are both safely tucked under cover, dead asleep, just as she left them. Jinx smiles and casually retreats to the other room to open the window, then dumps her backpack's contents onto the unoccupied space on the table. There isn't much of said space and some of the items she brought roll off it and fall down onto the floor. She doesn't care, she will or will not pick them up later, for now she throws the bag over her shoulder and sits down on the wooden bench while shrugging off the violet hoodie, leaving her upper body covered only in bandages, clumsily wrapped around her torso and arms, and letting her braids brush the floor underneath her. There is work to be done and she is unused to having so many clothes on, they feel constricting.
Her yawn turns into a coughing fit, reminding the girl to actually use the drugs she's liberated. Jinx grabs the right box and smirks. Dispersible tablets, yeah sure. Whatever. She rips the sachet open and pops a pill straight into her mouth, deciding to simply chew it, leaving her cringing as her taste buds catch up with the idea. It sorta tastes like lime paint, she used to ruin walls because of it, anything was better than her real meals. Well- before she was moved to the pillow room anyway. She forces herself to swallow and flicks the tongue around her mouth, cleaning it of the aftertaste before switching attention back to her workspace.
The surface of the provisional workbench is littered with halfway made bombs and rockets, beside them stand jars of chemicals she uses, some of them even labeled. It's a pain and a half to make her own rockets but her best friend is after all custom made. There is no serial ammo for him, as opposed to Pow-Pow who can use commonly available rounds, he too was created by Jinx herself but she knew straight away she would never find the patience to fill one casing after another, hundreds of times over, and then do it again just a day after. It's the kind of work a machine does. It's not like her minigun complains about it, she will find a way to find him custom made bullets should he ever mention it but he seems content for now.
As opposed to Fishbones, she doesn't get it, she pours so much love and caring into every rocket she makes for him and still he complains about her using him to blow things up. Ungrateful bastard. She's been working on a new one lately, crafty as they get, With expanded yield and acceleration and stuff. She calls it Super Mega Death Rocket, for now. She will think up a better name when it's finished, maybe, not like anyone cares. Stupid rocket launcher probably won't even appreciate it. She scowls at the though but it doesn't stray her from the task at hand. Namely, designing a shell small enough to work with her moronic friend. The problem is that in order to be more powerful she has to pack more amatol into the rocket, totally doable, problem is that it leaves too little space for fuel chamber. She theorized both using liquid and solid propellant but in the end the effects are just laughable, the projectile would fly for around a hundred meters and die. Yeah the explosion would be bigger but that's not what she is looking for. SMDR has to be better in every way.
To that end, she has focused on redesigning the shell itself, as to accumulate more propeller and explosives, so far she has concluded that a new missile would be either too long or big for her weapon, jamming inside the barrel or outright refusing to fit. All of it a moot point really since the rocket would be off balance and prove impossible to aim. And that's without even taking into account the differing weight of various materials used to gradually accelerate the little nuisance.
Basically a bad idea. Drawing the missiles proved to be fun though, even if they all are more or less impractical. She pouts and reaches for her sketchbook, drawing it from under a toy monkey (whom in a bout of creativity she named Monkey). She flips the notebook open and skims through her drawings. Most of them are at least somewhat viable, since she actually tried to get some work done with her pet project but some of them... suffice it to say that she didn't even do the math regarding them. These ones are there mostly because she needed a moment to gather her scattered thoughts. She glances at Monkey and after a moment of consideration turns it around, finding her unblinking stare disturbing. She flips the pages to find the project she has ultimately decided on. It's disappointingly simple in Jinx's eyes. Little more than a tube really, but it's also the only design she has any hope to perfect. Splashing some paint on it will resolve the simplicity issue anyway.
And it all needs to be just perfect to be good enough. Her normal rockets are just RPGs and she's talking art here, something to not just go boom when it hits a wall but to pierce through it and still have enough power to gut the room behind it, or even the entire floor! There is nothing like it in existence and the maniac shivers in excitement at the mere thought of being the first to ever use it. But that's the problem, it doesn't yet exist.
The only solution she can think of is drastic reduction of the payload to accommodate for more fuel, which in turn makes it hard to aim. She ponders on it for a second, feeling a dull ache well on its way to blow up behind her stinging eyes. Making the thing heavier would defeat its purpose, but using lighter materials likewise increases dispersion, arrows use feathers to stabilize their flight but how is she to fit fins into a hand-held launcher? Frustrated, she reaches for the cough syrup she liberated before visiting Fathands. She has no idea what it is other than the fact it tastes like liquified sugar. She unscrews the cap and downs half the bottle in one go. Jinx stares at it for long couple seconds, feeling vaguely like she's forgotten something and it is now at the back of her mind. Meaning lost and buried until it resurfaces on its own.
And even if she does it, even if she manages to get the rocket going. What does it matter if the effect will be that of an oversized bullet? She needs something big, spectacular! Material that yields far more power than the stuff she usually mixes. Something way out of her league.
Hm. Wasn't there some commotion over a Piltie having some fun in Zaun with his toys?
It's a viable option to consider, she would still have to figure out how to deal with all the other issues but tackling even one problem at a time is giving her a headache. She doesn't need more than that at the moment. Right now she knows to be in no shape to pull off a heist of that scale. A week (or less if she so feels), that's... a lot of time to burn. That's like- well she can't decide how much time it is, 168 hours yeah but how long do 168 hours take to pass? Pointless to think about, what's important is what will she do when the time comes.
What is that name... what is his name... She can't force her sore mind to remember, it doesn't matter in the end. All she needs to know is how the yordle in question has managed to make his explosives so astonishingly spectacular. She taps the syrup bottle against the wood as she tries to think of a plan to acquire the explosives.
But the only thing she can focus on by now is the pulsating pain behind her skull. Frustrated, she grabs her head with both her hands, trying in vain to make it stop, trying to stop thinking about pain as these thoughts only fuel it further. A coughing fit decides it a good time to rear its ugly head and it leaves the bluenette pulling at her hair, face down on the table.
She sits like that for some time before blindly reaching over to rummage through the pile of supplies she brought in, knocking half of it onto floor. She only lifts her head to look when she feels a familiar sized box in her hand. Jinx straightens out and pulls out a sachet from the inside, stares at it in contemplation and finally pops four pills into her mouth, then washes them down with the syrup still remaining in the bottle, which after emptying, she throws out of the window. She is fairly sure she has sent someone to hospital by now with her habit of disposing of small trash that way.
And at the top of it all, she can feel her nose stuffing up again.
Ugh.
Jinx waits a long time before standing up, her legs feel like cotton and the needles in her head are replaced with an overwhelming dizziness and something alike hum. Her eyes sting as if they never will again and everything just seems so... weird, and heavy. She grabs the drops from the last day, stuffs them into her shorts and makes way to the mattress in another room. Not to sleep, no, sleeping is quite impossible right now. Every time Jinx closes her eyes it seems like the world can't decide whether it should come closer, further away or simply fall apart. Rather unpleasant though not at all unfamiliar feeling, this drowsiness. It still comes nowhere near close to what she is used to, she can still think unlike after whatever it was she was being given back home. Not that she knows what it was, not simple painkillers that's for sure.
She stops dead in her tracks as she sees a lump beneath her blanket. There is someone in her bed, why is there someone in her bed? She grins wickedly as she creeps towards the mattress, pulling out a bullet from her belt, ready to slam it into the head of whoever it is that had thinks himself capable of outsmarting her. Hah! Maybe he thought he'd be lucky, that's a good one.
"Don't count on luck!" she nearly squeals in excitement as she throws the cover off. To find a rather confused and sleepy looking Fishbones lying beside Pow-Pow. Her smile fades into a frown. "And what are you guys doing in here?"
"Jinx?"
"Your mom." No wait...
"You don't look so good." Hah!
"Cause I don't feel so, how'd you get here?" She puts the bullet back into its belt slot and kneels down to roll the rocket launcher over, making place to sit herself on, and carefully rests her back against the wall. The bricks' cold is soothing, she likes it much better than warmth.
"I don't know, you left me elsewhere." Jinx can't remember leaving him anywhere.
"Whatever, just need to sit for a bit."
"What did you do again? Are you hurt?"
"Was a headache, took pills already, just gotta wait 'em out." She notices how her minigun seems to be eyeing her with a special kind of interest, and it takes a lot to get his attention. She shakes her head to clean her foggy thoughts a bit, nearly falling over from doing so.
"What?" She asks eventually, Pow-Pow naturally doesn't answer. He's got his partner for that.
"What?"
"Pow-Pow's doing the stare thing again," the girl turns back to Fishbones after picking her other friend up and setting him on her lap. "What does he want?"
"I don't know, maybe he's curious about your day, You were out for a long time." She bites the inside of her cheek to keep her mind awake, she doubts she'll be able to catch half of his words if he goes into one of his rants.
"I was shopping." Yup. Nothing suspicious at all there.
"For almost a day?"
"Yup, and painting too, I wasn't doing that for a while so... uh, thought I could." Fishbones eyes her with a calculating look, knowing full well she's lying. She does things for fun not because... reasons, damn it she's a bad liar. Especially like this.
Silence falls between them for some time, long enough for Jinx to close her eyes for a moment before the whirling sensation kicks in and startles her awake.
"You visited her didn't you?" Seriously? HOW? How does he ALWAYS knows these things?!
"No." It comes out more like a question, much to the girl's displeasure.
"Jinx," he begins, his voice patronizing, like one would speak to a child, it's irritating beyond belief and strangely soothing at the same time "You don't have to lie to me, you can always trust me."
"Yeah, I'm not lying though."
"Jinx-"
"I didn't." She cuts in, and that is that. The rocket launcher only sighs at her words.
"So you actually went shopping this time? Like with money?"
"Pft! No? Are you kidding? I said shopping not buying. Me. Buying!" She breaks out into a fit of giggles, followed shortly by more coughing.
"You okay?"
"Yeah, ju- just give me a sec." She reaches into her pocket to pull out the drops and tilts her head back to use them. They spend another minute like that before the criminal flares her nostrils couple times to finally find them clear.
"Besides," she continues "I don't have any money." It's of little use to her, and while she was curious of it when she first encountered it, the novelty quickly wore off. While she has a good mind for numbers (minus migraines) the way people go about life is strange at the least. Oh she grasps the concept of money and exchange, it has to do with being a productive member of society- which she is not. As her friend likes to remind her every now and then.
"Maybe you should start earning it, you know, settle down." She can't help but snort in amusement.
"Yeah sure, maybe we should join the police?" She flashes the twit by her side the most charming smirk she can muster.
"Ugh..."
Job.
Hilarious.
"...Maybe let's just forget about that for now."
"Why? Don't you want to-" She cuts off as she feels her insides squirm uncomfortably, letting out a faint sound of discontent.
"When did you eat last time?"
"When did YOU eat last time huh?" She giggles for a moment before noticing the stern look on her friend's face. "Urgh... like half a day ago? Ish?"
"And what did you steal this time? Candy?"
She puffs her cheeks out and looks to the side, avoiding Fishbones' judging gaze.
"Jinx!"
"Oh shut up, you never even ate it and you keep going on about how unhealthy candy is. Hey Jinx you should eat vegetables. Hey listen, maybe you should cut on sweets. Hey Jinx, liste- What are you? A deietes- deietis- diet- you know what? You don't get to tell me what I can and can't do, so hah!" She crosses her arms and turns her gaze towards the empty wall and away from her friend.
"..."
"...And this healthy stuff tastes awful, you wouldn't know." He sighs before speaking up again.
"Just wash your teeth before you fall over asleep. And did you get that thermometer?"
"...Dammit."
such ideas
many work
so struggle
succez ungaranted
wow