█ three (looting the gas station)

( in the gas station today, we have a noodle boy on a quest. emil is somewhere around here, but lalli has split off to scour the shelves for items of his own choosing. medical supplies. a couple of knives, you can never have too many of those. chemicals for cleaning, because of course emil's going to want to scour whichever cabin they end up taking over.

others in the store go largely ignored (they seem, by his assessment, benign) - but maybe he reaches for the same item you do. if so, his hand recoils slightly, and he glances from the person to the item. ) Yours, ( he decides, moving on down the aisle to find something else.

or maybe you've caught him at the end of his time in the gas station. he stays a bit longer than one might expect, if only because this hooded noodle boy is on a fucking mission. a discarded pint of ice cream lies melting on the floor by the freezers, the label showing a picture of a mustard container (no wonder he didn't recognize it, he has never encountered it in bottles before), and lalli can be found in the condiments aisle with a bucket, scooping every single bottle of the offensive yellow sauce it furiously into the bucket with one arm. give him enough time and he'll even be marching the bucket outside to the middle of the road and stepping back from it, eyes closing, hands extended, chanting what sounds very much like some sort of incantation in finnish. please, intercept him before he finishes, because otherwise there's going to be a flaming bucket full of mustard bottles in the middle of the asphault. )

█ four (scouting the barrier)

( it took very little time at all for lalli to set to work scouting the barrier - a few hours at most, as long as it took to establish that things were stable enough here to leave emil and klaus unattended without immediate risk of dying.

now anyone out in the woods might spot a slim hooded figure picking his way through the trees at a brisk jog, nimbly hopping over shrubbery or tree roots. one hand hovers a couple of feet out to his side as he runs, and a honeycomb glow pattern seems to emit from his hand and ripple out into the air. (those who have already interacted with the barrier will most certainly recognize what it is that's actually happening: he's following their invisible fence). he'll stop if called out to or intercepted in any way, but otherwise not much can interrupt him.

unless, of course, you're standing along the barrier yourself. if someone happens to be standing in his path, he pulls up short to eye them, half assessing (did they run headlong into it? it seems to ricochet those that do) and half impatient (they're in his way - he'll go around if he has to, but that doesn't change that they're in his way). )