I give up... I'm gonna make most of her W's into V's but that's probably going to be it. If only her voice actress didn't change some Th's into T's or D's...! ARGH Okay, calming down now. Carry on~
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A thought came to Lili's mind when she looked at the two children next morning and couldn't help but frown a little at how long their hair was. For Alice, it reached to the backs of her knees in unkempt, dirty strands. Their red-brown color was altered by all of the dirt that was caked on. Yao was hardly any better, though his locks only fell to just past his waistline and were already a dark brown, so the dirt didn't really change that much about the shade.
The medical kit lay open on the worn coffee table, and Liechtenstein's gaze wandered over to rest on it. There was a pair of scissors there, meant for cutting bandages... And Lili did know how to cut hair; she had been cutting her own for decades! So, why not?
"Alice, Yao?" Lili said to get their attention. The two of them had just woken up and were slowly rising to get ready for the day.
"Uh-huh?" Alice replied around a yawn as she scratched the top of her head idly, and Yao just gave Lili his bleary-eyed attention.
"Vould you like me to cut your hair today?"
Two pairs of eyes widened at the thought, and then Alice smiled brightly. "Yeah! But how're you gonna do that? We don't have any scissors..."
"There are scissors in here," Liechtenstein explained, and reached for the box. Finland sat up from where he'd been sleeping and handed the implements to her; she accepted them with a small, "Danke."
The look of delight on the younger girl's face was remarkable. "Yes, please!"
After a quick breakfast of water and trail mix, Yao got dressed for a trip out into the woods and Alice plopped herself down in front of Lili's rocking chair. Before Yao could leave, Tino spoke up.
"Could I go with you, Yao? I'd like to see where you get food from, so I can help out more." His boots were already laced up and his arms were pulled through his flight jacket sleeves.
China looked down at the silver umbrella in his hand, which was just barely wide enough to shelter two tall people underneath its canopy. "Okay, if you want to," he said after a moment.
Their group divided, leaving the girls safe at home while the boys were bundled up for an adventure in the outdoors. Before Lili started cutting, Alice tilted her head back and said, "When your leg heals up, you and I can go get food together! Then you'll know where it comes from, too."
Liechtenstein smiled down at Oregon. "I vould like that very much. Now hold still so I can do a good job. How short do you vant it?"
Finland and China walked in relative silence, caused more or less by the boy's distant attitude. Thinking to himself, Finland couldn't blame him for his way of acting; he and Liechtenstein had sort of barged in and disrupted the equilibrium China and Oregon had grown accustomed to. 'And there is also the past to consider, where China had been very against strangers and adapting.
'But that was the previous China's doing, not this one. Maybe they share that personality trait.' Tino couldn't help but wonder. 'That would be interesting to find out.'
Over the noise caused by the moderate drizzle, Tino spoke. "How far is this convenience store?"
"Two hours that way, if you walk careful," Yao answered with a minimal gesture ahead of them. He was taking good care to keep his fingers from leaving the protection of the umbrella's canopy, and therefore couldn't point very far.
"You know, I noticed that your English is a lot better than the last time I saw you," Tino commented light-heartedly, and repositioned his grip on the umbrella's handle. As the taller of the two, the task of holding it had fallen to him.
"Alice helped me," Yao said quietly. "And I'm teaching her Chinese."
"You seemed to enjoy the lesson you were giving her yesterday," he chuckled. "It was nice to watch. You two are very close; I can tell."
"... Yeah." Yao turned his face away from Tino and looked out between the slowly eroding trees, into the misty gray fog that blanketed the ground in the distance. Nothing stood out to his scrutinous gaze, so he deemed that it was still safe. For now.
The conversational atmosphere, if there had ever been one before, evaporated. It didn't take a rocket scientist to tell that China just wasn't in the talking sort of mood, so rather than push it Finland decided to lapse into silence and continue walking through the woods that way. Meanwhile, with his mouth closed and his other senses open, he observed the nature he was now going to become very familiar with.
As mentioned before, the thriving greenery that Oregon was famous for had all vanished as a result of the acidic rain. Because the trees were bigger and stronger, they were lasting only a little bit longer than the ferns and grass and flowers. Without any colors except brown earth, blackened trees, and a solidly grey sky, the setting was a bleak and monotonous one.
As for the animals, those too had disappeared. It was all too likely that not even bones remained of their carcasses, as long as the rain ate through bone matter. It certainly ate through flesh; Tino sent his palm a quick glance and spied the three circular scars that were already entirely healed but would last for a while yet.
No birds twittered in the treetops or the skies above. Squirrels and chipmunks didn't scamper across the forest floor. There was no way a mother deer with her fawn would be spotted between the charred tree trunks surrounding their path. Otters didn't swim in the rivers and pine martens didn't leap from tree branch to tree branch on their nimble little paws.
Speaking of pine martens, where was Revo? Was he alright somewhere else, or...?
'Probably best not to ask' Tino decided.
"Your hair is so knotted and tangled... It vould be nice if ve could clean your hair before I cut it," Liechtenstein mused as she lifted up a handful of Oregon's dirty red-brown hair.
"Oh yeah," she said as if remembering something. "I guess I haven't taken a shower in a couple months."
"You can shower?" Lili asked, her mouth hanging open a touch.
"Yep!" Alice pointed her finger at the old bucket sitting just a couple feet in front of her. "In that. We use a water bottle and reuse the water so it's not wasted."
"... You and China have gotten very good at saving your vater, haven't you." It was more of an assumption than a question.
"Mmhm," Alice confirmed. "It's 'cause we don't have a lot, and we don't want to run out... But I can take a shower right now."
So, the dirty water that had been sitting in the bucket already was their old bath water. The thought was a gross one, but the necessity for it still existed. Because Lili had to keep resting her leg so it could heal up correctly, she couldn't do anything but stay seated as Alice fetched a water bottle from the cellar and brought it back up to the bucket. She bustled about for a moment, clearing the blankets away from the area so they wouldn't accidentally get splashed.
The 'shower' itself didn't last very long; maybe five minutes at most. The water she used was cold, and she had to do a lot of scooping the water up and rubbing it into her skin to dislodge the stubborn dirt while she crouched inside the little bucket. When she was finished, Alice stepped out and made sure not to drip all over the floor as she redressed in grimy clothes.
Liechtenstein did her best not to look so Alice would have some privacy. Finally, after pulling her shirt on-- the last garment to put back on-- Alice ran wet fingers through her hair over and over to comb out the knots and tame it. It surely wasn't anywhere in the ballpark of "squeaky clean" but it would do in a pinch.
"All done!" Oregon announced, looking triumphant with her hair lying slick and straight-ish behind her shoulders, all the way down to the backs of her knees. "Ready for a haircut."
"Alright, sit down in front of me," Lili instructed, and moved her splinted leg out to the side so it wouldn't accidentally be jarred. Alice plopped herself down once again and sandwiched her hands between her thighs as she waited eagerly for Lili to begin.
Snip, Snip, Snip, Snip...
The scissors made a pleasant sound as they severed lock after lock of the overgrown hair they were trying to manage. Lili thought to herself, 'If I'm right, she had her hair long before. I should ask her vhat she vould prefer.'
"You vanted it to still be a little bit long, right?"
Alice replied with a cheery, "Yes~" and tried her hardest not to fidget so Lili could make accurate cuts.
'This is a bit harder than it looks... I'm used to cutting my own hair, not someone else's' Liechtenstein mused as she went about her work. Strands a foot long or longer fell to the floor at her feet in clumps. 'But I can do this. It looks nicer already!'
Finally, after dozens of cuts, Lili had a suitable haircut before her; she had asked Alice to stand up after a little while so she could judge whether there had been any mistakes made. But they weren't done yet.
The thought of what she would do next brought a smile to Liechtenstein's face. She reached up and untied the purple ribbon in her hair, and then stretched it out to make sure it was long enough. Though she hoped her big brother wouldn't be mad at her for doing this to a gift he had given her, Lili brought the scissors up to the ribbon and severed it in the middle. With one half held loosely between her lips, and the other half resting in her lap, she took hold of Alice's hair and began to twist it all into a single braid.
The familiar, gentle tugging sensations on her scalp made Alice's eyes widen impossibly, and her mouth dropped open. She didn't say anything, though, and held perfectly still so Lili could finish.
"There, all done," Liechtenstein announced after tying her work off with a simple bow, and she let go of the braid so it could fall against Oregon's back.
The younger girl's hands flew up to her hair and seized the braid, using her fingers more than her eyes to tell if she was dreaming or not. "You braided my hair!" she exclaimed, her tone a mixture of disbelief and unbridled delight while she spun around 180 degrees to face Liechtenstein.
"I remembered that you liked your hair braided," Lili replied with a smile.
"Thank you thank you thank you thank you!" she cheered while throwing her arms around Liechtenstein in a big hug. "It's perfect, I love it so much!"
Lili beamed and hugged her back, enjoying the feeling of giving such a small but meaningful gift. "You're velcome, Alice."
When Finland and China reached the convenience store, the much older nation was mildly surprised to see a half-destroyed building with intact windows but almost no roof at all. The walls were full of huge, misshapen holes, and when they stepped inside through the half-eaten front door he saw that patches of the floor had been dissolved all the way down to the building's foundation. A few barren shelves were still intact for the most part, but many didn't exist where they might have two and a half years ago.
Curiously enough, though the front windows had caved forward and shattered on the ground without anything to support them, the remaining glass was perfectly intact. None of it had been liquefied. "Does the rain not eat through glass?" Tino inquired, and then realized that was a silly question to ask when there had been evidence right in front of him for the past two days. The window of the shack wasn't covered in mud but it was still there, so of course glass was impervious.
"No," China answered anyway, and drifted inside the store stepping carefully up the little mound of dirt that led to the pockmarked stone porch. There were indentations in the dirt, indicating that those footholds were used often.
Underneath the sections of ceiling that were still being held up, whether by miracles or some other device, the floor was a slew of scattered dirt and something Finland hadn't seen in many months: dried up, pale brown pine needles. The rain hadn't reached them, so all they'd done was wither up and die where they lay, all but untouched ever since being blown inside the store via the wind.
The convenience store as a whole was just odd-looking, like a giant had taken bites and nibbles of the structure without wanting to finish the "meal." Even the floor, which had once been white tile, was absent in places where the roof also had vanished. Only one and a half of the glass door fridges against the far wall remained, tipped over and entirely empty of their contents; that included the shelves.
'Wait... I think I saw one of those shelves sitting on the coffee table in the shack...' Tino recalled. That was one minor mystery solved, at least.
Yao knew where to go, though, and walked out from under the umbrella's protection because there was a section of roof above the route to the back of the store. Tino still stuck close by and made sure he could cover Yao if necessary.
There was a 24-pack of water bottles was nearly all that was left inside the extra storage room, and it was less than half-empty. An open box of granola bars lay on its side on a steel shelf, but its contents was almost depleted, too.
'I don't think this will be enough to last us for very long...' both Finland and China were thinking at the same time, though neither knew the other's thoughts. Their concern definitely showed in their expressions.