Away from the Roux household Leroy ventured, instead trudging towards the stone hut he once claimed as his home. The place was filled by cardboard boxes, each one crammed top the top with a unique assortment of items and doohickeys. He dubbed the tremendous accumulation of unprofitable junk The Collection. With the entirety of his heart did he love The Collection. The Collection was his child, after all - he saw its birth, and he saw it grow. And whilst it grew, Leroy helped guide it through every stage of life, including childhood, adulthood, and that slew of awkward years in between. If that wasn't the protocol for raising a child, then he didn't know what was.

The oaken door which fronted the house appeared much more worn than the last time he laid eyes on it. The wood looked damp through and through, despite the recent aggregation of dry weather. It was cracked, and stood unevenly off the ground. Altogether, it seemed about as structurally safe as a sandal, and half as sturdy. Not much could be said in regards to the stone foundation, since it was fucking stone and all. But if the door's clinical condition was a result of abandonment, then the General could only imagine how the building's interior looked.

Biting back on his lip, mildly wincing as he proceeded, he reaches forward and wraps his front right paw around the stone handle.

He pulls back.

A tidal wave of the boxes' contents surge from the ajar doorway. In a matter of mere seconds, Leroy is drowned beneath  a substantial mass of odds and ends, nearly asphyxiating the poor bastard. However, he manages to find leverage beneath the gargantuan pile, and draws himself up. "Fuck!" he cries.

Oh yeah. It's fucking midnight in this bitch, so it's not like he could just call for help or anything like that.

Although it was fucking midnight in this bitch, Abathur was awake, a restlessness keeping him awake - he found himself unable to go to sleep these days... and all days, actually, because he never really slept, in the literal sense of the word, taking a few 'naps' throughout the day, in a dormant sort of consciousness that allowed him easy control of his faculties as soon as he woke up. Frankly, he found the mammalian sleep cycles rather crude, what with the minutes it took them to fully wake up.

But anyways.

It was midnight, and the moon hung high in the sky, a gentle quiet pervading the world, interrupted only by an unfortunate swear, one that shook Abathur to attention immediately. Admittedly, he had been going into dormancy, but there was no time for that - some form of fuckening was afoot, and he had to go make sure nobody was hurt.

The scene his acute senses led him to was one of a cuboid avalanche, a vomitous pile of cardboard neatly blocking off access to a house, access that the dog before it no doubt sought. Perhaps the house had some treasure? Besides the boxes, of course, which were no doubt valuable. The spider crawled forth, intrigued, wondering why all this was happening. Why so many boxes? Were they all full? Why was Leroy (the dog in question, it turned out) trying to open up this boxy house at midnight? And why did the door open outwards?

All questions that would have to wait, it turned out, for first, Abathur would have to engage in some small talk, or something. Or ask to help first - that would be good. Then he could make inquiries while he labored. "Greetings," the spider grumbled, shifting over to sit on some of the boxes, his lithe form not unbalancing the precarious nature of this chaotic modern art installation. "Does subject need... help?" Regardless, Leroy would have to talk to him to get him to move off the boxes, thus ensuring a dialogue would be opened. Truly, he was a genius.

tags - "speech"

Leroy considered himself a man of hardly any fears. The terrors and atrocities that the wolfhound witnessed throughout his existence vastly overpowered what the majority of his tribemates had seen. Thus, the few fears that he did held to his name were - in his humble opinion - incredibly hardcore. First off, Leroy was utterly terrified of the ocean. Its abyssal expanses just went on forever, so who really knew what went on down there? Giant squids? Sharks that shot frickin' laser beams? Octopus-headed god-like beings that yearned for the planet's destruction? Eugh, he'd rather not think about it. The ocean, though, wasn't nearly as scary as terminal diseases. Passing away sort of mitigated his insensitivity to the matter. Before being diagnosed, the mongrel never foresaw himself dying of it, and after being told that he had cancer, his life did a total 180. Without a moment's notice, the fragility of life became so apparent, and he finally began finding joy in the littlest of things. And then he died. But now he's back, and realizes that terminal diseases are no joke (yet technically speaking, he's still dead, though his spirit is using the body of his younger brother as a living flesh puppet).

None of the fears previously listed were anything on giant spiders smack-dab in the middle of the fucking night.

He coolly pulls himself out from neath the rubble, though at the sight of Abathur, Leroy lets out a bit of a scream. A horrifying, bloodcurdling scream. However, he cuts himself off before too long, so that he didn't have a horde of freshly-awakened Tanglers to deal with.

"Shit, 'm sorry Abathur," he apologizes sincerely, recognizing how fucking disrespectful that must've been, "ya caught me off guard. I dunno what came over me, I think it might've been the eyes-"

Shut up, Leroy.

Worried that his little act left the oversized arachnid with a bad taste in his weird-looking mouth, the general's gaze glides back to the massive mess that partially consumed him. Fuck, this mess was messy. "I dunno if there's much to help with," he voices as he digs around the top layer of trash, tossing away a rather ugly monkey wrench, "I came back 'ere to move some shit, since I don't live here no more, but it looks like the shit decided to move onto me." It was true. The canine made a habitat out of the Roux household nowadays, residing alongside the ex-leader, Crow, and his healer son, Selby. Howbeit, despite moving houses, he had yet to move any of his possessions. And while his old place of residence seemed to be filled to the brim with unwanted junk, there was some useful shit in there. Hell, his jukebox was still in there.

"If ya did wanna assist with anythin' - I'm not orderin' ya to or nothin' - then ya can help me out dig out my most valuable possessions... which are like my icebox, my jukebox, my strongbox, and my tinderbox. Lotta boxes. Again, that's only if ya wanna. I'm sure I can deal with this shit on all on my lonesome." Taking a long look up at the towering mass of clutter, that was clearly not the case.

The scream left him taken aback.

He was normally a very composed person - not in the icy cold robot way, as some may think, he did very much have feelings, but he was still in control of his body, and his reactions. For the most part. That 'the most part' did not, in fact, extend to people screaming in his face.

In an act of sudden fight/flight/freeze instincts taking over, the spider lurched backwards, limbs pulling him up to the side of the house above the door, green eyes peering down in fear, which soon faded to annoyance, when his body settled down. "Subject Leroy, please," he said, in a disdainful, disgruntled voice, the shout echoing in his head in the form of painful aches, "make terrified shrieks quieter. Or at lower pitch, at least." One of his pedipalps moved to rub his skull in appeasement of the pounding headache that threatened to rear its ugly head.

He then shifted forward, crawling at a slower pace, the eerie movement of each leg on full display as he stepped off of the significant pile with ease, before rotating and looking at it. "Apologies for scaring subject, was just interested in shouting." He grumbled in the space between conversation, right before Leroy began his fetch quest instructions. As he did, the j'ba fofi would listen patiently, flicking his vision to and fro across the scenery in an attempt to see what little he could, in the dark. "Boxes," he repeated, absentmindedly, before surging forward again, a clear indication of his intentions - helping people was most certainly the polite thing to do, yes? That, he figured, was common sense, and people liked basic things like human decency and common sense, things that were easy to get the hang of. Still, Abathur felt entitled to some questions - such was how he operated. Curiosity and growth before all else.

"Why does subject have so many valuable boxes?" He asked, his burrowing fully underway, as he shifted crates aside.

tags - "speech"

The general recoils in unbridled terror at the sight of the eight-legged creature scurrying up the face of his home. Ooooooh, how he hated those fucking legs. There was far too many of them, and whenever the arachnid strolled along, they would all move at a lightning-quick pace. If only he could halve the number of Abathur's limbs. A morbid thought, of course, but at least he'd be spared from having to witness the spider's petrifying walking pattern. Whilst standing upon the hut's surface, the creepy crawly then requests him to lower his volume, which left the wolfhound oddly perturbed. Seconds ago did he have the bejesus scared out of him, and now he was being told to shut up about it. And though he possessed a bullheaded persona that would usually challenge such an abrupt request, the disconcerting nature that surrounded this situation coerced Leroy to... simply listen. The canine's maw, that had initially been readied to spit back some foul retort, sealed itself shut in unusual defeat.

By the time Abathur climbed back to the ground and assumed his previous position, the soft hairs that hitherto stood upright in pure fear had fell flat against his back, and his shoulders found themselves free of the tense stance in which they were locked in. The rather jumbo-sized critter, although grotesque in visage, posed no threat to him tonight - nor did he ever (the mongrel hoped). The spider's apology obliged the leader to subtly shake his head. No, HE should be the one apologizing. For reacting negatively to the being's presence on a regular basis. For deducing the being to his appearance alone, rather than his intellectual prowess. Despite his apology existing as unnecessary, it alleviated him to an adequate degree. Hopefully, the next time Abathur decided to come wriggling around, he wouldn't be met with insolence.

"Boxes", he echoes the other individual, glancing towards the hefty pile that the building's doorway puked out. "This's my collection. Lotta this shit ya can't find anywhere else on the island." His closing claim was true. He had looked far and wide, but ultimately failed in his search of another erotic motorcycle poster.

"Tonight," he continues, "I wanted to move somethin' o' mine to the tavern. There's a jukebox somewhere in there, and I'm one hundred-and-one percent certain that there's a wagon too. Problem is, I got all these fuckin' boxes on the ground. So that's a fuckin' kick in the head."