lara-richter

[lara-richter]

[lara-richter]

"I know you weren't", Lara said smiling, slowly taking the steps upstairs, "Just tried to be funny, sorry I wasn't". She really did, assuming it might have put him off. One thing Lara Richter really wasn't was being funny.  There was a lift in the mall, two actually, but no one dared to use them these days. They hardly used electricity, if they had some, there was some sort of generator in the very cellar of Printemps, but Lara didn't know much about it. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't. A few times there were flickering lights. Another thing on the list they could think about researching about.

Turning around and walking a few steps backwards, her hand on the cold wall to guide her, Lara watched Damien take the steps, just to see how he would do. If it was worse than he said it could end really bad really fast in this world. Whether they had a run in with gang members or they had to walk on icy, frozen ground, a steady grip was absolutely needed. Or death or injury were almost inevitable. Damien was one of the persons she really didn't want to see hurt. "Not a lot is still something. Do you want me to have a look?", Lara asked carefully, offering it rather than suggesting.

Then she stopped in one of the zones inbetween the stairs, waited for Damien to catch up and rested her hand underneath her chin. "I'm not too sure. I know there are quite a few between the third and fifth arrondissement, along the Seine. Though they probably are already looted anyway. I would have to look at my map, I marked them there.", she started, trying to remember what she had seen on her 'walks' to find survivors. "We do have quite some vitamins, they are mostly being ignored by raiders as well. Which is good. Usually I'd not recommend vitamin pills, if taken too often, the body get used to an especially high amount of the certain vitamins. Though that won't be a problem here." Looking at Damien for a while, Lara crouched down again and sighed. "They are going to use up, too, eventually. What are we going to do then?"

Radio Silence || Lara & Damien

[lara-richter]

"Once you are at the place you are comfortable at, it can be however dark and cold around you, you will be comfortable despite everything."

wenn du an dem ort bist an dem du dich wohlfühlst dann kann es noch so düster und kalt um dich herum sein du wirst dich dort trotz allem immer wohlfühlen….

[lara-richter]

Lara crouched down, too impatient to properly sit down. But she would wait for Damien to get up, so she could leave with him. Her arms wrapped around herself to keep herself warm, it was cold down here, she raised her eyebrows. "Someone would make sure everyone knows if or when we go out to do stuff. Probably me. No way we'd forget you, even if you're hidden down here.", she said in an almost playful manner, her German accent ending her words very abruptly. Unlike French, or English, German wasn't very melodic. Neither was Lara, though once upon a time she had played the piano, before her life involved more and more of her job.

The smile Damien showed her made Lara's get a bit wider, a warm feeling growing inside of her. As far as she knew it, her family was still alive, somewhere in Scandinavia, Sweden probably. Unlike others of her group, or the ones she had called friends before the snow came down, her family was safe and sound and she knew it, maybe one of the reasons why Lara was able to stay calm even in these situations. Yet, when she felt as warm as now, it reminded her of the ones she loved and missed. Now, this group was her family. The ones making her feel warm, no matter how cold the world outside was.

His seriousness didn't bother Lara at all, what did was the way Damien stood up. Not smooth enough. Even though Lara was trained to see and noticed things like that, Damien wasn't her patient. He was a grown man and if he wanted to see someone for help, he had the choice of three skilled medics. Still, a short "Are you alright?" slipped out of her almost without control.

Standing up again, Lara opened the door wide so Damien could slip through it to her and smiled again, finally they'd go up. "Canned beans and meat.", Lara said, they ate meat every day, but what cans they opened was a mystery. Looking a little afar, her smile dropped and her face got harder, a face she showed more often: "The cans won't last long. Nothing grows in these temperatures, soon we'll have real trouble with the lack of vitamins."

Radio Silence || Lara & Damien

[lara-richter]

It looked fun, the way they, Laure, Taj, even Jan, were just outside of Printemps' entrance. All hustling and bustling around the fire, making dinner. It had gotten darker already, even though it was late summer, not even autumn yet, but the sky was filled with the clouds that dimmed the sun. Made it impossible for its warm rays to melt any of the meters of snow, any of the thick ice. The fire they had lit was lovingly warm and bright - possibly leading people needing help to them and keeping everything else at bay. The wolves had been sighted in a district rather far away, but Lara knew that eventually, they would get further into the city. Scavenging. As were humans.

The fire had brightened Lara's spirits especially and she had laughed about Taj's jokes, even build a tiny snow man with him, while Laure and Jan had important conversations. The mood was just nice, there hardly was anything as lovely as the warmth fire spend, it didn't need any electricity to heat up food, something they were all looking forward to. Fire used to be destruction, fire used to kill, now it was life itself.

It almost felt hard to leave the little campfire atmosphere that had come, moments as nice as these were rare, but there was something Lara missed. Or rather someone. Damien was missing from their little group and even if the food would still take a while to be ready to eat, Lara wanted him to be part of their fun. Quickly running through the building, calling for him, Lara stopped, then skipped downstairs. Damien liked things that were electronic, things that were mechanic, things that could, for example, be found in the watch repair in Level -1. The door was a small bother to open, but when Lara forced her way in, Damien was sitting in the room against the wall, a book closed in his lap.

Lara went a step further into the room and smiled at Damien, still keeping the door open. "We're cooking. Come and join us, it's a lot warmer around the fire than down here."

Radio Silence || Open

Can you make this work? The answer, most often, was no. 

Even before the apocalypse, the delicacy of power grids and satellite signals, as substantial as spider webs, had been a cause for wonder. How many people had relied on these things that would not withstand a bird or a thick roof? It was ludicrous. It had been torn down, made useless, exactly like a cobweb versus a broom. 

The others went out hunting most often for supplies and survivors and scavengers, ranging far out into Paris—a very different city, now, than the one he remembered visiting long ago, in a very different time—but Damien generally remained holed up in Printemps, and did things like put up insulation and know precisely how many things were in their makeshift warehouses and fiddle with the odd gadget. He assumed it was like what the doctors and nurses felt—people didn’t understand, and they were scared, and any expertise meant you knew and could do everything.

He hated saying no. He was not graceful at denying people, and when they went away, silent and dumb or, worse, muttering, he was left with a gnawing sense of failure. He should have known. Damien raided libraries the way others cleared out pharmacies and sat with his back to the wall, just under a sliver of light cast from between the slats of a reinforced window. He spent hours combing through books and guides, looking for answers he had forgotten or never known or had long ago discarded as obsolete.

Damien turned a page just as there was a rattle of a hinge—the door stuck, it was freezing fucking cold, and yet somehow that damn door did not shrink enough not to stick. He looked up, not quite done with the thought he was chasing. 

"What is it?" Damien said, shutting the book. It snapped in the cold, still air, sharpening the edge in his voice.  

[lara-richter]

[lara-richter]

Now that Jan had taken over the woman, Lara slipped a slight bit out of her working mode. She was still in it, but now she saw Jan as well, carrying the woman's weight. Sure, she hadn't looked heavy, but as a nurse Lara knew how heavy people could be once they lost their ability to stay stable. When all of them just was slow and pulled down by gravity it was even more important to watch out for them. For their neck, their spine. But Jan did great and Lara eased a bit up, keeping close to her to be there once he needed a break or similar. Lara hoped we wouldn't, but it might still be possible. Every doctor, every surgeon, every nurse was still only human. Even if she was told that she hardly was once she started working.

Lara was almost ready to turn into Taj's direction to get him to get the others, tipping on her feet, but Jan told her, or rather asked her, to go with him. In case of gang members. In the end, it was just as alright with Lara as getting the others first, as long as caring for the woman would be done as fast as possible. Lara nodded: "No problem. Sounds smart." Trusting the gangs was nothing she could do too easily, as much as Laure believed in them, they all were way too similar. Their deal was a time bomb ready to explode, and it probably would - waiting for it was the horrible part. The part when people got hurt.

As soon as Jan grabbed a gun from his pocket, Lara's features froze like spilled water in this world outside. The German did hesitate a little, but when she looked up from the weapon to Jan's face, the professional mask that was upon her when something was important cracked and mixed emotions showing. Discomfort. Worry. Fear. "I don't want it. I've never handled one and I don't want to have something made to kill. I don't want that. Please, just let's go.", Lara said turning her body to the direction they would have to head into. A pistol in her hands would end horrible, would end with someone hurt, with even more work - work that they didn't have time for. But more importantly, a gun really only existed to hurt. They weren't just there to look pretty, they were used to pull the trigger. As much as she didn't trust the gang members, they were still human and even if they decided to point their guns in their directions, that still didn't make it okay to hurt - or even kill - another survivor. In the end that's all they were, they all were - people trying to survive in this hostile world.

Frail Life || Lara & Jan

'Okay,' he had replied, as he carefully lifted the woman from the ground, keeping her chest straight as Lara had said. Nurses were much better in seeing the conditions of the patients, while Jan as a surgeon only saw the wounds and how to proceed on taking care of them. He easily forgot a person had feelings and while he knew they were in pain, he might as well forget that too if matters were worse. In times when time was short and he needed to act fast, he had to ignore all pain boundaries, and only think of what was the best way to get people better.

Instead of putting the woman on his back, he kept her against his chest, which acted as a better way to keep her chest straight. She didn’t weigh much, so he probably could walk her all the way back to Printemps without getting too exhausted. He still had to operate on her though, and fixing broken ribs when they were probably shattered wasn’t his favorite thing to do. He was rather pessimistic about the possibility of it all going well, but he would try, for the sake of this woman. Still, they didn’t have the proper equipment. It was only until his time in Paris that he had truly lost people while trying to safe their lives. If only the hospitals hadn’t been raided when he got their, he only had the medical supplies they picked up along the way. One day they would run low, and what would life be like then. He tried to stop thinking about it at the very moment. 

'Maybe it's better if you come along,' he reminded her. 'In case I have a run in with any gang members.' He sounded serious. They scouted alone, but they always returned together. And especially when carrying people, he didn't like to be alone. As he kept the woman against his body, he reached for his pocket and handed Lara his gun. 'Just in case,' he said, looking rather worried. He hoped his own body heat would at least warm the woman up just a bit. She shouldn't be fragile if he needed to operate on her. Though he probably had no other choice. 

[lara-richter]

eliego:

the enormity of living it by ephebic bears on Flickr.

[lara-richter]

The fact that it didn't snow was a big part of why Lara had decided to go out and search today. If it was for her, she'd be out every day, out to look for people who needed help, out to keep herself busy. Of course, people were brought to them as well, mostly gang members from Prolux' gang. They had made a deal and while Lara was happy to treat anyone coming to them, she hardly believed that Prolux would keep their little group safe like he said. She had talked to others and they told her that he wasn't exactly a man one could trust. Now, of course, she hadn't met him herself to get her mind around making an own opinion, but he obviously wasn't that good of a man if he was a gang leader, anyway. The gun shot wounds spoke of themselves, making it hard for Lara to keep a straight face whenever she saw one of the gang members on her patrols. Yes, they were there to keep them safe, keep Printemps from being raided, but now and then, the bullets in their guns ended up in other bodies, which was unacceptable.

Lara pressed her ski-goggles against her eyes and sighed. She felt like rushing her hand through her long, dark hair, but every bit of skin hurt in these temperatures, even though the sun shone and it was a nice day. The bad days were snow storms where ears and nose and eyes were red and swollen, ice crystals and snow in eyebrows and lashes within seconds.

Along the forest Lara went to the subway, but not a soul was along there. The subway itself was frozen anyway. Yet, Lara didn't feel like going back already, the sky was still cloudless, the sun sitting on its rightful throne right above her head. As long as it was possible to do something outside, she should, even if it seemed like today would just be one of those days where she risked letting her group down by being outside searching for people in need that didn't exist, when patients where brought in. Still, they were all able people and something kept pulling Lara further southwest. Speeding up her pace, her eyes either pinned on the map or looking for something, it was clear to her that she was going into the direction of the Eiffel Tower, in the seventh arrondissement. Where the wolves were.

Wolves, no survivors, Lara felt especially cynical that moment. Why again did she go out wasting two hours? At least Lara didn't want to go back to the place she could almost call home with empty hands, she thought, when a loud noise made her job down the street she was on. A building had just collapsed, probably from the heavy snow on it's roof, as it looked while she was eying what seemed to have been a supermarket to her right. That was when she heard a numb call from straight where she was looking at. 'Help'. Instantly, Lara ran towards the building and climbed over a very short part of what used to be a wall. "Help is here, where are you?"

Worth more than Gold || Lara & Leon

[lara-richter]

Lara hardly heard anything but Jan's words, her mind clearly filtering out what was important and what not. In situations like these, nothing was more important than the patient. It had always been that in Lara's life, a nurse, or anyone working in the medical field has the responsibility of knowing that their job is more important than an hour of pleasure. In one hour of meeting someone, people can already die. None of her previous boyfriends had understood that, just like none of them had understood how warm, playful Lara also had this strict, cynical side on her.

"Yes, I think even two.", she replied to Jan, "Fragments might have cut some vessels." 'Might have cut some vessels' was the nice variation. Another thing that could have been cut were organs, but luckily, the woman looked too relatively fit to have problems with her internal organs. Her head going with Jan's hand when he had taken her plastic sheet, he was already one step ahead of her, acting, keeping her warm, bringing her back. Another thing Lara enjoyed about others of her field: They didn't wait and see, or plan ages ahead, they all acted, because they had to. Waiting hardly ever improved a situation.

When Jan's pulled the woman straight upwards, Lara's eyes rested on whatever she cold see of the chest, seeing if anything unusual might happen in there, but as far as she could see it looked good. Looking good was what they said in hospital when there was no apparent danger of dying within a minute, even if their lives were still in danger. One minute was 60 seconds of taking measurements against death. While Lara had nodded to Jan's first two suggestions, when he rose a question at her, she looked into his eyes for the first time since he arrived, then back at the patient.

"No, you are right. The cold is just as much of a danger. Printemps, then we'll look for the bone fragments. Well, you have to. Afterwards she only needs rest and warmth.", Lara said and she had to admit that it annoyed her a little that she knew little about the procedure Jan would have to do as their surgeon itself. The woman's face was so pale, except for the swollen parts. "Try to keep the chest straight. I'll get the others to Printemps, okay?", Lara asked, seeing as he was their leader after all, and heaved her backpack up her back again. The hand she had outside of her glove started hurting and getting stiff, moving it was painful and necessary.

Frail Life || Lara & Jan

Jan watched the process. The wounded in this world were different from the one he had left behind, where people had little accidents, not turned out to being fighting for their own survival. He didn’t know how Lara could be so calm, he was, yes, he was taught to be. But when things were as heavy as they were now, he always felt out of it. He looked around, while listening to Lara describing the situation. He had half let down the backpack from his arm, but seeing as his  co-worker was already skimming through her own supplies, he didn’t go as far as opening his own. ‘Broken rips?’ he asked, as he watched her search the skin. It wasn’t as much a question as a notice. 

'We have to keep her warm, move her back to Printemps as soon as possible,' Jan said, steps he knew Lara had already thought off. He took the extra jacket he owned from his backpack and reached for the nurse's plastic sheet. Hypothermia hadn't been one of the few things he had been in touch with when he was a surgeon, it was all surgeries, and Jan had never lost a patient in his short career. Now everything was different, he was grateful for Lara's help, and Laure's knowledge, learning quickly what one needed to do to reduce the chances of hypothermia and treat the symptoms when they occurred. He stared at the cut blankly, knowing that while it was bleeding severely, getting the patient to warm up was their first problem. 

He carefully lifted the patient’s upper body from the ground, making sure her head rested against his chest, as he moved the coat beneath her body, and carefully wrapped her body in it. ‘I’ll carry her,’ he suggested. He was tall, and while he wouldn’t call himself strong, he was probably the only one able to lift her alone and carry her for the long miles back to printemps. ‘Unless you think we shouldn’t move her?’ he stared at Lara for a bit, before pulling his vision back to the patient. 

He repeated the symptoms of the condition in his head, remembering what had to be done when they returned. 

[lara-richter]

The dried up blood lead to a small cut on the trapezius muscle. It was neither too deep, nor too long, leaving Lara wondering whether it was a human attack or the woman had cut herself somewhere, but as she pulled down her pullover's collar, she knew why it had bled so much. On her swollen chest were huge bruises that differed from red to dark blue. Now Lara felt lucky they had salvaged alone and she hadn't gone with Taj, as good and nice as the boy was - he reminded her so much of her sister - he wasn't used to seeing what the world could do to a human's body. The last thing Lara wanted to deal with now was anything that wasn't this woman that needed her medical attention.

"Hypothermia second stage, though not for too long yet. Breathing still increased. Cut on her left trapezius, great internal bleeding, cause unknown.", Lara clattered down, like she had when she was still working in hospital. It probably wasn't needed, but the dark haired simply had already found the way of working that was best for her. She had hardly worked with surgeons like Jan, only towards the end of her career had she worked in every aspect of the hospital that needed her help. Too many patients and too little staff, since they had all fled. They had abandoned their job, but what made Lara a lot more frustrated was the people the abandoned.

It had been hard to keep working seeing all her coworkers, the little friends she had, leave without even looking back. Why should she still care, they all died anyway. They didn't have enough staff anyway. Still, Lara Richter had stayed, for the hurt, stayed because she knew if she wasn't, no one else would have. Stayed because it was right and looking at all those people made her want to stay, stay and be with them, do her best. Just like she wanted to do her best now.

Lara put her backpack down and opened it, getting her stuff ready to do the rough steps they could do out here, to get her to Printemps alive. Without any shame, she pulled up her pullover and shirt underneath, so see how far the bleeding went. Her rip area looked weird, so Lara put her right glove between her teeth, getting her hand bare to feel what she suspected: A broken rip. Or two.

Frail Life || Lara & Jan

The days they got out with the group were rare. it was not that they were constantly busy around Printemps, but there were always patients to look after or the building to keep in check. Some days though, they would hide all the medic supplies, lock down the building, and go out into Paris. Though Jan was always afraid to go back and find the place raided, he could not ignore the fact that somewhere in his heart there was a small spark of hope in finding his mother. 

He showed none of that when he was walking over the streets and scanning the buildings of which the doors were missing, sometimes being brave and daring to call for people. Eventually he would always return a bit more pessimistic. 

Today was one of those days, when he would walk around for a couple of hours, sweating in his warm coat, and move back his cap a couple of times to wipe away the sweat. He was scouting through an abandoned house, finding nothing but left overs of what was once the furniture, when he heard someone call out a street or two away. He was on his feet in no time, running out into the street to follow where his mind thought it had come from. The bag jumping up and down on his back, and his thread slowed by the amount of snow that had fallen. He was reaching deep inside his physical ability to get there as fast as he could, ignoring the pain in his lungs as the cold air burned in his throat. Within a minute he had covered the space between the street and the next, recognizing an image of two people, one bended over the other. It was either Laure or Lara, and whoever the person on the ground was, a potential patient always drove him to act faster. 

He slided down upon the snow, bending over the woman just as Lara had down - recognizing her only when he was really close. ‘What is it?’ he asked, though he could see the damage himself. Hypothermia was easily distinguished in these kind of situations, the reason for the dried blood around her neck though, was not. 

[lara-richter]

Frail Life || Lara & Jan

The very moment Lara's eyes spotted the person lying on the ground, she switched into work-mode. As a nurse working in a hospital, where there were times when everything had to happen as fast as possible and decisions had to be made in split-seconds, it was something she was used to and embraced. One deep breath, blinding out most of the world that was not the person about 20 meters away from her, everything seemed to run a lot slower. More time to see, more time to think. Jogging towards the person was a bother in her thick winter clothes, but before the storm, she had been jogging long tracks along the Saar every Sunday. In six months she had tried her best to keep in shape, to maximize her health. Lara didn't want to slow the others down and keeping her busy left little space for gloomy thoughts.

Her group had gone out to find survivors, Lara's favourite thing to do now and had split to be able to search in a greater areal. Now Lara had found someone, she wasn't able to determine whether it was a man or a woman this far away since he or she wore winter clothes. As soon as she got to the person her facial features made it obvious that it was a woman.

A woman in horrible state. Her skin was very cold and pale, did neither reply to Lara speaking to her loudly or gently, and less gently, patting her cheek. Eyes, nose and ears, the soft parts of the face were swollen and red, standing in high contrast to the pasty skin and the blue, lifeless lips. Her breath was faster than normal though. Hypothermia, like everyone they found outside had, second stage already, but not for long enough, because the breath and heart beat were still at higher rate. A sleep dangerously close on the border to sleeping into death. Dangerous, but nothing four people trained in medicine couldn't help with. They'd carry her back to the department store they stayed in, was where Lara's trail of thought was at when she turned the woman into recovery position, just before they got harshly interrupted.

On the base of her neck was dark, dry blood. Ripping down the zipper of her jacket, there was more dry blood.

Laure had been going in the straight opposite direction. In the region next to Lara's was only Taj. "Jan! I need help! Dringend!"

[lara-richter]

Worth more than Gold || Lara & OPEN

Closing the zipper of her Jack Wolfskin jacket, Lara Richter grabbed the thick winter gloves laying next to her on the cot she was sleeping. When she was young, she and her parents often went camping and although she hadn't been on away on vacation since she started her job at the hospital in Saarbrücken, she was happy her parents still had the equipment and were willing to give it to her when she visited them before they moved away. If Lara hadn't urged them to go, maybe they wouldn't have, they were stubborn and loved the house her grandparents build themselves. But this was too cold, too harsh. Hadn't she urged them to go, they would have died. The thought that they hadn't made Lara feel a little warmer, though it probably were all the clothes she wore.

Printemps had have an amazing amount of clothes, even if they were more fashionable than practical. The ones Lara got for herself were the thick ones, the ones that would keep her safe from frostbites and death from cold outside. It was hard not to judge the girls that went and grabbed very expensive or pretty clothes for themselves on the first days, but Lara liked everyone from her group so much that it felt bad of her to think ill of them. It even felt bad to use those things without paying, although money had lost its value a few months ago. Lara still had kept her Euros, but she doubted she'd ever use them again.

Finally wearing every piece of her outside 'armor' against the cold, she heaved her backpack filled with medical supplies on and went to tell either Jan or Laure where she was heading, whomever she would see first. There was just no way Lara would spend just one day doing nothing, just being inside. Maybe there still were survivors out there, or maybe survivors had just arrived Paris like Lara had back then. It was her duty to go and look. It was her duty to help. The healthy help the sick, the stable help the lost. Those were her morals and there was no way she would ever betray them.

It had been Laure, she had seen first and she had complimented her on going out, which lifted Lara's spirits again. Outside was freezing. Lara knew the world they now lived in for six months, but it would take much longer to get used to the razor sharp air that seemed to attack any free bits of skin as soon as the doors of Printemps opened for her. Crossing the big parking lot in front of the department store, Lara took a map and a pen from her jacket's pockets, which was harder than anyone could think with gloves as thick as the ones she was wearing. Circling the space around Printemps and the Railway Station to their west, she noted down where she would salvage today.

The Railway Station itself was just a tunnel of ice, since it had been flooded and then frozen, which was why she had ignored it on her earlier walks, but there could be people around or on the way there. Down the Avenue de l'Europe the snow became thicker. There was a lot of forest on the map and Lara knew where it was. One more location she should check out, but forest had proven to be unpredictable.

Though it had also been unpredictable to meet someone else this fast.

[lara-richter]

The Cloud || Self-Paragraph

The cloud had come from south west, from France, where it had thrown anger and fury down onto the country. Tons of water crashed down onto the rivers and lakes, flooding whole cities and districts. Lara didn't watch TV, but she read the Saarbrücker Zeitung, the locally biggest newspaper every single day. Now that people were suffering her eyes didn't only dart over the pages, but actually tried to soak up any information she could get.

What was happening in France was horrible, but what made the people in her country panic was the harsh winds that send the cloud towards Germany. It had arrived over the border yesterday and every time Lara turned her face up to the sky and met the dark cloud that stood between her and the sun, she remembered the time her eyes looked upon it for the first time.

From Saarbrücken, the big city Lara lived and worked at, it was only 8 kilometers to the border of France, she had lived through the cloud right from the start. She had seen it when it was still busy bringing doom upon Paris, on the horizon, big and black and huge. It took over so much of the sky that it was hard to believe it was only a cloud. Lara didn't talk to her co-workers, which most of her friends were, about the cloud, because she thought about it different than them. They wished for it to take another course, they took their family and drove further away to the east, trying to escape. A few didn't even come to work anymore, knowing how much more there would be for them to do.

Lara couldn't wait for the cloud to arrive. It would do so anyway, it was inevitable seeing the course of the winds, and waiting for it was just something the woman despised. In a week, people would suffer here, but Lara would be there to work after hours and help them. Even if she disliked it, the waiting had given her the time to prepare.

With it the rain had come. Since yesterday, 31 hours ago, it hadn't stopped raining. Which could happen, two days of rain, but not like this. Not without a single pause, not when it rained so very much, flooding the streets even on its first day. The cloud didn't seem to be normal, it didn't shrink or stop. Cellars were flooded the first day, but Lara's little one room flat in the third floor was safe so far. There was a pregnant woman living in the first floor, her boyfriend had just left her. Of course he had done so, from the moment she first saw him Lara knew he didn't have a spine. But Lara looked after her, she was still young, but it seemed like the woman didn't like it. She had offered her to come and live with her in the third floor would the flood get crazy, so her feet would stay dry, but the girl had sneered.

Lara had called her parents, who lived further in the south, even her latest ex boyfriend - or at least she left a message for him. In Germany, people either panicked and left even before the cloud had arrived or would stay until the very last moment. People were busy with other things. Lara's car drove to constant puddles of water on her way to work. She knew it would only get worse.

[lara-richter]

Frost || Self-Paragraph

The ball point pen drove over the page quick and swift, letters and numbers appeared in the columns printed on the paper Lara Richter was filling out. Although she wrote with the incredible speed of someone who spent years filling out various sheets and paperwork, as a nurse her writing had to be as clean and legible as possible - which it was. Otherwise the doctors wouldn’t be able to read the nursing sheets, which Lara found quite ironic, seeing how their handwriting was indecipherable most of the times.

Looking up from the work she did in her official break, Lara took a deep breath and stretched, then stood up and went to the coffee machine. It was quarter past 2am, only four hours since she had started working. Lara enjoyed the night shifts, hardly Doctors or other nurses that could slow her work down, come to her for help or ask her why she was working in her break, again. There simply was no time for breaks, now that the hospitals were overfilled like this. To Lara, the sick always were more important than one hour of doing nothing.

The Saar, the big river flowing through Saarbrücken, the city Lara lived in, had flooded like it had never before. In the streets the water had been knee-deep, rats and mice had drowned in the basements. All the water came from France, which was just a few minutes away, where immense storms had thrown tantrums, it was all over the news. Seeing the people suffer like that made Lara wish she could help them, but she was needed here, too. Horrible, to see all the destruction and the news reporters not do anything but stand in front of it and chit chat around. What else could one expect from people in the media industry, though?

Her fingers drumming on the machine - the coffee took ages again, Lara hated waiting - Lara’s eyes fell on the window, which rather showed her own reflection than the darkness outside. Something else had taken up her attention, however, something so peculiar that Lara quickly walked over to see it up close. Touching the cold window, the dark haired drew her fingers along it’s pattern and her eyebrows arched.  There was frost pattern on the window.

It was August.

[lara-richter]

Lara Richter - Age: 26 - German - Salvager

Strengths:  Hardworking, warm, good Weaknesses:  Cynical, judgmental, impatient

Biography:

Even before the storms, Lara was hardworking and diligent, completely dedicated to her work as a nurse. She had grown used to the accusations, people calling her a workaholic, relationships ending supposedly because she was married to the job. It was all a bit exaggerated, in her opinion. During work, she was a serious individual, who had no patience for idiots and fools. A different Lara came out to play whenever she wasn’t working, a brighter and more playful side of her, but due to the amount of time she spent at the hospital – often even insisting to work on her rare days off – she hardly had the opportunity to show this side to people before they had already formed an opinion of her.

After the storms, she did her best to try to help as many people in her town near the French border as she could, but it didn’t take long before the few survivors had left the town and she was one of the only people left. A few weeks passed, and Lara eventually decided that her help would be more useful elsewhere. She travelled in the direction of France, stopping at every town she passed, but Paris was the first place with enough survivors for it to be worth staying more than a few days. By chance, she ran into a group of salvagers (among them Damien Fontaine and Taj Kapoor) ran by Jan Cuyper and Laure Forestier and joined them without hesitation. Just like the others, she’s grown very fond of the group.

Lara, despite her tendency to be judgmental and impatient, is a kind person with very strong morals. She stands by her values, even if at times it’s easier to give into the temptation to do something she considers immoral for the bigger picture. It’s important to her that she continues to live by her own standards, just like she did before the storm, and doesn’t let the harsh circumstances and dramatic events change her for the worse. Although she can occasionally come off as a little strict, especially when she’s in the middle of something, she’s very warm and loving when it comes down to it, and if she does happen to lose her temper, a snide comment will always be followed by a heartfelt apology. It’s simply very difficult to not let the stress of the situation affect you once in a while, especially for someone who had always been prone to impatience.

Connections:

Laure Forestier, Jan Cuyper, Damien Fontaine, Taj Kapoor.

Other:

Lara Richter is: Taken

Her FC is: Oona Chaplin

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