"Damn... I need to stop thinking."
Shut down the stuff and go to bed. It's presumably to late for this shit.
You shut down the computer and go to bed. After all, you may or may not have a day job of some sort to take care of.
At some point, you pass out, and then begin to dream in an atypical manner. It starts out as dreams tend to, with a peculiar mixing of familiar circumstances, where you pass from one familiar place to another in a perplexing manner, people from your life and outside of it mixing together. This time it's something murder-related, but the fact is, it begins to make less and less sense as the dream goes on, and you almost reach that particular part of dreaming where you go off and do something unrelated or wake up and leave a great deal unresolved, but then it happens.
Lucidity. You realize you're dreaming. That's never happened before, you think. At least not that you remember. Currently you seem to have been mistaken for a serial killer, and the cops are after you. But you get the feeling that's not too important right now. After all, your dream is now your personal playground. A whole world of imagination at your feet.
"Hello! Miss, ummm..." Damnit, what was her name, again? I still couldn't remember it, after all this time. I was almost embarrassed, but worry about my brothers pushed the thoughts to one side.
"Hanstead."
"Hanstead! Sorry for bothering you, but do you happen to know where Dominic and Lucian Navarro are? I'm picking them up today, but they weren't outside..."
"Of course; if you'll fill out the visitor form while I find out?"
"Thanks."
She typed on the computer quickly before calling a number, presumably someone in the building, as I began writing my information on the form. It was more than a little silly to need a visitor form for picking up kids, but with the neighborhood being what it was, I could understand.
As you fill out the visitor's form, Miss Hanstead seems to be subjected to a lot of waiting. This unnerves you slightly. It is a sizable school, one of the few in this district, but still. Finally she seems to get an answer, and the face she makes as she receives it is slightly unnerving, even though she keeps it up for only a fraction of a second before returning to a more composed look. She looks at you.
"Um, well, they're not still in class. Apparently, they were let go a little early today," she says. "Hm. Could you maybe describe them to me? Maybe I've seen them?"
Would raise his hand in a fist "let's move" he would draw his knife, before moving forward at the head of the group of thugs.
And with that, you move with knife in hand, as is your general style. You also have a gun, of course, but knives have a much more intimidating look to them that you appreciate. And thus you and your mates stylishly drop in on the deal, and almost immediately, much to your chagrin, a roughly equal exchange of fire begins, and even though you have the element of surprise, things, you feel, have gone tits-up already - first of all, you're a bit slow on the draw, and you completely manage to miss Mrs. Black, though your mates get a bunch of her friends and the other people there. Second of all, most of your buddies get a very good taste of lead, and the closest thing you have had to a best friend lately, Tom, gets blasted in the head the minute the action starts. You're grazed a few times, several of your buddies are very, very dead, and you've only managed to get about half of the people here, and they, you can tell, are pretty goddamn pissed. They also seem a bit better at this than your guys, and appear to have you pinned down.
"Power outage? Dang, this is a really bad storm. I'll go check it out, you two stay here." Jason states, getting up and feeling around the room to find the flashlight on the shelf. He turns it on, shining it on his mother and brother to make sure they are okay before making his way to the next room to see what happened.
With your flashlight, you check that your mom and brother are okay, and when that proves to be the case (although Nick's pretty excited now), you go into the next room, noticing that one of the flower vases you got there seems to have broken. It looks a bit out of place for a moment, and you can't quite place why exactly, but then you realize that it seems to have broken right across the room from where you remember it being placed.
And if that wasn't enough, there's another crash from the room you just left - heavier this time, sounds like a chair - both your mom and Nick seem to have been greatly startled by it. You look over at the door, and then something crashes right behind you - the couch of the living room you're currently in. It seems to have smashed right into the ceiling!
Carrie climbed up a group of boxes and went in an open window. She snuck around in the warehouse until her mother's voice was clear.
"I know you lot don't exactly like the idea of more parahumans coming into town, but it is inevitable at this point. I at the very least am getting on the ground floor of this new tinker's business."
Carrie wondered at that. Edwardston didn't have much in the way of tinkers. Her mother's big friend opened the briefcase and showed it to the onlooking men.
"These are syringes containing Flask's newest batch. He gave us these to for free to test the market here." A couple of the men looked very intersted and Carrie gasped in spite of her self. Flask was an out of town villain known for chemical poisons. Her mother... Her mother was dealing with supervillains? What was happening here? Carrie's brain seemed to slow down, as if trying to avoid making the connection. She couldn't be... She wasn't... Her mother would never... She began to sneak away.
Before you can begin piecing together the already increasingly obvious facts, a group of men bust right in through the door, and from there it's complete pandemonium. You discover that your mother carries a concealed gun, first of all. And you see firsthand what a gunfight looks like, and what it sounds like, and exactly how loud an actual gunshot is in person, which is to say painfully so. You almost instinctively drop to the ground as the barrage of handgun and shotgun discharge happens all around. You're almost too afraid to look at what's happening.
Steven Jerle:You're a bit drunk, and it's a bit late. The streets of Edwardstown have never been particularly unsafe for people to walk at night, at least not in comparison with the national average, so you saw no real problem in just walking home. It seemed like a pretty good way to save money (especially since you had little of it on you, certainly not enough for a cab), get some exercise and fresh air, maybe even take in some sights. But as safe as it generally is, even Edwardstown has its bad side, and you, in your infinite genius, have decided that tonight's the night you will try it as an ingenious shortcut home.
Little did you know, of course, that when you're drunk at night in the bad side of town, it seems like virtually everyone you see on the street has some kind of malignant agenda. Especially small groups of people chatting amongst themselves in an alley. One such group you happen to pass, and they definitely notice you, looking at you every few moments, their conversation becoming a tad surreptitious, with some laughter mixed in.
Author
Topic: Worm: Edwardstown (Read 135714 times)