Kyle Jameson:Question after question you answer while Stevie listens intently, occasionally motioning for Crazy Joe to stop poking your captive sister menacingly with the bit of sharpened sheet metal duct-taped horizontally to the barrel of his hunting rifle. As you explain to him and the rest of the Churchboys (and, perhaps distressingly, your hostage family as well) the finer points of your lucrative career in running drugs, you can tell that any of these goddamn meth heads that form Stevie's "gang" are probably two to three wrong moves away from starting to fire wildly every which way, except for probably the aforementioned Crazy Joe, who only seems to be kept from stabbing your sister by his overpowering desire to keep leering at her.
And then things start to get a little tense when the topic shifts to the Promising Revelations, one of the weird-ass crypto-Eddite cliques you think you've done several runs for. You say "you think" mostly because all you saw of them were notes filled with burnout free verse and a good chunk of change at the end when you figured out what they were trying to tell you to get from a parked car and drop off in a particular tree stump in the park.
"The rejects," Stevie repeats his question in a tone that makes Crazy Joe shift his eyes your way with savage lack of comprehension. "Those 'revelation' assholes. You're in with 'em. You run for 'em. So where's their shit at?"
It seems he's got a different idea of what it means to be a drug gofer than you do. That, and a tragic overestimation of how much people ever tell you. The trouble is, the tragedy is increasingly likely to happen at your expense. The Churchboys are starting to stir as you stall, and Stevie tilts his head, silently but not subtly evaluating whether you're fucking with him because you're an idiot or because you're about to try something.
Vel Navi:A dark, damp basement furnished to resemble a living room, then left to its own devices for months on end, any attempts to clean it warded off with stern glares and unkind words lest the smell become uncomfortably different and the so-called 'order' of things be disturbed. Lamps that once served as a home for a generation of spiders before they starved to death, leaving husks that persist to this day. Room corners full of dust, out of sight and out of mind. At one end of the room, the very best desktop rig that money can buy, plus a few others kept for parts and due to lack of motivation to put them anywhere else.
Home sweet home, a place far enough from all else that you'd be forgiven to have forgotten anything else actually exists at all. You'd begun to miss it in your time spent outside. Took way too long for your liking to get this thing from the weird-looking asshole who sold it to you.
Sitting down in your overly ostentatious office chair, you unwrap the thing you bought. A black metal canister, the word "VOID" inscribed upon it. The instructions said to carefully unseal it, making sure not to spill even a drop, and you do so, enjoying the small hiss the thing makes. You expect a smell, but there is none. Appropriate enough, given the name.
Now then, the instructions said that once you start drinking, you don't stop. Drink it all, don't spill, don't wash down with water. Very banal. Looking into the black neck of the now-open canister, you can't see anything at all. Tilting it back and forth produces no sound, which makes you wonder if you've been fooled. Maybe you were supposed to drink it immediately after opening? Oh shit, what if it's all gone now? It'll take months to steal all that money again.
Rachel West:You're floating in an ocean of high-end painkillers, just as you have been for the past six months, though it's felt much, much longer. Maybe this is your reward for never getting to live to the age of 20. You get to experience all those lost years in the now, untethered from time, the painkiller haze putting you in a state of constant quasi-dreaming, an underlying edge of ever-increasing pain pushing you into a keen awareness that the end could not be far.
And yet you are wrong. You could live a thousand years inside your own mind, in this state. Here, in pain, half-alive is all you will ever be, forever extending into past and future. You can barely even remember how it was before. Seems so far now, completely unreal.
The only thing you have to count the days by is your father. Dr. West. He speaks to you, and you answer in a monosyllabic way, half-aware. You don't understand, really, but you do see the look of him. He used to be shocked at the rapid progression of your illness, in denial that it could be serious. Then he was determined to save you. Now he is on the verge of collapse, his techniques having proven inadequate, his knowledge inapplicable, and every man and woman in the biomedical research division of the RRZ not knowing what to tell him.
Judging by his look today, just a step away from breaking right in half, you would say the end is near. You know this by other means - the machinery keeping you alive has increased in size, forcing him to sit further away. You cannot breathe without assistance anymore. You think you died sometime earlier this week, if only for a fleeting moment.
You blink and you find yourself elsewhere. A different room. Less machinery here, though they brought some of yours along. Your IV looks... different, filled with a milky liquid of some sort. The pain is becoming incredibly sharp. You think your painkillers have been switched off. You try to move weakly, but find yourself strapped in, completely alone in what looks like a reinforced room, a hostile-looking steel door at the far end providing the only identifiable feature of the place that isn't your own little set of life extending machinery.
The pain is growing unbearable. You're definitely off the painkillers for the first time in months. The agony prevents you from appreciating the relative clarity descending on you.
Alex Raman:NAPALM. A word filled with endless possibility. You toy with the black canister, pondering when you'll work up the nerve to open it. When you do, your old life ends, no turning back. You'll overturn the odds. With a councilwoman for a mother and an upcoming senator for a father, you never had a single goddamn chance to be anything but a complete disappointment, average kid that you are. Some people have the good luck to have humble origins, you know? That way you can turn out great with just a minimum of effort. Hell, get a decent paying job as an inner city L.A. kid and you're basically an American hero.
Your little canister of godly power, though, is going to stack the odds a bit. Give you a leg up. It's one thing to be a senator. After all, who gives a shit about the Senate, really? It's impressive without a proper point of reference. Just like being on the city council. Put your parents next to
you, sure, they're contenders. Put 'em next to a
cape, though... everyone with half a brain knows it's capes who run the world. And this thing is about to put you into the fast lane for true importance.
You unseal the thing, delighting in the lovely sound it makes. That's the sound of the future, baby. There's no smell, it doesn't even feel like there's anything in there at first glance. But if you drink this, drink it all up without spilling a single drop, oh, the sheer possibilities. You elect to bask in the silence in the empty room, memorizing this moment as the one where your life took its greatest turn. Before this, you were just some random asshole with rich parents and no future. After this... well, you may very well set the world on fire, heh.
Lacie Vessalius:The steady realization that this is not about to go over well in any possible way dawns on you right after you nearly faint when you see that there is definitely a piece of broken bone sticking out of your leg, and you are bleeding all over from hitting and breaking a glass table surface. In fact, your shin getting caught in the metal frame below seems to have been the reason it snapped. Not that you get a chance to analyze this as your body, betrayed and screaming in every way it knows how, edges closer and closer to unconsciousness.
You hear urgent steps. Guards. If this were outside, no doubt they'd just set the dogs on you. All they'd find would be your bones in the morning. That you're inside, though... is probably not good news, though. Not at all. You are going to die, and you are going to die screaming. You wouldn't expect anything less from these private security guys - you've seen their work. And you'd expect the Richardson estate hires the absolute worst of them all. Before you die, they'll remark on what an incredible fucking idiot you must have been to even think you could have pulled this off. You wish you could work up the ability to just ram a glass shard straight into your skull through the eye socket, let it end before these guards show up and drag it out, amusing themselves with your soon-to-be-corpse.
They'll be here in seconds. There are but moments left. You could scream out to the heavens, resist, or try to escape. You can't really escape, of course. But you can hope against hope. They can't take that away from you. Yet.
Steven Jerle:Your companion, an even-keeled, well-dressed young woman who introduced herself as Kim, a trusted employee of your current benefactor, has been making light conversation on the way here, speaking about the weather and such things, not really paying attention to what you're saying. You asked her about Bubbles on the way here, and she said you'll meet him, but it may take a bit of time. He's a bit disagreeable in the mornings, and he does tend to take a bit of careful management. But she's confident you'll do your best. This could potentially be a very good thing for you, after all.
She's picked up some decaf and donuts on the way, presumably to stand in for breakfast. After letting yourselves into the quiet, sprawling mansion on the edge of the Bluffs, you find yourselves in a very nice living room with what your untrained eye assumes to be very nice imitations of priceless works of abstract art (or maybe just some mediocre abstract art) covering the walls, the furniture clean, terribly modern and vastly uncomfortable, and a rather large black bookcase filled with a variety of unusual-looking literature. A bit of wine seems to be spilled on the carpet near a sleek dark fireplace, the curtains drawn and the entire room looking a little dark. Kim invites you to take a seat on the leather couch - quite frankly the most comfortable couch you've ever sat on - and sets down the coffee and donuts on the conveniently adjacent coffee table, then goes to open the curtains, letting in some much-needed light.
"Sorry," she says quietly, smiling at you. "We may need to wait a while. He does oversleep sometimes."
As she sits down next to you, she sighs, crossing her legs as she relaxes. "While we wait, though, would you mind telling me about yourself, Steven? It was Steven, right?"
Arnie Stones:You are beaten bloody, weak from undernutrition, perhaps still a little drunk, and now you are about to feel the real pain. INSANITY, says the dark canister. You've heard about these. The government puts these into people, you think. Are these people the government? Is this what happened to Old Maury? Are they just grabbing poor people like yourself off the streets these days... are they going to let you live? Now that you've seen them, probably not. Maybe whatever this is will kill you. Some kind of alien thing? They're testing if they can put alien DNA inside you! And if it works, this woman will inject it into herself as well! What will happen then, you dread to even think.
What did you do to deserve this? You've had a run of bad luck, it's true. But dear god, you tried! You tried to get a job! You never stopped trying. You're not a bad person, no matter what it may seem like sometimes. Why couldn't they take Methyl Mary instead? Old bat had gone blind from a bad batch of hootch, she was no good to anyone anyway. But they take you instead! Do they know something? Do they know that you know? What do you know? You don't think you know anything. You haven't done anything! You're innocent, and you're sick! They can't do this to an innocent, sick man like you! You'll turn your life around! You'll...
"Listen, you piece of human trash," the woman says, noticing that you've spaced out. The canister she so proudly showed to you a moment ago while explaining your role in today's events is open, you note with dread. "We are going to feed you this, and you are going to drink it all down - all of it, you hear - or we will skin you alive and leave you in a gutter to die at your own pace. Is that understood?"
She gives you a vicious, inhuman glare, and you avert your eyes instinctively. She grabs your chin and pulls you to face her again.
"I said, is that understood?" she says.
Yvonne Barnett:The corridors bend and twist as you turn corners, dodging the occasional inopportune root, your steps echoing inside your mind and evoking deep red thoughts, the sound of gunshots materializing as white-hot pulses at the edge of your vision reminiscent of lightning strikes. The sound of rain is brought to the forefront of your mind, and the hallway grows darker and longer the further you go along it. You see glimpses of shadowy figures appear in the periphery, then vanish just as abruptly as you swivel your head to take in the sheer danger of the situation you are in. The hallways of the school, once so intriguing to explore during the Hour of Apparent Tastes, are menacing you at every turn.
At some point, you simply cannot take it anymore, and dislodge yourself from the stream of madness, diving into a more constrained territory - the science lab lit with feelings of warmth and smelling of safety matches, which evoke in your unshackled mind the comforting idea of safety. You stop for a moment, listening to the colors on the air carefully, humming a familiar tune to help attune the winds to your favor. The reply is more gunshots, closer this time, the sound blinding you for a second and making you shriek as the walls begin to openly weep tears of liquid ammonia that evaporate and fill your nostrils with a terrifying smell of inbound pain. You shrink back and continue your escape-flow into deeper areas, realizing that the hallways are not safe. You slink into the chemical shower, making yourself low and your fear as difficult to taste as you can.
You notice that there is no way out - this is as far downstream as your fear will carry you. The closeness of the walls makes your mouth burn slightly, and the smell of gunpowder fires into your nostrils every so often, every second or third breath you take. You feel the proximity of death, a cold embrace winding around your very soul. The sated feeling of safety is leaving you as you notice the shower tiles looking at you, and a hunger for escape starts to bubble up.
hes probably gonna take a few days to flesh out the triggers and decide your powers as well as get a few events ready so we have stuff to do and dont just bumble around doing nothing at the start.
That'd certainly be a right clever thing to do. Hence why I only did half of that. But now that you mention it, maybe I should plan a little more ahead.
Hm... and maybe Yvonne's planned power isn't exactly what I'd have liked to give her. Fortunately, there's still time to think of something else.
And yes, there is only one thread for game and OOC, because screw having to keep track of two threads.
OOC chatter from here on in is to be put in ((double parentheses)). Actions should be
bolded if you've got a big RP post to go along with them and you think I might miss it.
Author
Topic: Come On Down To Edwardstown: A Worm-Inspired RP (9/9) (Read 16513 times)