darkness

[Jilly]

((David starts somewhere around here))

Step, step.

Step.










Step.

Step.



Step.













CLANG!











"F-F-F-FUCK!"

[Jilly]

David wandered around for several more minutes before stubbing his toe again.

Fine, fine. He'd use the damn flashlight. Some fucking good his Gift was.

He opened his daypack thing and fumbled around for what he was looking for, turning it on to partially reveal the room of computers that looked even more ancient than Dad. He grazed his hand on the glass of one of the consoles, and then subsequently wiped his hand on his jeans when the kinda gross residue stuck to his finger.

He rapped his knuckles a few times on a table, mouthed out a softer "fuck", and sighed.

[Kermit]

[S020 - Millar, Astrid: Start]

[Jilly]

Some more minutes passed.

David lifted his head off its perch on the table. He unzipped his jacket and threw it down. It wasn't that hot but the stress of the whole abducting and throwing him and these fucking losers in an arena to murder each other thing was maybe getting to him a little bit, and that sweat was starting to add up.

He fanned himself with his hat a few times as he looked at the daypack thing. He turned the flashlight towards it and rummaged through it again, right on the table.

There's gotta be something here.

[Yonagoda]

The man asked them if they watched Battle Royale and, like, yes of fucking course she did. She watched it. She wrote fanfiction of it. She watched the Hunger Games too. She fucking ROLEPLAYED BOTH OF THEM online with a bunch of adults with jobs and wives and families and she didn't say anything about that because she DIDN'T WANT TO DIE. And the person was like "Shit, really?'' As if they would actually answer, y'know, because they were all terrified and crying and presumably pissing their pants.

Melodie was told she'll be shot for crying but she was also told they could make it out alive if they behaved, and then they just went 'Oh yeah you're all murdering each other.' So she cried, and they didn't shoot her, mostly because she wasn't usually a loud crier. So they lied about that too. They lied about a lot of things. She wanted to push them until they cracked, even at her own expense, to squeeze more of these untruths out of them.

Melodie was mad over a lot of things but the small indignity of someone insinuating she didn't know about franchises and concepts she was deeply connected to somehow overpowered a lot of other things. She rode on that anger. She kept it even after she woke up. It was like the nail in the coffin on how her agency was taken away, like a dog in a fighting pit. A character, toy soldier. Not allowed to show her own perspective, spoken over, faceless, unallowed to speak.

''Fucking Battle Royale,'' she muttered. ''Couldn't even be creative about it. Might as well get Kamon in there, will you?''

She laid flat on her back in the ground. Her hair splayed across her. She wondered if her friends online got the news of the ''bus crash.'' The last thing she sent them was a Pathologic 2 meme about sodomy and onions. Jason would probably have to rely on the local butcher shop for food again. Her school would make a memorial with that ugly picture they took in the beginning of the year where her smile never reached her eyes and her hair was all messed up.

Melodie flipped the bird at a camera and then realized she was looking at Astrid's eye.

Or a camera that looked like Astrid's eye, whatever.

''Sorry,'' she said. ''I just wanted to do that. Who do you think is gonna win? I think it's Janelle. I'm terrified of Janelle.''

She didn't like people who hurt other people.

...

It's Jenelle. Not Janelle. Some names flowed off of her tongue better than other ones.

Sometimes it felt like her whole world was inhabited by fictional characters.

It didn't matter because the names all sounded the same, anyways, but still her brain transcripted her words wrong, and her internal monologue had to take a little breath and go back, disrupting the flow of thought.

(10 seconds condensed into exactly 500 words, and it still wasn't enough.)

[Kermit]

It was actually a camera.

Or was it?

[Jilly]

"Who's there?"

[Yonagoda]

The flashlight bore down on her like that one painting of the sun made by Edvard Munch. She wasn't sure why she thought of that. Maybe she just wanted to scream. BgBrd once had a phase where he took pictures of mentally ill artists' work and overlaid weird text over them. Melodie once woke up to find that he used a picture of herself in one of them. It was equally validating and insulting.

The who's there reminded her of a knock knock joke.

She looked at the camera. Maybe it was actually Astrid. It was Schrodinger's goth. Like Schrodinger's catboy, perhaps, whenever Kincaid locked himself in a dark room. Or Kincaid right now, since he could easily be dead. She hoped he wasn't. He was kind of cool.

She gave the lens another flip of the bird.

''Actually, no, not Jenelle. Maybe not Jenelle. It's more luck, really. And about how much people like you. Most of the time everyone wants you dead more if they don't find you decent company. Still could be her, though. What do you think, David?''

Her brain was fuzzy, like people cut the neurons out and replaced it with cotton stuffing. The electricity had no place to go. The thoughts never connected together. She wasn't ever good at writing that. Her essays tend to get marked down for poor transitions. She was pretencious enough when it counted, though.

[Kermit]

A soft snap, like a pocket being unbuttoned, from somewhere vaguely behind David.

[MurderWeasel]

Yvette had always thought echolocation would be a cool power to have. If she could echolocate, that might actually be worth calling a gift. She could walk around in her house at night and not wake anybody up, and she'd know the precise dimensions of rooms and all sorts of other practical applications echolocation surely had. People who could do that probably made careers out of it, like her dad made a career out of his number thing.

But she couldn't echolocate. She just sat in silence in the stifling, muggy darkness, and listened.

She couldn't really move. She was surrounded by something soft and warm, and she was vaguely upright. There were footsteps and words somewhere, and it was strange.

Yvette wasn't entirely sure what she was experiencing. She remembered what she had perceived from the moment there was that popping sound on the bus onward, but she didn't really trust it, because someone had used their power to make her go to sleep and that was a new and strange and terrifying experience.

The doctors had figured out pretty quickly that Yvette could eat all sorts of pills and most of them didn't do anything at all. Sometimes some chemical or other upset her balance and made her lose matter, so she was careful about what she tried. Mostly, though, she just swallowed them and they broke down in the swirling vortex of chemical reaction that wasn't inside of her so much as it was her, and that was that. Dropping AlkaSeltzer in a cup of water was more interesting.

Sometimes her classmates went out and got drunk, and it made Yvette really jealous because she'd had an entire bottle of this drink called vodka with some friends a year or so ago and they were very impressed because it turned out you weren't supposed to just drink it like that. It had tasted very bad, slightly sweet but with a chemical edge to it, and that had been it. Yvette's friends had explained that you were supposed to mix it, and share it, and they'd split another bottle and poured it into some soda and had ended up giggling and falling over each other and Yvette just watched and tried to pretend she was the same. And for all that, it was apparently still super illegal for her to have it and her parents flatly forbade her from having so much as a sip of wine, and she couldn't explain to them she didn't even want to anymore anyways.

So it had to have been someone's power that made her sleep, and because now there was nothing to see and she couldn't move, she couldn't be sure she wasn't still in the grips of it. That made more sense than what had happened in between, at least.

The words in the distance were mostly indistinct, but one caught the edges of her attention, a name. It was pronounced wrong the first time or two, but then better afterwards. Yvette blinked, which did nothing, and moved around some more, which did slightly more than nothing, but her limbs were still held tight to her sides.

There was one slight difference in texture, though. Her fingers brushed against a rough patch, the nail of her index running over it and catching again and again on little dips.

Was that a zipper?

[Jilly]

David furrowed his brow, turning and glancing behind him at what he thought was another sound, but then silence. Maybe he was going crazy already.

He shook the thought and returned to the matter at hand, the four on the floor, Melodie, the girl, whatever. You fucking knew what he meant. He stepped closer to her, away from the table of supplies for a hot half minute.

He thought about her question in even less time.

"That's dumb," he scoffed. "Doesn't matter if people want me dead or not if I'm not gonna let them gank me in the first place. And that's assuming that crazy owl bitch wasn't lying about making us go all Fortnite on each other and shit. Like-"

He turned around for a moment again, flashing the light all around. Was that another sound? Was there any sound at all? The irony wouldn't be lost on him if it was fucking Jenelle eavesdropping but also she didn't seem like the creepily sit in the dark and eavesdrop type. None of Crispin's crew did for that matter, either. Those bitches didn't know subtlety, unlike David.

David flashed the light back at Melodie, his train of thought derailed. "...You gonna just lie on the floor all week or what?"

[Yonagoda]

''I'm sorry that I talk a lot,'' she said softly. ''I know I talk a lot. But at least we aren't hurting one another, you know. Aggression wasn't really my forte.''

She didn't know how to act out aggression. She didn't even know how to write it. She churns out all the same, placid characters, philosophizing and mulling over needless topics. She churns out the same apologetic attackers, people who are bad people but couldn't truly commit themselves to being bad because they want some justification and soft ground to fall on. She writes herself. Over and over and over again, she writes herself having to hurt other people and get hurt. She writes herself in these kinds of scenarios. She wrote herself playing this very game, right now. And she always had too much to say. Always had too much she wanted to do, arcs to close off, goals to accomplish, story beats to hit. No amount of words would never be enough.

Fuck minimalism.

She wanted to spill her guts.

"I [just pro/cess th_things ll_.like tha-at," she started to cry, in what she hoped was a kind of pretty way.

''A l.l.lock-my_self-into-a-ro/om-and-cry kind_//of [per]son.''

Schrodinger's Melodie.

Does Kyle cry? Dows Yvette cry?

It was easier for her to not really do anything than to do somthing when she didn't know what to do.

''If_the'y wERE ly_ing, then tha-at would-be worr_rse. Be[cause] I think I be_lieve her. An//d.. a l0t of {O_ther peo//ple be{lie}ve th-em to_o.''

The trembling of her own voice cut her words apart. She wanted to say more. She had so much more to say.

This is high-effort stuff, you know. Time. Investment. And for there to be investment there must be passion. A need for something.

Why build a set when you weren't doing theater?

Were they the variables in the equation? Or just he components waiting to be ground up into results...

She looked up at the dark, nonexistant sky. Schrodiger's sky. If nobody saw it or referenced it, who could prove this place had a sky?

If you were to brush your fingers against the wall, you would feel something soft buckling in. If you were to take a step forward or back, you would still feel the same thing beneath your shoes. If you stood there you would smell the sanguine scent in the air. Something bloody and fresh. If you were to block it you won't drown it out. If you were to avoid it the smell would still stick. If you were to exist in this small, dark, cramped area the evidence of Melodie's distress would slowly coat the surfaces and the wall. Her gift twisted something out of her panic and grief, manifesting it into the world in the form of the fleshy sheen, splayed over the walls, thin and vast as of it were a liquid that was smeared, small tumors, popcorn ceiling.

She couldn't hide it if she tried. The moss grew around her, marking the area- 'She cried here,' it said. 'And that was why we were here.'

[Jilly]

"...Uhm...," David stood there kinda dumbfounded, also gagging a little.

He clicked his teeth. "...Okay, well, good luck with uh... all that."

He turned his flashlight back to his workstation, grabbed his shit, and got going.

He stubbed his toe again before leaving.

((David continues to get lost in the dark.))

[Kermit]

Something brushed past the outside of Yvette's sleeping bag, closest to her right pinkie toe.

[MurderWeasel]

When the movement came, Yvette went very still.

She wasn't sure what it was. She wasn't sure if it was anything. All of this could be nothing, just some power blooming out of control, but also it could have been an animal, or something less simple to define.

Most animals made Yvette nervous. They were unpredictable. They didn't telegraph their wants, and their moods could shift at apparent random. They lived in or barely removed from a world where they could die at any moment, and where they often had to kill in self defense or to get their food, which meant most of them had big teeth or claws or stingers, which could be brought to bear with no warning.

When she was seven, on one of her very first play dates without her parents around, Yvette had been petting a friend's cat, and then the cat had suddenly hissed and slashed her, and she'd lost a whole three inches even though it was a pretty light scratch. It had been six months before she got to be anywhere without her parents again. There was something called cat scratch fever that happened to other people sometimes, and she imagined what she'd had was kind of like that.

Nowadays, when people had pets, she said she was allergic. Being allergic apparently meant you sneezed a lot and possibly died, which was pretty much the same thing as far as Yvette knew. She made sure to say it was only actual cats, though, because Kincaid was a person, and one who had a bad enough time without her adding to it.

She blinked, and this time when her eyes opened she caught the faintest afterimage of a glow flickering past. That half second of illumination was enough for her to make out walls fifteen feet away, blocky shapes indistinct around her, the outline of a door. Nothing else, and right away it was gone.

There had been more talking, but now it seemed quiet. A smell was starting to seep in from somewhere, though, sickly sweet and biological.

Yvette's hand trailed up the zipper. When her fingers found the top, she pulled it down an inch, but the noise seemed so loud and she winced.