[hider=Philadelphia, 9:32 PM, 72 hours ago][i]This city is a well of smog and traffic, caving in under the weight 62 million people and their pollution, crumpling into the tunnels of waste—the only place where his people were safe from merciless persecution. The unmoving lines of traffic on the Ben Franklin Bridge betrayed the truth all too well; in the past few decades they'd become desperate to leave. If it weren't for the debts they owed, the tenants of Philadelphia's unfortunate would've flew the coop years ago. Who wants to live in the City of Brotherly Love? 

God help you if you were mutant. With the development of  SCRN—small devices that displayed red at the presence of an X-Gene, with a cost upwards of 5K—and their release to the public, entering any social institution was just that much more of a hassle. Hospitals? Segregated, and you had to be registered. Work? Forget about it.

Sometimes Mort thought the city was ashamed of itself, the way the sidewalks cringed downwards, a depression that sunk lower every day.

He steps onto the fire escape for a smoke, inhales, exhales, adds his own to the dingy air. For posterity. 

He's eighteen or nineteen, maybe, with a crooked spine he's too jaded to bother straightening—it won't help if he does anyways, he can't pass as human. His dreads are damp with shower water and they're clumping at the back of his neck. He's standing for a moment, closing his eyes as he sucks on the little cancer stick and the tension melts of his shoulders, and then he's lazily crouching and watching the paper burn between his green, webbed fingers.

He belongs in this place, he thinks. It's ashamed of itself just like he is. 

He turns back into the studio, wanting nothing more than to sleep.[/i][/hider]
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The first thing he notices when he wakes up is that there's sand fucking [i]everywhere[/i].

It's hot—too hot for his hoodie, certainly—and he groans and rolls over, met with more sand. It's going to get in his hair and pool at the bottom of those metal beads and he's going to have to fucking take [i]all[/i] of them out, wash them, and meticulously reattach them to the ends. Which would be horrible. So fuck that.

He groans again and props himself up on his elbows, eyes not quite adjusted to the horrible brightness. He can smell the sea closer than he usually can, which is odd, so he forces one of them open. When it adjusts to the blinding shine, he's surprised to see what was most likely the most beautiful place in the world.

Really, he shouldn't be; why the hell would be sleeping in the sand with a nose full of sea breeze if he wasn't on the beach or something like that?  But this...this is [i]so[/i] much better than any beach, with sand so white and fine you'd think it was star dust, and an ocean so blue and clear it seemed like three feet where it should be ten. The breeze made example of how the marshy grasses dance in front of the tall, immovable trees, and the boy has to give kudos to good advertising. The arrangement of the landscape and the plant life all came together in an alien exoticism.

He's not sharing it with only himself, either, but his mind is too awestruck to count the other, still sleeping figures.

He sits up in shock, both eyes now wide open. For a moment, he admires it all, faintly wondering how he'd gotten here. Then he asks himself the question again, [i]how?[/i] He certainly doesn't remember getting on a cruise to paradise. He shrugs off the hoodie and ties it around his waist absentmindedly, trying to think back to the previous night.

The problem is that his mind is as blank as a newborn's and this startles him. He thinks harder, trying to see past the expanse of white and blue and green, and his throat tightens in oncoming panic. He can't remember [i]anything[/i], least of all how he got here.

The mood sours instantly, his high drops to a lowly feeling of unrealized dread. He isn't entirely in the moment just yet, still lingering on the scale between 'fine' and 'jump into the sea and swim away as fast as you can', but it's going to get to that point pretty damn soon. 

His fingers twitch and he looks down at them, expecting some shade of brown, and has too bite his lips to keep from screaming. He figures it wouldn't earn him any favors if the freaky-looking [i]green[/i] dude woke them up. [i]Green[/i], slimy, [i]and[/i] malformed—he's tempted to run over to the ocean to take a peak at himself, but is scared of what he might see. And now there's blood pricking at his bruised lips, unnaturally sharp teeth having broken the skin.

The panic blooms and he trembles. [i]What's your name?[/i] He asks himself, desperately. And since he cant answer it, he turns to the person closest to him, hoping they'll know better:

[b][color=a2d39c]“Uh...do you know me?”[/color][/b]