[center][h3]Nick Waller[/h3]
[sub]November 29th- Late Afternoon-Evening[/sub]
[hr]
[/center]

Nick spent another moment looking at all the fellow unfortunate souls who'd gathered here, all brought, unbeknownst to him, by the same cracks he'd followed, before shaking his head and focusing back on the cracks. "I...have no logical explanation for this." He mumbled. [i]It's not like this makes any logical sense, no it's totally normal for magic glowing air vents to open up all over the place yep definitely normal.[/i] Narrowing and widening his eyes as if the miniscule change in perspective would show him the secrets of the cracks, Nick shook his head in confusion. He was still a little overwhelmed by everything, and trying to figure this out was not helping. 

One hand came to run through his hair, the action barely serving to stifle his nerves from acting up. He wasn't really paying attention to the others and their interactions. He frankly didn't give much of a damn. Too much mental energy was going into holding his already-fragile state of mind together, and he felt that anger coming back, building in his stomach like the need to vomit. In a way, the two were similar. Expelling something poisonous from the body, although in his situation the poison was metaphorical. The same anger that infected his family, that had pervaded his life for as long as he could remember, started taking root in his mind even as his body started to prepare for a fight. 

[i]Why the FUCK does this shit always happen to me?! It's like every time something bad happens, a dozen more things happen just to pile it all on! It's not fucking fair! I just want to be left alo-[/i]

[i][b]SNAP![/b][/i]

Already frustrated, already angry, already more than a little unstable, the sudden loud noise tipped Nick over the edge. He couldn't take it. His vision flashed, his mind [i]reeled[/i], and he fell, lost to a memory for a moment.



[center][h3]Nick Waller[/h3]
[sub]November 29th- ????[/sub]
[hr]
[/center]

Tears were dripping from his face when Nick finally managed to force himself to look up, ignoring the stinging in his knees and his arms, which had once again caught his fall. [i]Oh. Oh what the fuck.[/i] Scrambling to his feet, Nick looked around, his breaths coming in rapidly and shallow, his eyes dilated, and his heart [b]pounding[/b] in his chest. To the others, he likely looked like a wild animal the way his head whipped around in abject terror to the sudden change of environment. 

He was having a psychotic break. That was definitely what was happening. Something on the gazebo broke, and once he was free of the flashback, his mind couldn't handle the stress and came up with something to explain to his body why he was reacting this way. That giant prison-looking place with the menacing walls and gargoyles and barbed wire was just the school, just his brain making it seems like a prison because of the fact that even though he would genuinely prefer to be here than at home, he was still essentially forced to go to classes to prepare for his designed future. 

Why the specifics of the scenery, he couldn't even think to rationalize, but it probably had something to do with his personal feelings on the prison industrial complex. Setting aside that political tangent, Nick finally managed to force into words his feelings. "I'm having a psychotic episode. Okay. Okay, this is...not good, but not too bad. At least I can tell it's happening. Yeah. Yeah that's good." Looking at the others, finally remembering that there were, in fact others around, Nick tried and failed to give a reassuring smile. "Uh...I guess I don't know if you guys are real or not, but uh...yeah can somebody call an ambulance or something?" 

After a moment, Nick's moment of rationality ended almost as suddenly as it came, and he started hyperventilating again. "Oh god I'm psychotic they're gonna put me in a hospital and they're gonna call my family or just leave me there nobody else really knows me or even cares they're not gonna let me out I'll just be a patient there forever just like in all those stories you hear about like when they go in as an experiment but the doctors think they're crazy even though they aren't but I actually [i]am[/i] crazy but if I get better they still won't let me out oh god oh my god oh my god oh my god...." 

As he kept talking, Nick slowly lowered himself to the ground, hands over his face to try and ground him, until he was sufficiently far down enough to plop onto his rear end. Sitting there, crying, mumbling and rambling to himself. A small part of his mind, the self-sabotaging part, the cruel, evil part that held him back in the self-fulfilling prophecy of his broken self-esteem, rejoiced at this. He was always a fuckup, so of course it would all come crashing down. He could only escape the inevitability of his failure for so long. And the more he resisted, the harder it would come. 

And come it had.