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[right][b]Interactions:[/b] Nah, everybody dead
[code]Warehouse[/code][/right][hr]

If the night had continued the way it had been going, Vicky would’ve ended it in a blackout. Tuyen would’ve gotten her another drink, Vicky would boot and rally, and she’d wake up the following morning with a massive hangover. However, something changed and the party was crashed. Vicky felt it just before it happened, the chill that descended microseconds before something went wrong. It raised the hair on her arms, then she heard the screams. She turned her head to the cacophony, her eyes widened and her jaw dropped as she saw the blood and the body and it looked like when she had found her brother in the bathroom, only her brother hadn’t been roughly folded like the shirt of a teenage boy being made to do his own laundry for the first time ever, all wadded up and carelessly tossed to the floor with the rest of the bodies. 

Alcohol isn’t the only thing that could make a person blackout. Fear worked well enough as Vicky was soon to learn. Her vacant eyes witnessed the carnage, her ears heard the shrieking chorus, but her mind refused to comprehend. It was as if her mind was shielding herself from herself, her consciousness briefly spirited away in an act of self-preservation, yet her terrified body still seized as her pulse quickened. The chill that had penetrated through her skin and slipped into her veins was gone, replaced now by a burning heat, stinging her like rubbing alcohol on a scraped knee, only it was everywhere: all over her skin, in her eyes, hell, even in her bloodstream. She could hear it boiling inside of her ears, her blood whistling like the steam from a tea kettle. 

It was deafening, drowning out the screams until all she could hear was the whistle, and then even the whistle faded into the background, still present but almost inaudible, and then Vicky heard footsteps. She looked up at them and the roof of the warehouse was gone, replaced by wooden floorboards. She could hear conversation in a language she didn’t understand from up above, several male voices, as she stared up at their boots through the cracks. The beanbag chair had vanished; she could feel the dirt beneath her. She could sense the other bodies jammed in with her underneath the floorboards, shoulder to shoulder. She could feel their tension. They all knew if the voices found them they would be dead. 

A sneeze, a shout, a couple clicks, and Vicky threw her hands over her ears as assault rifles unloaded into the floorboards and turned the basement into a mass grave. Tears streamed down her face as she watched a second salvo of bullets shred through the faceless corpses around her, somehow leaving her unscathed, and then a trapdoor was thrown open. Footsteps. She saw the polished boots of a soldier. She heard more shuffling above. There was no way out; the corpses had trapped her in. Vicky tried to scream, and then realized she already was; it hadn’t been the sound of blood boiling in her ears, it had been her own shrieks, so feral and so loud that they’d sounded unrecognizable. 

She felt something grab her.

“Babe! Vicky! Help me!”

[color=32cd32]“[b]NO! NO![/b]”[/color]

Her shouts were inhuman. Vicky flailed wildly, landing a couple of solid hits as Chef tried to grab her as she shouted out a few more noes. Finally he managed to dodge her swings and pull her up to feet, her strikes slowing as the memory faded and Vicky watched as the soldier uniform rippled off of Chef and disappeared alongside the rest of the basement and the bullet-ridden bodies. What the fuck? What the fuck! What the fuck! Was she going crazy? Was she delusional? Had Kersten given her some drugs? Did it matter? Chef had come back for her. She won. She buried herself against him, feeling safety in his arms even as pandemonium continued to sweep the warehouse. 

[color=32cd32]“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I fucked up, I mean, I was drugged. I’m not in love with Tyler. I…”[/color] Jesus, he was really going to make her say it huh? Whatever, it wasn’t like she had never lied before. She pulled out of the embrace to look him in the face as she finally forced herself to say, [color=32cd32]“I lov[i]AAAH![/i][/color]

It’s truly hard to say what happened in that very next moment as her false confession was cut off by her screaming. Vicky had seen the silhouette of something large and incomprehensible rushing across the warehouse towards her before the vivid visions began again. The warehouse warped, images cascading down its walls like backdrops for a stageplay, the hallucinations so real that they felt more like memories, hitting Vicky in such a rapid blur that she could hardly keep up. 

She saw dark silhouettes wearing buckled hats on the other side of flames and she could feel the heat but not the burn as she stepped through the flames and watched them scatter as she lifted a hand. She saw the dark belly of a ship, her own belly stuffed, hiding in plain sight and listening with a smile on her face as the sailors accused one another of stealing rations, preventing a snicker as she covered her mouth with her hand. She saw dark furs wrapped around bearded men in fading warpaint as they sang and danced and drank, their celebration interrupted as she burst through the door of the mead hall, blood trickling down from the knife in her hand. She saw so many more, too quick to parse, but the message was still the same: it’s us versus them, it’s always been us versus them, so take our fucking hand and stand with us or die like them. 

Vicky didn’t want to die. 

If you asked her what happened next, she would say that Chef had protected her. However, the other people there, the ones who would survive the night, who happened to be looking her way in that precise moment instead of being swallowed up by a swarm of scared teens, they would have a different narrative. Chef didn’t protect Vicky. He never even saw what ended his life coming. Vicky would say that it was all a blur, it happened so fast, she didn’t even know how to react, but from a certain angle, from a certain perspective, it looked like she had pulled him. Her hand had been on him, his body had been shifted, and whether it was willing or not, Chef had been turned into a meatshield. Vicky didn’t step back so much as she was pulled away by the unseen hands of her ancestors, screaming louder as the claws burst through Chef’s chest and ripped through his broken heart. 

Her scream was cut short as it was replaced by a gag as Chef coughed and Vicky could taste his blood in her mouth as well as feel it on her face. There was an earshattering, animalistic squeal being torn from Chef’s mouth as she dropped to her knees and started retching when [i]JESUS FUCKING CHRIST[/i] the boy was torn in two. Vicky was soaked in gore like she’d just won the big game and Chef’s innards was the gatorade, his missing jacket no longer needed now that his warm blood had completely coated her entire body. Blinded, seeing nothing but red, she tore at her eyes with her hands, trying to wipe them clean, the blood on her hands making it a nigh impossible task, barely allowing her to witness the dark shape that had killed Chef now striking down at her as she screamed.

Then there was silence as the slumbering Lux inside of her finally woke up after a nap that had lasted generations. 

There was a burst of light like a lightning strike as Vicky threw her arms up in front of her face defensively, or rather, they were guided up by the spectral hands of her ancestors that transformed into a sparking electric ribbon wrapped tightly around her forearm. She felt the chill of the shadow’s claw as it harmlessly knocked against the weave. The Lux continued to silently crackle like electricity as it shielded Vicky, her bloodsoaked hair being pulled upward by the static around her. She backpedalled across the floor in sheer terror away from the shadowy monster, slipping through blood and broken glass, her body convulsing and heaving painfully as her uncontrolled magic tried to protect herself.

To anyone Aware, it would appear as if she was being electrocuted to death, the blood soaking her skin beginning to bubble and smoke as the Yellow Lux surged around her in a protective cocoon. To the Blind, it would look as if the thing had gotten her and was pulling her by the hair as she had a seizure, dragging her away, ironically, to the room that once Vicky would’ve considered to be a safe haven. To all watching, they would see the scream stuck on Vicky’s face, looking like a crimson mask if not for her shifting expression of terror and pain as she writhed around in absolute silence, as she dragged herself through the bathroom door, leaving a trail of Chef behind. 

But who would be watching, really? Everyone was only interested in saving themselves. Selfish, little monsters. Everyone, Vicky realized, except for Chef. As the door of the bathroom closed the bubble of silence around her burst, but instead of a scream there was a howling cry, an admission of guilt, and acknowledgement that she had lost someone she had truly never deserved. 

From the other side of the bathroom door, the anguish sounded like she was being murdered.