Atrophy

Vivid Recollections: Into the World Unknown (Season 1 COMPLETE)

Okay updated the character list, NPC list, and relationships. Spoopy told me he will no longer be participating so Andrea is out.

Now, I think it's okay if I railroad the cast a bit to the next arc (where they visit John Reid's house) and do a few hour timeskip. It's gonna require a lot of off-screen explanations, but I'm certain that's okay.

@Surtr Inc

Choo choo, motherfucker! Leggo.

Vivid Recollections: Into the World Unknown (Season 1 COMPLETE)

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_{@Surtr Inc@Ciaran@Mike73@Zombiedude101}

Cafe Sucre.

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Her Abstraction wasn’t strong enough. She should’ve practiced more; she should’ve pushed through the headaches and nosebleeds. If she had learned how to control her aim and if she had learned her limits then perhaps she would’ve gone about this all a smarter way. Penny realized, as she tried scrambling back up to her feet, that her approach had been a little more than haphazardous—it had been goddamn suicidal. Her life didn’t flash before her eyes as the monster towered over her. The only thing she saw was Henry, her younger brother, her (likely dead) missing brother, her biggest failure. Tears burned in her eyes. No, she couldn’t give up on him yet. Reese was just another bump in the road...an eight-foot tall, roid-raging, nigh indestructible and likely unstoppable bump in the road.

And then he stopped, proving Penny wrong yet again. Out of her peripheries she could see one of the girls—Jasmine—that she had told to leave with her hand outstretched towards Reese. Penny wasted little time considering any other actions. She almost instantaneously jumped up to her feet, grabbed a fork from the countertop, and blasted it at Reese. It proved to be a mistake as he had began to move again, but it was one that didn’t come back to bite her in the ass. Within seconds Reese had fled, bolting from the Cafe and jumping to a distant rooftop. Penny dropped her pursuit once she had reached the street. There was no way she was catching up with him. Which, all things considered, was a good thing, because there was no way she would’ve been able to take him.

The world around her stilled. Penny walked to the street and half-sat, half-collapsed onto the curb. The other girls hadn’t even left yet, hell, the whole fight had lasted less than a minute, probably only even a handful of seconds, so they didn’t even have a chance. If Reese hadn’t have been spooked he likely could have bashed Penny’s brains in and still have time to make mincemeat out of the other four girls. She ran a hand through her hair and wiped the blood from her nose onto her wrist. Her head felt like a thousand hangovers had gotten together and decided to crash the pity party in her brain. She could feel the aches on her body; tomorrow she would be covered in the reds and blues of bruises.

Justin had arrived with Nate and...fuck, he had brought Claire with him. Penny remembered what the God-Child had said about everyone needing to work together, link hands, and yadda-yadda-yadda, and after fighting Reese she knew it wasn’t incorrect. She also remembered what she had said about Claire and felt a tinge of guilt, perhaps even sorry that she had been such an asshole and had let her mouth runaway like that. She hadn’t even really been mad at Claire, at least not at the start. Her beef had been with Britney for some pettiness from over a year ago. The thing was—Penny caught Claire’s look of disgust. The thing was, Penny would never be able to get along with Claire O’Sullivan. She returned the look, hopefully that looking like such a hot mess would only make it more withering.

“Are you okay? Sorry we couldn’t get here faster…”

“I couldn’t stop him,” she said, her voice strained with defeat, her lips tensing in anger. “Fuck, fuck!” She hit the ground twice with her palm to punctuate her curses, and then buried her head in her hands. She emitted a groan of frustration and then rustled her hair again, grabbing a cigarette and dragging it down as quickly as possible. She had felt herself about to boil over again. The cigarette helped keep the lid from flying off the pot. She light another cigarette with the glowing butt of her last one and then flicked the butt, repulsing it to who-knows-where.

“Like, I don’t know if I’m relieved that people even showed up or if I’m pissed that it was only so few,” she said before taking a deep breath and standing up, refusing any help that Justin likely would’ve offered. He was a good guy, really. She shouldn’t try to push him away like she did with everyone else. “To answer your question, I’m not too hurt. Most of this battering was my doing, anyway. I’m ready to go after him whenever you are or mastermind some great plan, but just…” She noticed Jasmine. “Just give me a second, okay?”

She walked over to Jasmine and gave her a sheepish look. They had mutual friends in Lynette and Aliana, but the two of them had never really talked outside of a few stilted conversations when one of the other girls had vanished and left them alone at a table somewhere. Yet, it was Jasmine who had stopped Reese, and Jasmine who had given Penny the second she needed to get up. Penny owed her and, well, Jasmine was likely very confused. For all the shit Penny had talked about the support group, it had cleared a few things up.

“Hey,” said Penny. “I just needed to thank you. I know we aren’t really close or anything, but...I think you know me well enough to know how difficult it was for me to say that.” She gave a little awkward half-smile. Expressing actual gratitude was difficult; she rather face down Reese anyday. “I know you might be freaking out right now and, like, you totally should be, I get it, but you should come with us. We sure as shit don’t know what the fuck we’re actually doing, but we can catch you up to speed on what we do know. Which...isn’t much, actually, but it’s better than nothing.”

With that she turned to join back up with Justin and the others.

Vivid Recollections: Into the World Unknown (Season 1 COMPLETE)

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_{@Surtr Inc@Ciaran@Mike73}

Cafe Sucre.

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Penny’s mind was a tornado of foul language and vivid descriptions of the awful things she would do to Reese’s mother as she noticed the monster swat away her projectile like it had been a paper ball and she had been the school bully trying to interrupt his class presentation. However, only a softly uttered “Shit” escaped from her lips before she unleashed the barrage of loose change, praying that perhaps she’d strike it lucky and lodge a few coins into those dead eyes of his. If her aim hit true, then it did nothing to stop his mad bull rush towards her at an impossible speed for a man so large. If she had been anyone else then perhaps she would not have seen it coming, and Penny would just be another tally mark on the growing list of Reese’s victims.

Fortunately, Penny had seen it coming, or rather, her Aura had sensed his movements. He was moving unnaturally fast, but she still had enough time to twist her body in such a way that his wicked blade would only cleave through the air. As she turned, Penny craned her neck to keep vision on Scott, the sigil on her chest burning with light as she tried to repulse two things. First, she reached out to blow his blade away. If she was lucky, perhaps she’d be able to blast it from his grip and send it across the kitchen. If she was really lucky, maybe the weapon would blow back into Reese himself, bringing about a wonderful karmic death as it split his skull in two.

And, since she doubted that luck was ever on her side, she also tried to repulse Reese’s entire body away. However, before she even witnessed him react she knew that her desired results of throwing the monster away from her likely wasn’t going to be successful. Normally, when she used her Abstraction, she felt no resistance, no push back. This time, however, it was as if she had put her entire body into the fruitless effort of trying to move a brick wall back even an inch. She felt fear flash through her body as her momentum from her dodge threw her into a tumble. With little grace she rolled on the dirty floor of the Sucre kitchen, grabbing whatever she could from her pockets and the lower shelves and blasting them towards Scott as she tried to get back up to her feet.

She told herself she wasn’t going to die yet. She couldn’t possibly die yet. There was still so much had to do, and it was only recently that she had been given the tools necessary to pull it off. She gritted her teeth, hard. She could feel the blood begin to flow from her nose. It hardly registered with her that she was screaming at Scott as she continued to struggle. It wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be right. If she realized what she was thinking, Penny would’ve broken up into laughter: as if the right thing ever happened in Farmer Hill.

Vivid Recollections: Into the World Unknown (Season 1 COMPLETE)

<Snipped quote by Surtr Inc>

I don't know for certain, guys, but I'm pretty sure a door gets opened at some point here.

@Ciaran

Doors, man, doors. Two doors. The car door, and the tiny door inside the car door that transports all of us to Narnia. It's about time we got (more) talking animals and religious allegories in this RP.

Vivid Recollections: Into the World Unknown (Season 1 COMPLETE)

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_{@Surtr Inc}

Grand Ridge Academy - Conference Room.

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Penny watched in a mix of horror and rage as the world around her shifted from a possible future of death and destruction to the current present of Scott Reese prowling after another girl. She wasn’t just pissed at the vision the ghost kid had forced upon them; she was pissed that Claire had been right and pissed at herself for letting her own petty squabbles and curiosity lock her out of taking actions that she should’ve done. She should’ve been hunting after Reese. Now, that bastard had already killed another camper and was now going after yet another one of their peers, and she had been wasting her time fighting with Claire O’Sullivan. Would she stop them? Reese? The Glutton? It wasn’t even a question. Penny didn’t waste a second (for she felt as if she had already wasted so much now, in hindsight) when the bizarre being sent them back to their world. She twisted past Claire and stood in front of her brother, her arm extended out expectantly.

“Keys.”

“Penny, man, I don’t—”

Billy obviously didn’t understand that it wasn’t a question. Penny grabbed her brother by the shirt and pulled him down so that they were eye level. “Keys,” she repeated, her voice weighted with gravel. He couldn’t even argue. If she wanted to kill herself, so be it. He reached into his pocket and produced a pair of car keys which she promptly snapped from his hands and then bolted out the door, the pounding of her footfalls falling silent as she passed by Lynette and her friend before the door swung back on its hinge and closed with a slam. If the strange tint of the world and the lack of sound outside of the conference room had been noticed by Penny, it had not phased her.

Billy didn’t really know what to do or what the hell had just happened. He slowly walked back to a chair—it hadn’t been the one he had originally sat in, and he didn’t care—and dropped into it with a heavy sigh. The vision of the ball of light, the piles of dead bodies, all of it was a bit too hard to handle, a bit too much for the young man to process. He had seen them in the piles, his parents, his friends, and he knew that there was nothing he could do about it. He had one of those prison tats, and with that came an Abstraction. That was clear. What wasn’t clear was what his Abstraction was, or how he would come about it. Propping his elbows on the table, he slumped forward and caught his face in his hands, pushing up his glasses as his fingers pushed back his hair.

Rita walked back to the table, her right hand pressed against her chest. There had been things that she had wanted to ask the Child, but by the time she had found her tongue the boy had vanished and reality had come back. She could assume what the rude blonde girl, Penny, was intending to do, and a part of her wished that she had gone with to help. However, she knew that there really wasn’t anything she could do to the man to slow him down, and she doubted the information her Abstraction would’ve been able to pull out of him would benefit her at all after he had put that wicked blade of his through her chest. She remembered the last time she had been in the same area as Reese and how she had froze up. What’s to say the same thing wouldn’t happen this time? Britney, their de facto leader it seemed, spoke up about a newspaper that had appeared on the table.

“So does that even mean anything?” asked Rita, unintentionally looking up at Britney. At her side, her sigil glowed.

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_{@Surtr Inc@Ciaran@Mike73}

Cafe Sucre.

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Tires squealed as Penny slammed on the brakes, sending Billy’s car into a minor fishtail before it came to a stop partially on the curb and definitely dinged against a light post, although Penny neither noticed nor would’ve given a shit to see his junker’s paint get scratched. She emptied out the change sitting in a cup in front of the dash and stuffed it into her jacket before stepping out of the vehicle, not even bothering to take the keys out of the ignition. If things went to shit then it’d be nice to have a quick getaway, plus she was a bit focused on one thing and one thing only: stopping Scott Reese.

The little ding of the bell as she walked into the suspiciously empty cafe coincided with a loud thud coming from the backdoor. Penny rushed past the counter towards the kitchen as the sound of another thud, plus a voice yelling “Reese!” echoed from the back. Blinking, the world around her began to shimmer as her aura sensing kicked in. "Back to the front, back to the front!" she heard as she popped through the door in time to witness Jasmine gripping a pan. The girl began to chuck it as Penny got in to place and, no, it definitely wouldn't be going fast enough to do what they all wanted it to do. Fortunately, Penny knew a fix. She reached out with her hand as Jasmine let go and—bang!—the pan blasted away Jasmine quicker than any person could throw.

Penny wasn’t sure if it had hit Scott in his stupid mug, but it sure did make a satisfying sound. Either way, she was already fishing loose change with hopes of shredding the bastard the second he was through the door. She put herself between the group of girls and the backdoor, readied.

“Take the car outside,” she barked, eyes not leaving the door. “Hope one of you bitches know how to drive stick.”

She wouldn’t be joining. She wouldn’t leave until she was certain that Scott Reese would no longer be killing anymore of the assholes in her fucking town.

Vivid Recollections: Into the World Unknown (Season 1 COMPLETE)

I want to make a post, but I want to wrap up the "God-Child" scene with one more post, so I'll wait for Fern or Atrophy before I post.

EDIT: I'll definitely post tomorrow.

@Surtr Inc

You should. The earliest I will post will be late tomorrow night. The gist of it would be Penny being all "hell yeah we walk with boy god" while Billy and Rita would be a bit more uncertain.

Vivid Recollections: Into the World Unknown (Season 1 COMPLETE)

Just a heads up for y'all, but I will be tied up for much of this weekend and likely won't have a chance to post. So, uh, I'll catch up with the gang and our sweet baby God-Kid when I can.

Vivid Recollections: Into the World Unknown (Season 1 COMPLETE)

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Grand Ridge Academy - Conference Room?

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Rita felt miserable. She was reminded of the scene she had caused with Claire the other day, and realized that she would’ve been as cruel as Penny if she had the ammunition. She didn’t know how, but she decided then and there that she would makeup with Claire. She’d keep her Abstraction at bay, even though the demon of doubt wiggling around in her brain kept pushing her to abuse it. Now, however, she knew that there was nothing she could do without risking the ire of both of the women, and so she sat there in silence and tried to politely pretend that she didn’t notice the screaming match that was happening across the table.

Billy gave a quiet chuckle to Nate’s comment, but otherwise he kept out of it. Like himself, it was difficult to get Penny to stop once she got rolling, and right now he could tell that she wasn’t going to slow down until she ran out of breath or someone knocked it out of her. He didn’t like that she was targeting Claire, who he mistakenly took to be one of his tight friends, but he did see the silver lining in all of this. Namely, if Penny was enough of an asshole then maybe people would forget about how big of a dick he had been to Rien. Billy hadn’t meant anything by it, really, he was just trying to bring some fun to a stiff, boring meeting, but he knew he had gone too far. He had a tendency to go too far with just about anything. Still, it was better than this dragged out, long-winded character assassination that his kid sister was doing.

“You need to leave. Now,” growled Andrea.

“No thanks. But you can go. It’s not like you’re even a part of this, so stop rubbernecking,” said Penny, her voice filled with a fake chipperness.

Billy winced when Andrea demanded that Penny leave in the same voice that his mom used when she was really, really upset. He knew that his sister wouldn’t have followed what would probably have been the best course of action for everyone in this room before she even quipped back. Hell, now, thanks to Andrea, she would probably keep going until she made everyone stand up and walk out of the room one by one until she was ranting to the walls and to the bat, wherever it had gone off. Maybe he should just take the moment to slink away unnoticed. In fact, that’s what he decided to do.

The cracking of the table forced Rita’s attention back to the argument, and she stared in fear as Claire began glowing red yet again. She hadn’t stuck around to see what the woman could do last time, and Martin’s pleading convinced her that there was little point in sticking around this time. She nodded her head and, with a turn towards Rien, pointed at the door and crept out of her chair. Billy, the unfunny jokester who had given her shit weed and a hard time, also seemed to have the same idea. They nearly collided before the tall boy sort of wiggle-danced himself out of the way.

“Yeah, she ain’t stopping,” he muttered to her under his breath.

“Neither did you,” said Rita with zero inflection.

Any normal person would’ve probably felt a modicum of shame, embarrassment, or defeat by now, having successfully turned an entire room against them in less than five minutes, but Penny wasn’t normal. She was a self-admitted asshole, and like all people who called themselves assholes she was proud of being an asshole. If it got them angry, then she justified it by saying that she had hit a sore spot because it was true. Penny was practically beaming when she watched Justin struggling to hold Claire back. Fuck what Claire said, she was the only sane woman in this town. It was cowardice to want to live in peace when others weren’t given that option and you could do something about it.

Her eyes widened when Justin was forced off of Claire, but it wasn’t from fear. It was a learning opportunity. She had been honing her Abstraction since she discovered it, but she had never used it on another person before. If Claire even tried to lay a single finger on her, then Penny would have to see if she could repulse her way—in the name of self-defense, of course. And if that didn’t work, well, she had been grabbing a handful of change from her jacket since the moment Justin had jumped in.

"... fucking stop!?"

And it did. Penny, with her hand in her jacket. Rita, with her arms up to avoid bumping in to Billy within feet from the door. Billy, with one leg side-stepping and a look of confusion on his face to avoid knocking Rita over. Then it was all gone, snapped to black, and when it faded to blue everything was different. Well, not necessarily different. It was familiar in a way; they had all been like this before. Penny withdrew her hand from her jacket, empty. Rita put her arms down and looked around the teal emptiness, wishing that she had been quicker on fleeing the scene. Billy, stumbling, was able to steady himself before he fell on his transparent, ghostly ass.

“Okay, really, it’s great you got them to stop, but I’m not in the right headspace for this soooo…” He looked around the group, searching for anyone that looked like they knew what was going on. “Uh, which one of you magic dorks did this? Just a quick hands up will be good. Just. Put it right up there.”

Vivid Recollections: Into the World Unknown (Season 1 COMPLETE)

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_{@Surtr Inc}

Grand Ridge Academy - Conference Room.

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The look Penny gave Andrea as she chided her was particularly withering, and she scoffed when the girl insinuated that she didn’t know her. If Andrea was the kind of person who would seek friendship from Britney Williams, then Penny knew the kind of person that she was. Just another sweet, caring, and completely full of shit, backbiting bitch. Be civil like an adult? Seriously? Has she met the adults around here? Andrea was lucky they weren’t shooting at each other with guns right about now.

Of course, Britney stepped in and tried to play it off as if she was sorry. Typical move. There were too many people around for her to show her true colors, so she had to pretend to be pleasant. Penny hated people like that. Even when Claire burst in, as she was apt to do, the windbag, Penny did not take her burning, judgmental eyes off of Britney.

“Right, Claire. You aren’t helping,” echoed Penny when Britney called her out. She was about to step in and point out that it seemed like Britney knew more than she should’ve when a few of the others in her group did the job for her. Penny held her tongue, her face as smug as a snake. She couldn’t wait to see Britney try to worm her way out of this one. Yet, much to her surprise, Britney pulled out a diary and passed it around the group.

Awakened. Abstractions. Rita didn’t know what to think. She was never the kind of person to believe in superstitions or to check on her horoscopes, but she had that dream, she had seen a monster. She sat there in silence after passing on the diary, her finger picking at her cheek as she tried to handle the information. The diary said that abilities reflected the user. Well, she could see why being able to force others to tell the truth would fit her—as she was reading, Rita strongly doubted that what this diary was telling her was real. Hell, she still didn’t fully believe it, and in all honesty, it didn’t matter anyway. This wasn’t her town, it wasn’t her fight, and she didn’t know what the job Reid mentioned was but it sure as hell wasn’t one for which she had put in an application. She had other things to worry about; why was she being made to deal with this?

Billy, already sunken into himself with defeat that he had truly deserved, felt even worse after reading the journal. As someone who loved sci-fi and fantasy, he had hundreds of conversations over the years about how cool it would be for something like this to happen. Of course, he was the hero in these conversations, decked out with awesome powers and surrounded by chicks with tight bodies in even tighter spandex, but the reality of it wasn’t so appealing. For starters, despite the sigil on him as far as he knew he didn’t have any damn Abstraction. Talk about being ripped off. Still, that was fine. If great responsibility came with great power, then no power meant he didn’t have to sweat any of this craziness.

So why was he still so on edge, then?

Penny read the diary in a quiet fury. It would’ve been nice to ignore everything that it said, like it was nice to ignore all of life’s problems, but too much of it checked out. She could only imagine her younger brother, Henry, and how he could’ve possibly been attacked like the boy in their dream. Why had that boy—why had Reid—been saved and made into a Guardian if it meant that he would only fail to save Henry later? She felt hot, angry tears well up in her eyes, but she kept them back. She refused to think like that. Until she saw a body, Henry was alive. Missing, but alive. Yet, if she had known about this earlier...she wouldn’t have believed it. As much as she wanted to scream and curse at Britney, she knew she wouldn’t have believed it if the girl had told her.

"And what's this all even mean? You want us to become the Guardians of this shithole?" asked Claire. Her words were like a hammer, striking against the glass that was holding what little amount of cool Penny had left. "Sorry, not interested, and I doubt anyone else here is interested."

It shattered. Britney barely finished her sentence when Penny started spitting fire.

“Go screw yourself, Claire. You don’t speak for anyone. Jesus Christ, like, you shouldn’t even speak at all, the sound of your voice makes me want to put a bullet through my goddamn head. Of course you don’t want to take responsibility. Nobody was expecting the town whore to step up from her fucking knees!” Penny was shouting, pointing an accusatory finger at the other girl like a fire-and-brimstone preacher. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people here who would actually want to protect this shithole of a town, including all of the assholes in it like yourself.”

“I’m serious. We just gonna let dickheads like Scott Reese stroll around and murder people because, ehhhhhh, it would be so hard to try? Screw that. Screw. That. I’ll have you know that he—someone—butchered another one of the girls that was also at the camp. Could’ve been any of us,” said Penny, her focus spreading to the group before she lasered back in on Claire.

“I would ask how many more of your trailer trash friends would have to be put in a coma before you stop screwing about, putting what shit you do into your body, trying to, like, open your mind, man,,” she said, with a spot on impersonation of her brother, “and open your eyes, but that would be pointless. Because you have no friends. Because you suck. Jeez-us. Zoey really dodged a bullet by going into that coma. If I was your friend, I would’ve hated to see how much of a fucking coward you actually are.”

Vivid Recollections: Into the World Unknown (Season 1 COMPLETE)

.... It didn't fucking go through and now I'm at work so I can't post it.

FFFDDFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFGTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUCK

@Surtr Inc

Truly the shortest of posts. I'll go ahead and wait for you to actually post before putting out what I'm currently working on.

Hider

<sub>Claire and Penny are gonna totally end up kissing

with fists. This is a no ship zone.</sub>