Enarr

Blighted Kingdom - Looking for Players & Co-GM Partner !

As you know, I am super interested

EDIT: I like the idea of the group quest approach

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas

---

Nic had just poured his heart out like it was a glass of rotten milk. In a rather ballsy move, he had explained that he literally couldn’t turn away from her when she was in danger, that it wasn’t even a question. Destroying the ambiguity of his devotion seemed like a great first step in the journey toward their happy ending. Even if he hadn’t made the best first/second impression in the world, at least he hadn’t blown the whole thing by being too honest. They’d have obstacles for sure. No doubt. But he’d fight a thousand were-crocodile reptile people to the death before giving up. Not that he had anything against Archie..

He indulged himself for a moment. Elizabeth Adair had a nice ring to it.

"Nicholas, give me your number,” she told him. Making demands? That must mean that she had understood implicitly what he was trying to get across. It meant that she was just as intent on crossing paths again. In retrospect, it felt like Nic had disappointed a lot of people--a lot of people--but there was no way that this maiden would find her way into their fellowship.

And she handed him her phone. Jackpot. It was already on the new contact page so he didn’t quite have the chance to scope out her wallpaper or anything, but it felt good in his hand. She trusted him. “Nicholas”, it said. He took the liberty of adding Adair to the name section, along with filling out his address, resisting the urge to insert hearts between his first and last names, feeling that doing so would probably be ever so slightly too forward. He’d have more opportunities. That was for certain. And if they didn’t come about on their own, he’d just have to make some.

“Maybe sometime we can all get together and explain what happened at the bonfire. We're gonna have to go soon, but it was nice to run into you." As she said the words and turned away, he could already feel the opportunities to make an impression disappearing, like ghosts in the snow. No, that analogy was a bit too morose. He corrected himself, he could feel his opportunities slipping away, going to heaven with his angel.

Then fate intervened in the form of a lizard man. The timing felt downright providential, like Archie was an agent of the divine, like he was Nic’s personal spirit guide on his quest to help an angel with a broken wing!

He charged over to them with the sort of finesse you’d expect from a tyrannosaurus playing double dutch. When he stopped, the way he tripped and wobbled, it wouldn’t have been surprising if he were wearing bean bags on his feet rather than shoes. So this is the real Archie, he thought.

If he had to rank Archie’s various stylings, he’d say Homecoming Hero Archie & Snakeskin Psychopath Archie were both aesthetically superior to Nauseous Normie Archie. That said, his superhuman levels of discomfort went a long way toward making Nic feel marginally normal. Sure, he had antennae but there was a strong possibility that Archie was literally uncomfortable in his own skin.

He had only talked to him for a second at the party but Anderson seemed like a stand up kind of guy. He was at least quicker to respond to whatever-the-fuck was developing in the woods that evening. They went through that, saw a man nearly bleed to death and he looked at Nic with a long, stiff stare. It’s like his eyes were experiencing the sensation of having its tongue frozen to a flagpole.

Nic regarded him with a generic, vending-machine variety smile. Then he heard the POP. What followed vaguely looked like his spine was getting a boner. He watched Archie's innards bobble around within a couple millimeters without moving a muscle. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. His muscles were moving, just not in a way that made sense within the usual range of human anatomy. He thought it looked like his insides were shuffling themselves like a deck of cards. It’s not like he was a surgeon or anything but he was familiar enough with the act of breaking bones and disabling muscle-functionality that he could tell that bodies aren’t supposed to do that to themselves.

“Hey, kiddo,” Nic heard his dear old dad pipe up, “y’know that thing we do? Where we keep dangerous people from being dangerous to people. This kid’s a prime example of that. It’s not his fault but it’s an inconvenient truth. Archie Anderson should either be kept on sedatives or kept in a cage. You know as well as I do that if you don’t take action people are going to get hurt. And not the kind of people who should get hurt.”

“I uh,” Archie started, with the cadence of a man holding in the kind of fart that could stop everyone in the room from ever being able to respect him again. "Hi. It's... on the way. Where we're going and-", Archie paused to pinch the bridge of his nose, probably harder than he was pinching his sphincter. "God, sorry. I'm Archie," Anderson said, extending his hand.

“I know,” Nic said, decisively taking Archie’s hand into his own. “Nicholas Adair. We met at the party. Before that thing,” he dribbled his eyebrows, “with the person at the place.”

As Nic loosened his grip on Archie’s hand and attempted to disregard his father’s voice in his head, he saw another girl approach. How could he not. As soon as she looked back at him, her hair flared a fluorescent orange. He really wanted to be flattered but he couldn’t help but wonder if her hair changed color expressively the same way that his antennae might stand up or fold themselves when he was excited or disappointed.

She looks great in orange, but he couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or if it was another chimpanzee smile, brightly colored the same way that poisonous fish and reptiles are. He took a breath. It didn’t really matter. His heart was spoken for.

The new girl was obviously totally enthralled by him and she tried to play it off, changing the subject, unsuccessfully, to a girl named Keaton. Nic still couldn’t keep them all straight. But after her mouth had settled into a regular pattern of speech, she returned to the subject that was really on her mind. "I - is that like a religious thing?"

Nic wasn’t entirely sure how to respond. So he told a certain portion of the truth, “Nah. It’s a gym thing. I like to do a lot of gymnastic routines. I just got so sick of sitting around my place and hadn’t done my laundry in so long that I just figured I’d say Y’know, fuck it and went out for a run, patrolling the ship for hours, using my Orwellian surveillance powers to find Eli so that we can make the most of what remains of our alarmingly short human lives, no biggie.”

“You look good,” he said, completely devoid of particularly emotional force behind it to attempt to prevent sending the wrong signal. “I was really worried about you. I actually had my first aid kit on me at the time but I got nabbed by security before I could get over to you.”

Nic looked over to Archie, still seeming to grow by the second. He got the creeping feeling that this wasn’t going to end well, but he bit down the part of him that kept reciting his father’s T.H.R.E.A.T. analysis acronym*. It swarmed in his mind over and over. Anderson’s toughness was pretty close to an all time low, at this very second. He seemed to be in decent health, not particularly out of shape. Though Lizarchie could close distance, he was pretty sure he could take pause his blood flow suddenly enough to prevent a panic. He assumed that regular Archie had no reason to be able to defend himself through regular means. He was a goof, seemingly infinitely more concerned with his social standing than his physical well-being. And they were on a sidewalk in town. Not particularly challenging.

Archie would probably prefer that I help him control himself than enabling him to go on a massacre. After all, friends don’t let friends murder friends. Right?” he asked himself. It wasn’t a question of ability. Just a matter of ethics. But then Eli piped up.

"Well, should we go sit? I think we... have a lot to talk about."

The urgency of his decision engorged itself. But he felt better, comforted by her calm demeanor. Maybe this happened all the time, he thought, ultimately resigning to just play this one by ear.

_*

THREAT Analysis

Toughness
Health
Range
Experience
Alertness
Terrain

ꇙ ꒤ ꋊ ꋪ ꒤ ꋊ ꋊ ꏂ ꋪ ꇙ (New Map! New Races!)

I have never really tried a tabletop styled PbP. I've been a Dungeon Master in D&D 5e before but I've never really been a player, so it would be a fresh experience for me for many reasons. I would love to play either way and don't want my curiosity to get in the way of everyone having a good time, but I would vote for tabletop style.

EDIT: Since Flagg actually does care, I'll just swap my vote over to regular storytelling.

ꇙ ꒤ ꋊ ꋪ ꒤ ꋊ ꋊ ꏂ ꋪ ꇙ (New Map! New Races!)

I'm interested.

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas

---

Nic saw Natalie ball her tiny little fists up the very moment that the muscles in her forearm started contracting her fingers. Right around the time he mentioned tossing the bomb.. behind Archie. His brow soared well above its usual position the very instant that he realized who she was. That’s Wonder-Girl! the one that Lizard-Archie was using as a sandal. And therefore she was also the very same one that showed up to the woods in that nice dress. There we go.

And just like that, his paranoia dropped like an anvil and the corners of his lips wobbled into a smile. He felt like a child grinning at a smiling chimpanzee. In an odd way, her little display of hostility had set him at ease. Really, it had done more to draw them closer than she could ever really be expected to understand. In some ways, violence was his mother tongue. After all, he’d been ordered around as a child, his development highly regimented. He may as well have been sucking straight liquid-combat when he had been at his mother’s breast.

As for casual, conversational English, without clear objectives for every conversation, without an eye on the clock at all times. Well, he was still learning. With a body as muscular as his, he had to fight every fiber of his own being just to relax but seeing that girl’s tiny fist, airtight and clenching on to every last modicum of Archie’s honor, presented a clarity that had generally been absent from his life for the longest while. And then, perhaps for the first time ever, it occurred to him that maybe--just maybe--he didn’t have to learn to see the world in a whole new way. Maybe it was okay for him to pick apart everyone’s triggers, to catalogue their microaggressions. Right now, Natalie’s fist read more like a love-letter than a death threat.

"I'm not really sure what happened in the forest either. I've...repressed that memory and don't really want to bring it back right now, if that's okay."

Nic heard her loud and clear. The courteous thing to do would be to not press the issue, to bite his tongue, to table his curiosity and accept that to get an answer he’d have to infringe on her comfort. It seemed pretty obvious that the right thing to do was to respect her privacy but, the more he thought about it, it felt like it had been a really long time since he had gone out of his way to do the right thing. What was going a little longer going to hurt? After all, having spent years in therapy, years reenacting training routines, years seeing so much blood on hands that looked very much like his own, he had learned patience. Someday soon, he’d be squeaky clean.

And as much as he wanted to say “yes”, to say that it was okay, he really wasn’t sure that it was. After all, he had been arrested twice now. People kept getting hurt. They kept getting hurt. He thought about Lynn, he’d caught a glimpse of her secondhand from some random student he didn’t know. She looked absolutely terrible. So maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do but he felt both that he needed an explanation and that one was, in fact, owed to him. It didn’t seem fair that he had to stay in the dark on the subject because she was uncomfortable.

But he had only ever gotten so much practice fighting for what he actually believed in.

“Oh yeah,” Nic grinned. “I understand. Don’t worry about it. I know it can be hard sometimes. Just thinking about it made me think of a list of things I’d rather not think about,” he said, truthfully. Bridgette Munroe, Dad, God, Uncle Derek, Guantanamo Bay & his sobriety all came to mind alarmingly quickly. “Aaaaaaand now I’m thinking about them.”

"I'm… I'm not doing great, actually,” Eli said, causing his antennae to perk right up, like the ears of a cat. “I'm finding it hard to bounce back from this one, to be honest. I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way right now. I think I just need a bit more time to recover."

Nic felt a salty tear surge through his eye, and he felt his lower lip punch the roof of his mouth as his face, still swallowed by his palm, contorted into an ugly-cry, spurred by just the thought of her suffering. But that, that kind of extreme sympathy, he understood, ran contrary to everything he had worked to achieve. So he did his best to widen his nostrils, so she couldn’t hear the mucus that had suddenly filled his nasal cavities, and he swiped away the tears that had impaled his eye socket as best he could within a single swift motion before offering her a consolatory smile.

"Well, that's what you have your friends for," Natalie offered, "and this meeting will probably help with that. Trust me, I know from experience that right now you need your friends the most. I shut you all out and I still regret it."

He had no idea what Natalie was talking about. He had no idea what it felt like to have people to shut out. After he was done toddling, the role that his nuclear family played was largely born more of economic convenience than emotional nourishment, though he could think of several instances that would speak to the contrary. They all felt like exceptions. He never had friends, not real friends. Not people that would fight to protect him. Back when he was a ward of the state, several of the other boys always said that it was extremely important that they stick together. Nic believed them, so he beat their bullies back. But when Nic was harrassed, his so-called friends had run away, leaving him to fend for himself. Now, he fended for himself quite well, horrifyingly well even, but that wasn’t the point.

Hearing Natalie’s speech, he felt his throat start to close as the tears came surging back to his eyes, though he fought to hold them back, to keep his poker face. And as much as he hoped that they stayed focused on anything but him, he knew that he needed an excuse at the ready. He needed a damned excuse. From the confines of his mind, he howled at the sky, begging for a lie but none came. Only three disgustingly honest, pathetic, sad words came.

I want friends. So, he yawned and took a deep breath, working that consoling smile back onto his face as his brain suddenly started to throb and his antennae shriveled and bobbed.

“I am so sorry to hear that,” he said, slowly, purposefully and with a deliberate meaning. “You’re totally right, getting better definitely takes time, but sometimes if you don’t put anything else towards getting better, it’ll take more time than you really have. That said, if there’s ever anything I can do for you, kill a rat,” he paused to try to think of any other skills he had. He couldn’t bake, he couldn’t sew and he couldn’t sing. For a moment, all he could think of continuing the sentence with was other small creatures he could kill, “or, like, open a jar, just say the word. I’d hate to see you struggle when you don’t have to. I won’t pretend that there’s much reason for you to really believe me much or, really, remember for that matter. But that’s okay. It’s totally okay if you forget. But it is true. I do my best to be there for everyone and everyone,” he paused, smirking, “includes you.”

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas

---

He got her name right. Fuck yeah. Due to the almost complete drought of non-urgent interactions he’d had with these people, it felt like a gamble to address her as anything other than "You". Besides Archie, he couldn’t quite recall having ever said any of these people’s names out loud. But she was Eli. What was that short for? Elizabeth, perhaps. Seems probable.

He, and apparently the various squirrels that had casually spotted her in passing had been so fixated on her that they literally hadn’t even registered that there was another girl with her. Nic took a quick gander at her. She was really posh and put together but something shot her seemed vaguely familiar. He knew that he knew her face but something just wasn’t clicking. And he was definitely going to put it together.

”Natalie you remember Nicholas, don’t you? He was at the bonfire.”

NATALIE. That’s it. She was Natalie.

Though hearing her name made him feel brighter, like a burden had been lifted off of his shoulders, it didn’t jog his memory in the slightest. Was she in the forest? If so, he’d been too preoccupied by negotiating the release of the Jell-O shot in his grasp to actually sort out who was who in a timely manner. If he realized that he was going to rub elbows with these people, he’d have investigated them. Figured out what they--

Nopenope, he cut himself off. No psychological biopsies today. This was his chance to win the love of the very same siren that he had locked eyes with from all across the way at that very party. The very stars had aligned to create this moment, quite literally in fact, and there was no way that he was going to let his diabolical diagnostics ruin it for him.

He gave Natalie his best smile, Nebraska’s finest, fresh off the vine. “It’s wonderful to see you. Gee, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks, hasn’t it. With all the excitement with the loading bay, the breakout, the forest. Actually, would you mind explaining what had actually happened in the forest? I’m a little fuzzy on the details.” he shrugged his shoulder and arched his eyebrow, chuckling.

“That’s some smooth operatin’ if I’ve ever seen any. That was goddamn amicable. Nicely done, kiddo. You did that like you actually cared what she had to say,” Nic felt the warmth of his father’s familiar nonstop commentary buzzing into his right ear. ”After all, nobody beats a black bear in a fist fight but here in America the most lethal carnivore is man’s best friend.”

Nic dug his finger into his ear, feeling for a wireless earpiece that he could just claw out. All he found was ear wax. ”We’ll bag these ones just like the last couple before the raid. After all, I know we had our differences but you're still my son. And if there's anything in this world that is true, it’s that there's nuthin’ that stops you from gettin' her done."

He clawed at his ear again, desperately hoping that he was being pranked. All his pinky finger found was a vacant canal of non-electronic stillness. Was there something wrong with him? Was this the moment that his dam finally give way to the deluge of disorientation? He couldn’t make sense of it. He felt foolish. He felt embarrassed AND he felt like there was a decent chance that the girls could hear it.

Or worse. Was one of them making the noise? No. Of course not. That would be preposterous. Clearly it was just his imaginatio running rampant. Either way, he felt like he was riding right up onto the verge of looking really weird and he just couldn’t think of any right-ear-related excuses, so he shifted his posture and acted like he was swatting at a mosquito.

“Little critters are out in swaths today,” he laughed heartily, each exhalation topped with a dollop of jolly antipathy. He had to make sure that neither of them caught on to what had just happened. Should he show her the snowglobe now? Did teenaged girls even like snowglobes? Was his self-restraint holding him back from finding his place in the world or was it merely allowing things to fall into place. Damn. Damn! Damn.

”How have you been? Were you in the loading bay too?”

Thank God she didn’t notice. No. This was a time for expressing feelings, for pouring the foundation of something special. If he tipped his hand now, if he jumped the gun, he may as well just jump straight off of The Promise.

Was it Natalie that was bringing this trepidation out of him? Was she… a MIND READER? He disregarded the notion. The odds of this random girl being responsible for this extremely personal, sudden intrusion as he tried to find the means to express himself, the way to make a very specific and limited portion of his true feelings known, seemed infinitesimally low. But the chance was still there. He’d have to test her. Just to see.

As he unrolled these thoughts, he watched Natalie carefully, intent on determining whether she was reading him live. Nope. She didn’t seem to have any tells that he could pick up on. So either she wasn’t a mind reader, which was objectively extremely probable, or she had been practicing her poker face long enough to avoid detection. Given that he, himself, had been raised to be he improbable thing that you’d have to be paranoid to suspect was actually out there, it only felt fashionable, karmically savvy, to extend the courtesy of suspecting someone else might be equally as treacherous.

It then occurred to him that it had been a solid minute since Eli had asked the question. And it was incredibly rude of him to have kept her waiting.

“Oh, sorry. I thought about it a little bit and, honestly, my mind just started wandering. No--not wandering, I.. Yeah. I was there. And I’m really sorry.”

“You see,” he took a deep breath, “when Archie was doing his whole Mr. Hyde thing, I had just been stepping out of the kitchen. I’d rigged a fire extinguisher into an explosive. I’d meant to lob it into the loading bay, where those… people were coming from. But then I saw you. And, even with all of the other terrible things happening, I couldn’t find it within myself to look at anyone else. Because Archie was charging right at you. And I’ve seen… I’ve seen a lot of things but I didn’t want you dying to be one of them. So I threw it your way.

“Specifically, I threw it behind Archie. And it blew. Just like I meant it to. But I’m not sure it really did anything for you. It was kinda stupid, actually,” he said pulling up the sleeve of his jacket and showing her the scar and scab where the shrapnel had crashed into his arm. “I actually almost killed you. Because I wanted to… I wanted to stop Archie--I didn’t know it was Archie--from killing you. But ultimately, he’s the one who protected you from me.

“And yeah. I, uh. After that, I saw one of the other girls that you guys hang out with being crept up on by some commando type. I assumed he was one of the bad ones, so I threw a chair leg at him. But it turns out he was a security officer, so I got to spend a couple hours being interviewed about it all.

“So yeah, I was there. Are you okay? It looked like you were having a real bad time with it all.”

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas

---

Feeling the familiar heft in his hands, he couldn’t help but smile. If he didn’t like what he saw, all he had to do was point and click. Then, with the slightest adduction of his index finger, he could crop them right out of the frame. If he wanted to. Oh, God. He was writhing with pleasure as he imagined how many problems he could solve.

Now, he was having the slightest bit of trouble making friends. In fact, every time he had seemed to find it within himself to reach out socially, at least one person ended up dead. Who knew how many other corpses the kids were bumping into. He knew that death was a part of life but he had thought that the amount of decomposing bodies he ran into would, like, generally decrease after the militia had been disassembled.

He thought about Anderson. Apparently Anderson was the werecroc, presumably sent into a murderous frenzy by the spontaneous homicide served up to him. Nic could still recall the ambience. That was probably the most dead bodies he’d ever seen at once. Some of his friends, if they were his friends, were almost amongst them. You’d think that surviving something like that would have brought them together as a group. But that wasn’t the case. Amelia, the punky one, had tried to murder him after he tried to protect her.

He understood the logic in her actions but felt a massive twinge of regret when he considered that he was apprehended by the remainder of the guards before he got the chance to explain that he had been trying to protect her. And then there’s the fact that he improvised a bomb that he tossed to Anderson. Possibly could’ve killed his aspirational best friend. He’d never had a guy friend his own age, really. Never had a bro. How fucked was that? And how fucked was it that, if it weren’t for The Cafeteria Colossus, he would’ve killed his angel by trying to protect her.

Aw, well. Life was too short for regrets. Better to just bottle that shit up and shove it deep down inside of you. All that heavy shit. All that densely ethically complicated shit. No use crying over spilled blood. He had to keep a move on. After all, if he stood still too long, all of his feelings would sort themselves out, just like blood. The only thing that kept them in the state of functional fluidity was the nonstop motion that they were always going through. Shutupshutupshutup, he thought to himself. Get your game face on.

And just like that, he felt his lips arch into a smile. One of uncommon intensity, radiating levels of sincerity so extreme that it was inhuman. He looked out across the freshly fascist-leaning fields of the fragile frontier.

“Go get ‘em son. Put all those freaks where they belong,” he heard the unflappable Nathan Adair whisper in his ear, almost feeling his dear old dad’s finger pressing on his own. There they were, pulling a trigger as father and son. He thought about it, as a juggernaut of a grin exploded through his skull and splattered across his face. He cackled as an electric crackle of “fuck it” flowed through him, jolting his muscles like a dead frog in a lab.

Nic recoiled.

---

“Aaaggggkkhhhhhhh!” Nic hucked, feeling his eyes open, he realized that he had no concept of how long he’d been screaming. His cheeks were hot and moist, like the condensation outside a cup of hot cocoa. And his throat was sore from screaming. The residual pain from the toll it took on his throat was almost enough to spark a whole new cycle of screaming. But this wasn’t the time or place for that. This was a new day. This was gonna be a good day.

“Do you know why it’s going to be a good day?” Nic asked himself as he unraveled across his carpet. “It’s going to be a good day because I’m going to make it a good day.” He crawled across his carpet with the same momentum as a man trying to find a handhold as he felt down a waterslide, only he felt the berber burn as his slithering scrubbed away at his skin. “I’m going to kill anyone who tries to make it a bad day. And if I find one more dead body, then whoever made it is going to find themselves playing the role of the second dead body I see today.”

He’d hardly left bed since the cafeteria incident. His part in casting an Area of Effect shrapnel spell in the cafeteria on a whim seemed dumber and dumber the longer he thought about it. Maybe it could’ve killed Archie. Maybe not. Needs further study.

He slapped himself. Thoughts like that coming in automatically were what he hated most about himself. The first thing he’d been taught to find out about someone when getting to know them was what their weakness was. His dad really loved all that Sun Tzu stuff. The Art of War. Every enemy has a weakness. That’s the problem with hating yourself, is you know exactly what to do to wage a war for the fucking ages.

Ironically, in his time with the counselors and psychiatrists back in Alabama, he never bothered reading anything like [I]How to Make Friends and Influence People{/I]. It was pretty much all Quentin Tarantino all the time. Drowning out his firsthand memories of violence with another man’s fantasy-fetish-violence.

He’d been escorted out of the cafeteria by a pair of guards who brought him in for questioning because he’d technically tried to kill a high ranking staff member. Which, under most circumstances would’ve seemed extremely reasonable. But this wasn’t most circumstances, this was [B}SPACE[/B], babe! And in space no one gives a fuck. They understood and let him on his way. Unfortunately, in inspecting his belongings, they had completely disheveled his first aid kit. It would actually be less work, at minimum wage, to save up for a new one and purchase it than it would to restore order to the mess that they’d made of his equipment. He didn’t even get the opportunity to help with triage since the entire space station entered martial law.

“Fuck the faculty and their food rationings. I haven’t eaten a bite since the first shot was fired. I don’t need their rations. I can just wait until things are back to normal,” he said, feeling resolved in his commitment to fast for the entirety of the next month. He’d never tried fasting before but it had no effect on his confidence.

“Actually, I could really go for a bagel right now,” so much as saying such an absurd sentiment summoned a symphony in his esophagus. “Maybe even two bagels. Yeah,” he thought as he looked in the mirror. “Actually, since food’s out of the question, maybe I can search for love.”

Kk-ckk, he clicked his tongue as he winked at his reflection.

Slipping on his yoga pants and a leotard underneath a leather jacket, Rolex in place, he picked up his satchel before stuffing a snowglobe into it. It was a snowglobe filled with specially treated rose petals that could be shaken about inside of it. And they shook violently over a painstakingly hand-painted recreation of the Promise. He spent ninety-three of the last 140 hours working on it. Looking at the literal cut corners within some of the architecture’s less obvious spots, he couldn’t tell if he was proud of that or not, but he did know that there was a very special girl out there that would probably tell him what she thought about it.

And like that, he was out the door. He was jogging along. He had no idea where he was going. He had no idea where to find her. He didn’t even know her last name, but he did know that her first was Eli. He couldn’t tell if he was being a hopeless romantic or an idiot anymore. He just knew that he had miraculously found the motivation to step outside. The oddest thing happened when he was jogging around the pseudo-urban dystopia. For the first time all week, he saw himself.

Not metaphorically. He literally saw himself. He saw the way that the spandex clung to his body, just how flattering it was on him. But, around himself, he saw leaves and tree limbs, so he turned around. And he looked for a tree. There was a slight rustling.

“Archie, is that you up there?” he asked, tenuously approaching the tree. Had he infected one of the guards? Were they running surveillance on him? He tip toed up, watching the perspective shift skyward, until they were on a branch so thin it would be impossible for a person to put their weight onto it. So this was some kind of parahuman, then. “Hey, it’s okay. My name is Nic. I’m not gonna hurt you. Unless you hurt me or pretty much anyone else. In that case, I’ll kill you.”

Then, the perspective zigged. And zigged. Twisting around the wood, looping like a snake. Stopping. Starting. Turning. Then starting again. Until it was on the ground, in the grass.

It was a squirrel.

A squirrel with antennae just like Nic’s. It seemed preposterous. But there it was. It had Nic’s antennae. Now that he was looking at it, it seemed apparent that it was unusually large, to the extent that it seemed preposterous. Nic had to know what was up with this squirrel. That meant he would have to capture the squirrel. When he was a little boy, his father had assigned him the task of chasing a squirrel specifically in order to train his dexterity and reflexes. That said, he literally never succeeded in catching one.

But things were different now. He was older. Faster. More powerful.

And better at throwing things. That was the important one. He waited for the creature to turn around. Then, like David lodging a stone into Goliath’s forehead, he slung his entire satchel at the squirrel, eliciting a frightened squeal as it realized that it was being preyed upon. Shocked by the sudden head trauma, it was sluggish enough for Nic to grab by the tail and stuff into the very satchel that had landed onto it a moment prior.

The Promise, being a space-faring vessel, didn’t exactly have a standing army of microbiologists on board, but fortunately, he knew exactly one. His name was Richard Edwin. He and Nic went back a ways.

---

“So why does this squirrel have antennae like mine? I’ve never known anyone else to ever develop external antennae? Why can this affect a squirrel? My virus doesn’t do that. Does it?”

“Well, Nicholas, it kinda looks like it does. What we’ve got here is a bona fide specimen of Ratufa Astra, colloquially known as Trevor’s Flying Squirrel.”

“That’s a flying squirrel?”

“Nah. It’s a flying squirrel in the same sense that we’re flying humans. It was ’discovered’ by Jason Trevor, who realized that some of the squirrels onboard the space station were biologically distinct from the ones back home that had been taken before launch. By all conventional metrics, it’s a bit too fast for evolution, so we suspect that the population of the various onboard wildlife may have been engineered to thrive in the rigid conditions offered onboard. But that’s just a theory. It’d seem that they are alarmingly bad at record keeping and it’s hard to convince the more senior faculty that dissecting the genome of the onboard squirrels should qualify as a primary concern regarding what projects are offered funding/time with the limited equipment available.”

“Ah. So… this squirrel doesn’t have parahuman powers?”

“No, Nicholas. Can’t say it does. Say, what do you think your ‘superpower’ is?”

“I can see through other people’s eyes by emitting a virus that convinces their body to construct the facilities to transmit their sight back to my brain.”

“Close. But nope. Your superpower is that you’re always sick and your immune system is just barely effective enough to keep the virus on the ropes. ‘Your’ virus, as you call it, is actually a constantly mutating lineage of viruses. Somewhere along the line, you constructed a strain that can spread amongst the squirrel population. That’s your superpower.”

“You’re supersick,” he continued. “One day it’ll probably kill you and we’ll call it old age. Just pray to God that you don’t ever get AIDS, or geesh, you are one fucked duck. Speaking of fucked ducks, though, did you know that we got AIDS from chimps. I’m reminded of that because you have introduced a pathogen into the squirrel population. We’ve actually gotten a lot of reports of these horny little critters,” he chuckled. “Now be honest, did you fuck a squirrel?”

“Excuse me,” Nic said, given pause.

“I’m just joshin’ you. But seriously, did you ever unload on a squirrel, point blank, with your antennae. This answer actually does matter. Not for anything concerning you. Just for my research.”

“Well, first thing: No. Second thing, I’m really uncomfortable now, Doctor Edwin.”

“If I were you, I would probably just wear a hat, or you know, something to stop you from spitting that stuff out everywhere. There’s no telling what this could mean for the ecosystem.”

---

Setting the squirrel free upon walking back out the door of Doctor Edwin’s office, Nic realized that this was perfect. He had the perfect solution for finding Eli. He could just run laps around The Promise until he found her, cheating by piggybacking on the vision of the squirrels he’d infected, since evidently every human he’d ever infected had habitually drank enough to clean it right out of their systems.

There was that involuntary emission in the cafeteria before he threw the chair leg at Gennedy. So those people probably all had it now. Unless they drank which, knowing them, they almost certainly had. It only took three hours of running laps around the space station for him to coincidentally bump into her.

“Hey, it’s Eli, right? Man, the last couple times we’ve bumped into each other have been some of the worse days I’ve had in recent memory. I choose to believe that there’s no correlation in that. How are you?”

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas

---

Peeking over the top of his lunchtable, improvised shelter that it was, Nic saw that the beast was momentarily disoriented, perhaps made pensive by the biting cold burst. That was the right move, right? His angel wasn’t an angel, so he supposed that he could take that as validation, to one extent or another. Natalie, the one that had been at the dance with Archie, had latched onto the werecroc’s leg. But she was about as effective as a python trying to crush the ribcage of a big rig’s front tire.

Fortunately, she seemed to be invincible. Or at least close enough. Either way, she was seemingly going to do a better job protecting his angel than he could. That was, until he could finagle something more powerful. Completely unarmed at this phase, it seemed illadvised to continue in that particular melee. As he leaned against the overturned table that held him, he decided that when he got out he’d have to look into what sort of weapons or self-defensive measures were legal onboard. And if there was nothing he’d find a way to make his own.

Using the scalpel that he’d added to his first aid kit, he loosed the screws on the underside of the lunch table. About forty-five seconds of tooth-gnashing twists later, he had liberated a pair of steel chair legs from the table, each about three feet long, hollow and straight. Excellent. He slid them into the backside of his pants before thinking on how to extract his angel. But brainstorming for Operation: Rapture was put on hold when he heard the sound of gunshots. He’d have to have a little faith in Wonder Girl for the time being, he supposed.

Nononononono, he thought as he crept for the exit. Wherever Archie is he’d probably never forgive me if I let his girlfriend get killed to protect my angel. It then dawned on him precisely how much of a possessive sociopath he sounded like. Worry about that later, that’s what hell is for. He decided to proceed anyhow. It was novel being in a combat scenario without communications with his father to guide him. Maybe novel wasn’t the right word for it. It was terrifying being in a combat scenario without communications with his father to guide him. Exaggerated by the fact that he didn’t have eyes on anyone in the vicinity. He felt completely blind.

At that, he felt his antennae perk up before violently emmitting a stream of his retroviral carriers into the air. They smattered against the ceiling before spreading out over the room like a cartoon soundwave. It was an involunatary physical response. He’d be embarrassed if he weren’t busy fearing for his life and everyone else’s. That is, everyone else who wasn’t already dead.

He saw an imposing man with his gun at the ready happening upon the girls. He said a few words that Nic couldn’t hear. Probably dabbling in some villainous monologue. He’d have to send the Devil a Thank-You card sometime to demonstrate his appreciation for the fact that what he’d thought was a nonsensical fictional trope was, in fact, an ironic reality. But before the guillotining gunman could seal his peers fates, Nic darted in from the loading bay before diving behind a large plastic garbage cart that the janitor had never quite put away.

In order to conceal his position, he tilted his skull and jutted out another stream of carriers to imply he was positioned closer to the opposite end of the cart before, a split second later, flinging one of the steel chair legs directly at the man’s skull, sentencing him to death, shouting “Angelus enim meus!”

Brainless Automatic Writing - Stream of Thought - Page a Day - Psychedelic Nonsense

Feb 14 2020
Day Three

I shake my hands like I’m rolling dice as I loosely clutch the deceased brain matter between my fingers. Hands ironclad and distant at once, like a socially anxious deathgrip, perhaps more accurately called a life grip. Makes me wonder how I ever managed to kill people before. Sure, it was me but it wasn’t really ME. That part of me is dead and bloated.

I’m getting off topic, it takes a minute but I start to feel the knots unravel. My biceps burn like I’ve been trying to churn sand into butter but I am making progress. And after that minute blows away, I take another. Drat. I should’ve bit the bullet and nabbed the tools from my mind palace. Boo fuckin’ hoo, I guess. Too late for that now. Finally, I feel the grey matter give way, with a measly three minutes remaining.

The fatty, muscle decorated organ has disintegrated, unraveling into a haphazard association of Cerebra, one of the most potent resources in the world. I’d recount its many idiosyncracies but I’m the slightest bit strapped for time, with only two minutes remaining until my inner demons descend upon me. I already feel my intestines trembling as they march up the hill, preparing to cross the barrier and meet me here in Innerheim.

So I begin to recite my oath:

So long as I may live
Never again will I be one to give
The innocent a cause for grief
Or the idealistic cause for disbelief
As the paul of nihilism descends
I will be one on whom the people can depend

At that, the Cerebra finishes melting, bubbling with power as the last of its stillness evaporates before the brain matter slithers up my arms, oozing and fonduing over my flesh before collecting the majority of its mass behind my skull, above my neck, like a symbiotic exoskeleton called to action by the very same duties that I am bound. I feel it, enhancing my sight, granting me the skills of my fallen predecessor, paradoxically making me feel more like myself than I have in a long time and also transcending the very notion of my humanity. Yes, it is good to be amongst The Thinking Men.

And then, they cross the gates. Climbing up from a lower plane, they tumble into Innerheim clumsily, seemingly washing into the realm the way that a shadow stretches off of your body and onto the evening Earth. Mostly, Maleftos seems to have brought a hastily assembled platoon of whatever doubts had been running through my mind at the time. Sure, it’s an affront to my self-esteem, but to make up for they were carrying some remarkably heavy artillery: Dreadsabers and dread grenades. Clearly they were going to attempt to get some cheap shots in by capitalizing on my classic weaknesses of self-doubt and depression. Fine.

“Maleftos you dumb son of a bitch. This is the same bullshit I’ve been dealing with my whole life. I’m over it.”

“You keep saying that, but that has yet to be seen. Soon enough this body will just be another corpse that you mine for Cerebra before we do this dance over and over. Y’know the thing about self-doubt. They kill you today, you kill ‘em tomorrow.”

“Shut up. At first I was gonna kill you because it’s what you’re supposed to do to someone that threatens you. Now I’m gonna kill you because the only thing I hate more than myself is the new Star Wars trilogy.”

The Promise - Second Star to the Right, and Straight on 'til Morning.

Nicholas

---

Nic had been by the cafeteria’s exit when the festivities began. As per usual, his head had been so firmly up his own ass that he failed to respond with the efficiency that he should’ve been conditioned to. It obviously would’ve been suicidal to bum rush the armed assailants, so he decided to hold off on that front, even as he heard the wet splotch of red-hot scarlet splashing onto the ground. So he turned his back in favor of a short-term tactical retreat, rushing low to the ground to the kitchen, with the same four legged stance as a rushing weasel.

Once inside, he wasted no time. The kitchen staff screamed, quite reasonably, before they realized that he was not one of the terrorists. They were all low to the ground, hands over their heads, many cuddling up like they were trying to share body heat in an earthquake.

“What’s happening?” one of the kitchen staff asked.

Not feeling particularly chatty, Nic simply snipped, “I’ll give you three guesses” before throwing the cupboards open. “Useless. Useless,” he snapped as he sorted through, shuddering as he heard the continued sound of explosions, screams and gunshots. Some of the people he’d briefly gotten to know last month were there. He wasn’t sure if he’d call any of them friends but that guy, Archie, wasn’t a dick and that was a start. Finally, he found what he was looking for: Peanut oil. Shortly thereafter, he ripped open a bag of sugar, dumping a helping of the oil into it.

“Fire extinguisher: Where is it?” he asked. One of the cowering cooks pointed him in the right direction. “Wonderful. Thank you for not being completely useless,” he condescended unintentionally before offering a small apologetic salute.

At that, he got to work, slathering his mixture on the outside of the extinguisher until it was positively caked. Then, borrowing a lighter from one of the cooks, he set it alight. Stealing a teflon from the supply closet, he rolled the flaming fire extinguisher onto it, having formed an unreasonably heavy, extremely hazardous, sling. At that, he decided that it was time to get his darling little fire retardent grenade the fuck away from him and out of the kitchen.

Creeping out of the kitchen, he had been planning to sneak back towards the front of the melee using the tables as cover. Didn’t work out that way. It was a good plan though. His pa’ always said that “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” It appeared that the insurgents had unleashed a were-crocodile upon them.

“No.” Not just upon them. Specifically their dog was about to sic his angel, the one who he’d heard clear as day from across the way at the party last month. “Not happening,” Nic said, swinging his flaming teflon sling towards the creature’s hind leg.

She’s mine, he thought as the steel burst directly behind the creature, having impacted against the tile of the cafeteria, unleashing a burst of scarlet steel shrapnel and pressurized carbon dioxide. An instant later, Nic felt his arm fly back, stinging. Sore from carrying that thing? Doesn’t matter. He took cover behind a table that had found its way onto its side before rubbing his arm down, realizing that he’d evidently caught a piece of shrapnel in his forearm. But if it kept his angel safe, it was well worth it. And if it didn’t, well… fuck. It probably wouldn’t, with his luck. The only thing he was really good at was hurting innocent parahumans.

The were-croc was probably gonna be fine. And he would probably fail to make a meaningful move against the terrorists.

Alright. Let’s look at our little to do list rationally: 1) Remove head from ass. 2) Neutralize were-croc. 3) Neutralize gunmen. 4) Perform first aid on everyone in the goddamn room. 5) Ride off into the sunset with his angel in his arms after she confesses her love for him, on account of how brave he had been. 6) Repeat step one, as needed.