HereComesTheSnow — Roleplayer Guild

Somewhere within the depths of unconsciousness, one short black-haired twenty-something thought he might have heard some strange, unnatural noise. Normally, this wouldn't have been cause for alarm, as sharing a room with three other young adults tended to get noisy. His already naturally heavy sleeping habits had only further been bolstered by three long years of cohabitation with his team.

However.

Despite his frontal lobe's best efforts, there was nothing they could have made that sounded quite like the vworp-tmp pair that had just resonated through the otherwise empty and silent dorm.

He stirred, limbs each moving somewhat independently, but didn't fully wake up. This elicited a light sigh from the source of the noise, and something muttered under her breath.

Wait, her?

"Wake up."

"Mmgrfb." came the retort from the ever eloquent eldest son of the Schwarze clan.

"Wake up." the voice repeated, this time with conviction.

"nnnh"

In his semi-conscious state, he had an inkling of awareness of the glare being leveled at him. Meh. Whoever it was could--

"OH HEY, LOOK AT THESE MAGAZINES, I WONDER WHAT'S INSIDE!"

!!!

The resulting scramble of limbs that may have meant something vulgar in a cephalopod sign language was punctuated by a painful-sounding thud upon the floor, and one now entirely awake Luke Schwarze looking up from below a pile of his own appendages in fear.

"I can explain!"

"Sheesh, you're just as hopeless as Mom said." muttered the figure from on high, looming over him like a very dissatisfied thundercloud and slapping her palm to her forehead, ahoge in a disheartened slump.

Hold on. Mom?! Hair antenna?!

Sitting bolt upright, Luke looked up at the tall young woman with saucers rather than eyes. "Uh..."

"You awake?" she asked, and he nodded  slowly, taking the opportunity to look his sudden and unexpected guest up and down.

Tall, athletic, bike shorts (nice!), black hair done up in a ponytail, ragged and worn looking hoodie and tanktop beneath, what would normally be a cute face looking down at him in a condescending manner with stormy blue eyes...

And completing the set was a lone hair-antenna swaying in the nonexistent breeze. Eyes aside, there was no doubt about who this girl could be.

"Good. Now, you're probably wondering why I'm here..."

"Some daughter of mine or a relative's back in time to warn me about something, right? When do the Androids attack, then?" he fired off quickly, throwing the shoe expertly onto the other foot. Now it was her turn to look confused, an expression he honestly found kind of adorable.

"C-Close…” she replied, looking somewhat akin to a tall, elegant deer in the headlights and obviously taken aback. “How'd you--"

Luke smirked triumphantly, folding his arms. "Please. I've watched that show since I was a kid. I know this deal like the back of my hand. Do I have a Cell to worry about?"

"I don't know what you're referencing, but Mom did say you'd catch on if I asked if you knew Dragonball, so I guess that's about as good an explanation as I can get."

"Hold on, you’re saying you've never seen--"

"I haven't, and that doesn't matter, Uncle."

Uncle?

U n c l e?

Man, talk about depressing... I'm never gonna find love, am I?

"Hey, eyes up. I need you paying attention to what I tell you. If you listen, hopefully we'll never have to do this."

He tilted his head much like a canine. That line certainly didn’t make sense in context…

"Never have to?"

"Multiverse theory."

"Right! Yeah, I getcha. So Time Paradoxes can't exist."

"Bingo. Now then. You know Team KPT, right?"

KPT? Oh, right. Them. The Kaputs were always a troublesome bunch, but he wasn't sure how exactly they could necessitate time travel...

Maybe they awakened an ancient evil, and kicked off the plot of every other video game ever made.

"Yeah, what'd they do?"

"Long story short, they let in a horde of bad guys that just swamped the school and took it down by storm. The Order of Grimm. You haven't heard of them yet, but they're out there, waiting for the right moment to strike. They've got things that are even tough for an entire team of Hunters to deal with... a huge blitzkrieg like that, the school doesn't stand a chance. And with Beacon, the rest of Vale falls." she muttered bitterly, eyes going back to whatever desolate time she had come from. A blunt, and honest appraisal of what was in store, too.

Well, that was certainly a bleak future.

"So do I die, or something? Why're you going tell me? There's gotta be someone better for the job..."

To his discomfort, his niece nodded, mouth pulling into a hard line of a grimace.

"You do die. In fact, you dying arguably sets it all off..."

Oh.

Well, and here he thought he could at least say he was hard to kill. Now apparently KPT or some Grimm-loving wackjobs could do him in?

Come on. No way.

"Alright then," he replied, injecting a healthy spoonful of skepticism into the mix as he folded his arms. "How do I die?"

His niece (who he at this point assumed was the result of his older younger sister... middle sister finding love with someone a bit less straightforward and simpleminded) folded her own and closed her eyes in thought, face scrunching up into a contemplative frown.
“You wouldn’t let me get away with just telling you calling in sick would avoid all this, would you?”

He grinned. “I’d be disappointed in my sisters if you didn’t already know the answer.”

She chuckled humorlessly at that. 

“They said something like that, yeah. About you being too nosy to stay out of something that’s interesting. Runs in our family, huh?”

A small smile. Good. She wasn’t all cold and weary business after all. Still had some light left in there. That meant even if he screwed this up, there was still hope.

He returned it, with a nod on the house. “That and the hair.”

“Ugh, I can never get it to stay down...” she grumbled, fiddling with the aforementioned ahoge.

“Don’t try.” he advised, taking that certain tone of “trust me, I know what I’m saying here” onto his words. “It resists whatever you throw at it. Just do like the rest of us and own it, life gets so much easier.”

“Yeah, but it looks duuumb.” she pouted, completely dispelling any sense of seriousness in their flow of conversation. Luke was good at pulling this side of people out as ever, even three hard years of missions had failed to rend that particular quality from him. 

“I just wanna cut it off sometimes, you know?”

Woah woah WOAH!

Hold up!

“Do you realize what you’re talking about, kid?” Luke asked suddenly incensed by the notion. “That’s like throwing away the family name! The cowlick has been our calling card for the longest time now! It’s not dumb! It’s charismatic! Don’t make fun of our weird hair, niece of mine! Have a little pride in our awesome family! You’re talking to your uncle here, your prodigy mother’s beloved big bro! Don’t you dare neglect a part our family’s identity right here in front of me! Did your mother never teach you to respect your elders, to respect the dead?!”

While he was sure a patent Lucas rant was sure to sway her opinion at least a little, he ended up being sorely mistaken. The only reward Luke had received, instead, was one of his niece’s increasingly common facepalms. Really liberally applying those, huh? Someone really took things serious.

Then again, he reminded himself. Post-apocalyptic future. She oughta get a little leeway for that, I guess.

“One: You’re the same age as me right now.” the nameless niece responded, listing off the points with her fingers and an exasperated scowl. “Two: You’re not dead yet, which is the whole reason I’m here. And Three: ...It’s hard to be proud of a family that includes a pervy uncle who takes hair that seriously.” came the grumbled conclusion, and with it, a dark cloud over Luke’s being.

Ow.

That was painful. It was one thing when his own team ragged on him for that stuff, but a girl who he’d only just met and was supposed to be his cute little niece that he may never get the chance to meet?

Agony. Sheer agony.

“That hurt. Shouldn’t you respect your elders?”

“Like I said, we should be about the same age right now. And even then, you haven’t shown much worthy of respect…”

“Okay, now you’re just being mean!”

“I just call it like I see it.”

“May whoever’s in charge of handling the threads of fate provide me with a save point to restart this unsalvageable conversation with my disrespectful descendant from!” he cried out to the ceiling, before bowing his head and clasping his hands in mock prayer.

Thankfully, his niece had apparently had her fun and relented with a wry smirk. “You done?”

He looked back down at her, meeting her amused look with his own. “Only if you are.”

At that, she gave an eerily familiar shrug that she could have only picked up from her aunt. “Where were we, then?”

“I think you were telling me how I die…”

“Right, right. You’re sure you want to know, even though you not showing up at all to the event’s the most important part of the plan here?”

He nodded, this time curt and to the point. “Yeah. May as well know what I’m trying to avoid, right. Play this thing smart.”

She pulled up a chair, seemingly sensing that she’d need it for the retelling of this story. Smart girl. Luke was planning to get as much information as he could for the event ahead. And that, of course, meant grilling her with questions like a history test.

Which, well, it kind of was for her, if you think about it.

Anyway.

“Alright, then, let’s take this thing from the top…”

And so it went from there.

Lucas Schwarze--Out of sight, Out of mind

Well, yeah... thought the black-haired teen in reply, settling for an internal response and a mildly exasperated frown rather than the spoken word. Cian wasn't the only one keeping her ears on a swivel...

He'd have to find a better phrase than that. Really, "ears on a swivel"? That's like specifically scraping the bottom of the barrel, even if there are plenty of ripe and fresh apples to pick all the way up to the brim. His lyrical and eclectic mind could surely produce better results!

Let's see here...

"Ears open" is good, if a bit overplayed. 

Maybe something like "keeping an ear out for trouble?"

No, no, no.

That just runs into the same issue as "ears on a swivel". Think of something good!

He squatted there in silence and massaged his temples, face contorting into a scrunched-up, intensely concentrated grimace. It was a spectacle that would look humorously out of place in such a tense situation, were his compatriot able to look back over her shoulder and not be glued to watching the door and surveying the activity of the guard(s) outside. A necessary evil, and one that was surely better than the alternative.

You can do this, Schwarze! You didn't pass English class with ease once you had to stop doing annotations in your books for nothing!

"Ears on point"!

"Ears in tune"!

"Ears on the ball!"

His head flopped forward, fingers squeezing his scalp in what could only be described as a midway point between the "Hear No Evil" pose and Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Scream.

This is hopeless... Just like back when I learned of the "Courage Series" last year, and how just one word can make anything sound positive.

The image of a college-aged, brown-haired girl flashed through his mind, along with the phrase "The courage to admit defeat!" said in an amused, singsong tone that brought back more memories than you might expect from the voice of someone that he, logically, should barely know at all.

His hands left his head and his fist clenched passionately.

I COURAGEOUSLY ACCEPT MY DEFEAT!

A sharp, yet thankfully quiet gasp escaped from his previously sealed lips, and his eyes went wide as saucers. He fell for it again despite knowing about the trick for nearly a year! Truly a masterful exploitation of simplicity, both in the language he spoke and wiring of his poor brain!

...Wait, where were we? 

He snapped himself out of his own contained aside, and glanced around the room, taking stock of the situation once again. They hadn't been found out yet, Cian was still keeping watch at the door, but the footsteps seemed to have died off.

Had the guard already passed? Was he stopped outside?

Inwardly, he shamed himself for losing track of the situation at such a crucial moment. Reaching to his earpiece, he clicked it on, broadcasting to all channels in a low, yet as clear as possible whisper. Better play catch up.

"Jack, any more of a clue what's goin' on than the two of us?"

HereComesTheSnow Member

dehydration expert

Status

Recent Statuses

Bio

Most Recent Posts