January — Roleplayer Guild

LUCAS ROSATI

The bustling city's night life never failed to provide Lucas will plenty of visual amusement as he took in the neon-bright scenery from his seat on a sidewalk bench, earbuds firmly in place as the rapid beats of his preferred liquid drum and bass genre pulsed against his eardrums. He could almost imagine the rhythm of life and lights around him were tuned to the music. That thought didn't soothe him as much as he thought it would. 

Today was one of those days when he simply didn't feel like heading home just yet, his bag of convenience store food dangling loosely from where his arm was stretched across the top of the bench's backrest. He took a moment to lean his head back, reveling in the salt-sweet air from the ocean's proximity to the town. Somewhere he could breathe--not in the sense that his family or school life applied any pressure to him that he didn't allow, but in the sense that he could just let down his guard and not worry about having to care or how much he frankly didn't care. Lucas banished that train of thought before it could proceed any further. Stress management, and it was only effective as long as he didn't think about the mechanism or its ramifications. 

"I don't care," he said softly to himself, speaking slowly and with enough of a lilting cadence that any passerby would think he was just singing along to a song. That wasn't completely untrue. "Apathy" would be the title of the theme song Lucas sang along to his entire life. Or maybe it was more accurate to call it the title of a mantra.

Deciding that sitting around with only his mind and his music to distract him was probably not the best way to keep idle thoughts from wandering into mental areas that Lucas had very consciously cordoned off, the teenager cast his eyes around, looking for some kind of distraction that wouldn't bring any unneeded attention to himself. He liked to watch and be amused from the sidelines. Particularly active participation was a little more effort than he was comfortable giving, and he wanted that nice balance of doing the bare minimum for his fun. He settled on his mobile games.

Lucas played a few songs on Cytus and sighed as the congratulatory screen flashed with another "Master" rank score on the last song, wondering how to stave off boredom now that the rhythm games were getting repetitive. A banner appeared at the top of his screen reminding him that he had missed a lot of messages on Skype. With his mind only on some form of more interactive amusement, Lucas called his girlfriend on Skype. He briefly checked her name again on the phone to make sure it was right: Amy.

Amy was not the girlfriend. Nope.

"Hello, you've reached Dr. McCullough's clinic. We're currently closed or unavailable--"

Lucas hung up. Whoops. He checked the Skype contacts list again, wondering for the umpteenth time why he hadn't labeled people properly in the first place.

His girlfriend's name was one of these generic "A" names, he was sure of it. Amy was the family's previous general practitioner, Amy 2 was...someone, but probably not his girlfriend, Annie was an old classmate he had traded contact information with for a school project but never called, Anita was maybe the same deal, but who cares, Atley was someone random he met at a friend's party...

He grumbled a bit at all the people he kept on his list for no reason. Maybe his contacts list was overdue for a purging. Finally coming across two names that seemed familiar (Avee? Or was it Avery? 50/50), Lucas took the gamble and called Avee. She picked up immediately.

"Hi, Lucas!" her chipper, nasally voice grated on his ears a bit, but he ignored the discomfort.

"Hey, uh--" he double-checked the name and realized he'd forgotten if it was pronounced AY-vee or AH-vee "--'sup?" Decided to skip the name completely. Hadn't contacted her at all for the last month or so. Purposely forgotten.

"I left you a bunch of voicemails and text messages because you said you were going to be busy last time you called," she prattled on. Lucas looked at the numbers he had been ignoring for roughly the past month as they had increased slowly: 26 missed calls and 206 text messages. That was practically one call and five messages per day. "Did you get them?" she finished.

"Um, nope. Cell service is weird in Japan."

"Oh, that sucks! But we should totally talk now that you have the time! This call's going to be fine, right? What have you been up to?"

"Studying." He almost snorted when he said it. As if.

"Uh, wow. Must be a lot of studying."

"Yeah."

"Um...so what were you studying for?"

Lucas could have groaned into the microphone. She was fishing for topics, grasping at straws--trying to sincerely talk to him. It was really fucking annoying. Why couldn't she just casually chat at him like the other 99% of people he interacted with often? Why did she always, always want him to talk so much to her? Everything was so awkward with the one person he liked keeping around out of some mild interest--interest that was starting to depreciate in value really quickly.

"Stuff. Look, I'm pretty bored, so why don't you just tell me about funny shit that's happened to you recently. That should be fine, right?"

Avee went quiet.

"Aren't you going to ask how I'm doing?" she asked softly just as Lucas was wondering if the call had cut off.

"Huh? Sure. I kind of already am?" he leaned against the bench's armrest with a roll of his eyes, shifting the phone to his left hand so he could easily reach for some caramel candies in his cardigan's right pocket. Nothing but empty wrappers. Damn.

"Lucas, are you going to ask or not?" her voice broke a little and she sounded like she was going to cry.

"Oh my god, not this shit again," he muttered without thinking before clicking his tongue in annoyance that he had 1. said that out loud and 2. felt only a little bad about it. "Fine. How are you doing?"

"What do you mean 'this shit again'?" she was sniffling now, ignoring his compliance to her demand. "You hardly call me and when you do, it's only because you're bored!" She spat the last word out like it was a crime.

Lucas considered hanging up. Avee was a huge hassle to deal with when she was emotional and he had started noticing, even through his lack of concern for her, that she had been getting emotional a lot more often recently. He had made a habit of ignoring at least half of her communications two months ago, hoping he could fade away and she would just forget him. But of course it had only gotten worse.

They had met through MapleStory, where Avee (HashtagAwesome) had played a Bishop and Lucas (DementedMario) had played a Corsair. She had warmed up to him after he had given her a full set of level 160 Sweetwater gear, following him around as his pocket healer before pushing to be his long-distance girlfriend. He hadn't known what the big deal was--Bishops were irrelevant endgame anyway. Not like anyone had really demanded the gear that had been collecting dust in his storage.

"Can we just break up already? This is stupid." He said the words like he was talking about the weather. For Lucas, it was about as important.

"No! I don't want to break up! I want to keep trying and I want you to try harder!" she was getting a bit shrill. He wondered what time it was in Arizona that she could make such a racket and not disturb anyone. 

It irritated him to hear the words "try harder." For reasons beyond the annoying voice and the annoying conversation--beyond even him--he really wanted her to shut the fuck up. Please.

"Pretty sure I told you when we started dating that I don't really care that much about you. Why are you making this so difficult?" he stopped briefly, a thought occurring to him. "Is it just 'cuz I'm cute?" A different topic, then.

"What? No! I just want to get to know you better. We've been dating for almost three months now and you haven't changed at all." She brought up "changing" and Lucas had to really debate hanging up and blocking her before they started one of those arguments again. First it was "try harder." Now it was "change." The demands just toppled over each other and sprawled at his feet without any concern for him. Or was it too much concern for him? He had no problems with himself--why did she always want to find so many?

"Yeah, let's just break up. I'm pretty tired of you. Sounds like you're pretty tired of me, too. Rip the Band-Aid off already, would you?"

"You're pathetic, Lucas," she hissed, the venom seeping from her voice despite her watery sniffling. "You're just gonna stay like that until you die."

"Yeah, probably."

"You've never said my name right even once! It's--" 

He hung up and blocked her.

"That went about as good as it could've," Lucas muttered to himself as he put his phone down at his side. Leaning back against the bench, he heaved a quick breath out of his mouth. Nothing. No racing heartbeat, no flushed cheeks, no tears coming to his eyes. The movies really overplayed how the whole "breaking up" thing worked. How did so many people--like Avee--have so many issues with it?

He spared the time on his phone a quick glance and lurched to his feet, realizing he had lost track of time during the conversation. Maybe he'd make it back home before his parents started blasting his phone with worried text messages and calls.

A throwaway thought bounced to the forefront of his mind as he finally bothered processing his fresh ex's last words.

Huh. I still don't remember how to pronounce her name.

The thought was gone before he had taken two steps.

Namely because the world had dipped out on having colors and everyone was reduced to indistinguishable images--like someone had decided to render the crowd in smudged charcoal.

Lucas looked around, not quite comprehending what he was seeing in this new monochrome and Gaussian blur filter of reality. Nothing seemed solid, yet everything felt substantially there. But it was all fundamentally wrong somehow because everything simply moved inhumanly.

"Hey!" he called out, trying to grasp a hold of anything normal. A response. Turns of the blurred head-shapes. Anything.

And got something entirely monstrous instead.

Creatures--things--were rising from the ground, each one unique in its blend of the mundane into something altogether horrible. Lucas was distinctly reminded of the childhood fear he had of Pablo Picasso's paintings, particularly "The Three Dancers," the vivid painting approximating with a disturbing similarity the stature and movements of the shifting masses that Lucas could only describe as vaguely-human mosaics of reality. Except these things weren't harmless paintings. They were real and every fiber in his body screamed "danger." Lucas had no mental quip for when his consciousness only screamed back "how exciting."

He ran towards the direction of home, dodging the facsimiles as the streetlamps flickered back to life, revealing patches of vivid details stitched together all wrong--a cellphone and Scrunchie mashed together here, broken birds melted into zippers and suitcases there, eyes and mouths protruding all over a magazine cutout of a dancer whose body was corkscrewed beyond human limits. Too much to look at. Couldn't understand. But there was a mounting sense of thrill spurring him on and Lucas noted with no small amount of surprise the ease with which he had settled into the thick of the situation. It wasn't happiness he felt. This was something more compelling.

Lucas sprinted faster, catching quick movements in the distance and a lingering scent of roses. This didn't strike him with the sense of impending death he had felt upon finding himself in whatever hell this was. Unnatural excitement and harried thoughts producing recklessness, he skidded to a stop in front of an actual person in a sharp, white military uniform with carefully crafted gold accents and epaulets. The guy didn't seem much older than him, and from the looks of things had just finished dispatching a group of monsters with a flashy storm of petals.

"What--" Lucas gasped for breath, realizing too late that this person could be just as dangerous as the monstrosities nearby--probably worse if he had killed them. But it was too late to run now. Not that Lucas wanted to run anyway.

He braced his hands against his slightly bent knees as he leveled a wary glance at the guy's fancy attire, choosing not to say anything more and waiting to see if this was the last mistake he'd ever make. He should have been worried that there was an unsettling giddiness that accompanied the thought of this guy lunging at him with that sword.

@Leslie Hall
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