Lemons

ᴀᴘᴏᴛʜᴇᴏsɪs: __ɢᴇɴᴇsɪs

I think Tori is going to start calling the ability-neutralizing metal Retainium if they run into more of it.

In other news, I'll probably in the next day or two; a bit busy recently.

A Tyrant's Undoing

Beep boop

ᴀᴘᴏᴛʜᴇᴏsɪs: __ɢᴇɴᴇsɪs

Tori & Kyle

---

Tori narrowed her eyes at the man as he approached, her lips pulling back into a pained snarl. He was nearly as scruffy-looking as she was, but she could tell he was strong, and definitely not to taken lightly. Her right hand was applying pressure on the gash in her left arm, and in the unoccupied hand, her lighter was constantly flicking, sparks showering from it in a near-constant cascade. Her voice, when she spoke, was a low growl. It was largely a painful, angry warning, but tucked beneath it where she couldn’t stifle was a definite note of fear:

"Turn around. I do not want to deal with you or them right now. I’m getting the fuck out of here." With that, she continued on her limping path to the stream, wondering for a moment which article of clothing would be best to use as a bandage for her arm.

Kyle was caught off guard momentarily by the girl's sudden outburst, enough so that he just stood there for a couple of seconds, his brain still processing her words. It was then that his ears picked up on the commotion near the stream. When he turned around to see what the other survivors were up to, he realized that quite a few had actually made it out alive, considering the sheer brutality of the accident.

Kyle's eyes darted from person to person, briefly analyzing them. It was only when he noticed one of the survivors, a brunette that seemed to be around his age, that had knelt down beside one of the guys sitting next to the steam and was apparently tending to the wound on his head.

Kyle clicked his tongue in amazement. "Well I'll be damned, there was actually a medic among those abducted, and she managed to survive! Seems like God didn't take a shit on us after all".

Tori stopped nearly mid-limp at hearing the man's exclamation. Her face contorted in an expression torn somewhere in between relief and frustration, and for a moment, she debated whether or not she wanted to turn around and face him. After a second, though, her pragmatism won out and she sighed, painfully shifting on her good right leg to face him, face set in a stonelike lack of expression. She began limping back towards him, raising her voice to be heard over the small distance:

"I heard the word medic."

Kyle's ears prickled once more, now, however, it was to the sound of a voice coming from behind him. He half-turned around, keeping most of his body facing towards the creek but leaving his head to face towards the girl. He looked at her for a moment, sizing her up, before a sneer crept up his face.

"Well," he said and pointed towards the brunette. "She seems like she knows a thing or two about wounds, seeing from the way she patched up that guy's head".

As much as her stubbornness hated her going back towards the people she'd done her best to rather painfully distance herself from, her arm was still bleeding pretty heavily and no matter how much pressure or how effective of a bandage she applied, it wasn't going to be better than the treatment that someone who actually knew what they were doing could give. As she drew up to him, she debated giving her name, before deciding that if it was of interest to him, she'd have to get his first. She occasionally flicked her lighter, more as an anxious tic than anything else.

Kyle looked as the girl silently walked towards him, noting the deadpan expression she wore on her face. He genuinely felt like laughing at that moment; she really looked like one of his friends from way back, when he was still with the orphanage. His friend used to wear the same expressionless face when she was feeling especially stubborn, and Kyle always felt like teasing her for that. One of the few memorable things about that damned place. Alas, those days were long gone now...

Tori cocked her head at him for a second, eyebrow quirked slightly as he stared off into space. "Maybe there's something on the fifth dimension I'm missing," she muttered, walking past him, "wouldn't be the strangest thing to happen today."

Whatever. It wasn't her concern what he did. She was just interested in the coveted medical treatment that the brunette off in the distance could provide to stop her from bleeding herself dry from the damn arm. She glanced back at him before grumbling, continuing her limp which was, by the way, really starting to wince as the pain in her kneecap grew worse. "Not my problem."

Kyle remained oblivious to both the girl's words and movements as she walked past him, absorbed as he was in his little road down memory lane. When he came to, the girl had walked almost half the distance between him and the place where the rest of the survivors gathered. Without anything to say, Kyle merely sighed to himself before following after her. Soon enough, he had caught up with the girl; what with her leg injury, she couldn't exactly be called a fast walker or anything.

Biting back an angry snap to the man, Tori opted instead for grinding her teeth together and glaring as spine-chillingly as possible. The effect was somewhat lost by the fact that he was several years older than her and didn't seem to much care for any of her none-too-subtle signals of "leave me alone." After a moment, she sighed and dropped the glare. Then, like the angelic call of the Pearly Gates themselves, she heard a voice on the wind, calling out to her in whatever suitably overdramatic metaphor one so chooses:

"Hey guys! I've saved a few MREs from the train! Come here if you need some food!"

6slyboy6

Only then did Tori realize just how hungry she was. She glared to the side again. "Look, I don't know why you're following me, but as long as you're going in this direction too, I might as well try to not make another enemy. I have enough of those already." In lieu of attempting a handshake, she inclined her head, glare slackening off into neutrality, her stomach cramping, the days without food beginning to take their toll on her. She accelerated as much as she could with her limp, her salivary glands igniting. "Tori Frejsdottir. I won't say it's a pleasure because let's both be honest, it isn't, but...hello."

"Heh, this girl's funny..." Kyle thought, a non-committal expression on his face as he watched her having a mini temper tantrum. One thing was for sure, however. The moment the word "food" left that guy's mouth, both Kyle and she shared the same glorious expression. In all honesty, Kyle wasn't much of a foodie himself, but after the crash, his body practically screamed 'FOOOOOOOOOD' in order to repair itself, and Kyle assumed was the same for everyone there. "Let's just hope there's enough for everyone", he thought.

"The name's Kyle Jensen", he replied with a weak smile. "And yeah, this shithole really doesn't seem like the best place for first introductions, does it now?"

A wan grin, so vague it was barely there, crept across Tori's face. "Well, there's a time and a place. And the best time and place is always the worst time and place."

With that bit of pithy wisdom, she finally limped just ahead of Kyle into the rendezvous spot, beginning to feel slightly lightheaded. She hadn't thought that the wound in her arm was that serious, but it just wasn't stopping. "This isn't going to go well, is it," she muttered.

ᴀᴘᴏᴛʜᴇᴏsɪs: __ɢᴇɴᴇsɪs

@Vec Sorry, got really busy for a time. I'm game for a collab.

ᴀᴘᴏᴛʜᴇᴏsɪs: __ɢᴇɴᴇsɪs

Waiting sounds about right to me.

ᴀᴘᴏᴛʜᴇᴏsɪs: __ɢᴇɴᴇsɪs

That feel when you just can't find a good voice, so you default to anime, the only thing you know...

ᴀᴘᴏᴛʜᴇᴏsɪs: __ɢᴇɴᴇsɪs

@Vec Np breh👌

ᴀᴘᴏᴛʜᴇᴏsɪs: __ɢᴇɴᴇsɪs

@Vec

Just a brief note on some inconsistencies: Tori is on her feet, not crawling, but limping heavily, and while she's going towards the stream, she's veering away from the group, not towards.

ᴀᴘᴏᴛʜᴇᴏsɪs: __ɢᴇɴᴇsɪs

Beep boop.

ᴀᴘᴏᴛʜᴇᴏsɪs: __ɢᴇɴᴇsɪs

Tori shivered spasmodically, flicking her lighter uselessly for the umpteenth time since she'd been awoken. She hadn't the faintest idea what was happening. She'd gone to bed, ready to sleep and go to school to next day. Everything had been utterly, splendidly normal, at least as far as normal had ever gone for Tori. Then...a strange in-between blur, not quite awake, not quite asleep. Some kind of light. The familiar feeling of a lighter's flickwheel under her thumb, the hypnotic glow of leaping flames. Pain. Dully gleaming metal, the agonizing sensation of seizing muscles, and blackness. Then light, then darkness again. Sterile fluorescents, the thump of being carried like a sack of potatoes over someone's shoulder. A seemingly-neverending series of broken images blitzing through her skull. Then wakefulness, and above all, cold.

Wherever she was--some kind of train car, she thought--it had seemingly neutralized any of her exceptional talents. Normally this wouldn't be all too frustrating to Tori. She didn't actually use them all that much under normal circumstances, though if she ever got out of whatever this was, that might change. However, she'd not counted on one thing: her body heat. That feverish heat that consumed so many of her calories and gave her so much energy had fled, leaving her running three degrees lower. Not that much, one might think. Three degrees is nothing. Not so; she was beset with a feeling of through-and-through frigidity, shivering into soreness and numbed into barely being able to think. She flicked the lighter again, cupping her hands around the flame and desperately trying to absorb the warmth into her, but to no avail; the cold remained.

At first, she'd thought that the food they gave her would be insufficient; indeed not. Her caloric intake had gone down to match anybody else's, leaving her feeling bloated and unpleasant whenever she ate. She'd barely touched her food, and she could feel it; her stomach had shrunken even further past it's usual state. The food had been stacked meticulously in one corner of her cell. Obsessively arranging and perfecting the organization of the pyramid had been her only activity for the past two days. Beyond that, she'd huddled against one of the cold metal walls, desperately trying to generate some of her old heat and failing utterly. Her eyes bored into the word on the wall opposite her: Apotheosis. She knew that word, but her addled mind couldn't seem to retrieve it from her limp brain.

"So...cold..." she mumbled mindlessly, rendered nearly incomprehensible through her chattering teeth.

Then the lights died, and for a moment, Tori relaxed. I'm dead, aren't I? Took them long enough. The cold stillness pervaded.

Then, in a sudden flash of light behind her eyes, the heat rushed back, and she surged back to life. Her mind raced. Her body suffused with the renewed flow of blood, and for the brief instant before the bone-rattling crunching of metal on metal smashing itself into tin cans, she grinned, clenching her fists and fingering the lighter.

She was totally unprepared for the sound, and for the gravity. She felt the oddest sensation of weightlessness, and in the utter blackness, she once again wondered if this was what it was like to be dead, before the wall rushed sideways to meet her and she ragdolled across her cell, feeling a deep, crunching pain in her right leg. Her teeth clenched together as her lips pulled back into a soundless snarl. If I'm lucky, she thought grimly, that isn't broken. She didn't really have a whole lot of time to think about it before the train car cannoned into a solid object, dashing her against the floor and exploding an array of brilliant colors behind her eyes. She spat blood, and the cell opened up, a huge rift to the outside world appearing next to her.

She tried to stand, but her hurt leg fell out from under her. It probably wasn't broken, didn't hurt enough to be, but it was still plenty painful, and she ended up falling to the ground and settling for a weak crawl out into the broad light of day. Fire swelled up into the gap where spilled fuel had ignited, and she calmed the raging blaze with a weak wave of her hand, sending it shuddering into the ground as she emerged into the sun.

She tried to stand again, and this time, she managed to struggle to her feet. Though she limped heavily, it was still faster and infinitely less degrading than crawling, so she bit her way past the pain and grunted as she felt a half-dozen other minor pains across her body. The worst of them was a slash across her left arm where a jagged shard of metal had bit into it as she crawled out, and though it wasn't bleeding enough to worry about killing her, she still grimaced. I should really get that cleaned up and bandaged.

Casting her eyes about, she set her sights on a stream, and began limping towards it. Before too long, she caught some movement out of the corner of her eye, and saw a girl about her age, maybe a little younger, walking towards the same stream, stride easy, seemingly without any pain. Angling slightly away from her, Tori continued limping. I have no idea who you are, and you better not come any closer, she thought, frowning angrily as she flicked her lighter. I've had enough trouble today.