Maxx

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

I'mma yeet you all into the sun.

That's it. That's the end of the roleplay.

You all died.

The end.

Recollections: The Othergrounds [Complete]

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ABERRANT ENTITTY DETECTED

"H...Hi Trent! It's good to see-"

The entire ship reeled. Trent's ears were filled with the creaking and splitting of metal. He lost his footing and slipped in the puddle at the base of the stairs. He crashed head-first into the staircase and his vision went blurry. Pain spread across his head like wildfire. He laid stunned for a split second, then slowly rolled onto his forearms. His head throbbed all over, spreading from the point where his head hit the stairs. Everything felt foggy. The corners of his vision blurred. Trent held a hand up to the point where his head struck, just behind his right ear. No blood.

"What was that..." Trent grumbled in a daze. Before anyone could respond, he answered his own question. From a point lower on the ship, Trent felt staggering energy erupt. It was an apparition, and a damn powerful one at that.

"<Stop milling around! Get on that boat and away from whatever that thing is!>" Still foggy and in pain, Trent stood and jogged towards the lifeboat, clutching the side of his head. He pushed past the white-haired girl (whose name he did not know) and stepped inside wordlessly. The inside was cramped, filled wall-to-wall with white rubber-covered seats. There was easily enough room for this group and more. Trent looked out of the door towards the others, his usual brand of awkward confusion present on his face.

"We gotta go, now," he said. "Anyone know how to drive a boat?"

Recollections: The Othergrounds [Complete]

Yay. More teens for Stacey to connect with.

@silvermist1116

I can't wait to meet Stacy's mom. I've heard she's got it going on.

Recollections: The Othergrounds [Complete]

This post rate makes me die inside.

@Majoras End

Patience, blue one.

Recollections: The Othergrounds [Complete]

Trenton MacDonald

╚══════════════╝

Theme: Castle of Glass by Linkin Park

"I’ve seen shit man! Coming through the walls, dangling over my fucking head as I sleep. They’re always following me. They never leave me alone. No one believes me..."

[ 15 | 5’4” | White | He/him | 140 lbs ]

[The Stranger who hears voices.]

APPEARANCE

"W-why are you looking at me? Leave me alone..."

Scrawny, short, physically-unimpressive. Trent’s got traditionally-Italian features: dark white skin, dark hair and eyes. His cheeks are flushed and his body is dotted with freckles. Not much particularly sticks out about him, save a rather sloppy black tattoo of a pentagram on his left shoulder— a self-done job he learned how to do online. A small sterling silver crucifix hangs around his neck on a chain. His hair is buzzed and his eyebrows are thick, and his eyes dart back and forth constantly- his gaze is the epitome of paranoia. He’s wearing a LeBron James jersey (Heat) that’s clearly fake, beige cargo shorts, and a pair of high-top Nikes.

Recollections: The Othergrounds [Complete]

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Rain fell from the gunmetal sky to the grey concrete surrounding the swimming pool on the lido deck. White recliners scattered about the deck, wind-blown and abandoned. The water of the swimming pool frothed like the sea in a storm, lapping gently over the edges. The wind was cold and wet and miserable and not one sound floated on its fringes. Then, a voice, crackling with static, shouting from the ship's intercom. Trent didn't budge. He laid face-down on the pool deck, head sheltered beneath a round white table with a folded umbrella. His left leg twitched as the banks of the pool overflowed and brushed up against him. Chlorine wafted past his nostrils.

"<Get Up.>"

The voice was bass and rumbling, like an earthquake. Only Trent heard it, as only Trent heard all of Saint Jimmy's voice. Trent stirred, his eyes still closed and his body intent on sleeping. He groaned and covered his head with an arm to block out the grey light of the day.

"<I said get up. We're not safe here.>" the voice spoke again. Trent grumbled and pushed himself onto his hands.

"What do you mean we're not sa-" Trent raised his head, blinking in the light, and bashed his head against the rim of the table. He recoiled and covered his head with his arms. "Fuck." Trent looked bleary-eyed through the crook of his elbow; he could see a concrete deck, and past that a railing and a placid green sea blending into the sky. Something was very wrong— this was not home or anywhere else he'd seen. Trent rolled onto his back and propped himself up on his elbows. His legs were wet, but the rest of him had been shielded. Instinctually, he looked to his left; previously, Trent had slept on his bed and Fin in an old sleeping bag Trent took from his dad's closet.

Fin...where were they? What were they? Where was here...

"<Now is not the time to ask questions. Get up; we need to get off of this ship, now.">

"We're on a ship..." Trent said. "Any idea how we got here?"

"<Jack shit nothing. Obviously supernatural. No apparitions around...wait, two. One's close. Be on your guard.>" Rubbing his still-throbbing head, Trent stood up and looked about the pool deck.

"I don't recognize any of this," Trent said out loud. He walked around the large square pool, past beach chair after beach chair to the railing that looked down to a lower deck. Several large lifeboats hung off the edge of the ship. In front of one, a small crowd stood, all teenagers, though most of them older than Trent. One of them, Trent knew, was an apparition; he could feel it, like a vague shimmer— seen, but not registered by the eyes. It was as much a feeling as a sense.

"<Careful,>" Jimmy said. "<There's a ghost.>"

"They're the only other people we can see on this ship," Trent replied out loud. "Looks like they're trying to get off the ship too." Trent looked to the end of the railing; a metal staircase led down to the lifeboat deck. He walked towards it and began to descend.

"<I hate it when you don't listen,>" Jimmy muttered. Trent shrugged. He focused on his third eye as he walked; the apparition before him was definitely in the body of one of those teenagers, like Fin before. The other...it was far away, up in a higher section of the ship. He couldn't tell what it was, but it wasn't moving towards him. Sometimes, spirits would just pass through Trent's aura sense without meaning to.

Trent slipped as he reached the bottom stair, catching himself on a handrail before he could fall. His eyes darted towards the teenagers before him— they'd be aware of his presence now. He stood in awkward, stunned silence. One of them, the apparition he'd sensed, it was definitely Finley.

"Fin?" Trent called out?

"<Oh, this one again,>" Saint Jimmy grumbled.

Recollections: The Othergrounds [Complete]

<Snipped quote by Maxx>

Go away

@Ghost Note

Eat your own anus.

Recollections: The Othergrounds [Complete]

Howdy

Charity Beach: Paradise Gone [Semi-Sandbox/Superhuman]

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Feeling Good by Muse

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Spaniard Town

The Charles Building was situated on the corner of Buford Highway and 14th street, across the road from a strip mall and a liquor store. It was a nice building, with a modern, pentagonal shape and brick and concrete facade. Wrap-around windows demarcated each floor, of which there were seven. The lawn outside was well landscaped and manicured: short, perfectly conical evergreen trees in terracotta pots lined the walkways, and small flower bushes bloomed by the first-floor windows. A small koi pond surrounded by smooth river rocks trickled quietly. The first floor consisted of a cafe and convenience store, with a bank of four elevators in the room's center. The walls were wood-paneled, the floors smooth beige tile. Behind a granite-topped desk, a security guard slumped in an office chair, looking up as each person passed, showing their ID for clearance, and then back down at her phone.

On the fifth floor of this seven-story building, in a glass-front office labeled "Gouche Informatics", the heart of REAPER operations in Charity Beach beated nondescriptly. Behind the glass and a small lobby with a white marble receptionist desk could be found a series of offices lining narrow corridors. In one room, locked from the outside with a key card, hundreds of black computer towers hummed in unison, making the whole room vibrate. The rooms were labeled with gold plaques, reading things like "Director of Quality Control", "Accounting Office", and "Programming Department". At the back of the office, at the dead end of a twisting hallway, sat an office completely different from the others. It was all black glass, tinted dark to the point of opacity, with a glass sliding door locked from the inside. The gold plaque next to the door read:

"Rachel Cantor, Director of Operations"

Inside, the office was trapezoidal, occurring at one of the points of the pentagon. Banks of windows flanked a large dark-wood desk with an enormous computer monitor atop it. The office was idiosyncratically neat. It was lit by fluorescent lights and a tall silver lamp behind the desk and a comfortable black office chair. A black rug sat beneath the desk at a perfect 90 degree angle to the corners of the room. By the windows, low shelves held books on programming and a series of manilla folders. One such self, the one closest to the silver lamp, instead held books of poetry and literature. A large fern sat in a white pot near the right window. On the back wall, behind the desk, another large computer screen showed an image of a tropical landscape, and below that three silver filing cabinets stood resolute.

Rachel Cantor sat in her comfy chair in front of the enormous computer screen and drummed her manicured nails on the edge of the desk. Calming electronic music played from a speaker under the desk somewhere. On the screen, several Word documents were opened in sequence, progress reports from agents around the city. The one pulled up currently was particularly grisly.

”Encounter with special target AMCC in the Industrial District. Casualties: 0. Fatalities: 3. AMCC last spotted east of the initial encounter. Agents have been deployed to identify the AMCC and track it.”

Rachel sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. There was a lot of paperwork to read today. Rachel had been working here for two months now, and with each day her patience wore thinner. This office job felt stifling compared to the work she had done before. The power and the trust the job came with— those suited her. The tedium of paperwork, not so much.

Suddenly, a ring came from the door. Rachel looked up (it was one-way glass, so she could see through) to see the doors swing open… by itself. Before the doors closed, Makoto appeared in a cloud of smoke on Rachel’s desk. With her legs swinging like a child, and she looked back at Rachel.

“Hey there, sweetie,” Makoto said with a warming smile, “Look at you, with your own office… in your own city! You’re making big moves, babe.”

“That’s not usually how people enter my office,” Rachel replied, jumping at the unusual sight of a woman appearing on her desk. Quickly, she reached for a coffee mug which, displaced by the woman’s appearance, had tipped and spilled over the side of the desk.

“Oh, I think the Foundation Woman briefed you on me, right?” She gave her a forced, toothy, smile that displayed all the woman’s teeth. “Agent Onryo, master spy, at your service!”

“I assumed a master spy wouldn’t announce themselves as such,” Rachel replied.

“Well, kid, it’s about time you threw those assumptions out the window,” Makoto also shot right back with a cheeky grin. “Y’know what they say about assumptions?”

“Yes, I have been to grade school before,” Rachel responded. She reached into one of the cabinets to the right of her desk and pulled out a roll of paper towels, then began to clean the spilled coffee. “Nonetheless, you are welcome here. I have set up an office for you just outside of this one, across from our President of Marketing.”

“Oh, I don’t need all that, sweetie,” Onryo replied with a wave of her hand. “I won’t be sticking ‘round that long, all that office is going to end up being is a storage for my equipment.”

And that was true, given how “mobile” Makoto was; she may end up staying here for like a few days before being sent to Australia or something to seduce a politician! “Thanks anyway.” She, nonetheless, had to thank her. However, she had to get to business.
“So our prestigious Director of Operations,” Makoto started off, “I am, contractually obligated, to inform you that I already completed one of my assignments! And I haven’t even stepped foot in this place for a few hours. We have a lead on the crystal that Warmonger snagged, and I intend on following it.”

Makoto started off before the bad news came in.

“However, we may have to deal with an annoying redneck sheriff getting in our way.”

“FAMA is an unfortunate hurdle in all our dealings,” Rachel replied. “I’m certain he won’t be a problem. What have you learned so far about the crystal?”

“For starters it’s white,” Makoto said before breaking out into laughter, “No, no, just kidding; it’s sealed in a case they can’t open without breaking it - as reported - and it’s currently in the possession of the police department… for now. If they found out there was a crystal inside, FAMA would take it and ship it to one of their vaults! And the Foundation Woman wouldn’t want that, especially when getting it would be easy.”

“Standard police should be a cakewalk,” Rachel replied, shrugging. “I can have an agent scope out the station’s security within a week and we can take it back. Considering your impromptu entrance just now, I’m assuming you won’t have any problem entering the vault?”

“Until I hit a wall and go like splat!” Makoto chuckled before she stopped. “But, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it… now I got a question for you; do you have anything to report to me?” Rachel thought for a moment, then nodded. She clicked through a few of the files on her cluttered computer screen until she came to a video recording. Then she turned the computer screen towards Makoto. The timestamp in the corner read “12:03 pm, 6/11/2019.”
The video began. It was security footage from the inside of a warehouse in the Industrial District, played at 2.0x speed. As it played, a silver blur entered the picture, pursued by three people in all black. A fight ensued, leaving all three of the black-clad people on the ground in horrendous, mangled form. Rachel paused the video, then zoomed in on the silver being in the video.

“I presume that you recognize this as the missing AMCC android,” Rachel said. “Just this morning, after several weeks of espionage, I sent a small team of agents to extract it from its hiding place. Things quickly decayed.”

“Oooooh, good thing I wasn’t in that team!” Makoto said with a raised eyebrow. She heard of the AMCC project and REAPER had made a robot - a freakin’ robot! - but yet the idiots in charge of the project never thought to once consider not making it intelligent enough to rebel. And now all of REAPER has to drop everything to find it because it was “one of a kind” or they’d “never be able to make another one”.

Bullshit, all of it.

“‘Course, if I was in the team, things would’a gone a lot better,” Makoto answered with a chuckle.

“I agree,” Rachel said. “Unfortunately, you have your own list of obligations and this chapter of our agency is particularly understaffed when it comes to powerful supernatural abilities. I have... considered hiring some outside assistance to deal with this machine. Our true nature would, of course, be shrouded in ample ambiguity.”

“... And that outside assistance is?” Makoto asked with a raised eyebrow. She didn’t like the whole “ambiguous” tone this gal was using. “You could always ask the Foundation Woman for more assistance.” She shrugged

“Too much REAPER blood has been spilled to clean up this vanity project,” Rachel replied. “I happen to know of a highly-capable crew of metahumans who, for a completely attainable price, can dismantle this machine without having to put anymore of our people in danger.”

“Ooooh, naughty,” Makoto said with a cheeky grin as she finally got up off the desk and stood straight up to face her “superior”. “The Foundation Woman would flip if she found out but… it’s a win-win for us, even if they all die horribly at the hands at a robot...”

“Then I guess we’ll have to make sure the Foundation Woman doesn’t get wind of this, then,” Rachel replied.

Then the question popped up in her head.

“... Who are they?”

“They are a particularly well-off family of metahumans I befriended many years ago. You know them, of course,” Rachel paused and clicked to a different window, revealing a Google Maps search of The Lucky Scale Hotel and Casino.

“..the Valos family.”

Makoto has definitely heard of the Valos family… they’re a big name in Black Fall and during her time there she definitely paid a visit or two to one of their casinos. On the job and off the job, of course. Out of curiosity, she dug up some information on them and that got her even more curious! But, she didn’t see them as the mercenary types except for one of them…

“Hmmm… sure they’ll bite?” Makoto asked, “They practically own Black Fall - what more could we give them other than a spot in our little… family.”

“Jonathan Valos has a hard-on for action and money. Last I heard his father had cut him off to curb his litany of unsavory habits. The others will, at least, come along to make sure he doesn’t get himself killed, even if money isn’t much their style.” Rachel looked down at the clock in the bottom right corner of her screen.

“Aye, aye, captain,” Makoto flagged off Rachel before she walked towards the door. “In the meantime I’m going down to the festival to… scope out some of our targets. I’ll get back to you.” Makoto opened the door before she disappeared in a puff of black smoke. Of course that was kinda bullshit because she wanted to have some fun if nothing else, but Makoto knew that a few of their targets would pop up at the festival… and she could definitely make use of that.

Rachel sighed and rested her head in her hands. That woman was going to be a pain in her ass. After massaging her temples for a few moments, Rachel looked back up at the search for the Lucky Scale. It was close, only about a mile away down where the tourists traveled in mindless herds. She reclined in her chair. Later, she’d have to give them a little visit, but she didn’t have the heart for it now. It was midday and she was tired and her coffee had been spilled all over her desk.

Charity Beach: Paradise Gone [Semi-Sandbox/Superhuman]

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Eventually, Drake and the lizard-man wandered off, and Grey was left alone on the bench with Albert, who was just finishing his hot dog and starting on a brown paper cup of fries. Out on the beach, the carnival was in full swing. Obnoxious pop music blasted out of enormous black speakers. In the distance, a local rock band set up on a small wooden stage. A food truck called "Garbanzo's Burgers" had set up at the edge of the boards where the fence parted; the smells of frying chickpeas wafted through the air. Grey's stomach rumbled loudly. They looked around and, shrugging, got up to walk towards the food truck. As they walked, they looked through the growing crowd: a few familiar faces jumped out at them. In an alley beside a shop selling novelty marijuana paraphernalia, Gonzo talked to two fraternity brothers wearing salmon shorts and matching black sunglasses. Gonzo nodded, and nodded his head towards the alley. The two exchanged looks, then followed him into the dark. Grey shrugged and got into line at the food truck. They would have a word with Gonzo later about being more discreet in the touristry districts.