van (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yubishines) wrote2015-01-14 02:19 pm
yubishines) wrote2015-01-14 02:19 pm
Entry tags:
Text: [agonizing henshin noises]
(Concept for an Unfleshed from Promethean: The Created, with some details fudged to make 'em a showa-era Kamen Rider. For a campaign that won't happen for a while, but P:tC is so very character-focused that I wanted to get this on paper. Don't have any good ideas yet on who the mysterious benefactor is, but I assume they're a rogue ex-shocker scientist-type.
On another note, having license to be super cheesy and overwrought is great.
Note: Themes of depersonalization, trauma, homelessness, loss of family, body horror.)
------
The note read,
I found you unconscious on the beach and took you to shelter. You don't know me, but I know something of the people who did this. I am sorry for what has been done to you. I wish I could stay and answer all the questions you must have—but the nature of your condition is that I would not be in my right mind by then.
For your own safety and others, you must leave as soon as you are able. Take the bike, it's yours. Consider it an apology, I suppose.
Until we meet again, please think of me simply as
A friend
------
She walked because it was easier than thinking.
Sen drove cautiously—her mysterious benefactor hadn't provided safety gear—but mostly she walked, wheeling the motorcycle beside her. The strain on her shoulders and back, having to lean over all the time to keep ahold of the handlebars, and the crunch of gravel underfoot blotted everything out somehow. The speed of the bike often cleared her mind instead, and brought uneasy thoughts to the light. For instance, there was the idea that she wouldn't need a helmet, even if she had one. That if she swerved off the road and folded the bike around a utility pole, she'd come out standing.
But that idea led to other, more uncomfortable ones. So she didn't think it.
For lack of anything better to do, she followed the coastline. She would fix her eyes on some landmark—a signpost, a grey lump of driftwood—and follow it until she passed it by, then she would pick a new one. It seemed her entire world had diminished from one pinpoint location to another. This suited her just fine.
It never rained harder than a light drizzle. Sen supposed she should be thankful.
She saw nobody on the beach, not the people she was looking for. She didn't think she would.
Now and then a car would pass by. Occasionally one would slow down, but never stop. Once she turned to watch one go by, and caught a glimpse of a small curious face peering back at her from the rear window.
Well, what would you do? Sen thought. Picking up a stranger on the road, you're already taking your life into your own hands, and you have a kid to think of—
She slammed down hard on that thought, and walked on.
------
She broke into a house once. It was a vacation cottage, one of a half-dozen identical ones that lined the road, facing the horizon. They were all empty now; it was the wrong season, perhaps. (Or perhaps it was the location. Urban sprawl had eaten the countryside, but it hadn't quite reached here yet. Probably why she'd hardly seen anyone. It was easy to understand why. This was not scenic beachfront property. It was the kind of beach that made you depressed and think about mercury levels in fish.)
Sen felt guilty about it, but dusk was falling and by then she'd been travelling for... how many days? It was hard to tell. She'd realized by then that she needed to eat and rest less often, and certain personal necessities had stopped entirely, but that meant the usual ways to mark time passing—eight hours of sleep, three meals a day—didn't apply anymore. All Sen knew at that moment was that the sun was setting and her hands were shaking and if she had to sleep on the freezing ground one more night something was going to give way.
And anyway, anyone who could afford a cottage could afford a broken window and the spare change in the cookie jar. Probably.
(Sen had woken up with a handful of small bills in her pocket; another gift from her benefactor, she supposed. Mostly she subsisted on vending machines—one or two dispensed hot soup and coffee, which had been wonderful—but once she had stopped at a cheap roadside cafe, with the vague idea of borrowing someone's phone. (To call who, exactly? a small voice had said mockingly. Who'd believe you?) The moment she walked in she had felt eyes crawling on her, both from the servers and patrons. Not in a threatening way, exactly, but with a palpable feeling of you don't belong here. She had bolted her food and fled without a word.)
Under a roof at last, she turned and stared out the window. The path to the front door was lined with tufts of pale grass, making shushing noises in the evening wind. Aside from that and the grumbling coming from the radiator, the cottage was silent and empty.
In the quiet, memories and echoes of memories seemed to coil in from the edges. The ship. The lab. An empty room with a scratched-out name on the door. A tag on her wrist. A body under a sheet. A view of the ocean from above, much too high to be from a ship's deck. And the dark place, that period of time that contained nothing but slim knives and tubes and needles and—
No, stop right there. We're not going there tonight.
Something had been done to her. No, that was a lie, she knew what had been done, more or less, but she couldn't look at it directly. Not yet.
I wish I could stay and answer all the questions you must have, the note had said.
Damn right she had questions. The problem was that the really important one, the million-dollar one that determined whether she could afford to keep wandering around like a broken toy or if she had to pull herself together, it wasn't a question any cryptic stranger could answer. Whoever they were. Whatever they were.
All she could find in the pantry was instant oatmeal. It tasted like wet tissue, though Sen figured that was more her problem than the oatmeal's—but hot food! That she could eat sitting down and linger over in peace! She put away three bowls before slumping on the couch to sleep like the dead.
In the morning—she woke up early, from confused dreams of waves slapping against a ship's hull—she cleaned up the broken glass carefully and fixed the radiator before leaving. She got on the bike, started the engine, and pointed it uphill, away from the sea and towards the closest town.
------
It got easier, and it didn't. Easier, because the raw, jumpy feeling in her head slowly dwindled, and she could follow a line of thought without having to mentally yank her hand away from a hot stove. The dark place and the empty room were still off-limits—but she could feel her way around the edges, kind of. It was enough for her to form a semblance of a plan.
And being back in civilization helped, even though she'd have thought the blare of traffic and the unintelligible babble of strange people's voices would have an adverse effect. But it was a reminder that no matter what had happened at the lab, it had happened there. Normal human life with school and work and bills carried on regardless.
Even if the conversation somehow always flagged and died if she hung around a little too long.
She stayed on the move. That didn't change, and that didn't get any better. Sen didn't particularly want to put the warning in the note to the test. She hadn't noticed anything obvious when she woke up—she hadn't been in a state to notice much—but there had been this smell. A sweetish hot-without-heat smell, almost like the fumes from a welding torch, and a sticky, staticky feeling in the air. She'd stumbled along the coast for a long time before the smell went away and the sea breeze came back.
Very rarely, a person would stop her on the street and hand her the card to some women's shelter or other. She usually managed to smile and thank them—even if she was beyond their help, it was a kindness and she appreciated that—but there had been a bad moment once, when someone asked if she had any family they could call. Her face had gone rigid and the stranger had stammered and backed away quickly, and Sen was left wondering what they had seen.
A sense of unreality was seeping in. Maybe it was all a dream. She would step through her own front door, and sleep in her own bed, and when she woke up everything would be fine. Nothing had gone wrong with the voyage. Whatever took place during the dark time, it hadn't happened. She would be home. Everyone would be home.
------
It took longer than it should have. Her mind seemed to have shrunk in on itself again, and she would wake up to find herself somewhere else, with the impression that her arms and legs had gone on their business without needing input from higher-up. Sen could only hope that these periods of forgetfulness didn't happen while she was driving. But she got where she was going to in the end.
The neighborhood had changed. Unfamiliar cars parked on the street, different signs in the shop fronts. There was scaffolding over her apartment building, and the door- and window-frames looked newly painted. Renovations.
Sen stood on the pavement and stared up the building. Her arms hung limply at her sides. What did she do now?
Yes, said the little voice, less mocking and more resigned this time. What do you plan to do? They put something inside you. People can't see it, but they can tell, somehow they know. Even homeless people are just... invisible, mostly. This is something different. Do you think you can just go in and live happily ever after?
For a little while, Sen thought. I can't do this forever. I can afford to stop for a few days. Get my things in order. See if Yua's alright. Call someone who can look after her for the foreseeable—for a while. Then I can figure out how to fix it.
I can fix this.
"Can I help you?"
She started, jerking her head around. The speaker was a youngish man, though age was hard to tell behind the layers of hoodie and overcoat and knit hat. He looked wary, but for once without the veneer of resentful disdain she was getting used to. He had his keys in one hand and a cardboard parcel under the other arm.
"I—" For a moment Sen considered the truth or a half-truth: I used to live here, I was in an accident and I think I lost some time, I lost my keys, but something cautioned her back. "I'm looking for some friends of mine. The Okada family on the third floor. Do they still live here?"
His eyebrows squeezed together in a frown. "I dunno... I mean, I've been here for a while, but who really gets to know their neighbors, right? But I don't think anyone like that's on that floor?"
"I heard they've gone on a trip overseas," she said. She felt very calm and distant. "They might have been delayed some time. But I think they had a family friend to look after their child. Are you sure they aren't there?"
The man looked puzzled and thoughtful, shifting his parcel from one arm to another. At last he gave her an odd pitying look, and Sen's heart sank slowly to her knees.
No, shut up, he hasn't said anything so don't you dare overreact, shut up, shut up—
"Shit, lady, you've sure come here late," he said. "Yeah, there used to be a family like that there, but not anymore. Some folks came to their door, like, Social Services people. Couple weeks later this moving van pulled up and the friend and the little girl left in it. Nobody's been in there since. This was, what... four years ago?"
Sen didn't say anything.
He looked uncomfortable. "Uh, guess that's not what you wanted to hear. Sorry to, you know, bearer of bad news. Maybe your friends are still out there?"
"Yes," she said. "Maybe."
------
She broke in. She couldn't think of anything else to do.
It was easy. She waited until the man had gone inside, then circled around to the back and climbed up the scaffolding. It was like climbing a ladder. She left the bike hidden in an alcove.
Legal decree of death was seven years. She'd been gone for over half that, plus however long she'd been... wandering. Yes, she and her partner had vanished at sea, but that could mean anything. Without a body, their possessions had to exist in a sort of legal limbo. There had to be something, some paper trail or trace left behind that she could salvage. That was what went through Sen's mind, as she hauled herself up from rung to rung.
She reached the correct floor—lucky that their window hadn't overlooked the front—jimmied the latch open, and clambered through.
The wall switch didn't work, but she didn't need to turn on the lights to see.
The apartment was empty. No furniture, nothing on the walls. No normal life waiting here for her. No daughter.
It was almost funny, if you thought about it that way. It was like the signpost and driftwood landmarks on the beach. She'd fixed on this one thing to the exclusion of everything else and trudged steadily towards it, except now it was gone and there wasn't anything left on the horizon to fix on.
Sen had thought, quite reasonably, that she had hit rock bottom on the day she woke up in a disused bus stop, with a crumpled note tucked under her elbow and a pounding headache. Or before that, when her research vessel had found the strange hidden facility and paid the price for finding it, and she spent four years on a metal slab and in a crawling nightmare. She was wrong.
It felt like there was a huge hollow space in her ribcage, an empty space left behind after she'd quietly folded in on herself. There was something in there now, something hard and burning and getting steadily bigger.
It took a moment for Sen to notice the pounding on the front door. She couldn't tell how long she'd been standing and staring into the darkness, but someone was outside the apartment now. Multiple someones.
Police, she thought dispassionately. Someone saw me go in. Or the boy with the parcel went upstairs and had second thoughts about the stranger on the road. But,
"Subject Anzu, come out with your hands up! We have been authorized to use lethal force if you do not cooperate!"
ANZU had been on the tag on her wrist. She'd sat up on the slab and looked at her hand, watched it melt from soft skin into layers of black-red chitin and claws. She suddenly knew what the people outside looked like: the guards in the black body armor and masks that looked like riot gear, if you didn't notice the insignas and realize they weren't cops or military. The guards from the lab.
She couldn't stop grinning.
She could feel the lines on her face (the lines where they'd cut into her) spread and split open again, and it should have hurt, but it didn't. There was a red gleam in the apartment and wasn't that strange, if the lights were all out? The burning thing inside her had grown, pulsing at the edges of her skin, lengthening the bones of her limbs and pulling at her eyes.
You killed my husband, she thought, because she was grinning too hard to speak, and anyway there was something wrong with her mouth. You killed him and my friends, and you almost killed me with your tests. You took my life away and my daughter has been taken away by strangers. And you think you can take me back.
There was a slim belt around her waist that she supposed had always been there, and she spread her arms wide and let the transformation take her right as they broke down the door.
------
(Now with a soundtrack! Zero's a satan.
We're probably going to use a homebrew Wasteland and I'm not quite settled on using the Frankenstein Disquiet even if I'm going with their Torment, so any effects of the first two are just spitballing. Though you may want to google "welding torch smell.")
On another note, having license to be super cheesy and overwrought is great.
Note: Themes of depersonalization, trauma, homelessness, loss of family, body horror.)
The note read,
I found you unconscious on the beach and took you to shelter. You don't know me, but I know something of the people who did this. I am sorry for what has been done to you. I wish I could stay and answer all the questions you must have—but the nature of your condition is that I would not be in my right mind by then.
For your own safety and others, you must leave as soon as you are able. Take the bike, it's yours. Consider it an apology, I suppose.
Until we meet again, please think of me simply as
A friend
She walked because it was easier than thinking.
Sen drove cautiously—her mysterious benefactor hadn't provided safety gear—but mostly she walked, wheeling the motorcycle beside her. The strain on her shoulders and back, having to lean over all the time to keep ahold of the handlebars, and the crunch of gravel underfoot blotted everything out somehow. The speed of the bike often cleared her mind instead, and brought uneasy thoughts to the light. For instance, there was the idea that she wouldn't need a helmet, even if she had one. That if she swerved off the road and folded the bike around a utility pole, she'd come out standing.
But that idea led to other, more uncomfortable ones. So she didn't think it.
For lack of anything better to do, she followed the coastline. She would fix her eyes on some landmark—a signpost, a grey lump of driftwood—and follow it until she passed it by, then she would pick a new one. It seemed her entire world had diminished from one pinpoint location to another. This suited her just fine.
It never rained harder than a light drizzle. Sen supposed she should be thankful.
She saw nobody on the beach, not the people she was looking for. She didn't think she would.
Now and then a car would pass by. Occasionally one would slow down, but never stop. Once she turned to watch one go by, and caught a glimpse of a small curious face peering back at her from the rear window.
Well, what would you do? Sen thought. Picking up a stranger on the road, you're already taking your life into your own hands, and you have a kid to think of—
She slammed down hard on that thought, and walked on.
She broke into a house once. It was a vacation cottage, one of a half-dozen identical ones that lined the road, facing the horizon. They were all empty now; it was the wrong season, perhaps. (Or perhaps it was the location. Urban sprawl had eaten the countryside, but it hadn't quite reached here yet. Probably why she'd hardly seen anyone. It was easy to understand why. This was not scenic beachfront property. It was the kind of beach that made you depressed and think about mercury levels in fish.)
Sen felt guilty about it, but dusk was falling and by then she'd been travelling for... how many days? It was hard to tell. She'd realized by then that she needed to eat and rest less often, and certain personal necessities had stopped entirely, but that meant the usual ways to mark time passing—eight hours of sleep, three meals a day—didn't apply anymore. All Sen knew at that moment was that the sun was setting and her hands were shaking and if she had to sleep on the freezing ground one more night something was going to give way.
And anyway, anyone who could afford a cottage could afford a broken window and the spare change in the cookie jar. Probably.
(Sen had woken up with a handful of small bills in her pocket; another gift from her benefactor, she supposed. Mostly she subsisted on vending machines—one or two dispensed hot soup and coffee, which had been wonderful—but once she had stopped at a cheap roadside cafe, with the vague idea of borrowing someone's phone. (To call who, exactly? a small voice had said mockingly. Who'd believe you?) The moment she walked in she had felt eyes crawling on her, both from the servers and patrons. Not in a threatening way, exactly, but with a palpable feeling of you don't belong here. She had bolted her food and fled without a word.)
Under a roof at last, she turned and stared out the window. The path to the front door was lined with tufts of pale grass, making shushing noises in the evening wind. Aside from that and the grumbling coming from the radiator, the cottage was silent and empty.
In the quiet, memories and echoes of memories seemed to coil in from the edges. The ship. The lab. An empty room with a scratched-out name on the door. A tag on her wrist. A body under a sheet. A view of the ocean from above, much too high to be from a ship's deck. And the dark place, that period of time that contained nothing but slim knives and tubes and needles and—
No, stop right there. We're not going there tonight.
Something had been done to her. No, that was a lie, she knew what had been done, more or less, but she couldn't look at it directly. Not yet.
I wish I could stay and answer all the questions you must have, the note had said.
Damn right she had questions. The problem was that the really important one, the million-dollar one that determined whether she could afford to keep wandering around like a broken toy or if she had to pull herself together, it wasn't a question any cryptic stranger could answer. Whoever they were. Whatever they were.
All she could find in the pantry was instant oatmeal. It tasted like wet tissue, though Sen figured that was more her problem than the oatmeal's—but hot food! That she could eat sitting down and linger over in peace! She put away three bowls before slumping on the couch to sleep like the dead.
In the morning—she woke up early, from confused dreams of waves slapping against a ship's hull—she cleaned up the broken glass carefully and fixed the radiator before leaving. She got on the bike, started the engine, and pointed it uphill, away from the sea and towards the closest town.
It got easier, and it didn't. Easier, because the raw, jumpy feeling in her head slowly dwindled, and she could follow a line of thought without having to mentally yank her hand away from a hot stove. The dark place and the empty room were still off-limits—but she could feel her way around the edges, kind of. It was enough for her to form a semblance of a plan.
And being back in civilization helped, even though she'd have thought the blare of traffic and the unintelligible babble of strange people's voices would have an adverse effect. But it was a reminder that no matter what had happened at the lab, it had happened there. Normal human life with school and work and bills carried on regardless.
Even if the conversation somehow always flagged and died if she hung around a little too long.
She stayed on the move. That didn't change, and that didn't get any better. Sen didn't particularly want to put the warning in the note to the test. She hadn't noticed anything obvious when she woke up—she hadn't been in a state to notice much—but there had been this smell. A sweetish hot-without-heat smell, almost like the fumes from a welding torch, and a sticky, staticky feeling in the air. She'd stumbled along the coast for a long time before the smell went away and the sea breeze came back.
Very rarely, a person would stop her on the street and hand her the card to some women's shelter or other. She usually managed to smile and thank them—even if she was beyond their help, it was a kindness and she appreciated that—but there had been a bad moment once, when someone asked if she had any family they could call. Her face had gone rigid and the stranger had stammered and backed away quickly, and Sen was left wondering what they had seen.
A sense of unreality was seeping in. Maybe it was all a dream. She would step through her own front door, and sleep in her own bed, and when she woke up everything would be fine. Nothing had gone wrong with the voyage. Whatever took place during the dark time, it hadn't happened. She would be home. Everyone would be home.
It took longer than it should have. Her mind seemed to have shrunk in on itself again, and she would wake up to find herself somewhere else, with the impression that her arms and legs had gone on their business without needing input from higher-up. Sen could only hope that these periods of forgetfulness didn't happen while she was driving. But she got where she was going to in the end.
The neighborhood had changed. Unfamiliar cars parked on the street, different signs in the shop fronts. There was scaffolding over her apartment building, and the door- and window-frames looked newly painted. Renovations.
Sen stood on the pavement and stared up the building. Her arms hung limply at her sides. What did she do now?
Yes, said the little voice, less mocking and more resigned this time. What do you plan to do? They put something inside you. People can't see it, but they can tell, somehow they know. Even homeless people are just... invisible, mostly. This is something different. Do you think you can just go in and live happily ever after?
For a little while, Sen thought. I can't do this forever. I can afford to stop for a few days. Get my things in order. See if Yua's alright. Call someone who can look after her for the foreseeable—for a while. Then I can figure out how to fix it.
I can fix this.
"Can I help you?"
She started, jerking her head around. The speaker was a youngish man, though age was hard to tell behind the layers of hoodie and overcoat and knit hat. He looked wary, but for once without the veneer of resentful disdain she was getting used to. He had his keys in one hand and a cardboard parcel under the other arm.
"I—" For a moment Sen considered the truth or a half-truth: I used to live here, I was in an accident and I think I lost some time, I lost my keys, but something cautioned her back. "I'm looking for some friends of mine. The Okada family on the third floor. Do they still live here?"
His eyebrows squeezed together in a frown. "I dunno... I mean, I've been here for a while, but who really gets to know their neighbors, right? But I don't think anyone like that's on that floor?"
"I heard they've gone on a trip overseas," she said. She felt very calm and distant. "They might have been delayed some time. But I think they had a family friend to look after their child. Are you sure they aren't there?"
The man looked puzzled and thoughtful, shifting his parcel from one arm to another. At last he gave her an odd pitying look, and Sen's heart sank slowly to her knees.
No, shut up, he hasn't said anything so don't you dare overreact, shut up, shut up—
"Shit, lady, you've sure come here late," he said. "Yeah, there used to be a family like that there, but not anymore. Some folks came to their door, like, Social Services people. Couple weeks later this moving van pulled up and the friend and the little girl left in it. Nobody's been in there since. This was, what... four years ago?"
Sen didn't say anything.
He looked uncomfortable. "Uh, guess that's not what you wanted to hear. Sorry to, you know, bearer of bad news. Maybe your friends are still out there?"
"Yes," she said. "Maybe."
She broke in. She couldn't think of anything else to do.
It was easy. She waited until the man had gone inside, then circled around to the back and climbed up the scaffolding. It was like climbing a ladder. She left the bike hidden in an alcove.
Legal decree of death was seven years. She'd been gone for over half that, plus however long she'd been... wandering. Yes, she and her partner had vanished at sea, but that could mean anything. Without a body, their possessions had to exist in a sort of legal limbo. There had to be something, some paper trail or trace left behind that she could salvage. That was what went through Sen's mind, as she hauled herself up from rung to rung.
She reached the correct floor—lucky that their window hadn't overlooked the front—jimmied the latch open, and clambered through.
The wall switch didn't work, but she didn't need to turn on the lights to see.
The apartment was empty. No furniture, nothing on the walls. No normal life waiting here for her. No daughter.
It was almost funny, if you thought about it that way. It was like the signpost and driftwood landmarks on the beach. She'd fixed on this one thing to the exclusion of everything else and trudged steadily towards it, except now it was gone and there wasn't anything left on the horizon to fix on.
Sen had thought, quite reasonably, that she had hit rock bottom on the day she woke up in a disused bus stop, with a crumpled note tucked under her elbow and a pounding headache. Or before that, when her research vessel had found the strange hidden facility and paid the price for finding it, and she spent four years on a metal slab and in a crawling nightmare. She was wrong.
It felt like there was a huge hollow space in her ribcage, an empty space left behind after she'd quietly folded in on herself. There was something in there now, something hard and burning and getting steadily bigger.
It took a moment for Sen to notice the pounding on the front door. She couldn't tell how long she'd been standing and staring into the darkness, but someone was outside the apartment now. Multiple someones.
Police, she thought dispassionately. Someone saw me go in. Or the boy with the parcel went upstairs and had second thoughts about the stranger on the road. But,
"Subject Anzu, come out with your hands up! We have been authorized to use lethal force if you do not cooperate!"
ANZU had been on the tag on her wrist. She'd sat up on the slab and looked at her hand, watched it melt from soft skin into layers of black-red chitin and claws. She suddenly knew what the people outside looked like: the guards in the black body armor and masks that looked like riot gear, if you didn't notice the insignas and realize they weren't cops or military. The guards from the lab.
She couldn't stop grinning.
She could feel the lines on her face (the lines where they'd cut into her) spread and split open again, and it should have hurt, but it didn't. There was a red gleam in the apartment and wasn't that strange, if the lights were all out? The burning thing inside her had grown, pulsing at the edges of her skin, lengthening the bones of her limbs and pulling at her eyes.
You killed my husband, she thought, because she was grinning too hard to speak, and anyway there was something wrong with her mouth. You killed him and my friends, and you almost killed me with your tests. You took my life away and my daughter has been taken away by strangers. And you think you can take me back.
There was a slim belt around her waist that she supposed had always been there, and she spread her arms wide and let the transformation take her right as they broke down the door.
(Now with a soundtrack! Zero's a satan.
We're probably going to use a homebrew Wasteland and I'm not quite settled on using the Frankenstein Disquiet even if I'm going with their Torment, so any effects of the first two are just spitballing. Though you may want to google "welding torch smell.")