Private Roleplay~ IOD

asi • 10 March 2017 at 8:40 PM

"Sure, sure," Izzy said slowly in reply, having listened to all of Quincy's laughter and amusement with a perfectly neutral expression. His right eyelid fluttered faintly while his left eye looked the approaching boyfriend up and down evenly.
There was a light touch on his back and Izzy leaned in like he was fleeing it, but only getting closer to the other male as a result. He smiled back up at Quincy, just as adoring, and with the same matching edge as Izzy voiced his complete agreement, his stamp of approval to Quincy's method... "Jus' give Mikes more time to humiliate himself, she'll have to ask him on a pity-date," Izzy gave a sharp smirk, pulling Quincy in for a quick kiss.
"That's exactly how it happened for us," he told the other as soon as they parted, smug as a cat that got the cream.

taffy789 • 11 March 2017 at 12:06 AM

~~~~~

“Okay,” was all Samuel said after sucking in a breath so sharp Naji was surprised the guy didn’t cut his lips, “Okay.” He repeated it a few times more over, first to himself, then to Jorge after pulling out of his grasp, and then to the soldaditos as he turned to face them.
There was another intake of breath.
“Okay, so-”
“No.”
Samuel’s jaw tightened at that singular word Gabriel spoke.
“What?”
“You heard me,” Gabriel said, arms crossed against his chest, “No.”
“But I’ve haven’t even-”
“Oh,” Gabriel bit back, “I know what you’re going to say.”
Samuel’s head twitched slightly to the side. His eyes narrowed dangerously.
“Fine. What am I going to say?”
Only half paying attention to the tense conversation happening a foot in front of him, Naji’s teeth chattered together as he stared at the way more threatening object floating in the distant sky. The small cloud hovered pleasantly still, and Naji could’ve sworn it inched closer and closer by the second. Naji wanted to vomit out his fear, and the swell of anxiety rising up in his gut seemed to gurgle so loud that it muffled Samuel and Gabriel’s ensuing argument.
Naji blinked furiously, trying to steady himself as his entire body shook and swayed. As he concentrated on not doubling over to curl into a ball and cry, Gabriel was sternly informing Samuel that, “No, if you’re thinking of making us run away now, you’re wrong”. When Samuel rebutted back with “You’re not seriously about to go suggest we pick a fight, are you?”, Naji felt a jolt of panic rush through his entire body at the word “fight”. As more words were thrown back and forth, words like “our duty” or “crazy” or “leadership” or “suicide”, Naji’s head spun around and around with every syllable spoken, every sentence uttered out.
Through his fuzzy, blurring vision, Naji could make out a few scenes occurring to either side of him.
The soldaditos had all begun to produce weapons out of seeming thin air, pulling out knives and swords and, what, was that some sort of machete? The different sizes and shapes of blades only made Naji shrivel up further out of fear. As Esperanza twirled a particularly nasty looking throwing knife around in her fingers, Naji gulped and switched his gaze to the breathing body on his other side.
Jorge looked concerned, anxious even.
The guy fiddled with what looked like a small metal disk as Samuel and Gabriel argument grew more vicious. Naji noticed the almost impatient, furtive way Jorge snuck glances towards the hovering cloud in the sky, the one that was almost certainly getting closer now. It was almost a matter of time before the Falchions got over the next few sand dunes and noticed a bunch of Glaeroes standing around staring at each other.
“And running away is obviously the best solution here!?”
… If the Falchions hadn’t already been clued in to their presence by all the yelling, of course.
Naji turned his attention back onto the fight, the angry words grounding his thoughts to the current moment while sending what little composure he had left run screaming for the hills
He couldn’t hide his wince when Samuel snarled out, resolutely, “Listen, pal, if you want to lead your little troop to a needless death match, go right to heck with it. You can do that while I take all the sane people in the opposite direction, you hear me?”
While Naji had to agree that running away was certainly the best, most optimal solution to being faced with a death match, Gabriel seemed to disagree with the sentiment.
The boy met Samuel’s stare, his entire body tightened and tensed and ready for action right up until the point it wasn’t, the point it uncoiled and straightened up and set itself stubbornly, firmly in a new positon.
“…Okay,” Gabriel said, jaw fixing itself at a new, solid angle, “Feel free to leave.”
Samuel straightened up slightly at this, and his head tilted in hesitant surprise.
“… I will then.”
“Okay,” Gabriel repeated, softly, but suddenly his voice lowered, as if bringing itself down to ruthlessly hammer the final nail into the conversation’s coffin, “But I think you’ll have trouble getting home without knowing where the pick-up point is, right?”
Samuel’s spine snapped straight up now.
“You, you,” Samuel’s hazel pupils widened and his breath left in shallow, ragged puffs, “don’t you dare freakin’ try to pull that crap, man.”
Gabriel only gave a nonchalant shrug in reply. “Maybe you should’ve been on time for the first briefing,” he offered coldly then, turning to the rest of the soldaditos, told them it was time to move out. As the soldaditos all walked away with Gabriel, Naji stood frozen in place, much like Samuel who had transformed into an unmoving pillar of rage at Gabriel’s final words to him. Naji watched as the soldaditos moved further away, and he didn’t notice the subtle popping, fizzing sounds until they became a cacophony ringing out right next to him, and he swiveled his head around to see-
“Woah,” Jorge said, materializing behind Samuel and swinging an arm underneath his friend’s chin. He quickly tugged his arm upwards, effectively putting Samuel in a headlock while remarking, “Easy there, Sam, Crackle and Pop.”
Samuel choked and as he brought up his hands to pry the guy off of him, Naji saw an orange energy dissipating around the once clenched fists. It was gone so fast that Naji had to blink a couple of times after that, doubting his own eyes and mind.
“Jorge,” Samuel continued to choke out despite whatever Naji may have or may have not seen, “I swear to god I’m gunna fry you if that means also being able to fry that sonna bi-”
“Maybe,” Jorge recommended, rolling his eyes while tightening his grip around his friend’s neck, “you don’t threaten to fry the guy currently holding you in a headlock.”
Samuel clawed at his friend’s arm. “Well, like. Nothing personal dude,” he wheezed, “not against you at least. ‘Course. If you let me go though, I won’t need to fry you at all.”
Jorge was unyielding. “While in a normal situation dude, you know I’d love to go hide a body with you, you rage-murdering someone in our current situation would kinda pour more gasoline on this already flaming pile of crap.”
“I say,” Samuel snarked out, his voice a bit muffled from the weight of Jorge’s arm, “might as well let it burn.”
Frowning, Jorge squeezed tighter.
“BUTNOTMURDERINGISCHILLTOOIGUESS-” Samuel wheezed, a hand wildly slamming onto one of Jorge’s arms as if trying to tap out.

awesomeness • 11 March 2017 at 12:14 AM

When Jorge snaked his arm away from his friend, Samuel slowly caught his breath, and so Jorge then took the silence to remark, quietly, “Ya know, fighting isn’t the worst thing we could do, being honest and all.”
After Samuel shot him an embittered look, Jorge sighed, sounding exhausted, and he explained, “Dude, listen. Assuming the Falchions are following the general four people to a group rule, we have like, a totally loco numbers advantage on our side. And soldaditos may be dumber than sacks of bricks, but they hit as hard as a brick being thrown at you, and they’re trained. And if we convince the soldaditos to do the smart thing and ambush, we’ll have the element of surprise on our side. Plus,” he added, as if it were the final selling point, “we need to go into that fight and make sure at least one of them survives or else we are most definitely dying in this godforsaken desert, and that was seriously not on my five-year life plan.”
Although he’d been deadly silent as Jorge reasoned out his plan, Samuel had snorted at that last bit. “What even does that five-year plan consist of?”
Jorge grinned. “Kinda was hoping to get super rich in the lotto and open up a zoo or something, idk.”
“Oh my god,” Samuel chortled, and shook his head, slowly, “Dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Hey,” Jorge frowned, “now I actually hope we all waste away wandering this desolate hellscape just ‘cause you like to crap on dreams.”
“Um,” Naji pipped up, softly. His body was still shaking from everything that had occurred, it wouldn’t stop shaking, why wouldn’t it stop shaking..? “Um, I’m, um, not a fan of dying here, um.”
The two turned to face him, faces pulled into an expression Naji easily recognized as pity directed at him.
“Naji, dude,” Samuel spoke up first. He walked over and placed a hand on Naji’s shoulder, as if trying to steady the shaking guy. “Buddy, trust me, you’re not gunna die.”
“Yeah,” Jorge added, “Remember ealier today? I already said nothing bad will happen to you, okay?” He walked over a braced an elbow against Naji’s other shoulder, steadying the shakes completely now. “Come on, like, the entire reason me and Sammy are here in the first place is to make sure you get out of this first mission squeaky clean!” Playfully, he then gripped Naji’s shoulder and shook the entire boy, making Naji feel suddenly more light-headed, and Jorge laughed, “Stick with us and we’ll protect you, don’t worry dude.”
“Yep.” Samuel had begun walking forward now, his hand still gripping Naji’s shoulder as if to help lead the frightened boy forward, “Hang back, keep out of sight, and stay behind us. I would almost suggest you hiding out over here fully, but if the Falchions end up retreating this way, I don’t want you to be caught off guard over here alone either.”
At all these words of assurance and pleasantness, Naji weakly nodded. A warm, thankful feeling spread through his gut as tears threatened to start leaking from the corners of his eyes. The calm and gratified feeling lasted for a split second before being replaced by something darker and more terrible. Naji remembered that, yes, the sole reason Samuel and Jorge were risking their lives was to help him. They were risking so much, and yet he had nothing to give back to them, nothing he could do to help them. He couldn’t even save them, if it came down to it, couldn’t heal anyone on death’s door because he wasn’t a real healer, no, not really, not at all.
Guilt ate a hole through Naji’s gut, leaving him hallowed and empty as he walked forward with the two boys.
To his right, Jorge flipped the small metal disk he’d been holding during the argument around in his hands.
To his left, Samuel distractedly ran his fingers through his own shaggy hair, staring off at the sand dune in front of his with his jaw locked in a determined, set position.
Looking back towards the right, Naji watched Jorge, looking for the obvious signs of anxiety that had been present in Samuel, but finding comparatively little. The guy appeared almost relaxed, and his entire body- still coated in sand from earlier laying down on a dune- moved forward with a calm ease in its movement. The only twitchy part of Jorge was the slight fiddle of the disk in his hands. When Jorge finally noticed Naji’s eyes concentrated so intently on the metal disk, the guy only gave a wide grin in response. Pressing down on a button on the center of the disk, Jorge continued to grin as the entire metal circle extended outwards, expanding into what Naji could only guess was some kind of oversized Frisbee. Jorge did a large, elaborate wave towards the disk, looking positively excited to show the thing off. On Naji’s other side, a loud snort echoed out.
Glancing back left, Naji could see Samuel snorting and shaking his head, muttering something that was pretty muted but sounded a lot like “showoff”.
To the right, Jorge rolled his eyes so viciously at the comment that his entire head moved, and the action shook bits of sand out of his unruly black hair.
To the left, Samuel began to make a noise that sounded like the beginning of something snarky, but suddenly the quiet previously just in front of them erupted into loud, bloody screaming and Samuel’s snark turned into a loud curse instead.
“Crap, crap,” Samuel breathed, and his legs moved fast, faster than Naji could ever hope to keep up with as they moved up the sand dune.
Jorge, who stayed closer to Naji, called up to Samuel, “Dude, they caught up to the Falchions already? Crap, did they rush right in and not even think about ambushing or-?"
Samuel didn’t reply, already having rushed to the peak of the large sand dune, the one the soldaditos had disappeared over while Naji and the others had been walking slowly and talking…
Naji wheezed as he half-heartedly climbed the sand dune after Samuel, and while his heart pounded with fright at the thought of what he might see on the other side of the dune, he climbed nonetheless. Although fearing for his life, he felt determined to stick by his protectors, to stick to the plan-
The very plan that came violently crashing apart as soon as a vicious, horrible wind blew from behind, knocking Naji forward and stealing the ground beneath his feet.
Naji felt weightless as the world around him exploded into an endless expanse of flying sand. The harsh winds whipped around him and buried grains like shards of glass into his arms and neck and face. He felt his sun hat fly off his head, and he felt sand fill his nostrils, and he felt like he was flying, and then with a start he realized, oh, he was flying, not just feeling like it. He was flying, soaring, defying all gravity suddenly, against his will. He heard a scream pierce through the roar of wind, then he heard nothing more but sand grains hitting against other sand grains, and he saw nothing more because his eyes were shut tight, and then he felt afraid because, suddenly, so very suddenly he was no longer flying against his will but falling against his will, and he saw nothing else, heard nothing else, and he felt only the harsh, terrifying tug of gravity right up to the moment his fragile human body made direct contact with the unforgiving sand.
And for that next minute, Naji’s entire world turned blank from pain and shock.

taffy789 • 11 March 2017 at 5:32 PM

~~~

“Leon Knight,” Annabell spoke, and she craned her head over Mikey’s shoulder to make sure he typed it into the search engine correctly. “No, with a K, like the knights of the roundtable.”
“Leon, huh?” Mikey remarked as he backspaced and retyped the last name, this time with a K. “Was he… a, uh, friend?”
“Yeah,” Annabell said, her blue eyes concentrated on the computer screen, “He was a good friend who went missing here.”
“… I’m sorry,” and Mikey shifted in his seat as he offered that small consolation. He tapped the desk once before sighing and checking “MIA records” on the search limitations. He glanced over the other choices to narrow things down, and he asked, “Do you have a specific time period he went missing in? This thing might take forever to load if we search the entire database.”
“No,” Annabell admitted, “I have no idea.” She rocked back on the heels of her running shoes, once, twice, before stopping and adding, “Leon was sent to IOD a good nine months before I arrived here.”
This made Mikey turn around to Annabell, his face struggling and looking almost pitying, “Annabell. Do you know what exactly happened to him? If you came here and heard rumors about him going missing, and it happened months ago… Annabell, I hate to say this, but-” Mikey faltered, but closed his eyes and continued, without having to look at this girl. “…He’d be dead out there, you know.”
Annabell shook her head. “It’s not like that. It’s a lot more complicated, and confusing.”
Mikey opened his eyes again. “… Lay it on me.”
“Leon,” she began, “He went to the super school with me and a lot of my friends. And one day, he disappeared? The teachers told us he’d died in some tragic training accident but he was a trouble maker so everyone kind of knew that was a total lie. He was gone for three months. Then, one day out of nowhere, he came back.” Annabell’s voice grew softer. “But he wasn’t the same. He was, um, scared? Paranoid. Jumpy. He often wouldn’t joke around like he used to, wouldn’t eat sometimes, wouldn’t sleep- and he kept talking about these really awful nightmares? It was horrible.” She spoke, remembering it all too vividly. Annabell knew she and Leon hadn’t been best friends before he’d come back from what she could only assume had been IOD. She knew they’d been friends, that the guy’s first impression made involved him saving her life, that the guy made cheesy jokes and had a soft spot for dogs, that the guy hated using his power for anything more than climbing up walls and making balloons stick to himself before running down the school halls screaming “BALLOON MONSTER HUNGRY!”, but what Annabell had not known and what she’d never prepared for was the guy coming back from the grave so. So.
Sad.
It had caught her completely off guard.
There was no way to prepare for something like that, nothing in Annabell’s previous experiences and friendships could ever come close to teaching her how to handle it.
Sitting in his computer chair, Mikey startled slightly as Annabell’s hand unconsciously began pressing flat against the chair’s armrest. Her long, lithe fingers tightened around the cushioned armrest, and her short nails dug deep and left slight marks in the leather.
Leon had been so alone. He had no one when he came back, and Annabell had saw this, had ran face-first into the boy’s despair and her heart had broken into a billion pieces on impact.
Her friend had been so hurt, and she’d tried, tried so much to help him, had spent many, many hours and days just trying to return him to how he had been, had spent so much effort trying to save him.
“I’d tried to help him get better. And I think, for a while there, it really was working. But, eventually,” the girl said, her words catching up to her thoughts, “he disappeared again, and ended up back on IOD as a feral.”
And that, Annabell realized, her body now trembling, was what perhaps hurt the most, was the least fair.
It was unfair for Leon to have been pulled away from his life again, right when it had been looking better.
It was unfair for Annabell to have invested everything she had into her friend just to have her heart ripped out again.
And it was just so unfair, so horribly, horribly unfair and tragic and even ironic that, having saw and empathized with Leon’s loneliness, having tried her best to cure it, having found an odd sort of comfort in becoming the guy’s best friend-!
It was so unfair that, after all was done and through, that Annabell had been the one left feeling terribly, awfully, alone.
Because she was trembling so much by this point, Mikey gave a sympathetic sideways glance at the girl, gave a low sigh, and finally gave the girl’s hand- still clenched tight around the chair’s armrest- a small, comforting pat.

awesomeness • 12 March 2017 at 10:25 PM

Quincy had snorted at Izzy’s summation of how Annabell would start dating Mikey, and when his boyfriend had then kissed him, he’d kneaded his fingers into the back of that soft cardigan. After they pulled apart, Quincy was grinning ear to ear and already chasing Izzy’s mouth for another kiss, but he stopped when Izzy’s mouth opened and an unexpected comment caught him off guard.
“Uh,” he said, dropping his hand from Izzy’s waist, “yeah.” As he scooted back and further away from Izzy, the chilly air of the archive room hit him full-force, and Quincy shivered uncomfortably. He shifted his weight foot to foot before turning his attention to the rows of filing cabinets to his right. “Anyway, this is where area information is kept, so we could find those files Four was askin’ for…”
He smiled back at Izzy, “So, guess I’ll get started on that, huh?”
With that, he left for the filing cabinets, walking down the rows and staring at the cabinet’s labels until he apparently found the right one. Pulling open the cabinet’s top drawer, he began to rummage through it, pulling out files and placing the unimportant ones back. At one point, Quincy pulled out a map of a section of A-L, and he noted with some amusement, “Hey! Babe, I think this is where they’re going keep your maps after scanning them in the computer system.” He held up the rather ancient piece of paper, scrutinizing it carefully. There was a pause before he remarked, smiling to himself, “I might be biased, but I do think your stuff looks a lot cleaner and easier to read than this old thing.”


~~~


Naji regained awareness to the sounds of ripping winds and yelling and metal hitting metal.
Fighting the daze, he slowly found himself laying half on his side, half on top of his backpack. Something hard and plastic in the backpack was painfully jutting up into his ribcage, and Naji rolled over onto his belly to escape the discomfort.
A sharp, searing pain caught him as soon as he moved.
It jutted up his right arm, and the boy yelped, tears welling at his eyes and immediately soaking up into the sand grains that coated his entire face. Blinking through the pain and muddy tears, Naji creaked his eyes open enough to see the sand he laid on. He breathed a ragged breath and shifted his body slightly, wincing as he attempted to move his right arm to a position he could look at it better.
The pain screamed in his head again, and to avoid breaking down into wild tears and panic right there, Naji laid still.
As the fierce wind ripped sandstorms all around, Naji breathed in and out slowly.
As the screams of war grew more violent, Naji stared at the sandy ground his nose was practically pushed into.
And as his anxiety of the unknown began to play his heartbeat like a bongo, Naji cracked and turned his head to the side, trying to see what was happening around him.
Although he didn’t see much, what he could see absolutely terrified him.
The wind had ripped all sand dunes from the ground, leveling the entire area into a smooth, sandy battleground. Naji could see people fighting in the center of this flat arena, he could see knives flying and weapons meeting and gusts of wind tossing people backwards, and he could see blood being spilt. Everything moved so fast, and Naji caught only glimpses of the fight; like glimpses of Amy punching an unfamiliar face so hard that they flew ten feet backwards, landed, and stood up before disappearing in a blink of an eye; glimpses of Esperanza flinging knives that were easily flicked away by the wind; of Gabriel’s sword making a smooth, clean downwards arc right into an unlucky Falchion’s back-
Naji tore his eyes away after seeing that one, after all that red had filled his vision and caused his stomach to twist into tight knots.
A strangled scream pierced out soon after, and the wind picked up again, slicing viciously over Naji’s head. It roared, loud and pained, and Naji craned his head back at the battle scene to find everything engulfed in a vengeful funnel of wind, rocks, and sand. It rose up and devoured the blue sky above in its wrath, and, slowly, laboriously, it began to expand outwards, threatening to pick him up right in it…
Now was the time Naji decided to no longer play dead.
He stood up, his left elbow digging into the rocks first and helping him to his knees, and despite the pain screaming in his right arm, Naji scrambled to his feet. Blindly, he ran forward.
In front of him, the sand dunes hadn’t been lobbed from the earth yet, and so he stumbled as his boots sunk into the steep, sandy incline. His backpack, which hung limply around his right shoulder, hit his butt with every step and kept threatening to throw him off balance. Staggering halfway up the sand dune, Naji tore his eyes away from his feet and instead glanced further ahead of him, and what he saw made his breath catch in his throat. While the other sand dunes in the distance came to no surprise to him, a small human figure standing on top of one of them did, and Naji stared at it as he ran, that fear of the unknown creeping down his back once more-
And then Naji tripped over his own stumbling boots, and all he could see was golden grains and dusty rocks as he hit the ground once again. He caught himself on his left elbow as he fell, and with the jolt, his backpack fell completely off his back and landed with a plop right next to him.
His arm screamed out again, and this time Naji screamed with it.
Tears pricking his eyes a second time, he lifted himself to his knees and gingerly cupped his right arm with his left hand. His breathing came out in fast, heavy and hot puffs as he slowly turned his right arm side to side, noticing the streaks of red, moist sand discoloring every inch of his brown skin. The edges of his vision had long ago turned fuzzy and unfocused, and so his head pounded with the effort of trying to register what exactly it was he was looking for, what on his arm he was looking at.
As his breathing settled and his sight refocused, the pieces of busted skin and gapping, bloodied laceration only became all too clear to Naji. At that moment, the first clear thought the boy had since hitting the ground flashed into his mind:
Oh God, I’m bleeding, aren’t I?

taffy789 • 14 March 2017 at 12:06 AM

Naji had liked to believe a few things about himself and the world around him.
For example, he knew he wasn’t the best at remembering things like procedures or training.
He knew blood frightened him and so did death and so did people having to rely on him for anything.
He knew facts, like the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and would rise from the east every day, even if he wasn’t awake to see it happen. Likewise, if a tree did fall in the forest and nobody was around to hear it, it would make a sound, and Naji knew this was a fact for the same reason he knew that, despite not being conscious to feel his arm bust open on impact with the ground, it still had to have happened whether or not he was aware it did.
And lastly- most importantly.
Naji knew he wasn’t actually a healer.
The boy thought about all these things at once as he stared at the matted flesh of right arm.
It was hard to remove his eyes from the pulpy texture of the sand that had ground itself into the yawning wound. It was harder to unsee the red smearing his skin, coagulating beside broken flesh, and leaking down onto the ground below.
His eyes crossed at the effort to avoid seeing the blood, his breath caught, and, in that moment, Naji forgot everything he’d ever been taught.
Despite the blankness rolling across his mind like a cool breeze through an empty plain, Naji’s hands somehow knew what to go for. His left one acted on behalf of its struck-dumb owner, and the fingers trembled as they unzipped the over-stuffed backpack. A sweaty hand palmed blindly inside the bag. It grasped at a water bottle, a fruit bar, the map Samuel had not yet burned, a half-emptied bottle of sun screen, and then, finally-
Naji’s stare drifted from the wound and to the first-aid kit his shaking hand clenched tight. His fingers jittered wildly as they pulled pathetically at the latches of the kit. One popped open after a little added pressure, but by the time he tried to second one, his fingers had become so clammy and shaky that they slid right off of the latch. Anxiety surged in Naji, and he attempted the latch again, with a better grip and all the strength he could muster, and-
The first-aid kit flung open spectacularly, and gauze and bandaids and disinfectant rained down everywhere around the boy, like the world’s crappiest medically-themed confetti.
As Naji watched a bandaid flutter down past his nose to land gracefully on his knee, a new kind of despair rose within him. It was a different beast all together, Naji knew; this despair was a desperate, dreading, dizzy sort of one that someone less acquainted with despair could’ve mistaken for the symptoms of blood loss and shock.
It ate him.
The feeling devoured him whole and left nothing but skulls and bones and the untouched remains of a bloodied, fractured arm.
The despair ate him alive and there was nothing left, and since there was nothing left Naji knew he had nothing to lose.
He looked at his arm.
He stared at the dizzying gurgle of blood.
He thought of his power.
The flesh of his arm began to glow a bright, bloody pink.
He then tried not to think about his power.
More specifically, Naji tried and failed to fight down the erupting memories of him using his power during his training at the Glaeroe’s school.

The first lesson had involved them cutting him.
It had been a small cut, of course, but they’d cut him and told him to heal himself, to put himself back together, because that what his power did, right? Put things back together. “Healing.”
This first time, he’d done it. Perfectly. No problems. Like he’d done with his papercuts before, back at home where he’d been nice and safe and comfy, and where nobody had ever purposefully cut him.

The flesh around Naji’s wound began to be pulled together by the pink energy, merging and connecting and rejoining with itself.

His coaches had smiled at his victory, congratulated him, and then they’d cut someone else instead.
A particularly loud coach had been screaming at him at his watched the kid’s leg ooze a steady, ugly stream of red, just a few shades darker and glowing gorier than the color of his own power. It had made him nauseous, and he’d wanted to cry.

Now Naji’s fracture, the split in the bone had repaired itself again, all pieces perfectly slipping back into their proper places and melding together once more. An unbroken bone, free of all splits and cracks.

The coaches had been yelling at him too much, and his heart had been beating in his chest too hard for him to concentrate. He had been afraid. Nervous. Unfocused. And his power had shuddered with that same nervousness, and those shimmering tendrils of energy hadn’t gently wrapped around the flesh to pull in back together, no. The tendrils had wriggled and shook and had weaseled their way into those splits in the flesh, had pushed more glowing cracks into the broken skin, had-

Without warning, the wind howled behind Naji and an explosion of rocks and dust pelleted his back. He jolted up, jumping out of his skin and then there was pain, a horrible agony screaming from his wound. Naji looked down to see that pink glow coloring the edges of the bleeding gash and pushing the cut open, further now, all the way up to his wrist, and-
Naji let out a strangled cry and willed the glow to dissipate right before the color spread up any further and pulled apart any more skin.
Mutely, he stared at the elongated slash in his arm, not surprised in the least.
Really, Naji reflected numbly, who was he trying to fool?
Himself?
The increased flow of blood dripping from his wound proved that hadn’t worked.
Others?
He’d tried to be a healer, tried to act the role and sit back and not have to- to do this, to fight on this stupid death island, but-!
In the end, he had still been chosen to be a field medic, he had still been sent on a mission playing a part that he had no business trying to play.
Because- and the boy had known this truth, had struggled to hide this truth, had even said this truth many times-
Naji was, truly, honestly, no healer.
Tears sprung to life in the boy’s eyes and rolled down his cheeks in big, fat droplets, and Naji began to cry.

awesomeness • 14 March 2017 at 12:08 AM

He continued to cry uninterrupted right up until a faint “ziiiippppp” sounded off behind him and a hand roughly clutched his neck before tossing him over onto his back. Naji made an ugly retching noise, and his tears ceased for just a second as his eyes focused up on the human figure pressing his body into the sand. Through red, swollen eyes, Naji could see the grim face of a young man staring back at him. He felt something metal and cold tickle his neck, and when he looked down, whelp, there was a knife against his jugular, and then suddenly Naji couldn’t see anything again because now he was bawling.
The crying was ugly, and pathetic, and Naji cried harder because he had known he would die like this, not all heroic or noble but bleeding and lying in the dirt and blubbering for mercy. He couldn’t stop himself, he couldn’t make these final moments count if he tried. Fear wrecked him, and he howled, wept, moaned; he cried out for help, for god, for his mother, for anyone who could either save or comfort him. Snot began to bubble out his nose, and the grip on his neck suddenly jerked away, as if repulsed.
It took Naji two seconds to register he wasn’t yet dead, and when it hit him, he crudely wiped a hand against his face and peered ahead, trying to set sights on his would-be killer.
The young man was standing now, towering above Naji with a knife in hand but not poised to use it. The blade hung limply instead, unwilling to lift itself up and finish off its kill. Naji moved his gaze from the knife up to the Falchion’s face, and the expression he saw there was so many things at once that Naji would’ve bled out before he could name them all. He tried instead to decide the most prominent emotion present and failed at that too. Was it exhaustion? Pity? Guilt? Disgust? Regret? Naji couldn’t say anything, so he just gulped down the things it had crossed his mind to say- a “thank you”, perhaps?- as the Falchion slowly stepped backwards from the bleeding, puffy-eyed boy.
When the Falchion boy took his last step backwards, it lead him right into the hard metal shield of a charging Jorge.
Naji choked in surprise to see his tentmate slam so viciously into the Falchion, and the Falchion nearly tumbled over but managed to grasped onto the shield at the last possible second. Jorge and the Falchion grappled for a moment- Jorge tugging the shield back and forth in an attempt to lose the clingy Falchion, and the Falchion pulling right back, trying to throw Jorge off balance. The shock still fresh, Naji stared open-mouthed at this scene, and he was struck with how funny the fight would’ve been in any other scenario. The two looked like dogs fighting other the same pull-toy, grunting and growling with the effort to outdo the other’s strength. Dogs, however, did not fight with knives like the Falchion did, so the amusing imagery was ruined for Naji as soon as the Falchion got their free arm over the shield and swiped at Jorge’s throat. Jorge managed to roll his neck out of the way in time, and he replied likewise, unsheathing his own knife while shoving his shield forward into the Falchion’s chest. The Falchion staggered backwards with an “oof”, Jorge’s knife cut outwards, and a bleeding cut ripped into the Falchion’s right cheek. When Jorge next launched the shield forward, the Falchion stopped clutching his wound, grimaced, and blinked out of existence. Naji gawked, not having expected that, and the now fearful Jorge had expected it less so. Even less anticipated came that sudden, vicious knife striking fast lodging itself above Jorge’s collarbone. Jorge’s body seized up and froze, and in the next moment he was easily kicked over by the Falchion, just reappeared beside him.
Naji watched Jorge’s body stir up a cloud of sand as it fell, and a deafening quiet descended upon Naji’s ears. Gone was the clashing sounds of fighting, the ripping of the sandstorm, the screams of pain and terror. From his place pressed into the sand, Naji could only hear the faint wheezes of Jorge as he struggled for oxygen. Then soon after he heard a strangled, unrecognizable voice say, “Dear lord”, and Naji tore his eyes away from his dying teammate to stare at the Falchion boy, who himself stared towards the motionless battlefield…
It then rapidly dawned upon Naji why the sandstorm had quietened.
Naji watched the last Falchion alive tense up, every muscle tightened and tremble, as one’s body did before collapsing into a puddle of grief. Naji watched this, and his own chest tightened with the boy’s, and an unspoken pity clawed up his throat and closed it off. This same pity quickly turned into a choking scream of fear when the Falchion swiveled on his heels and revealed two vengeful eyes peering out through a mask of unfiltered fury. Those wrathful eyes were set on Naji, and as the Falchion charged the boy again, Naji knew bawling for his mother wouldn’t save him this time.

taffy789 • 18 March 2017 at 12:04 AM

The Falchion approached with his knife drawn, and Naji cried out before kicking his legs out and pushing his body away from all that murderous intent. He didn’t get far pathetically scooting his butt along the sand dune, and as the Falchion towered above him, Naji realized just how utterly defenseless he was.
In a shining moment of brilliance, Naji grasped his backpack and held it in front of him as if it were an impenetrable shield.
Easily, the Falchion yanked the bag from Naji’s hands and violently lobbed it in some far-off direction. His genius plan having failed, Naji reverted back to his original plan of pathetically clawing backwards while crying.
Tears streamed down Naji’s cheeks as the Falchion’s gripped tightened on the knife’s handle. The blade was close, so close and glinting in the harsh sunlight, and seeing the weapon that would end his life caused Naji’s heart to explode with fear. He trembled and dared to peek away from the knife and to the Falchion’s face. The expression present was no longer one of pity or regret. The face was all glinting, judging eyes, a stoic-set mouth, and a vengeful cut bleeding red down a cheek. It was not the face of mercy. Naji felt pale, and once again he found no words to say. His mouth became as dry as the desert air around him. While Naji was at a loss of words, the Falchion chose to voice his grief through sound and action.
Screaming out a bloody cry, the Falchion boy rose his knife into the air.
His blood drumming in his ears, Naji held his palms up as if trying to halt the blade’s savage descent.
Humming with an vibrant anxiety of its own, Naji’s power engulfed its user’s mind with a horrible glowing pink.
Naji had been watching the Falchion’s face as the blade came downwards, and Naji continued to stare as the pink burned against his brain, as the pink burned brighter inside the Falchion’s bleeding cheek wound, as the pink exploded inside the wound, violently tearing the flesh open at either end, elongating the once small cut into an gushing gash. The sudden pulling apart of flesh had caused the Falchion to scream a painful scream, had caused blood to spray from the erupting wound and splatter against Naji’s face and arms, had caused Naji to stare, frightened and dumb-struck by what he saw. Naji couldn’t remove his eyes from the unraveling flesh as it tore upwards, cracking unnaturally around the left eye, and as it split downwards, the pink glow extending the gaping wound across the jawline as easily as stitches being ripped off a shirt.
The Falchion had long ago dropped his knife and wouldn’t stop screaming.
The cries of pain rang so loud, so sharp that Naji pressed his hands to his ears and shut his eyes, as if that could stop the sound and make him unsee what his power had just done.
What it was still doing.
Naji could feel it, a sensation in his gut, the energy swirling, vibrating, spending no effort at all to send cracks blooming across flesh and skin. It terrified Naji with how easy it was to pull things apart like this, compared to all the immense concentration and worrying it took to meld them back together. The thought of him being unable to seamlessly undo what he’d ripped into halves made the boy feel sick, feel dizzy.
Naji’s eyes swam behind closed eyelids, disorienting him more and forcing him to open his eyes again, and Naji let out a strangled cry when he saw that the Falchion’s wound had split all the way down to his collarbone. The Falchion was staggering backwards again, desperate hands pressing against the opening wound as if trying to stop the skin from tearing any further down. The entire right side of the Falchion’s face was drenched in a sickly red, and Naji wanted to stop the pink glow, wanted to will it to cease its warpath, but the terrified beating of his heart only seemed to push it more, push it faster, more furious, and Naji couldn’t stop it, no, his fear fed the beast and made it rip more apart, made it widen the cut, and Naji could only stare, trembling more with every growing inch and every inch growing with each tremble.
Naji had broken down into incoherent, hiccupping, choked “I’m so sorry’s” when a voice called out, “NAJI!” and everything halted. Naji froze, his glowing power dissipated as if it were never there, and the still-bleeding Falchion recovered himself and spun around just in time to be knocked backwards by a swinging, sparking punch.
Samuel was readying another swing but stopped, eyes wide with fear and confusion when he saw the unnaturally large wound gaping at him from the Falchion’s face. The Falchion staggered backwards one, two steps, stared back at Samuel with one non-blood blinded eye, and then disappeared suddenly, leaving only a small cloud of sand puffing up from where they once stood.
Samuel’s hands fell to his side.
He paused, waiting, and when everything remained still, he turned to Naji. Towards the boy, he sent a small, comforting smile.
Naji stared, wide-eyed back.
That smile was misplaced, and Naji’s gut twisted up. He had no words left, couldn’t say what he had to say, his mouth couldn’t form that first “J” sound, and he didn’t even know if bringing it up was a good idea. Although he didn’t speak, his eyes betrayed him.
Samuel blinked once at seeing Naji’s stunned, frightened stare dart quickly to the right, as if it were surreptitiously trying to signal to someone. Before Naji could stutter out that weak, “No, wait-“, Samuel followed Naji’s glance and turned his head to face Jorge’s bleeding body.
Samuel’s voice cracked. “Jorge!”
He was at his friend’s side faster than that Falchion could ever blink away.
Naji struggled to sit up, his body weak and nauseous and not wanting to cooperate at all. It shook. It shuddered. His cheeks were swollen from tears, red and puffy, and he could feel snot dripping from his nose and mixing with sand grains as it rolled with gravity. His arm hurt, a dull, vibrating kind of pain that made his limb feel numb and difficult to use. It was easier to lay in the sand and dry up under the sun than to think about moving.
“Naji!”
His own name, hitting his ears and sounding that desperate and cracking, forced Naji to sit up.
“Naji! Naji, god, Naji hurry!”
Naji didn’t have much strength, but it took every ounce of it he had just to decide to attempt moving towards the cries. It took even more willpower, more drive, to scramble seven meters across the sand, stumbling about and almost faceplanting twice. When he got to Samuel, and knelt down beside him, it dully registered in Naji’s mind that Samuel’s body was trembling as much as his was.
Samuel’s arms, especially, shook as they stretched out, muscles clenched as his hands pressed tight against the hole in Jorge’s neck where the knife had been stuck. Naji didn’t look directly at Jorge’s face, but he heard the subtle, wheezing gasping sounds, and so he instead kept his gaze fixed on Samuel’s hands. A deep red had already soaked into everything- Jorge’s neck, Jorge’s shirt, the sand they knelt in- and it didn’t stop its conquest there, it bubbled up between Samuel’s desperate fingers and coated them in a squishy red. Although Samuel pressed harder against Jorge’s throat when he saw this, the tidal wave of red kept splashing over his hands and wrists until they were dyed the same bright, bloody color as Jorge’s neck.
Samuel’s hands were shaking now, proving even more ineffective at holding the blood back.
He kept repeating a mantra of “Oh god oh god oh god” and a few other long strings of words, and Naji listened to it all and his head swam with the sound. It became so repetitive that the boy almost thought it some kind of twisted lullaby, like the chorus of a song you can’t get out of your head, and Naji could feel himself growing dizzy, blanking out with the tune, the world growing distant and far away.
And, for a blissful moment, Naji could’ve sworn he was dreaming.

awesomeness • 18 March 2017 at 12:06 AM

“Naji, I know you’re not the best healer,”
And then, suddenly, Jorge was bleeding out in front of him again.
“But I know you can do it, I don’t care what your jerkward healer boss said,” Samuel rushed out, the words spilling out from him in a hurried, shaky mess. “You can do it, you can save him, god you can try it’s better than nothing, please, Naji, please,”
Naji’s head rose up to look at Samuel, and he then realized Samuel wasn’t looking at him at all. Samuel was talking down, head bent and looming over Jorge, and his entire body was leaning in, putting pressure on the wound, and maybe too much pressure but what did Naji know? He wasn’t a healer. Not really.
The longer bits of Samuel’s hair hung down as his head bent, both framing the panic of his face while casting shadows across his skin that contrasted with that ghostly pale hue. Through the tips of the hair, Naji could see Samuel’s mouth moving fast, but the mouth didn’t even seem to be moving fast enough to keep up with the continued tumble of words from Samuel’s mouth.
“, and save him, I know you might not be the best but you can try, dear god, there’s so much blood Naji, and I can’t, I don’t-”
Naji looked down at Jorge, not at the neck, but the face.
The eyes were all clouded black glass; the lips moved like a fish on land gasping for water. Sand covered the boy’s cheeks like blush, the golden grains the only light color present against Jorge’s greyed out and cold brown skin. The gold flecks also flooded his black, unruly hair like glitter or an extremely bad dye job. From the chin up, Jorge looked more like a wasted, blacked-out partier than somebody currently dying.
Naji didn’t know when his hands had taken Samuel’s placed pressed against that bleeding wound, but suddenly, he was fully aware that they had.
Naji also didn’t know when he started crying again, but he was. He supposed he hadn’t stopped yet, and the tears at this point just seemed constantly present, like a trustworthy river cutting through the contours of his face.
The anxious tears didn’t bring snot and heavy breathing with them, and Naji was grateful, because he couldn’t get afraid, not now, because Jorge’s neck was under his hands and there was blood and, oh no-
His breath hitched, and Naji tightened his grip against Jorge’s neck. He concentrated.
He couldn’t be afraid.
He concentrated, and his power flared to life in his hands, that bloody shade of pink engulfed his red fingers and hummed against Jorge’s wound.
He was terrified.
The power waited patiently for its orders, vibrating impatiently, catching his fear and growing more anxious.
Naji inhaled all the air he could into his chest, and he held it in.
He imagined a needle threading two pieces of cloth together. A seatbelt buckling. The zipper on a pair of jeans being pulled upwards.
Naji willed his power to pull the two halves of the spilt artery back together.
It did, and the other veins around it followed, the clean rip in the skin being weaved back together by the soft tendrils of energy. It was seamless, and Naji held in his breath, not daring to breathe nor think until the power hummed, impatient again for it had finished its job and now had nothing left to do. Before it tasted his thinly veiled terror and got any smart ideas, Naji jerked his hands from Jorge’s throat.
As Naji had used his power, Samuel had taken to patting Jorge’s head, frantically smoothing down the guy’s hair and speaking loud words of comfort and encouragement to his friend, things like, “you’re going to be fine”, and “hang in there”, and Naji’s going to fix you right up”, and “you’re tougher than a stupid paper cut, come on buddy”. Now that Naji had sat back, Samuel stared at Naji, glanced at the unbroken skin of Jorge’s neck, and then again fell back to watching Jorge as his friend showed no signs of improvement. Samuel waited, and Naji listened to him murmur more pleading statements as his hands cupped the back of Jorge’s head.
Naji felt an eternity drip by, waiting like that.
Unable to keep watching Jorge, Naji bent his head and looked at the sticky red coating his fingers instead. Dully, he slowly pressed his fingers all together before pulling them back apart, and he shivered at the sticky reside of blood that tried to keep his fingers glued together. He didn’t know how long he stared wordlessly, unthinking at his fingers like that, but it was long enough for Samuel to finally gasp slightly and ask, softly, “Jorge? You there?”
Naji’s head rose to see the slight, steadied way Jorge’s lips were puffing out air. His skin, though still greyed and clammy, seemed to be shaking with cold signs of awareness. When Samuel moved slightly more left or right of Jorge’s head, Jorge’s dulled eyes followed.
A slight edge of brightness broke into Samuel’s voice. “Jorge? Dude?”
Jorge’s mouth opened, and a loud moan that sounded like a tired attempt at words rang out.
“Jorge, no, okay,” there was a soft, uncontrollable happy laugh that followed Samuel’s words, “no, you’re okay dude. Stay still. You’re okay. Okay, you don’t need to talk, it’s fine, you’re-” the happiness remained even as the voice again cracked, “- you’re okay.”
Naji released all the breath he’d been holding in, and it puffed out in one gasping moment.
Jorge groaned and relaxed further down into the sand, and he lolled his head limply backwards. His hands still clutching his friend’s head, Samuel laughed, quietly. Between the slight shaking of the guy’s shoulders and the wetness shining in the corners of his eyes, Naji couldn’t tell if Samuel was chortling or crying.
Instead of focusing on that uncertainly, Naji’s watched the assured, constant rise and fall of Jorge’s chest, and at seeing that, the disbelief hit Naji all at once.
Before he could feel joy at having somehow, against all odds, cheat death itself, reality swung back in the form of loud hooting and hollering.
As Naji swiveled around to the sound of the noise, Gabriel piped up with a happy, “Everyone okay over here?”
The soldadito grinned ear-to-ear as he stood over the three boys, and he looked positively excited despite what looked like a bleeding gash dripping down his forehead. The blood matted his short strands of sandy brown hair together, but it didn’t bother him any, and his bleeding face wasn’t even the most shocking bit of red on his person. It was the front of his shirt that Naji was drawn to, to that loud splotch of red splattering against his issued sweat-proof shirt. Blood clearly not belonging to the boy had speckled everywhere against his body. Gabriel’s sword, which he held easily over one sword, dripped with the same, glistening bright red. Naji watched a drop slide off the blade and hit the ground, soaking into the sand and disappearing. Naji felt suddenly queasy.
Samuel, usually so sharped tongued, only rubbed his thumbs against Jorge’s temples instead of gracing Gabriel’s presence by looking up.
The other soldaditos were appearing now, Amy laughing heartily and saying “Wasn’t that so fun?” and pumping a fist into the air. Naji noticed how her fists were covered in splatters of red up to her wrists, and a bile threatened to leave his throat.
“Well, one of those Falchions got away,” Esperanza muttered darkly while wiping the red off her machete with a rag. Naji saw how easily the steel wiped clean and his stomach twisted into knots.
Geraldo was there, also bleeding. A slash in his arm was wrapped in a crud bandage, but the red had bleed through the white, and Naji’s vision went fuzzy at the contrast of color. Despite his injury, Geraldo spoke as monotone and curt as ever. “But we did not lose anyone.” He briefly glanced over to where Jorge lay. “Correct?”
At this question, Samuel’s jawline tightened, and he finally glared up at the soldaditos.
“Yes,” he gritted out through clenched teeth.
“Well,” Amy clapped her hands together, “that’s GREAT!”
On the ground, Jorge’s body shivered still from cold despite the warm desert sun.
As the soldaditos celebrated their good fortune, Naji’s vision had been clouded by red. It was everywhere, everywhere, he realized. The soldaditos were soaked with it, but it wasn’t just them. Jorge’s body. Samuel’s hands. His own-
Naji stared at his arm, at all the red coloring his own skin. He realized with a start he couldn’t be sure where Jorge’s blood ended and his began. He recalled the Falchion’s face wound erupting and spraying him with more red and, that was it, Naji felt his stomach throw itself against his lungs. He gagged.
He shot up, standing and surprising everyone except Jorge, who dully focused on the sky. Before he turned away from the group, Naji caught the intense of eyes Raquel, who stood apart from the other soldaditos. He noticed the tense, concerned way she seemed to stare at the three boys, but that was quickly replaced by shock when her steely eyes flittered to Naji’s now standing form. Naji didn’t hang around any longer to see what other expressions Raquel had to offer him. Whipping around, Naji beelined straight ahead, running away from the group but not anywhere in particular. He made it further than he’d expected, over a nearby sand dune, before collapsing and falling onto his knees.
With a swirling, horrible sensation buzzing violent and red in his head, Naji remembered just how much blood terrified him.
Then, onto the sand, Naji threw up the last three bottles of water he’d drank.

taffy789 • 19 March 2017 at 12:38 AM

~~~

Mikey clicked the “search” button and, as he waited for the ancient computer to process the request, he looked back up at Annabell.
“I’m sorry to hear about your friend,” he said, after a thinking over exactly what he should say, “I don’t know what could’ve possibly happened to him to make him that way, but whatever it was, it sounds, well, terrible.”
Annabell blinked. “Oh. Did I not explain that part well enough?” Her hand uncoiled around the chair’s armrest, and it moved to grasp her other arm. “Well. I know it sounds crazy. But. I think Leon had gone to IOD, and then somehow returned to the super school? And now he’s back here, and I-”
“Wait,” Mikey interrupted the girl, “you’re saying your friend, this Leon guy, he got OFF IOD?”
“Only for a couple of months,” Annabell added.
“Still,” Mikey frowned, “I’m sorry Annabell, but you gotta know that- that’s impossible.”
“So I’ve been told.” Annabell hugged herself tighter, and she looked away from Mikey and towards the computer screen, which was still loading slowly. “It’s a hunch I’ll admit. But given everything he bothered to tell me about what happened to him? It all checks out. Leon had to have come here. And I want to know what had happened to him here.”
What had happened to destroy her friend like that.
Maybe it was just her natural curiosity, or her “nosiness” as it’d been called before, but she so much wanted to understand why Leon had come back the way he had.
What had he experienced on IOD; how had he lived?
How had he managed to get off of the island in the first place?
Would learning these things let her better be able to help him?
There were so many answers Annabell wanted to find, and she knew if she could just take a look at Leon’s file, then she would be one step closer to ridding herself of a few questions.
Although Mikey still vocalized doubts over the entire endeavor, he too watched the computer’s screen as it finished loading.
However, he didn’t share Annabell’s look of surprise when the results came up empty.
Annabell looked shocked, and Mikey sighed.
“It may be the search limiters. I searched the MIA database, and if your friend was ever here, maybe he had been put into another one. I’ll search the general files next and see what comes up. It’s going to take a while though, ‘cause these computers are slow as crap.”
“That’s fine,” Annabell said to all that. She leaned forward and steadied herself on the computer table, willing to wait however long it took if it meant finding the answers she searched for.



“Anyway,” Quincy had put the map of A-L he found down, and he continued to peruse through the filing cabinet. He scanned file after file for a report referencing a moldy subterranean drowning deathtrap, or at the least, some kind of post-it note warning about a swamp witch living in the area who enjoyed the Olympics just a tad bit too much.
Quincy found neither of these things, and he closed the top drawer before moving onto the second one down. Before he pulled the drawer out, however, he spared a glance over at Izzy, and his mind flashed through yesterday’s mission. Specifically, to a part at the beginning where-
Shifting self-consciously, Quincy decided that now was a better time than any to bite the bullet on this one.
“Uh, Babe?” he began, opening the second cabinet drawer as he did so. Quincy stood to the side of it, so the drawer acted as a low barricade between him and his boyfriend. “So, like,” He talked conversationally, loud enough but speaking towards the ground, as he pretended to search through the filing cabinet that stretched out stomach level to him.
“Like, uh, Mikey asking about the mission a while ago made me remember something I’d kind of wanted to ask you about?” His fingers, which had been leafing absentmindedly through the manila folders, paused on one tab and tapped it anxiously.
“It actually is pretty silly if I’m honest, and it’s old news, like, I should’ve brought it up before but I didn’t want to on the mission because it could’ve made things awkward, and, uh,” Quincy sucked in a breath before exhaling it, sharply. “Yeah.”
His hand had moved, now pressing against the side of his neck.
“So, uh. Yesterday at the mission briefing, you kind of didn’t seem all that excited to see me show up. And uh, that’s okay, but,” He looked towards Izzy, but his eyes didn’t seem to quite meet the guy’s face, choosing instead to stare to either side of it.
“I wanted to make sure, to check, that, uh,” Quincy finished, lamely, “that you're actually cool with me being on these missions.”

asi • 20 March 2017 at 6:28 PM

Izzy heard him in silence, fingers slipping out from between the thin cardboard he'd been thumbing through. He'd been traveling in the opposite direction from Quincy, in the hopes of meeting him in the middle, more or less. Now the place he'd gotten to in the drawer full of folders was lost, but Izzy would be the last person to notice. The smile that had been brought about by the compliments to his work also fell from his face.
"Idiot," he muttered, without malice or scorn, anxiety more than anything causing him to press his nails against the hard flat of his side of the metal cabinet, as if his delicate little nails could really dig in and hide in it. "You got it all wrong... I'm the one who didn't want to go on these missions," he spoke clearly in his frustration, grinding his teeth together at the break of the sentence. Izzy burst out hotly; "Four's stupid and reckless and I didn't want you to know I-"
He quieted, his gaze, that had been focused solely on the tidy little rows of paper in front of him, unseeingly, now turned even further away, to the left and to the ground. "Turned out y'were coming 'long anyway, so it di'n't matter..." his voice sunk back into slurs as his tone turned uncaring again. "Which's prolly the only reason we all survived," Izzy added cynically, picking up a file up at random and dog-earing, wearing at the corner although he now lacked the motivation to even pretend to look it over.
His bad eye was starting to feel itchy and irritated again and when that happened, it was hard to concentrate on anything. Although right now, he hardly wanted to. Still, after a minute, he forced himself to look back up at Quincy, because he needed to use his good eye to see... exactly how he'd reacted to that.

taffy789 • 20 March 2017 at 9:39 PM

Although he'd winced at the first word, Quincy quickly relaxed upon realizing there was no bite behind any of it.
Towards him, anyway.
He watched with concern as his boyfriend worked himself up in a frustration, and he listened, intently, right up until that final statement caught him off guard.
"No," Quincy frowned at that, "I'm not-"
He cut himself off and craned his neck up towards the ceiling, staring at the far-up spinning ceiling fan.
"I didn't do anything to help anyone, really," Quincy confessed, giving an embarrassed little shrug. "You weren't up on top to see, but I was kind of useless for most of it? I mean. I let that swamp witch escape like, twice. I couldn't stop Four for getting hurt and that was literally my only job..." His mouth pressed into a grim line. "And," he concluded, flatly, "While you and Annabell were apparently in danger of drowning, all I could do was fall down the stairs and get injured. So, really, I didn't do much of anything to help..."
As he trailed off, his eyes drifted back downwards and they caught Izzy's upwards gaze with a start. Seeing his boyfriend look expectantly up like that made him hastily shift gears.
His hand stopped clasping his neck and instead flew down, reaching across the cabinet's drawer to rest closer to Izzy's personal space, as if in invitation.
"Hey, babe," Quincy began, softly, "I know you don't like these missions- er, at least," he amended, "I definitely knew after we talked this morning! Yesterday I knew you were all agitated, but uh, I guess I wasn’t a hundred percent on what about. So I wanted to ask and make sure it wasn’t…” His fingers twiddled against the file tops for a moment. “…anything I did? …Though I suppose I should’ve figured it wasn’t going to be all about me, huh?” He laughed a bit there, good-naturedly, before all the dry humor died out. After a quiet moment of hesitation, he continued.
“… If I’m being completely honest though,” he said, hand pressing against the cardboard tops of the file dividers, “I was pretty excited about yesterday’s mission? Uh. Before it turned out to be so dangerous, I mean.”
He sighed.
“So, it was given to me kind of as a favor, right? And it wasn’t supposed to be a hard mission, not anything like going on rescue missions where you could get uh, all injured, and it wasn’t anything stupidly boring like border patrol. And so when I thought we were going on an exciting mission together, I got all excited for the both of us without, uh, really stopping to think how you would actually feel about it…”
Quincy looked apologetically towards his boyfriend. “And you’re right, you didn’t know I was coming along. The mission sort of came out of nowhere fast for both of us, huh? We didn’t even have enough time to tell each other about it, so it was really my bad to assume you’d be happy for either of us to be on the mission!” He shook his slightly head at his own past actions, as if chiding himself for ever doing such a thing.
Meeting Izzy’s eyes again, Quincy gave a candid smile. “And so babe, you don’t need to worry about me knowing how you feel about these things. ‘Mean like, I’d rather, ya know, talk about this stuff even though it can’t get pretty awkward sometimes, and, ya know, stuff.” Not exactly knowing how to end the conversation, Quincy here gave another shrug, this shrug being the very definition of “pretty awkward” that he had just alluded to moments ago.
Despite that slight fumbled, he still grinned a large, only slightly goofy grin at Izzy. Inwardly, Quincy hoped he’d aced that lesson in “awkwardly talking through awkward minor feelings issues with your boyfriend”.

asi • 21 March 2017 at 7:49 PM

Hearing those words of self-deprecation, Izzy straightened, his fingers forgetting the metal drawer they had been gripping so tightly and falling to his sides instead.
"Honey, sweetheart... puddy cat," his mouth couldn't help but broaden into a smile as soon as it got itself around that pet name.
"I think y'did plenty 'nough. You must've stopped Four from gettin' killed 'cause I don't see 'im doing 'nything," he said dryly, knowingly, "'sides, as for letting that feral get away, s'not like the others were any better, an' I..."
He cut himself off again, looking away, rubbing at the corner of his bad eye even though he shouldn't, because it itched.
"That thing was so scary, I wanted to run in th' other direction," he joked although he didn't find it funny at all, still feeling the fright from the memory, then; "I, I mean, I did, but..." he lowered his curly-haired head. "I wanted to chase the soapy smell 'fore it washed away, too," Izzy revealed, speaking lowly. "That's why... The path was lit up but vanishing, I went to see... who was there."
He looked up at Quincy with his one good eye pulled wide, thinking, what it might have been like if Izzy hadn't essentially led them down into that dungeon, where that kid... Crap, getting trapped like that had hurt them so bad, it was hard to know were to begin. And that part was all his fault. If he'd said something, he could've...
"I messed up, don't I know it," he exhaled, sticking his hands deep into his cardie's pockets, grabbing at the soft and soothing material around his fingers.
"You're good at these missions, Q, and I'm... not. Don't know why they 'ave t'bother bringin' me along." He snuggled into himself, trying to find warmth in his cardigan by pulling his shoulders in and drawing everything together inside it.
Although it wasn't his favorite sweater, he did feel moderately comforted, even if he was set rather ill at ease by all the awkward talk of, well, awkward talk. In return, Izzy tried to talk about anything else, merely nodding and focusing on the missions at hand, muttering questions like; "D'ya think they're gonna get any better," and, "Four should a-at least give us decent warning, r-right?"
He was perhaps sweating more than he ought on the last question, eyes squeezed tight, but, Quincy had already made that assumption without his help, so it could only be described as the whitest of lies, right? There was no way he could be blamed for that now...

taffy789 • 22 March 2017 at 7:24 PM

Upon hearing that terrible pet name, Quincy's hand flew up to cover his face as he snorted, just a bit, at it.
Then Izzy continued, and Quincy's hand left his face to press again against the folders inside the filing cabinet.
"I guess," he relented after a moment of thinking, "I did do some good." He grimaced, "But I could've done a lot better too. ...But that just means I'll try harder next time, huh hun?" Quincy sent a wide smile Izzy's way, and he pushed off of the filing cabinet in the next moment, choosing to walk around the open drawer to join his boyfriend on the other side of it.
"I don't think you should sell yourself so short babe," he said from his place now standing in front of Izzy. "You're doing great as our tracker, and didn't you kinda help Four out there at one point, or, uh-"
He faltered here, realizing that his memory of everything after banging his head on a hard set of iron bars and then having to hold his wound closed was fuzzy and disjointed at best. Quincy remembered Four helping him to the ground, something else about those monstrous water tendrils trying to murder him, seeing a whole lot of red water, and then that thing with Izzy..?
Although that sequence of events sure was fuzzy, what remained crisp and clear in his mind was the image of his drenched and miserable boyfriend leaning in close to untidily wrap bandages around the wound.
Because he remembered that and everything after it much clearer, Quincy added, with a smile, “And you helped me, which is, ya know, pretty cool in my book.” He stepped forward as he said this, reaching out and placing a tentative hand on Izzy’s left hip.
Mulling the next questions over, Quincy massaged his palm gently against the pocket of Izzy’s jeans.
“I don’t know,” he confessed after a moment of reflection. “I hope they get easier, I mean, I thought they were going to be simple but now there’s apparently some kind of evil five-year-old or whatever Annabell was talking about?” His eyebrows furrowed inwards. “It’s pretty strange, yeah. But Four mentioned another mission soon, tomorrow, I think..? … So I think we should just hope we don’t have to go snorkeling again with children. If not, then it should probably be easy.”
To emphasize just how trouble-free he predicted it would be, Quincy gave Izzy a simple, easy smile.

asi • 24 March 2017 at 6:29 PM

Izzy shook his head. "Try any harder an' you'll make the rest of us look inexcus'bly bad, sugar," he said fondly, turning his full body to face the other as he drew nearer.
When Quincy paused and a somewhat troubled look overcame him, in just a subtle way that Izzy's eye, sharp as it so infrequently was, picked up on it and softened in response. "Y'know I really am that short," Izzy pointed out, gruff yet playful, raising a hand to denote the difference between the tops of their heads.
That hand then dropped down to close over Quincy's on his hip, pressing warmly over the flat back of his boyfriend's hand, and holding him there reassuringly.
"C'mon, let's get this stupid task of Four's done so we can do nothing f'the rest'f the day," Izzy managed a smile, before reminding the other; "We gotta make lunch on time though. 'M not for anythin' missing out on my kushari." A dreamy glaze taking over Izzy's eye on the final word, whispered reverently as it was.
A sudden remembered thought brought a slight frown back to his features, then he smirked.
"Speakin' of Four though... You sure you didn't just set up your roomie with 'is girlfriend?" Izzy quirked an eyebrow.

taffy789 • 25 March 2017 at 12:08 PM

“So, Four,” Mikey took it upon himself to begin the conversation again, since staring at the loading screen in silence apparently had started to grate on him.
Annabell felt impatient, so the conversation was welcomed. It had been too long, waiting for the search results to appear. She’d almost reached down and reclicked the “search” button but was stopped by Mikey, who had to push her hand away and tell her clicking again would just slow it down even more.
Without any sort of distraction from the maddening wait, Annabell was certain she would go insane, so the choice to reply to Mikey’s small talk with a “Yes, what about Four?” was an easy one.
“You and Quincy are working with a leader, right?” Mikey continued, raising an eyebrow. “Just wanted to know, uh. How that was going for you. Quincy had seemed pretty giddy about doing something important himself, but Quincy’s Quincy, so I wanted to know if you had a different take on it…”
“Well,” Annabell blinked, “I kind of, um, knew Four before he became Four? Back at the Super School. So we’re already, um,”
“Friends?” Mikey seemed incredulous. “So you’re rubbing elbows with a leader already? Sheesh, Annabell, I see you. Working those connections.”
Annabell looked at Mikey, momentarily confused about how impressed the guy seemed to be with her apparent “connections”. She reflected on her relationship with Riley for a moment, and she considered the well-known fact that the Falchions leaders, typically, do not interact with many outside of the numbered leadership. Then she immediately tried to recall every leader she, personally, had interacted with.
…
Well, Riley, or, Four, for one. That nasty Fifth leader, Zach, which poor Raven was currently tied down to. Eight, who had practically kidnapped her on many occasions since they’d first met. “Katrix”, aka, One, had even scared the daylights out of her by cutting a dead body haphazardly in half before mending it back together! Annabell tried her best to push that memory out of her mind and went back to counting the leaders she’d met one her fingers. She’d ran into Two a few times which had been somehow all awkward, strange, and three different shades of frightening. She’d spoken to Col about twice, but she doubted he remembered her face or name honestly. The old Nine had been leading the first real mission-mission she’d gone on, and the new Nine she recognized as one of Alex’s friends from the Super School. Heck, she even had seen the old Five and Seven briefly during that post-raze incident leader debrief, where she’d seen the new Seven too, and-
… It was here Annabell had to stop counting on her fingers. As she dropped her hands and made a face, Mikey stared up at her with his eyebrows rising higher and higher on his forehead.
“… I guess you can say that,” Annabell relented to the guy’s questioning gaze, “that, yes, I do kind of have connections, I guess..?”
A grin spread on Mikey’s face. “Hella. That means that I’m trusting YOU to hook me up with all the safe missions and non-radioactive cafeteria food, okay Annabell?” He winked. “You can work some serious magic with leader connections like that, believe me. Miss Jane, for example, isn’t even a leader but she still can do a lot just by being Eight’s assistant! Like, if you can’t be besties with a leader, at least knowing an assistant is the next best thing…”
“Yeah,” Annabell agreed, “Another one of my friends is working as Five’s assistant right now too. Although I fear for how much power she has in her own situation…”
Mikey’s eyebrows jolted up again in surprise. “Wait, you’re friends with an assistant too...?” After registering the rest of the girl’s words, however, his face slacked and became rather strained. “Though yeah. If your friend is working for Five, I really feel for her. I’ve heard things about the guy, old things, but if he hasn’t changed yet…”
Annabell shook her head. “He hasn’t. I mean, I hate to talk bad about the guy, but I’ve worked a mission with him and he’s rather a…” She decided to choose her next word carefully. “…. Unpleasant person.”
“Wait, you have direct connections to Five too?” Mikey snorted, “Ha. Don’t mention that one to Quincy.”
Annabell didn’t understand what Mikey meant by that, and so she was about to question “Why?” when the computer screen flashed completely white. That caught her attention, and she and Mikey both turned to the monitor and stared at it. Annabell held her breath, and the computer’s screen loaded a search result page in.
…
“… Annabell,” Mikey sighed when the results popped up.
The girl went cross-eyed, fixated on the screen and trying to comprehend what she was seeing.
“No, that’s not possible,” she stated, voice catching against her throat and coming out sounding strained and hurt, “Search it again.”
Mikey leaned back in his chair, his body tired and limp.
“That’s it, Annabell.” He waved a hand towards the computer, at the screen saying to both of them, “No results found.”
“If there’s no files on your friend here, he never was here.” Mikey explained this, and his voice fell soft as he recognized the contorted look of confusion and grief spreading itself slowly across the girl's face.
“I’m sorry Annabell. But it really looks like your friend never came to IOD.”

awesomeness • 26 March 2017 at 8:51 PM

The feral growled, vicious, a thick yellow-green smoke rolling out from its jaws and spilling against the ground like a thick fog. It stepped backwards, recoiling at the glint of the rusty sword that came swinging its way. The form was bad, lazy- playful even- and so the feral easily stepped out of the way of the blade. It lifted its eyes towards the advancing figure and snarled.
Grinning, the figure mimicked the snarl, higher pitched, as if mocking it.
The feral roared now, agitated, and a stream of sickening smoke poured from its gaping mouth, filled the area and turning the green foliage of the swamp and dirty yellow.
Looking only annoyed by the poisonous cloud drifting towards him, the figure holding the sword retreated further back into the marsh behind him. His black combat boots, stolen a month ago from a dead Glaeroe, sunk an inch into the wet ground. The swamp trees had begun to droop now, affected by the yellow cloud and dying appropriately. The swordsman watched apathetically from the safety of a few feet back, and he with some mild interest did he notice how effective this feral’s power was at sheer destruction. The swamp’s forest drooped and died to the power’s will.
Charge would’ve found it more impressive had he held any less contempt for the brainless shell the power was.
As the feral flailed about, spewing its own noxious poison everywhere, Charge looked bored as he shifted his rusty sword from one hand to the other.
Really, he considered while grimacing down at the blade, didn’t even like it much. Weapons were too constraining, he felt, and so lifting this one from a skeleton he’d stumbled upon had been moreso a careless afterthought of an action.
Cutting people down with weapons meant nothing to him. More than anything, Charge’s entire body hummed with the desire to leap with sparks, shoot bolts of lightning into the cloud and fry the feral where it stood like the dumb, useless beast it was.
However, annoying as it was, he had to wait, for he wished to test something out.
Something he’d discovered after those long, hot days sweating with infection in the rainforest, unable to manifest lightning but feeling his energy burn within him all the while…
A loud yell shook the yellow fog apart and, suddenly, the feral flew out of its hiding place inside the smog.
It breathed a hot, scalding pillar of yellow towards Charge, who sidestepped it easily before flying back in to knock the feral in the ribs with the butt of the sword. The feral staggered backwards, pained, and Charge smirked at his little victory.
He continued to rejoice as he felt his energy hum, growing stronger and more wild with every second he held it in. He himself hated the feeling, the feeling of being held back and contained, but Charge knew it was worth it, if he could only practice that interesting thing which had occurred…

Charge remembered it vividly.
After days of sweating and drifting in and out of consciousness, after days of sickness and infection, Charge remembered awaking to his body burning while the soft sound of croaking echoed to his direct right. He remembered seeing gold, gold everywhere, filling his vision and curling off of his body in long, drifting streams. Like fire, his aura devoured him, engulfing him and burning him alive.
As he’d fully awoken, Charge had roared in fury. It was agonizing, for his energy had built up to the point where it oversaturated his fleshy body and threatened to overheat him and cook him from the inside out. He felt his energy, his essence, him waving off his body and screaming for release, escape, destruction-
Then, a loud croak had echoed again from his right.
With teeth gritting together and his sweaty, golden hair falling sloppily in front of his eyes, Charge turned his head to the right and saw a large toad staring at back at him from a log.
It then croaked again.
Charge had wanted it dead.
He had wanted it dead so badly.

Back in the present, Charge recalled the next few events that had occurred, and a large, crazed grin stretched across his face in gleeful anticipation of the event’s repetition. He could feel his energy burning beneath his skin, hot and searing, and he knew it was time to make his move.
As the feral recovered from the last hit, it turned to Charge and rushed him again, and Charge only smiled in return before focusing his energy completely on the feral.
Out of thin air, a blazing gold aura thrashed to life around the electric power, and, sensing the outburst of energy, the feral skid to a stop in its tracks. Across its face flashed an emotion, a primal one even the most basic of creatures could feel- fear.
Charge continued to grin, and he took one stop forward to the feral while his aura curled off of him and whipped violently about. The tendrils of energy caught a tree branch and snapped it in two as easily as one would slice butter with a hot knife. The feral took a step backwards, cowering now as Charge approached.
Charge remembered the toad again.
It hadn’t been so afraid when it had met its demise, not like the feral acted, no. Neither he nor the toad had expected his aura to flare to life, so suddenly, so viciously physical, tangible, deadly. The toad was dead before it even knew it was in danger, the energy had lashed out so quickly.
The feral, Charge thought to himself while staring down the frightened power, would not be so lucky with such a quick and merciful death. After all, Charge hadn’t suffered through holding all his energy in just to stop playing with his new ability right away.
Before the feral could even begin to turn and run off, Charge grinned a vile, sadistic grin, rose one hand, and let his physical aura attack the feral’s legs, gripping them tight and crushing every bone under an immense amount of pure, unyielding energy.

taffy789 • 27 March 2017 at 9:48 PM

~~~

The fan blew loudly, it’s caged head swiveling back and forth in a slow, predictable rhythm.
Sitting in a waiting room chair, Naji suffered a swirling sense of déjà vu as he waited patiently for Paola to return from the infirmary’s inner rooms. All the waiting for people to come and get him was just like when he first arrived to his workplace, except this time of course he was covered completely in sand, was pressing a gauze against his bleeding arm, and was currently surrounded by more sand-covered, also bleeding soldaditos.
Yep. Naji shut his eyes tight. Just like he remembered it, totally.
All sarcasm aside, the little déjà vu Naji did feel made him sick, and his senses felt so shot that the only option that remained was to blind himself to all color or motion. Instead, he focused on the soft whirring sound of the fan blowing in the room, that sole white noise being loud enough to drown out most light chatter sounding off from the soladitos. The room having gone quiet, Naji relaxed his body in his chair and tried to brain dump the last few torturous hours of the mission.
He tried and failed to forget how pale Jorge remained, on the ground, as the others collected the dead and made a horrible bonfire.
He tried and failed to forget the sight of the dead, and he failed worse when he tried to clean that horrible burning stench from his nose.
He tried and failed to forget the embarrassment of being unable to find his backpack and med kit and instead having to bandage wounds with borrowed gauze from the better prepared soldaditos.
And he remembered, keenly, the limp, dead weight of Jorge as he and Samuel propped the guy up on either side and had to practically drag him miles upon miles to the pick-up point.
Naji’s shoulders still ached from the burden, but he didn’t dare to vocally complain because Jorge was the one who could barely stand by the time they brought him to the infirmary tent.
The images playing on the back of his eyelids now making him feel sick as well, Naji cracked open his eyes once again.
The soldaditos sat a few chairs down from him, sanitized and cleaned of all red for the most part, but those with wounds still bandaged up and awaiting treatment. Amy sat on the floor, making large, exaggerated hand movements and punching motions as she retold some apparently exciting Falchion-fighting story. Gabriel sat, laughing at the story while Raquel sat in the chair next to him, but she idly chatted with her twin brother. Stretched across two chairs and resting her head against Geraldo’s shoulder, Esperanza relaxed, almost snoring despite her own gauze wrapped around her right leg.
Naji watched them, not the slightest interested in Amy’s most likely brutal and bloody story, and yet captivated by the group all the same. He marveled at how at ease they were about everything, the ending of the mission and the wounds on their body, and their relaxed attitudes sent chills of fear rolling down Naji’s back, cold and gripping.
The boy continued to stare, in awe at the smiling soldaditos for minutes, right up until the second that Samuel pushed through the curtain leading to the inner tent, looking a bit rushed and fearful himself.
The idle chatter of the soladitos stopped as soon as Samuel entered, but he didn’t seem to notice or care as he bounded quickly up to Naji and slid into the empty seat next to him, wheezing, “Dude. Wow. Okay, that boss lady coworker of yours? Dude, she’s some plain mean scary crap.”
Even if Naji had worked with ten other “boss lady coworkers”, he still would’ve known Samuel was talking about Paola by the description of her personality alone.
“Well,” Naji said, quietly, after a pause, “I kinda, um, told you that when she meant stay here, she um, really meant it…”
Samuel folded his arms across his chest, insisting, “She can’t disappear with Jorge like that and seriously expect me not to go check if my best dude hasn’t like, bled out after thirty freakin’ minutes of me sitting around.” He sulked in his seat, his foot tapping impatiently on the ground. “Seriously, it shouldn’t take that long, Jorge had been talking a bit by the time we brought him in-! So, why-?”
He appeared to be dead set on continuing this concerned train of thought, but a voice from the quietened soldaditos piped up, addressing Samuel.
“Is he okay?”
Raising his head, Samuel narrowed his eyes on Geraldo and shot back, “Why do you care all of a sudden?”
At Samuel’s snapping tone, Amy glanced at Samuel and chewed at her lip a bit before twiddling her thumbs against her thigh. Gabriel frowned and watched both Geraldo and Samuel carefully. Esperanza continued to relax against Geraldo’s shoulder, but now one of her eyes had creaked open to glare dangerously towards Samuel. Only Raquel seemed unaffected, aware of the tensed atmosphere but blinking in confusion at how it came about.
Instead of starting a physical fight as Naji feared would happen, Geraldo tiredly rolled his eyes at Samuel’s tone, and snorted before replying, “I am asking you for my sister.”
Warily, Samuel glanced at Raquel. He stared for a moment before shooting off back to Jorge, “Can’t you let her talk for herself?”
Geraldo groaned, exasperated, “She cannot understand English!” and he then muttered some choice Spanish words directed at Samuel that Naji didn’t need a translator to know that they weren’t exactly nice.
Samuel’s eyes twitched slightly as Geraldo insulted him. Then, slowly, Samuel allowed a phase to roll off his tongue that everyone in the room but Naji looked surprised at. As Geraldo scoffed and looked pointedly away from Samuel, and as the other soldaditos slapped hands against foreheads, saying to themselves, “Oh right, he’s been trained too, hasn’t he..?”, Naji felt, once again, incredibly lost in translation.
No longer directing his words at Geraldo, Samuel looked at Raquel and began speaking to her in slow Spanish.
Raquel, after a moment of wary hesitation, replied back, and the two exchanged curt words which Naji could not even begin to understand.
Unable to follow the conversation, Naji allowed himself to drift off as those two chatted. He listened as the musical notes of Spanish conversation flowed in the air, and he especially noticed the light, slowed tones which with Raquel spoke, so easily. It was nice, listening to the words, and Naji could’ve just sat there listening forever except he couldn’t, because suddenly another body came charging through the curtain and into the waiting room.
“Bhatti!”
Naji jumped a foot into the air at Paola’s summons.
In the doorway, an irritated and tired looking Paola stood, impatiently waving Naji to her.
“Hurry it up Bhatti,” she grunted, “I need to talk to you about the patient.”
“Wait,” Samuel said, breaking away from his and Raquel’s conversation and beginning to stand up.
“You sit down!” Paola commanded Samuel, pointing at his chest, “I’ve had enough of your interruptions, so sit or else I’m kicking you out of the entire tent, and you can build sandcastles outside while you wait for your friend!”
Grimacing, Samuel reluctantly sat back down.
On behalf of his coworker, Naji sent an apologetic glance towards Samuel before standing up and scurrying after Paola, back into the main halls of the infirmary tent.

awesomeness • 1 April 2017 at 12:38 AM

When the first words uttered by Paola as she pulled Naji through the tent were, “Bhatti, I’m so friggin’ disappointed in you”, Naji started to sweat under his shirt.
Before Naji could even stutter out a “why?”, Paola raged onwards, “You come in here dragging your sorry little group behind you and a half dead guy, stammering about how you can’t heal them because oh you’re so tired and you don’t want to mess anything up, well, BULLCRAP Bhatti, that was all utter bullcrap and you know it!”
At this accusation, Naji winced, but he couldn’t find any strength to argue with her. After all, what excuse did he have, what could he possibly say that could manage to contradict the truth?
Naji was full of bullcrap, and he knew it. He was full of so much bullcrap that he was sure it was visible leaking from his ears; he knew he might as well be a sack of bullcrap trying to masquerade at human at this point, after all the lies he’d told. Naji knew he was a bullcrap fake healer, and the idea that Paola knew these lies terrified Naji for so, so many selfish, stupid reasons.
As Naji clutched at his chest and opened his mouth to say some lame apology, Paola interrupted with a snapping, “Save it, Bhatti! You could’ve healed the others up before dragging them here for me to do all your work for you!”
Naji closed his mouth again.
… She wasn’t wrong, Naji knew, not completely.
He could’ve closed the other wounds, yes. However, when Naji had considered using his power, the splitting face of the Falchion had come screaming back into his mind like a vengeful apparition, and Naji had felt so sick that he’d wanted to lay down and not get back up for a long, long time.
So, obviously, him using his power to close those non-lethal wounds had been off the table.
Sure, the soldaditos and even Samuel had believed his hasty lies of, “Um, um, healing Jorge, um, took a lot of energy out of me, ahaha… um, healing powers, can be funny like that, and I know this because, um, I’m a healer, yeah…”, but Paola believed…
Naji stopped staring at the ground for long enough to glance at Paola, and he shuddered with fear when he saw the anger and disappointment settled into the girl’s brow.
Paola, Naji glumly noted, seemed far less convinced of his “I ran out of healer juice” falsehoods.
Which was most definitely why she shouted something like, “Can’t heal anyone else my butt! You expect me to believe even you’re that useless Bhatti? That you spent all your energy on that little heal? God, what a worthless excuse!”
Naji’s wince at that turned into a shocked gasp as Paola roughly grabbed him by his shirt collar.
“Bhatti,” Paola bit, “you lack something alright, and it’s not lacking enough energy, let me tell you that.” She shook around a bit, and Naji went comically cross-eyed with the motion, complete with cartoon little birds tweeting and flying in a circle above his head.
After the little birds flew away and Naji looked less dizzy, Paola still gripped Naji’s collar, but her expression looked relaxed, less furious at the boy.
Almost too calmly now, she asked him, slowly eyeing him over once, “… Do you know what you lack, Bhatti?”
an actual healing power an actual healing power an actual healing power-
“Um,” Naji stuttered, trying to not say the very answer repeating so forcefully in his mind, “Um, um-”
Paola scowled, then swung the boy around, pushing him through a curtained doorway.
Above Naji’s yelp of surprise, Paola commanded, “Go take a look at your little patient Bhatti, and then go tell me what it is you lack!”
Naji stumbled, flailing, into the patient room, and a person lying on a metal table lifted his head up at the movement.
The person’s smiled the strongest with his eyes, as the actual grin across his cheeks shone dulled. Still, despite all his apparent exhaustion, Jorge seemed happy to see Naji enter the room.
He even forced that tired smile wider as he greeted the boy with a hushed yet friendly, “Hey, Naji.”
Naji stared back.
Jorge looked… not dead.
It was actually, legitimately shocking how very not dead Jorge looked.
The last Naji had seen Jorge, the guy had been pale and bloodied, his shirt and neck still drenched in nothing but red, his voice hoarse and a dark, dark color forming an ominous crescent beneath both eyes- a perfect, fading Cheshire cat smile of a dark crescent that Naji had felt assured could’ve only been the grin of death itself appearing on Jorge’s skin.
But now that was all gone.
Jorge looked alive. He looked well, now shirtless and having been cleaned of all remaining red as he sat up slowly on the metal table. Gone were the dark crescents and gray, clammy color. His skin was clean, refreshed, healthy- without any knife cuts or scars blemishing it. After being relieved for a millisecond, Naji glanced again and winced to see a purple spot welting up near Jorge’s collarbone. Naji worried momentarily if his power somehow caused that, and he was in the process of kicking himself for being such a big failure right up until Jorge smiled again, bright and alive, and Naji realized with a start that, wait, Jorge was actually still alive.
Naji almost couldn’t believe it.
He wanted to tear up with joy, relief- perhaps even a strange swelling of confidence, perhaps- but then Paola snapped from behind, “So Bhatti, what do you see wrong with your patient there?” and Naji deflated once more, much like an elated balloon that happily flew too high before getting sucked straight into a jet engine turbine.
Following her cue, Naji glanced over Jorge, saw nothing wrong, and began sweating bullets.
This is it, oh no, this is it.
The mantra repeated in Naji’s head like a prayer before certain death.
Naji could feel his palms becoming slick and sweaty with the stress. His mind raced as it rationalized what would happen next.
Paola, being an actual healer as far as Naji knew, could of course tell when somebody was actually healed or not, having all those fancy energy-sensing abilities the good, lucky healers tended to get. Just like the abilities Chief Velaquez had, and Naji had been scared to death when the Chief Healer had called him out for having no healing ability. Paola, Naji reasoned, had sensed the same thing too about Jorge’s heal. Now she was giving him a chance, an opportunity to either prove her wrong and sense Jorge’s heal being wrong, or giving him a chance to fess up and admit the truth.
That he wasn’t a healer.
That he didn’t deserve the job. The title. The… safety.
Naji’s sweat-coated palms closed in on themselves, and his fingernails, which were in desperate need of a cut, dug deep marks into his palm lines.
No. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t admit those things. Although he was still on the Frontlines, Naji knew just how much worse it could be for him. What he’d been taught from the school, about which powers were better suited for what, and what those expectations were, what they’d make him do, and-
Naji’s heart beat, fast and frantic, in his chest.
No. No, no, no.
He couldn’t tell the truth, never. Naji knew he would never survive it.
He had to survive.
He had to lie, and so, Naji did.
“I don’t, um,” Naji bluffed, “see anything wrong? If there is, I guess it was, um, something I overlooked? But I don’t see, um-”
“Anything?” Paola prompted, “Anything wrong at all?”
Expecting the worse, Naji gulped, and he shook his head.
Her grin spread wide, Paola reached out and slapped Naji playfully but forcefully above his ear. “Exactly Bhatti, exactly!”
“Huh?” said Naji, holding his hurt head.
“Don’t look so lost, you absolute space-case,” Paola rolled her eyes, “Get with the program. He’s fine, Bhatti. God, believe in yourself a little more, will you?”
“HUH?” Naji repeated, and maybe that smack to the skull had damaged something because now his eyes were definitely bulging.
Jorge, from his seat on the metal table, laughed a bit at Naji’s incredulity.
“Dude,” he said to Naji, reassuringly, “You didn’t need to worry so much about me! I’m really fine now! You saved my freakin’ life dude, that’s a like, A plus in my book-”
“Don’t flatter him too much,” Paola interjected sourly, “He’ll get a big head. It was more like a B minus.”
“And ‘sides,” Jorge continued, “My power took care of all the minor stuff anyway, so you had nothing to worry about when it came to the heal being rushed, or whatever.”
This comment made Naji blink. The cogs turned in his stunned mind, reviving the processing power that was his brain, and Naji slowly formed a careful, necessary question-
“… What’s your power?”
Looking a bit sheepish, Jorge began his answer with an awkward sort of laugh.
“I suppose? It’s kinda useless compare to like, Sammy’s or even life-saving healing stuff or a leader’s power, but like, it kinda cool I guess. I mean. I like it, but I would like it more if-” His face scrunched up here, contorting before relaxing with a sigh. He then said, simply, “Look, it’s just not a power I think was deserving of me getting stuck on this island for, but them’s the breaks, huh?” He gave another awkward laugh here, this one more hallowed instead of embarrassed, and Naji felt the emotion pang deep in his ribcage. Despite that bitter statement, Jorge seemed to do the opposite of sober up, and he grew brighter as he continued with, “So, yeah. Anyway my power is like, basically my body is in top physical form at all times? So I’ve never gotten sick after my power developed, even when a nasty flu was going around base a while back, and I have this small healing factor to me too? Though it’s nothing spectacular, like it won’t heal something uber deadly right away, so Naji, I’m really glad that, out of everyone, you chose to waste all your awesome healer energy on me.” Jorge ended that sentence with a sly wink towards Naji, grinning dumbly all the while, as if he’d honestly meant that last bit.

taffy789 • 1 April 2017 at 1:05 AM

Naji took the compliment, but his brain had kicked into overdrive, piecing the puzzle together, Paola not finding anything wrong with Jorge, Jorge being completely healed, Jorge’s power…
It clicked easily, of course, as a baby with the knowledge of what only Naji knew could have figured it out.
Naji stared at Jorge for a split second following the revelation before realizing the guy looked puzzled over his lack of response and frozen state of being.
It was now Naji’s turn to awkwardly laugh.
“Haha, yeah,” he said, sweating with a cold relief, “It was sure a good thing I was there, to heal you up like that, with my… healing… power…”
…
Although this statement only caused Jorge and now Paola to look MORE confused, a loud voice exclaiming, “Dude! You didn’t mention the best part of your power!” caused all three heads in the room to simultaneously swivel to the doorway and react in three completely different ways.
Naji’s eyes widened in surprise, Paola’s brow set in a stern, solid quiver of utter fury, and a large, alive, down-right delighted grin spread, wide and shining, on Jorge’s face.
Samuel rushed further into the room, exclaiming to his friend, “Tell them about the muscles dude, it’s so friggin’ unfair!”
Immediately, a hand shot out and pressed hard into Samuel’s face, grabbing it.
“Oh NO YOU DON’T,” Paola raged, “I’ve had enough of you, enough of it! Like I said before, get the heck out of the patient care area and sit your BUTT back in the waiting room, else I’m going to make you be back here for a long time, as a patient yourself.”
Although that threat had carried enough heat to reduce Naji to a pile of ash, Samuel seemed cool against all the flaming fury.
His voice muffled by Paola’s hand, Sammy managed to get out a defiant, “But that defeats the purpose of wanting me out of here, doesn’t it?”
Reaching her boiling point, Paola exploded.
“THAT’S THE POINT! IT’S IRONY YOU DUMB SHHHhhhhgrrAH!” She hissed, her implosion fizzling out, and she roughly pushed Samuel back by his face. “Just get out already,” she snapped, “you’re going to mess up the delicate healing process of my patient-”
From the metal table, Jorge gasped, scandalized. “Sammy? What, no way!” He shook his head, insisting, “Sammy couldn’t hurt my healing. Like, just look at all that shaggy yellow hair!” Jorge grinned, “Obviously, Sammy here is a good substitute for a big golden retriever therapy dog, so he can’t do anything BUT help…”
Unamused, Paola shot a frown towards Jorge before turning to Samuel to glare at him.
Samuel only grinned in response.
“Woof,” he said, convincingly.
Apparently having enough of this nonsense, Paola threw her hands up in the air. Sharply, she turned to Naji, saying, “Make sure these idiots don’t kill themselves. I’m going to get some forms to fill out to kick this patient out of my tent as fast as humanly possible.” With that, she stormed out of the patient operating room and out of sight.
Naji gulped with the responsibility given to him, but he quickly realized that he had no hope in controlling the two “idiots” as he turned back to see what they were doing.
Jorge had swung his feet off the side of the metal table, grinning as his friend rushed to his side.
Samuel paused when he closed in on Jorge, wavering for a slight second as he glanced his friend over with a concerned gaze. As that initial worry faded, the grin broke out again, and Samuel unflinchingly shot a fist out and punched Jorge on the arm.
“Dude,” he warned, shaking his head with good humor, “if you refer to me as a dog ever again, I’m seriously going to beat you up. I like, went with it, sure, but I think a part of me died on the inside. So degrading, man.”
While rolling his eyes, Jorge overdramatically rubbed at the spot Samuel had hit him.
“Threatening me with being beat up already?” Now dropping his expression in a tragic show of aghast, mock sadness, he placed a hand over his heart, as if being punched had affected him emotionally. “I died, Sammy,” Jorge said seriously, “I died for your sins, and this. THIS is how you repay me.”
At the mention of Jorge dying, Samuel sucked in a deep, sharp breath before letting it out in one quick inhale and saying in the same action, “Already using that against me, huh Jorge? ‘Eff you Jorge, you huge pile of crap for a friend.”
Naji moved closer to the two, not interrupting, but now joining the conversational space just behind Samuel. Being that much closer made it so Jorge’s next bright, genuinely delighted laugh rung all that louder in Naji’s ears.
“Anyway dude,” Samuel continued, slapping a hand on Jorge’s shoulder, “Put a freakin’ shirt on, ya hippie.”
“I don’t think all the bleach in the world can save my old one buddy.”
“A different one then,” Samuel rolled his eyes. “Also though,” he pointed to the bruise on Jorge’s neck, “might want to ask for a turtleneck to hide that, loverboy.”
Confused, Jorge’s hand traveled to the bruise, and he snorted upon realizing what Samuel had meant.
“Please don’t tell me that scary healer lady gave it to ya,” Samuel teased.
“Nah,” Jorge replied easily, “but she did say it looked like either somebody tried to strangle me during that fight, or that somebody put too much pressure on my wound…”
At that, Samuel rubbed at the back of his neck. “Aha. Oops.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Jorge shrugged. “You’re the one having to live with the fact that when people ask me why I have a bruise on my neck, I’m going to have to reply like, ‘Oh, that? Sammy gave it to me’…”
Barking with laughter, Samuel smacked him again on the arm, exclaiming, “You idiot!”
Naji had inched even closer now, close enough for Samuel to notice the guy’s presence between his continued snickering with Jorge.
Seeing Naji again, Samuel eyes shone with a remembered something, and he turned to Jorge, saying, “Dude. I just remembered. Stop selling your power short, tell Naji here the good stuff.”
“Man,” Jorge complained, “don’t start on that.”

awesomeness • 1 April 2017 at 1:06 AM

“Okay Naji so get this,” Samuel said, turning quickly to Naji while, behind him, Jorge’s head dropped into both his hands. “So Jorge’s body is always at top physical condition for the most part or whatever, so he doesn’t get winded when running for a while and not as tired even when going without a lot of sleep, and he can practically eat anything he wants without getting chunky, which is already super unfair but like. The worst part is that he gains muscles like seriously easily? Like I’m over here trying to seriously put in some effort to try and get freakin’ ripped, and Jorge lifts one twenty pound dumbbell and is JACKED.”
“I still have skinny arms,” Jorge contested.
“Yeah because you don’t care,” Samuel retorted, “you COULD have some serious anchor-arms type crap going on, but you’re dumb and take for granted this glorious gift bestowed upon you.” He looked at Naji, adding, “I’m stuck with these lame sparky fists while Jorge over here gets the promise of eternal good health with no effort on his part. It’s terrible.”
“Your sparky fists are cool though,” Jorge chimed in.
“You know what’s really cool?” Samuel snorted, “Doing one push-up and being good for the rest of the week. Like, dude. It’s seriously unnatural. I can’t even explain it, like, Naji, you need to see for yourself, feel his arms, dude.”
Naji had felt lost in the conversation of comparing the pros and cons of powers, having remembered the deeply contrasting mending and ripping effects of his own horribly conflicting power. When Samuel said his name, however, Naji had jumped out of his own swirling thoughts. When Naji slowly realized what Samuel had asked for him, he blinked, looked at the frown on Jorge’s face, and replied with a slow, “Um, no thanks.”
While Jorge looked grateful, Samuel grabbed the protesting Naji’s hand and put it on Jorge’s arm.
“What?” Naji exclaimed, “I don’t, um, want to-” He cut himself off upon feeling the pure firm muscle of Jorge’s arm.
It really was surprising, mainly because neither Jorge and Samuel had appeared as particularly beefy to Naji. Both boys were incredibly similar in height and stature; they were both moreso the tall, twiggy looking type. To Naji, this gangly growing height was only emphasized by their natural humor and excitability, making them have an even more goofy, awkward appearance than their personalities gave them already. Naji could’ve likened them more to two oversized, playfully greyhounds than anything less gawky looking.
However, Jorge, at least, was nothing but pure muscle underneath those lanky, scrawny-looking arms.
Seeing Naji’s surprise, Samuel laughed, exclaiming, “Right!?”
It was at that moment, with Samuel giggling and Naji’s squeezing an exasperated Jorge’s arm, that Paola decided to walk in and clear her throat, loudly.
As the three guys all turned to her, she leveled her gaze at all of them, sighed, and decided it wasn’t worth her time.
“I’m not even gunna ask,” she muttered. “Anyway,”
Flushing, Naji pulled his hands off of Jorge’s arm and began to wonder if his and Paola’s entire relationship will consist of nothing but her finding him in awkward situation after awkward situation. First the fan, and now…
“Naji,” Paola continued on, “I need you to go do some work for once. Go to Dylan’s office for me and pull these patient forms for me, from one of his filing cabinets or his desk or somewhere. Look for a paper with this header and you’ll find it.”
Naji frowned at the paper Paola handed to him. Really not wanting to run into the Chief Healer at any point in his life, ever again, Naji ventured to ask, “Um, I don’t really know if I could find this easily… Could you do it?”
“Look Bhatti,” Paola replied, “You know how I feel about slacking off of simple tasks, and you already left me with an entire waiting room full of people to heal up, just because you say you’re tired or some bs. I have some words to say to you about that later, but for right now, secondly,” a grimace crossed her face, “Dylan’s been holed away in his office all day, not helping me with a single freakin’ thing around here. That lazy sack of crap has made me super pissy, and if I see his mug, Bhatti, I think I might punch him. So, in summary” Paola glared at Naji, “Go do the thing because I said so.”
All those words being scary enough for Naji to want to leave the room without any more convincing, he quickly yelped out an “Okay then!”, clutched the paper Paola had given him as reference, and rushed out of the patient operating room.

taffy789 • 3 April 2017 at 11:38 PM

Naji took his time finding Chief Velazquez’s office again.
He wandered the long, singular hall of the medical tent slowly.
As he turned the paper Paola gave him in his hands, Naji thought about how lucky he really, really was- er, relatively speaking.
The plastic walls of the medical tent shook slightly from the wind outside, but despite whatever sand swirled around hitting the others outside it, inside, Naji was safe. Secure. Free from most of the wind, and sand, and sweat, and all that death.
Naji shivered, not thinking about being outside, but instead thinking about where he should be, with his power.
Where Naji knew he actually belonged.
It wasn’t in the medical tent.
He’d been playing medic since the school, since he learned what was expected from powers that could destroy and rip apart. Naji had shrunk away from being a soldier, and though medical duty had its own scares and responsibilities, Naji wouldn’t be expected to put his life on the line when his job was to save lives.
No, killing or being killed wasn’t the job of a healer; that work was suited more for the soldaditos, or even… Samuel and Jorge, given their roles on the front lines. Although Naji felt bad for his tentmates having to be in such a scary position, he sure was glad he wasn’t in their shoes.
The frog shower curtain that compromised the door to Chief Velazquez’s office greeted Naji as he approached his destination. The one-eyed frog from before winked a hello at him, his body still half-hidden behind the taped up sign. Naji acknowledged the frog before rustling the curtains and calling out a wary “Um, may I come in?” in hopes the Chief Healer would be more forgiving about interruptions if Naji asked nicely.
… There was no response.
Afraid of angering Chief Velazquez by barging in, as the lack of response could be a cruel, horrid test, just like last time, Naji waited a good fifteen minutes outside the office.
… As all that time passed, it dawned upon Naji that either the Chief Healer would strike him down for entering without permission, or Paola would murder him for taking too much time retrieving the forms. Naji groaned as he realized he’d been effectively trapped between a rock and a hard place by his terrifying co-workers. Summoning up the will to make a decision, Naji hesitantly pulled a sliver of frog curtain back, and he peeked into the office.
It was empty.
After another pause of decision-making, Naji entered the empty office.
The two chairs, one comfortably cushioned and one all jagged metal, sat unoccupied, facing a cold metal desk absent of any human presence.
Naji skirted around the chairs and desk, heading to the wall behind the desk that was lined with short metal filing cabinets.
He brushed the back of his hand- his left one, on the uninjured arm- against the top of the cabinet, and he noted the room temperature feel of the metal. The cabinets were a comforting sight, recalling to Naji’s mind all the ease of filing paperwork back at the school, which they made him do often when he helped out in the nurse’s office. It had been such an easy, non-lethal task, and Naji bitterly missed it.
It made him almost want to shed tears over his dumb luck, he got put on IOD as a field medic, of all things…
Naji sniffled a bit, resigning to the facts. The good healer jobs, as Naji had learned at the school, went to the healers who could actually heal, of course. Those like Paola and Dylan got sent to IOD and were able to stay on the front lines or sit on reserve back at base. There were only a set number of field medics, and the field medics were usually the… expendable healers.
Naji knew this shouldn’t hurt him as much as it did, considering he wasn’t even a healer in the first place, but the added assurance of his own uselessness still stung.
Wiping his hand against the cabinet again, Naji gazed into his own reflection and sniffled again, sucking the tears back into his eyes.
When he’d found out he was going to be a field medic, Naji had felt his heart bang wildly against his ribs, as if trying to burst from his chest and race away from his soon-to-be-dead body. He’d been terrified, he’d been terrified of it all.
Although, despite the terror Naji had felt then, Naji knew there was… less to be terrified about now.
Because, like Samuel had told him, field medics weren’t exactly…. expected to fight.
Naji’s hands twittered guiltily against the metal cabinet. Feeling a rush of anxious energy, he bent over, pulled open a cabinet drawer, and began looking for the forms Paola had told him to find.
Despite this distraction, his swirling, guilty thoughts did not abandon him.
Samuel had explained Naji’s job to him with those smiling words of, “let me and Jorge take care of you”, and he’d been so pleasant about it too. That was the agreed upon relationship, right? That Naji, being a field medic, couldn’t fight back, so others would fight for him, and he, in return, would… heal…
The boy wanted to start sniffling again, but he gulped instead, swallowing both the shame and the blooming lump in his throat.
But- but- but! Naji’s mind interrupted, daring to hope, to try to justify its own actions, But you DID save Jorge, so it’s okay! Everything is fine!
A strangled noise escaped Naji’s throat at this thought, and he fought himself, wrestled with the second intrusive idea of don’t pretend as if you knew you wouldn’t have killed him, and tears sprang to Naji’s eyes again. No, no-! He couldn’t handle many things, and possibly at the top of the list of things he could not handle was this, was these two opposing thoughts clashing so brutally inside his mind-!
Naji slammed the cabinet drawer shut, and he yelped as he nearly squashed one of his own fingers. He jerked away from the cabinet, skittering backwards, towards Chief Velazquez’s desk. As he did this, his foot made contact with something that made a soft “tink” noise, and Naji hastily glanced downwards to see a glass bottle rolling lazily underneath the desk. Curiosity biting at him, Naji squatted and climbed underneath the desk. He carefully picked up the large, slender bottle, and he turned it in his hands before lifting the opening up to his nose, and-
Naji gagged at the strong, distinctive odor wafting out of the bottle.
He quickly held the bottle away from his face while the teachings of his father resurfaced in his mind at full, vivid force. Yeah- Naji decided after reliving a thorough explanation of why he shouldn’t look forward to turning twenty-one for the same reasons others in his neighborhood did- though he certainly wasn’t the most religious in his family (a definite, shameful understatement), he still didn’t want to be touching the stuff, for any reason.
He was about to place the bottle back under the desk when a loud SLAP rang on the metal desk above him, and Naji jolted up, banging his head on the desk as he did.
He groaned in pain, and a cool, low voice spoke, “Oh, Naji Bhatti, is that you..?”
Recognizing the cruel voice of his boss anywhere, Naji froze like a deer in headlights.
A sigh sounded off from somewhere above him.
“Get out from under my desk, Naji Bhatti.”

awesomeness • 3 April 2017 at 11:53 PM

Making fearful noises of compliance, Naji flung the bottle to the side, scrambled out from underneath the desk, and stood up. He was now nose-to-collarbone with the imposing figure of Chief Velazquez.
The taller man lowered judging, critical eyes at Naji, and when he spoke down to him, Naji could smell that distinctive odor from the bottle curling off the man’s tongue.
“I see your back from your mission alive, hmm?”
Naji stiffly nodded his head.
“You’re back in one piece?”
Naji stiffly nodded again.
One eyebrow raising at that reply, Chief Velazquez’s looked to Naji’s arm, and Naji winced as he felt the healer’s knowing gaze pierce into his wound.
Smiling with his mouth but not his dulled, tired eyes, Chief Velazquez held a hand out to Naji.
“Well, let’s see about that, shall we?”
Swallowing his fear, Naji lifted his injured arm to the healer’s hand, well aware of the sweat dripping from his right armpit at the motion.
Chief Velazquez took his sweet time to unwrap the bloody gauze around Naji’s wound. When it finally fell away, he inspected the arm, humming with quiet “ohs” and “ahs” as he forced Naji to uncomfortably wait for the verdict.
After what felt like a lifetime, Chief Velazquez grasped Naji’s arm with tender, uncharacteristic softness, taking care not to touch any of the dried blood with his ungloved hands.
“So,” he said, smiling pleasantly down at Naji, “learn anything new on this mission? Or did your power simply stick to, ah, closing wounds?”
The shift in tone made Naji almost pee himself. His gut tightened, and he tried to think of what to say, a clever lie to tell his boss. The only thoughts surfacing to Naji’s mind, however, were of the bloody, ripping face of the Falchion inches in front of him; of the hungry pink viciously spreading; of the Falchion screaming as his skin tore and his flesh-
Naji blabbered out, without thinking, just lying reflexively, “Aha- just-t s-stuck to the wounds, um, sir.”
Chief Velazquez snorted. “I forgot how much I liked that sir thing,” he muttered to himself. His fingers tapped against the underside of Naji’s arm. He continued, “So, tell me. Why didn’t you try to close your own wound up right here?”
“Well,” Naji stammered, “f-funny st-tory…”
“I better be laughing, Naji Bhatti,” Chief Velazquez smiled.
“Sit’s not really funny!” Naji yelped, and he tried to jerk his arm back from the malicious healer, but the other man’s fingers wrapped tighter around the limb in response. Naji let the arm dangle, limp. “So, I, um, I tried to close my wound, and everybody else’s, but my other team mate, Jorge, got really hurt-”
“Save the explanation there,” Chief Velazquez interrupted, “I know all about the boy you saved. It’s my medical tent, after all.”
“R-right.” Naji gulped. “S-so. Um. After closing Jorge’s wound, I felt, um, really drained, and I couldn’t-”
“Close anyone else’s wounds?” Chief Velazquez finished for the boy. His eyes then narrowed sharply, and his tongue clicked once, unimpressed. Then his pitch lowered, and he said, scathingly, like Naji had been thrown suddenly into boiling water, “Ah, but I suppose, Naji Bhatti, that restructuring bone doesn’t count as closing wounds, and so you had plenty of energy for that, correct?”
“Aha-ha, ah,” Naji laughed weakly, out loud, but in his mind only one pained thought raced across it: “Oh crap.”
Chief Velazquez’s hold on Naji’s arm grew vengeful, personal.
“Naji Bhatti,” the man spoke carefully, “One of us is healer enough here to sense a poor attempt at a heal when he senses it. The other?” He darted cutting eyes over Naji, “The other? I’m not so sure of, anymore.” The long fingers bit more into Naji’s sensitive, bruised flesh, and tears sprung to the corners of Naji’s eyes. Staring at his boss and resisting the urge to fall over and play dead, Naji watched as the man sneered, cruelly, before demanding, “I’ve asked you once before, Naji Bhatti, and I so hate to repeat myself. Tell me. What are the exact capabilities of your power?”
“J-just!” Naji pathetically whimpered, feeling small, oh-so small under the gaze of the Chief Healer. “It’s just closing wounds!”
All ten of Chief Velazquez’s fingers dug into Naji’s arm, and the boy cried out with the sharp pain.
“Remember,” the glaring healer warned as he applied a spiteful, continuous pressure to either side of Naji’s wound, “remember clearly, Naji Bhatti, before you chose your next words. Remember how I feel about people walking into my medical tent and trying to lie to my face.”
Naji began to snivel, and Chief Velazquez demanded again, moving his own face inches away from the boy’s, “What are you not telling me about your power, Bhatti.”
Naji felt all of time stand still.
The tears halted as they rolled down his cheeks, the agitated, fresh blood stopped dripping from his wound, and the vile words of Chief Velazquez froze right before they could leave his sneering lips.
Time froze, and so did the racing, frightened fears running through Naji’s mind. His head cleared, and he had time to think.
He thought about telling Chief Velazquez the truth, right now.
It would be the easiest thing to do, to stop the pain; to clear his conscious and lift the burden of guilt and deceit from his chest. To rid himself of the responsibility of acting as a healer; to renounce the false promise of life he’d claimed when he’d taken on the title. To give himself up and become what he should’ve been from the start.
A regular soldier.
It would be so easy.
Simple. Clean. Truthful. Just. Correct.
And yet when Naji thought about that future, he could see nothing but the bright, burning promise of death at the end. Above him, it shone so brilliantly and beckoned him as if he was a moth and it was a flame.
It would be so easy to fly into this light, so easy that it almost seemed like the unquestionably right thing to do.
And perhaps. Somebody with a better moral compass leading to the right, somebody like a soldadito perhaps, would gladly fly up and meet death if it meant doing what was right for the ‘mission’.
Naji, however, did not feel as so inclined.
Time began speeding up, slowly, like viscous honey crawling down the side of a jar.
Naji found his breath first, then his voice, then his final, desperate resolve.
If he told Chief Velazquez the truth, he would die. If he lied, and Chief Velazquez continued to hurt him until he was forced to tell the truth, he would die then too.
But at least the second option gave him a chance.
So when time unstuck completely, and Chief Velazquez looked expectantly at him, Naji opened his mouth and resigned himself to sinking deeper into the endless, black pit of lies he’d already dug for himself.
“I’m- I’m just,” Naji whispered, his voice wavering and his eyes cast ashamedly down, remorsefully at his boss’ feet. “I’m. I’m just a useless healer.”
The hands around his arm remained gripped as tight as ever.
Naji wiped at his moist eyes with the back of his free hand.
The pressure of his arm was replaced with a soft, warm glow that made Naji gasp with how unexpectedly nice it felt.
His eyes shot back up to the man healing his arm, and Naji recoiled at the sight of the genuinely fake smile plastered against Chief Velazquez’s cheeks.
“Well, Naji Bhatti~” Chief Velazquez hummed, seamlessly fixing Naji’s arm with one slow wave of his hand, “If healer’s the game you’re choosing to play~” He looked at Naji, once over, as if seeing the boy clearly for the first time.
“So be it.”

taffy789 • 5 April 2017 at 10:21 PM

Right after Naji’s arm had been healed, a series of belting rings echoed down the hall and into the office space, and Chief Velazquez cursed Paola’s name. As he grimaced and held his head, as if suffering from a migraine, he groaned to himself, “I swear an hour of my life disappears every time she does that.”
Desperate to get out of the current situation, Naji shakily informed his boss about Paola needing those forms, and he shuddered when his boss replied back, smiling, “Well, let’s go give them to her, then.”
Having wanted to use that an excuse to leave the office space alone with the forms in hand, Naji uncomfortably stood, waiting as Chief Velazquez went through the motions of finding the forms and preparing to leave his office. Naji watched as his boss grabbed the forms, paused, and then dug through the drawers of his desk to pull out a bottle of mouthwash. Naji continued to stare as Chief Velazquez swished the mouthwash, grabbed the empty glass bottle from underneath his desk, and casually spit into it. He replaced the bottle underneath the desk, and winked at Naji while dabbing a small amount of mouthwash onto his hand.
“Not technically supposed to be drinking that,” he explained to the boy as he dabbed the mouthwash around his neck as if it were a cologne, “But you won’t tell Paola, right Naji Bhatti? I know how you feel about secrets, after all~”
Of course after that, Naji vehemently assured Chief Velazquez that, no, his lips were sealed shut, tight, never to be opened again. Chief Velazquez laughed a little at this, saying “Good.” before pushing Naji out of his office and back to the room where Paola and the others were waiting.

To say Paola was unhappy at seeing who tagged along with Naji would be the gravest understatement anyone could possibly make. She tensed upon seeing her boss walk into the room, her eyes narrowed, and she stop-mid reply to whatever snarky comment Samuel had tossed her way.
“Dylan,” she greeted, all monotone while lapsing into that familiar passiveness, “It didn’t think you were alive anymore. You haven’t been out of your office all day.”
“Ah,” Chief Velazquez said with an unkind smile, “Don’t flatter yourself by thinking I was avoiding you, or some self-centered thought along those lines. I had much important work to attend to.”
He blew past Paola, and the girl wrinkled her nose in disgust as he passed.
“Did that important work involve drowning yourself in a bottle of Listerine?” she bit back, before grumpily flipping through some papers on a clipboard in her hands.
Ignoring Paola’s comment, the healer approached where Jorge sat on the table. He smiled again that fake smile, this time directed towards Jorge, who looked mildly uncomforted by its presence.
“Now those formalities are out of the way,” the healer began, walking to a cabinet and snatching some rubber gloves from it, “let’s get started on business. How do you feel?”
To Naji and anyone else present in the room, Jorge still looked very uncomfortable, sitting perched and half-dressed on top of the metal table like that. Samuel, standing to the side and looking disgruntled, seemed to pick up on his friend’s discomfort, and his expression contorted to match Paola’s own grumpy expression.
Chief Velazquez had pulled on the gloves, and now was pulling on a blue surgeon’s mask, and to herself but loudly, Paola scoffed at these “overboard” precautions.
Still ignoring the girl, Chief Velazquez looked at Jorge again, glancing him over before asking, “It’s strange. You came to me last night in a frenzy about wanting to stop a mission, and yet you’re here because you went on it yourself. I find it highly bizarre that you’d volunteer so willingly to fight alongside those soldaditos, considering you’re not much the soldadito type yourself, correct?”
Jorge opened his mouth to reply to that, but he was too slow, and a fuming Samuel beat him to the punch.
“Funny how you’d find it strange that we volunteered to help out,” Samuel snapped at the healer, “since you can’t seem to grasp the idea of helping anyone else out yourself.”
Paola jolted at this exclamation. She turned to Samuel, and her eyes widened a bit, and Naji gulped when he saw a big, excited grin blare out on her face.
She looked as if she’d just made a new best friend, and the thought of Paola actually having best friends was a whole new kind of terror for Naji to imagine.
Jorge coughed a bit at Samuel’s comment, and though his mouth was not visible beneath that surgeon’s mask, Naji could see the dark frown in Chief Velazquez’s eyes.
Samuel frowned right back, waiting for the healer to speak again, but Paola broke the silence before that could happen. She interjected almost too giddily, “Wow, Dylan. You’ve met with these two before? I’m sure your sparkling personality made the perfect impression on them. At least they seem to think as highly as you as you deserve to be thought of. Though not as highly as you think yourself as, but I think asking for that much praise would be a little much, right?”
Samuel grinned at Paola. “This healer guy made the best impression, yeah. I won’t be forgetting his face anytime sure, that’s right.”
“Dylan’s face does often linger with you in a haunting way,” Paola replied easily, “I’m not surprised you’re having trouble forgetting it, it’s one you certainly remember for all the wrong reasons.”
“Paola,” Chief Velazquez suddenly snapped, twisting his head towards the young woman, “you and your new little friend are distracting me from my patient.”
“The patient you wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been such a-” Samuel was cut off by a female’s voice lashing out with even more venom, “Your patient? Ha. Fine. If you want to suddenly start working today, take my patient, be my guest. You healing someone would be a first, for sure, one for the record books.”
“Oh Paola,” Chief Velazquez sighed, turning his back to the girl and choosing to focus on Jorge instead. He spoke without turning around to even acknowledge Paola. “You don’t need to worry about me commandeering your patients. In fact, feel free to leave and deal with those waiting in the lobby. All those injured patients can be yours. You need the practice, after all, and since you’re so concerned with me pushing in on your workload…” He trailed off. Paola’s body went ridged with fury, and Naji saw the smirk in Chief Velazquez’s eyes as he finished with a soft, “So, Paola, you’re welcome.”
The young woman, shaking with rage, gritted out a signature “Bite me Dylan, flipped on her heels, and stormed out of the room.
“Take your new friend with you as well,” Chief Velazquez called after Paola. She didn’t vocally respond, but Naji saw a certain finger be thrown behind her right before she disappeared out of his line of sight.
Still with his back to the door, Chief Velazquez sighed, and he muttered, “Ah. She threw the bird at me, didn’t she..?”
“Totally,” Samuel replied easily, “And also pal? You should know I’m not going anywhere. If you can’t tell, I didn’t exactly like the way you treated Jorge and me yesterday, and I sure as heck didn’t like you getting Naji-” At this mention of his name, Naji stiffened with fear, and he began to make frantic, silent, “No no no!” hand wave motions at Samuel, who continued to defend him, oblivious to Naji’s warnings to stop- “mixed up in all this soldadito mission stuff. It’s messed up, and you better believe we’re going to have some freakin’ words-”
“Okay,” Chief Velazquez said.
“Okay?” Samuel echoed, surprised.
Chief Velazquez whipped around to Samuel and took two steps into the boy’s personal space, standing an inch taller yet posturing as if he towered over all present.
“Here’s some words.” Chief Velazquez said without emotion. “Get out of my medical tent.”
“Excuse me?” Samuel colored a dangerous red.
“Get out of my medical tent,” Chief Velazquez repeated, “Now.”
Samuel’s hands formed into tight fists, and Naji was familiar with this sight of rage, and he nearly expected Samuel’s hands to start sparking orange-
“Hey,” a softer voice sighed from the operating table. Jorge was sitting up, waving towards the door and smiling at his friend, “Faster we get this done, faster I and we and everyone else gets out of here.”
Jorge caught Samuel’s eyes, and Naji saw a mute conversation pass between them, conveyed in pouts and eye rolls and a variety other sequential facial expressions that Naji could not decipher meaning from. Samuel, however, seemed to get the jist of it because he slowly deflated, glared up at Chief Velazquez, and then slunk spitefully out of the room.
Sighing, Jorge lifted his feet up on the table, bringing his knees to his chin. When Chief Velazquez looked back to his patient, Jorge fearlessly met his eyes and gave a goofy grin.
“So, doc, lay it on me,” he joked, “I have two days to live? What is it, tell me, I can handle it, I’m a tough boy.”
Surprisingly to Naji, one of Chief Velazquez’s eyebrows lifted in a show of…. amusement?
“Nothing like that,” Chief Velazquez replied, all signs of fury smoothed back into a cold, impersonal monotone, “But as a Chief Healer of this base, it’s my duty to see to it that my underlings are progressing how I wish for them to progress. And,” Naji’s heart stopped beating as that dangerous glint shone again in his boss’ eye, “And I am aware that our very own Naji Bhatti saved your life on the mission today, correct? Of course I need to double check his work, but first, I was truthful in saying how unexpected your injury came to me, so I do have a few questions about that as well…”
Naji’s heart now frosted over completely, growing still with fear, never again to pump blood to any of his vital organs. That he would be brain dead and unfeeling within seconds of the start of Chief Velazquez’s inquiries, Naji could only hope.

awesomeness • 7 April 2017 at 12:19 AM

“Uh,” Jorge hesitated, “I’ll try to answer your questions, sure.”
“First things first then,” Chief Velazquez said, glancing the guy over, “What had Paola said about the condition of your wound when she’d looked it over?”
“She didn’t find anything wrong,” Jorge answered honestly, “Naji did good work.”
“Really.” Chief Velazquez asked with flat surprise. He walked around the metal table Jorge sat on, now facing Naji and the doorway with Jorge between both of them. From over Jorge and the table, Naji saw his boss make pointed eye contact with him. Chief Velazquez then prodded further, knowingly, while staring right at Naji, “Jorge, is it? Jorge, may I ask, does your power have a… healing factor to it?”
Jorge squinted, recoiling a bit from the oddly specific guess. “Uh. Yeah.” Cautiously, he glanced between the smug healer and the now (more than usually) distressed Naji. Appearing to sense something had occurred- perhaps rightly assuming a battle to injury Naji had raged that Chief Velazquez had won- Jorge immediately added, defensively, “But Naji had healed my wound before my healing factor could even do anything. He saved my life, he healed me, not my power.”
At that statement, that false, false yet spoken so candid, statement, Naji felt sweat begin to pool around the collar of his shirt, and he felt hot, and uncomfortable.
Chief Velazquez smiled again with those cruel, cold, merciless and unforgiving eyes. Without speaking to the patient, he put a latex glove on Jorge’s knee and pressed his legs down, so the guy was in a less closed off position. Not seeming to appreciate this, Jorge grimaced but said nothing.
“So,” Chief Velazquez continued conversationally. He pressed two finger tips to the bruise on Jorge’s collarbone, which Jorge grunted out a displeased, “Watch the merchandise” at. “Jorge, I still am wondering why you went on today's mission, and I can’t help but feel as if I was somehow an influence on you and your friend volunteering for that recon mission today, considering everything I know.”
“You think?” Jorge muttered, but winced as the fingers prodded a particularly sensitive area of the bruise.
“I do,” Chief Velazquez answered easily, taking no extra care as he callously examined the injury. “Obviously we have a common link between us here, I’m not blind, nor am I deaf. You and your friend are both angry with me about Naji’s training.”
“Uh, I, yeah, I, uh, Naji-” Naji saw Jorge glance towards him for a quick second, but another stinging, deliberate press of the healer’s fingers had the guy yelping and twisting vengefully back to Chief Velazquez. Agitated, Jorge pushed the guy’s hands away from him.
“Yeah, you can say I’m pretty effin’ peeved,” Jorge snapped, which surprised Naji, for he’d never expected Jorge to be the one to sound so aggravated. It had surprised Naji when Samuel had first showed fury, but now that was nearly commonplace, considering the presence of the soldaditos. Jorge, on the other hand, had seemed much slower to anger, and the last thing Naji had expected was-
“Actually, I think you’re pretty effin’ crappy for sending Naji on that mission to begin with, dude,” Jorge continued, glaring at Chief Velazquez.
-The last thing Naji had expected- and this hit him hard, in the gut, all at once with the weight of it all- was Jorge getting mad on his behalf.
“Now,” Chief Velazquez now held both gloved hands in the air, as if surrendering, “you realize why I did that, right? Naji needed practice. I didn’t do it out of malice, I-”
“What you did was send him out with some soldaditos to protect him,” Jorge accused, bristling slightly, “It’s messed up man. He could’ve died, and he just got here, you didn’t have to-”
“But what about you?” Chief Velazquez quickly snapped up that train of thought, clinging onto it, “If this mission was so dangerous, if it was actually so deadly, why risk your own life on it? Why your friend risk his life on it? You almost died yourself, and for what-?”
“Dude,” Jorge’s face dropped. When he spoke next, Naji heard the most honest voice he’d ever heard spoken before, “I almost died, yeah. But like. Looking out for people, having their backs like that, that’s what’s important. That’s, that’s just- that’s just the most decent thing for anyone to do.”
Naji felt a blade twist into his side, metaphorical but sharp and painful as the most jagged, rusted of metals, and he made a choking, gagging sound.
At the noise, Jorge whipped back around to Naji, eyes wide with surprised, as if he just had remembered the boy was there.
Awkwardly, Jorge laughed, turning a bit red. “Ah, dude, was that all too sappy..? Haha, I think Sammy’s freakin’ ‘angry about leadership’ rants are all getting’ to me…”
Naji flushed too, but not from embarrassment. Jorge’s words had struck a chord of shame in the boy, had called him out without even meaning too, had made Naji realize, realize really that Jorge had almost died, and for what?
Him?
And not only Jorge, but Samuel could have died too and- oh dear.
They could’ve both been injured, maybe bleeding out, and they could’ve need a healer, and they-

Chief Velazquez, from the other side of the table, spoke up again, critically.
“You could have died today.”
“But I didn’t,” Jorge asserted, “And Naji saved me.”

Yes, Naji remembered saving Jorge, he remembered that wound closing up, surprisingly, unexpectedly, as if by magic or like winning the lottery or by a wish on a star that just so happened to come true, or like-

“You’re putting a lot of faith into your field medic there.” Chief Velazquez remarked blandly.
“Well. He healed me once, right?”

He remembered that first heal of course, but Naji also remembered his own flesh tearing apart, and he remembered the ripping flesh of the Falchion’s face, and how easy that had been compared to closing Jorge’s wound, and he realized not for the first time how much easier it would’ve been for Jorge’s wound to have-

“You were still lucky to have survived.”
Jorge’s shoulder’s flexed. To him it seemed as if the healer was challenging his trust, ridiculing his team mate’s competence, so he met the healer, head-on.
“I’m lucky a great healer had been there.”

Had Naji been more scared, more frightened, less in control of his power… He wondered if the word “healer” would still be used to describe him now; he wondered dully if Jorge would still be alive to sit there and defend his imagined healing ability.
Naji really, really wondered these things, and a sick, uneasy knot tied itself in his gut.
“Do you hear that, Naji Bhatti?” Chief Velazquez hummed, and Naji could barely register the happy, almost musical tone of his boss even as it rang out like a threatening siren in his brain. “Your friend says that he’s lucky to have had a great healer at his side. Wouldn’t it had been a shame hadn’t a healer been near him? In that case, he would’ve been even more lucky to have lived at all, don’t you think?”
Sweat now poured down Naji’s back and chest, and he shivered, feeling deathly cold all over.
He raised his shaking, guilty eyes towards Jorge, who blinked back in some mild confusion at Chief Velazquez’s smug tone of voice. Jorge wasn’t close to guessing the truth, at knowing how close he’d come to- to-
“Aha, ha,” Naji managed to weakly laugh out, as if agreeing with Chief Velazquez, as if the words were just some cruel, mean-spirited joke. “You’re, um, right. Yeah, that- that sure would’ve had to have been a surge of luck, him having survived without a- a proper. H-healer.”

Yeah, Naji thought, mutely casting his eyes to the ground in a hot shame, his brain blazing even brighter, on fire, something like that happening would’ve had to have been nothing pure, dumb, stupid luck.

demon • 13 April 2017 at 11:20 PM

"Are you ready?" The boy looked up, down, shuffled his feet. "You know we could come back later if you'd rather..." he was saying, and the sound waves didn't seem to be reaching his ears, or making the voyage down his ear canals, or beating vibrations onto his eardrums, or tiny bones weren't passing the rhythm along, or maybe the little hair cells inside his inner ear just weren't converting it into electrical signals his brain could interpret. Whatever the reason, he didn't hear it.
But even if he wasn't listening, the words still rung loudly in his head, lighting up his Wernicke's area like some humans traditionally did with their seasonal trees.
Rai pulled his hands down from his face, then dragged them around either side of his neck, feeling the strange and vibrant heat of life throbbing just beneath his skin. Then he pulled those hands up, through his short, strawberry blond hair, tugging briefly on its ends before letting go.
His eyes, dark stony cobalt blue, finally opened, blinking briefly. "No, no," he said calmly, the touch of cold air now on his hands. "This is the last thing I have to do. Take me in," he instructed, holding out his hand to the phaser.
The kid obeyed without another word, pulling him through the solid rock wall in front of them. Meters of darkness rushed past, nothing to be seen for no light could reach it. There was no feeling of air whipping by as they traveled, no resistance of any kind, no air at all in fact. Holding his breath, Rai thought the experience felt more like being submerged in liquid, of floating so long underwater you start to not feel the water at all... But there was still that slight weight pressing down on you from all sides; heavy, soft, constant yet evasive. Like it could be felt rubbing against the hairs but never actual skin. It was really the oddest thing. And ever so slightly, terrifying.
But it lasted only a few moments. Exiting the rock was just the same as breaking the surface, only much more sudden and jarring. The only heads-up he had was the moment the phaser's busy feet stopped moving, heels clicking together, the end. Rai would like to say he stepped smoothly out, but the reality was more like a lurch, though he recovered quickly, found his footing, and relinquished his hold on the phaser's hand soon after.
Then Rai looked around, at the natural prison with no doors and no windows, only six solid surfaces and no way out- or in- save by that child's hand. This was the place he'd chosen to keep... Her.
She sat in the corner, back to them, body turned to the wall, hands occupied with, something, he couldn't see. No reaction at all to their appearance, it was uncertain whether she'd noticed she had visitors. Back to his right, Rai didn't miss his phasing companion sinking back into the wall, a nervous expression on his ordinarily impassive young face.
Rai approached the girl, slowly, keeping as much as possible his weight on the foot behind him.
"Is anyone home?" he asked, cautiously.

Even Rai had to be concerned. The static silence coming from her would unnerve any mind-reader. And as a power, there weren't many minds he couldn't read- unlike Riley. He was much more effective. He wondered if her mind wasn't truly blank. Maybe whatever that child Mael had done had finally truly managed to break her. Maybe she was brain-dead now, a mental vegetable. He feared-
Then her head turned around, slowly, and he caught sight of those eyes. Heavy eyes, dark eyes, filled with the deep brown of her natural pupil... still glowing faintly violet with eerie light. Her face was unnaturally thin, too, and framed by matted hair that didn't appear half as blonde as it ought.
But he'd seen it come to life, bright as electricity and flowing in waves when she'd attacked... Rai inhaled a sharp breath as she looked at him.
"Who's there?" she said in a soft voice, making his ears work or else he'd really miss it.
The answer was easy, but answering was harder. "Angel, it's me, Rai," the power managed, feet gradually bringing him closer as they obeyed the commands of his head.
"Rai-who?" she smiled, and he stopped.
"Just that. It's my name, not a game," Rai corrected her, helplessly. "There aren't any more sylla-"
"Riley! You came to get me after all...!" She spun around properly, legs still curled underneath her as she hovered in the air. Her bright blonde hair had shed all dirt and grime in an instant, which swirled about in the air around her before falling fluidly to the ground. Now spotless from her head to her toes, save her worn clothes, the girl had no problem smiling blithely at the boy, though her eyes still looked tired and her frame, thin. She seemed lively anyway, as she clutched her ankles and leaned forward midair, hair floating so that it never interfered with her face. "I'm so glad," she said shyly, looking down at the ground resting half a meter below her feet.
"Oh. That's... good." Rai looked over with a quietly puzzled look on his face. "But... what did you just call me?" His short honey-colored hair was ruffled gently by a breeze passing through.
"Ri-ley!" she held up a slim finger as if to teach it to him. "It's your name, isn't it? Ya silly," Angel said affectionately, while her knees loosened, allowing her legs to swing free, dipping down to touch the ground, and-
"Oof!" she yelped aloud, her leg collapsing underneath her as soon as its toes met the rock beneath her, and she landed hard on her butt.
At the same time, Rai called out; "Hey! Are you..." he reached out towards her but hesitated to get any closer, and withdrawing his hand on seeing that she remained at least physically intact.
"Ow, ow, ow..." A briefly pained expression scrunched up her features before they smoothed out with her gingerly rubbing just above her backside, since it was all she could reach. "I, uh, miscalculated that, huh," the blonde muttered, but all in good humor. Gravity might take hold of her body, but it could never take her spirits down!
"Pfffffft, haha!" the other couldn't help but start to laugh, and she looked up in surprise. "What a determined expression! Like you're considering the ground as a worthy adversary. It's really too much," he chuckled into one hand, sneaking little side-eyed glances at the mess of a girl on the floor before him. Many powers naturally had difficulty adjusting to physical surroundings, but even so, seeing Angel like that was really something else.
Even though her smile was widening, she held on tightly to the furrow between her eyebrows, trying to protest earnestly to him; "It's not that easy! One second I don't need to concentrate on it at all, it doesn't even warrant thinking, and the next, I've forgotten about it and it slips right out of my control! Ow ow oww!" she exclaimed, sounding just a little worked up now.
His amusement slowly cooled, trickling away like the last of the hot water from a shower-head, leaving the waiting body wanting. "You... really can't control it well, can you..."
Her hands stilled behind her, then clasped together faintly, a shadow hold all they had on each other. The smile she'd worn quickly faded away.
"I know I caused you a lot of trouble..." she said quietly.
Rai contemplated her for a moment, thinking about exactly what she might mean by trouble.
After the incident in which she'd ripped the life out of five powers and the sixth halfway to pieces... Angel had appeared to return to herself- or, if not herself, then something else that was stable and sensible to others. So Rai had let her out, taking with ease Mael's assurances that, 'No, she'd be no danger, she's totally tame,' and rather blissfully ignoring the subsequent, ominous warning of, 'for the time being...' imparted just before that kid had carelessly strolled away. And even though she had indeed seemed fine for a time, it wasn't long before Rai had another messy string of deaths on his hands. As if his hands weren't full already on that front, with just an army of powers.
He'd known it to be irresponsible, sure, to let a thing like her go around nearly unchecked (but what could check her?). Still, Rai had allowed it, because- because...
Well, her mind... hadn't she seemed harmless? At least until the gory evidence of her savagery convinced him otherwise. And now he couldn't read it.
All that torn, bloody tissue, smashed bone, shredded clumps of clothes and hair in the mix, and she wouldn't stop shaking-
She'd been watching him all this while, and while Rai very much liked to think he had a devil of an impressive poker face, maybe something of it showed in his expression, because Angel gave a long, shaky exhale like it did.
"It's not about that, it's-" Rai started to say, as he tried to get closer, then... stopped. It wasn't there, actually there, but in his head, he could still feel... the shadowy echo of that searingly bright, violet light, overflowing with energy. Phantasmal limbs that twisted and spun in freeform like they'd minds of their own. Lashing out with violent, sinister force. Like they might strangle the very air in the room with their weight. And Rai found his feet wouldn't move anymore.
They didn't need to, because a thought had just occurred to Angel, like a light-bulb flashing in her head, she'd brightened immediately. "I know! You're bothered because you can't see me properly, is that right?" She surged forward, catching him completely off-guard now that they were all of a sudden nose-to-nose, when he couldn't close the gap beyond two meters. "Let me let you in," Angel touched her fingertips to his forehead before Rai could react with so much as a single cell in his body.
Then the floodgates burst open, and the thoughts of her mind flooded his consciousness.

asi • 13 April 2017 at 11:22 PM

Izzy forward leaned over the table, locked in a dreamy stare with the object of his desires, and inhaling deeply just to further drink in that tantalizing scent... Of kushari, that he really didn't need to lean anywhere for, as the powerful aroma had already flooded the entire cafeteria hall, until the very air felt thick and marginally harder to breathe.
But while there were many other identical and equally tantalizing trays in the room, Izzy was a loyal man, who only had eyes for his own... lunch tray of kushari placed on the table in front of him. Filled with intense feelings of love and admiration, Izzy took a moment to hold his hands still and, internally, recite a quick prayer of thanks for the meal he had received, so touched was he.
Then he ate it slowly, savoring every bite. Florie made a mean kushari.
At that moment, Izzy thought that the only thing that could possibly make this meal any more perfect would be playing footsie under the table with his boyfriend- so that was precisely what he did.


"... I can't believe you're still hung up on buying all those clothes with my money," he said in wonder, one hand pressed to his cheek. He tilted his head and almost laughed at the look that she made when he asked; "You still feel guilty just to look at me?"
"A little," Angel had to admit, since there was no point in denying it. Not when the other could read the answer in her head. She didn't mind one bit though, if it made him more comfortable.
Rai's expression turned somber, demeanor quickly sobering, chilly again like the mountain air, as he spoke in utmost seriousness; "I can't blame you for killing anyone. It's in your nature, after all," he said finally, daring to offer the girl still cold on the floor a helping hand. "And I certainly don't care about the shopping," he added as a humorous aside.
She didn't just take it. Angel leaped up into his arms, enveloping the power, who'd only just enough notice to not freak out about it, in a warm hug. "I'm so glad..." she murmured tearfully into his shirt collar, while Rai patted her back carefully, thinking.
What evil creation had Mael left him with, Rai wondered...
But in his eyes, she still appeared as an-
"Angel," he said softly, under his breath, and then his muscles grew stiffer, every tendon in his biological mess tightening. "ANGEL WHAT ARE YOU DOING," he said much louder, slowly but in a single breath.
"Eh?" she drew back in surprise at the outburst, hands still on his shoulders but holding him at arm's length so she could look at him curiously.
"THE GROUND. PUT ME BACK ON THE GROUND," the mind-reading power ordered with a splutter in his speech, as he stared down with terrified eyes at the rock appearing to swim several feet below the reach of his own!
"Oh." The blonde blushed in embarrassment, and quickly lowered the both of them to the ground with a light 'flump'. "Whoopsie," she offered in bashful apology, seeing Rai fall to his knees and clutch at the rocky earth with two hands as soon as she let him go.
"... Are you okay?!" Although she wasn't immediately worried, she quickly became so when Rai's panic showed no fast signs of waning.
"NEVER DO THAT AGAIN." Rai was still breathing heavily several minutes after the incident, and the guilty, flustered and very concerned Angel could only flutter anxiously around the guy, not getting too close for fear of inadvertently doing something to set him off again.
It was also... just a little funny, watching the usually composed teenager freak out about something so small and ordinary, but, Angel was sure to hide this fact from the mind-reader- since it was so easy to conceal such a thing, along with her slight smile, just by looking the other way.
She waited patiently for him to recover, even as he seemingly inhaled half the oxygen in the room, and rather alarmingly stretched his lungs to capacity while doing so. But Angel was excited, and there was only so much virtue one excited girl could display. "So, umm... Are we going to get out of here now?"
Rai stood up, brushing dirt off of all areas of his clothing ensemble, and seemed to regain his composure proportionally to the cleanliness of his outfit. "Of course. We're getting out of here now, Angel," he assured her, dignity mostly restored, even if his goldy-red hair was completely out of order.
"Can we take Stella and Blaine and oh, that walk-through-walls boy with us too? Plus that tough auntie, and of course cute little bro Mael!" she enthused, giddy enough to literally float around the room.
Rai watched her in bemusement, before shaking his head and answering; "Sure. They can all come along."
"Great! Then it will be a Great Escape!" she swooped down to stand by the power's side again, beaming down at him; "I'm so happy, Riley...!"
It's a shame you don't understand any of it, thought Rai to himself as he called the phaser back, and they three left the prison behind, only to enter the next, of sorts... This world was a series of prisons, but she didn't notice at all. Or, maybe she really just found joy in having a little more air than in the last. Even reading her mind, there were still some things he couldn't discover...
Maybe, maybe it was better she was simply keeping her spirits high, he thought as they light-heartedly conversed with each other as they walked. For some people, they may be better off-
She was saying, in a deep, but rather good impression of his voice, with a teasing tone; "I can't believe you're still hung up on the time I accidentally suspended you middair-"
"THAT WAS LESS THAN FOUR MINUTES AGO," Rai automatically shot back, before pausing, remembering they had company now.
The phaser had actually jumped, having never heard the rebel leader raise his voice even once in the months they'd known each other. Seeing this reaction, Rai and Angel could only exchange a look... and continue the discussion in more subdued terms.

taffy789 • 17 April 2017 at 9:57 PM

Feeling good after having found the files he thought Four would’ve wanted, Quincy had been enjoying the nice lunch date with his boyfriend when something began nudging at his ankle. Realizing Izzy’s intentions, Quincy snorted between bites of his own food and glanced over at his boyfriend sitting across the table from him. Izzy looked so contented and blissful and sunny and happy and, in that moment, Quincy felt his heart skip a beat. A wide, goofy grin broke free on Quincy’s face, and he playfully returned the under the table nudges to distract himself from his overwhelming desire to shoot across the table and smooch the guy right in the middle of the entire cafeteria.
Instead of that very public display of affection, he laughed, candidly, said some cheesy, overtly flirty line with intent of seeing how red he could get Izzy to blush, and Quincy continued the date on like that until lunchtime was over and done.


~~~~~~~ Timeskip to evening~~~~~~~~~

If she had to admit it- to herself, if anyone- Gale knew she was nearing the end of her rope.
She felt frazzled, entirely out of place, nearly out of her mind- often it felt like a struggle to hold herself together, to keep from dissolving into aimless wind, to keep solid and strong and-
“…Seven?”
… Despite how much she wanted to break apart, she somehow managed to keep it well enough together in front of the likes of her assistant.
Madigan glanced up from the piles upon piles of paperwork on the desk and stared at Gale as she quietly entered the room.
Smiling at her assistant, the Seventh leader retained a stiff sense of composure as she greeted the boy.
“Madigan.” She said sternly, but as the boy seemed slightly startled by that, she quickly amended, more kindly, “It’s, um- it’s late, you can go to your room, if you want.”
Her assistant looked surprised at that. He furrowed his eyebrows in confusion.
“It’s- it’s late?” he stared, forlorn, at the stacks of papers scattered about the desk and blinked a few times. “… How late?” he whispered softly.
“Um?” Gale scratched at her arm. She didn’t feel good, not good at all, in the slightest. “I don’t know. Nine? Ten?”
Madigan seemed to become a bit visibly distressed by this news, which did nothing for Gale’s own crushing distress and current situation.
She clawed at her arm some more, lamenting her choice to even enter her office in the first place. She’d only come back to her office because it had been closer than her room, because it had presented itself as a nice, quiet place without anyone else around. Apparently, if the presence of Madigan was any indication, that assumption had been very wrong.
Now anxiously tugging on the sleeves of her stolen gray hoodie, Gale looked over her assistant again.
The old assistant to Seven had died in the feral attack, and when the idea of choosing a new assistant had been brought up to her, Gale hadn’t known what to say, who to choose. The feral attack had been fresh in her mind, and so when she had to name a name, for whatever reason she could only remember that trembling seventh division worker who’d been sitting next to her when she’d woken up from- from-
Madigan gulped at how intensely Seven was fixating on him, and upon noticing the return of that startled fretting, Gale jumped to calm the boy down.
“Look,” she said, willing her voice to not sound as shaky as her nerves felt, “You seem to have lost track of time in here. You’re working too hard. Go rest.” She herself began moving to the door leading into her back office, “I’m just. Going to go grab some papers I need from the back, but don’t feel the need to wait up for me, or anything…”
“R-right,” Madigan replied, and as he began to shuffle some papers around on the desk, Gale turned her attention on slipping away to her back office, to hopefully be able to panic alone and without any-
As she pushed the door open, some plastic bottles rattled around on her floor.
Gale blinked.
The carpet was discolored horrible, sickly green, and it reminded her of the fake ghost ectoplasm from those Ghostbusters movies and made her flinch back in disgust. Giggling sounded off from somewhere in front of her, and, startled, Gale lifted her eyes up from the hair dye bottles and green goop and found herself nose-to-nose with a certain grinning leader.
“Hiya~!” Eight chimed, and Gale yelped, immediately skittering five feet backwards and hitting her spine against the wall far behind her. At the impact, Gale inhaled sharply, every molecule in her body urging her physical form to explode apart on the impact, but she closed her eyes tight until the pounding sensation faded.
As she did this, she could hear Eight continue to giggle while Madigan’s exclamation of, “Seven! Are you okay?” loudly bounced off the walls of the cramped office space.
When Gale composed herself once more, she slowly breathed out and opened her eyes again to see Eight now sitting on the floor and laughing while Madigan stood tensed near the door frame, eyeing from leader to leader with caution. He looked ready to bolt and pale as some vampire from that series of “Carmilla” dime store novels Gale shamefully recalled reading late in her teens. Bad analogies and equally bad lesbian vampire romance books aside, Gale now forced herself to focus on the current issue at hand.
She turned to Eight.
The other leader smiled widely at her, and she waved.
Hesitantly, Gale had begun to wave back before remembering herself and dropping her hand in favor of masking her face with a calm, controlled expression.
Eight pouted at that.
Carefully, Gale approached the other leader.
“Eight,” Seven said, giving her best attempt at sounding serious and unfearful of the other girl, “What were you doing in my… office back there?”
“Hmm~?” Eight replied, looking mildly confused and also looking at the ceiling instead of the other leader talking to her. “Oh yeah! I came to hang out with Maddy again~! ‘Course!”
Gale shot a curious look her assistant’s direction, and Madigan paled a more colorless hue of white.
“I don’t-” he stammered, his words dry, “I don’t- don’t remember….”
Not holding that against him in the slightest, Gale returned her gaze back to the incoherently giggling Eight, and noted with some grief that the leader seemed even more out of it than usual.
Actually, Gale noticed after glancing the leader over once more, Eight’s appearance was vastly degraded from the messy pep and shine Gale had first seen as well.
Her clothing was rumpled, messy, dirty, and in need of a washing. Her hair, all bleached out and dry as it normally looked, was even in a worse shape than usual. The dark blue that had colored her hair previously had been bleached and shoddily re-dyed a light green, but the dye job had been done so poorly that the hair color was now a splotchy, blue-green mess, like the graying mold of a sandwich left out in the sun for a week. Gale wrinkled her nose at the unpleasant clashing of colors, her inner art student immediately taking offense to color choices made.
Eight continued to blather on about something or another, and Gale began wondering how to corral this crazy leader back into the hands of someone much more capable than she (Jane perhaps? Though Gale didn’t really feel like speaking to her much again, so… Nine? Who seemed ultra-capable, capable enough to know what to do with a rambunctious, rambling leader, so-)
It was in the midst of Gale trying to figure out what to do with this leader when said leader made a low, whining sound, declared “I don’t feel so-”, and then immediately barfed all over Gale’s office floor.
After the initial shock of vomit nearly missing her good converse shoes died down, Gale shot out a hand and pressed her palm against Eight’s forehead, pushing the girl’s bangs upwards and feeling the hot, slick sweating skin present underneath.
“Madigan,” Gale stated, her passive mask breaking into concern, “She feels very hot. She’s sick.”
“Uh, should we, uh,” Madigan said after a slight pause to digest this information, “should I go get someone? I don’t really want to stay here alone with-” His eyes flittered to the Eighth leader, and he seemed terrified, “I honestly didn’t know she was back there, and I don’t really remember the past few hours all that well, and my head kind of hurts just thinking about this stuff and trying to remember, and I- I don’t want to-”
“Go get Eight’s assistant,” Seven commanded the boy, “Or at least Nine. Or another leader if you can’t find either of them. Just. Just hurry.”
Don’t need to tell me twice,” Madigan sighed, relieved, and he rushed from the office, leaving Gale cradling Eight’s head in her hands and wondering what the heck she was supposed to do.

awesomeness • 19 April 2017 at 9:56 PM

Jane rubbed at her eyelids.
They were drooping low, just as exhausted as she was.
Despite this, she tiredly and faithfully clicked the “replay” button again.
She observed the grainy camera feeds once more.
Five videos of five hallways played on her laptop screen at one time.
She rewatched the familiar scenes, the empty halls and unmoving views of cameras fifty-four, fifty-five, and fifty-six, and also, after a minute of nothing, the unlucky figure of a Falchion being chased from the view of camera fifty-eight all the way up to camera fifty-seven’s angle. Following close behind the Falchion, a feral, flames burning in its hands and murder surely on the brain. Jane hated watching the ensuring struggle play out on camera fifty-seven, knowing very well how it would end. Instead, she flipped her focus onto camera fifty-four, and she waited.
The wild stir of papers and dust and debris was visible for a slight nano-second before the camera fifty-four’s feed went to static. A paper more wildly danced in the air in front of camera fifty-five before it followed suit. Camera fifty-six actually caught a glimpse of the mangled camera fifty-five flying past it down the hallway before its camera feed winked out as well.
Finally, on camera fifty-seven, the feral and unfortunate Falchion fought still, struggling, and the feral seemed almost ready to burn the poor Falchion alive before something- something- pushed between them, pushing them apart, some wild, unseeable force, and the two were both thrown against the two hallway walls and held there as the debris swirled and papers flew, and as the camera feed of camera fifty-seven turned into silent, humming, white static.
Lastly, Jane dropped her gaze to the last camera feed. Camera fifty-eight, Jane knew, had survived because it was tucked in a corner and facing down a completely different length of hallway than the rest of the cameras. She watched this video feed, and she counted out the seconds.
Six, seven, eight, nine-
As if dragged along by some powerful force, the dead body of the feral violently slammed into the corner of the hallway walls, a dark stain drenching around its mouth and running down its throat. An unnatural wind rippled across the dead body, sending the feral’s hair whipping about before dying down just as quickly as it had come alive. Although that was all the surviving camera feed Jane had found from this sector of the base, she didn’t find it a large stretch of the imagination to assume the wind had continued its warpath down the hallways where cameras fifty-nine through sixty-eight had sat before being burnt to a crisp by the fire feral just moments before.
Removing her glasses, Jane tiredly rubbed at her eyes before sighing and holding her entire face in her hands.
She breathed in slowly.
Furthermore, she had to admit to herself, it would seem to be even a less of a stretch to assume that, that the wind blowing down the halls was, without a doubt-
“Seven.”
Startled by the voice, Jane pushed her glasses back onto her nose to unobscure the blurry figure standing in the doorway to her office.
“It’s Seven,” the voice huffed, who Jane know recognized as one of the newer assistants, Madigan. His cheeks shone red with the flush of exercise, as if he’d been running around the entire base looking for her.
“She told me to find you,” he continued out in feverish gasps, “because, there’s- there’s Eight-”
At the mention of her missing leader, Jane sighed the deepest sigh yet, and she stood, closing her laptop as she did.
“Whelp. I suppose it’s about that time for her to make a return.” She remarked, sounding almost wistful. “Well then. Lead me to them.”


“Hehe~ Hey~”
Eight speaking up made Gale’s skin crawl.
Gale had moved the shaking leader across the floor, laying down far away from the disgusting vomit. Eight stared up at the ceiling, her sweating, pale form trembling slightly and clearly suffering from a fever, yet still awake enough to speak. Gale, who had been fretting about while wondering if Eight was at death’s door, as unnerved by the absent way the Eighth leader spoke while not looking in her direction.
“Hey, hey,” Eight continued to protest, weakly. “I don’t feel good, hey.”
A clammy hand wrapped around Gale’s arm and tugged, and Gale made the mistake of glancing towards the sickly leader and meeting her eyes first.
Eight’s irises were a beautiful golden yellow color, like daffodils or the bright rays of the sun. So pretty were the colors that it nearly distracted Gale completely from the burning, painful sensation of what felt like her brain being pulled out of her nose. She blinked back tears, her mind searing with flashes of what could only be described as scenes from her nightmares, of her body exploding into wind, of her and her power vying for control, fighting tooth and nail and her failing, her and her power exploding down the hallways of base and ripping both feral and user alike to shreds, and blood, all that horrible, terrible blood, and-
As soon as the memories resurfaced, they dissipated, only leaving behind a wave of violent nausea that caught Gale off guard and made the tears pool larger in the corners of her eyes. She retched, slightly, her entire body vibrating with the memories, with the need to explode outwards again, and-
Sucking in a deep breath, Gale held herself together once more.
From her spot laying on the ground, Eight let out a pitiful whining noise.
“Awww, your memories totally suck! That didn’t make me feel any better at all~”
…
Unable to stay completely composed around the difficult leader, Gale released her held breath in a gasp of furious exasperation.
Despite this, Eight continued to hum, almost pleasantly.
“Buuuuuuttttt~” she sing-songed, her eyes glazed over and still fixated on the ceiling above. “Buuu~~~uuuu~uuuuu~tttttt~!!! I can help you, ya know~”
Gale tensed.
“…What?”
“With your lil’ problem~” Eight giggled. “Your problem with the meanie who won’t share with you!”
Although she never removed her eyes from staring straight ahead, Eight must’ve somehow noticed the confused, wary look on Gale’s face because she elaborated, “Your POWER, silly~! Your problem with your power.” A lightbulb dinged above Eight’s head, and she gasped, weakly yet still dramatically loud, “Your POWER PROBLEM!”
By this point, Gale’s entire body was ridged, frozen solid.
She found her voice after a few seconds of choking on the words.
“I don’t-” her fists clenched tight, nails biting into her palms- “have a problem with my power.”
“Abbbbbbyyyyyyyy~” Eight protested, “Lying is bad! And like, ‘course you have a problem! You didn’t, hmm, kill all those people just ‘cause you LIKE ‘xploding lungs, righto?”
Gale jumped back from Eight completely now, putting a foot of distance between herself and the girl’s body. Now sitting up, Eight had those mesmerizing, dulled yellow eyes aimed towards Gale, and she smiled at the Seventh leader.
“You wanna forget all that nasty stuff, right?” Eight was staring at Gale but not really looking at her, still staring forever past her, as if speaking to the wall. “I totally get that! Bad memories totally suck! And ferals can be mean, and make you not feel good, and can make you do all sorts of bad things. It’s okay to wanna forget! It’s okay to wanna stop the meanie power inside of you who doesn’t want to share~”
Gale chewed on her bottom lip, turning her head away from the Eighth leader. Considering it, she bit her lip so hard that a few drops of blood fell onto her tongue. Finally, she spoke.
“You can… stop my power?”
“Yeppers~!” Eight chimed. The leader was moving towards Gale now, crawling across the floor on all fours to close the gap made between the two. “I can tots do it! I’ve done it before, and it worked then! Um! Kinda!” She giggled there, all cheerful snorts and good humor. She then winked, as if letting Gale in on a little joke, and confided in her, “But my friend had to die for other reasons~! Not ‘cause of me messin’ with a nasty mean ole’ feral!”
Not feeling very comforted by that, Gale began to scoot away from Eight, but she was stopped by the surprisingly strong grip the girl had on her wrist.
“Heeey~” Eight whined, “I just wanna help! You remind me lots of my friend, who was really sad and had fun memories until they got all sad, and it was very sad, and you remind me a lot of- of-”
Was Gale just imagining things or did Eight’s eyes seem a bit… watery? She made the mistake of staring at the leader’s hypnotizing eyes too long trying to figure it out, and Eight grew lucid enough to intensify the gaze right back, and Gale gulped upon feeling a frighteningly heavy, smothering weight pressing against her mind, barely waiting permission to burst in.
“I don’t want you messing around with my memories.” said Gale, and whatever force she had tried to throw behind the words came out half-hearted and colored with hidden desperation.
“Oh,” Eight said with a reassuring smile, “I’m not really really gunna mess with all your memories, only the bad nasty ones!” Eight steadied a sweaty, shaking hand against Gale’s shoulder to hold herself up. “Buu~uuu~~ttttt~” Eight added, and a dizzying, white-grey static burned itself against Gale’s mind, “I will mess up all of hers~”

taffy789 • 19 April 2017 at 11:08 PM

Madigan huffed after Jane, trying to keep up with her brisk, serious pace.
She reached the door to Seven’s office before he did and, since it was ajar, quickly pushed it open. She made a slight inhale of shocked breath, and when Madigan wheezed his way over next to her, he too paled to see Eight inches away from his leader’s face, almost nose-to-nose and staring intensely into her eyes. Although Madigan had no earthly idea what to do (he honestly didn’t even want to go anywhere near the scary Eighth leader), Jane jumped to action surprisingly fast.
She flew across the room, clearing a few yards in a blink of an eye. Equally fast, a pair of dark sunglasses slid onto Seven’s nose, a matching pair to the ones Jane and Madigan also wore perched protectively on their own faces.
As soon as this occurred, whatever spell Eight had been casting over Seven seemed to be broken, because Madigan saw his leader jolt backwards and clutch at her head. Fearing the worst for her, he then rushed forward and knelt by his leader’s side.
Doing this, he paid only mild attention to Eight’s loud complaints of, “Wait! I wasn’t done yet! I’d just wanted ‘ta help! Jamesy, you needa let me finniiisssshhhhhhhhhh!”
“You helped enough, I’m sure,” Jane muttered while helping her own leader back to laying down on the ground. After Eight had been properly subdued besides all the continued complaining about being interrupted doing something important, Jane cast a worried glance towards Seven’s direction. “Madigan? How is her condition?”
“Uh,” Madigan began, not knowing how to respond to that one.
Seven didn’t look all too well.
She’d looked exhausted before, sure, but now Madigan stared helplessly at the shaking form of his leader as she curled in on herself and pressed her palms tight against her head. Madigan knew he was no Einstein, but it didn’t take a genius to see how badly Eight’s memory manipulation could apparently mess with a person. It also didn’t take much for Madigan to realize that, considering all his lost time, that how Seven currently was could have very well been him at one point during the day.
However, that was one frankly terrifying thought that Madigan tried to push far, far back in his mind, somewhere not even the best mind reader could reach. Instead, he focused on the current trembling Seven in front of him. Cautiously, he pressed his hands dumbly pressed against his leader’s shaking shoulders, as if that could comfort her.
“…Seven?” he asked, softly, and received no reply.
He waited a moment and patted her back a couple of times, like he remembered his mother doing when he was young and sick. He then tried, again.
“Seven?”
Finally, a shaking gasp from the girl.
“I’m-” she lifted her head up, and while Madigan couldn’t see much of her face from behind those thick black sunglasses, he was startled to see puffy red cheeks and teardrops rolling past his leader’s nose. “I need to get out of here, now. I need some space to breath. Bye.”
“What?” Madigan replied, and he leaned in closer to Seven, about to ask what she meant, but suddenly the shoulder his hand was resting on had disappeared into literal thin air. Having no counterweight to hold himself up on, Madigan fell forward, landing roughly on his face as a swift, strong breeze ruffled through his bronze hair and swept away, out the door.
Picking his chin off the floor, Madigan scrambled to his knees and worriedly glanced back at Jane for further direction. Upon seeing the ghostly white the Eight assistant had turned, Madigan shivered, dreading the grim seriousness of Jane’s expression.
Noticing him noticing her, Jane’s eyes flittered and caught Madigan’s, and she gave him a smile that attempted to be comforting but instead came off as uneasy and clearly troubled.
“We’ll locate Seven soon,” Jane declared, “Right now, Eight needs a healer. We’ll tackle these concerning matters one at a time.”
… Not loving the fact his leader was now apparently a “concerning matter” that Jane felt the need to tackle, Madigan nodded mutely and agreed to helping Jane move Eight, who was giggling to herself between near incoherent words that sounded something like, “I told you so Jamesy, I told ya~”