#this post is inspired by me spending a good half hour looking for a very specific vibe of stalking werewolf for ren
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How I find my references for my art:
Search specific poses, props, or interactions ❌
Scroll through Pinterest till I see a reference that vaguely fit the vibe and go down a rabbit hole of connected posts till I find a reference (or multiple references I can smash together) that actually looks how I was envisioning ✅
#it would be so much simpler to go for the first one#but google can never give me quite the vibes I’m looking for#but Pinterest#oh boy#it may take me up to an hour#but it gives me so much more freedom#though often if I can’t find exactly what I’m looking for I’ll just take a picture of myself#this post is inspired by me spending a good half hour looking for a very specific vibe of stalking werewolf for ren#when I likely could have tried looking up a reference by describing what I wanted to google
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more than this? ` ༘ ⋆𓂅
pairing: choi beomgyu x fem!reader
genre: friends with benefits to lovers, smut, the slightest bit of angst, kinda mutual (unknown) pining??
synopsis: when beomgyu asked you to be fuck buddies, you thought it was risky considering your already growing feelings for him. but, you just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be close to him in any way that you could. now you’re wondering if the two of you will ever be anything more than this.
warnings: unprotected sex (no!!), dom!beomgyu, sub!reader, fingering, creampie, multiple orgasms, slight praise, petnames (baby), some aftercare
word count: 3.1k┊masterlist
author's note: when i tell you i was literally working against the clock for this one to post it on time for beomgyu’s birthday… happy birthday beomgyu!! :)) this was kinda inspired by the song k. by cigarettes after sex! hopefully i can get past this writer’s block so i can start posting regularly again :( i hope you enjoy!! ♡
the mixture of you and beomgyu’s pants filled your bedroom. the two of you had been going at it in different positions for hours and the sun had just started to come up. your body was essentially jello by now but the feeling of beomgyu inside you felt too good to stop. besides, you knew this was the only time you could ever be intimate with him.
when the idea of you and beomgyu being friends with benefits first arose, you were hesitant to accept his offer. the two of you were close, but not exactly bestfriends. you refused to let yourself get that close to him knowing you had feelings for your longtime friend. it was also difficult knowing that he mainly just wanted a quick fuck whenever you were down for it.
but, you couldn’t refuse. you couldn’t pass up the opportunity to have your body pressed against his, your breaths mixing as he pounded deep inside you.
again, you felt the knot in your stomach tighten as the pleasure got too much for you. “beomgyu, i’m gonna c-cum again,” you spoke shakily, pushing at his shoulders. everytime the two of you were together he insisted that the main position you fucked in was missionary. “you’re face is way too pretty to just be pushed down into the sheets,” beomgyu had said.
beomgyu pressed his lips to yours, half kissing you and half moaning, “cum for me, baby. one last time.” your nails dug into his shoulders and you leaned your head back towards the headboard as you came undone. still, beomgyu slid in and out of you, helping you chase your high. his lips were on your jaw and slight whimpers were coming out of his mouth as he came right after you.
you looked at beomgyu through hooded lids and furrowed brows as you felt him release inside you once again. whining a little, you kissed him hard. after this, he would leave and you would be alone again. you didn’t want the time the two of you were spending together to end, even if the ever growing stickiness between your thighs was starting to get a little uncomfortable. you were definitely going to have to wash your sheets and comforter a couple times after this, the mix of both of your cum was all over it.
beomgyu slid out of you and fell onto the bed next to you, his hair falling over his eyes as he looked over to you. he tapped a finger to your lips, his body catching the light from the thin sheen of sweat all over him. “good?” beomgyu asked you. you giggled and nodded, “very good.” beomgyu smiled at you and got up from the bed, the sunlight coming through from the blinds lighting up with slightly dark room.
“shower with me,” beomgyu said as he walked around to your side of the bed. he held out his hand to you and you had to resist the urge to take in his naked body in front of you. you’ve seen him naked more times that you could count now, but it always shocked you to see how delicious he looked. you stood up slowly, wincing slightly from the pain in your legs, and took his hand.
you had some of beomgyu’s clothes, either from him keeping some at your apartment for future hookups or him accidentally leaving some at your place after rushing out. you didn’t mind really, it was more convenient and you liked wearing his shirts to bed after he left.
“if i can get up…” you trailed as you moved to him. “i wasn’t expecting to go for that long today,” you added as you wobbled slightly. beomgyu smirked down at you as he held you steady. “i didn’t hear you complaining,” he replied as you both made your way to your bathroom.
rolling your eyes at him playfully as you leaned against the sink, you murmured under your breath, “and you never will.” thankfully, him turning the water on covered your words. becoming fuck buddies was risky enough to the strange friendship you and beomgyu had, but adding your feelings into the mix would be catastrophic. sometimes you felt like your friendship was hanging off the ledge and one wrong move would completely destroy it and you would lose beomgyu forever.
the sound of the shower curtains drawing pulled you out of your thoughts and you looked over to beomgyu. “come on,” he said and stepped into the shower and behind the curtains. you walked over and pulled the curtains back slightly to peer in at him. beomgyu’s back was to you and he was under the running water as you stepped into the shower. he turned to you with a small smile and moved you towards the water.
the two of you worked in silence as you washed your bodies, occasionally helping each other, until you were clean. you were both now sitting on your bed watching the sunrise through the window that you opened to let in the fresh air. “let me take you out to dinner,” beomgyu suddenly said, his wet hair sticking to his forehead. you turned to him with a raised eyebrow. “i feel like an asshole after we have sex. i don’t want you to feel like i’m just using you,” he then added.
isn’t that what this is though? maybe not him explicitly using you per se, but him just being here for the sex? you knitted your brows together as you thought over his proposal. you tried not to let yourself fall into the thought that beomgyu might want something more than this. you didn’t want to go through the heartbreak if you turned out to be wrong.
what damage could you going out to dinner with him do? “okay,” you nodded, speaking softly. beomgyu’s face lit up with a smile and he brought his lips to yours, causing your heart to race and your face to heat up significantly. the two of you did all the intimate things couples do, except you weren’t one. it made your head spin.
“later on today!” beomgyu exclaimed as he got up from the bed. he started to collect his things from around your bedroom. your heart sank as you realized he was about to leave. “around noon. i’ll pick you up!” he added. you put on a smile that didn’t quite reach your eyes as you nodded again. “i’ll see you then!” you laughed breezily, hoping to come off as carefree as you got up and followed him to the door.
beomgyu pressed another kiss to your mouth before turned to leave. you waved goodbye to him as he jogged to his car before shutting your door. pressing your head to the coldness of the door, you breathed in deeply. you desperately needed to sort out your feelings before this all became a mess.
you smoothed out your dress again as you stood in front of the mirror by your door. taking a deep breath, you checked the time on your phone again. beomgyu would be arriving any minute, which was confirmed from the incoming text of him saying he was around the corner. you still weren’t sure if this classified as a date or not and you tried—and failed miserably—to steel your nerves.
there was a knock at your door, causing you to jump. you took one last deep breath before opening it to beomgyu on the other side. a small smile grew on his face. “hi,” beomgyu said, taking in your appearance. “you look pretty!” you couldn’t help but smile back at him, especially after he called you pretty. everytime you looked at him your heart fluttered and leaped around in your chest, begging to be let free. “hi,” you replied softly, your smile growing. “thank you, you look pretty too!”
“are you ready?” beomgyu asked with a slight laugh and you nodded. he led you to his car and the two of you began the drive to whatever restaurant beomgyu had picked out.
at the restaurant, which was quite fancy from the looks of it, you got a table towards the back where it wasn’t as crowded. now you sat across from beomgyu, menu in hand, as your face heated from the sheer thought of the situation you were in. the waiter had come and taken your orders so now it was just a waiting game. you and beomgyu had been making small talk as you tried to ignore the slight grumbling of your stomach.
“i know you said you felt like an asshole, but you didn’t have to take me to dinner,” you said, letting a smile form on your face. you were trying to gauge his intentions to make your anxiety go down since pushing your feelings away clearly wasn’t working. “i do. and yeah, i did feel like an asshole, but that was mainly an excuse to ask you out to dinner with me,” beomgyu said.
you almost started to choke from an inhale gone wrong but manage to cover it up. you stared at beomgyu with wide eyes, “you wanted to take me out to dinner?” beomgyu laughed and leaned towards you slightly. “of course! who wouldn’t want to take you out to dinner?” the waiter came back with your food and you waited for them to leave before speaking.
“well you don’t really take someone you’re casually fucking out to dinner,” you blurted, stabbing your fork into the food you got. you froze as you realized what you just said. without missing a beat, beomgyu replied, “then let’s stop being casual.”
looking up at him, mouth agape, you struggled to form words. all you could manage was a choked, “what?” beomgyu shrugged and repeated his words, a smirk growing on his face. “we already do everything a couple does—kiss, fuck… and it’s not like i’m seeing anybody else—don’t even have the desire to. you’re the only one i want,” beomgyu shrugged again like he was simply saying the grass was green as he ate his food. he then looked up at you through his lashes, “unless you’re seeing someone?”
you forced your mouth to stop hanging wide open. “you want me?” you asked seriously, setting your fork onto your plate with a slight ‘clang!’ beomgyu stopped eating and looked at you, tilting his head to the side as he let out a small laugh. “y/n, are you serious?” he asked you as if you were joking around with him. when you were silent he sat his utensils down and stared at you for a couple seconds.
“i just spent hours having sex with you. you think i’d spend hours having sex with someone if i only wanted a quick fuck?” beomgyu then ask you seriously. you shrugged and looked down, pushing your food around on your plate. “being fuck buddies is different for everyone… how was i supposed to know you wanted me back?” you trailed. beomgyu gave you a bewildered look, mouth slightly ajar.
he then called over the waiter and asked for the bill and to-go boxes. you stared at him in confusion, “what are you doing?” beomgyu just shook his head at you, saying nothing. the waiter brought what he asked for and he handed you one of the to-go boxes as he paid. “beomgyu,” you spoke as he moved his food into the box. you were confused on what was happening as you mimicked his actions.
once the two of you were finished, beomgyu stood from his chair, to-go box in hand. “let’s go,” he said. you rose to your feet and grabbed your things with furrowed brows, “go where?” you desperately needed answers. “my place,” is all he said as he started towards the entrance of the restaurant.
the drive to beomgyu’s place was silent. he pushed open his front door and dragged you inside towards his bedroom, abandoning your food on the kitchen counter. you stood awkwardly in the middle of his room as you waited for some sort of explanation. “do i want you?” he murmured under his breath sarcastically like it was some joke. beomgyu turned to you suddenly, “are you seeing someone else?”
“of course not!” you exclaimed, brows knitting further together. “okay then,” beomgyu replied as he began stripping off his clothes. “what is going on?” you asked frustrated.
“i’m showing you i want you,” is all beomgyu simply said, now only in his boxers. he came up to you and grabbed the hem of your dress, taking it completely off in one swift movement. you weren’t wearing a bra underneath, so now your breasts were on full display for him, nipples perking up from the sudden coldness. beomgyu’s lips were on yours in an instant as his hands slid up your waist.
you returned his kiss as you pressed your body to his for some type of warmth. “you could’ve waited until after we ate,” you murmured against beomgyu’s lips. you felt him smile and he guided you back to the bed. “lay down,” beomgyu said, breaking away from you. his finger hooked onto the hem of your underwear, “and take these off.”
your heart was racing as you slid your underwear down and climbed onto beomgyu’s bed. heat pulled at your core as you waited for him to make the next move. beomgyu smirked at you as he slowly pulled his boxers down against his hard bulge. his cock sprang out, causing your eyes to widen a little.
now that your mind was clear for once, you really took in just how big beomgyu’s cock was. pressing your thighs together and shifting on the bed, your face heated at the fact that it was about to be inside you. beomgyu stroked himself a couple times before stepping towards the bed. he climbed overtop of you, causing you to lay down onto your back.
the tip of his cock was rubbing against your clit and it sent shivers through your body. your pussy throbbed even more at the contact. “how could you be so clueless?” beomgyu asked you before his lips captured yours. his hand trailed down to your pussy and his thumb started to rub circles into your clit. you moaned into his mouth, hips rocking upwards, “you should’ve just told me.” your voice was starting to come up breathy as your hips grinded up towards his hand.
beomgyu slipped his fingers inside you, “why didn’t you tell me?” your brain fogged over, small moans escaping your lips as he pumped in and out of you. your wetness made it easy, and the slight squelching sounds set your body on fire. you kissed beomgyu to try and stifle your whimper. “gonna cum,” you breathed out, completely ignoring beomgyu’s question.
you threw your head back into the pillow and beomgyu trailed kisses along your neck as the knot in your stomach tightened. you wrapped your arms around beomgyu’s neck and brought his face to yours as your legs started to tremble, kissing him hard. your hips rolled up as you came around his fingers, breathing heavily as you put your forehead to beomgyu’s.
beomgyu kissed you sweetly for a moment before pulling away to hover over you. he lined his cock with your entrance and slowly slid inside you, brows furrowing. “fuck, baby,” he said as he bottomed out. beomgyu began sliding in and out of you at a decent rate, his head bowed as he watched your cum coat his cock, before picking up his pace.
you cried out as he pressed your thighs to your stomach, using the advantage to fuck into you deeper. “you can take it, baby. i know you can,” beomgyu said before giving you a chaste kiss, a whimper spilling out of his mouth after. he filled you up so much you felt like you were going to burst at the seams. you felt every inch of him, especially the tip of his cock hitting against your sweet spot. it made tears prick your eyes and your teeth to bite down hard on your bottom lip.
“you like that? you like when i fuck into you like that? when i make you feel good?” beomgyu breathed, staring down at your whimpering figure. you squirmed underneath him, eyes squeezed shut as you nodded, “mhm, p-please don’t stop!”
beomgyu sloppily kissed you, slight grunts vibrating against your mouth as he continued fucking you. “it feels so good,” you murmured, trying to grind up into him in any way that you could. beomgyu’s hands gripping your thighs and pinning you to the bed made it impossible. beomgyu moaned, head falling with tightly knitted brows and you felt him twitch inside you.
“mmm, baby you’re gonna make me cum with how fucking tight you are around me,” he said lowly. beomgyu’s voice was so attractive, especially when he lowered it. that it made the rope inside you snap and you came all over his cock, a whimpering mess beneath him. “that’s it, baby. fuck…” beomgyu trailed and his grip on your thighs tightened as he feverishly stroked in and out of your pussy faster.
your nails dug into his shoulders as you cried out again, shallow moans pouring out of you as your back arched off the bed. “t-too much!” you whimpered.
“take it,” beomgyu demanded as he continued his pace. his head fell back and his mouth hung open as you watched his hips roll back and forth through watery eyes.
“shit…” beomgyu said, breathing hard as he came inside you, filling you up even more. his strokes faltered as he rode out his high and you whined loudly underneath him, squirming from your sensitive pussy. beomgyu leaned down and brought his lips to yours to slowly kiss you.
“my baby,” he said airily, pecking your lips before pulling away. you looked at him through hooded eyes and tear stained cheeks, not even registering his words. beomgyu chuckled at you before kissing your cheek and then your neck. “my baby, always so good. i could fuck you for days,” he said against your neck, leaving goosebumps on your skin.
beomgyu leaned back and slowly pulled out of you, a wince on his face. you felt empty without him inside you, without his big cock filling you up to the brim. you felt the cum drip out of you and whimpered slightly. beomgyu laid down onto the bed next to you and pulled you towards him. “my clueless, fucked out baby,” beomgyu laughed as you settled into him. you giggled and pushed at his chest a little, “shut up!” beomgyu pressed a kiss to your forehead as he laughed more.
© jjunieworld - all rights reserved. please do not repost on any social media sites, translate, or modify any of my works.
permanent taglist: @jjunberry @gothgyuu @spooksh0wbabe @beargyuuzz @kittyhyuka @dani-is-tired @riaawr @nxzz-skz @soobieboobiedoobiedaboobie @rapmonie2047
masterlist┊request rules
#txt x reader#beomgyu x reader#beomgyu#choi beomgyu#txt beomgyu#choi beomgyu x reader#kpop scenarios#kpop#txt soobin#txt hueningkai#txt yeonjun#txt taehyun#tomorrow x together#tomorrow x together imagines#kpop x reader#txt#txt imagines#txt scenarios#txt angst#beomgyu angst#beomgyu oneshot#beomgyu drabble#beomgyu imagines#beomgyu scenarios#beomgyu fanfic#txt fanfic#txt au#beomgyu smut#beomgyu hard hours
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So it's been a while since i posted any books - mostly because i've been hiding my progress like a little sneak.
I just finished this bind last night of The Desert Storm by @blue-sunshine-mauve-morning, or really it's volume 1 out of like ??? 15, maybe. Please take whatever i say with a pinch of salt (I have had 0 sleep for more than 24 hours, and that tends to make me a little very sleep-deprivation drunk a.k.a. unhinged). Okay, on to thoughts! The Desert Storm was foisted onto me by @celestial-sphere-press who told me under no uncertain terms that I WOULD FUCKING LOVE THIS SHIT. Well, I did. This more than 1 million word epic about Ben Fuckin' Kenobi is pretty much god-tier fanfiction. It reads like a goddamn novel. I can never think of canon again without thinking that this good shit should be canon. I read it and then consumed half of it within a week, and I have zero regrets. @blue-sunshine-mauve-morning, i absolutely love you and love your writing. It is the best thing since sliced bread. It is better than sliced bread.
I also had the benefit of @celestial-sphere-press saying, hey would you want to use the typeset? MY GOD, i am grateful. I love this fic, i would have typeset it if it hadn't been typeset but Des did such a beautiful job that i am absolutely in awe and thankful that she and the author allowed others to use it. Look at it - it's so beautiful. I only had to think hey, i just gotta design the cover and et cetera and so the book happened.
Please also check out @celestial-sphere-press 's amazing post here and here, who is the only person i know who's started and is almost complete in fanbinding this epic, and is also making an author a copy of the entire series.
Some stats, if you will.
96215 words || 380 pages
Title font: Ghaomiec
I took some inspiration from starblight bindery's lovely desert scape as well as this amazing cover of Dune which i own. I love that the landscape emanates Dune vibes while being oh so Tattooine - just sand and heat, relentless loneliness and melancholy. This fic centres around Obi-Wan Infinite Sadness Kenobi so it needed SAD VIBES TM, which i tried to deliver in desolate landscape form.
Also thank the heavens for Renegade members, who in a masterful stroke of Group Buy Saves Money, managed to source extra-out-of-production colours of Colibri and help a fair number of us get really cool limited edition versions of bookcloth. I am now a proud owner of a lorge stash of Duo and Colibri of which i am now sitting on like a shifty dragon with a hoarding problem. Good luck getting your bookcloth now, Folio Society, ha ha (gloating)! This particular bookcloth is Colibri Copper which has been wholly stashed for The Desert Storm series. I am leaning on transitioning to Malachite for Rise and Fall when I get to it.
The front cover design was done with a stock image and converted to a PNG, which i then fiddled with and did some HTV magic with. It was remarkably easier to weed than expected. I tried something new and ironed the design on the naked bookcloth first before gluing it to the boards, which was a new challenge in making sure everything was aligned.
Endpapers are marbled endpapers (Renato Crepaldi) which I got from Hollanders, which perfectly fit the colour scheme of the bind. The only hiccup was as I was cutting, I realized the sheet was running in the opposite direction of his usual papers and half the size, and only yielded 3 A5 size endpapers and so my heart went noooooooooo. oh well. i guess i will use it for quartos.
Endbands are my favourite - silk in 3 colours in the french doublecore style (as i was binding this i did not have the mental capacity to handle the difficulty of 4 strands). the truth is i usually only can do 4 when I have higher brain function and am willing to spend 80% of my time unraveling it from getting tangled.
I also forgot to mention I had mild fuck-ups, I got glue on the front endpaper which I had to hastily remove with wet cloth, and the back square is preposterously bad but I'm ignoring it for now.
Anyway, i've actually managed to complete a few other binds which have not been mentioned here as they've all been gifts/ surprises or event books in some form. I am SO EXCITED, also because I am travelling in the latter half of July to San Diego and L.A. and I get to meet some bookbinding friends in the flesh. Renegade is fucking amazing y'all. I am ready to embrace these crazy lads who have enabled me for the last 1 year, even when i'm the solitary (1) weirdo from my country of origin in the server. Also... potentially bookbinding trip early next year??? I am enthused.
#bookbinding#fanbinding#renegade bindery#my books#star wars#clone wars#obi-wan kenobi#ben kenobi#ben naasade#infinite sadness#the desert storm#the ben naasade epic
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party trick
A/N: this silly little fic is directly inspired by this hilarious post by @pedge-page 😝 this fic is meant to be silly, a little unrealistic, and fun! If that ain’t your thing, no worries! Just scroll on by, gem. Also, big thanks to @itsokbbygrl for betaing and @morallyinept for encouraging me with my shenanigans! hehe.
~word count: 1.9k~
Summary: your boyfriend Dieter wants to show you his new party trick that he learned from a pornstar named Ezra
Pairing | Dieter Bravo x pornstar!Ezra x f!reader
Warnings: fluff, smut, established relationship, mentions of drugs and eating, dieter and the reader are openly bi, implied open relationship (not described) Ezra is a bi male pornstar (definition of bi panic) (very light dubious consent as reader and dieter smoke before fucking but it is not described) male masturbation, self sucking??, reader is able bodied with no physical descriptions, readers nickname is gumdrop, no age gap, +18, minors dni!
Your first date with the ever-so eccentric, Dieter Bravo, was a success! Sure, he was a bit clumsy, and maybe even a bit of a blubbering idiot, but you had an incredible time. Did you kiss? Well—maybe! There’s a tell-tale sign when he admires the color of your lipstick against the heart shaped patch in his beard.
After that first date, he washes his face, but is careful to not remove the residue of your lipstick. Not even a week goes by and he’s asking you out on a second date.
Two dates turns to ten and somewhere down the line…you’re Dieter Bravo’s girlfriend, and you couldn’t be happier. (And neither could he)
-
Dieters plan for the evening was to throw a party with some of his friends: not necessarily a rager, per se, just an intimate get-together. Pop a few bottles, skinny dip in his inground pool, and dance under the California night sky.
He canceled his plans last minute because the only person he wanted to spend his evening with was you, his gumdrop.
Hiya, gumdrop baby! 💗
Dee! Hey, baby boy 🥰 having fun at your party?
He cheeses a smile down at his phone, dimples on display, fingers typing fast on the tiny screen, little tap tap taps echoing through the cooling evening air.
Good golly, I’m blushing 🤭 actually…I canceled the party! Just wasn’t feeling the vibes for it! Wanna come over?
Yes! I’d love to! I was just about to order some takeout. Want me to pick something up on the way?
Yes! How about veggie grill? I was just about to smoke, want me to wait up for ya? Oh! Also, I got something I wanna show you later 😉
Being in a relationship with Dieter meant that nothing he could possibly say or do surprised you anymore, but his vibrance, care-free, goofy, eccentric attitude, made him even more attractive to you. That and the fact that he was the literal definition of a trash panda. Your trash panda specifically.
Sounds good to me! 💗 did you want your usual or something different? You don’t have to wait for me, Dee! I’ll have some when I come over. Oh? What is it that you want to show me? 👀
Okie doke! Hey, how about you just order the whole menu? My treat! See ya soon, gumdrop xx. And you’ll see! It’s a surprise. Hehe.
God, Bravo. You sure know how to spoil a gal rotten! Looking forward to the surprise!
He hearted your messages before he reached behind his ear and grabbed his perfectly rolled joint and reached for his lighter that was resting on the table next to the poolside chair he was spread out on.
He couldn’t wait to see you and show you his new party trick.
-
Hours earlier in the day, Dieter found himself in his bed, boxers discarded on the floor and his fist languidly wrapped around his half-hard cock.
His freehand was scrolling through Pornhub, trying to find something to get off to. Usually it didn’t take him very long to settle on a video, but today he was finding it to be a bit of an annoying struggle.
He scrolled and scrolled till he stumbled upon something he had never seen before, self sucking?
He spit into his palm, using his saliva as a natural lubricant because he was too lazy to reach across his nightstand to grab his favorite bottle of lotion (ain’t nobody got time for that!).
Holy shit! He’s sucking himself off??
Christ, his cock is taking up the entire screen!
Dieter's private thoughts ran rabid as he watched the pornstar, Ezra, easily bend over and suck the head of his cock (which was massive, by the way) into his mouth.
“Holy fuck! How is that even possible?!” Dieter announced in disbelief.
He paused the video, and went to Ezra’s page and scrolled till he found the contact button and a direct link to Ezra’s instagram. He sent him a message:
Hey! I hope this doesn’t come off as weird or creepy (feel free to ignore) but I watched one of your videos just now…the self sucking one and DUDE, nice cock! How the hell do I do that? 🫣
Ezra responds seconds later after hearting the message,
HOLY SHIT! THEE DIETER BRAVO GOT OFF TO MY COCK? 🥵 (sorry, huge fan!) anyway, gem, I’d be happy to show you the art of self sucking, and then you too can be a pro like me. xx
Dudeee you’re a fan of me?? I’m blushing! 😉 okay, okay, I have to ask…is it all natural?
I am, indeed! You have quite the eccentric presence, gem. Oh, it’s natural alright. The gods have certainly laid their blessing upon my loins x.
Ohhh, I get it! You’re like Shakespeare? 🤣 damn, you sure know how to swing that thing around! Anyway, I will take you up on that offer! Here’s my number:
Lawl. You’re a funny one huh, gem? I suppose I am a bit like Shakespeare both with my verbiage, and my cock. You free right now?
The funniest guy around! Well, Romeo, got my cock out and everything, let’s boogie?
Boogie we shall.
And so that’s how Dieter ended up FaceTiming with Ezra: who coincidentally, also had his cock out.
“Not to be a total massive fucking flirt, but you’re gorgeous, and my girlfriend would probably eat you right up!” Dieter preened, leaning in close so he could get a better look at Ezra’s third limb, er, cock.
“Oh?” Ezra smirks, “would she now? Well, gem, perhaps the three of us should get together sometime?”
“Yes! You can be like the skunk to my raccoon!” Dieter said with a giggle.
“I beg your finest pardon? Your—what?”
“Oh! Sorry, sorry. Probably should have provided some context, huh?” Dieter blushes.
“Naturally, gem. Go on.” Ezra sits back on his elbows, listening,
“So, my girlfriend calls me a trash panda! It’s endearing, really. And well, you got that blonde streak in your hair…so you can be the skunk?”
Ezra chuckles in pure amusement, eyebrows raising, heavy cock bobbing between his thighs.
“A skunk, huh? You’re lucky I think you’re cute, gem.”
Dieter fanned his face like the little slut that he was, and giggling, “You think I’m cute?”
“Cute as a button, gem. Now, let’s see what we’re working with so that you can show your girlfriend what I taught you.”
“Yes sir.”
Ezra is a wonderful teacher and by the end of it, Dieter is almost able to suck the head of his cock into his mouth. There’s a slight strain in his lower back, but fuck it! You only live once.
“Well, gem, I think you just have to remember to relax your muscles. Pretend you’re floating on a babbling brook, or napping on a fluffy cloud, and then you’ll be sucking yourself off in no time. I gotta run, but let me know how it goes!”
“Ahh! Okay, I think I can manage that! Thanks for all the help, Ezra.”
“Anytime, gem. Anytime.”
-
After passing the joint back and forth together, fucking (a few times) and devouring the veggie grill you brought over, Dieter brings you upstairs to his bedroom, nearly stumbling over his two feet because he’s so excited to show you his new party trick!
“Sit that cute ass on the bed, gumdrop.” He’s not being domineering at all, quite the opposite actually.
You’re both naked, naturally because in Dieter’s home, clothes are always optional!
You wrap your arms around him from behind, kissing his jawline, pecking at the heart patch in his beard. “Are you gonna show me the surprise now, Dieter?”
He leans back into your embrace with a pleasant sigh, “Yes, gumdrop. But c’mon, bed. Now.”
You press one last kiss to his face before detaching yourself from around him, walking over to the bed and plopping down with a soft, oof.
He joins you moments later, laying on his elbow facing you while you reach across and card your fingers through the soft curly hairs on his chest.
“So I was watching this porno earlier, right? I did a deep scroll, and stumbled across this video of this dude…with literally the biggest fucking cock that my two eyes have ever seen!” He speaks animatedly, throwing his hands up as he leans in.
“It literally took up the entire fucking screen, gumdrop! Anyway, that wasn’t the craziest part! His cock was so big, and long, that the motherfucker was able to suck himself off! Dude barely even had to bend over, just popped that sucker right in and got to suckin’!”
You twirl a strand of his chest hair between your fingers, giggling as you listen to his dramatic retelling of the massive cock he saw.
“Shit, it really took up the whole screen? That’s insane, Dee!”
“YEAH! Like…the guy was packing a literal BAZOOKA down there!” He chuckles, leaning in so he can nuzzle his face against yours.
“Anyway, I found the guy's instagram and sent him a message because I thought to myself, ‘Damn! Imagine if I could also suck my own cock?’”
“Let me guess, you asked this pornstar fellow how you can suck your own cock like him?”
“Yes! How did you know?” He chuckled and stole a quick kiss, melting against you like the soft man that he was.
“Lucky guess?” You tease, dragging your finger down lower, skating it across one of his nipples. “So, was it a success? Did he teach you how to properly suck your own cock, Dee?”
“Well, I was actually able to barely get the tip in my mouth! Wanna see, gumdrop? S’gonna be my new party trick!”
“Show me, Dee.” You giggle, encouraging him as he quickly sits up, remembering how Ezra told him the way to curve his spine, and relax his muscles so that he can bend over just enough—
Dieter is hunched over, using one hand to hold the base of his cock, and the other is resting against his lower back for support. He’s so fucking close to wrapping his lips around the head of his cock when–pinch!
He yelps in surprise, immediately rolling over and yowling like a cat.
Ow. Ow. Ow! Fuck! Fuck me! Ow!
You're at his side in an instant, comforting him and reaching for your phone to either call 911, or look up an immediate remedy for his pain.
“Fucking pulled a goddamn muscle!” He whimpers, burying his face into your chest.
“Dee, it’s okay! You’re not dying, baby. Okay? Look! Google says that we have to treat the area with ice and then a heating pad!”
“I’M DYING, GUMDROP! I SEE THE LIGHT!” Your boyfriend dramatically groans, “I'M FADING FAST!”
After icing Dieter’s lower back for a good hour or so, you placed a heating pad against the sore spot while spooning him for extra body heat.
He was typing a message to Ezra, a deep frown set between his eyebrows because he really just wanted to know what it was like to suck himself off! (Who wouldn’t)
Hey, Ez. I pulled a fucking muscle in my back!
☹ gf is spooning me with a heating pad now, but I was really hoping that I would be able to suck myself off!
From Ezra: (Shakespeare-BAZOOKA 🍆)
Aw, I’m terribly broken to hear that, gem. Better luck next time, Birdie!
-
The next time Dieter announced to you that he wanted to try and suck his cock again, you came prepared with two yoga mats and a beginner yoga flow video (thrifted, of course).
He gives you a funny look as you set the yoga mats down in the sunroom.
“What?” You laugh, placing your hands on your hips. “It would be a cool party trick, Dee! Just gotta get you a little more flexible and bendy before we try again.”
Ohhh. He grins, dimples peeking out, “Well, let’s yogi, gumdrop.”
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#fic: party trick#dieter bravo#dieter bravo fanfiction#dieter bravo fic#dieter bravo smut#dieter bravo fluff#dieter bravo x f!reader#dieter bravo x female reader#dieter x Ezra prospect#ezra prospect#Ezra prospect x dieter#tw light dubious consent#dieter bravo x you#the bubble fanfiction#the bubble fic#pedro pascal#pedro pascal fanfiction#pedro pascal characters#pornstar!ezraprospect#tw food#able bodied reader
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Skz Pack: 2 Omegas, 1 Rut
NO MINORS!
Author’s Note: the title is cringy but idc 😭😭pls still read this 🫶🏾🫶🏾 thank you to everyone for telling me about their ages in my post and hopefully this is good
Synopsis: spending his first rut together doesn’t turn out too bad
Genre: Fluff and smut ‼️
Warnings: mentions of sexual activities, ruts, eating schedules, being a simp, lying, skz x skz, breeding, cuddling, pregnancy/pups, safe words, pack lunas, animalistic behaviors, probably more so tell me what you think deserves a warning
Word Count: 2,697
You are in the middle of your piano lessons with Jeongin when he looks over at you.
“I want to tell you something.” You immediately raise your eyebrow. Jeongin has never been the shy type so what is this about?
“Go on..” You say, hesitantly.
He seems hesitant himself and starts by saying that he doesn't want to alarm you. “My rut is starting tomorrow, and I wanted to know if you wanted to spend it together. I understand if you don’t.. It can be a lot. Also, Chan-hyung will be assisting as well as Minho-hyung. I brought it up to them, and they suggested having someone in the room in case I go a little too far.”
Although you are surprised, you are also touched that Jeongin wants to spend his rut with you. Is it rather fast? Yes, but wolves mate forever. It’s not like you are going to run off on him, or vice versa; he is your moonmate. Is it too soon for you mentally though? Chan had warned you that Jeongin could be a lot to handle.
“Can you give me until tonight to decide?” He simply nods as the lesson continues. You can’t help but watch him for any signs of irritation. He helps you with the next part of the song with an okay attitude.
Your lessons are helping you improve, and you could play whole songs which was your inspiration to register to attend university. Jeongin is happy to possibly have classes together considering he is still years from graduation as well.
Jeongin checks the time and looks over, “did you wanna stop now? It has been a hour and a half”
“We can st-'' You are cut off by the loud growling of Jeongin’s stomach. Oh. He wants to stop to get food.
“Innie! You told me you’d start eating breakfast!” You scold, putting your hand on your hip.
“I was running late today..” He mumbles, feeling embarrassed. He gets up and grabs his bookbag. You shake your head and grab your purse before taking his hand.
“Lets go before you collapse from not eating” You tease as you both leave the building.
You both walk together to a nearby restaurant and got some food to take home. You are very nervous to be going to Jeongin’s place since your awkward interactions with Felix. You don’t even know what you did wrong besides existing. Did he just not like new people? Was he the yandere type? At least Minho seems okay. He is very supportive but also stern, and you could respect that about someone, especially an oppa.
“You look like you got a lot on your mind. Wanna fill me in on what’s happening in your big, beautiful head?” Jeongin asks, kissing your forehead. He is holding your waist now as well.
“Oh nothing, just thinking about you.”
“Oh? What about me?”
Oh brother.. Lying is not your forte at all. Be quick.
“You know your outfit is amazing, and your dimples are so pretty.” You smile as you look at him blushing now. “You think I’m pretty huh? I think you’re pretty too.” He pecks your lips before resting his head on your shoulder. “Of course I think you’re pretty Innie. You’re my everything.”
It seems like the sun is beaming down on you both as you walk home because Jeongin is so happy. He skips ahead of you carrying your food in his hands. You smile and follow him recording for memory sake. He is being really adorable today. He is always the happiest with his glasses on.
“Innie do you have anything you wanna say for memory sake?” You ask as he spins around. “I love y/n with my whole heart, and I don’t wanna be without her.” You blush and hit his arm. “Such a simp” you whisper before ending the recording.
“You love it.” He responds. You nod and hold his hand once again today. “I do love it. I’m glad you aren’t the shy type.” As you approach their home, you can see someone waiting outside.
As you approach Jeongin's home, you could see a figure waiting outside. As you got closer, he realizes it is Jisung, one of his' closest friends.
"Hey Jisung," Jeongin calls out as he approaches his pack mate. "What are you doing out here?"
"I just wanted to get some air.," Jisung replies, glancing over at you. "Who’s this?"
Jeongin looks at you, silently asking for your permission. You nod, and Jeongin explains that you are his mate before all three of you go inside.
“Oh you’re really pretty..” Jisung says, tone low before shying away.
Inside, Minho and Chan are sitting on the couch watching TV. They greet Jeongin and you warmly before telling Jeongin to eat good before tonight, considering ruts take a lot of energy.
After a few minutes of small talk together, Jeongin leads you to his room. "So, have you made a decision?" he asks, referring to his earlier request to spend his rut together.
You take a deep breath and look at him. "I think I'm ready," you say, smiling nervously. "But, I do have one request. Can we have a safe word just in case things get too intense?"
Jeongin nods understandingly. "Of course. We'll come up with one together."
You both spend the rest of the evening planning for the upcoming rut. Jeongin explains to you what to expect and how he would feel during this time.
“I promise that I will do everything in my power to not be too much or make you uncomfortable during this process. Please tell me if anything is just too much. We should probably talk about the safe word now. Do you have any ideas?”
“Should we use the stoplight system? So red is the safe word and green means okay?” You ask, searching his face for a response. He just laughs.
“You know it’s a little basic but it does work so that’s fine. Are you ready to eat now?”
You smile and nod, feeling relieved that the conversation about the safe word went well. "Yes, I'm ready to eat now." You eat together as you watch Youtube, cuddling up once you are both done.
You feel grateful for Jeongin's openness and willingness to communicate about his needs, and you take a personal vow to do everything you can to make this experience as comfortable and enjoyable for him as possible. As the night is coming to an end, you both take your time making a nest in his bed with different articles of clothing from his pack members and your own clothing.
As you both settle into the nest, Jeongin wraps his arms around you and nuzzles into your neck. "Thank you for being so understanding and supportive. It means a lot to me," he says softly.
You stroke his hair gently, "Of course, Jeongin. I care about you and want to make sure you feel safe and comfortable during this time as well."
He snuggles closer to you, and you can feel the warmth of his body against yours. You close your eyes and take in the moment, feeling grateful for the bond you share with him.
As you drift off to sleep, you feel confident that you and Jeongin will be able to navigate this rut together, with open communication and respect for each other's needs.
Downstairs, Minho and Chan prepared some smoothies for later as well as water bottles, storing them in the fridge for later. They gathered some granola bars and hot towels for after the rut has run its course. They wanted to be prepared for anything, so they had just gotten home from working out together. Chan was strong, but Jeongin was also strong, especially mid rut. It would take both their strengths combined to stop Jeongin if it came down to it.
It was four hours later when Jeongin woke up, shaking you awake. "Y/N.." he says as softly as possible. You grumble before your eyes flutter open. "Innie, what time is it?" He checks the time on his watch. "It's 4 am. I think my rut is starting. It's so hot." You rubbed his arms feeling the heat radiating off him.
You yawn before slowly getting out the nest, warning Jeongin that you were going to get Chan and Minho so he wouldn't think you're leaving. You slowly go out the door, calling for Chan or Minho. Not knowing which room is theirs off the top of your head.
"In here!" They call from the end of the hall. The first room by the kitchen. You approach and open the door in your nightgown. "Jeongin's rut is starting. He isn't fully in it, but he is getting warmer and in a little bit he will be spiking." You inform them before turning back to return to Jeongin's room.
"Shit he couldn't make it through the night." Chan was working on something at his desk, but Minho looked like he was actually sleeping before you came in. "You don't make it through the night either. Your rut comes at approximately 12 everytime." Minho says, drowsy from sleep but following Chan and you back. Chan blushes "don't just be exposing me," he whines.
Upon entering the room, you all are surrounded by the spiking scent of red wine. Jeongin, who was still in the nest, immediately growled at Chan. Jeongin grabs you and Minho pulling you both into his nest. Minho yelps, not expecting the possessiveness of Jeongin over him.
"Innie it's okay. It's just hyung and I. We are here for you." Minho presses a kiss to his cheek, but Jeongin is not letting Minho out of his grip.
"I don't think you're getting away babe. Just try to appease his alpha side for now. We are all mates." Chan suggests. He has no problems with Jeongin spending his rut with the two omegas. Hopefully, it drains his energy quicker.
Jeongin took his time making out with you and Minho. Both your scents mix in with Jeongin's making it smell like a fruity wine. Minho's blackberry smell was overwhelming because you and Jeongin both have light scents. Your cherry blossom smell is fading into the background. Just as you feel like your mind is wandering, you hear Minho call out to you.
"Are you still here y/n? Need help grounding yourself?" He asks, causing you to nod rapidly. Minho and Jeongin attack different parts of your body with kisses. Knowing he is the pack luna, Minho makes you comfortable because he has experience. Minho leaves hickies along your neck while Jeongin kisses up your legs. The kisses are making your skin hot; Jeongin’s kisses were soft while Minho’s were more passionate. A good mix of them both had you growing wet. The desire you feel for them both is increasing as time goes on.
You whine as Jeongin rubs a hand over your underwear-covered vagina. "Jeongin.. don't tease." Your words are simple, yet Jeongin almost loses himself to his animalistic side. He slides your underwear down and rubs your clit in small circles. "It's so pretty. You're so pretty." Jeongin whispers compliments to you as he slides a finger into you. You sigh before Minho encaptures your lips against his.
You are having a tongue-war with Minho, a fight for dominance, and he wins by sucking on your tongue causing you to moan in his mouth. Jeongin's continuous attack on your walls with his fingers are not helping either as you grind your hips down on his fingers. The sound of gushing fuels his appetite causing him to slip in another finger and use his other hand to slide a finger into Minho as well. A rush to prep you both before his animalistic urge took over.
It doesn't take long before everyone was at their limit. You moan out, practically begging him for more. "Jeongin hurry!" Minho is groaning next to you as he tugs at Jeongin's hair causing a moan to leave his mouth. Feeling like he prepped you enough, he slid his hand away from your vagina slipping those fingers into Minho’s mouth. He sucks them clean as they weren’t glistening from wetness anymore. The fingers leave his mouth with a popping sound, leaving him to feel impatient. "Give me your knot, alpha" Minho’s tone is sassy and angry. As if a rubber band had snapped, Jeongin grips Minho's throat, his fingers feeling every breath Minho takes, kissing him as he rubs his tip up and down your clit, sliding in with ease.
It is simple biology for your bodies to want each other. The desire reached an all time high. You are needy and weak under Jeongin, and you have no control over your mind anymore. Neither did Jeongin. You throw your head back as he strokes in and out at a decent pace, not wanting to leave you too sore. Staring up into his eyes, "Alpha.. Alpha.." the words flying out your mouth as if he was a God, and you were chanting a mantra to him. The feeling going to his head. "You can take it, little one. Alpha is gonna give you his pups" He says, slamming into you. You had your eyes closed, focusing only on the feeling of Jeongin.
Your screams and loud moans raise an alert for Chan who thinks if he should interfere. "Are you okay y/n?" He asks, checking if you were even alert enough to answer. "I- I'm okay. I want his pups so bad. I need them." Chan nods as your eyes meet his, and he understands that look so well. The look of someone who was being bred and wanted to be marked.
"Oh you need them little one? You need alpha's pups?" Jeongin asks, in between groans. Minho decided to slide his hand down your body to rub your clit, making it hard for you to speak. "Yes! I need them!" You choke out; you were crying at this point, tears staining your rosy cheeks. Jeongin's pace was unrelenting, making you feel overwhelmed. He was going to rip the orgasm from your body. "I'm gonna give you my pups.. taking me so well"
"Jeongin! I love you!" Your last moments before everything went white. You held Jeongin close as your orgasm hit, causing your whole body to shake and your toes to curl. The warmth of his body gave you a comfort only a mate could give; you felt safe under him, his whole body covering yours. You felt like his’ in that moment, your hands intertwined across his back to hold him there. His strokes got slower after you orgasmed, he was close and his knot was inching closer. It only took four more strokes before his knot was expanded and he held you close afterwards. "You're so pretty y/n" You smiled and laughed as he smiled at you back.
After a moment of catching your breath, Jeongin rubs your belly. "So full. Are you sure you're even gonna be able to carry our large child?" You hit his arm, "I'm not that small Jeongin. Also, our child will be a baby so not that large yet.. I hope." Minho chuckles and that's when you both remembered his hyungs were in the room. You hid your face in Jeongin's neck. "I'm sorry you guys had to see that," you mumble "I know it was a lot"
Minho helped you both wipe off some as Jeongin's knot goes down. Chan went to get you some water. "It's fine. We are a pack and all mates so it's nothing we probably won't experience with each other at one point." You nodded and took the granola bar Minho offered, eating the first bite was heavenly. You had been starving apparently. Jeongin just waited for Chan to return with water as he kissed over your face, then, all over Minho's as well.
"You owe me a knot as well, alpha," Minho says casually. Jeongin looked shocked and the blush on his face made you both laugh. It was going to be a long night.
Taglist: @lino-jagiyaa @svngcore @kpflyn @changbinsrightboob @cooooooooookieeee @queenmea604
#kflixnet#skz#stray kids#omegaverse#skz!pack#skz!abo#skz!werewolf au#skz smut#skz imagines#stray kids smut#yang jeongin#jeongin#poly!skz#skz ot8#skz i.n#jeongin x reader#jeongin x y/n#angelwroteit
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[CN] MLQC’s Lucien Wonderful Moments Date English Translation
⚠️ SPOILER ALERT!! ⚠️
This post contains a detailed spoiler for a date that has not been released in EN yet! Feel free to notify me if there are any mistakes in the translation~
Lucien boops Snowball's nose, his tone hinting at jealousy.
"You've been praising this little guy a lot."
"Pfft, is Professor Lucien jealous?"
Translation under the cut!
[Notes from Lux: Here’s the CN video link if anyone wants to follow along with his Voice Acting.]
A car moves slowly on the vibrant countryside road, joyful laughter spilling out of its windows from time to time.
Lucien casually rests his hand on the steering wheel, looking ahead, and quickly comes up with a Chinese idiom.
Lucien: The victory is in the bag. (shèng quàn zài wò)
MC: Idiom with wò… crouching tigers and hidden dragons! (wò hǔ cáng lóng! - 卧虎藏龙 - fig. mean talented individuals hiding their talent)
Lucien: Just a reminder to this beautiful contestant, this phrase was already said during our first round of the idiom chain game.
MC: Then, how about… I control my destiny! (wǒ mìng yóu wǒ - 我命由我- a phrase, not an idiom)
Lucien: [chuckles] That doesn't seem to be an idiom. Is Miss Producer starting to cheat?
Lucien tilts his head and looks at me with a smile. I sheepishly stick out my tongue, wracking my brain as I search through my vocabulary.
The gentle spring breeze seeps through the gaps of the car window. Looking at those cunning eyes, I have a sudden inspiration and break into a sweet smile.
MC: I like you~ (wǒ xǐhuān nǐ~)
Lucien's demeanor briefly halts for half a beat as though he doesn't expect my answer. But then, the smile on his lips grows bigger.
The warm afternoon sunshine reflects brightly in his upturned eyes, making them look particularly beautiful.
Lucien: [chuckles, then sighs] This is the most sophisticated cheating I've ever seen, so I concede defeat.
I cheer joyfully, but before I can utter a word, an electronic broadcast interrupts me.
"Distance to the next highway toll booth is 1.5 kilometers ahead.”
I glance at the phone screen and see it shows another hour and a half to the camping village.
Lucien suggested this camping trip to an ecologically pristine village with beautiful scenery, though the only downside is that the journey was a bit long.
I turn to look at Lucien, who appears to be in a good mood, and can't resist asking the small question that's been lingering on my mind.
MC: Lucien, what made you suddenly want to take me to this camping village?
Lucien: It was recommended by a colleague from the research center. I heard the scenery there is nice and worth a visit.
Lucien: I originally wanted to find an opportunity to spend time with you, and just last weekend we went to see a play, which gave me a very legitimate reason to invite you on a date—
Lucien: To create “beautiful moments”.
He deliberately emphasizes the words "beautiful moments", causing me to momentary pause as a recent memory quickly floods into my mind.
—[Flashback Start]—
At the entrance of the theater last weekend.
Lucien and I walked out of the theater hand in hand. I was still sniffling, lost in the storyline of the performance we just watched, unwilling to let it go.
Just as I was about to wipe away the tears at the corner of my eye, a warm hand handed me a tissue and gently dabbed it beneath my eyes.
Lucien: [gently] If this little audience member keeps crying, I'll have to go find the production team for an explanation.
MC: I'm just really moved by the play...
MC: At first, when I saw the protagonist growing up under the shadow of his mother's depression, I thought he would fall into despair.
MC: But he was able to diligently record the beautiful moments in life and ultimately salvaged himself...
MC: I just tried to put myself in his shoes, and it's really hard to be as optimistic as the protagonist, so I couldn't stop my tears.
Under Lucien's gentle gaze, I rambled on and on, completing my "review" of the play. He patiently wiped the corners of my eyes and offered a comforting smile.
Lucien: I actually think the lady by my side also has a pair of eyes that can discover the beauty of life everywhere.
His sincere praise caught me off guard, and I couldn't help but feel a little buoyed by it. My heart, which had been saddened by the protagonist's struggles, also eased a bit.
MC: If I had a "Book of Beautiful Moments," the first thing I would record is how Professor Lucien always generously praises me~
Lucien chuckled softly, and the strands of hair hanging over his forehead swayed gently in front of his thick lashes.
Lucien: [chuckles] I'm just stating facts. She shares the beauty of the sky with me and finds satisfaction in good weather...
Lucien: —Isn't that kind of you very much like the protagonist?
MC: Then next time I discover something beautiful, I'll make sure to record it promptly.
MC: Let's see if I can fill several volumes of "Wonderful Moments" just like the protagonist!
—[Flashback Ends]—
I casually remarked and thought it was nothing but a joke, yet Lucien silently remembered it in his heart. I come to my senses and blink.
MC: So, the reason you suddenly decided to take me out to play is to create more wonderful moments in my life?
Lucien: I wonder if it's because I'm not "competent" enough that you don't have much to record, so I deliberately created this opportunity.
Lucien: Of course, it's also to show myself off a bit.
He adopts a tone of pretended grievance that stirs a feeling of itchiness in my heart, I suppress the curve of my lips, nodding in mock annoyance.
MC: Well, in light of your "timely remedy," I'll reluctantly start recording officially!
✂———————–
MC: ...Lucien takes me camping;
MC: Before we set off, Lucien made me a cup of hot chocolate.
MC: While playing the idiom chain game, Lucien deliberately went easy on me...
As I speak, I open the Notes app on my phone and mutter to myself, recording a dozen or so entries. But as I continue to write, I suddenly feel something is amiss.
MC: Wait a minute, why do all these "wonderful moments" have Professor Lucien's shadow? I'm starting to suspect that I have a “love-brain”*...
[T/N: "恋爱脑" (love brain) is a Chinese internet buzzword that refers to a mindset that puts love first above everything. It refers to individuals who are deeply in love and often become consumed by their emotions, making it difficult for them to think about anything else. This phenomenon is characterized by extreme devotion to their lover, often leading to uncontrollable emotional dependence and intense desires to be with the other person... If anything, from the way Lucien takes her casual remarks seriously and uses them as a reason to hang out with her, this word describes Lucien more LOL]
Lucien: [with a pretending-don’t-to-know-anything tone] Oh, really?
Lucien is amused by my muttering, and a hint of sly self-satisfaction shines in his long and narrow eyes.
Lucien: [chuckles] It seems the Great Producer has already fallen into my sweet trap.
Lucien: Because my goal is to dominate your today's "wonderful moments" list through this trip.
MC: Hmph, then I won't let you succeed. Right now, I'm going to come up with something completely unrelated to you.
As I speak, I catch a glimpse of a white shadow flashing in front of the car. But before I can react, Lucien has already hit the brakes.
[Sounds of the car suddenly braking]
Almost simultaneously, a strong arm instinctively protects me in front of my chest.
Lucien: ...Are you okay?
He removes his sunglasses and swiftly scans me with his gaze as if confirming whether I'm injured.
I stare blankly ahead. After a moment of daze, there's no movement in front of the car, and my heart leaps into my throat.
MC: I, I'm okay...
MC: Lu, Lucien... Did something just rush onto the road?
Lucien: I'll go down and take a look first. Stay in the car and don't move.
He smooths out my disheveled bangs and then gets out of the car after turning on the hazard lights.
Through the windshield, I see him quickly walk to the front of the car. His gaze instantly shifts downward, as if he's spotted something, and he crouches down.
Did we really hit something?
Just as I nervously stretch my neck and am about to get out of the car to take a look, Lucien suddenly stands up, cradling a bundle of white fluff in his arms.
MC: Eh?
I take a closer look and can't help but exclaim in delight—
It's an adorable little Pomeranian!
Under my expectant gaze, Lucien quickly gets back into the car with the little Pomeranian in his arms, then raises the pup's paw and waves it at me.
MC: Hello there, cutie! How did you end up on the road?
Lucien: This little fellow must have gotten lost. I didn't see anyone else outside the car.
I follow Lucien's gaze out the window. The road is very quiet, there's no sign of anyone around.
MC: Is it injured?
Lucien: It wasn't hit just now. When I got out to check, it was still some distance from the front of the car. It's probably just a little startled.
As if understanding, the Pomeranian snuggles its face into Lucien's palm coquettishly. Its dewy eyes shift between Lucien and me, softening my heart.
I tentatively reach out my hand towards its nose, intending to let it get accustomed to my scent before attempting to pet its little head.
However, as soon as I reach out my hand, the little fellow enthusiastically licks my fingers. In the next moment, it leaps over the center console and goes straight into my arms.
MC: Wow, what a good little doggy!
MC: And it looks very clean, not like a stray dog... Could it be lost?
Lucien leans in and turns the collar of the small Pomeranian, discovering a small round tag. On it, it reads "Snowball*" and a string of numbers.
[T/N: the pet name, "雪糕" (xuě gāo), actually means "ice cream bar/popsicle" LOL. I take some liberty in translating the pup name because “雪” (xuě) word alone means “snow” (while “糕” (gao) means cake). Imagine that this fluffy white bundle looks like a snowball so I give the pup that name :D]
MC: "Snowball"? Is that its name?
Lucien: Mm, below should be the owner's phone number. Let me try contacting them. Maybe the owner hasn't gone far.
Lucien takes out his phone as he speaks and quickly gets connected. After briefly explaining the situation, a wave of gratitude comes from the other end of the line.
??: Thank you so much! I stopped at the service area for a break and took the pup out of the car for a walk. I forgot to bring it back into the car.
??: I've already turned back onto the highway. I'll be there in about forty minutes!
??: Will it delay you?
Lucien doesn't respond, he just looks up at me and gestures with his eyes, as if asking for my opinion. I quickly nod in agreement.
[asking for opinion from the family leader.jpg]
Lucien: No, it won't. Then let's meet at the nearest gas station to the toll booth on the highway.
After a brief conversation, he hangs up the phone and shakes his head at me helplessly.
Lucien: [smiles helplessly] Looks like our journey might be delayed for a bit.
MC: What a careless owner! How could they forget such an adorable little dog?
I affectionately rub Snowball's head. It seems to whimper aggrievedly, then it straightens up, leans against me, and licks my cheek.
The adorable and silly look melts my heart once again. I exaggerate by placing my hand over my heart, then I scoop Snowball into my arms and give it a tight cuddle.
MC: Lucien, it's just too cute.
Upon seeing this, Lucien boops Snowball's nose, his tone hinting at jealousy.
Lucien: You've been praising this little guy since earlier until now for so many times.
MC: Pfft, is Professor Lucien feeling jealous?
Lucien: After all, I was the one who wanted to make a good impression today, but I didn’t expect to be outshone by this "little attention-seeker".
MC: I think, it's actually quite timely that Snowball showed up.
I mischievously wink at him and raise Snowball triumphantly.
MC: Just when I couldn't think of any beautiful moments unrelated to you.
MC: The appearance of this cute little fellow right now just fills that gap perfectly~
Lucien: Is that so?
Lucien presses his lips together thoughtfully, his clean fingertips lightly tapping on the steering wheel. He puts his sunglasses back on and, as if on a whim, starts the car again.
Lucien: Buckle up your seatbelt, let's go.
MC: Huh? Where are we going? Aren't we supposed to wait for Snowball's owner?
Lucien: MC's words just aroused my desire to win.
Lucien: In order not to lose to this little fellow, I have to put in some extra effort during these forty minutes of waiting.
Lucien: Before that, let's go find some more unexpected wonderful moments.
✂———————–
Ten minutes later, Lucien drives us to a countryside field.
The golden sunlight blankets the emerald green grass, while wisps of light mist hover amidst the sea of green.
Excitedly, I hop out of the car while holding Snowball, and find myself unable to tear my eyes away from the beautiful scenery for a moment.
MC: It's so beautiful! Lucien, how did you know there's a place like this nearby?
Lucien: We passed by here when Miss Producer was fully focused on playing the idiom chain game just now.
Lucien: The meeting point I arranged with Snowball's owner is very close to here, so it was convenient to stop by on the way.
MC: [sweats] What? During that intense idiom chain game just now, you still managed to notice the scenery on the sides of the road?
Upon hearing this, Lucien seriously crosses his arms, one hand supporting his chin as if deep in thought.
Lucien: Hmm, after all, even in such a tense moment, Miss Producer didn't forget to use "sweet words" to bribe her opponent.
MC: Pfft-
I can't help but laugh, but Snowball in my arms suddenly wriggles restlessly, as if trying to break free from my embrace.
MC: Do you want to go down and play?
I carefully place Snowball on the ground. It sniffs around with its tiny nose and then happily starts running around us.
MC: [laughs cheerfully] Hahaha, Snowball, you're so fearless, don't you?
MC: Even after such a day full of twists and turns, you can still play so happily!
Lucien: A puppy's mind is very simple.
Lucien: Perhaps in its eyes, it simply unexpectedly took a risk to venture into an unfamiliar place and met with a beautiful and empathetic Jiejie (big sister) who understands it well.
Lucien: And now, this Jiejie has brought it to a playground where it can run freely, so why can't it be happy?
MC: Oh, come on, it's definitely the credit of this reasonable and understanding handsome Gege (big brother).
I jokingly gesture with my hand, but as I watch Snowball's carefree figure, I can't help but ponder Lucien's words with a thoughtful expression.
MC: That being said, it seems like any simple thing can easily make a puppy happy.
MC: Whether it's the company of its owner, a friendly pat from a stranger, a passing butterfly, or even just a small treat...
MC: I often see videos of dogs being scolded by their owners. One moment, they're scared out of their wits…
MC: Then, the next moment, as soon as their owners call their names with a smile, they instantly become happy again.
MC: So, is life filled with beautiful moments everywhere in the eyes of a puppy?
As we talk, Snowball runs around a nearby grassy area and then returns to Lucien's feet, panting. It looks like it's tired from playing and eagerly starts pawing at his pants.
Lucien cooperatively lifts it, and it comfortably stretches lazily in his arms, then leans against his arm and rests.
Lucien pats its head, his expression somewhat resigned.
Lucien: I originally wanted to create a "wonderful moment" for MC, but it seems like Snowball is the one enjoying it more.
MC: Indeed, we should learn from puppies and embrace the spirit of enjoying every moment. I can't let Snowball beat me~
As I say this, I take a deep breath, and the fresh air instantly fills my heart.
MC: So pleasant... If it weren't for the tight schedule and better scenery waiting for us, I'd want to camp right here.
Lucien looks at me upon hearing this, seeming to contemplate something. After a moment, he gently places Snowball into my arms and gives me a mysterious wink.
Lucien: I've received the classmate's wish, please wait a moment.
He walks around to the back of the car, opens the trunk, and folds down all the rear seats, creating a spacious area.
[Lucien’s car being an SUV is really useful in times like this huh-]
Then, he hangs the small decorative lanterns that were initially used for the tent on the roof of the car. Finally, he shakes out a small thin blanket and spreads it on top.
After finishing all this, he bends slightly and makes a gentlemanly invitation gesture.
Lucien: Please, have a seat.
MC: This is...
Lucien: Our time is indeed limited, not enough to set up a proper tent.
Lucien: So we'll have to use this "temporary camping spot" instead, I hope you two* don’t disdain it.
[T/N: He actually uses 小朋友 (literally means: child) as the term of endearment to refer both of them (so the more literal translation should be “I hope the two children don’t disdain it”). I change it for an obvious reason here, but I swear it’s not as bad as the english language makes it to be-]
I stand still for a moment as his intention dawns on me. Pink bubbles seem to bubble up in my chest, making my heart move up and down in the ripples it causes.
I compliantly put on airs, playing along with his gesture as I cradle Snowball and settle into the car.
MC: Can you see a look of "disdain" on our faces?
I raise Snowball, showing a coy and obedient look at Lucien. Snowball, oblivious to the situation, cooperatively wags its tail and barks cheerfully at Lucien twice.
Lucien chuckles softly, then takes off his sunglasses with one hand, his gaze shifting between Snowball and me.
The vast expanse of clouds above his head begins to slowly drift away, revealing the warm and radiant sunshine.
His deep gaze is imbued by the golden sky, revealing a hint of childlike innocence and simple contentment.
Lucien: Indeed, I can't see it, because I can only see two adorable faces.
His doting tone is unreserved, and I satisfactorily squint my eyes, my heart full of joy.
MC: This one-of-a-kind camping area, with Professor Lucien's intention behind it, is priceless and worth more than any amount of money.
MC: I cherish it so much; how could I possibly disdain it?
Snowball seems to understand my words. With a "woof", he jumps down and happily rolls around on the blanket.
Both Lucien and I are amused by its adorable appearance. A gentle breeze blows by, and my entire heart feels light as if it's strolling in the clouds.
Our gazes lock into each other, and this tranquil moment is so beautiful that I truly want to record it in some way.
But I don't take out my phone to make a note. Instead, I instinctively reach out and gently pull Lucien to sit beside me.
The warmth beside me makes me unconsciously lean closer. I nuzzle his shoulder clingily, my heart filled with softness.
MC: Professor Lucien, you've succeeded.
MC: Now my mind is filled with countless wonderful moments, and each of these moments is related to you-
MC: Me leaning on your shoulder, your scent filling my senses, and us sharing this unexpected encounter of scenery together...
MC: And even if these moments aren't intentionally recorded by me, it's okay.
MC: Because every little thing that has been happening with you has already integrated into my world since a long time ago.
The breath above my head becomes even more gentle and elongated. Lucien enfolds me in his arms, his warm breath almost as if it's seeping into the depths of my heart.
Lucien: I am honored to be part of all the “wonderful moments” of Miss MC.
Lucien: As the sole recipient of this “award”, I will remain humble and continue to work hard, bringing her even more happiness.
I smile in his arms, but suddenly, I think of something and pull myself away from him a bit.
MC: But it's not fair, I've listed so many 'wonderful moments' of my own. How come you haven't shared a single one with me?
Lucien seems taken aback by my sudden mention of this. He is struck silent for a moment, then a flicker of wounded expression crosses his face.
Lucien: Perhaps because I thought even if I didn't say anything, MC would know what I’m thinking—
Lucien: My "list of wonderful moments" is very simple, so simple that it has only one item.
Lucien: Now, do you still need me to tell you this one and only item?
He stares steadily into my eyes, with an irreplaceable radiance that ebbs and flows in the depths of his gaze.
I softly laugh, and my entire heart feels as transparent and bright as if it has been meticulously polished.
MC: No need.
I shook my head, the stray hair on my forehead bringing a slightly unbearable itch, gently brushing against my heart along with the gentle spring breeze.
I gently cup his cheek in the palm of my hand, and the world becomes unusually quiet, only the sound of two hearts beating can be heard.
MC: You don't need to say anything.
Because in those beautiful eyes, I only see myself.
————Fin———–
[Bonus Phone Call - Want it Now]
Lucien: Hello? Are you busy?
MC: So, I was about to take a lunch break—I was just thinking about you, and then your call came.
Lucien: It seems like there's always some kind of wonderful little tacit understanding between us.
Lucien: Then tell me about it.
MC: Haha, here's the thing. The company's pet club is planning a charity event.
MC: They plan to sell some handmade items and donate the proceeds to animal shelters. But I don't have any inspiration for what to make at the moment...
Lucien: Mm... I just received a delivery that might be helpful to you.
Lucien: The owner of Snowball sent us some things as a thank you. There are small felt keychains shaped like Snowball, as well as cartoon-style standees and cross-stitch fridge magnets.
Lucien: Looking at the note in the delivery box, it seems that the owner of Snowball designed them personally and also has the same ones at home.
Lucien: Perhaps we can also make some similar small items.
MC: Wow! They actually make these for their pet? The owner of Snowball is so thoughtful.
Lucien: You can tell that Snowball is truly cherished, so its owner makes these everyday little things, wanting its presence to fill every corner of their home.
MC: Hmm... Just like how my phone screensaver is you, and all the photos hanging around the home are of you?
Lucien: If what you're saying is that feeling of 'even when you're not around, I still want to see you first thing’...
Lucien: Then we're the same.
MC: I have another idea, I wonder if Professor Lucien shares the same idea as me.
Lucien: Hm?
MC: Even though my screensaver and chat background are pictures of you... I still want to see you right now.
Lucien: What a coincidence, I was thinking the same thing. So I've already brought your favorite milk tea and the Snowball keychain, and I'm on my way to see you.
Lucien: I checked the navigation, and the route from the research institute to your company is very smooth.
Lucien: In twenty minutes, both of our wishes will come true.
#the most jelly man in the world fr#THE THEME OF ENJOYING THE PRESENT TO THE FULLEST FOR XM DATE IN THIS YEAR!!!#pg is trying to convince me that this guy is basically a puppy (and it works)#'my list is so simple that it has only one item' WHAT IF I SOB#it's bittersweet that she's basically the only thing that makes him perceives the world as beautiful though :“”#mlqc lucien#mr love queen's choice#mlqc cn#mlqc spoiler#mlqc#mlqc translation#mr. love queen's choice#mr love lucien#mlqc xu mo#mlqc spoilers
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Bestiaryposting Results: Tatchgob
This is a weird one, I think, because there are a couple aspects of this entry that fully make sense in the context of what this animal actually is, and others that just make you think, "wait, the medievals thought what about [redacted]?" Not a lot else to add here, and I'm already running unusually late with this tonight, so here's the entry in question:
And below the cut is the art people have produced, in rough chronological order:
@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) has decided this is an insect, for entirely sensible reasons. The entry says that it flies, but not that it's a bird. It also says that the female reproduces without copulation with the male, and Silverhart helpfully observes that parthenogenesis is a much more common phenomenon in insects than in birds. Specifically, it's a bee, because the Tatchgob is said to be large and slow-flying, and as we all know, a bee's wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground.* This one is specifically inspired by vulture bees -- bees that do in fact eat carrion as the Tatchgob is implied to do (the entry doesn't actually say it eats the corpses, only that perceives them).** Silverhart further notes that they ended up spending a few hours going down a rabbit hole about vulture bees, a warning from which I failed to learn, as I spent the last half-hour reading arguments about whether "meat honey" is a real thing. Anyway, enough commentary from me, look at the very good drawing of a bee and then read what Silverhart says about it in the linked post.
*Bee Movie reference mine; please don't blame Silverhart for my internet-poisoned sense of humor.
** The Aberdeen Bestiary does actually specify this, but it was buried in the long religious-allegory section after the main description so I missed it when setting this up and didn't include it in the post. Now I wish I had, because it hilariously notes that the [Tatchgob] "is often overtaken by death when it descends to the dead animal from a great height." The drawings we could have had of animals crashing full-force into the ground... actually I'm torn on whether that would be a plus or a minus.
@strangelyflesh (link to post here) has made the reasonable call that a large flying animal may as well be a dragon-thing, so here's a bird-like dragon for you. Delightful facial expression on this one. Honestly everything about that head is very charming, actually. The linked post mentions that they "reproduce like those fucked up little geckos" and I am struggling against the temptation to fall down another rabbit hole, so I'm just going to move on.
@cheapsweets (link to post here) drew a bird, but decided to focus in on the fact that it's too large to fly quickly. It's broadly based on a bustard, which is apparently the world's heaviest flying bird (learn something new every day) but is shaped and posed specifically to evoke the silhouette of an aircraft, specifically the infamous Spruce Goose. (Cover the head with your hand, you'll see it.) Extremely clever, in my opinion. For more details on the design decisions, see the linked post. One more thing before we move on, though... check out that thing on the far right of the image, down in the sea. I think that's one of these critters:
Okay, now we're moving to the next one.
@coolest-capybara (link to post here) continues to outdo herself with the stylized medieval drawings. This one is definitely a creative choice -- Capybara notes that they would have been inclined to draw a dragon for this one, except we already had the dragon entry a while back. So she decided this was a komodo dragon that can glide on skin flaps like a flying squirrel. Excellent, love it, very interesting coloration also.
Capybara also raises the interesting question of whether the bestiary writer ever considered what male Tatchgobs might be for, if they aren't involved in the reproductive process. I suppose evolution is a fickle mistress, especially when the person describing your animals doesn't know what evolution even is. They don't seem to have an allegorical purpose either (there's like half a page railing against hypothetical people who fully accept that a [Tatchgob] can give virgin birth but deny that Mary could, which I guess is the point of that detail, but the male Tatchgob goes unmentioned). Anyway, the monk would probably just say they exist because God wanted them to or something... actually I'm not sure how aware they were of the possibility of species that didn't come in two sexes. Anyway, moving on.
@pomrania (link to post here) also thought large flying thing -> dragon, but decided to make theirs more fishlike. See, fish engage in external fertilization, and what are the odds of a pre-modern observer just missing the fact that the male is involved? Assuming they're not on board the "spontaneous generation" wagon. I really like this design, also; gliding on these fin-like structures is especially cool. And yes, according to the linked post, the fact that it shares a color palette with the ace flag is fully intentional. Ace icon Tatchgob.
@strixcattus (link to post here) has drawn a good bird -- serrated beak a solid choice -- but as with many of their posts, the real gold is in the text. See, Strixcattus gave us another carrion-eating bird some months ago, and they've decided this one is a related species. That's right, meet Wutugald tatchgob, the Brown or Lesser Wutugald. Which also explains why this one has that yellow thing above its beak there. Love the connection being drawn to previous entries. (Strixcattus's original Wutugald post can be found here.) As usual, you are strongly, strongly encouraged to go read the descriptions Strixcattus includes with their animals. You should then go check their brief follow-up to the Tatchgob here.
Now, to the Aberdeen Bestiary.
That's right, it's the eagle again! I wasn't expecting a repeat, but you have to admit it's clearly the same bird. The illustration for "eagle", in case you don't remember, looks like this:
Virtually identical except for the coloration of the wing feathers.
Okay, yeah, there are no duplicate entries, I just had to point out the fact that they look exactly the same. This one is the vulture, which apparently also doesn't reach far enough north for our illustrator to be familiar with it.
(A quick check through Wikipedia indicates to me that the various vulture species whose ranges include Europe tend to stick to the southern parts. None of them seem to reach the British Isles, which is where this manuscript originates.)
Anyway, something I find interesting about this is that vultures are another animal that modern people often think of as sinister, creepy, or just gross, but the bestiary is actually really positive about them. There's even one part where they get to be a Christ symbol, which honestly I have to share. It starts with that "dying by descending from a great height" bit I quoted earlier:
The fact is, if a vulture, in flight, sees a corpse, it sets itself down to feed on it, and is often overtaken by death when it descends to the dead animal from a great height. It is right, therefore, that Christ, who was God's mediator and our redeemer, should be signified by the name 'vulture'. While remaining in the heights of his divinity, like the vulture flying on high, he saw the corpse of our mortality below and descended from heaven to the earth beneath; he deigned, indeed, to become man for our sake; and when he sought man, the living thing that had no life, he who in himself had eternal life, met his death at our hands.
That's right, the whole Jesus thing was the allegorical equivalent of diving towards a corpse and accidentally smashing into the ground. Really puts the New Testament in a different light.
There's also a part where vultures foretell death. But not foretell for our benefit, mind: the example given is that vultures have learned to recognize what an army is and follow it because they know there will be food. So they're foretelling for their own purposes, and if we happen to notice and draw any conclusions, that's just a side effect.
One more quote from the Aberdeen Bestiary, and then we're done.
For who looks at the eyes of the vulture, that is, at what lies behind men's thoughts?
... that's a reference people get, right? anyway, it's late, good night.
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We May Have Gaslit Gatekept Girlbossed A Little Too Close To The Sun
You know why you shouldn't work late nights at an office job? Because you might become the new obsession for something in the shadows that shouldn't exist in the human realm. Unless you're into that kind of thing, of course.
Serena, unfortunately, wasn't.
--
AO3 Link
(This fic is broken up in 6 chapters on AO3 which may be easier to read for some! I was not going to spend an hour posting and tagging each part here on Tumblr lmao)
WE'RE BACK BABY!!!
Guess who got her little monsterfucker heart broken by an indie horror game and decided to write an obscenely long fix-it fic in under a week agaaaaaain (<- it was me)
Anyways, The Lancaster Leak Episode 2: Crisis At Call Center is very good and I encourage everyone to check out their series (: So hyped for Episode 3 lads they really stepped up their game compared to the first one!!!
Heavily, HEAVILY inspired by the storyline in Crisis At Call Center -- like almost beat for beat. I need to emphasis that this concept is only half original content and a majority of the plot is taken from the game, I claim no originality for that.
The formatting for the bolded note sections may be formatted kinda funky between Tumblr and AO3. Ain't much I can do about that chief it looks good on Google Docs /:
General warnings for gore and death and whatever you already know what I write
Word Count: 36K
--
FEDERAL WARNING
The following tape is to be viewed only by Abnormality Breach & Containment (ABC) employees with a clearance level of three (3) or higher under supervision.
Unauthorized duplication - including, but not limited to: video, audio, audio transcripts, still images - and distribution is strictly prohibited and offenders will be prosecuted. Agents caught tampering, destroying, or editing tape will be immediately terminated.
BY PROCEEDING, VIEWER HAS ACKNOWLEDGED RESPONSIBILITY
–
CS# 1763-87 - ABNORMALITY AB299
Abnormality Behavioral Observation
Date Range: [N/A]
Observation Status: COMPLETED
Abnormality Status: CONTAINED
–
ABNORMALITY DEBRIEF
Picture Left [ID - CCTV still frame of darkened corner. No discernable shapes can be made by human eye. Abnormality only visible as two contrasting dots in upper-right corner – These are Abnormality’s eyes.]
FN# AB299
Threat Level: D
Containment Capability: Low
Management Capability: Extremely Low
Intelligence Capability: Mid-High
–
AB299 OVERVIEW
Abnormality first sighted three months before successful containment. Abnormality has breached the facility a total of seven (7) times during captivity as of this recording.
Abnormality is of great stature at approx. ten (10) times the size of an average human male.
Abnormality walks crouched on all four limbs. Abnormality’s pitch black coloring allows it to blend in shadows aside from red-ringed yellow eyes.
Abnormality is seemingly able to manipulate technologic frequencies and dimensional planes. The latter is believed to be how Abnormality travels unnoticed despite large build.
Abnormality is able to interfere with the following technologies [as of this recording]:
Video Feeds
Computer Software [All Access]
Phone Lines
Note: AB299 unconfirmed to have abilities related to manipulation of localized power sources.
Note: Technological interference documented to be rudimentary and overall harmless.
Abnormality only sighted outside of the facility when actively on a hunt. DO NOT ENGAGE DURING THIS TIME PERIOD.
–
THE FOLLOWING OBSERVATION TAKES PLACE ONE (1) WEEK AFTER ABNORMALITY’S SEVENTH (7TH) TOTAL CONTAINMENT BREACH.
CS# 1763-87 STUDIES NEW BEHAVIORS NOTED OVER A SIX (6) DAY SPAN.
–
Picture Left [ID - CCTV still frame of interior shipping office at WerTech Production Headquarters taken from Camera 17]
Location: WerTech Production Headquarters
Note: It is believed Abnormality chose this location to hunt due to wide corridors and tall ceilings, in addition to spacious attached warehouse and storerooms.
ABC tracked Abnormality to site but did not engage in recapture protocol. Attempts at containment during active hunting are ill-advised with a fatality rate of 92%. Highest success rate of recapture achieved immediately after hunting period.
Under Clearance 3 supervision, ABC agents were permitted to observe Abnormality’s behavior in an uninhibited environment for research purposes.
ABC implemented the following observation protocol:
Phone Line Wire-tap
Computer Access [All Levels]
CCTV Access
Electronic Recording
Call Redirection
No WerTech employees were notified of enrollment.
–
Picture Left [ID - A young woman of African-American descent. She has dark brown eyes and black hair. She is smiling. Image taken from employee database.]
SERENA BOYD
Serena Boyd (26) was a college student employed at WerTech Production Headquarters as an intern for course credits. She primarily worked night shifts and completed after hour duties for additional time signed off.
Abnormality seemingly selected her as prey, likely due to late hour solitude.
The following footage and accompanying notes document the unusual correspondence captured between Boyd and Abnormality. Updated overview for AB299 will be provided at the end of observation recordings. Future research of new and/or atypical behavior necessary and pending.
–
BEGIN ABNORMALITY BEHAVIOR OBSERVATION
First Day
–
Filing was not a difficult task. All that needed to be done was to stack the packets in descending order of completion date, or alphabetically by vendor name, or even separated with color coded labels to differentiate job types. The point was that it should not be this goddamn hard to keep files in any semblance of order for longer than a week, Gregory.
Whatever. As much as it was the bane of her existence to have to repeatedly move order receipts from the Zuckermann account out of the filing drawer clearly labeled for names starting with ‘E-H’, it at least killed a full hour of Serena’s time with minimal effort. Besides, she quite liked the freedom that came with being in a near empty office past closing time while finishing up her menial tasks. She could hum, she could bitch, she could coyly look at her manager’s family photos and wonder just how good his salary must be to keep a wife that pretty smiling in every shot.
One more week, Serena reminded herself with a sigh. One more week of unpaid overtime and she should have just enough hours completed for her internship. An internship that she accepted under the impression that she would, of course, be learning more about machine operations and less about how to draft an invoice that was outside of her job description. That was kind of the whole purpose of getting an extended degree with a trade concentration – to actually learn the trade. But it was her second to last course needed before she could graduate and…well, on her resume it would still say she completed her full hours at WerTech, it just wouldn’t elaborate that she managed to get absolutely zero experience in the ten weeks she was there.
It still counted as being fully certified though, right?
Oh well, she could learn all the useful tips and tricks on the job, the real job she’ll be qualified for by the end of the semester. A job that actually put to use all her months and years of studying and testing and cramming rather than wasting her efforts on clerical duties. Serena couldn’t help but wonder if her age or gender or race or some culmination was the reason why her manager insisted she work anywhere but the operations department. Then again, as demonstrated by the fact that Gregory thought an unsigned six-month contract was a great coaster for his coffee, it was more likely the fault of general incompetence. Good thing he was the one with the yearly bonuses and shiny title placard on his door.
She felt her back crack when she rolled her shoulders a few times, groaning at the stiffness from being hunched over for so long. Corporate America: destroying spirits and posture one 9-5 at a time. Or 9-8, in Serena’s case, though that was a choice of her own doing. The more hours she packed on, the sooner she could be signed off.
Speaking of signing off, she went ahead and mosied back to the cluster of cubicles down the hall from the managerial row. The common people, separated from their superiors with distance and private closed doors, with rows of desks jammed into neighboring spaces and flimsy walls to divide the departments. A place Serena wouldn’t wish for any damned soul to spend a moment of eternity in, especially her own, as it was just on the opposite end of the building where the computer hardware manufacturing was done. So close, yet so far away.
Instead, all she could do was drop into her hand-me-down chair that had about two decades of strange stains on the fabric and wake her desktop from sleep mode. A quick refresh of her email showed Gregory sent her a new message thirty minutes prior, which unfortunately meant she was obliged to check and carry out whatever his request was. Saying that she hadn’t seen it in time before she left would imply she had left earlier than she really had, cutting a full half hour from her overtime that he’d be approving on her weekly log.
That was time wasted she refused to give up.
–
[Email Transcript]
Sender: Gregory Jules
Recipient: Serena Boyd
Subject: Trash Run
Hey Serena,
Hate to be a bother, but can you do me a favor before you head out? There’s a cart out in Warehouse B with a few boxes of damaged motherboards the guys forgot to throw away. Can you pitch those in the dumpster so that we don’t miss the morning trash truck?
You rock!
Gregory Jules
–
“And this can’t be done by the first shift crew because…?” she mumbled with a roll of her eyes. Fine, fine, she could toss a few boxes of crap out back, it wasn’t like it was a job involving backbreaking labor and grueling hours to complete. She may not be thrilled about it, but maybe if she dawdles out there long enough she can squeeze an extra twenty or so minutes for her hourly log.
Double checking that she had her keycard in her pocket, she punched in the door code for the warehouse and pushed through one of the massive doors with a small grunt. Okay, as eager as she was to get her hands on a couple soldering tools, she couldn’t deny that the amount of manual labor needed out here was far beyond the physical strength she could manage, and these employees flung open boxes and bay doors like they were nothing! No, online application, she could not move and lift approximately fifty pounds as part of her daily duties.
On second thought, maybe these boxes would involve breaking her back…
It seemed that good luck smiled upon her tonight in the way of simple yet mind numbing tasks. There on a two tiered rolling cart parked by a bay door ramp were the aforementioned parts she was asked to toss out, packed tight into rows of neatly stacked cases no bigger than a shoebox. The good news was, if they really all were just broken hardware, they shouldn’t weigh more than a couple pounds. The bad news was there were probably twenty boxes on both platforms of the cart, which meant she was going to have to throw almost all of them individually as the mouth of the dumpster would be too high for her to drop full armloads.
Well, she said she wanted those extra twenty minutes.
Immediately after pushing the cart outside, Serena was cursing at herself for not grabbing her sweater. The chill that racked down her spine only made the tense muscles in her shoulders ache worse. In and out, dumpster and back, finish and go home. The only person prolonging this miserable task was herself. Though perhaps she was only feeling so on edge because of the fact she was outside. Alone. In the near dark. As an unarmed woman. She shivered again and pushed herself to walk faster towards the dumpster that felt like it was half a mile away rather than thirty feet.
There was nothing to worry about, she was making herself paranoid for nothing. The glow of the ‘WerTech Production’ sign illuminated the backlot of the warehouse enough for her to see, not to mention the security cameras positioned at nearly every junction to ensure no thefts during shipping and receiving hours occurred. So, if she was jumped or kidnapped or murdered or somehow all three of those things at once while being outside for five minutes, Serena could take solace in the knowledge that they may or may not be able to catch her attacker on film. Yippee.
Christ, no wonder she was getting so worked up around throwing away some trash, she was her own worst enemy when it came to reassuring thoughts. What if, instead, she stopped worrying about becoming a television cold case and imagined a scenario where she finishes this stupid chore before going home? And then maybe she’d get a call from Gregory explaining that he had made some mathematical error on her time sheet and accidentally signed off on an extra forty-three hours? And because it was already submitted to her course instructor at the time, she was cleared to receive her credit hours and never had to come back to this place ever again or stand unguarded in their dimly lit backlots?
Her fantasy was unlikely, but it never hurt a girl to dream. Still, she gave a quick scan of her surroundings every few moments to reassure herself that nothing had mysteriously changed. No unmarked cars or headlights appearing, no hulking figure in the distance waiting to charge, just a chilled breeze and the ambient noises of the evening keeping her company. As much as she would love to stay in this half state of anxiety, she found herself all but jogging with the cart back to the safety of the warehouse before the final box had the chance to smack against the dumpster’s walls. For some reason, moving felt safer. Being stationary meant she’d be easier to focus on and attack, whereas keeping a fast pace would make it harder to snag.
Assuming there was anything remotely after her. A mosquito, perhaps. Knife-welding boogeyman, probably not so much.
And yet, the way Serena felt her heart stutter when her eyes caught sight of the property fence somehow validated and heightened her wariness. The tall, netted metal was used to block out any unwanted visitors of the human and animal kind, preventing access into the building unless they went in through the main doors to the reception desk or had a company keycard. There were a few locked gates within the fence to make it easier to enter or exit from one particular side of the building or another, and maybe something to do with OSHA standards for fire safety or whatever. Where Serena stood with her white knuckle grip on the cart, she could see straight down the gap between two shipping containers at one of the gates, despite it being blurred into the natural shadows of night.
And it was open.
And maybe she ran up the docking ramp at an impressive speed and slammed the door behind her, jabbing the lock button in rapid succession under the illusion she’d secured herself ten times more than usual.
And maybe it took an embarrassing amount of minutes for her to steady her heart rate with deep breaths.
And maybe afterwards, she mentally berated herself for acting like a child who was afraid of monsters in the dark.
Where had this newfound apprehension come from? She’d never been like this before, and she certainly never had any problem with working late in an office by herself. Hell, she never even felt an ounce of this kind of nervousness walking out of the front doors to her car every night, although that could be because she was more relieved to pick up a late dinner and crash on her couch than she cared about an ax murderer in her backseat.
Right, dinner. She hadn’t had dinner yet and it was already close to half past eight. These were probably just jitters in relation to low blood sugar, coupled with typical work related aggravation and excitement at being so close to wrapping up her internship. No wonder it felt like her nerves were dialed up to an eleven. On the way back to the finance office (that still made no sense for her desk to be there), she could buy a quick snack from the vending machine outside of the break room for a little pick-me-up. Or potentially a full dinner. The twisting in her stomach was making her appetite more finicky than usual and eating an entire cereal bar sounded pretty daunting right now.
That still didn’t stop Serena from bumping the vending machine with her shoulder just as the metal coil dropped her chosen snack, slyly knocking the one behind it off the rack as well and giving her a two for one of blueberry whole grain breakfast bars. You learn a lot of neat tricks when you’re a starving college freshman that still come in handy as a hangry college graduate.
She pocketed one of the packages and tore open the other, trying to trick herself that she was feeling hunger rather than agitation. Each bite was a little easier to swallow than the last once her body realized it was actually getting some form of nutrients that it had been craving since her lunch break at noon. Yet she couldn’t ignore the feeling of the hairs on her neck prickling, like she was being watched no matter what angle she turned herself to check for shadows.
So, she started walking, because moving was safer.
The same sensation of being observed followed her no matter what hall she dipped into or what speed she tried to maintain. Hopefully, the calories of the cereal bar she hastily stuffed into her mouth would work their magic soon. She was damn near tempted to inhale the second snack in her pocket with the belief her unbalanced emotions would be regulated twice as fast. Instead, she ducked into the women’s restroom as soon as she caught it from her peripherals, the one private place she was sure she –
[Note: Full coverage achieved by use of hidden cameras in rooms otherwise unmonitored]
– could have a moment of peace. It worked that way during normal operating hours, she saw no reason why it couldn’t provide that same comfort now.
Her shoulders slouched in relief at the imagery sensation of a dozen watchful eyes finally shutting themselves. The thumping of her pulse in her ears faded just as quickly as it had begun, another sign of faux trepidation that was soothed in a matter of seconds once she settled down. With a deep sigh that was definitely not meant to help steady her heartbeat, she stepped over to the sinks and peered at her reflection in the mirror, bracing her hands on the cool counter to further ground her.
It was amazing how quickly unwarranted consternation could turn someone into a hot mess. Or there was a chance that was just how Serena always looked these days, a gradual decline in rationality after being temporarily employed at an office job. Her blouse was bunched up near the collar from where she had grabbed her chest, baby hair slicked on her forehead out of place by sweat and curls frizzy at the end. The bags under her eyes looked more pronounced, or was it that the shadows made them appear deeper while she overworked and under-ate? At this rate, she had every damn right to be stressed and it was only now that her body was finally taking it out on her. Late nights bred insomnia more often than not, meals were replaced with junk food or beverages with way too much caffeine, her eyes flickered between computer screens and files and textbooks until they watered.
She really wished this physical and/or mental breakdown would have had the decency to wait until the end of the week. At least then she could have suffered her panic attacks in the comfort of her own home with a bag of frozen peas on her stomach and the entire series of Overruled! playing for the millionth time as a familiar white noise. She still could, if she wanted.
Serena splashed cold water on her face, uncaring how it wet her hair and dripped down onto her clothes. It wasn’t like she would be seeing anyone when she walked out, it didn’t matter how unkempt she looked in the final ten minutes it would take to lock up the building and walk to her car. The touch felt nice on her burning cheeks, a contrast to the frigidity shooting through her core from being outside in the new spring air.
“Okay, okay,” she said to no one but her mirror image. Leveling a firm gaze with the other woman, she tried to even out her voice into something more persuasive. “You’re tired. You’re stressed out. You’re so fucking done with this place. Just…just go home, girl. That’s all you gotta do. Go home and sleep and finish strong.”
She wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince the reflection or if she was hoping the reflection would convince her. Either way, she took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly, and walked out of the restroom determined not to let her insides jumble themselves up over nothing. If anything, doing her rounds to lock up the building should provide her with a sense of comfort in knowing she was safe all along. Each locked door relaxed her a smidgen more, though flicking off the lights immediately returned the foreboding she just got rid of. Much like a parent, she had to console her inner child that nothing was going to magically appear that hadn’t been there two seconds before she turned off the lights just because it was dark now.
Even if some of those decorative plants looked awful menacing in the shadows.
Luckily, the routine of triple pressing lock buttons and turning off hall lights was well ingrained in Serena’s mind, helping her breeze through closing up without much of a second thought. Before she knew it, she was already walking down the darkened main hallway back to her desk to clock out, her path illuminated only by the fixed lights of the vending machine and overhead exit signs. Sure, having her back to total darkness and the end of a long, gaping hallway behind her made her neck itch with the overwhelming fear of being observed that had no business being in WerTech headquarters. But as long as she didn’t turn around to confront her fears, it was like it was nonexistent. Schrodinger’s horror movie, in a way.
No way in hell was she going to be sacrificed as the token black character. Serena Boyd was a goddamn final girl.
[Note: Subject remains unaware of Abnormality’s eyes behind her. Abnormality does not close in for the kill, keeping distance in Hallway 3.]
Firing off a reply to Gregory’s email to confirm all requests were done and logging her time out at a quarter to nine, she was out the door and locking the main entrance while her desktop was still running its shut down screen. This time when she was outside, strangely enough, no feeling of dread weighed down her heart until it sank to her stomach. If anything, it was as if that pressure had been lifted off her back, alleviating her tension more and more with every step to the driver side of her car. By the time she was pulling out of the parking lot, the anxiety was completely gone, almost instantly forgotten.
The curse of corporate hell, she supposed.
–
END OF FIRST NIGHT
–
Picture Left [ID - CCTV still frame of Abnormality’s eyes in darkened Hallway 3.]
Boyd shows no acknowledgement of Abnormality’s presence.
Abnormality choosing to prolong hunt is unusual deviation from previous observations.
–
Second Day
–
MORNING OVERVIEW
Abnormality has not been spotted on CCTV or by witnesses during daylight operating hours.
WerTech Production employees remain unaware, including Boyd.
Manufactured request anonymously submitted from ABC has guaranteed Boyd will stay later after hours in building alone.
Abnormality continues to pursue chosen prey more intensely.
–
It took everything in Serena’s power to not lean over her manager’s desk and flick him right between the eyes.
“Custodial work,” she repeated back to him.
Gregory raised his hands in defense of her unimpressed frown. “Look, I get it, I know it’s not what you signed up for here,” she didn’t sign up for most of the bullshit he assigned to her, frankly, “but it’s just for tonight! And…maybe tomorrow, too. I’m not sure yet.”
“Greg,” she groaned. Because last night hadn’t given her enough heart palpitations, now she needed a migraine on top of it.
Serena didn’t bring up anything about the eeriness of her previous closing shift.
This time, however, her after hour duties couldn’t be helped. Gregory had received an email that morning reminding him that the company’s hired cleaner would be out the remainder of the week for a pre-approved vacation, so he would need to ensure the biweekly tidying of the offices were taken care of to prevent any build up of messes. Sure enough, that time had been blocked out on his computer’s calendar with a note regarding Gloria’s absence, but for the life of him he could not find any email or written document first notifying him she’d be gone. That absolutely did not surprise Serena in the slightest; the man was lucky his coffee mug could find its way to his mouth some days.
“I promise it’s nothing too bad. Just grab the trash from the bathrooms and conference room. Oh, and water the plants up front,” he said.
“Why can’t Julie water the plants? They’re literally in front of her reception desk.”
“Julie already went home for the day.”
“So, why can’t she water them when she comes in tomorrow morning?”
He blinked owlishly at her. “...because they get watered at night.”
Oh, her resolve was chipping away one stupid sentence at a time.
“Okay, yeah, fine. Fine, no problem. Trash and plants,” she conceded with what little sanity she had left. The performance review on her weekly log better have the most glowing fucking review about how much of a team player Serena was and how she went above and beyond her job description that already had nothing to do with her degree.
Her manager nodded with a smile. “Well, I won’t get in your way then,” he tapped the hefty stack of defunct account files on his desk. “Make sure you get these shredded first, though, then you can take it out with the rest of the trash. Just double check the close date is over five years.”
She rubbed the side of her temple. “Uh-huh.”
“And don’t forget to check your email in case anything pops up from me,” he said while shrugging on his coat, almost halfway out the door.
“Uh-huh.”
“Have a good night, Serena!”
“Uh-huh.”
Perhaps the man had a few more brain cells than she gave him credit for; he certainly knew when to get the hell out of dodge right when any of his workers seemed ready to overthrow the corporate regime. With Gregory leaving her to her own devices, she was now officially alone in the building that mildly perturbed her as of twenty-four hours ago. Well, actually, nothing about it had really bothered her all day or even leading up to her nightly run down, but it was as soon as she knew she was by herself, as soon as she instinctively knew the front doors had closed behind Gregory, did her anxiety start creeping its way into her throat.
She wished Gloria was here. Not only because this was a multimillion dollar business that hired custodians for the sole purpose of janitorial duties so that other employees didn’t have to mop and scrub toilets, but because the other woman was good company the nights when they crossed paths. It was strange that she hadn’t mentioned to Serena that she would be out when they chatted earlier in the week. Maybe she hadn’t thought it important to mention, or maybe it was one of those sudden trips that everyone politely referred to as a ‘vacation’ rather than whatever somber event she was going through. Either way, she would have liked to give Gloria a proper goodbye seeing as Friday was likely to be her last day once her hours were signed off.
She guessed she could leave a little note somewhere for her in lieu of a farewell, something she could stick on the supply closet door before she left at the end of her shift to be found Monday evening. And still, despite all her displeasure at having custodial work pushed on her when she was here as an intern for hardware manufacturing, it wouldn’t be right to take out that frustration on poor Gloria. It wasn’t her fault for Gregory’s poor planning, and ignoring or doing a half assed job only meant more work she’d have to make up immediately after her alleged vacation.
So, like everything else, she sucked it up and did what was asked of her. And it wasn’t because she was a pushover! It was because she was a compassionate coworker and she was determined to get every good grace she could squeeze out of this internship to ensure her recommendation letter brimmed with praise.
The monotonous task of opening each file, scanning the finalization date, and shoving its contents through the singular floor shredder a portion at a time helped distract her from the discomfort tingling down her spine. It was much less bearable almost two hours later when she had dumped all the minced paper and manilla folders into a black trash bag, stepping out of the safety of her manager’s office and into the vacant hallway. Partially lit, thankfully, but hardly any more comforting than if it were totally dark. A familiar unease twisted her stomach like before, urging her to leave go leave before something happened. What that ‘something’ was, her brain refused to tell her, which was ever so helpful.
On the bright side, the bathroom trash was almost entirely paper towels in both waste bins, meaning she could carry all her bags out to the dumpster in one trip with no struggle. Even the trash in the conference room was nothing more than a few disposable coffee cups, though the smell of stale drinks did make her crinkle her nose until she tied off the bag. All that was left to do was brace herself for the unknown terrors of the backlot and she could cross this off her to-do list. If nothing had happened last night, then she really doubted anything would try to –
[Note: Subject remains unaware of Abnormality’s eyes following behind her down Hallway 3. Abnormality does not go in for the kill.]
– make a sinister move that could have just as easily been achieved yesterday. Tonight, she made sure she ate a lunch that consisted of vegetables and limited herself to one afternoon energy drink, so there should be no excuse for jitters as far as she was aware. The fact that she was still experiencing them the entire speed walk down the main hall to the side exit was…unrelated. That was because of caffeine withdrawal and a shock response of eating something that wasn’t twice her daily serving of sodium. Regardless of what she tried to do, her body was hellbent on punishing her with physical symptoms of mental distress.
Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.
She paused at the door that led to the dumpsters without having to cut through Warehouse B. The bags were gripped tight enough that her fists trembled while she shifted her weight from foot to foot, stalling. Come on now, this was ridiculous! If Gloria, a tiny little fifty year old woman with creaky knees, could run garbage out in the middle of the night for dozens of companies without a care in the world, then so could Serena. It was more probable that she’d be startled by a raccoon than –
[Note: Abnormality seen tilting its head in interest at Boyd’s hesitance. Sign of emotional intellect recorded in Intelligence Capability file.]
– star in the next episode of a true crime show detailing unsolved mysteries. All she needed to do was rip the bandaid off. With little fanfare, she pushed the door open with her forearm to let the cool air greet her, the night appearing much more inviting than it had prior. As soon as she was outside, everything felt less suffocating. She could feel the coil of her muscles relax enough for her shoulders to drop, having not even realized they were nearly hunched up to her ears for who knows how long. Maybe the outside wasn’t so bad after all, especially now that her body wasn’t running on empty calories for the sixth straight day in a row.
See, a semi balanced meal and an okayish night of sleep was all she needed to get herself back on track. The continued unease she felt inside the building was nothing more than the fact she wished this place would burn to the ground, as all interns feel at some point. During her walk to the dumpster, she caught herself checking between the shipping containers again at the gate that singlehandedly had her sprinting for her life.
It was still open.
Well…it could have always been open. It wasn’t like she came out of the building at any time of the day to confirm how long it had been ajar. There was a possibility that it had been left open since she had started almost three months ago, she simply had no reason to notice until now. The lock might be broken, or the hinges damaged, or the programmed entry code malfunctioning and so needs to be kept agape to prevent the gate from being permanently locked as a safety precaution. And if nobody had bothered to close it in the two days it had caught her attention, then surely it must not be a big deal.
It was all too tempting to say the hell with it all and jump straight into her car parked at the other end of the building. A quiet walk with a slight chill hugging her was just the thing she needed to clear her head as she shook her fear of being assaulted by every criminal in a ten mile radius. There was a comfort Serena hadn’t noticed she was missing in letting the night embrace her; the only thing watching her being the twinkling stars above rather than something unknown glaring daggers into her back.
As lovely as it would be to hop up on the docking platform and stargaze for the better part of an hour, she unfortunately still had things to do if she wanted to get out of here at a somewhat decent time. She had been hoping it would have been early enough for her to cook herself an actual dinner, but the cleaning duties that were tacked on to her schedule nixed that pretty quick. There was probably a twenty-four hour diner she could pop in somewhere around here, at least to eat something that wasn’t prepared in a microwave.
Plants. Email. Done. She repeated the mantra over and over in her head, trying to manifest the rest of an easy night. Instead, she felt her mood plummet the moment she stepped over the threshold back into the building, as if a vacuum had sucked out any serenity she had just experienced.
Plants. Email. Plants. Email. Plants. Email. Plants –
While her luck often felt hypothetical when it came to dealing with anything relating to WerTech Productions, she could count her blessings that there were only three large plants by reception she needed to water. Easy. It’d probably take her longer to fill up the pitcher she took from the break room as a makeshift watering can.
“Because god forbid you get your water at eight in the morning, huh?” Serena asked the monstera she was currently watering.
The massive leaves did not answer, not even to give thanks. What jerks. No wonder they were so bratty about the specific hour they were hydrated.
“Do you guys even get watered every day? That seems like something only Gloria would remember to do, and she’s not here most of the week so…” Talking to plants was not weird. Talking to plants is totally normal and encouraged. “I’d say you’re stuck with me for now, but really, you’re on your own as soon as the weekend rolls around.”
Serena smiled while watering the last pot, imagining that she was dumping the rest of the tap water on Gregory’s lap. “Because once I clock out on Friday, I am totally, one hundred percent, out of he- AH!”
The pitcher flew out of her hand when she startled, slipping on the fresh puddle on the floor as she whirled around to look behind her. She grit her teeth when she landed hard on her bottom, feeling her pants soak up the unpleasant wetness of water. Damp jeans were the least of her concerns as she frantically looked above for any sign of those…fuck, what were those, eyes? That’s what her mind was convinced she had caught a glimpse of in the reflection of the transom windows above the entryway. Two orbs practically glowing against the shadowed backdrop of evening that swirled with color, looking down directly at her in an unblinking gaze, wide with intrigue.
But that was impossible. Absurd. Insane. Eyes did not look like that, eyes could not tower so high like that, eyes certainly were not in the same vicinity as she was or that would only imply something else was in the building with her.
No, now the idea that it was something rather than someone only made her breathing come out in more ragged gasps. She clutched her shirt, feeling her heart hammering at worrying speed under her knuckles, like it was trying to break free from her chest and save itself. With the confirmation there had been nothing behind her, she whipped her head back towards the windows where she saw the reflection. What she assumed was a reflection, that was. Who was to say it wasn’t something peering in at her, as if that was any better than knowing it was directly behind her?
There was nothing in the windows but stars and street lights.
Right…right, because that was all unbelievable to get worked up over. Giant eyes, really? Like some cheesy sci-fi concept from the fifties? Obviously, she had glanced over while some headlights were passing in the distance. Or a plane was flashing overhead. Or a floater in her vision popped up as a reminder she hadn’t drank anything that wasn’t loaded with sugar in a stupidly long time. No Peeping Tom here with noticeable cataracts, just a girl with a frayed thread of rationality who may very well lose her mind in a place that barely deserved her patience.
Yeah, it was time to go home. Most of the water spilt had been absorbed into the backside of her pants, the rest of it would probably dry up before morning. Sorry Gloria, but this wasn’t any type of cleaning she had the wits for at the moment. She didn’t even bother bringing the pitcher back to the break room, opting to leave it on Julie’s desk. And hey, while it was there, maybe she could make herself useful and water the damn plants for once.
“Fuck me,” Serena said with a thick swallow, cringing how her jeans stuck to her thighs and chaffed with every step she took.
I’m going to burn down this place and not even try to make it look like it was an accident. I want them to know it was me. Capitalism hath no fury like a woman scorned in the STEM field .
She didn’t bother sitting in her chair, knowing it would only add to the mirage of discoloration on the cushion. Not that she particularly cared about that, rather she wasn’t in the mood to sit in soggy pants longer than necessary. Perhaps because her heart was still coming down from the adrenaline overdose while she vigorously shook her computer mouse to bring her desktop back up, the unexpected jumpscare of an entirely red background on her home screen did little more than make her breath hitch. Apprehension turned to confusion as she clicked around on her background with no change to its new glaring color. The program icons were still there, but it was like the calm blue stock logo that was formerly displayed on her desktop had all of its pixels fried to a damaged scarlet.
That wasn’t good. Though from what she could tell, nothing else seemed unusual about her computer’s functionality. There could be an issue with the phosphors that was causing the red light to overcompensate for the blue. In theory, this would have been something Serena was perfectly qualified to diagnose and fix on her own had she been given the hands-on training she was promised to make good on her textbook knowledge. But she couldn’t, so she didn’t, even if she was fairly confident on what to do.
Ignoring the glaring color that was making her eyes squint, her theory was swift to change from hardware error to software corruption when her email window pulled onto the screen. Of course, there was one new email from Gregory, declaring itself urgent and important and time stamped only twenty minutes after he left which meant he would know if Serena flat out ignored him by pretending to go home. Annoying, but not what immediately caught her attention. A pop-up window for an email draft flashed to request if she would like to save her work in the event the program shut down. Considering she couldn’t recall writing any emails within the last four hours on the clock, she dismissed the notification to skim through and jog her memory.
–
[Email Transcript]
Sender: [Empty]
Recipient: [Empty]
Subject: [Empty]
Note: Original email contained roughly 38,000 characters. Below is a cut passage.
sEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡asEren♡a
–
She blinked, pursing her lips. “That’s…something.”
Something she knows for a fact she hadn’t typed, much less received from anyone else. Crap, she must have some type of malware on her computer then. The virus was trying to make her home screen unreadable while pulling her personal information from her profile and email contacts. She was certain it would brick her whole system once it sent out a mass phishing email to her coworkers. Although, really, that wasn’t much of her problem if it was done after the end of the work week…
Still, she went ahead and deleted the wall of text and started a new draft to be sent to IT. If she was lucky, maybe they’d decide to wipe her computer tomorrow morning to stop the malware before it got any worse, effectively leaving her with no access to any of the databases and with nothing to do but twiddle her thumbs on her last day. No, there was no chance she’d have that kind of fortune; Gregory would definitely make her do some type of asinine clerical work like taking out staples from expense reports and fasten them on the opposite corner.
Oh well. If she sweet talked Alice in IT enough, there was a chance she could worm her way into spending a morning going over debugging and system diagnostics for firmware while asking for a demonstration on how to fix her computer. Girls had to stick together in this type of industry, after all. And she knew damn well Alice had the best gossip of the office given that she had remote access to just about anyone’s system. Serena was dying to know if there was any follow up to the board director that was sending electronic payments to his mistress on the company credit card.
After sending a quick heads up to IT that she was in need of their assistance ASAP tomorrow morning and pinky promising she hadn’t clicked any suspicious links recently, she checked to see what was so high on her manager’s priority list that he had forgotten all day to tell her.
–
[Email Transcript]
Sender: Gregory Jules
Recipient: Serena Boyd
Subject: !! Please read before leaving!!
Hey there, Serena,
Super sorry to wait until the last minute, but I totally forgot Jorge wanted me to grab last quarter’s Bangling order forms for him. Think you can do me a solid and grab those from the stock room? Just drop them on my desk and I’ll run them up to his office when I get in.
You’re a lifesaver!
Gregory Jules
–
Yeah, he wanted to be the one to make the delivery to the executives on the legendary second level so that it didn't look like skipped out on the one job he was asked to do. Typical. At least it wasn’t anymore cleaning or shredding, just moving a box from point A to point B. She could deal with that. She’s dealt with everything thus far.
She might not be dealing with it well, but she was dealing with it nonetheless. Such as pointedly averting her gaze from lingering on any reflective surface for too long in case she saw someone stare back.
But why would she think her night would improve in any capacity at this point? Was she so foolish to assume that because she had finished her duties that she could go about her life in peace? Had working here for ten weeks taught her nothing? The worst was always yet to come and it seemed in her final week here it was more determined than ever to sour her enjoyment of near freedom.
With an undignified hum, the lights cut out.
Not just the lights in the office, but apparently the entire building, plunging almost every square foot into total darkness. The red glow of the exit signs barely offered any solace and the security lights along the exterior had died as well, making only scarce moonlight peek through the windows.
[Note: WerTech Production security cameras are equipped with night vision capability. Cameras remain operational despite sudden blackout, indicating Abnormality’s involvement.]
Fantastic. Wonderful. Because Serena didn’t have enough issues last night about the unknown spooks hiding in the shadows. It must be a total power outage as the air was quick to grow stuffy without the vents circulating it. Unless WerTech forgot to pay their electricity bill, which…honestly wouldn’t be that surprising depending on who was in charge of paying that monthly.
This wasn’t the first time the breaker had been tripped. It had already happened once while she was in the middle of her shift and Alice had told her plenty of other instances. Sometimes it would only be a department, sometimes it would be the whole place, and one time they had managed to cut power in HR while flipping the circuit back on for Warehouse A. Every time, the cause for the outage was due to (or at least blamed on) the technicians out in operations and assembly testing too many high voltage components at once. It was an easy fix of going to the storage wing and flicking the switches back on the breaker box, though it was much more of a hassle during work hours when everyone had to wait for their computers to reboot and pray they hadn’t lost too much unsaved progress.
There was no reason it should have tripped now. It wasn’t like she had every desktop turned on and all the power strips unplugged. Unless it had something to do with whatever little virus was in its beginning stage of crashing her PC, but that wasn’t how those things worked. Software bugs couldn’t secretly travel along the physical cables of a power source and knock out anything plugged into a socket.
…she should go check the breaker, just to be safe. She was too close to the finish line to have a blackout pinned on her. Not to mention, she still needed to email Gregory back for her hours. Maybe the hard restart of her system would help kill the program the malware was in the midst of running, too.
The problem was actually getting to the damn storage wing when she couldn’t see more than a foot in front of her. Shapes were swallowed by shadows in such a way that even as her eyes adjusted, it was hard to tell where something jutted out and how far away dim outlines really were. On the bright side, her manager’s office was right down the hall from the employee break room, and under the sink cabinet was a bunch of first aid and shelter-in-place supplies, including a flashlight.
She could only wonder if she looked as moronic as she felt stumbling around in the darkness. Her legs shuffled in hesitant steps while her hands stayed splayed in front of her to catch herself on anything in the way. She’d already knocked her shin twice on a waste bin and the edge of the copy machine in the hall, the second almost causing her to fall. As soon as she was able to press against the left wall, it became much easier to guide herself down a straight line towards the cafeteria. Excluding the grunted string of swears when she clipped her hip on the water fountain sticking out of the alcove near the restrooms.
Oh, she hated this. She hated this very fucking much. The stifling air made her skin prickle with sweat, yet an ominous chill racked her to the core. Despite not being able to see in the slightest, all she could feel was that she was being watched. Every move she made was under someone else’s observation, making her irrationally self conscious of her already clumsy staggering down the hall. Like she was embarrassed that her final moments in someone’s eyes would give the impression that she didn’t know how to walk on her own two feet. Of course, if she was going down, then she wanted to go down with some dignity.
There was no one here. It had already been established that no one was here but her and probably a couple crickets that always found a way inside from the warehouses. Besides, if she couldn’t see, neither could anyone else. Unless they followed the sounds of her tripping and groaning. God, it was killing her not to be able to power walk quicker to the breakroom, knowing she’d only guarantee herself to smack face first into an open door or something. The journey of twenty-some feet might as well have felt –
[Note: Subject remains unaware of Abnormality following behind her as before. Abnormality does not go in for the kill.]
– like a mile long trek with how much energy she exerted just to fumble through the doorway and paw at the lower cabinets until she could feel the bulky flashlight tucked away underneath. It clicked on with a stutter of its bulb, but a shake was all the old batteries needed to keep a steady glow.
No longer surrounded on every side by darkness, Serena found it a smidgen easier to breathe now that there wasn’t the full weight of anxiety on her chest. It was still there, obviously, but now she had the advantage of seeing what obstacles were actually in front of her when the time came to have to sprint for her life from a serial killer ghost. The walk to the storage wing went much smoother thanks to the flashlight’s guidance. Now, instead of bruising her thighs that were still clammy under her wet jeans, she only had to nurse a bruised ego over the notion that she was still afraid of the dark at age twenty-six. Actually, she refused to take shame in that. The dark was goddamn terrifying and people who insisted it wasn’t were either liars or the nightmare entities themselves.
At first, when she opened the door to Storage One, she was confused by the light that flickered inside. If it was a total power outage then it made no sense for there to still be a way that the overhead lights could work, even if the breaker box was mere feet away. That was when she realized the flashes of luminosity were coming from the breaker box itself, spewing out streams of sparks like a fountain on display. The spray of electricity crackled with each pulse of attempted power, burning the air with a bitter smell.
“Oh, shit,” Serena winced, taking an extra step back to avoid any stray spark. That was a little more difficult than flipping a few switches. Workman’s comp was enticing, but she quite liked her fingers to not be blackened stubs and for her heart to remain unexploded.
Despite the illumination of the fried electrical circuits and her flashlight, it was too difficult for her to make out the exact damage that was done. The floor and wall was burnt from the flow of loose currents, yet there didn’t appear to be any type of surrounding destruction as far as she could tell. Damn, guess she was being forced to call it a night after all, which wouldn’t have been so terrible if now she didn’t have to call Gregory to explain the situation and possibly also a fire department. Then again, she did say she wanted to burn this place down to the ground.
The universe was really testing her these days.
Not wanting to get caught in a potential electrical fire, Serena was quick to make her way back down the hallway towards the front entrance to leave. Or it would have been quick, had it not been for the fact she had to skirt out of the way of paper machines and rolling whiteboards and…wait. Had those always been pulled so far out from where they were normally lined against the walls? After all, that was the whole point of keeping them accessible but out of the way of everyone’s walking path. For all her shuffling in the dark, she didn’t think she had any problems with toppling over things that weren’t already affixed to the wall, aside from a few things in Gregory’s office when she chucked the box of order forms through. She considered if her sense of spatial awareness was better than she thought but, no, that side table of pamphlets was literally smack dab in the middle of the hall.
Granted, it didn’t look like anything on the table itself had been disturbed and it wouldn’t be too hard to shove it back into place up front. But that was the problem; it was meant to be up front, around the corner between reception and the entry doors. Not blocking the direct footway. She didn’t put that there, it certainly wasn’t there when she passed through earlier to water the plants or she would have had to pointedly walk around it.
So…how did it get there?
Actually, that was something she could let Gregory deal with when she called him. His files were pulled, the breaker box exploded, and also the furniture was moving on its own now – those were managerial duties, in her opinion.
Still, it was a bit cumbersome to have to maneuver around such bulky things while watching her step in limited lighting. What was the universe trying to do now: impede her route? Slow her down? Why did it feel like everything was so freaking persistent in keeping her stuck here longer than necessary? Even then, it wasn’t like these were very hard obstacles to dodge, not unless she had been running without noticing their strange rearrangement and being forced to pause.
“Sonava-!”
She had been so transfixed on the stupid side table that she completely missed where her foot was stepping, sending her sprawling on her knees when her leg slipped from under her. A shot of pain ran up her elbows from where they took the brunt of her upper body, mellowing into a dull throb seconds later. Sure, she had already fallen flat on her ass today, she may as well let her front take a bit of abuse, too.
Gripping the flashlight that had almost rolled out of reach when she landed, she shined it behind her legs to see what she could have possibly slid on. It wasn’t water, she was plenty familiar with that sensation already. It was…
Cereal bars?
A glance next to the impressive pile of whole grain snacks revealed the vending machine, powered off but missing an entire row of treats. Another look at the mound confirmed they were, indeed, the snacks that were meant to be stocked. A couple toaster pastries, quick breakfast nibbles, including the same snack she had gotten herself two of yesterday to serve as dinner. Actually, she had only gotten the ones with blueberry filling, whereas it looked like the machine was happy to spit out other four flavor options as well to add to its disposed horde.
The weird surge probably had something to do with the vending machine dispensing things at random. Tempting as it was to shove a bunch of free food in her arms and call it a successful grocery haul, there was no way Serena could get away with taking what had to be a hundred dollars worth of cheap snacks without anyone noticing. And really, right now, she wasn’t much in the mood to stick around and have a bite to eat. She wanted to go home, change her clothes, and maybe prevent WerTech Productions from being a smoldering shell by opening hours.
“What the hell is wrong with this place?,” she mumbled. She couldn’t walk fast enough out the front doors, not bothering to lock it behind her. The sigh she blew into her hands was more pained than she wanted to admit. “What the hell is wrong with me?”
She swore her car headlights against the showroom windows looked just like eyes as she drove away.
–
END OF SECOND NIGHT
–
Picture Left: [ID - CCTV still frame of Hallway 3 cluttered with moved furniture.]
Abnormality’s hunting behavior has taken unprecedented deviation from previous encounters.
Abnormality has chosen to stalk prey without engagement despite ample opportunities.
Because the power outage was confirmed to be the result of Abnormality’s abilities, continued usage of property’s CCTV camera footage was unexpected. This implies
Abnormality is aware it is being observed with its prey and allowed it OR
Abnormality is also using CCTV to track Boyd
Abnormality has also used technological interference to direct attention at Boyd.
See:
Email consisting only of Boyd’s name and hearts
Collection of food previous seen eaten by Boyd
Despite unusual occurrences, Boyd appears to remain unaware of Abnormality and reports findings as an electrical blow up. This is accepted to be fact by WerTech Production superiors.
–
AB299 Behavioral Theories
New theories regarding Abnormality’s shift in hunting practices have been noted to include the following:
Note: Ranked by likelihood
Savor Theory - Abnormality is intentionally causing psychological distress to prey as a way of toying with its food; it is beginning to take pleasure in the hunt rather than relying solely for survival means.
Courtship Theory - Abnormality is displaying interest in affection towards prey in an attempt at reciprocation; rejection of courtship will likely result in prey’s demise.
Enrichment Theory - Abnormality is not actively on a hunt; instead it is showing signs of new emotional threshold by harmless playing; prey likely to be killed once game is over.
Theories to be revised as more information is gathered from subsequent observations.
–
Third Day
–
“A break in? Are you kidding me right now?”
“Hey, okay, lower your voice, alright?.”
“No. No, you cannot just come up here and tell me you think we had a goddamn break in–”
“I mean, we don’t know for sure…”
“- when I am here alone, every night, no protection –”
“I get it, I totally get you–”
“- fighting for my freaking life–”
“Look, let’s just,” Gregory took an exaggerated breath, hoping Serena might mimic his attempt to calm down. The twitch of her eye said otherwise. “take a breather.”
“Sure, yeah, because apparently it might be my last,” she said.
Her manager had the decency to wait until the end of the day during their performance talk to drop the bomb on her that last night’s strange happenings may have been the result of an attempted robbery. This was done, naturally, when everyone else had already left to enjoy their weekend and weren’t around to hear Serena’s outrage.
When she had come in that morning, the power had been restored and everyone was abuzz with new rumors about some mysterious fire that nearly torched all of their outlets. Some jokingly lamented that they wished the system had stayed fried so they could enjoy a three-day holiday. Others were pissed that their computers had to be manually restarted and lost whatever data they had pulled up in sleep mode. None of them had asked Serena if she knew anything about what happened despite always being the last one in the building, unknowing that she was the one who had to walk Gregory through the steps of calling a fire marshal and scheduling an on-call electrician to come out before opening shift.
All she had been told by him soon after she arrived was that everything was hunky dory now besides the fact that the breaker box was severely damaged and barely fixed and one overloaded circuit might cause the whole thing to blow. But other than that, there was nothing too major to worry about.
Except now, because of the clear tampering around the busted and scorched metal, the slashed wiring, the unexplained decoration of appliances that had since been moved back to their original positions. Random electrical malfunctions were a rare but not unheard of occurrence. The signs around this one, however, seemed to be intentional.
She wondered if Alice had known about these new suspicions. The technician hadn’t mentioned anything about it while she sat next to her and wiped her computer’s internal harddrive as a precaution against the virus. All she got out of her was a side eye when Serena tried to convince her she hadn’t downloaded anything from a shady website and a tidbit that one of the call center girl’s didn’t know browsing history was logged until she had to explain a few interesting searches to IT when deleting her cookies. She should just be thankful no one was trying to point the finger at her for somehow being involved as a vindictive employee hellbent on torching her way out of here. That wasn’t an additional comment she wanted added to her weekly log.
“I’m only telling you about this so that you won’t worry,” Gregory explained.
She cupped the hollow of her cheeks in the palms of her hands. “Greg. How…is that meant to make me not worry?”
He shrugged. “Because we don’t know if it really was a burglary or not! The cameras got all screwy during the outage.”
[Note: WerTech Production archived footage was wiped after Boyd’s departure on second day. ABC’s taped live recordings were untouched in facility’s database. Abnormality is purposely hiding its tracks.]
“And if there was?” She pressed.
“Then they probably won’t be back,” he assured her. “We’ve done some stock recounts and nothing looks to be missing so far. If it was anybody, it looks like they thought it was a bust.”
“You’re killing me,” she said, cutting him off before he could try to soothe her again. “No, really, you’re killing me. You’re signing me up for a death trap.” She threw her hands up in the air, if only to keep herself from wrapping them around his neck. “Probably? Probably? Or, how about this, they come back now that they’ve cased the place and know I’m here by myself defenseless. What do you think is going to happen then, Greg? I can tell you what I think is going to happen.”
Gregory shook his head. “No, no, I hear you, I got it, trust me. I’m on your side! I know that’s gotta be pretty scary for a young girl like yourself. I can’t imagine what it must be like in your shoes.”
“...but?”
“...but, we’ve taken some extra precautions for tonight, just for you.”
She rolled her eyes and flopped back in her chair, sinking into the leather with a groan. “I’m flattered.”
“I’m serious, Serena, I really do take your safety as a priority,” he said in such an earnest tone that she softened her glare just a fraction. “We’ve got security on site the entire time you’ll be here, even to walk you to your car. Cameras are good to go again. I already had Ops lock up all the access doors so that you don’t need to check them, just lock up the front like you normally do on your way out.”
That was all…pretty reasonable. For once, the stress uncoiled from her body at Gregory’s words, a personal best in the entire three months they’ve worked together. Her visible relief must have eased his own worries, thankful she didn’t want to escalate the issue any further in a way that might involve board directors and/or legal fees. Relief may be too strong of a word; more like the same type of acceptance when dealing with the five stages of grief.
“Real easy job tonight. Just need you to print out the stock count sheets I emailed you earlier and check that they’re in the right bins out in Warehouse B. You can take Ted with you if you don’t want to be alone, or y–”
Brown eyes that had been closed in resignation flew open to look at her manager. “Ted?”
He paused. “Yeah, Ted…the security guard? You’ve had to have met him, right?”
Of course, almost every woman in the office knew Ted. They knew him because he was a weird little creep that ogled a bit too much at the monitor feeds and had the social awareness of a rock. Guys thought he was such a jokester, ladies thought he had no business telling them how great that skirt looked from the back when the cameras captured them leaning over a filing cabinet.
Would you believe me if I told you he got caught with his hand down his pants once? Alice had asked during one of their mini gossip breaks. Serena scrunched her face in disgust, asking if that was true and praying that it wasn’t, but the other woman only shrugged with a smirk.
I dunno, but you believed it, so what does that say about him? She said.
“Why Ted?” she asked instead. “Why not Allen? Or Jodie?”
Gregory frowned, the furrowing of his brow matching hers. “He was the only one available for after hours on short notice. Why, what’s wrong with Ted?”
A lot of things, even if most of it was hearsay. The fact that so many women had so many consistent stories about him was more than enough evidence for any of them. Except for HR and anyone higher up on the ladder, who apparently wanted fifty pages of proof that Ted had physically acted inappropriately to combat the dozens of complaints against him. It was an argument Serena was sure her manager had already heard plenty of times before, and tonight would not be the night he miraculously changed his tune.
Ted was all she had in the way of personal security, otherwise she was on her own. Despite it being really, really inviting to stay by herself instead of having to share any type of close quarters with him. Did she think he would try to pull anything…violent on her? No, but, she definitely couldn’t be too careful. And even if he was proven to be totally harmless, spending the evening getting leered at and given unwarranted ‘compliments’ was not her ideal way to spend a Friday night, much less in a professional work environment that was dead set on turning half her curls gray.
If nothing else, she can always sacrifice him to give herself a running start should anything start to go bump in the night.
“Nothing, he’s…fine,” she grumbled. The way she crossed her arms was reminiscent of a pouting child.
“Hey, listen, it’s only for one more night,” Gregory said. “I know you’ve gotta be excited to fly the coop and get out there in the real world. After tonight, you’ve got a whole slew of opportunities to look forward to.” He was right, almost encouraging, like a real manager. “Don’t give up while you’re in the homestretch. You can stick it out for a couple hours, right?”
“Yeah…”
“Yeah! So don’t let these kinds of things bum you out; you should be pumped! You’re done after tonight, girl, you get to party over the weekend like a real college graduate!”
God, Gregory was so painfully in his late forties. She could still appreciate his attempt at a relatable pep talk, even if it made her inwardly cringe rather than motivated her.
“One more night,” she sighed in agreement. “I can do this.”
“You can do this!”
“...okay, well, I’m going to go do it then,” Private rallying over, she bid him a goodnight while he rambled on about how proud he was of her, how much he was going to miss having a free spirit like her in the office, to keep in touch, that he’ll get her final hours submitted to her professor over the weekend, not to hesitate to reach out if she needed a job reference or even a formal interview to become salaried at WerTech –
For all his airheadedness as a manager, Gregory really wasn’t too bad of a guy. She most definitely was not going to take him up on his offer to stay in contact, though.
It felt weird in some way, knowing this was the last time she’d be plopping down in her dingy swivel chair at a desk in a department she had no business being in, turning on a computer that had already had most of her work expunged aside from her login. She couldn’t say that she’d miss this place, certainly not after these last few nights of pandemonium, but…it wasn’t all bad. Mostly bad, but not always, and usually not outright terrible. She really was on her way to become a bonafide computer engineer if she had lowered the bar this far down when ranking what a decent job was like.
Just as she was reaching for her mouse to pull up the email she needed to print, her hand bumped against something that hadn’t been there previously. A blueberry whole grain cereal bar, courtesy of the vending machine outside the office. It wasn’t hers; she hadn’t bought anything today, which meant someone must have left it on her desk between the time it took to finalize an EOD request and have her enlightening chat with Gregory.
Ted. It had to be Ted. There was literally no one else it could be because he was the only person accounted for staying late besides her. He’s probably seen her eating the same snack as a shoddy meal substitute more times then she’d care to admit. What was this meant to be – a peace offering, an attempt at flirting? If it were anyone but the security guard, she might have been a touch peeved that such a simple act stole her heart. To know that someone paid attention to the little details about her and rather than judging her pisspoor diet, offered her a bonus treat to make sure she ate.
But, it came from Ted, and Ted could choke for all she cared.
The churning in her stomach insisted that it didn’t matter who it was from so long as she stuffed it down her throat posthaste. She was hungry, having skipped lunch in favor of an iced coffee to secure that hour towards her final count. This had to be some endeavor to butter her up, maybe to act like he had treated her to dinner so that he could insist she owed him a favor in return.
Fuck it. Serena was starving and this dry cereal bar she was only a little bit sick of was the best thing she had seen all day. If Ted tried to pull anything funny with her over it, she could shove the two dollars and fifty cents in his face for an equal exchange. Stale whole grain and artificial blueberry preservatives had never –
[Note: Following Courtship Theory - Subject’s approval for Abnormality’s offering believed to be taken as agreement towards advances, becoming the catalyst for later events.]
– tasted so good.
She was halfway done with the snack by the time the printer had finished spitting out her count sheets. Warm paper held to her chest, a pen tucked behind her ear, she crammed the last two bites into her mouth and crumpled up the wrapper to throw it away on her way to the warehouse. Just as she was about to turn the corner for the double doors, she saw the familiar black security jacket slink out of the breakroom to follow after her. She wondered if he could feel the displeasure rolling off her the mere moment he existed within her bubble. He was probably used to that.
“Hey, Sierra!” he called to her, quickening his pace to catch up with her determined speed walk.
“It’s Serena.”
“Right, right, sorry,” he laughed. “We haven’t really spent a lot of time together, is all.”
And she would have liked to have kept it that way.
Her lack of a response did not deter him from having a one sided conversation. “So, Greg told me today was your last day?”
“Hopefully.”
“That’s crazy, it feels like you just got here.”
“Feels like it’s been ten weeks to me.”
“Did they throw you a party?”
“No.”
“Did they get you a card or something?”
“No.”
“Well hell, did they do anything for you?”
No. Really, she was fine with that. She was sure a majority of the people here would miss her the same amount as she would miss them, which was next to nothing. She was only an intern after all, not even stationed in the correct department or working alongside anyone that could be considered a mentor. There was no reason to mourn her scheduled departure. Frankly, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stomach the fake smiles and overly saddened coworkers crowding around her in the breakroom had they decided to host a farewell luncheon in her honor anyways.
Although, she wouldn’t have turned down a free cake.
“You know, I could always take you out somewhere,” Ted shrugged, trying to play it like a nonchalant offer. “It’s not right to have no one celebrate you on your last day.”
She rolled her eyes and entered the door code. “I can celebrate by myself at home, thanks.”
The guard gave her a cocky grin, an attempt to pull some sort of boyish charm he was too old to use. “C’mon, let me treat you to a couple drinks after this.”
With a strained smile that didn’t reach her eyes, Serena shoved the wadded up wrapper from her cereal bar at Ted’s chest, who caught it in surprise. Or maybe he was just shocked by a woman’s touch.
“You already treated me to dinner, that’s about as much as I can take,” she said.
He blinked as she pulled open the door to Warehouse B and slipped inside. “Huh? What do you – I didn’t…”
His voice trailed away from her ears when the door shut between them, muffling whatever backup plan he was surely going to try on her next. Faintly, she could hear his muffled see you on the cameras, then as she walked off down to the shelving racks she needed to check off. She couldn’t help the roll of disgust in her stomach that didn’t settle well with her pathetic dinner, though she didn’t think it would have mattered if she was full or not. The idea alone of Ted watching her every move through the CCTV at the direct order of her manager made her skin crawl. But at least he was several rooms away with many doors between them, allowing him to keep his skeezy thoughts to himself on the other end of the video feed.
The inventory she was asked to count wasn’t too difficult to handle. The guys and gals out here kept the bins organized to perfection under their shockingly competent warehouse manager. Everything was in its assigned place, clearly labeled, marked with daily quantities at the end of each shift to keep track of so many moving parts. Again, Gregory, a filing system is not that hard to maintain. Checking off if pallets were stacked in the correct location and how many GPUs were in each shipping box was the easiest task she’d done all week. Hell, being this close to actual manufacturing parts was the closest she’d gotten to doing what her degree was intended for the entirety of her internship.
As quickly as she was breezing through these stock sheets, she was glad she gave up her lunch hour to go towards her weekly log. She wasn’t sure this would take her any more than forty-five minutes to finish. Of course, because she’s such a thorough and dedicated employee that should be hired anywhere she applies, she could always go back and double check her counts. For absolute accuracy, certainly not to stretch out an easy hour and a half. She wouldn’t want to miss a single solid-state drive and throw off their supplies.
She was counting a box of coolant jugs for the third time when her hand froze mid pen stroke. All at once, it was as if her body drenched in dread, an icy shock dumped over her head like a bucket of water. Her back stiffened, forcing her to square her shoulders and stand at full height.
Someone was watching her.
No shit someone was watching her, that was the whole point of Ted being on duty with her. However, the ick he normally gave her was nothing compared to the way her heart started to rabbit out of the blue. Her pulse was roaring in her ears, drowning out her thoughts in favor of panic for no discernable reason. Every labored breath was forced through her nose to prevent herself from hyperventilating. Her feet refused to move to turn her around and see what might be the instinctual cause for her bout of anxiety this time. Never before had she considered herself someone with a panic disorder, but the constant flare ups this week were starting to become alarming.
Chances are, Ted was glued to watching her backside from the security cameras positioned around the warehouse aisles. If there really was someone or any reason that she would be in immediate danger, he would have alerted her by now. He was a creep and a weirdo, but he was still a qualified security guard. She was sure he’d love nothing more than to burst in and play the role of a macho hero who more than earned an evening with the fair maiden he rescued.
“You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine,” she whispered, balling her hand into a fist to help direct her tension somewhere she could control. “No one here but you. You and the terminal casings.”
An overhead light popped behind her. The sound of crackling acrylic jolted her from her rigid posture to whirl around for the source. Further down the deep row of the rack aisle, one of the ceiling lights flickered before dying from a voltage overload. She stared up at the fixture in puzzlement, vaguely wondering what could have caused it to blow out so unexpectedly. Right, Gregory had told her that the breaker box had been fixed as best it could for the time being, but it was treading a fine line between operational and shorting out. A random current was probably redirected through the wiring and overloaded the fluorescent tubes.
Then the lights next to it sputtered and blew out, casting a deep shadow at the end of the aisle. Another fixture fritzed, then another, and suddenly the darkness was rapidly approaching her down the row ready to swallow her in pitch black.
She couldn’t focus on anything but turning on her heel to dash away from the encroaching shadow. The lights burned bright until they burst into sparks in quick succession, trailing behind her sprinting form at an alarming pace. Almost as if it was determined to close the distance that had previously been between them, to pull her in just as it had fully encompassed her last night despite its suffocating grip. Could Ted see her fleeing for her life from the pursuing shadows, or had the cameras in the warehouse already gone offline in tandem with the localized blackout? Should she bother trying to scream for help? What good would that do besides embarrass her once she could see past her irrational fear? Or worse, what if help –
[Note: Though Subject is fleeing in distress, she makes no acknowledgement of Abnormality’s hand reaching for her.]
– came too late?
Serena slammed her shoulder into the access door, dropping her papers to scatter on the floor and frantically wiggle the handle in a desperate attempt to get through. She had forgotten that Ops already locked up the outside doors for the night in what was meant to be a gesture to make her feel safer in the building. But she didn’t want to be in the building, she wanted to be out out get out go get OUT–
“Open, open, please,” she panted. Fumbling fingers swiped her keycard against the reader over and over until the magnetic strip made enough contact. The beeping lock was lost in the static that rumbled between her ears, only focusing on twisting down the knob and flinging open the door before the last light of the aisle could plunge her into darkness.
The door swung shut behind her with a heavy bang, sealing the shadows within. Her hands shakily gripped the railing along the ramp. Cool metal against her palms felt wonderfully grounding, giving her fingers something to squeeze until her nails dug into her skin. It was cold and it stung, but it wasn’t enough to fully shake the despair that clung to her heart. Each exhale was a ragged pant, gradually smoothing into a deeper breath as she calmed down. The outside was also dark, arguably darker than Warehouse B who had only lost one row of lighting, but it was just…safer. The security floodlights, the neon signs, the stars, the openness – it soothed her frantic thoughts in a way she couldn’t describe.
Just what the hell was any of that? One minute she was fooling around with pallets, the next she was acting like a doomed gazelle in a nature documentary. Why, because of a fuse blowout? None of this kind of stuff ever bothered her before, yet now it was as if she needed a nightlight and security blanket just to make it through an overtime shift. Anxiety was a fickle thing, rearing its ugly head at the most inopportune times for little to no reason, much less for any reason that made sense. It was like Gregory and Ted had told her, she should be ecstatic to finish the last night of her internship, one step closer to having full certification in a field she enjoyed. So, why was she sinking deeper into disquietude as the final week stretched on? Did her brain no longer understand the difference between terror and excitement?
She blinked away the wetness in her eyes, rubbing the heels of her palms against them to staunch any pitiful tears before they could begin. With a sniffle, she took a final, stuttering inhale and slowly blew it out. That was better, she was better now. Her arms still shook and her nerves tingled under her skin, but she didn’t feel on the verge of going into cardiac arrest anymore. Now, she just wanted to throw up what meager food she had in her system. Not only that, but she wanted to go home. She wanted to drink something strong. She wanted to lay down in bed for thirty-seven hours. She wanted…
…she wanted to close that goddamn motherfucking gate.
Unbelievable, un-freaking-believable. Well, not that unbelievable, but still. How in the hell was her manager going to sit there and try to placate her worries that there might have been a break in, that someone might have been tampering with things around the building, when nobody could be bothered to close the propertyline gate for the past three days minimum. Yeah, no wonder someone felt like they had free access to WerTech Production Headquarters; the employees there routinely left the locked doors wide open for anyone to wander in! If there were any late night thieves, they had half their heist planned for them when it came to securing an entry point and getaway.
Fear muddled into misplaced anger, heating her veins enough to thaw the chill that previously ran down her spine. Stupid gate, stupid stupid stupid gate, the bane of her existence for the last three nights. If she had never seen that it was open while throwing out the trash, she never would have inadvertently sent herself spiraling down the rabbit hole of what-ifs relating to her mysteriously violent demise. Such a strange thing to fixate on, yet one undoubtedly about to be on the receiving end of her frustration as she marched through the backlot towards it. She didn’t know why it was open, if it served some vital purpose that may or may not cause issues for her former coworkers come Monday morning. She didn’t care. This place wasn’t her problem anymore at the stroke of eight o’clock.
The closer she got to the fence, the more of its shape she could make out against the inky backdrop of evening. Twists of steel wires and towering poles became defined with each step, the opening in its chain links giving the illusion that it was gaping wider and wider as her perspective shifted from the distance. And as she raised her arm to grab hold of the accursed gate, ready to slam it shut with all the might she could muster to help ease a fraction of her vexation, she came to the startling conclusion that it was more open than she had anticipated. Not just opened – completely peeled backwards like a tin lid off of a can. The metal was mangled back and upwards as if it had been carelessly pulled from the ground. Support bars meant to take the impact of a wayward vehicle with only a few dents were bent at a multitude of angles.
This kind of damage shouldn’t be possible, not unless it was a big rig plowing through at top speed. Even then, the fence wasn’t smashed or bulging like it had been hit by something going out, rather it was deliberately torn open by something wanting to come in. But there were no signs of tire tracks or skid marks, no abrasion to any of the shipping containers that would have been hit in its path, no mention around the office about any kind of big machinery accident on site. That led to the conclusion that either this destruction of property was old news long before Serena’s employment…
Or it happened too recently for anyone to take notice, simplifying assuming the gate was cracked open when looking from the bay doors.
“What…the fuck,” Seriously. For every instance she explained away, three more appeared in its place like a hydra.
She couldn’t begin to fathom what kind of incident was able to do this much damage, yet so little at the same time, kept only to a small corner of the fencing. How long ago had it happened, how deliberately was it done?
Ted might know, loathe as she was to give him props for anything. Being one of the four rotational security guards, he of all people would either have been present or informed of any type of vandalism on company grounds. In fact, he could probably pull up the archived footage of when it happened to give her a definitive answer. Was it truly worth the mental strength she’d need to expend to willingly ask Ted for a favor? It would be so much simpler to let the issue go and finish up the last half hour of her overtime hiding in the bathroom. She could forget it, be done with it, let WerTech handle themselves as they pleased.
But dammit did she need to know if her gut instinct had been right since Wednesday.
The walk of shame back towards the side entry made her wonder if she should have gone ahead and left through the tear in the fence. Embrace her new life in the small, woodland strip between textile businesses, content to never look at a computer screen or human being for the rest of her days. Instead, she got to enjoy the feeling of a stone dropping into her stomach every inch she came closer to the building until she was worried she might be weighed down through the asphalt. The building itself wasn’t the monster she was afraid of, it was what it hid in its darkened halls and empty rooms that made her squirm. And some of the people. And the abysmal pay, or lack thereof for interns working overtime.
Forgoing the door back into Warehouse B, Serena opted to use the side entrance that dropped her between the security office and conference room. Raising her hand to knock on the door made her feel braver than any American soldier deployed into battle.
“Ted?” she asked. “You there?”
“Sure am,” a voice called back and a moment later the door was opened. He smiled, gesturing for her to come into a small, enclosed space with him in private. She stubbornly stayed hovering in the doorframe. “Ready to wrap it up?”
“Yeah, almost, um…do you know anything about the busted gate out back? That’s all, like,” she jumbled her hands in explanation.
Ted raised an eyebrow. “Busted gate?”
Oh, that wasn’t reassuring at all. “Yeah, past the dumpster and the trailers. It looked like something just…plowed through it? I didn’t know if maybe there had been an accident or…?”
“First I’m hearing about it,” he shrugged. “Could have had something to do with the fire truck here this morning if I had to guess. Maybe they backed up too far. Pretty shitty if they didn’t say anything to anyone before they left, though.”
A fire truck was big, but not big enough to rip up metal fencing unless it was being hurled through it. “Could you…check? Like, the cameras?”
“Now?”
“...yeah.”
“I mean, we don’t even know what day or time it happened, that’s hours of footage.”
“Right, but, you should check, shouldn’t you? Isn’t the whole point of being a security guard to actually guard the building?”
His mild confusion morphed into a smirk that was a little too patronizing for her taste. “Ah, I getcha, you’re freaked out about that break-in possibility, aren’t you?”
Caught red handed. The way she averted her eyes to the floor and ducked her burning face made Ted snort.
“No, hey, don’t worry about it, I get where you’re coming from,” he leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his stomach. “I think Greg’s full of crap. No one breaks in, moves a couple desks to the left, and leaves.”
“What about the breaker box? He said it looked like it had been mauled,” she pressed.
“Yeah, it was smoldering for hours, of course it’s gonna get fucked up.”
“And the gate…?”
“Like I said – fire truck. Or one of the vendor semis when they picked up a load. Some dumbass in a big truck, either way.”
She chewed her lower lip while she absorbed his harmless explanations. Ted said everything so calmly, so effortlessly, with zero hesitation because he truly believed there was nothing to worry about no matter who said what. She wished she was able to take in and hold on to those nonchalant vibes, but her paranoia refused to believe anything had that simple of an answer. Nothing was a coincidence, nothing was just the wind, nothing had a logical reason; nothing made sense!
“Serena? Hey,” she hadn’t realized she was trembling until Ted wrapped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her into his side. When had he gotten up? When had her nose begun to burn with the threat of tears? “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“No,” she choked out. “No, I’m not fucking okay.”
Before the security guard could ask her what was the matter, all of her anxiety was spilling from her mouth in a watery ramble that she couldn’t stop. “I feel like I’m losing my mind here, like, literally going insane. I keep, I keep thinking I see things to the point I run out the damn door so that I don’t have to be in the dark, like there’s actually a-a boogeyman after me.” She took a gulp of air and let it out in a humorless laugh. “And I’m twenty-six, I’m twenty-six goddamn years old and I’m worried about monsters in the closets but it’s not in the closets it’s everywhere in this fucking building when I’m alone.”
Her breathing was becoming shallower with every cluster of words she forced out in a single breath. “And I don’t know where this came from! It just, it started so suddenly and I don’t know why but it makes me feel like my heart is about to explode and that I’m being watched and I’m scared, Ted, I’m so fucking scared for no reason, but I don’t know what to do, I can’t, I can’t tell anyone because I know nothing is wrong but something is wrong and I just, I-I…”
“Hey, hey,” he interrupted her, squeezing his arm tighter around her shaking frame to break her out of her rant. She should shrug him off, worry about how she would need to scrub her skin raw in the shower tonight to get rid of his touch. At this point in time, she couldn’t care less where her comfort came from, so long as it was someone who believed her.
“I’m sorry,” she sniveled, burying her face in her hands to hide her humiliated tears. “I don’t, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing’s wrong with you. I mean, a lot’s wrong with you, but, like, not in a way that’s your fault, you get what I mean?”
Strangely enough, she did, so she gave a weak little nod.
“Sounds like you’re having your first burn out,” he rubbed his hand down her arm. “College girl, shitty internship, apparently thinks those gross fruit bars taste good…I’m surprised you hadn’t snapped sooner.”
She pulled away from his hug and scrubbed her face, ignoring how his hand lingered on her back. Give a man an inch and he’ll take a mile, as they say. “I think this place is cursed.”
Ted sniggered. “Oh, yeah, definitely, like, twenty people brutally died here in the eighties.”
“What.”
“I’m kidding! No, this place sucks for a lot of reasons, but I promise we don’t hire shadow walkers or whatever.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure. Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen on the cameras was when Tiarra’s bra broke during a board meeting and everything just went fwomp.” He made sure to pantomime with his hands how her breasts sagged exaggeratedly to her midriff.
Yep, there was classic Ted. His decency towards women was nice while it lasted. At least the distaste Serena felt blocked out her overwhelming nervousness. Just being able to vent her frustration and cry it out had eased a considerable weight from her chest with some significance. Ted would have much more luck wooing the girls in the office if he could pull his head out of his ass more often and listen instead of drooling.
She was saved by the bell when in the distance a landline rang from one of the offices. They both shared a look, unsure of who could possibly be calling at this hour. Serena peeked down the hall to get a better listen, only coming to the assumption that it must be one of the desk phones ringing in the finance office. What a strange time to want to call and ask for a rebate program.
“Just let them leave a voicemail,” Ted said. “and I’ll tell you what – how about you and I take a walk around the building, check out the gate and the lights and whatever you want, and then we grab dinner together?”
The first half sounded okay, but the second half of his offer made her wince. “I don’t know about that…”
“It’s just to show you that there’s nothing to be afraid of,” he reassured her, assuming her apprehension was because she was still too shaken up to want to venture into dark corners and not because the idea of going on a date with him repulsed her. “And if there is anything out there, I promise that I’ll hit it really, really hard with my nightstick for you.”
“I…” The phone continued to ring, its shrill tone echoing down the hall. It should have cut off by now, unless the caller redialed again. Persistent, weren’t they? That must mean it was either vitally important or the most asinine thing anyone had to ask. She sighed. “I should go get that. It might be Gregory.”
“I doubt it.”
She shrugged, inching her way out the door for her grand escape from this awkward conversation. “Better safe than sorry. You can be my human meat shield after.”
Thankfully, Ted didn’t try to trail after her. Probably sulking or plotting how to get Serena to agree for a little late night rendezvous. Hell no. She was going to answer the phone, send her last email ever to mark her time, and get the hell out of here. Even if Ted had been the handsome charmer he thought himself to be, she didn’t have the energy to be in someone else’s presence for any remainder of the night. At this rate, it would be a miracle she didn’t just flop on her couch and stay comatosed until Tuesday.
As she guessed, the phone was ringing from her office enclosure. More than that, it was her deskphone that was flashing red. Definitely Gregory, then, if not some insistent spam caller that was only getting through because she was the sole representative online in the system. Still, she didn’t want to assume in case it was someone who wasn’t her manager but had equal importance. She was courteous and professional, after all, as her supervisor comments better damn well say.
–
[Phone Call Transcript]
Note: This is not a real call. Abnormality is using its technological interference to lure Subject away.
[0:00:05] Boyd: Thank you for calling WerTech Productions, this is Serena, how may I help you?
[0:00:27] Unknown Caller: …
[0:00:43] Boyd: Hello?
[0:00:46] Unknown Caller: …
[0:00:51] Boyd: Hello? Are you there?
Note: Building experiences a second total blackout at this time, however the phone line remains connected. CCTV cameras remain functional as well.
[0:00:57] - Call Terminated by Unknown Caller
–
“Crap, again!?”
The dial tone hung in the air as she tossed the receiver onto her desk, not bothering to hang it up. Having one operating phone line on the grid must have been the breaker’s final straw if the lights in Warehouse B were anything to go by. Of course it would be another system failure right when she was about to leave despite running smoothly enough when everyone was bustling about during the day. Her only good fortune was that she stashed the flashlight she used yesterday in one of her drawers. She had to knock it against the edge of the cubicle divider to help the dying batteries hold on for a little longer before it was ready to lead the way out of this hellhole for a second time.
Swinging the beam into the hallway, she couldn’t detect any of the furniture having jumped out of place like before, which was already an improvement.
“Ted?” she called out. “Ted? Hey, let’s just forget it and go home. I’m sick of this place.”
He didn’t answer her. Maybe the office door was closed and he couldn’t hear her, or maybe he’d gone to check the breaker himself. Regardless, she still needed him to walk out of the building with her so she could call Gregory about the grand sucky finale of her night without being accused of abandoning him and creating a hostile work environment. With a huff, she walked towards the security room, wrinkling her nose at how quickly the air turned stale.
“C’mon, I’m done. I’ll tell Greg this place is about to burn down again when we leave.”
Nothing. Not even the squeak of a rolling chair or shuffling behind the door. He must not be in the office. Great, because going on a wild goose chase for a guy she could barely stand in a dark, stuffy building was the one thing she had always wanted to do. It wasn’t like she hadn’t just had a miniature crisis about this damn place giving her the heebie jeebies.
“Ted, I’m leaving,” she tried again. To hell with it, she’ll just write him a message on a sticky note and let him figure out the rest.
The thickness in the air swirled into a bitter aroma, enough that it coated the back of her throat with something unpleasantly tangy. Gross, had something started leaking, maybe spoiling? She hadn’t smelt anything unusual during last night’s power outage; something internal must have gotten fried during round two. Be it melting wall insulation or a busted gas main, she wasn’t inclined to breathe in slightly noxious, possible toxic fumes longer than need be. If the security guard wanted to go gallivanting through the halls until the whole place exploded from sparks and vapor, he could be her gu-
“Oh…oh my god. Oh my god.”
It wasn’t until her flashlight reflected off the floor in front of the security office did she understand where the source of the stench was coming from. In the dark, the thick liquid had blended in with the abstract pattern of the hall tiles. Now that she was closer, however, a puddle was clearly spreading from the doorway, the bright red color glaringly obvious once the light was on it. Splatters and droplets sprayed around the main pool all the way from the threshold to the corridor wall. What was worse was that it wasn’t just wetness, but gooey chunks darkening certain spots to almost appear black.
Thank god she didn’t have a bigger meal in her stomach or Serena would be adding a second mixture of bodily fluids to the floor.
A hand flew to her mouth, muffling a scream, holding back a gag, unable to tear her eyes away from what was undoubtedly a fatal amount of blood seeping into the grout.
“Ted!? Ted, this isn’t funny!” It has to be a joke. It had to be a sick, cruel prank that he was playing on her after she had just gushed about the ominous feeling WerTech gave her lately. Gregory was probably in on it, too, maybe the whole office as well. A carefully orchestrated trick they had spaced out over seventy-two hours to make Serena feel like she was going crazy.
Certainly not because something bad had actually happened.
“Please, please, Ted, just…just fucking answer me!” she cried, her voice catching in her throat at the tailend of her sentence. “We’ll go home, we’ll go on that stupid date, please, just come out!”
The flashlight shook violently in her hand no matter how hard she squeezed the yellow plastic. Its beam may as well have been better suited on a rave dance floor with how frantically it moved from the floors to the walls to the doors. Past the initial pool of gore, it illuminated a trail of blood that streaked down the rest of the hallway in a shape roughly the same width of Ted. He’d been dragged off, mortally wounded if not already a goner. Every part of Serena screamed at her to run, smash her way out of the front windows if she had to, but she couldn’t. Not without Ted. She couldn’t…fuck, she couldn’t leave him to die, not if there was a chance to save him. He was a sleaze, but he was still a person.
And even if he was a lost cause, he should still have his baton and service weapon on his utility belt. She didn’t know where their assailant was, so she needed all the help she could find to be prepared. It wouldn’t do her any good to make it to an exit just for someone with a hatchet to be blocking the way. Could a hatchet even do this kind of lethal damage? Definitely not in one blow; Ted would have had to have been hacked consecutively to – no, no, no, she was not going to think about that she was not going to envision that.
Each exhale came out as a whimper, a clear struggle that she was barely keeping herself from breaking down into sobs. What was she going to find, what was going to find her? She had to push forward, despite the squeal in her throat when she had to step over the sticky red puddle and hope to god none of it stuck to her shoes. She kept her back angled towards the wall as she shuffled along the trail, hoping to protect herself from any unseen attack while keeping as much distance as she could from the blood trail mere inches from her steps. It smeared to the left at the hallway’s junction, heading towards the storage wing before disappearing through the open door of Storage One.
Just from the doorway, she could see the sparks flickering from the breaker box, though not nearly as fervently as it did before. Enough to light up a corner of the room with a flash every few seconds, but nothing else.
“Ted…?” she whispered. “Ted, are you…are you there? Are you…h-hurt?”
Obviously he was hurt. Obviously he was dead if that much blood was outside of his body. But what if it wasn’t his blood? What if he was alright, the true savior of the day that had already dispatched the convicts who tried to get the jump on him as part of their three-day master plan?
Any kind of stupid hope her mind tried to supply to block out the mounting trauma was dashed when she shone her flashlight through the door. She could see his legs on the floor, pants torn and soaked with his own blood, and when she fully stepped into the storage room to look at the rest of him, she wailed.
He was desecrated beyond recognition, resembling pulp more than a man. The entire right side of his body had been ravaged to the point Serena couldn’t tell if it was missing or simply turned to mush and smeared along the floor. Bones were broken and jutting through the skin, skewering organs that spilled out from the absent side. They, too, were tangled between themselves and hunks of muscles that were torn from the bone. His head…his head was the worst, by far. The skull was caved in at his forehead until it was practically flattened, causing graymatter to splatter like a rotten grape. Bloodied eyes popped out of their sockets to forever stare at nothing while his jaw was misaligned around a swollen tongue.
Every orifice oozed with red, the flow having already slowed to a trickle from his nose and ears given that there wasn’t much left to drain from his remains. Any scream Serena wanted to let out was trapped as a silent sob in her chest, unable to process the sight in front of her. Ted hadn’t just been killed, he had been slaughtered. Whoever did this had done so with an ungodly amount of rage and strength, unless it had been carried out by a depraved group of individuals lost in the bloodlust. She didn’t know what was worse: to be outnumbered, or to go against the brutality of a single attacker.
“Oh god…oh god…”
God was not going to save her.
She allowed herself two mournful sobs before she forced herself to back away from the sight on wobbling legs. It wasn’t safe here, she couldn’t stick around to grieve unless she wanted to rest ending up the same way. She needed to get out of here, drive as far and as fast as she could, and call every police department in the tristate area for help. And she needed to do it now before she was caught next.
She turned around and she screamed.
There was no way she could have possibly missed that…that thing in the corner staring down at her with those awful eyes. Wide and yellow, glowing against the backdrop of black, with ringlets of red that were evocative to a bullseye at a carnival game booth. But no, that wasn’t it; it was the fact that the eyes towered so, so high above her all the way to the fifteen foot ceiling. Its frame was swallowed up by the darkness of the room courtesy of the blackout, only faint outlines of what she assumed were its arms and neck visible from the pinprick beam of her flashlight ghosting over its massive form. It was like the shadows blended into its skin as the perfect camouflage to the point its own body could hardly be made out when flush against itself.
And somehow, that still wasn’t what sent Serena over the edge. Not this giant fucking monstrosity looming over her, not her coworker’s mangled corpse behind her, not that fact that such a creature should be impossible to exist in the first place, not the realization that it was somehow able to squeeze into the room with no visible damage to the doorways that were meant to accommodate a ten foot height at most, not the fact that her intuition about something being so terrible wrong the last couple days was right.
But because Ted’s arm, from his broken fingers to the intact joint of his shoulder, was hanging out of its mouth.
The contrast of gore on skin and charcoal color of the jacket’s sleeve was the only way she could make out the line of its top lip. White fangs poked out from the corners of its mouth due to being slightly parted by the limb snatched in its teeth, likely held fast by smaller but equally sharp dentition. If it weren’t for the fact something was between its lips, she wouldn’t have even realized there were any features on its face besides its dizzying eyes, the shapes also obscured by its inky coloring. If it even had any in the same arrangement that a human would.
It tilted its head to the side, unperturbed by her sharp cry at its appearance. The movement caused blood to dribble from the stump of Ted’s arm and patter on the ground like rain, splashing at her ankles. Instinctively, she stumbled back to create a sense of distance between the viscera and the monster who had created it. Unfortunately, there was still the matter of Ted’s near inside-out body directly behind her. Too focused on the terrifying sight in front of her, she didn’t watch where she stepped and squished the remnants of a liver (or maybe the kidneys? Could be the stomach.) under her heel. Her foot slipped out from under her in a way that was reminiscent of the way she fell after dropping the pitcher of water in the lobby.
Like before, its eyes watched her unblinkingly. Like before, she cried out at the feeling of liquid seeping into her clothing. The difference this time was that the creature didn’t disappear without a trace and she was far more distressed at the sticky warmth that stuck to her body from her lower back to her thighs. She tried to scramble out of the meaty pile, but her hands kept slipping in the blood and the sensation of guts squelching between her fingers made her recoil. All she could do was mewl such weak little sobs until her shaking limbs found enough purchase to pull her against the wall. She could move no further back, gain no extra footage between herself and the monster.
It knew that just as well as Serena.
“No, no,” she croaked, watching as the creature slunk out of the deepest shadows that concealed it so well towards her. The flashlight wasn’t close to being powerful enough to unveil its entire body structure, but despite nearly slipping out of her shaky hold from the blood, she could see a few details that were missed in the darkness.
For one, it wasn’t just as tall as the ceiling. It was even larger with what looked like legs bent into a crouch to help it fit within the confined space. The hands that inched closer to where Serena was huddled had wicked points at the end of long fingertips, scratching along the concrete. She still couldn’t wrap her mind around how such an enormous being was able to hide itself in a compact storage room when there was no conceivable way it could have fit through either of the doors. Unless, somehow, it had made its own opening with such skill that there wasn’t a trace of demolition.
A rumbling noise made Serena shrink back into the false safety of her corner. It was deep and throaty, something between a growl and a purr. Not inherently hostile, but not remotely comforting in the slightest. From what she could tell, it hadn’t yet entirely extended itself forward and already the creature had invaded her personal space as a testament to its full height.
“Please,” she whined, her tearful brown eyes pleading with its two-toned stare. “Please…”
Please don’t kill me. Please let me go. Please make it quick and painless. Please please please–
It opened its mouth just enough to drop the severed arm at her feet. It would have landed in her lap had her knees not been drawn to her chest in a vain attempt to shield herself should the creature strike.
She gagged hard enough that her whole body flinched, bile burning in her throat but swallowed back down. She pressed harder into the wall and willed herself the sudden ability to phase through solid objects with no luck. Was it better or worse to know that while Ted had been horrifically mauled, it didn’t seem like much of him was eaten as it was pulverized. Was it a more dignified death to be reduced to monster food or a sludge of innards? At least in the case of the second option, their families would have something to bury, even if it could all be scooped in a shoebox.
Again, it made a noise at her. Softer, like a croon of encouragement, perhaps for her to accept the shared meal of her coworker as her last.
To think, not even an hour ago, that was the same arm that Ted wrapped around her in comfort. It was the same arm that held her close to his body while it was still warm and, for just a moment, made her feel protected from the horrors lurking around the corner. There was nothing it could defend her from now.
Serena bit her lip to stifle a moan of anguish. “S-stop, stop, please, get…g-get that away from me.” When the monster didn’t comply with her request, she kicked her leg out from her arm to shove the appendage back. “Get away!”
It tilted its head and rumbled in response to her. She shuddered, unsure what it was trying to ask of her, if it was capable of conversation to begin with. All animals had some sort of intelligence, but that didn’t always equate to morality, much less the complexity of human ethics. Not to mention, this creature was like no animal she had ever seen. She hadn’t known something like this could have ever existed, except maybe a million feet below sea level where the fish were all the more ghastly and colossal. This thing was just…unnatural. Nothing about it fit into a single category enough to be plausible. Like it didn’t belong in this world.
If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back and wow was that feeling more literal than Serena previously imagined. The eyes that wanted to swallow her up were like floodlights in contrast to the void that was the rest of the monster. It was like it was the personification of a blackhole, pulling the darkness around itself as a cloak and uncaring what was demolished in its hunger. Slowly, it bowed its arms to lower itself in front of her, eyes never leaving her once. She couldn’t look away, her mind was memorized by the glow of colors. It was almost too late when she noticed movement out of the corner of her eye and saw Its hand cocked and reaching, so close to brushing against her side
Adrenaline pumped through her as if it had been shot directly into her heart. Without a second thought, she twisted away from the clawed fingers before they were able to dig into her flesh, scrambling to pull herself up. Her back hit a hard metal and she didn’t hesitate to grab it off the wall. Small and cylindrical; a fire extinguisher. It was dubious to think a little bit of suppression foam would be the single weakness for a beast of unknown forces, but she didn’t need a total knock out; merely a distraction.
Pin pulled, hose aimed, trigger squeezed – all before the creature had a chance to cage her in. Dense, white mist sprayed into the air, thickening into a light froth that shot directly at its face. It reared back, more out of shock than pain, she imagined, and snarled. If it weren’t for the fact her nerves were already shifted into overdrive to get her moving, she may have frozen with the way the reverb rocked her bones. The monster squeezed its eyes shut to avoid the blast of foam that splattered its face white in a continuous hiss. Now being powdered with the color contrast of its inky hue, she was able to pick out more of its face that she could see previously. Creased eyelids and a pinched brow, tufts of fur that covered from its forehead to its cheekbones like a head of hair, the bridge of a nose, lips curled back to reveal horrifically sharp daggers.
Almost human.
But the wrong kind of human.
Human in the way some fish had two rows of flat teeth that looked like a grin, or how a monkey could stand and walk upright while dragging limbs that were too long, or when an animal’s muzzle deformed to give the appearance of a drooped nose and protruding chin. Things that belonged at the rock bottom of the uncanny valley, that had no business existing as features on anything but a human being. Whatever this thing was, it was too far removed to be a recognizable person, no matter what kind of mask it wore.
While it was vigorously shaking its head to dislodge the foam blinding its eyes, Serena hurled the empty extinguisher to the side in hopes its resounding impact could be mistaken as her. She didn’t bother to wait and see if her bid for a few extra seconds was successful, using her head start to fly out the double doors to her right that led into Warehouse A. Her hand all but punched the emergency fire alarm –
[Note: All emergency calls and alerts have been deactivated by wireless jammers. Requests are transferred to ABC’s mock services and responded with trained personnel.]
– as she sprinted down one of the middle aisles towards the main entrance back into the offices. A piercing siren rang in every room of the building, strobes of red flashing in time to the beat. The echo in the warehouse only made the noise all the more ear bleeding, but she worry too much with how it made her head throb. A migraine was nothing in comparison to being eviscerated by a very nightmarish, very pissed off being from hell that now had a personal vendetta against her. Around her, the surroundings were briefly illuminated in red as the fire alarm screamed for evacuation, only to plunge into total darkness a second later, repeating the cycle. Being able to see, if only for a few moments at a time, was already a godsend.
But when the world blinked away with each pause of the alarm’s wail, her heart skipped a beat, knowing that was all the creature needed to be virtually invisible to her. Despite the stretch she ran at a speed that would make track stars envious, it didn’t take long for the monster to be hot on her heels. Maybe it was because the alarm was so harsh, or because she could only hear breathing in her ears, or something in the middle of the spectrum, but she hadn’t caught the slightest sound that could have been it thrashing its way out of the storage room to give chase. There was no way it should have been able to wriggle through the warehouse doors, even if it crawled on its stomach, without tearing half the wall out as well.
Had it just…materialized? Poofed out of thin air into the next room over?
There wasn’t much time to dwell on the schematics of the monster chasing her. She could make up all the hypotheses she wanted after she had gotten to safety. If she made it to safety.
For something so large, it was incredibly light on its feet, barely a tremor on the ground as it pursued behind. Hell, the only reason Serena had realized it was catching up with her was because its shadow was revealed in a flash of red along the racks of shipping crates. She yelped at the proximity and dodged into the open shelving under one of the aisle racks, shoving over a cart of loose hardware fasteners in her haste. Being over in the next row didn’t deter the monster in the slightest. Its arm swiped through the third tier of the rack, sending heavy boxes wrapped in plastic film to rain down on her. She yelped, her arms bracing over her head as she continued to pump her legs faster to avoid being struck.
Metal groaned under a weight it was not designed to hold. In a flurry of movement, more pallets stored on the upper shelves came crashing to the ground behind her. She could feel the shrapnel of scattering components and splintered wood smack the back of her legs, a near miss from dropping on top of her and shattering her spine on impact. Whether it was stupid or not, she risked throwing a glance behind her to see what the creature was plotting with its makeshift avalanche. To her horror, it had climbed up the shelves to perch almost thirty feet above, making the steel buckle and shake to support its large stature.
It leapt from the rack on her left to the one on her right, causing even more inventory to go sailing to the ground with a crash. The shelves barely held together from the landing and Serena feared it may go falling in a domino effect on top of her with the way it swayed and screeched. Regardless, the monster didn’t break its stride to pounce forward down the row and purposely send industrial coils of wire careening over the edge. Because it had gained a few feet of lead, something it could have done when she was well within its reach on the floor, she was able to skid to a halt as supplies rained down right in front of her. The forced stop was exactly as it intended, blocking her front and back path along the aisle with smashed stock.
She thought herself so clever when she squeezed between the gap of shelving units to be back down her original route. The door was straight ahead, just a few more paces, and there were no more racks on either side of her to potentially block her in with debris. Unfortunately, slipping through lower openings was a trick the monster already picked up on mere moments ago. If her lungs didn’t burn like every inhale was ablaze, she might have had the air to scream when it sprung down to land between her and the door. Most of the white powder had dissipated from its face, leaving only its eyes as the key feature to look at.
Whether washed out in a red light or hidden in the void of black, the only thing Serena could consistently see was its goddamn eyes.
Her body moved on its own accord before her brain could think of firing off an order. She thought maybe, since she was so small and it was so close, she could juke the creature by running around it to circle back towards the door. There was no time to formulate a plan B when her only options were fight or flight. And ‘fight’ might as well be renamed to ‘instant suicide’. What she hadn’t accounted for in her brilliant scheme for survival was a long, thick appendage to strike against her whole body when she veered from its crouched legs. The collision sent her flying backwards, all of the air being knocked from her lungs and leaving her breathless. In that moment, her shock overtook her brain in a daze, making her forget she was currently being flung off by some type of crime against nature in favor of noting a few new observations.
A tail…it had a freaking tail, one that tapered off like a reptile.
The texture under her hands was smooth but with a slight give, like velvet. Was this what covered the rest of the creature’s exterior?
It had arms like a human – hands and elbows and shoulders that connected to a torso. But its limbs from the waist down were wrong. Its legs looked to bend at an extra angel, each length of bone too long to match human proportions. It was more akin to the hindleg of a dog, which made it easier to move while crouched.
Human, reptile, dog. What the hell kind of amalgamation was its physique, and how was such a fusion pos–
Her back crashed into the side of a shelving unit with a thud, snapping away her ponderings that only existed for the four seconds she was airborne. She felt her teeth crack together when her head hit a metal crossbeam while the taste of blood filled her mouth from an unknown source. Some sort of choked grunt escaped her lips on impact, but when she crumpled to the floor she could hardly muster a wheeze. No matter how desperately she tried to suck in air, her lungs refused to work, worsening the burn of suffocation in her throat. Stars blotted around the edge of her vision and what she could see kept splitting into blurry doubles. Blinking only made it worse.
It was a good thing she was curled on her stomach as she turned her head and retched. Hardly anything but yellow bile and spit was thrown up, the spasming of her diaphragm making her ribs stab with agony. She made the most miserable sound of pain that could be forced out of her. Everything hurt so fucking much. Her head was swimming, her legs throbbed from exertion, her back ached with the onset of a wicked bruise darkening the skin from her shoulders to her tailbone. Breathing was like inhaling glass. Crying was like setting a firecracker off behind her eyes. In the back of her mind, some basic health class she had taken as an elective course unhelpfully reminded her that pain was good. It meant nothing was numb from blood loss or nerve damage or just completely ripped from her body. It meant she was alive.
She wasn’t so sure she wanted to be alive right now.
How much pain did Ted endure before he succumbed to his wounds? Had it been quick, or was this merely a fraction of the torture he was put through. This alone was pushing Serena past her limits of what she thought she could handle. There was no way she’d be able to stomach anything more brutal than a flick of the monster’s tail.
She coughed wetly once her lungs had regained the function to breathe, even if it was only shallow gasps. Through her fringe of curls that had fallen over her face, she dared to look at the creature. It looked right back at her. With shame, she could only imagine how downright pitiful she looked from its point of view. Her hair was mussed, her cheeks were wet with tears and runny mascara, blood was smeared from a busted lip onto her chin when she wiped away the dribbles of vomit from her mouth. She was half curled in a fetal position while every inch of her trembled in various amounts of pain. By all accounts, she had clearly conceded to being captured by a predator.
And if the monster was pleased by that, Serena had no way of knowing, because all she had to go off of were unblinking eyes that stared at her with unbridled fascination. Was it impressed by her will to live, or was it simply salivating after working up an appetite?
“Wh-what…” she rasped. “Wh-what do you want…f-from me…?”
That got the creature’s attention. Really, its attention had always been locked solely on her, but her attempt to provoke a conversation had garnered a quick reaction. It crooned, a stark contrast to the growl it had made when she sprayed extinguisher foam in its face. She couldn’t tell if it was trying to mimic comfort or condescension, either way the low rumble made her break out into goosebumps. It inched closer in that same slow, deliberate way it had tried in the storage room, its body low to the floor as if there was any chance of them being on the same non-threatening eye level.
“What are you doing?” she asked with a tremble in her voice. “What do you want?”
It didn’t answer. It might not even understand. The only response it offered was another, quieter croon when its face was less than a foot from her. To her absolute horror, the creature parted its lips enough for slivers of white to show, only for those, too, to open further and a long, black tongue to slither out.
She paled, eyes wide in terror. “N-no…no, no, please, god, no!”
Her cries for mercy fell on deaf ears as the creature leaned down.
“No, no, don’t, please, I don’t want, ple - AH! NO!”
Warmth spread along her back and dripped down her collarbone. Thicker than water, thicker than blood; she felt like glue was being poured along the length of her spine and allowed to leak in the crooks of her arm and neck. The weight of the creature’s tongue squished against her thighs and stroked up to her hair, drenching her more with each pass. A shiver of disgust ran through her bones at the sensation of saliva slicking her curls to the nape of her neck. She cried out to make her extreme displeasure known, trying to turn her head enough that spit wouldn’t dribble down her face, but it was of little consequence to the monster.
In fact, the continuous reverb that echoed in its chest indicated it was quite pleased with this development. It must enjoy the taste of sweat and misery because she couldn’t imagine she had anything else to offer its palette. If it weren’t for the fact she was being licked by a ravenous monster that had already shredded one person and had her next on the menu, the soft pressure and heat trailing over her would have felt wonderful for her aching muscles. Instead, it only made her tense and squirm, putting more strain on her body that begged for a moment to recover. When she managed to wriggle half a foot away, the creature paused its lapping to grab hold of her soaked blouse with its teeth and drag her back to her original spot.
The feeling of teeth pressing into her lower back, only for a second, was enough to kick start her adrenal gland into high gear once more. She could already envision them clamping down through her flesh for the first bite now that it had had its fill of savoring her. A phantom pain blossomed along her shoulder blade from the imagery of meat being scraped from the bone. No, no, no, she didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to go out like that. In the short distance she had dragged herself on her arms, she threw out a hand and grabbed hold of a jagged two by four that split from a pallet when it shattered thirty feet below. Splinters from the raw wood dug into her fingers, but the sting was ignored as she pulled it close to her chest.
Endorphins dulled the pain radiating through her enough that she felt a renewed surge of strength tingle in her muscles. Not wanting to give the creature a chance to resume its tasting, Serena twisted around and swung the wooden shard like a bat. Its mouth was still hovered over her in the transition of nipping and licking, taking the full whack to its lips and teeth. Even if the hit didn’t do too much damage, the slivers of rough wood would surely stab into its gums as little splinters it would have to claw out. The board cracked against one of its fangs, causing it to bark at the unexpected pain shooting down its jaw.
Its head snapped to the side following the motion. The tongue that had been happily gliding over Serena now prodded at the tooth she hit, swiping around the gum to feel for swelling or bleeding. She would have loved to relish in her minor victory of causing any miniscule amount of discomfort to a monster she thought was indomitable, but that celebration would have to hold off. As soon as its attention was diverted by the shock of being struck, she rolled out from under its looming form and clambered onto her feet in a mad dash for the office doors. It growled sharply at her retreating figure once it saw where she had fled, though that didn’t stop her from disappearing into the main building and smashing the automatic lock button on the keypad.
Would a flimsy internal mechanism keep out a forty-some foot tall being from clawing through a single door? No. Especially not if it really didn’t need to use human entrances to go from one room to another. Still, it provided a tiny bit of security that her mind needed to cling to to stay sane a little while longer. She turned to make a break for it down the hall, only to slam her knees on the edge of a copy machine from the customer service department.
The furniture had been moved again, pulled from walls and offices to create a maze of obstacles that couldn’t be solved with a straight line.
When the hell had it managed this!? It was clearly a set up meant to delay her escape long enough that the monster could catch up to her. Which meant last night, when it had done the same thing, it had been pursuing her all the way out the front door without her even knowing. Well, no, she knew something was lurking around, but the new knowledge that it could have sprung on her at any given time and chose not to made her chest seize. Unlike then, however, the current total blackout was interrupted by a flashing fire alarm that lit up the hallway in timed bursts to guide her through. She bobbed and weaved between desks and machinery, vaulted over toppled chairs and sidestepped waste bins and boxes that tried to snag her foot.
Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the screech of metal followed by a cacophony of crashes muffled only by the siren still ringing throughout the building. Wherever the monster had manifested itself, it was soon to be closing in on its target as it barreled through the traps it laid for her. She knew there wouldn’t be enough time for her to make it to the main entry. It was bigger than her, faster, and as soon as it whipped around the corner and had her in its unsettling sight it would be game over. Her only hope was to hide and pray it couldn’t scent track. If she could just hold out long enough, maybe the fire department would be here soon to respond to the pulled alarm. And then, while the firefighters tried to keep the creature at bay with the water spray of their hose before being mauled, she might have a long enough diversion to slip out a back door.
Where the fuck was the fire department?
Up ahead, the open door to the finance office inspired a new idea in her rattled brain. Her phone line was still active, the caller didn’t hang up until after the power was cut. If she could find somewhere to stay out of view with the phone, she could call for a myriad of help. Police weren’t good for much, but they knew how to pack an artillery when the chance arose to use it.
Serena shut the door behind her and rushed to her desk, grabbing the phone, receiver and all, and tucked herself under a neighboring cubicle. This might be Janice’s desk. Or was it Jessica? It didn’t matter, it was going to serve as her impromptu shelter during a deadly game of hide and seek. She balled up her fist and bit her finger until she could even out her breathing into something less hysterical. As urgent as she wanted her call to come across, it still needed to be quiet and coherent for the dispatcher. When she was able to swallow down the lump in her throat, she used the same teeth indented finger to dial 911.
Outside, a watercooler shattered. The monster was clearing a path down the hall.
–
[Phone Call Transcript]
[0:00:03] ABC Operative: 911, what’s your emergency?
[0:00:06] Boyd: Please, I, I-I need help! I’m trapped, I can’t get out, there’s, th-there’s, it’s in the building with me!
[0:00:13] ABC Operative: Yes ma’am, but I’m going to need you to remain calm so we can send help. What’s your location?
[0:00:21] Boyd: I’m at WerTech Productions, [RETACTED], n-near the entrance, please, just get someone here!
[0:00:28] ABC Operative: We have officers in route. You’re saying there’s an intruder on the property?
[0:00:35] Boyd: Yes, yes, it’s been here! It’s been after me for days and it’s, oh fuck, oh my god…
[0:00:42] ABC Operative: Ma’am –
[0:00:43] Boyd: It killed the security guard. T-Ted Milton. It ripped him apart!
[0:00:49] ABC Operative: Medical will be dispatched. The intruder has a weapon, then?
[0:00:54] Boyd: No! N-no, no, it is the weapon, it’s…it’s not human! I-I don’t, I don’t know what it is but, please, please, you need to send more people! I can’t, I –
[0:01:08] ABC Operative: Ma’am, I need you to calm down. You are aware that you’ve called 911, correct?
[0:01:17] Boyd: Wh- yes! Yes, I need help, I’m going to die!
[0:01:23] ABC Operative: Are you on any substances or prescribed medications that may cause hallucinations as a side effect?
[0:01:30] Boyd: No!
[0:01:32] ABC: Are you possibly suffering from extreme mental distress?
[0:01:38] Boyd: Of fucking course I am! Something is hunting me down and you’re not listening to me! I’m serious, there’s something out there, i-it killed Ted! Fucking send someone before it finds me!
[0:01:51] ABC Operative: Are you currently in a secure location?
[0:01:56] Boyd: I-I’m hiding in one of the offices, but I can hear it nearby. I, I don’t think it knows where I am…
[0:02:03] ABC Operative: That’s good, try to remain in place until officers arrive on the scene.
[0:02:10] ABC Operative: [Off Screen] Now?
[0:02:14] - The National Emergency Alert System Signal is remotely played through the phone line and out of Subject’s earpiece speaker at 120 dBA
[0:02:16] Boyd: What? What is that?
[0:02:20] Boyd: Wh-, s-stop, stop, turn that off! It’s too loud, it’s going to hear you!
[0:02:26] Boyd: Please, please, stop!
[0:02:31] Boyd: Stop, hang up! Fucking–
–
“- hang up!”
No matter how frantically she slammed the handset down on the switch hook, she couldn’t get the sound to stop blaring from the speaker. In her desperation, she was more so trying to break the phone against its own base to cut off the awful noise. It was just as loud as the fire siren, all the more easier to hear over the shrieking white noise that had been deafening her for too long. Her eardrums throbbed, worsening the pressure behind her eyes from the headache she hadn’t been able to shake yet. She grabbed at the cord that trailed back to the telephone jack by her desk and yanked as hard as she could with a petulant whine.
The cable went taunt, but didn’t pop from the socket it was clipped into. She couldn’t get the leverage she needed for a strong enough pull. In a last ditch effort, she threw the phone system across the room to at least get it the fuck away from her as to not be so close of a pinpoint to her exact location. It didn’t go too far as it was still tethered by the phone jacket and clattered in a heap near the metal cabinets against the wall, continuing to scream. Serena wanted –
[Note: Because Subject was unable to end the call on her end, ABC Operators are still able to hear and record the final interaction via the wiretap as well.]
–to scream, too. So, she did. She threaded her fingers through her hair that was still damp with saliva and dug her nails into her roots and sobbed.
“Shut up, shut up!” she cried at the phone. “Please, stop!”
She cut off her miserable wailing with a stifled whimper, clasping her hands over her mouth like she was holding back even a single exhale from escaping. Right outside the door, she heard the creature make a low, pleased chitter. It found her. Maybe it always would have found her eventually, but in this case she knew her fate had been sealed by a dispatcher with clumsy fingers. Regardless of how many officers and EMTs and firefighters were sent, they’d never make it in time to save her before the monster had its way with her. If anyone was sent at all for anything but a wellness check on a delusional woman. She squeezed her eyes shut, though tears still found a way down her cheeks.
No one was coming for her.
Between the alert blaring from the phone speaker and the fire alarm playing in surround sound, it was impossible for her to strain her hearing for the creature. It was loud when it wanted to be, as demonstrated by its vocals and disregard for office equipment that was in its way, yet it could be whisper quiet in the same breath when it was on the prowl. How many times had it trailed behind her when she was none the wiser? Always out of sight, but always within reach. She held her breath until her lungs burned, just in case a sniffle gave her away. Who knows what other unfair advantages the thing may have over her.
For a moment, there was nothing, only two alarms whooping in tandem in an empty office. In that period, Serena felt she was hyperware of everything but the monster. She could feel how her ruined blouse stuck to her back with spit that had significantly cooled, she could smell Ted’s blood that still flaked off the hands around her mouth, she could hear every swallow crackle in her ears while trying to silence any stray sob. Time stretched from seconds to minutes, just as when she had been thrown into the side of a rack.
Then time resumed when black fingers curled over the edge of the desk she took refuge under, its claws digging into the laminate material like butter. In a flick of the wrist, the desk was pulled up and tossed aside to hit the ceiling behind the creature, landing on the cubicles below in a flurry of paper and broken dividers. Serena shrieked, pitching back until her elbows caught her from fully hitting the floor. She hadn’t heard it come in or disturb any of the other desks to accommodate its size while it made its way to her hiding spot. How was it getting into places without a peep only to run through it like a tornado a moment later!?
“Get away from me!” She crawled backwards, her hand pawing for anything useful that might give her her third head start. “Please, please, leave me alone!”
Another sob tore from her throat when she was naturally forced into a staring contest with its eyes. Usually, they were wide like a child in wonderment, fully engrossed by Serena and wanting to commit every second to memory. Now, however, the lids were slightly narrowed down at her. Not entirely a glare, but enough to convey the feeling of irritation that was directed at her and her alone. This was the second time she’d thrown something of mild annoyance at its face and scurried off; the game was already getting stale if the creature wasn’t the one winning. But it was the winner because it always found her minutes after fleeing, it just didn’t like the fact she was the one resetting the chase instead of staying captured.
It stalked towards her with a low rumble. When it looked like she might try to get up, the monster darted forward to slam its hands on either side of her. The sudden lunge was enough to startle her flat on her back with a squeal, wincing when the tender spot on her head bumped against the floor. She tried to scramble and roll over on her side to get up, or at least get out of the way, but the creature was too fast for that from where it hovered overhead. It bared its fangs with a short growl and when that only heightened her struggles, it leaned down to snap its teeth an inch from her stomach. The fear of having a bite taken out of her abdomen paralyzed her. She laid immobilized, arms shielding her tear stricken face and legs trembling worse than a newborn fawn.
Seeing that she had finally ceased her fruitless fight, the next croon it made lacked the temper it had before, accompanied with a soft nip to her chest that inadvertently shredded the green ruffle along the placket. Better it be her shirt that was torn by teeth rather than the quivering skin underneath, she supposed. Still, that didn’t stop the strangled keen stuck in her throat. It added insult to injury by flicking the tip of its tongue from her neck up her cheek in misguided praise for her submission, coating the flushed skin with a sheen of salvia. She grit her teeth, shaking her head to signify her dismay.
“Let me go,” she tried to beg. “Please, I, I-I don’t know what you want. Just let me go.”
It chirped a reply, the vibration making her bones turn to jelly from such close contact. The creature buried its nose into the crook of her neck and purred, the tremors nearly making her body go numb. She cried out, wanting so badly to shimmy from underneath where it kept her pinned, but the mouth that was pressed into her abdomen as it nuzzled stilled any attempt of a struggle. One wrong twitch and it might take that as an invitation to carve out her intestines for not heeding its earlier warning.
Though she couldn’t move, Serena had little control over the mewls of terror it elicited from her. “S-stop, please, get off, get off,” her weepy pleas were dangerously close to becoming hysterical. “Don’t hurt me, please, god…”
The monster gave pause in its touching with a curious grumble, the purrs fading from its chest as it pulled back to look down on her. With some relief, its eyes no longer regarded her with annoyance for her behavior, though that didn’t mean it was any more of a comfort to stare into them head on. She shrunk in on herself, unable to gauge its change in mood. Had she offended it with her babbling? Was it done playing with its food now that she had been properly put in her place? Was it being intentionally cruel in the way it tormented her, or was it simply natural behavior in the way a cat toys with an injured mouse for fun?
A hand lifted from its perch beside her and extended a single finger. With bated breath, she did her absolute damnedest to stay where she was lest she tick the monster off for a third, and likely final, time. She winced at the feeling of its claw brushing her tangled fringe out of her face, the tip nicking her temple and drawing a stinging bead of blood. That didn’t dissuade its tracing from her jawline down to her neck, slowing its descent for a moment to admire the way her throat bobbed with a nervous gulp, so close to being slit wide open if it wasn’t more mindful with its claws. The pad of its finger rubbed against her collarbone and continued down to the curve of her chest before stopping.
Even at their difference in size, Serena knew it had to be able to feel how her heart was hammering under the sternum it was prodding. With a grumbling hum, it pushed down a fraction, earning a squealing gasp from the poor girl like a squeaky toy. Thankfully, the creature didn’t try to poke any harder or she thought its finger might penetrate straight through to her spine.
Satisfied with…whatever it was hoping to accomplish, it let its finger slide off of her and sat further back on its haunches to observe its prey. It stared at her. She stared at it. It tilted its head with a croon and she nervously darted her eyes around the office for something. Its tail languidly thumped against a cubicle partition. Her chest started to heave with short, quick breaths of unbridled panic. It did nothing. She snapped.
Damn it all to hell.
The overwhelming urge to survive until her last gasp was ripped from her lungs refused to let her lay there until the creature made the first move to slaughter it at its leisure. Miserable as it was, the reality of her situation was that Serena could either die now, or she could die later at an unknown time. Regardless, she wouldn’t be making it out of the front door alive. As much as she would have liked her demise to be relatively painless, the uncertainty of when her gory death was to occur was almost half the agony. Waiting for the brutal inevitable was far worse than getting it over with so she could be relieved of this nightmare sooner.
She knew it wouldn’t like her turning over and clambering on a rolling chair to heave herself up after it had just gotten her to yield. She really couldn’t give two fucks about what it thought, much less when already thought she was a catch that needed to be reprimanded before the end. If it was going to kill her, she may as well go out with the knowledge that at least she died swinging. Even if it was quite the unfair fight. It wouldn’t be the coward’s way out.
Of course, she would have liked it if the creature granted her a little more dignity to stand tall before it pounced. Her hands had barely found purchase on the armrests of the chair to help her sit up when it decided she was already moving too far away. A scream rivaling the decibels of the fire alarm made her throat burn, almost animalistic in the way it ripped from her diaphragm. Her body was encased in a damp warmth, pinpricks digging into her back and stomach that welled up with blood if she twisted too hard against them. A familiar tongue pressed to her arm and side, instantly coating half of her in a sticky wetness. One hand was able to flail and claw and grab hold of whatever she could for leverage, scratching across velvety skin. The other could only knock against hard pillars and spit-slick flesh, blinding pushing away the prodding muscle and smacking the roof of the humid cavern she was partly ensnared in.
This is it, Serena thought. Tears of pain and frustration clumped her lashes but refused to fall out of spite. Though her mind naturally screamed at her to struggle with all the strength she had to dislodge herself, the movements only caused her to be cut deeper by teeth. What did that matter, anyways? She had already been snatched up in the creature’s fucking mouth, held in place by fangs that only needed a nibble to tear into fat. One bite and she would be gone. A single chomp would sever forty percent of her body from itself. Assuming it wouldn’t just toss its head back and swallow her whole like a pelican. Assuming it wouldn’t take enjoyment chewing on every non vital part of her anatomy to prolong the experience and savor the adrenaline seasoned meat.
The creature didn’t clamp down. Despite her clumsy wiggling and grunts of pain caused by her own doing, it didn’t apply any additional pressure beyond what was needed to keep her securely in its mouth with minimal discomfort. She was almost waiting for it to violently throw her about like a dog with a rabbit’s neck locked its jaws, but what it did instead was far worse.
It shifted itself to be upright on its hands and hind feet and walked away from the debris field it made, Serena partially dangling from its mouth with no say in being carried off.
“What, wh-what are you doing!?” she called to it, only able to see the creature’s hands as it batted a few desks out of its way towards the door. “Put me down! Let go, put me down! Stop!”
One second, they were approaching the office wall directly facing the hallway, its door comically small for the monster to try and squeeze through. The world around Serena flashed from red, to black, to red, as the fire alarm tirelessly called for emergency. In the next moment, just when everything had disappeared into the blackout, her surroundings showed to now be the main hallway washed in red light. The creature continued down the hall without breaking stride, returning in the direction of Warehouse A with Serena held fast. She couldn’t begin to comprehend the transition that led her outside of the office in the blink of an eye without a wall being knocked down. Whatever the monster had done, it made her feel lightheaded, like she had just stepped off a whirlwind ride at the fair after having been on it seventeen times in a row.
Everything was so dizzying and spacey all of a sudden. Her limbs drooped from where they had tried to shove against the creature’s mouth, her head lolling with a whimper of confusion. Was that how it was able to seamlessly travel between rooms – through some usage of the dark? No wonder it unsettled her so much recently; she was potentially surrounded by an open door any time the lights were shut off. The travel between shadows was not made for human bodies to fare well in.
“Please…stop…”
[Note: While following Abnormality down Hallway 3 and Hallway 5, CCTV cameras lost contact and cut off shortly after. Power was not restored until 4:37 A.M.]
–
END OF THIRD NIGHT
–
Picture Left [ID - CCTV still frame of Boyd in Abnormality’s mouth.]
Though not captured on footage or phone call, Boyd is presumed to have been killed by Abnormality for the end of its hunt.
ABC cleanup services were deployed to WerTech Production Headquarters the following morning to dispose of evidence:
The body of Ted Milton was collected and destroyed
Ted Milton’s and Serena Boyd’s cars were removed and shredded
Hidden cameras and bugs were removed
CCTV footage was wiped back until 7:30 P.M. the following night
An electrical fire was staged to have effected - Storage One, Finance Office Two, Warehouse A, & Hallway 5
Note: Boyd’s remains were not recovered during this sweep. It is believed she may have been killed off property.
Surveillance of the building permitted to continue through WerTech’s internal security systems until Abnormality is located and returned to ABC’s facility.
–
AB299 Behavioral Theories - Updated
Previous theories for Abnormality’s change in behavior have been revised in light of the events pertaining to the third day of observation.
Savor Theory - Due to the prolonged nature of its hunt, it is likely Abnormality was taking pleasure rather than acting solely on hunger. This theory is to be refined and added to Intelligence Capability file.
Courtship Theory - While some behaviors may be similar to socialization displayed in the animal kingdom, it must be kept in mind Abnormality is not part of that. This theory has been scrapped.
Enrichment Theory - Because Abnormality has confirmed to have killed at least one person, it can be concluded this was an active hunt. This theory has been scrapped in favor of ‘Savor Theory’.
–
Sixth Day
[Two (2) days since Abnormality last spotted]
–
MORNING OVERVIEW
No activity has been noted at WerTech Production Headquarters over the weekend aside from authorized clean up by ABC personnel. Business proceeded as usual for scheduled operating hours.
Artificial rumors were circulated through employees to cover up remaining evidence of Abnormality and Boyd’s interactions:
Areas staged with electrical fire damage were tarped off for repair; displaced employees were placed in temporary offices
An email was sent from Ted Milton’s address to announce his immediate resignation; no questions were asked
An email was sent from Serena Boyd’s address to confirm her hours were approved for graduation; she was not expected to return
Abnormality has not been found on property or around the local area at this time. While it is unusual for it to return to the same location after a successful hunt, the possibility cannot be ruled out due to behavioral changes.
–
Picture Left [ID - CCTV still frame of Boyd exiting custodial closet in Hallway 1. She is surrounded by three (3) employees who offer assistance.]
SERENA BOYD’S RETURN
Unexpectedly, Boyd reappeared at WerTech Production Headquarters at 5:49 P.M. in which she enters from a closet. There is no archived footage showing her entering or exiting the closet prior to this reveal. It is unknown if she had been in there since Abnormality’s disappearance.
Seven (7) WerTech employees were in the building when Boyd stumbled into the hallway and collapsed. An intercepted call to 911 was made by an employee that was answered by ABC’s mock service.
Three (3) ABC personnel with Level 4 clearance were dispatched to the scene as two (2) officers and a paramedic.
Witnesses stated that Boyd appeared out of nowhere and was extremely unfocused. They were unable to get her to speak or walk without support.
Note: All employees were required to wait in the break room under the supervision of an ABC agent until Boyd was assessed.
–
Medical Assessment: Serena Boyd
Clouded eyes; unable to follow penlight movement
Vision improvements thirty minutes after recovery
No reaction to auditory stimuli; delayed nerve reaction to physical stimuli
Motor improvements forty-two minutes after recovery
Slurred speech; unable to support head when sitting up and continually slouching to the side
Balance improvements thirty-six minutes after recovery
Speech improvements twenty minutes after recovery
Full body tremors
Low body temperature - 95.8 F
Temperature increased to 99.3 F fifteen minutes after recovery
Ashened complex
Gaps in short term memory
Bruising along abdomen and mid back; scabbed lacerations on posterior and anterior
Dizziness; nausea
No signs of sleep deprivation or malnutrition despite having been missing for sixty-six hours
–
Picture Left [ID - CCTV still frame of Boyd and two (2) ABC personnel seated at a table in a manager's office. She is slouched in a chair with a shock blanket draped over her.]
The Interview Incident
ABC personnel privately interviewed Boyd on her experience when she was coherent enough to participate over an hour later. It is not believed she suspects them of being undercover operatives.
During the interview, Abnormality has returned to the property.
–
Her eyes remained glued to the glass of water she had been offered earlier at the medic’s insistence for hydration, transfixed on the droplets of condensation that slid down the sides into a growing puddle at the base. That would leave a ring stain on the desk’s finish; she should get a coaster. She should also probably drink the water that was almost room temperature by now, but she didn’t want it. She wasn’t thirsty, just a slight headache, and she worried the shake of her fingers might cause the glass to slip and spill should she try to hold it.
“-to an extremely traumatic event,” the officer continued. His words faded in and out of her ears in little fragmented sentences. They’d been talking to her for a length of time but made little progress in cracking her case. She couldn’t even remember their names. “I know it might be hard, but we need you to try to remember anything about what happened.”
“What happ’nd?” she repeated, her tongue feeling heavy in her mouth. It sounded more like Serena was the one asking them for clarification about what took place rather than the other way around.
He nodded at her patiently. “You’ve been missing for two days, Ms. Boyd. Can you tell us what happened the night you disappeared?”
“Two…days?” Her brow scrunched in confusion. Days didn’t sound right. If it had been days, she would be hungry and grimey, wouldn’t she? The only thing she felt now was exhaustion in the way that everything ached and nothing worked as a remedy.
“Did it not feel like days to you?” He asked.
She shook her head and immediately regretted the action with a wince.
“How long do you think you were gone for?”
“Gone? Where…where’d I go?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” the medic said with a sympathetic smile. Weird that she was also present for a police interview, but maybe it was in case Serena collapsed face first on the desk.
The officer pushed a tape player across the desk so that it could be in the middle of them. “Let’s start from the beginning, try and jog your memory a bit.” He pressed the red play button, her own voice playing from the staticky speakers in clear distress with a 911 dispatcher. “Do you remember making this call?”
Immediately, she curled in on herself and whimpered. Her shaking worsened, breathing quickening to shallow pants as she listened to herself beg for someone to help her from a gigantic monster prowling in the halls.
“It killed the security guard. T-Ted Milton. It ripped him apart!” her past self sobbed.
Ted. Oh god, Ted. Gone and bloody and broken and pulverized and shredded and dead dead dead dead –
In an act of mercy, the medic reached over to stop the tape. “Deep breaths, Serena, or your blood pressure might crash again.”
She gulped, screwing up her face in a bid not to cry as the memory of Ted’s eviscerated corpse washed over her before fading into obscurity, safely repressed once more. “N…no one came…”
“We did,” he said softly. “but you were already gone when we arrived on the scene.”
“Can you tell us about what you were running from? What you think killed your friend?” the medic encouraged.
The monster. The void that had shaped itself into an unnatural form with fangs and claws and horrible, horrible eyes. Bent legs and a tail, a face too human for comfort, throaty grumbles and a slick tongue. Any time she closed her eyes, glanced at a shadow, she swore she could see it lurking somewhere in the depths of darkness. Inescapable.
“I don’t…I dunno,” she squeezed out.
“You do know,” the officer said. It wasn’t accusatory, but it was firm, like a teacher wanting a student to solve a problem on their own. “It’s somewhere in there, but you have to work with us so we can get it out.”
She buried her face in her hands and groaned. “‘m trying…”
“I know, and we need you to try a little harder. What were you running from, Ms. Boyd?”
Her hands dropped to her lap in exasperation, already feeling dizzy again with this constant runaround of being asked the same questions with the same answers. The things she did know didn’t make sense, and the things she didn’t know refused to come out of hiding in the recesses of her trauma. Was it that she didn’t want to relive those memories, or were they, in fact, moments in time she was beyond comprehending?
“Wh’does it matter, you won’t believe me,” she snapped. “No one believed me. You’ll jus’ think I’m crazy, or, or, tell me I’m having an episode and that I…”
She cut off her own thoughts with a sickening realization. Of course these two wouldn’t believe her story about a monster in the dark, just as no one took her seriously about her growing anxiety prior or when she tried to call for help. Outside of her own head, she could recognize how absurd the claim was and how it would hardly stand as evidence about the real culprit of Ted’s slaying. They were trying to evaluate how much of the monster was truly all within her head as a manifestation of stress, looking for the trigger that may have caused a psychotic breakdown that resulted in her brutalizing her coworker before fleeing the scene in a daze.
“You…you think I did it, don’t you? Y-you think I killed Ted, a-and, and I’m making this all up.”
“Serena, no,” the medic reached her hand across the desk again to place it over Serena’s trembling one. She gave her fingers a warm squeeze. “I think we’re the only ones who do believe you. And you know what else I think? I really think you saw something that night that shouldn’t exist, and I think it had something to do with your disappearance.”
The kind reassurance that she wasn’t being interrogated as a delusional murder suspect made her want to cry. Not that she did have any hand in Ted’s death, to her knowledge. She bit her lip, pulling the shock blanket tighter around her shoulders to conceal the way she shook in the chair. Was it too late to ask for a lawyer? She hadn’t been read any Miranda rights yet, had she? There was a vague recollection of the officer telling her that she wasn’t in trouble, this was simply to gather what information they could to help her, not convict her.
The medic rubbed her thumb on the back of Serena’s hand, looking at her with those kind, green eyes. “Where did you go, Serena?”
She couldn’t help the sob that slipped out, stifling the rest of it with a sniffle. “I..I don’t…I don’t know…”
Before either of the responders could start again with their circular questions, she pushed on to wring what she could from her muddled mind. “I dunno what it was. It…I try…it’s so fuzzy in my head when I think about it. And, and I don’t know if maybe…that has something to do with it. Like…like it’s…” she grit her teeth at the pounding behind her eyes. “It gives me a headache.”
“What was it like? Can you tell us anything about how it looked?” The officer asked.
She swallowed. “No, everything in my mind is just…dark. And when I think I remember something it…there’s…I can’t describe it. I see it but I just, I can’t, it’s not…it’s like I’m trying to make something that isn’t real.”
The medic nodded at her with some type of understanding. “You were somewhere your psyche couldn’t handle.”
“Hm…?”
“It’s like…for us, we can see things in two- and three-dimensions. That’s normal, we can process those things. But when we try to picture something in a fourth- or fifth-dimension, it’s impossible,” she explained. “But those planes of existence are still out there, allegedly.”
She blinked slowly at the other woman. “You think I…slipped between dimensions?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” she said.
Her eyes looked between the officer and the medic, almost like she had fallen back into her half comatose state. “That’s…”
“I know,” the officer sighed. “But so is being chased around by a shadow monster, Ms. Boyd.”
“I’m not lying about that!”
“I know,” he repeated. “So we can’t rule out anything that happened to you afterwards yet. Not until you can tell us exactly what occurred.”
“I…I told you, I can’t remember,” she winced again at the sharp stab in her skull, pressing the heel of her hand against her temple to alleviate the pain. “I was here and then I wasn’t and there were…it was dark but there were these, like, just…”
“These what?”
“...colors. Things were in colors but…colors I’ve never seen before, ever. And I try to look at ‘em but I can’t see them, but it was so…blinding, I think, I don’t know. It hurt my eyes.”
The medic rested her chin on her propped up fist. “That must be why your memories are blacked out. You’re trying to remember them in color shades that don’t exist, so you can’t picture anything.”
That made a fair bit of sense if Serena was to believe she had really been kidnapped to an alternate dimension by a shadow hopping creature for one reason or another. Just thinking that made her want to check herself into the looney bin for an extended vacation, apparently with the two responders as well who were only feeding into her hysteria.
“Let’s talk a little more about your attacker,” the officer redirected. “Do you remember your encounters with it before you went missing?”
It was hard to think about, but she nodded.
“Do you remember what it looked like? How it acted?”
She nodded again.
“Tell us what you can about it.”
The shock blanket crinkled as she dug her fingers into the outside material, a sense of dread washing over her immediately from just having to relive being in its presence. “Big. It had fangs and claws and it…it was like this demon-man-dog thing, I don’t know. And, and it was all black with yellow and red eyes, but, but you could only see the eyes.” She gave a shuddering sigh. “It…hurt me a little, but…but nothing like it did to Ted. I don’t, I don’t think it was trying to…”
“How often was it with you in the two days you were gone?”
“Not…I don’t think all the time. I felt like I was running nowhere a lot, but, but not for two days.”
The medic hummed. “Did it feel longer or shorter?”
“Both. Like, like when you’re having a nightmare.”
“And how did you get out of your nightmare?” she asked.
Their impossible, neverending questions were starting to make Serena feel faint again. Her migraine was worsening with each instance she needed to recall from a reality that didn’t exist. She felt like she was going to throw up if the stress caused her stomach to tie itself into one more knot in her jumbled guts. No amount of deep breathing could slow the beat of her heart that banged furiously within her ribcage, further aggravating the purple bruises that mottled her skin. There was a right answer for everything the responders asked, so tantalizingly close in her mind, yet stubbornly guarded by an annoying little disorder called PTSD that refused to let her open Pandora’s box.
What was the worst that could happen; she goes completely mad like the protagonist of a Lovecraft novel who tried to understand a concept outside of human knowledge? Hey, if she became a raving lunatic, at least they’d be able to string together better answers from her ramblings than her repeatedly mumbled ‘I don’t know’s.
“I just…did,” she said with a strain in her voice. “I couldn’t see where I was going and…and I ran into something. And I felt around, and I found the knob and…I was here.”
She slumped deeper in the chair, avoiding either of the responder’s gaze so as to hide the tears burning in her eyes. “I don’t wanna be here. I, I don’t want to go back there anymore. I wanna go home…”
To her credit, the medic looked extremely consoling to Serena’s plight, but the tight smile she offered was that classic you’re-not-going-to-like-this-but-we-need-to-do-it-anyways look all medical professions gave their patients who felt the remedy was worse than their sickness. “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.”
“Why not?” she whined, like a goddamn child.
“Your condition needs to be monitored. Even under normal circumstances, you’re still in shock. It wouldn’t be safe to leave you alone,” she explained. “But we can make sure you have the treatment if you’d be willing to be admitted to a private hospital.”
She paled. “A psych ward?”
“No, Ms. Boyd, it’s not a state sponsored institution,” the officer said. “It’s a very respectable facility that has numerous therapies to help. Therapies that can pull those memories out and help with the pain.”
“You do think I’m crazy.”
“We think you need help processing your trauma, not because we think you’re imagining it.”
“It’s to keep an eye on your physical well-being, too,” the medic added. “You were in a pretty rough state a couple hours ago.”
The officer nodded once. “ABC can take good care of you. We can take you to their facility for an overnight stay, just to ease your mind, and have you discharged in the morning.”
“Well…provided you pass the examinations, of course. We can’t have you discharged if you’re still in clear medical distress, but after those though, yes.”
Something niggled in the back of Serena’s mind, almost missed by the severity of the headache that was making her brain throb. It was a tiny little prickle; the same feeling that made her spine tingle and her hands clench, the same feeling she had felt when walking through dark spots in the building less than a week before. Intuition. The sense of dread that something was very, very wrong even if anything had yet to happen. It had been right so far, despite hindsight reminding her that she hadn't taken the warnings as seriously as she should have.
don’t go don’t go don’t go don’t trust don’t go don’t go don’t trust don’t trust don’t go
But why not? They were the only ones who believed a word she said. A few internet forums might also believe her wild claims about giant monsters and worlds beyond their own, but these were two people that were legit. An officer of the law, sworn to serve and protect, and a medical technician dedicated to save lives – who better to guarantee her protection? In fact, these were the last two people she would have ever thought would agree that not only that she had been stalked and kidnapped by an otherworldly being, but that her coworker had been slaughtered by it as well with no suspicion pointing to her at all. Cops and EMTs were always the one having to talk down the crazed druggies going on about how they had to kill their spouse to prevent an alien apocalypse, after all.
Even if it was odd that the offices at WerTech were still open despite being what should be an active crime scene. Even if the officer didn’t wear a name badge. Even if the medic was present and asking questions unrelated to her health. Even if neither of them were taking notes the entire interview with no camera or voice recorder in sight besides the tape player containing her paused 911 call. Even if they cared more about where she disappeared to rather than what took place prior that resulted in a man’s death, as if they had already figured that part out without her input. Even if she had never heard of a place called ABC that specialized in hospice.
If her brain hadn’t been so clouded with such a thick fog, she may have picked up on these inconsistencies throughout the interview process. But the fact of the matter was that she was lucky if she could hold on to a thought for longer than a second before it disappeared into static. Her past was a blur and her present was already getting fuzzy at the edges in real time. All she could rely on was that instinctive pull that was trying to steer her away from a threat she couldn’t understand. The last time, that threat had been a rampaging creature. It was most certainly in her best interest to listen again, despite the desire to be around the experts of her situation.
“I don’t think…my insurance would cover that,” she said as a pitiful excuse. “Can I–”
The lights flickered. Serena froze. They then went out for one, two, three seconds before blinking back to undisturbed brightness. The officer and medic glanced at each other in a way that told her they were thinking the exact thing she was, though they were far more calm about it. However, the lights had never turned back on after an unexpected blackout before, and she was waiting for one of them to dash her worries by saying something about a shoddy generator or broken breaker box to explain the weak electricity. They didn’t.
“Call for C Team,” the medic ordered. Her partner nodded and, rather than using the radio clipped to his shoulder as Serena had seen most officers do, he pulled out some kind of sleek, flat device from his pocket.
“Requesting immediate dispatch; C Team to WerTech. AB299 possibly on premise,” he spoke into it.
A voice crackled from the other end. “C Team inbound. Status on subject?”
“Conscious and in custody.”
What the hell did that mean? Was she the subject? And what was C Team, and who the hell were any of these people!?
“What’s, wh-what’s going on?” she asked, only to be promptly ignored by both responders, whom she had a sneaking suspicion weren’t real responders at all. No, actually, they were technically responders, just not for any emergency service the general public could call.
The ‘medic’ hefted her black bag onto the desk and rummaged through the contents within. “Check with Jack that we have the building on lockdown and all seven witnesses accounted for. If any of them get out, it’ll be Atlanta all over again.”
“Don’t remind me,” he grimaced. He pressed another button on his strange walkie-talkie, presumably to switch the channel. “Jack, what’s your status?”
Staticky dead air responded. The ‘officer’ waited a beat before trying again. “Jack, are you there? What’s the status update?”
This time, the silence was broken in a series of snaps and sizzles of various volumes, occasionally cut in by what could only be described as electronic shrieking. Or was it real shrieking? It was too distorted to tell, but someone was clearly trying to signal back with little success.
“-ere-”
“Jack, you’re breaking up.”
“-abn – in buil – trapped – eed bac – need! –”
The speaker was blown out by white noise, then cut off entirely.
“Shit,” the ‘officer’ muttered, switching back to his other line. “AB299 confirmed on premise. Sounds like it just took out Jack.”
“C Team is seven minutes out,” the other voice said.
The ‘medic’ pulled out what looked to be something similar to a zip tie, made of a thick white material and with two loops at the bottom of the clasp instead of one. “Go check and make sure we have the location secured. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. They should have all been in the break room at the other end of he buildingl.”
“What about her?” he asked with a gesture to Serena, who seemed to have been forgotten during this exchange. She couldn’t even dignify that with a response, let alone think of anything that wasn’t ‘what the absolute fuck are you guys talking about?’.
“I’ll take care of her,” the ‘medic’ replied. Those ties in her hand were suddenly much more threatening with the looming promise to ‘take care of’ a girl who had seen more than she bargained for. “If AB299 gets a hold of her, it might try to take her back and we’ll have to start from scratch.”
“Who the hell are you people!?” Serena finally cried, slamming her hands on the desk as she forced herself to stand despite the black spots that made her head spin. Her outburst had almost no reaction on either of them, only regarding her with cool indifference.
The ‘medic’ jerked her head at her partner. “Take care of the witnesses while you’re at it.”
“Understood,” was all he said before leaving the office.
That just left Serena and the other impersonator alone in the enclosed room, one of the women being at a slightly higher advantage when it came to mental clarity and reflexes at the moment. Unfortunately for Serena, she was also the one with the weird zip ties that were either meant for her wrists or her throat. Both did not sound like very great options. The ‘medic’s eyes lost the warm hospitality that had lulled her in during the interview, replaced now with an icy professionalism that gave way she didn’t care one way or another if a supposed patient was lost on her watch. Especially if it involved seven of them being coworkers who were only trying to help.
“I’m sure you have a lot of questions, Serena,” she started, taking a step forward as Serena took a wobbly one back.
“Shut the fuck up,” she hissed. To that, the other woman blinked. “You’re…you have something to do with that thing, don’t you? You, you created, or something, or –”
“The only thing I am associated with is the Abnormality Breach & Containment organization. I have nothing to do with AB299’s attachment towards you,” she explained. Ah, so that’s what ABC meant. That cleared absolutely nothing up.
Serena pinched brows. “What’s AB299?”
“An abnormality. Something that’s not meant to exist, but does. That’s its classification serial number.”
Great. Still made fuckall sense.
“I know you’re confused. Honestly, we’re a little confused, too. AB299 has never acted this way before when it would break out to hunt,” She took another step closer. “We’re not sure yet if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
“What are you…talking about?”
The ‘medic’ huffed. “Come on, Serena. Whatever AB299 is, it’s a predator. And you, well, we thought you were prey at first. We never expected you to make it the three days that you did. We never expected you to show up when we thought for sure you were dead.”
She felt her heart hit the floor at such a casual reveal of information. The horror had to be clear on her face as she grappled with so many new layers added to what she was forced to experience for a voyeuristic secret service. Not only had they presumed her dead, not only had they never intervened to save her, but they had known the entire goddamn time she was being hunted and allowed it.
“You…y-you let it go after me.”
“It chose to go after you. We just didn’t stop it,” she clarified. Another step. Serena was backed into a corner. “We needed the research; you have to understand that observing its behavior is how we can learn to keep it better contained.”
“You were going to let me die.”
The other woman didn’t say anything, only leveling her with a heavy gaze. The sacrifice of one to save many, except it wasn’t just one that was passively offered as bait in the name of scientific discovery. How many others had died while ABC looked on and scribbled on their notepads? Was it enough to counter the lives they claimed to have saved as a result? By the sounds of it, AB299 was a routine jailbreaker, so they must not be making too many strides in their confinement regulations.
From her pocket, something beeped sharply. The ‘medic’ paused her advancement to fish for a similar device to what the ‘officer’ had, holding down one of the buttons on the side to answer the channel’s request.
“Building secure, AB299 is definitely around here somewhere, though.”
“What about Jack and the witnesses?”
There was a pause. “Break room’s a fucking bloodbath. Anything that’s left is minced meat. Doesn’t look like anyone made it past the exit sign…Jack included.”
“God damn it,” she growled. “AB299 probably blocked his call…”
“That’s just the job, Alesha. I’ll put in a request for a clean up crew and head back. C Team is four minutes out.”
“I know what the job is. Just, be careful, Adam. It’s in a frenzy and it left the lights on, it doesn’t care about being seen.”
“Understood.”
The radio silenced its sizzling overlay and the ‘medic’, Alesha, pocketed it with a sigh. Her lips were pressed into a tight line when she looked back at Serena, straightening her posture. “You’re not the only person who gets lost during research sometimes. Certain things need to be done, and someone is always going to be the bad guy.”
The conversation was still ringing in Serena’s ears, blocking out whatever moral bullshit Alesha was trying to justify. Bloodbath. Minced meat. That’s all that seven people were given the decency to be referred to after so graciously trying to make sure she was okay when she collapsed in front of them from a closet by calling what they thought was an emergency service number. Seven people who had families and friends and lives, who came to work today like any other, who tried to keep Serena conscious and comfortable until help came, who agreed to stay two hours past their shift at the request of faux police with little complaint under the guise it was in case she had a medical episode.
And these ABC people let them be fodder for a monster that was predicted to kill her before it deviated from that goal. No, not just that, ‘officer’ Adam had gone there with the exact purpose to get rid of them himself under Alesha’s orders. They might not have even seen anything at that point, had no idea what was going on, and would have died regardless for being a potential liability. Because they knew Serena was alive when she wasn’t supposed to be and had been found in a very odd way in a very odd state. Doomed by proxy out of the goodness of their hearts. All of them could have been spared had they been sent home after their own questioning wrapped up thirty minutes into her examination.
AB299 wasn’t the only predator in this building with her.
“Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be,” Alesha said, holding up the ties. “We’re going to get you out of here and take you somewhere secured. You don’t have to be in any danger.”
“What, are you going to experiment on me, too?” Serena asked incredulously. “You just…you let all of those people die and now you want to dangle me in front of your monster until it, until it fucking does something? Is that it?”
“You cause some very…let’s say, interesting, reactions in AB299’s behavior. There’s something unique about you, Serena, something that might actually work to keep it contained.” Alesha’s tone was losing its evenness, becoming sharper with each argument Serena threw back at her to prolong the inevitable. She was quite good at keeping monsters at bay, it seemed. “Think about what this could mean. Do you know how many people you could save? We can figure this out toge–”
She was also quite good at tricking monsters with a sneak attack to the face.
The shock blanket was whipped from her shoulders like a magician’s cape and flung at Alesha, blinding her with silver material that tangled around her head and arms as she tried to push it away. While the blanket itself might not be a heavy hitter, Serena’s elbow sure was when she cracked it against the general area that the other woman’s face should have been underneath the fabric. She wasn’t sure what she hit, but it was hard, and it struck her funny bone with enough force to make her fingers go numb. More importantly, it sent Alesha stumbling backwards with a bloodied face and further wrapped up by the very shock blanket she had given to her earlier.
In a flash, she was out the door that Adam really should have locked. Alesha was definitely yelling something, or perhaps just cursing in pain, but her voice faded quickly by the time Serena had sprinted down the hall. It took a moment for her to get her bearings and realize where she was in the building. Somewhere on the west side, near the manufacturing end and distribution offices. It also didn’t help that her vision would swirl every few inhales, unable to keep up with the exertion she was trying to use. Her stomach clenched in pain from the ugly bruise on her abdomen that was aggravated by her heaving diaphragm, her head wasn’t faring much better with her migraine. She just wanted to curl up in a ball and suffer in peace until she felt human again.
That wasn’t an option right now. Somehow, some way, she had been handed an open can of worms and promptly spilled the whole damn thing on herself. What kind of person finds themself mixed up in a world of mystery agents and reality shifting creatures and lives to tell the tale? Maybe lives, she hadn’t made it out of here yet. It wasn’t like she asked to be stalked by a monster who liked to escape ‘secret jail’, much less turn into some sort of special interest for it, which in turn made her a special interest to a lot of other people she had no desire to associate with.
If she was going to be thrown into the plot of a summer blockbuster, why couldn’t it have been a cheesy romcom instead of an epic sci fi horror? If that was the case, then she’s said it before and she’ll say it again: she wasn’t a token death, she was a motherfucking final girl.
There was the slight issue of running down a hallway of training rooms that Adam was also walking up. He seemed startled to see her and the feeling was mutual. As far as he was concerned, she was meant to be in the office with Alesha monitoring her, bound at the wrists, sitting pretty with the understanding that she was under ABC surveillance for the foreseeable future. Instead, she was none of those things. They both paused in their tracks to silently appraise each other in confusion, which gave enough time for Alesha to catch up a bit from behind.
“Adam, stop her!” she yelled.
That was all the command he needed to snap out of his confusion. He moved towards her, drawing his gun from his holster, probably the only real thing on his police uniform besides the fact it was an amoral douche wearing it. The gun was aimed at her with steady hands and even at the distance, she had no doubt he was a sharp shooter. But she was supposed to be so important to their scheme, wasn’t she? They wouldn’t gun her down, she’d be no use in their stupid mind games to domestic monstrosities then. If he shot her, it would certainly be in one of her limbs to slow her down without the problematic aspect of death. A bullet lodged in her humerus was not something she wanted to deal with on top of everything else that was beating the hell out of her.
She turned heel and ran back up the way she came, ducking into an intersection where some of the hallways converged to make a loop for the front entrance. The side doors required her keycard and, even if she still had it on her, it would have been deactivated this morning per the scheduled end of her internship. Her best bet would be the entry doors, regardless if they were locked up like Adam had declared. There were plenty of plant pots to hurl at the full length windows around them for a messy escape.
Adam had to be hot on her trail, but her dulled senses only allowed her to hyperfocus on her own body. How her heart sounded, how her legs burned, how her sight was tunnel visioned. One thing she did have going for her though was that she was more knowledgeable in the layout of this building than either of the two agents. They may have done their homework, maybe even gotten a full blueprints for WerTech to plan for some cool secret spy getaways, but none of them knew how to find a secret spot to hide for prolonged periods of time like an intern who was wasting thousands of dollars on a degree that wasn’t even being utilized at a job that barely paid.
There was an alcove where…something used to be some years ago, probably obsolete in this decade now. But within that alcove, there was a closet that couldn’t be seen from around the walls, hidden by the bulk of a drink machine that had been shoved into the open space. She had to grip onto the wall’s trim to help swing her into the nook, concealed from sight in the nick of time. Two pairs of shoes were jogging towards the intersection, Alesha telling Adam to check down this hallway while she went ahead to try and cut her off elsewhere, splitting the sound off to just his patrol boots stomping past her hiding spot.
She took a moment to collect herself. She knew if she slumped down, she wouldn’t have the strength to get back up in her exhausted, disoriented state. With a few deep inhales to fill her lungs, she pushed off the wall and dipped back into the hallway. New plan: retrace her steps back to where she started while the other two were trying to intersect her at the front of the building. And then…she…would come up with part two of that ploy when she got there.
Actually, no she wouldn’t. Because at the end of the hall where all of them had just come from was the creature. AB299, in all its glory.
What a stupid name, she caught herself thinking as if she wasn’t a hen in the foxhouse at the moment, is that supposed to mean there’s, like, two hundred and ninety-eight other monsters being stored at ABC? It didn’t roll off the tongue very nicely.
To see it under the glow of slightly yellow fluorescent lights was unsettling in a way she didn’t think was possible. In the void of darkness, it blended in as another seamless shadow, only identifiable by its eyes following the movements of its prey. In the full light, though, its shape was clearly defined in crisp lines, ruining the illusion of omnipotence. That didn’t overlook the fact that AB299 was still massive, still crouched on all fours to fit in the building, and still as terrifying as ever with its narrowed eyes and thumping tail.
She was grateful the deep coloring of black helped to hide the blood she was sure its mouth and claws were drenched in. Her heart wouldn’t be able to stand the sight otherwise.
“Son of a bitch…”
It grumbled something unhappy, probably asking why she had left the lovely little plane of unreality it had hidden her to have a mental overload in. Such the unseemly habit of running away from the creature she had. Serena could only stand there, knowing any move she made would send the monster barreling towards her before she could slip its grasp again. The gears were turning in her head for something, anything, but all she was rewarded with was smoke and a wicked throb between her temples.
On one end, she had an ‘abnormality’ with a strange fixation on her and a penchant for blood, of which hers may or may not be spilt next if she kept testing its patience. On the other end, she had two agents circling nearby, at least one of them with a gun. She wished she could say it was clear who was the lesser of two evils, but at least AB299 was acting on primal instincts as an excuse. Those two were just sociopaths with a warped hero complex.
…and really, if they got to play god over which lives were saved and which ones were bait, then why couldn’t she?
This was stupid. Really, really stupid. Suicidal, even, and definitely unethical enough to get her a first class seat to hell. Arguably, she was already in hell, so she couldn’t imagine anything worse than what she was prepared for. She raised her hands, trying to still the trembles enough that it didn’t look like she was erratically waving.
“H-hey…” she whispered, her throat suddenly dry and wishing she had drank that water on the desk when she had the chance.
AB299 responded with another growl, a little less irked, and tilted its head.
She gulped. Too late to back down now. “C…come here,” she gestured her open hands towards herself. “Come follow me.”
She took two steps back. The monster lunged.
Automatically, she stumbled a few more feet back with a frightened squeal. It took every ounce of her self control to plant her feet firmly on the ground to avoid the flight or fight instinct screaming at her to run. Her arms were raised again, as if she would physically be able to stop the creature that filled the space previously between them in two pounces.
“Stop, stop! Not chase!” she shrieked and by some miracle, AB299 heeded her cry before it closed in on the last five feet before her. “Not chase. Follow. Okay? Can you follow? Can you…do you know what I’m saying?”
It rumbled, eyes hooded in apprehension of what she was asking it to do, but at least no longer glaring. Taking that to be some kind of affirmation, Serena started to walk backwards again with her arms still up to signal the need for distance. Much to her surprise, despite the fact that was the intended goal, AB299 obediently crawled at what had to be an agonizingly slow pace in order to stay her requested distance as she walked. She had no idea how long she’d be able to keep this up for, hopefully long enough that she’d have a new exit strategy in mind should the creature grow bored of this game of Simon Says.
Alesha was right; it behaved strangely around her. If she had to guess, it was only listening to her now because it thrived under the positive reinforcement of her company. If it stayed and heeled as she asked, she wouldn’t go running off, and then there would be a mutual exchange where she also wouldn’t go running off the next time it spirited her away. Which was a term in their agreement she did not concur, by the way.
“Little more,” she said, just to ensure she still had its interest. It crooned softly. “That’s a good, uh…well, just…good.”
She could hear the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum drawing closer to her from the hallway’s left opening. Her bet was Adam, given that he would have been closer to rush back once he heard Serena making her commotion. She wondered if AB299 heard him approaching as well, if that was a prowess it possessed, or if it was simply too consumed with admiring her to pay it much mind. Her throat tightened at the thought of what she was orchestrating, knowing it was the only way out she’d make it out somewhat in one piece. Cruel violence didn’t solve cruel violence, but she tried to trick her conscious that this was merely karma in play. It’s not like she was directly ordering the creature to maim, she just…happened to lure it into a scenario that it would make that decision itself.
“You’re…you’re going to keep me safe, right?” she asked. It felt akin to a little girl asking her teddy bear for reassurance that it would chase away her bad dreams, except this teddy bear was one of the boogeymen from her closet. There was no telling what the creature ultimately wanted with her, whether it meant her harm in the long run or not. For the time being, she had to trust that its possessiveness equated to wanting her alive and mostly unscathed.
The consequences of baiting a monster with an unhealthy attachment could be dealt with at a later time that was more convenient, such as never.
Adam rounded the corner with his gun raised in preparation to threaten her into surrendering, if not to go ahead and take the shot to save everyone the trouble of her getting loose again. Really, if she had a quarter for every time she was being chased around WerTech by someone who was pissed she wouldn’t stop running away from an obligation she had no say in accepting, she’d have a worrying amount of quarters since that number should be zero for most people. She turned to see him realize his mistake too late. He froze, finger on the trigger but knowing it would be useless against the creature. AB299 snarled at the brandished weapon putting its prized prey in danger, practically making the hallway vibrate from its intensity.
Serena dropped to the floor as the creature sprung over her to slam itself on the new threat. The agent cried out, but he wasn’t able to form any words that would be his last, all of the air squeezed out of him when claws dug into his chest. There wasn’t time to waste in being awed and sickened by the ferocity AB299 was capable of. The aftermath of its maulings were horrific enough, she didn’t need a full viewing to learn how it was made. With the creature distracted and one ABC agent permanently handled, she scrambled back up before her legs turned to jelly and disappeared down the opening on the right. She could hear the crunch of bone, the wet splatter of meat striking a solid surface, the groans and gurgles of a dying man. She didn’t look back.
Following down this hall, she would be able to cut across the rotunda and loop back to the main hallway that offered a straight shot to the entrance. She begged her legs to push harder, ignoring how even at half-speed they were threatening to go numb if she forced them another step further. Who knew how long the creature would busy itself with devouring a man as an affectionate sign of protection. Once it had its fill in flinging the remains around, or perhaps noticed her missing first, the hunt would be back on. Would it be angered by the betrayal of her leaving after she tricked it into thinking they’d reached a mutual agreement? Would it think this was all part of the game and eager to continue? She’d rather not find out. She'd rather go home and sit in her shower for four and a half days.
On her way down the familiar hall, she made note of the few areas that were sealed away under blue tarps and yellow caution tape. Black scorch marks around the edges of the room indicated fire damage, but she already knew that wasn’t the case. The storage room, the finance office – these were areas she had the most interactions with AB299 last week, areas that had been torn up by said creature in its chase. Pyrotechnic powers didn’t sound accurate, which meant these fires had been intentionally started to hide any unexplained damage. To hide the fact that Serena was missing, taken alive but presumed dead. They covered up her death and made sure no one would ask questions to mourn her.
She hoped every last scumbag at ABC choked.
Being able to run down the main hallway without being impeded by scattered furniture felt like a luxury. She hadn’t realized what she took for granted in moving along a straight path during a life or death situation. Even though she was counting on this being the last time she would ever have to flee in this damn building. The only thing she needed to be mindful of was the bunches of tarp that poked a little ways out on the floor from where they draped over windows to block a room’s interior. Up ahead, she could see more fire burnings on the floor from where a flame had licked quite far from the doorway, though it didn’t like the room it trailed back to was sectioned off for remodeling.
That was because, as she got closer, it wasn’t scorch marks. It was blood, already darkening to a deep rusty color and smeared much like Ted’s had been when his corpse was dragged off. Except this streak only went a couple feet out before stopping with a single handprint showing that the person had been pulled back into the very room they were escaping. The break room, more precisely. The room her former coworkers had been corralled into and guarded by another fake officer named Jack to keep them from leaving, where they were trapped on all sides when AB299 came to attack.
She shouldn’t have looked, she knows she shouldn’t look, but her eyes followed the trail of red before she could stop herself in shock. Adam had been right when he said it was a bloodbath; the inside looked as if a blender full of meat had gone off without a lid. The floor, the walls, the ceiling – every square inch was covered in a thick splattering of viscera that still dripped into puddles below. The tables and chairs were overturned as the monster wrecked havoc and people tried to get out of its path with no success. There weren’t even any bodies in the sea of gore, not like how a good portion of Ted had been left. All she could see were bits of flesh, a few clumps of hair, a single finger or heel of a shoe that still had a partial foot inside.
There was virtually nothing left of these people, nothing but blood that mixed together and coated the room in bitter smelling scarlet. She had no idea which of her seven coworkers had been present to begin with, leaving her with no way of knowing who she should feel sorrow for. It was likely that no one else would know either as there was barely anything in the gore to identify one chunk of yellow fat from another. How long did the massacre last, how long did they have to watch each other be torn apart by a creature that only existed in nightmares, all because they happened to still be in the building when Serena magically appeared? She wasn’t sure what was making her more nauseous right now, the crime scene or the guilt.
Whether it was because she was disturbingly growing desensitized to copious amounts of carnage done in her wake or because her mind had already blocked the memory as a trauma response, her only reaction was to stumble back with a pained whimper. No tears were shed, not yet. She couldn’t afford to fall to her knees and wail in horror when she was so close to walking out the front doors. Or through a broken window, it didn’t matter to her. Then she could run and scream and sob to her heart’s content as she found a place to hunker down away from secret agents and giant monsters. She sniffled, clenching her first to her mouth in case she needed to bite down and muffle a cry, but the wave of anguish passed over her to be safely compartmentalized and never touched upon again if she had any say in it.
She’d only made it a few steps forward when a body ran into her back, nearly toppling both of them to the ground. Her surprise mixed with the lingering shock she was still experiencing, allowing her attacker to get the upper hand and wrap their arms around her to pin her to them. After a second, her brain caught up to her motor functions and ordered her to flail her limbs to break free of the hold, but it was too late. Something pinched the skin at the junction of her collar and shoulder, turning into a slight burning sensation as it plunged down into the muscle. She gasped, a warm feeling suddenly spreading through her veins that made her body involuntarily relax. Her arms dropped down from where she had tried to claw at the person’s face despite her protest, her legs finally making good on their threat to be as useful as rubber noodles.
Interestingly, her head finally cleared of throbbing colors that flashed in her vision and she sighed in relief. What an unexpectedly blissful feeling that was coursing through her, almost as if she took a double dose of muscle relaxers and then dove into a hot tub. But as wonderful as her body felt, her brain was screaming at her this was wrong, so wrong, loud enough that she could still hear its warnings through the fuzzy euphoria of no longer wanting to split her head open. She groaned out some kind of noise, her throat and tongue refusing to work together, not that she was too sure what she had actually been trying to say.
She lazily followed the forearm braced across her chest with her eyes and saw at the end that a fist was holding a syringe, the needle still stabbed into her skin and all of its contents already pumped into her. She’d been drugged; poisoned or sedated she didn’t know, but it wasn’t good either way. There was hardly any coordination left in her to slap her hands around or jerk her shoulders to dislodge whoever was keeping her in place.
“We could have done this the easy way, Serena,” a voice hissed in her ear. Alesha. That bitch.
“Fff…f’ck ‘ou…” she slurred.
“I told them we should have taken you in when we first got here, you wouldn’t have put up such a fight then,” Alesha continued, more so talking to herself as the girl in her arms couldn’t formulate the most coherent replies at the moment. “And speak of the devil…”
She turned to face down the hall, Serena forced to move with her, to look at the creature poised at the other end. It growled lowly, its back arched in preparation to charge, only held back by the fact its prey was entangled with each other. Instead, it stalked forward, claws digging into the floor as it did while its tail whipped back and forth in displeasure, striking the walls each time with a resounding crack of plaster. All the while, it snarled and glowered at Alesha in warning to release what it had claimed as its own, but she held firm. The closer it got, the more clearly Serena could see the body hanging from its bared fangs, if it could still even be called that. Once it deemed itself close enough, it flicked its eyes to Serena and dropped the remains, a sickening squish when they landed before her. She could make out half of an intact spinal cord, flesh and fat looking like it had been used as chewing gum, but what part of human anatomy that was meant to formerly be was anyone’s best guess.
Behind her, she could make out Alesha muttering something about Adam being a poor bastard. She desperately wanted to thrash and kick up as violent of a fuss as she could, anything to wriggle out of her arms and maybe throw another elbow in her face. If she could play up her antics, she might have been able to goad AB299 into attacking the other agent as soon as she slipped from her grasp, but there was no way she had the functionality to do that. She also just wanted to cry and have the fit of crisis she was damn well entitled to by now. It wasn’t fair. She didn’t want to be absconded by a man eating monster. She didn’t want to be taken away for studies and experimentations for the man eating monster.
But she’d lost. She hadn’t escaped in time, and now she wouldn’t be escaping at all. Whatever happened to her next was out of her control seeing that she couldn’t even lift her arm all the way up to smack against Alesha’s. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fucking fair! She’d worked so hard all her life to get to where she was today, busted her ass in school and at this stupid job, defied all the odds of survival against an unknown creature, and for what? For nothing. The life she built for herself was taken from her before she could even fully enjoy the fruits of her labor, all by someone else’s decision.
“I’ll be sure C Team grabs your gift for you,” Alesha said with disdain, crinkling her broken nose in disgust of what became of her colleague.
Serena felt herself be dragged backwards as Alesha took slow, deliberate steps towards the very entrance she’d been so close to reaching, the agent careful to readjust her grip and avoid showing her back to AB299. She mentioned that it was time for all of them to go, giving faux praise to the monster as it followed without attacking, promising that sweet little Serena would be coming with it so there was no need to get too hostile. Her words sounded muffled despite being held to the agent’s body, like she was talking underwater, which made sense since she herself felt like she was floating. She whimpered again, never taking her eyes off the creature that trailed after her like a puppy. Her pathetic noise made it croon.
The entry doors opened with the chattering and footfalls of a dozen people, but Serena was too focused on the feeling of cold air on her cheeks.
–
END OF SIXTH NIGHT
–
Conclusion
Both Abnormality and Boyd were successfully captured and returned to ABC for containment.
The scene of the breakroom rampage was altered and ascribed to Ted Milton, a disgruntled employee, who returned to commit a mass casualty in retaliation and took his own life afterwards.
Victims’ families were given a large insurance payout and fully covered funerals to avoid private autopsies
News of the event was not circulated into media outside of county newspapers
–
BEHAVIOR OBSERVATION RESULTS
The following information has been updated in AB299’s file:
Management Capability: Mid-Low
Intelligence Capability: High
Dimensional planes confirmed to be how Abnormality travels between spaces and possibly where it originated from.
Abnormality can only conjure these doorways in spaces of total darkness. If possible, it will trigger a blackout to achieve this.
Abnormality is not weakened by natural or artificial light.
As of now, Boyd is the only recorded human to have access to this space
Note: Electronic devices, such as cameras or recorders, do not work when taken between planes; researchers must find a way to observe inner reality
Per Boyd’s testimonial regarding the planes, it can be concluded that –
Time in nonlinear
Colors beyond human receptors are present
Humans possess the ability to open doors back into reality from Abnormality’s dimension [Ability to be reverse engineered in future testing]
The Courtship Theory has been reopened and is currently being revised in light of Boyd’s survival.
–
Picture Left [ID - Picture of Serena Boyd taken after her arrival and assessment at ABC facility. She has been allowed to groom and change her clothes. She is not smiling.]
Utilization of Serena Boyd
Abnormality continues to show fascination for Boyd without causing harm. As such, Boyd is required to be kept in good health and in frequent contact with Abnormality.
If Abnormality believes she is being observed too much by researchers, it will hide her in dimensional planes. Boyd is typically found within the facility two to four days later.
Boyd is to be interviewed immediately after being recovered and watched until her vitals are stable for best results of understanding Abnormality’s dimension.
Boyd is to go no longer than four days without interaction with Abnormality. Failure to do so may result in a facility breach. DO NOT ALLOW HER TO DECLINE, USE SEDATION IF NECESSARY.
Do not forcibly remove Boyd from Abnormality’s containment; Abnormality will attack.
Do not use physical violence with Boyd in Abnormality’s presence; Abnormality will attack.
Do not engage inappropriate contact with Boyd in Abnormality’s presence; Abnormality will attack.
Do not inform Boyd of Abnormality’s response behaviors to her distress, this may be used against ABC personnel.
Do not allow Boyd outside of Sector 17 to minimize risk of escape.
Abnormality has shown to continue breaching containment to hunt, however it is now returning on its own accord if Boyd is left in its containment cell.
- Additional funding may be required to discover how the usage of Boyd could prevent hunting breaches entirely
–
FINAL NOTES
Full experiment results and research can be found on archived tapes relating to AB299 and Boyd. Research between the two will continue until Abnormality’s potential has been unlocked for ABC control, or Boyd is killed.
Access and travel through dimensional planes is of top priority.
THE GENERAL PUBLIC IS NOT TO BE INFORMED OF THESE ONGOING INVESTIGATIONS AND FINDINGS. ANY THREAT TO ABC’S SECURITY IN OPERATIVE RESEARCH WILL BE DEALT WITH AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. THIS INCLUDES AIDING AND ABETTING THE DECAMP OF RESEARCH DETAINEES.
DO NOT ALLOW SERENA BOYD INTO POPULACE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
–
End of tape.
Please continue with CS# 1789-64 at supervisor’s instruction.
#g/t#giant/tiny#macro/micro#gianttiny#g/t ocs#size difference#g/t fluff#g/t angst#g/t scenario#g/t community#handheld#g/t fearplay#fearplay#whump#tiny whump#g/t whump#my writing#oc serena#oc ab299#SCP rip off#g/t writing#g/t story#this was like 4 days of backbreaking labor by which i mean my shoulders are very stiff from hunching over my keyboard owie#monsterboy#tiny whumpee#idk what other tags to use its been a hot minute#anyways what if i told you i only finished this so fast bc i wanted to draw art of them whoops#and also draw art for their sequel which has a lil dude and minigiant monstergirl (:#dont ask me when that story will be written okay let me not think of brainwords for a minute
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Finally finished my weird hanging painting thing (originally a secondhand partially-done 'paint by numbers' kit that I found at a thrift store and kept to repurpose lol)! Imagery somewhat based in my own worldbuilding projects, and text written in my constructed language for one of my fantasy species, but also vaguely inspired by old tapestries and illuminated manuscripts and etc. I've never been great at neat clean patterning or text, but it looks cool from afar, and I always enjoy making "props" or things that are somewhat like real objects that might could exist in my world. :0
(additional pictures/info under the readmore)
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Here's what it was originally! I probably didn't have to actually have a river running down the middle because it further makes the composition of the whole thing weird (various connected yet separate locations and things happening, instead of one unified event being portrayed), but I wasn't sure if I'd be able to fully cover up the already existing paint that was there.. and I can also kind of justify it by going with a more "all the imagery is just symbolic so it doesn't have to make exact sense" approach lol.. How is one half of the grass green and the other is suddenly snowy? shhhh.. it's not literal.. shhh...
Made a vague sketch, then painted over it, and then added more distinct lines in black pen. Center image first and border second.
The very last thing was the text, which actually took forever to translate because my conlang is still only like.. partially done, and some of the grammar is not worked out exactly how I would like it to be, so a few sentences I had to think about for a long time before just going "eh, this is probably not how I would do it if I considered it more, but I'll go with it for now" lol . I also am not entirely satisfied with all of the characters for the writing system, but again, it's good enough for a quick project, it doesn't have to be 100% accurate and perfect because it's a fake language that nobody knows anyway lol.
I thought about breaking down the text and translation here like I have for some of the tidbits of Avirrekava (the language) in things I've posted in the past, but I think it would take too long and is not interesting to anyone but me ghghj, so for the sake of getting the post out quickly, I shall not spend an hour typing All That lol.
The general jist of the writing though is that it's just about the Avirre'thel being cast out from the other elves, after abandoning their magic for immortality as a means to truly attain perfection (an important concept in elven culture), the usual, blah blah blah, but how it's Actually A Good Thing, because the gods are wrong and immortality is Cool actually and they like the shitty frozen lands they were sent to, so it's fine that everyone else is being a Hater about it lol
Lastly, here's a few photos outside in the sun to TRY and show the gold detailing actually shimmering or showing up! It really doesn't come through in photos, but there's plenty of little golden spots to highlight light or Importance.
Mostly the fire, the pink sparkle that represents magic, the red drop that represents blood, the light behind Inaashi's hands and head (common symbol for the elven religion/one of their main gods, shout out to anyone who read the ancient elven religion post and recognized that lol), the sun, and the symbol for the Avirre'thel/country of Navyete at the very top. I did a few other gold bits, but they're not highlighted because they're Significant, more just that it looked more symmetrical to have some gold on the border too lol.
Other things of note: The animals are not actually significant to Avirre'thel culture really, I just wanted to put a cat and a bird because I like them lol. (I also wanted to have a few funny looking creatures, as I was slightly trying to go with the 'in some old medieval painting the anatomy and perspective is very weird' vibe, though I think some of the other parts of it look too Normal to pull it off entirely). Same with the four leaf clover, which means nothing in their culture - but these are the only areas where stuff was just added self-indulgently .
Bligabata (giant cabbage that grows along rivers in Navyete) making an appearance! The architecture of the building IS based on actual concepts for ancient elven/older Avirre'thel architecture and metalwork. The Avirre'thel who's turning away from Inaashi/elves/magic and collecting blood, is doing so in a Special Bowl, as is part of their culture (collecting it in the hands, or just in a normal vessel would be disrespectful, they have Specific Bowls which is the only thing blood can be kept in, etc.).
The figure that represents Jhevona (and thus, a closer connection to magic, celestial imagery, etc.) is in weird ugly teal, which is not necessarily a color or design associated with them, as I don't have much common culture (like clothing) worked out for Northern Jhevona (who the avirre'thel would have come into contact with) yet, BUT everyone else is in more Typical colors (a northern elf in green, Inaashi in lavender + white + blue, an Avirre'thel in darker purples and reds).
Some things, like the four figures in the corners, and the two people + fish in the stream, do not currently have a meaning, but in-world they would.. Like, I could make up lore for how they're culturally significant and it would be true because I am god of the world, but I don't have anything currently. But just know.. they DO mean something, I just haven't decided it yet, maybe kind of fill in as I go, come up with a meaning later lol. Probably along the lines of an old myth from the ancient elven religion, a story, etc.
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I don't know, probably other stuff, but that's my Trying To Keep It Short rambling for now lol. I'm just glad I finally finished this! For how vaguely sloppy it is up close (everything being completely freehanded, only used rulers once when doing the initial sketch and lining where the border should be + my hands are shaky + the canvas is bumpy + my handwriting is scratchy and terrible + etc. etc.) it still took a REALLY long time, even when not trying to make it all perfect. Especially if including the text translation + writing, which took like 3+ hours itself.
Maybe all the asymmetry/lack of things being centered is NOT because I was too lazy to measure anything, but is actually because in-universe, it's a practice illustration made by some young apprentice who has to work on little canvases for years before he can be trusted will a full sized mural or tapestry. It's his first week on the job! of course he's uncoordinated! don't laugh at him!!! lol
#worldbuilding#elves#I AM WORKING ON A NEW PAVENTURE POST also !!!! I know I keep being like 'oh I'm going to get back to that! I'll stick to it this time!!'#and then another whole month goes by without me posting a new poll adventure - however - this time I DID fully intend to so#*do another one soon but my beloved beautiful perfect cat unfortunately passed away AND there was a heat#wave ANd I felt sick for a while for unrelated reasons so I just genuinely was not focused on posting online at all#I am trying to get back to it though along with other things hopefully so.#ANYWAY#avirre'thel#irithoas#maybe???? not super relevant to elves but I'll keep it intheir tag anyway also. Just since their lore is so closely tied with avirre'thel s#stuff and they're mentioned in the post. Or the gods are. Inaashi is.#OIGUGUGUGUHH I should have done a tapestry with the FCJhjkING triplets!!!!! Sehalanora Semoniyare and the other one whatever the hell#his name is. ... sehalanora my beloved .. (I'm referencing the ancient elven gods - for those who dont know)#It's funny that I rarely watch tv shows and when I do I rarely if EVER care about characters at all in any capacity#with maybe like a handful of even then extremely minor exceptions so I cannot relate to the concept of like 'having a blorbo' or whatever#but then for my extremely niche worldbuilding content#.. it's like OMG MY FAVORITE character!!! my favorite obscure god from a religion#that I entirely made up myself for a cultural group that I also made up that literally only I and maybe like two other#people who are able to sit through my novel long dry and wordy worldbuilding posts care about!! you all know them DUH!!#even WITHIN modern elven culture in the world at the moment in current day most people do not give a shit about them hghj#BUT .. I should have made a painting of the siblings actually!!! I stand by that!!#I mean I like Inaashi and Nisateyu and everything too. Actually all of them are fine except for Ea'ivuyera I guess. whoever the#like War and Order bootlicker god is basically. and the Evil dumbass one. but all the others are fine. I'm suprised I'm even able to rememb#that many ancient elven goofily long names ghgh.. But I could have maybe made it about the elven gods#The thing is just that.. i Don't have ancient elvish worked out as a language and I knew I wanted to put text on it#so it kind of HAD to be something written/drawn by the Avirre'thel#Knwoledge of the ancient elven gods is still a thing in their culture. But usually more as a joke or just a common fairytale knowledge#sort of thing. not really something to make a painting of. Inaashi is here less because of Inaashi The God being genuinely significant and#and more just she's there to Symbolize the elven religion as a whole. just like all the other figures are mere symbols of things. etc.
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It's about time I show you (Pierre Gasly)
Four times Pierre and Y/N acted on their feelings and one time they finally decided they were done hiding
Note: english is not my first language
Thank you to the people who gave their feedback to my post, ultimately it was between Pierre, George and Mick and since there was no way to break the tie, I decided to go with Pierre, but I have kept the other two in mind for the next pieces I write! Last week I did post a bit for Mick (after this app did not let me post it in one single post) and I had something else in mind for him too! 🤍 Anyhow, I have some planned ideas for future content as I'm on a bit of a countdown before uni is back
(I got inspiration from a these 'nonsexual acts of intimacy' lists on pinterest x x)
Thank you so much to everyone who likes and reblogs, your feedback is appreciated 🤍 and although I'm not taking requests per se, if you have any ideas or concepts you want to share, feel free to do so!
Tw: mentions of (athlete's) diet plans
When Pierre said he wanted to go to a small concert in one of Milan's parks, you never thought it would be this busy. The entrance looked to have a lot more people than the usual Tuesday late afternoon but, standing in the middle of the grass where you usually lay a blanket and lay down anyway you want while reading a book, the same blanket was now folded in half and was accommodating you and your bestfriend Pierre. Sure, you could have layed the blanket down in the usual way but you didn't want to be a nuisance to the other people who, like you, wanted to have some off time of their busy lives, so you and Pierre sat comfortably in the blanket as you waited for another singer to begin their show, "You know, if you weren't a giant, your legs would fit in this blanket just fine, see?", you nodded to your legs once you noticed how the French man kept switching his legs' position from bending and crossing them, careful to not bother the family that sat in front of you. He only laughed at your teasing, "Do you want anything to eat or drink? I could go to the food stalls and grab something while we wait for the next on", Pierre asked, his hands propped on his sides and ready to lift his body up if you gave a positive answer, "I don't want anything, for now at least, but you can go get anything if you want. Do you want me to go with you? I can ask the lady to watch the blanket", you suggested, "No, I'm good too", he said smiling. A few minutes passed as you engaged in casual conversation about your jobs, his driver obligations way more interesting to talk about than your own routine day, until a guy with a guitar got up on the stage and started playing some acoustic music, everyone lightly swaying their body, sitting down still, to the rhythm of the music. Pierre couldn't help but smile as he looked at you. Long gone were the days where you would spend hours together daily, now sticking to texting nearly everyday, as you were now adults with very different job schedules and calendars, and getting together everytime you could find some time, so naturally he was smiley. Seeing you so relaxed and so beautiful, your eyes closed, leaving your lashes to settle on your freckly cheeks as you enjoyed the whole situation made his heart skip a beat. Getting up once the show finished, "I'm actually a bit hungry now, what do you say we go and grab some food?", you tempted, earning a nod from Pierre as you finished shaking the blanket to get out any grass and dirt, stuffing it into your bag as you made your way to the previous food stalls you had talked about.
Like you had that idea, everyone else in the park though the same, the cues to the stalls were getting bigger and bigger, you and Pierre deciding quickly what you wanted to have before the cues got even longer, "If I had known the cues would be like this I would have gotten here sooner", Pierre said, "It's fine, we can wait", you yelped slightly as someone tried to squeeze past you with their food, apologising to you as they excused themsleves. Seeing how people were getting closer together, Pierre felt a sudden need to protect you and have you within his grasp, "Hold my hand please, I don't want to lose you", he said, stretching his arm the best be could to find your hand and clasp it in his. When you finally got your food, Pierre stretched his neck to look for the nearest way to get out of that commotion, rhe bag on one of his hands as the other one stayed clasped in yours, guiding you away as he kept politely asking people to move so you could go through and sit somewhere quieter, "See? My long legs are useful after all, how else do you think I could have gotten us away from that crowd?", Pierre winked at you as you both sat down in one of the picnic tables that were surprisingly free, people opting to go back to their where they watched the concert from.
The free practice sessions had been tough for Pierre, the car not reaching the pace the team wanted and leaving a nervous aura around the garage as they prepared for qualifying in the early afternoon.
Arriving in his driver room after an impromptu team meeting to go over the results, Pierre found you sitting in the sofa, "Hey you", you said lowly, not knowing how his mood was but wanting to show him some kind of support. He sat down next to you, fiddling with the rings on his fingers as he stayed silent, just taking in everything that had happened in the last 24 hours, how the car seemed weird in FP1 but maybe it was just a glitch, then FP2 coming around and the results just kept deteriorating, and after the late night meeting and the work from mechanics and engineers, FP3 couldn't have gone worse, even given everything that had happened. You stayed in silence for a good while until you heard him mumble, "I don't want to keep you in this awful mood, so feel free to go somewhere else", he said half harshly, immediately regretting how the words left his mouth in a tone that he never talked to you with. Getting up, Pierre thought to himself that it was his fault really, and was ready to hear the door open when you kneeled in the spot you were previously sitting in, your hands tentatively coming around his shoulders to test the waters as you rubbed your hands on them, feeling the tension on his muscles. Pierre let out a big sigh of relief, a mixture of being happy that you had stayed and the way your fingertips felt against his taunt muscles, "I'm sorry", he whispered as you shook your head, dismissing it just as quickly as you forgot about it, "just relax for a bit okay?", you asked as you got to work wirh your hands. Maybe if Pyry were seeing this he would find so many mistakes and things you shouldn't be doing but it just felt right at the time in helping Pierre release some of the stress that was bugging him since the day before. "I just feel like we had progressed well, things were finally heading to where we are supposed to be and then this...! And we can't seem to figure out what it is, if it is track specific and we have to wait, of if the car is going to be like this until the end of the season...! And then there's the media that are doing their job and I understand that but sometimes they just really really get in my nerves...", he exasperated, closing his eyes halfway the rant as he moved his torso a bit to meet your hands where he wanted the pressure. "There are very big brained people in that room", you referred to the team's engineers, mechanics and strategists, "that are going to find a way to make everything work, and hopefully it won't take them long", you said as you felt his body relax a little bit more, "Thank you for always being here, even in the bad stuff", he said remembering how you had always been there for him, wether it was the highlight of his career or the rock bottom moment, turning his neck slightly to press a kiss to your hands. You smiled back, feeling the skin where his lips were just seconds ago burn from the affection still.
"That is not how it was and you know it!", you yelled from the counter that separated your dining area from the kitchen area, putting the plates in the sink, "You were walking along the side of the boat, specifically after I told you to be careful because it was slippery from everyone getting out of the sea and boom! One feet after the other, you landed on your butt and nearly got yourself a nice cannonball jump", Pierre said, "you should have seen Charles, there are no words in the dictionary that could possibly describe the moment, it was beyond hilarious, it's a shame no one recorded that", he finished as both drivers "at least have some kindness and solidarity with me, I still can't sleep on my side from the bruise on my thigh", you pouted, "and you ego's bruise too", Charles whispered in a tone he thought was low enough, his giggles not helping the volume. "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Charles Leclerc didn't get to have dessert", and he stopped, "but your recipe is the best, I even asked the dietician to have some of it, c'mon Y/N, I've laughed about worse things involving you and you know you've said some about me too, you're not so innocent either", he pointed the spoon at you. Charles spent his day in the factory in Maranello and decided to visit you and Pierre, making the two hours trip over and arriving just in time for the dinner you were cooking. You had met the monégasque when Pierre started mentioning this Charles friend he had met in the races when he attended one of his birthday parties and, despite initially feeling like your Pierre's best friend place was being taken away from you by him, you quickly learned that the place could hold the both of you and you had blossomed a beautiful friendship with him. And now Pierre was telling him about the three days of summer break you had been able to visit him and his family in the French Riviera region, your accident on the boat remaining a funny memory for everyone, "I'm not doing that because I'm not a bad person", you said as you got back to the table with the tray you were carrying the mousse in, giving everyone their serving. You noticed how Pierre had finished his and kept looking over at yours, and in the middle of the conversation you were having with Charles the upcoming races you were thinking of going, you slowly nudged your cup to Pierre's side, silently telling him you were willing to share and smiling faintly when he dug his spoon in. This, however, did not go unnoticed by Charles, "I nearly got no dessert and he, the guy who told the story, gets to repeat?", Charles teased, "Oh, I have more in the fridge if you want to", you said simply, getting up a d heading with the empty cups to the kitchen, "I don't want anymore, thank you though, but I guess there's just different treatment in this house", Charles said as he heard the coffee machine start, "a special treatment even", he finished, a knowing look on his face as he watched Pierre follow your every move with his eyes. Pierre had confided in one of his bestfriends about how he might really really like his other bestfriend and Charles had told him to be cautious: of course he wanted nothing more than for them to be happy, but he also advised Pierre to think a bit more about it, understand where he was and where you were in this whole situation because maybe once that line was crossed, things would never be the same.
You had woken up late on race day, your phone's alarm not doing enough noise to prompt you to wake up. You got up on a hurry, showering quickly as you grabbed the outfit you had planned for the day as you then grabbed the hairdryer in an attempt to tame your locks. As you made your way out of the hotel, you entered the Uber you had called and made your way to the track, taking in the calming views after a rushed morning. Apparently you had also been graced with rain on race day, and thanking the driver for the last time, you braved your way into the paddock, scanning your pass before hurrying through the rain until you reached the Alpha Tauri hospitality, looking down at how your parka had done little to protect you from the rain. "Y/N, dear, you're soaked!", you heard Fabiana's familiar voice, "Hi, good morning! Yeah, seems I am, I need to get these dry as soon as possible", you said as you took in your full state, "Well, luckily you are in the team that has their own clothing brand, follow me", she said as she took you to Pierre's driver room while she went to where they usually keep some clothing items in the hope that they would have your size available.
Your boilersuit was wet everywhere but your shoulders, "at least it seems the wind and the rain did not get here", you mumbled as you heard a knock on the door, "come in". Fabiana entered the room, "I found these Tapered Pants in your size, unfortunately we don't have anymore hoodies or t-shirts, they're sold out already", she said as she noticed that you were wearing a one piece clothing item, "Oh, don't worry Fabiana, this is amazing already! Thank you, I'll borrow something from Pierre, thank you so much again", you smiled, "No worries dear, glad I could help", she said, "And Y/N?", Fabiana finished, earning a hum from you as you were checking the pants, "It probably doesn't help much now, but it's not raining anymore", she said smiling before she left you to change. The black pants fit you surprisingly well for something found at the last minute, and with a quick flick through Pierre's clothes that were hung you were able to grab a simple white t-shirt you hoped he wouldn't mind. You were trying to tie your hair in a bun when you heard the door open, "Fabiana told me someone didn't do well in the rain today", he said, "Hi, you good?", he asked as he passed by you and helped you gather your hair at the nape of your neck, helping you with the flyaway hairs that insisted in staying up, "Morning! Yeah, but Fabiana as very kind and got me these pants from the team's collection, and they fit quite well too... and I got this t-shirt from your hanger, but I was thinking of going back to the hotel now that it's not raining anymore and chan-", you forwarded before Pierre interrupted, "Nonsense, no need for that. Besides, you look cute in the team's attire", he said before pressing his lips to the top of your head, grabbing his phone from his pocket and sitting on the sofa, bringing you with him as he showed you some videos. The action had left the butterflies go through your body, the cold chills from the wet clothing on your skin long gone as you appreciated the smile on Pierre's face as he showed you a challenge himself and Yuki had taken part in for the team's social media channels.
You were in Pierre's flat cooking dinner for the two of you on a Friday night since he didn't have a race that weekend, the water on the pot on the stove already boiling as you stirred the sauce on the other pan, "I'm already out of the shower", your bestfriend yelled before you heard what you assumed was his bedroom door, giving you the timing cue like you asked so you would know when to put the pasta in. You heard his steps down the stairs and crossing the corner to meet you in the kitchen, "Thank you again for sorting dinner, I was really needing it after that workout", he said as he grabbed your hand that held the wooden spoon as to help you stir the pasta. Things had been getting more touchy with Pierre, and you can't really say you didn't enjoy it. Sure, as bestfriends you had never had a problem with spending a lot of time with eachother, but recently you felt a weird shift in the air, both of you were bolder in your greetings, kisses on cheeks and forehead were a common reoccurrence and the hugs seemed to last a bit longer. And although the other wouldn't see it, friends and family also noticed that the looks and stares lasted longer too.
"See if this is good", you reluctantly took your hand away from his to go and grab a spoon from the drawer so he could taste the sauce, bringing the spoon to his mouth wirh your other hand in a shell shape to not let anything that might drip fall on your clothes, "a little bit more of basil maybe?", he said grabbing the glass container and adding more to the sauce before you got everything set on the table and enjoyed dinner.
You were now laying on the sofa, the news on the TV screen as you both got up to what was happening the world and soon, your eyes felt droopy and you fell asleep, cuddling further into the massive blanket you were sharing with Pierre. The french driver had been talking for a bit, giving his opinion on something one of the reporters had said and looked at you when you didn't reply, chuckling to himself as he admired your sleeping figure. Soon, midnight was approaching and he knew better than to just let his eyes rest a bit before he would get you in his arms and tucked in the spare bedroom's bed. Five minutes turned to ten, and ten turned into hours, rhe sofa large and comfortable enough for the two of you to spend the night there if you wished.
The sun started flickering through the curtains when you woke up, feeling some tingles on your leg as you tried to make sense of where you were. This is not your bedroom. This isn't even a bedroom, this is Pierre's living room and that's when you felt someone next to you. Pierre was sleeping still, although the sunlight that persisted and landed on his eyes prompted him to rustle in his sleep, "Oh, I fell asleep didn't I?", his groggy morning voice was heard as you giggled, "Apparently, and somehow we're all tangled", you referred to your tingly right leg shin that had been caught between Pierre's thighs. "Did you feel that shift too? Or was it just me?", Pierre said out loud, willing to take the risk, "How everything seemed deeper, more meaningful... when was it? I think I've felt it since I grabbed your hand in the park, I was so scared someone would grab you or that I'd lose you in there", he mused as his blue eyes focused on yours. Looking for his hand under the blanket, your hand clasped is his as you found it, "For me, it was when we were with your parents the other day, when they came to visit, when we went to the restaurant and you had your hands on my back to guide me to the table and everyone assumed I was your girlfriend and I wasn't... totally grossed out by the idea?", you giggled as you felt the blush of your cheeks, "it felt really nice, and I slept really good tonight". Getting impossibly closer to you, Pierre freed his hand from yours only to place them on each of your cheeks, "what if we try something between us? Just something between us for now, see how this goes...", he said, "it's about time I show you how much you meant to me", he finished with a chaste kiss on your lips, sealing all the promised he intended to keep.
#pierre gasly imagine#pierre gasly fic#pierre gasly fluff#f1 imagine#f1 x reader#f1 fanfic#pierre gasly × reader
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Naughty kind of fun~ (Miguel O'hara x reader)
（｡･ω･｡)つ━☆・*°。+ *🎀
warning: +18 (so if ur not, get outa here, buddy), thigh fucking, penetrative, blowjob, cumming in the mouth, finger fucking, etc... 🤨🤨😔
(I wrote it, haha but credits to jaex0x0smikle anyways.)
also to note: wrote this a while ago, used some posts on tumblr for inspiration (paraphrased for the vibrator and thigh parts!)... pls comment if u can find who's it is cause i wanna give them full credits :(
btw i was like half dead because i wanted to die from the amount of hw i had and needed a writing break :(
🚶
HAVE FUN Y'ALL
dunno how to write the captions, my bad :(
type a comment if you want some more 😉
[Dom Miguel, Sub (ish) reader]
（｡･ω･｡)つ━☆・*°。+ *🎀
"Hey, baby..." Miguel leaned against the door frame, his eyes sliding over your new dress. He licked his lips and smiled. "You certainly look delicious..."
"Not so bad yourself..." You say, trying to not squirm under Miguel's unwavering gaze. You look at his handsome face, the chiseled features and broad shoulders made him look strong. Matched with the black and white suit he was wearing, Miguel was handsome. Extremely so. You coughed and looked away, trying to not seem like you were ready to pounce on him. You could already feel the heat rushing to my face. "You look... very handsome tonight..."
"Hmm... but have you tried yourself in a mirror lately, sweetheart?" Miguel smirked, his eyes sparkling with mischief. He moved closer, placing his hand on the small of your back. "I'm dying to see what's underneath, babe..."
"Come on, we don't have time for this. Pavitr's party is going to start at 8:00!" You push him away playfully, but he huffs impatiently.
"We still have more than two hours- that's plenty of time."
"We both know that if we start now, we'll end up spending the entire night instead of just two hours." You quickly clapped a hand over your mouth. You blush, embarrassed.
"Oh really~?" His husky voice made me shiver, his hot breath blowing against your ear. The way Miguel towered over you was scary- but also thrilling.
"Y-yeah." You avoided his eyes, but he lifted your chin up to his face. Miguel's gaze bore into you as his jaw tightened.
"Please? I'm begging you..." He stepped forward, pushing you against the wall with one arm. He leaned forward, planting a kiss on your neck. His body pushed against you, his body heat slowly rising as he stared hungrily. You could feel your breath quicken too, eager to keep on going, but you couldn't just ditch Pavitr's without a notice.
"Fine. I'll send a message to Pavitr." You start to head for your phone, but Miguel stops you.
"What do you think you're doing when the fun already started?" Miguel's eyes were piercing, trapping you in place. He shoved a hand against the wall and bent down to be eye level with you. Suddenly, his voice becomes gentle, "Do you want me to keep going? I'll stop if you don't... there's no rush."
"a-ah... no. You can um- continue..." Your heart beat so fast it felt like it was going to leap out of your chest. It was only the third time you guys ever had intimacy, and it still felt so alien to you. Without knowing what to do, you say, "Let's have some fun."
"Oh really?" Miguel asked, licking his lips as he looked at you with a mischievous grin. "And what kind of fun did you have in mind, sweetheart?..." Miguel moved a piece of hair behind your ear, lightly tracing a trail down to your shoulder.
"A naughty kind of fun..." You smirked at him. This side of you never showed except for moments like these.
"Oh?" Miguel purred, his eyes glittering. "How naughty?..." He leaned down to gently nibble and tug at your ear, his lips brushing against your neck. "Do you want me to make a good girl out of you, sweetheart?"
You shiver at the closeness of Miguel. "Yes, please~"
"Mhm..." Miguel pressed himself against you, his voice husky as he spoke. "Are you a naughty girl, baby?" Miguel's teeth flashed, his body trembling with desire. He reached out and ran his hand along your waist.
You move closer to him, "Only for you~" As his hand trailed along your curves, you decided to be more bold. "I'll keep you up all night long..." your whisper shocked Miguel, but in a good way.
"Oooh~" Miguel purred, his voice going lower. "How long will you even be able to keep me up, sweetheart?..." He chuckled. "Hmm... maybe you want me to... push... your... buttons?..." Miguel paused to let his words sink in. He leaned forward, nibbling gently on your ear.
You whine softly, burying your head into Miguel's chest. "Yes please... daddy~" Instantly, you regret saying that. He was going to tease you to death after tonight.
"Hmm?..." Miguel chuckled, his eyes sparkling. "Oh did you say something, sweetheart?..." A small smirk danced on his lips, a hand traveling across your thigh. "You're such a tease~"
He brought his hand down from the wall, gently grabbing your hips and tossing you onto the couch. "Hmm... I'll teach you a lesson..." Miguel crawled over and pinned you down to the sofa, looking at you with a small smirk. You start to undress, lifting up your skirt slowly.
Miguel's eyes widened as he glanced at your legs. His tongue ran across his bottom lip, a hand moving to caress your thigh. His voice sounded husky, his gaze traveling up your leg.
"I wore your favourite lingerie- just in case this would happen..."
"Oh really~?" Miguel purred, his eyes glistening. He leaned forward to nibble along your shoulder, his fingers digging into the soft skin. "Hmm, I don't believe you, babe... I'm gonna have to take a look for myself, sweetheart..."
"Go ahead~" You say, before he suddenly yanks off your underskirt. You squeak, surprised. Instinctively, you squeeze your legs together, face flushed red from the unexpectedness. Miguel chuckled, moving his leg between your thighs.
"Are you ready, sweetheart?" He said, his voice low and husky as he looked down at you.
You gasped softly, wrapping your legs around his waist. "Yes~"
Miguel smiled, his eyes glimmering with desire as he looked down at you. His arms surrounded your waist, holding you firmly in place. One of his hands moved to caress your hair, while the other went down to untie your lace dress. "You just have to let go... let me take charge, baby..." His gaze looked hungry, his eyes staring at you as if you were a feast. His eyes wandered over your body.
Miguel's arms supported your weight as you straddled him. His hands traced the curves of your hips and thighs, teasing you. Miguel purred, his lips traveling over your neck. His teeth lightly scraped against your skin as he ran his tongue along your neck. "I need you to tell me what you want, baby..." He paused, nipping gently at your throat. His breath went against you, his lips grazing your ear. "Tell me... what... do you want?"
----
YOU CAN STOP HERE! EXIT THIS CHAPTER NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE ANY MORE SMUT
No?
Ok.
You've been warned 😨
----
"I guess I need to loosen you up first..." Miguel opens one of the cabinets next to the TV, taking out a pink vibrator and lube. You could already feel you were wet enough to not use lube, but Miguel always stood by the phrase, "The wetter, the better."
He placed the vibrator between your legs, rubbing it against your thigh. "Spread your legs." Miguel says, and you immediately sit up a little more, leaning against the cushion and widening your legs. He rubbed your clit softly, blowing against it. You squirm, letting out a small moan. The lube was cold as Miguel massaged it into you. His fingers were long, pressing against all the sensitive areas he knew you loved. He slowly drew his fingers in and out of your pussy, quickening the pace. Starting with 2 fingers, then adding another.
"A-ah~ Miguel~" You panted, grasping at Miguel's arm. You could see his ears go red, and the bulge in his pants get even bigger.
"Ready?" Miguel tapped the tip of the wand against your clit, and your hips squirm a bit, a squeak leaving your mouth. As Miguel pushes the vibrator in, he turns up the intensity of vibration- making you jerk your head back. Every moan that escaped your mouth made Miguel's bulge grow larger and harder.
"You should see yourself right now..." he was panting quietly, eyes looking eager to thrust into you. "I'm not sure how much longer I can wait."
He took fun in seeing how long you could last before coming, raising the intensity of the vibrator, eating up the expressions you made. Your core tightened around the vibrator, and an electric shock passed through your body.
"a-Augnh~ M-miguel! stop~ I-I just-" You couldn't finish your sentence, though, because Miguel was raising the vibrations even higher. You had just came, the sticky juice slowly seeping out of your hole, coating the vibrator. When you realised you were close AGAIN (omg how), you let out a raw moan, "m-more! a-aAh~ faster!" Miguel responded by taking out the vibrator, and switching it off.
When you finally came back to your senses, you pouted, "Why did you stop? I was about to-" Miguel flipped you over so that you were on your knees, and he unbuckled his belt. His massive dick came into view, and you weren't sure if you could handle it. "Wha-?"
"You can't be the only one having fun, sweetheart." He stroked your hair, leading your face towards his shaft. "Suck it." His voice was so commanding, so you started to lick the tip of his dick, pleasuring in the groans Miguel let out. You swirled your tongue on the head, massaging his balls with your fingers. You looked up at him as he tilted his head backwards, breaths becoming laboured. His pre-cum dripped from the sides of your mouth, tasting slightly salty.
"Your dick is delicious... I'll make sure to savour it~" You say, stroking Miguel's dick with your hand. It didn't even fit in one hand, so you used both, squeezing as you brought your hands up and down his shaft. You placed your tongue on his cock, getting ready to deep throat it. "You're such a-" You bring your mouth down onto Miguel's dick, feeling it hit the back of your throat. Thank god you don't have a gag reflex- cause if you did, you'd be throwing up because of his size. Miguel whipped his head back, letting out a load and high pitched moan. (Not as high as yours, of course...) His eyes widened, and yours did too. You guys looked at each other, both shocked. "I-I didn't mean to-"
You take Miguel's cock out of your mouth, and smile. "It's okay- I think it was kind of cute." You continued to blow him, loving the whimpers, moans, and sounds that came from him.
"I th-think I'm close~" Miguel whispered, his hands grabbing at your hair. He brought your head down even further, making your eyes water. But you kept going, bobbing up and down faster and faster until he shoved your face almost all the way to his balls. He groaned loudly, and you could feel him release his white cum inside of your throat. He kept you in that position for a few more seconds, until he let you go, exhausted.
"Don't tell me you're already done~?" You laugh, placing your hips so he could see your pussy drip.
"h-hugh... N-no..." Miguel's chest had a faint sheen from the sweat. "I can keep going..."
Miguel looked at your pussy, and he can't control himself anymore. You feel his rough hands grip your hips, harshly pushing him back into you. The plumpness of your ass hits the girthy shaft of his cock, but before you can look for the lost balance with your hands in front of you, he thrusts his erection up against you cunt. You can feel it begin to become rock solid again.
"Ay, mi amor-" His voice is rugged and laboured, laced with a deep groan. His broad palm hits your butt-cheek, making you gasp. "Te necesito así de mal ahora mismo." (I need you so badly right now.) Miguel slammed inside you, thrusting at a quick pace.
"So tight..." Miguel grunted, his jaw gritted. "...it feels so good..."
You arch your back, the noises coming out of your mouth were low-key embarrassing. It was too big for you to handle, his shaft stretching your pussy so wide as it slammed in and out. The "plap" sounds from him slapping against your pussy was loud in your ears. The vibrator was big, but Miguel's dick was huge compared to it.
"S-slower... please~" You mewl, eyes watering from the overstimulation. "I-I can't..."
Miguel started thrusting gently, but it still felt like you were being eaten up from the inside. You clench around him, noticing him shudder inside you as you tighten up.
"Tell P-pavitr that w-we aren't coming t-to the party~ a-Ah~" I signal for Miguel to give me my phone so I can text him a message.
Miguel picks up the phone, ringing Pavitr's phone.
"What are you doing?!" You hiss, WHY WAS MIGUEL CALLING PAVITR? WHEN YOU'RE HAVING SEX? "Miguel Ohara! S-stop!"
But Miguel doesn't stop the call with Pavitr, only quickening his hips. Your eyes roll back, arching your back so he could hit your gspot.
"Huh? y/n? Why're you calling?" You could hear Pavitr's voice loud and clear through the speaker. "Miguel? Is that you?"
"Yes. y/n and I can't come to the party tonight..." Miguel clamped a hand over your mouth to prevent you from moaning so loudly. "She'll tell you why."
Your head was spinning from the pleasure, and you couldn't think of a decent excuse. Should you say that you family has an emergency? Or maybe that you got sick? In any case, you know Pavitr is too smart than to believe it. Miguel lowered the phone next to your mouth as he kept on thrusting.
"U-um, we f-forgot that o-our... uaHGh~!" A moan had accidentally escaped from your lips. You cleared your throat. "S-sorry, I-I mmHMm~ I hurt my foot..."
You turn red from the stupid lie. "H-hope we c-can see y-you soon... nnNGh~!"
"Woah. I know what you're doing, and it doesn't sound like you hurt your foot." Pavitr chuckled, "I understand. Have fun, Miguel. Tell me about it tomorrow."
BEEP. Pavitr had ended the call.
"Miguel! Why did you embarrass me like that!" You bury your face into the coach's cushions, hearing Miguel's deep laugh.
"Why, you said you wanted to have 'fun', sweetheart." Miguel grinned, slicking his hair back to get a better view of your ass. He took off the condom he had on, tapping his raw cock against your clit. "This is what you asked for~"
Smiling mischievously, e delivers a rough spank to your plump ass before pushing two fingers over the lips of your pussy, running them over your slit.
"You can't do it raw... I'm not on birth control." You warned, and Miguel's eyes twinkled.
"Let me fuck your thighs then." It took you by surprise, because you thought he would suggest anal or something.
With caution, he pushed his dick between your thighs while navigating his way to feel your wet folds and making sure he pressed the tip against your clit. Miguel began thrusting himself, keeping a steady rhythm— pre-cum smearing between your legs with each thrust.
not doneee :)
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Something I don’t see talked about (and yes I know that’s a loaded opening sentence but I have feelings so I’m going to ramble) is how it feels to come to art late.
Like people throw out examples like George Clooney being 40 or something? Or Samuel L Jackson, or you know there are many, of people who came into something older and then were fantastic at it. It’s like a “it’s never too late” reassurance and ok cool, cool, but that doesn’t really help.
I didn’t draw as a kid. I hated art class at school because they didn’t teach. I wouldn’t know how to get the effect I wanted and given no guidance (but plenty of “that’s not what I wanted” criticism). If I found a workaround it was wrong. Like I spent a ridiculous amount of time drawing a model train once by measuring every single line. Best drawing I did as a kid but my teacher told me I was never to do that again as I should spend no more than an hour on the homework.
Part of this was probably being undiagnosed autistic. I need structure and rules and I need to understand. I can’t just experiment how I probably should. So I internalised the “I am not artistic, I have no artistic flair” and I didn’t doodle or decorate. I would be envious of the other kids who did. My notes always looked so boring. We didn’t do art at home. Mum always tells the story of how she was excluded from art class at school for “being a waste of public resources” and so is adamant she can’t draw.
For some reason at 19 I decided I wanted to draw. But again with an undiagnosed autistic need for things to be “right” and obviously any lines I made were ‘wrong’, plus the computer was where I sought answers I fell very quickly into tracing photographs. That was a huge mistake because it taught me nothing and only made it worse if I tried to draw without the crutch - as obviously that was much much worse in comparison.
You see I didn’t have the willingness to draw something awful that little kids have (because to them it isn’t awful) and I judged myself so so harshly. I wanted to draw what I imagined and I found workarounds, like modelling programs to make my own pose references, or smushing multiple references together - I still do this and I absolutely hate it. It doesn’t help but it’s like that bandaid trying to hold a water leak back - it’s better than what I can do without it, so I keep going back for fan events etc. as I feel if I’m gifting someone something it needs to be the best I can do (and merlin knows I am deeply ashamed of what I have posted for past exchanges, 30+ hours or not of effort it was baaaad).
A few years ago I decided enough was enough and I needed to “go back to basics” and get away from the computer. I have got a ridiculous number of courses from places like Udemy/Domestika and enough art supplies to open a small store. I talk a good game - I can sound like I know - but my hand does not.
The problem with the YouTube videos or the courses is these people are skilled - obviously, I mean that’s the point - but sometimes they will show their “old art” from when they were 13 or something and it’s better than what I can do now, or maybe at 9 or something it was about the same but that’s 9 - I’m going to be 34 this year.
I’m still that kid that wants to be told what steps to take. I am still flailing and I still don’t know how best to move forward. Worse I am not a kid and so I feel ashamed I guess. And I’m also alone because there is no actual person I can talk to. I have looked into in person art classes but there’s nothing suitable. I need to find a path forward.
But to circle back to “coming into art late”. I’m 33 and surrounded by so much inspiration (I see art and I so desperately want to be able to make something half that good). But that’s a curated thing because people only post their good stuff (obviously) and so I don’t want to post my shitty stuff so I can’t engage with “art tumblr” or whatever, and I’ve never been good at engaging anyway. I have always felt like an outsider in every community I have tried to join. Plus with fucking AI I don’t want to post my stuff online (although it’s so bad if it did get scraped it would probably act like poison).
So yeah basically flailing and lonely.
It’s deeply demoralising and frustrating. I have never put in the practice time that I should have but that is more to do with my chronic mental health issues than anything - but that then compounds the age problem as I am not 19 any longer. It has been getting on for 15 years - actually I hate putting it like that because then I have to see that I have been wanting to draw for nearly half my life and I have still not managed it. I am still flailing around near the starting line.
Anyway yeah I just feel like nobody talks about being older, and still being shitty at things, and how damn lonely and scary that is. I get majorly stressed out everytime I try and do “serious learning” as I guess it’ll take time and I will be shitty for a lot longer. Maybe there’s also a point here about adulthood and immediate gratification I don’t know. I just know I wish for the impossible to be able to be the child I never was I guess, to start art when people are supposed to - as a kid - and get this stage done and so I can be better. Is that just me wanting to skip the work? Maybe I don’t know.
It’s as I said - I have feelings.
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car’s outside - spencer reid | oneshot
(not my gif, credits to the og post)
“I'm tired of lovin' from afar
And never being where you are
Close the windows, lock the doors
Don't wanna leave you anymore”
pairing: gn!reader x dr. spencer reid (criminal minds)
summary: you always knew Spencer’s job wouldn’t let him have an exactly normal routine, but lately you missed his presence more than ever.
warnings: a bit of angst as always in my writing but also lots of fluff we're talking Spencer here.
a/n: this goes around 2nd season or so. really proud of this one.
song inspiration.
The pair of you met in a very typical situation, which, ironically for Spencer, was very special, since ‘normal’ was not really a word he could attribute to many things in his life. But to you he could. He found in his days with you the peace he thought he’d never experience in his life. The way you just made things seem lighter and find the good part in most situations was what made him fall madly for you in the first place.
You remember the day you first saw him walk into the café, you had your notebooks and laptop all over the place in the regular table you’d always occupy to study, when lucky enough for it to be empty. When bell rang something brought your eyes right to the door, not something you normally did, but God, you were glad this time you looked over.
Your eyes escort him as he walks to the balcony where he orders a large cup of black coffee to the barista, judging by his order, the eyebags and the bag he carried with, you thought he’d be a student, just like you, a bit older, but still.
That went by for a while, around the same time, he’d walk in, take his order, then always two or three tables away from you he’d sit and read some book, other days he’d spend hours looking over some brown folders you never got the chance to read the covers.
You never really had the guts to go and talk to him, but you were just fine with a little staring sometimes, and you could swear sometimes you’d feel him staring back. After about a month of getting used to see him daily there, you caught yourself stupidly waiting for the time he’d arrive, sometimes even putting a bit more of an effort on how you looked, just in case he showed up.
A month and a half went by without you ever getting his name, it was until an event day at your campus, more people than normal frequenting that area, the café you normally found peace to study was crowded, people bumped into each other and waited in lines to get their orders, needless to say you had no peace to get your activities done.
Still, you had no choice, so you put your earphones and keep going at the routine, this time so stressed at the environment you didn’t’ even check if the pretty boy was sitting at his usual place. You had your focus on your tasks until from your panoramic view you see something that would be enough to make you snap on that already shitty day.
Someone had spilled coffee on your notes.
You open your mouth ready to drain out all of your swearword arsenal over whoever did that to your pages of work, until you look up. Those familiar eyebags and pretty hazel eyes looked at you in panic while his hand, in turn, was also covered by the black liquid. Your eyes instantly soften your gaze looking at him.
“Oh, God, are you okay?” You’re the first one to say something while he stands still, you grab a handful of napkins in your table and try to dry his hands, pulling softly the cup from it and laying it on the table. “It must have burned like hell.”
Your touch on his hand wakes him up to reality and he finally speaks.
“Oh, I- shit, your notes.” His voice is so cute. He awkwardly tries to dodge your touch and put his focus on your notes, some just had meaningless brown dots and some of them were probably already ruined. “I’m so sorry, some guy bumped on me, then I stumbled in this bag, I couldn’t keep the balance I-”
“No, don’t worry about that, really, it’s okay, they were just drafts anyways, is fine.” They were, in fact, not drafts, but you didn’t have to make him feel any worse with that information. “And it’s partially my fault too, well, you tripped in my bag, I should’ve just left it in the bench. Sit there, please, let me get you another coffee.”
“I couldn’t. That’s to kind of you, thanks, but I can’t accept that.”
“C’mon, the tables are crowded anyways, sit here with me, I insist.” You gesture around as you say it and Spencer could indeed confirm the table he aimed to sit before the incident was now occupied by a group of students.
“Okay” He sighs “But I buy myself another coffee.” He points at you with a bossy tone that weirdly matched him, you can’t help a giggle over his cuteness.
“Yessir.” You play. “Be my guest if you want to pay for it, I’ll not insist on that, I’m a college student anyways, it’s not like a display money around, I’ll just order it them, be back in a sec.” He nods with a friendly smile and sits on the opposite side of where you were minutes earlier.
After facing a little line you get to the balcony and order two more large black coffees, thanking the barista when she happily hands you them over. On your way back to your table you decide to stop by a mirror and quickly fix your hair, thanking the universe you looked decent enough today.
You sit back with a smile, sliding his cup over to his side, only to notice he was intrigued looking at your notes, well, what was left of them.
“What is it?” You lean your head to the side and slide your laptop out of the was fixing your posture with both forearms on the table, now having him face to face with you, admiring his curious look reading your papers.
“Butterflies?” He asks also leaning his head and now also facing you. You bet I’m feeling butterflies right now.
“Yeah” You answer shortly. “They´re my subject of study for this semester. Why?” You pucker your eyebrows and sip your coffee never taking your eyes off him. He’s so much prettier up close.
“Nothing, I just always found them interesting. Did you know they use their feet to taste?”
You smile at him nodding yes slightly while sipping more coffee “Yeah, yeah I did actually, they also have four wings, not two, like most believe.” You chuckle at your own words. “We sound like such nerds.”
And for the first time you hear him laugh.
You talked to each other that whole afternoon, if Spencer could frame a moment of yours, he’d choose that exact one, while in the outside your talked mundane stuff and spilled random facts at each other, inside you were just both happy to finally have someone who genuinely seemed interested on what they had to say. It was perfect.
After that it just slowly escalated, you exchanged phone numbers, shared tables everyday, and now, two and a half years later, shared a small New York apartment. It was close enough to your campus, close enough to his work, and cozy enough for the pair of you. It worked perfectly.
Of course, now coming to nearly two years of relationship, there were things that would bother, after all, you can’t have it all. The major and nearly only one, if you’re honest, were the demands of his work. Of course, you knew it’d be a challenge from the moment you said you were all in. But this day specifically was making your blood boil.
Spencer should be in a two week vacation from work, which meant two weeks without calls from the office, right? Well, wrong. You had your tickets bought and were leaving the next day to your dream vacation. That was until your boyfriend got a call with urgency that he would, indeed, travel the next day, but not with you, and not for vacation.
That made you mad, really mad. You knew that it was selfish of you to be putting your shallow needs in front of whatever probably very important deal they had called Spencer in, but that wasn’t the first time and it would surely not be the last. That wasn’t reason enough for you to leave him, you weren’t that crazy. But it never failed to make you mournful. Knowing that for the next few days you’d have to sleep without him by your side.
You stare at Spencer’s puppy eyes while he slowly sat the phone on the desk. He didn’t need to tell you what was the reason they were calling, after all, whatever it was, lives depended on it, and you couldn’t bring yourself to ask him not to go to stay with you, that wasn’t an option.
Your eyes stare at him back, also glassy with tears as your breath pace slowly speeded up while you tried your best not to cry in front of him, you didn’t want to make him feel any worse than he already did, and you felt stupid crying always for the same reason, but you just missed having some alone time with him so bad.
It is ironical considering now you shared the same roof and the last month you could count in one hand how many days you’ve actually spend together. Which, honestly, hadn’t mattered that much since you were counting the days for his vacation, dreaming the final peace at least for a couple of days before getting back to the normal routine.
“Go” You say simply with a raspy voice, not risking many words or you’d give in to the emotion.
“They need me there to-”
“I know” This time it had game out ruder than you intended to “I know you have to go honey and that’s- that’s okay I-” You snuffle now feeling some warm tears down your cheeks “I understand.”
“Oh, sweetheart” Spencer closes up the space between you to hug you tight, the contact making you melt into his arms and you allow yourself to cry on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.” He used his other hand to stroke your hair trying his best to calm you down.
“No, it’s okay, really,” you say between sobs “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty, I just miss you so much.” You tighten your grip on his shirt and Spencer swore he could hear his own heart break, specially when there was nothing at his reach to make the situation any better, and that he was the reason the love of his life was crying, all he could do was whisper ‘I know’ in your ear while he waited for you to be calmer.
When you let go of him you feel your heart sink, heavy and empty at the same time. You try to give him a half smile, sniffing due the tears and he looks at you with a frown that makes you even sadder.
“I also with I didn’t have to go.”
“I know.” You hold both his hands in yours.
“And I miss you too. A lot.”
“I know.” You connect your foreheads, letting go of his hands and cupping his face. Enjoying the contact you have while his ride doesn’t come.
“I don’t know when I’m coming back, but I promise I’ll make it up to you, okay?” You nod, still holding his face within your hands. You give him a long kiss, trying to make him get all your feelings without having to say a word. You don’t know how long you stayed like this, but it was interrupted by a car honk followed by a stuffy voice that yelled ‘Dr. Reid’ impatiently.
You let go and he pecks your lips once more before stepping back reluctantly. You watch him as he picks up his bags from the floor and once more closes the door behind him and all you can do is hope he comes back in one piece.
“I'm packin' my bags that I didn't unpack the last time
I'm sayin', "see you again" so many times it's becomin' my tag line
But you know the truth
I'd rather hold you
Than try to catch this flight”
#criminal minds#spencer reid#spencer reid x reader#spencer reid fanfiction#spencer reid fanfic#spencer reid fic#spencer reid x you#spencer reid x y/n#criminal minds fanfiction#criminal minds x reader#criminal minds imagine#matthew gray gubler#sad#fluff
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The Prayer Plant. Episode four - "The littles"
HELLLLOOOO non-plant beings. It has been a bit. So here's some news about Dottie's story... three parts to the ending. <3 I couldn't really figure out how to end this properly, and I guess that's the point of the tumblr houseplant series - growth, decay, but never an end, not really.
A tumblr houseplant story from @awleeofficial
The seed post is here
Episode one - "Inspiration"
Episode two - "Desperation"
Episode three - "Rose"
Note - this is still a first draft, any feedback would be much appreciated. <3
Also also, a picture of the littles' plants <3
The first step is Pancake's. The second step is Cream's and the last one is Fuzzy's.
We don't talk about the third step.
------
"Dottie? You're being LOUD."
Dottie glanced to cream. Fae rested faer head on the pot rim and blinked faer half-lidded eyes.
Dottie cooed, faer head was fuzzy. "But this means we will be very clean"
"And we like clean."
"Yes." Dottie bit back a snap... and recoiled at the very thought of snapping at Cream. Why was fae so-
"But what's the point? Now you're all dusty."
Dottie looked to faer paws. "I'm all.... dusty."
The dust fae spend the past few... hours apprently, cleaning had caked onto faer paws and faer leaves and... eyes and nose and mouth.
Dottie wanted to nap.
Cream tumbled out of the pot to Dottie's feet. "I'll have to clean you now"
Dottie nodded.
Cream was in the open.
The others would see.
They would see and they would want Cream gone because fae didn't have a plant. None of them had plants and it was all Dottie's fault and fae couldn't even take care of faer own plant or dust it properly. Fae was getting worse and worse and cleaning was faer best trait and -
Why did fae think fae was good enough for this? Before the others knew exactly how to break up fights and not bore the littles and show them everything they needed to know. Here every plant grew fine and never showed any signs of distress, ever.
And Dottie?
Dottie found all of that - what was normal and easy for them - so incredibly difficult.
So here fae was, covered with dust, leaves wilting, littles exposed.
Dottie failed everything, everyon-
Cream patted Dottie's paw. "It's okay, it's okay, you don't need to cry."
Dottie was crying? When did that-
Faer breath hitched. Tears wiped away the layers of dust.
Oh.
Dottie was crying.
Cream murmured, snuggling faer head against Dottie's paw.
Fuzzy came nest, followed by Pancake.
Fuzzy booped Dottie's nose and made silly faces. Pancake sat next to Dottie and leaned against faer side, a silent comfort.
It broke Dottie.
Fae collapsed into sobs, getting tears and dust all over the littles, crying all of it away.
Perhaps the others before were better at taking care of the littles. Perhaps they were better at keeping everything clean and healthy. Perhaps they were better at never making mistakes or needing time to rest.
Dottie tried faer best.
And Dottie had the sweetest littles ever. The others would agree, and if they didn't - if they wouldn't want plant-less pollywiggins - then Dottie would bite them. Fae would protect faer littles and give them as much love as fae could.
Dottie hugged Cream and Fuzzy - who were arguing on whether tickles would cheer Dottie up or annoy faer - and whispered 'thank you.' Fuzzy nuzzled into the hug and Pancake - who didn't like hugs - patted Dottie on the head.
And Dottie?
Dottie took a nap.
-----
Okay.
So I had written this a while ago, but the perfectionism came up and I was wondering if I should rewrite the whole ending because... well I had written better before and there were others who wrote a lot better than me... but wow, look. Tumblr houseplant series. Looking back on it now, it's probably my favorite things I've ever written.
Two more mini episodes - more of wrap-up ones - to go <3
if you don't mind the little self-promo: reblog this with one kind statement to "water" Dottie, let's spread some wonder to this convoluted place <3
And spread the word to anyone else who would like to add their houseplant to the garden, perhaps we can fill tumblr with houseplants.
[next episode- "Cream, Fuzzy, Pancake"]
#writeblr#creative writing#short story#self improvement#perfectionism#the tumblr houseplant series#the tumblr houseplant series Dottie plant#The tumblr houseplant series Prayer Plant#Holy herbs I forgot how much I love writing this#I can overuse rhetorical devices and describe feelings with words instead of metaphors and its the complete opposite of Anuli's POV#and I love them both#the land of the fallen fairies#take care of yourself#fiction#dryads#oc story
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Drippy shoes
Hawks x reader one-shot (crossposted)
Now, before reading this, keep in mind that:
I am by NO MEANS a (good) writer, writing is not my passion, I simply enjoy doing it for fun, sometimes (rarely)
I wrote this story a few months ago, I just wanted to post it on my Tumblr account too
If you find any grammatical mistakes, tell me!
Crappy fanfic or not, please do not repost this anywhere
I literally just copy and pasted it + the A/N (a.k.a. I didn't re-read it)
It's very...cringy
Reader is female! (this is why)
" Can't wait to see his face, pff.. " you chuckle.
What are you doing, you ask? Well, you see… It's nothing too scandalous, just a little prank between boyfriend and girlfriend… Best friends… Boyfriend and girlfriend who are best friends…like… Let's say, pouring sweet chilli into Hawks' shoes… Really, no big deal.
" Oh my fucking God, he's going to be SO pissed, holy shit-.. " you say to yourself, wheezing, while pouring the rest of the sauce in his 'Yoyogi Park Pack' adidas x atmos forum shoes.
Oho… Now THOSE were some expensive shoes (they aren't THAT expensive, I think they cost the average adidas price? Idk, but let's just pretend they're super duper expensive). Actually, YOU got HIM these shoes for Christmas, you know, a special occasion. It's not like you had a choice, he had to beg on his knees just to get you to buy those damn shoes. You asked him why couldn't he buy them on his own, but he never really gave you a proper answer, something like " Ehh… You know me, always broke, haha-" or " I don't like wasting money on something that someone else can buy me. " and even " I'm saving up a bit for something special. ". That 'something special' turned out to be some video games that you hadn't gotten yet, AND an expensive short trench coat that you'd always wanted.
And hey, you WERE grateful, I mean, why wouldn't you be? Video games and a trench coat? Score!
My God, you still remember his stupid little face when he used to beg nonstop, "But baaabe… They look so COOL??? Do you NOT like them? They're so fashionable AND they're inspired by the Yoyogi Park! THE Yoyogi Park! Do you have any idea how many times I went there? Like… TWICE. ".
So… With a little bit of more bickering, you ended up buying his oh-so-' fashionable' shoes. And boy, was Hawks happy when he got a glimpse of the somewhat heavy adidas box.
But AAAAAAAANYWAY… What you did last Christmas doesn't concern you right now, BACK TO YOU.
After filling his lovely shoes with your sweet chilli sauce, you decided to hide the half-empty bottle in your purse/bag/backpack, and wait for Hawky-baby to arrive. (You guys do NOT live together, yet, at least. You were just hanging around his place).
" Note to self, buy more of the godly sauce. "
You know… Now that you think about it, Hawks shouldn't even be that mad, you took your TIME to fill up his shoes with such an appetizing CONDIMENT, that, by the way, did NOT come in CHEAP.
Half an hour later, while watching YouTube videos on his Smart TV, you heard the door being unlocked (YES, he locked you inside, ok?? FOR SAFETY REASONS).
"Hawks?" You asked, even though you knew it was him.
" No, it's Dabi. " Hawks chuckled.
"Haha. Very funny, Hawks. How was work? How come you're home early?",
" Why? Did you want to spend more time in MY house? You know, the place where I live? Did I interrupt something? "
You rolled your eyes, a small smile on your face " No, of course not."
"Well, it doesn't matter anyway. I need to go somewhere else, but I want to take a quick shower and change clothes first. " he said, while taking off his jacket, and heading to the bathroom.
" Go on, am I stopping you? " you answered, sitting back down on his sofa.
The sound of clothes being scattered on the floor could be heard, as well as the shower curtain being shoved away, and the water hitting the ground.
As your excitement grew, you unpause the video you were previously watching and wait for Hawks to come back, trying to calm down a bit, not wanting Hawks to hear your giggles from the living room.
When your dear boyfriend came out of the bathroom, in nothing but a towel around his waist, you don't spare him a glance, and neither does he, heading directly to his room to get some new clothes, muttering something about ''getting new shoes because the pair he was wearing had become dirty from all that fighting and he doesn't have enough time to clean them up right now.''
You ask him what was he going to put on then, and he says that he would like to wear the shoes you had bought for Christmas.
Mentally smirking, you tell him that it'd be a great idea to wear some clothes with earthy colours, to match with his shoes. He agrees, and in no time, he comes out of his room looking good as new, and very stylish.
'' How do I look, (y/n)?''
'' With your eyes, Hawks.''
'' You are no longer welcome in my house.''
'' You can't do anything about it now though, can you?''
Hawks hummed in amusement, not really trying to find a comeback because he was running late.
'' Where are you going, anyway?'' you asked, realising that he never told you where he was going.
'' Somewhere important.'' he replied.
'' Somewhere important… where? Elaborate.''
'' Wouldn't you like to know, weather girl?''
'' Alright then, keep your secrets.''
The moment you were waiting for was so close…just a little bit more… '' Phew… keep it down, (y/n). Don't wanna blow your cover now, do you?'' you quietly tell yourself, sighing.
'' Well, I'll be off now, take care and try not to damage my stuff too much.''
'' Who, me? I would NEVER.'' you dramatically gasp.
'' Pff…yeah, sure you won't.''
Finally! The moment has come!
In 3…
2…
1…
'' WHAT THE FUCK?!''
Not being able to contain your excitement anymore, you burst out laughing, tears of hilarity rolling down your burning cheeks.
'' WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?? (Y/N), DID YOU DO THIS?? ANSWER ME, DAMMIT!!''
After you settled down a bit, you answer:
'' Hawks, I already told you, I would never do such thing! I'm a Saint!'' you chuckle, the image of Hawks putting on his juicy shoes playing in your head.
'' This is DISGUSTING. Seriously, (y/n)? It's just downright NASTY, it feels HORRIBLE. Especially after you took a goddamn SHOWER.''
'' Oh well, it is what is is.''
'' Eugh… God give me strength…''
Your partner, clearly in a bad mood, decided to go inside the bathroom once again to clean up his feet, socks and…shoes.
'' Ah fuck, I can't believe you've done this. I don't even understand the reason behind this stupid prank. Was it something I had done again? I told you, you can call me out whenever you feel like I did something to upset you.'' Hawks grumbled from the bathroom, easy to hear since he didn't close the door.
'' Oh, it's nothing like that, I just wanted to see your reaction. What's the problem? I thought you liked that sweet chilli sauce.'' you say in a relaxed tone.
'' Yeah, I like it on CHICKEN, a.k.a. FOOD.-'' he yelled.
'' Very poor choice of words, chicken wings. I see no difference.'' you smile at his suffering.
''-AND the problem is that: a) I'm late for dinner, AND b) my precious shoes are RUINED. What am I supposed to do now?'' Hawks sulked.
You were about to answer regarding his 'precious shoes' problem, how he could always just throw them away and get a new pair since he DOES have the money, or just find someone that would be able to thoroughly clean his shoes…even though you think that buying a new pair would be better since there are extremely slim chances of finding someone experienced enough for such a job…ahem…you filled those shoes up pretty good. (Props to you)
'' Hold up…dinner?'' you asked, curious, ''I though you were going somewhere important?''
'' Is dinner not important? People need to eat, (y/n). Jeez.'' the angry birdman answered.
'' Where, exactly, were you planning to go?''
'' Isn't it obvious?''
'' KFC…'' he muttered.
'' Oh my God.'' you facepalmed.
'' What? What's wrong with KFC? It's not like I was going to bring you with me.''
'' Hawks, I thought you were going to an important meeting or something like that, not KFC! How are you even late? Were you going to meet up with someone?'' you said, confused.
'' No…I was planning to go by myself, as I always do.''
'' Hawks…''
'' Me and the boys were gonna eat until we passed out.''
You sighed, but after thinking for a second, why were you sighing exactly? because you wanted him to be late to an important meeting that turned out to be a dinner date with his homies?
To be honest, you can't be upset right now, I mean…You don't have a reason to be, YOU'RE the one who ruined HIS shoes, and it's not like he hasn't gone to KFC with his friends before.
'' Ok ok, I get it, but why didn't you just tell me what you were going to do? It's not like you weren't allowed to go, you know.''
Zoning out for a second, he looked at you and shrugged, not knowing either.
'' You're an idiot.'' You said softly.
'' Hey! Sometimes I just do things…that make no sense, ok? It doesn't matter, important meeting or not, my shoes would've been filled with chilli sauce anyway.''
'' Yeaaaah, that's true…'' you replied, not knowing what to say next.
Now that everything has been cleared out, you didn't know what to do, and neither did Hawks. Hm… I guess that prank wasn't as funny as you thought it'd be. For some reason, after these events, everything felt kind of awkward, and you had no idea why (and neither did the author).
Sighing once again, you snicker and tell Hawks that he should hurry up, not wanting him to be any more late than he already is. He couldn't help but let out a stifled laugh, agreeing with what you said.
Grabbing another pair of sneakers, he kisses your cheek and leaves through the window, but not before yelling "I love you, chickadee! Even though you poured sauce in my shoes!".
"Oh, shut it! I bet you did something to deserve it anyway! And don't forget to bring me something!" you also yelled.
'' No promises!'' he replied one last time, before receding from your view.
After making sure that he won't be home any time soon, you go into his living room, where you originally were, to lie down on his couch and wait for your winged doofus.
BONUS:
An hour or so later, you felt your phone/tablet vibrate, a signal for you to pick it up and see who has sent you message, or, a notification from a youtuber.
Turning on your device, you see a message from your so-called 'beloved':
'' Oh, btw, you owe new shoes, boo.''
You groan and turn it off, pretending you didn't see his demand.
A/N:
Now....idk if you have noticed, but I have kind of lost motivation halfway through the fan fic, and I also didn't know what to write because...it didn't really make sense, ya dig?
Oh yeah, this fan fic was supposed to be about Hawks trying to get revenge on you, but I guess it didn't work out. I was thinking about making a part 2 about it, where he actually gets revenge lol.
Umm...it didn't come out very great...as I thought it would...it looked better in my mind, but oh well...it is what is is.
#Kuma chan writes#my hero academia#boku no hero academia#bnha#mha#mha crack#y/n#mha x y/n#bnha x y/n#mha x reader#bnha x reader#my hero academia x reader#hawks#hawks mha#hawks bnha#hawks x reader#my hero academia hawks#hawks boku no hero academia#fan fiction#mha fanfiction#hawks fanfic#mha funny#keigo takami#keigo takami x reader#takami keigo#mha takami keigo#mha oneshot#keigo x reader#hawks oneshot#oneshot
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Are you a fan of My Chemical Romance?
Never was much of one. I don’t even have a favorite song of theirs.
When was the last time you had your ears cleaned?:
Like half an hour ago after I took a shower.
What's your morning routine?:
I typically wake up anywhere between 7:30-8, so before my shift starts at 9 I will usually make a decision on whether I’ll go back to sleep for one last nap, or spend the extra minutes awake and be on like YouTube or whatever. By like 8:50 that’s usually my signal to get up for real and by then I’ll do a streak of little errands before starting work - heating up the water for my coffee, making my bed, washing my face, peeing, etc.
Does the future scare you?:
The only thing I’m afraid of is the possibility of me not making the most of it. But I’m generally pretty optimistic and open-minded about the future.
Do you think anyone dislikes you for no reason?:
Not that I know of.
Where did you last adventure to?:
I went to Pinto on a whim last Sunday since I had no plans for that entire weekend, and so I thought going to a museum was a good way to maximize the remaining freedom I had before starting another work week.
Have you ever read a book in an entire day?:
Yeah, at least when I used to read.
What always makes you feel better when you are upset?:
My dogs, BTS, and food.
Have you ever been to a horse race?:
Nopes.
How did you get your most noticeable scar?:
I don’t have any noticeable ones, at least - all my scars are very if you know you know lol. That said, my most notable one came from an incident when I was a kid; another kid wanted to hit me in the eye with a glass bottle, but he missed and got me in the eyebrow. It bled all over, of course, but I’m really glad it didn’t wind up having a lasting appearance. These days I have to point it out to my friends if they really want to spot the scar.
When is the last time you had candy?:
I had chocolate candy a couple of weeks ago.
Have you ever taken back an ex or friend after they done something bad?:
Yep.
What did you last borrow?:
My mom’s earphones.
If you were to get arrested, what do you think it'd be for?:
Probably fighting the police. I don’t trust most of them to begin with, so.
What song did you last sing along to?:
Autumn Outside the Post Office.
Who is someone you strive to be more like?:
I don’t really have any inspirations or role models...but if anything, work-wise, I try to be even half as resilent as Bea is, I guess. I don’t know how she does what she does and how she consistently doesn’t miss a beat.
What last made you laugh?:
That BTS VLive when Taehyung literally napped in front of the camera while we were all waiting with him for the Proof performance thing on YouTube.
What does your hair look like right now?:
It’s in a haphazard bun, nothing remarkable.
How many people do you know that are pregnant right now?:
One.
Milk or Juice?:
Milk, even though I never drink it on its own. I do like it as an ingredient in dishes, though. As for juice, I’m just not a fan.
Do you like to vent on social media?:
Nah, I’ve since had a preference for keeping my shit more private now - also just because I have co-workers following me and they don’t need to see my rants, work-related or otherwise. I do rant on here but my relationship with Tumblr is clearly very different from how I treat my other social media accounts.
Did you go outside much today?:
Idk what you’d count as ‘much,’ but yes I have been out. We went to church in the morning, then we went to my grandma and cousins’ for a quick visit. My mom also had to run a few errands so we had a couple of stopovers at a computer shop to have something printed, and a water refilling station.
What would you say to someone who is having a hard time mentally?:
It would depend on their situation.
Have you read any news articles today?:
I don’t think I have. I’ve barely touched social media today and that’s my usual lead for articles I might be interested in reading.
If you have any pets/kids, what are they currently doing?:
My mom and siblings took Aki out so he can get groomed and his fur trimmed (I stayed behind because I’m sooooo sleepy and need to spend my last weekend hours just staying in lol). Cooper is probably napping downstairs.
Do you own any plaid pajamas?:
I do, actually. It’s purple, but it’s in a plaid design.
What is your favorite thing to put whipped cream on?:
Pancakes.
Do you know how to play pool?:
Nah. I don’t even know how to properly hit the balls with the cue stick.
Have you ever held a chicken?:
Don’t think I have!
Do you polish your nails?:
Nah.
Do you like to watch true crimes shows? What's your favorite?:
Not really. I followed Buzzfeed Unsolved but that’s over now; that was my main go-to if I wanted to watch anything on crime, though. I haven’t gotten into any similar shows since.
Do you remember the last time you seen a rainbow?:
I may have seen one recently but I can’t remember one.
What color is your pants?:
I wore a blue pair this morning, but I switched it to black shorts this afternoon.
Do you try to exercise every day?:
No, it’s personally never been a priority though I know it should. My body could not be assed, though.
If you have any piercings, what color is your jewelry?:
My ears are technically pierced but I have not worn earrings since I was 10, when I did something to botch the left piercing. Anyway, I do wear clip-ons, which I prefer to be silver for the most part.
Do you know your blood type?:
Honestly, no. I keep forgetting which one is it.
Have you ever purchased anything from American Eagle?:
Nope.
Can you hear any birds from where you are?:
Nope, everything is a bit overpowered by the fan beside me and the sound of the TV playing in the living room.
Do you like the music being released in the 2020's?:
You know it’s so weird that I have close to zero knowledge on today’s music. I wouldn’t be able to tell you who’s getting played the most on the radio, or who has been releasing singles -- super disorienting to me considering I used to play so much attention to Top 40 lol. My listening habits have been completely one-sided since discovering BTS a little over a year ago.
Would you say that you have a loud laugh?:
It can be loud, but I don’t think it’s distinctly so.
Any uncommon pet peeves?:
Aggressively grazing utensils across a plate. I’ve never seen anybody annoyed by it (unless everyone’s good at hiding their discomfort?) but I can’t help but physically wince every time I hear That Noise. It’s almost always automatic for me.
Do you like any weird food combinations? :
A bunch of stuff + mayonnaise.
Do you own any ripped jeans?:
Yep.
When you were in school, what foods did you like from the cafeteria?:
I never bought full meals because I wanted to save the meager allowance I got to go out with my friends on weekends, so what I did was hang by the snack booths instead. That said, I always got those mini cinnamon rolls that the school would sell for like P5 each.
Do you currently see anything blue from where you're sitting?:
Yes, my sister’s umbrella.
How long have you been on Bzoink?:
I’ve used it to look for surveys since 2009 but have never been a member.
How many surveys have you ever created?:
I’ve never made one.
What is your daily screen time?:
On my phone at least, it tells me I’m runnnig 7 hours and 42 minutes for today alone. So...basically the entire day LOL.
Have any plans for the rest of the day?:
Take a couple of surveys, finish this bowl of ramen that I made, enjoy maybe 2-3 episodes of Run BTS, and mentally prepare for tomorrow.
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