Background: The birds never came around to sing
anymore. They used to, whenever she had a treat for them they’d come and
sing a little song for her at her apartment balcony. They’d twitter away
and give her that moment of fleeting happiness that rarely came anymore.
But they had stopped coming. No bluebirds, no doves, no chickadees, not
even pigeons wanted to come around anymore. She looked guiltily at the
pile of feathered carcasses outside her balcony door. They would chirp
until they were grabbed up and ripped to shreds, and they would look so
frightened because they never knew what it was. Sometimes they were hands.
Sometimes they were claws. Maybe they were something else entirely. But
they did things, mean things to anything that did as much as live. She
couldn’t do anything about them. There was a tapping outside that was loud
enough to make her look up from her glass of water. She didn’t want to go
out to get anything to eat so she just had a glass of water for breakfast
every morning unless she had leftovers from last night’s delivery. A bird
had landed outside on the balcony railing. She sat and stared at it for a
few seconds. It began to chirp as it looked down at the pile of blood and
feathers on the surface below. She looked down at her water again before
something with a squat stature and vomit-yellow skin rushed out of her
bedroom and dove through the sliding balcony door. She didn’t see much of
it before it went through the glass, except it had a short tail and a
small two-elbowed arm where its left eye should’ve been and many teeth
coming out of its jagged-looking snout. And it had wooden legs. They
clunked against the floor with every step. It ran and smashed through the
window and the pigeon tried to fly away but it wasn’t fast enough. The
poor bird was grabbed in a pair of clawed hands and the two of them went
falling down to the concrete far beneath her balcony. She winced as the
glass shattered. She’d have to get that replaced. Poor bird. Should’ve
known better. After finishing her glass of water she went back into her
bedroom and began to change into the best clothes she had - a white
blouse, a long drab skirt, and her good pair of shoes. She would need to
look somewhat decent today. Today was the day she went in and asked for a
raise. She didn’t want to go out, didn’t want to be around all those
people. The idea scared her so much that she had convinced her boss to
give her a home job because she was terrified and worried about it all at
the same time. She needed it before she dragged herself into debt, what
with the car payments (not that she used it often but it was handy to
have) and ordering delivery almost every night and the rent on her
apartment. That and she needed to get those prescriptions that didn’t
work. The doctors had given her pills upon pills to help her deal with her
conditions, but none of them worked. They just made her feel sick all the
time so she had stopped taking them after the second year, though she
still had to buy them or they’d get worried and bring her in again.
Nothing could treat all the various phobias and other indeterminable
things she had. She glanced at the clock over her refrigerator. 9:47. And
then she looked at the stopwatch she always left on the dinner table.
14:23:49. It would be best if she got to the office before noon, that way
she could get back home long before the stopwatch reached zero. Then there
was the matter of road conditions, though the weather just looked the
slightest bit drizzly. She hoped there were no accidents on the way.
Character Personality A traffic jam. She hated traffic jams. They made
everything go so slowly. She might as well just get out and walk. It took
too long, gave her too much time. When she had time, she began to think.
Thinking made her remember. She couldn’t remember, didn’t want to
remember. Not any of the things she had done when she had been stripped of
all the things that had made her a good little girl. She switched on her
radio and turned up the volume, fiddled with her rearview mirror, shuffled
through her glove compartment. Nothing. She sat there and just breathed so
she could completely clear her mind. She sat in her car with her hands on
the wheel and her feet on the pedals and the radio off. Then she began to
sob. She tried to stop it for the first few seconds, only allowing the
tears to come through first, but that never worked because she always felt
so sad and it had to happen at least once a day anyways. Her cries weren’t
heard over the other radios in the other cars and the tears began to sting
at her cheeks. She shook with her sob-racked body and let herself go limp
with everything but her hands. She closed her eyes and stared down at her
knees, slowly banging her head against the steering wheel and tightening
her grip. And then she stopped crying. She stopped trembling and stopped
hitting her head and looked up again like it had never happened. She
didn’t wipe the tears away and her eyes didn’t stop tearing either. There
was a child in the car ahead of her. He might’ve been around twelve and
was looking at her as if he was concerned. Or frightened. She sniffled,
waved at the boy, and smiled gently. Maybe if she pretended she wasn’t
afraid they wouldn’t come. He had this strange pout on his face before
slowly turning around and facing forward again. It took a few minutes for
the jam to clear up. The boy hadn’t looked back at her again.
Powers and Abilities
Teraphobia
- Power: Weapons
Creation
- Level: Supreme
- Advantage: Ranged and Melee Attack! Attack is equally
effective at range and up close.
It had
begun to rain lightly. The sky was completely blocked out by depressing
gray rainclouds. The right windshield wiper on her car didn’t work, and
she had neglected to get it fixed because she didn’t want to go out and
she never had any passengers anyways. It was such a dreary day. She
supposed it was fitting, considering someone always had to die when she
went outside and it would be horrible for someone to die violently on a
beautiful day. She stopped at a walkway. A male crossing guard had halted
traffic to let across a bunch of second graders. Some of them had
umbrellas. She felt a nagging sensation and pulled the stopwatch out of
her pocket again. 12:39:32. Plenty of time. She caught a motion out of the
corner of her eye. She ignored it at first, and then it stepped directly
into her line of sight. It was a man wearing a cheesy cowboy getup - sky
blue button-up shirt with leather tassels lining the pockets, faded blue
jeans underneath black leather stirrups, cowboy boots, and a brick red hat
with a string that went around the chin. It walked strangely, limping
almost, because one leg was about a foot shorter than the other. It also
had three-and-a-half arms, the spare arm sticking out of its right armpit
and the half from the elbow up jutting through its stomach. All four hands
held guns. A permanent wide toothy grin was frozen on its face like it was
made of polished wood. Its eyes were just little black dots on its
forehead. It was smiling at the crossing guard and slowly walking up to
with all the guns drawn. Oh God not again. She felt the fear crawling up
in her and all the muscles in her jaw loosen. But she couldn’t be
petrified. She had to warn him, had to stop him from being murdered out in
broad daylight like all the others. She grasped frantically at the door
latch, but it was jammed so she started to bang against her window with an
open palm and scream out, trying to tell him to run away. Then the bullets
began to fly. Two, five, eight, nine, twelve. The crossing guard fell down
and all of the screaming children scattered and none of them saw or heard
what had done it except for her and she had been too late. The four-armed
cowboy with the guns and the grin was gone now, had walked on its merry
way. Now all she could do was feel ashamed, continue on her way, and hope
the police wouldn’t track her down for questioning.
Paraisthiphobia
- Power: Illusion
Creation
- Level: Supreme
- Advantage: Auto-Hit This mental attack hits the target
automatically, but may or may not effect them.
She was at the office now. It had taken awhile to get
past the front desk and she didn’t want to take the elevator because she
might have to take it with other people but she was where she wanted to be
now - the working space of the SLJ Headquarters, where most of the
paperwork was written up, filed, and kept. That’s what she did, organize
records from her home computer. She hadn’t wanted to come and had tried to
call about a raise, but her boss insisted that she come by and ask for it
in person. Now she was trying to keep her breathing rhythmic as she sat on
one of the seats outside Mr. Arnold’s door. Breathing evenly was supposed
to keep her relaxed, a doctor had said. She had seen a tall greasy-haired
womanish figure following one of the interns into the bathroom, trying to
wrap a choke-wire around his neck, when Mr. Harvey the secretary had told
her to take a seat. She tried to stop shaking. Mr. Harvey noticed and
jokingly said that Mr. Arnold seemed to have that effect on people. She
closed her eyes and tried to ignore the quiet strangled gurgling sounds
that would eventually be followed by cries of confusion and panic when
someone discovered the body. Ignoring things seemed to work better. There
was some shuffling within Mr. Arnold’s office. Mr. Harvey didn’t care. She
wasn’t able to control her trembling for a few seconds. A few more seconds
of shuffling were heard within and the door opened, allowing one of the
other interns to leave while buttoning up her blouse. There was a call
from inside. “Come in.” She did as told, just in time to see Mr. Arnold
adjusting his tie and repositioning himself in his tall expensive leather
chair. “Ah, Ms. Branson. Take a seat.” Already he had changed modes, from
sweet-talker to strictly business. She did as she was told again,
apprehensively getting in the smaller of the two chairs sitting across
from his desk. As she sat down, her head dipped for just a second, taking
her eyes away from the man behind the desk. A pen rolled off his desk and
fell to the floor. When she was seated, she raised her head for a glance
at him for just a second before returning to her usual routine of
anxiously avoiding eye contact and shifting in her seat. And then she was
terrified and trying to sink into her chair, stiffly grasping at the arms
so she didn’t fall in. It stood behind him - a court jester in red and
black with a frilly white coif around its neck and an eternal impossible
smile on its white-painted face and an ivory scythe in its gloved hands.
She began to silently choke on her own cries, tried to bury her head in
the backrest. The jester prepared to take a giant swing that would lop his
head off. Mr. Arnold bent down to get the fallen pen after searching the
floor. The scythe swished over the back of his neck and the jester span to
the floor with the power of the swing. Mr. Arnold sat back up as the
jester got to its feet, corners of its mouth looking like they were slowly
turning down. Her arms flailed stiffly as she tried to gain the wit to
point at it, the left side of her face pushed into the seat. Mr. Arnold
frowned slightly. “Something wrong, Ms. Branson?” The jester behind him
raised its scythe over its head, anxiously wanting to slice Mr. Arnold’s
head in half. He turned his seat to a side and stood up just as the jester
took its downswing. The tip buried itself into a mound of papers, barely
nicking the desk itself. Mr. Arnold stepped up close to examine her. “Hey,
are you okay?” The jester had raised its scythe again, had it over its
head again. She was terrified now, barely managed to crawl her way out of
the seat and drop to the floor before the scythe’s tip buried itself into
Mr. Arnold’s shoulder. He screamed. She screamed. It chuckled through its
clenched grinning teeth. The scythe was pulled strongly from his shoulder,
nearly ripping the rest of his arm off. He turned around to see what had
happened and was surprised when he saw nothing. The jester pulled back
again and gave a mighty swing as she stumbled out the door past Mr.
Harvey, checking to see what was the matter, and curled into a ball on the
floor before going into another crying fit. Mr. Harvey dropped backward
and scuttled away from the office as Mr. Arnold’s head popped clean off
his neck.
Enochlophobia
Today hadn’t
gone nearly the way she had wanted it to. No raise, no way to buy her
medication, no way to keep them from coming over to her apartment and
bringing her to an institution and lock her up. She might have to sell her
car to buy them just so she could drop them in her sink drain one by one.
All in all, it had been a fairly unsettling morning. The police had come
in to investigate. Mr. Harvey refused to let her go because he thought she
was a witness to a murder and that she would be wanted for questioning.
They had kept her for hours so they could listen to her lies because if
she told them what had happened they’d never believe her. They’d kept her
for too long. Too little time now. She knew. She checked her stopwatch.
2:54:26. Oh God the ride to the SLJ Documentation Facility had taken
somewhere over two hours, the wait had taken a little under an hour, the
murder had taken some ten minutes, and they had kept her for questioning
for nine hours. They didn’t want anyone to leave until they’d questioned
everybody about Mr. Arnold and the strangled intern in the bathroom. She
needed to get home now before time ran out. She was fumbling with her keys
when she saw it. It was some man in a ragged business suit holding a stick
sharpened at one end and standing on stilts. Either stilts or his legs
below the knees were very long. He was hobbling towards a mother and the
child toddling at her side. The screams caught in her throat and she began
to run. She could move faster than the man on stilts but it was closer to
them than she was. She ran across the street and barely avoided getting
hit by the oncoming traffic as it raised the stick up and jabbed it down
through the top of the mother’s skull. The boy heard a sound that went
*splurch* and felt his mother’s grip loosen but when he looked up to see
what was the matter he only saw her slacked jaw and the blood beginning to
drip down from her head. She had gotten there and scooped up the child and
began to run away before the stilt-man had time to take his spike out from
the mother’s head. She had to run away, she didn’t want anybody to die.
She had to at least try and stop them from killing anybody. The boy in her
arms was puzzled and began to ask questions. “Where’s mommy? Where’re we
going?” But she didn’t answer. She ran for as long as she could because
she knew there were people chasing her and thinking she was kidnapping,
and when she finally couldn’t run anymore she hobbled into a dark alley.
She hid behind a dumpster and rocked back and forth on her knees with the
child in her arms and cried loudly into his shoulder. She tried to tell
him that everything was going to be okay and that no one was going to hurt
him but she couldn’t because she was crying too hard. She began to scream
when she felt the fingers prying at her, the concerned voices telling her
to let go. She didn’t have any energy left and they pried him away from
her within a few seconds. She tried to scream out “But they’ll kill you
all!” but it came out broken and garbled and unintelligible. She couldn’t
see how many people there were through the tears, but they all turned and
walked away because they were more concerned with the child that had been
kidnapped from the mother that had just been murdered and they didn’t know
it. They didn’t know, they didn’t care about her. It was a fact of her
life that no one cared, and if by chance someone did they would stop soon
or she would convince them that she was alright. She didn’t want to be
around people. When people were around her they’d get killed by things
they couldn’t see but she could see too well for her own health. She began
to bawl, letting everything fall out. She wasn’t even diverted from her
fit when a man stepped out from a doorway. He looked ragged and smelled of
alcohol and walked every step like he was going to fall down. But he was
real. He was smiling with blackened rotting teeth and the stench of
whiskey wafting around him and his words slurred by his drunkenness.
“You’ve got a pretty mouth.”
Isolophobia
- Power: Matter
Animation
- Level: Supreme
- Advantage: Area Effect This attack causes damage in a large,
circular area.
- Advantage: Seeker Ranged attack hunts target.
- Advantage: Ranged and Melee Attack! Attack is equally
effective at range and up close.
- Advantage: Multi Attack Attack can hit multiple times during
one strike.
Such a change of pace this
was. Just a couple of hours ago she had been rocking back and forth and
crying to herself because she couldn’t even save a child’s life right. Now
she had her panties around her ankles and was crying to herself because
she was being taken advantage of in a time of weakness. Who was she
kidding? She was always weak. And now she was paying for it. The drunken
man had dragged her to a foul abandoned apartment building nearby that was
as clean as he was and smelling worse, fondling and pawing her nearly
every step of the way, thrown her into a bathroom, locked it from the
outside for awhile, and then came to take her out after ‘cleaning himself
up’. His snoring had been loud even from some stories up. There was no
point in banging on the walls and trying to knock the door down. She just
sat on the broken toilet, tried not to cry, and waited. She had checked
the stopwatch again when she heard him fumbling with the door lock.
00:14:05. No. No no no. Not good. Not good at all. Why couldn’t he have
waited just for a little longer, why didn’t he just leave her alone, why
why why? Why now? He had come to the door completely naked. She had tried
to sink into the bathtub. He dragged her into a room with peeling and
fading hot pink wallpaper barely visible beneath the rotting centerfolds
and magazine clippings. There was a decent mattress on a rotting bed
frame. He didn’t feel like violating her on the floor. She screamed and
swatted and clawed and hit him, but she was weak and cut her fingernails
every day. How miserable she was. How dirty she felt. How she wanted to be
pitied and held and told that everything was going to be okay and that no
one was going to hurt her. But it wasn’t going to happen. Nobody cared
that much. The doctors had tried to help her after she left the place her
guardians wanted her to call home, but all they succeeded in doing was
drying up her wallet. The psychologists just got fed up with her and
referred her to someone else until she was sent in circles and it became a
waste of time. She had no more tears left to cry. She didn’t want to cry
anymore. But she wanted to laugh for some reason though. Maybe because she
had spent so much time crying her mind decided on doing something else.
The drunkard raised himself off of her for just a second to look her over
and grin. Then he stopped grinning and tried to scream but choked on his
own blood. Four holes had been stabbed through his chest and stomach. Then
one went through his neck. He fell dead on her, bleeding and twitching
slightly. She didn’t panic, just gently crawling out from under him to the
middle of the rotting floor and staring at him from there, quietly rocking
back and forth in her dirty, sullied, bloodied clothes and forgetting that
her underwear was still around her ankles for just a moment. She had
gotten used to the death by now. After five years of it, that was all
someone could do. It was the hallucinations that really scared her. God
no. She had gotten used to it? Used to the blood and pain? No. She shook
her head to nobody. He had it coming anyway. She screamed and clutched at
her head. No. She couldn’t do this again. She couldn’t turn back to the
cold. A name rung in her head. She wanted to bang her head on the floor
until it stopped and she wasn’t having these evil dirty thoughts anymore.
The stopwatch in her pocket had been beeping. She hadn’t noticed it before
and took it out of her pocket. 00:00:47. It had been set to give a
minute-early warning before hitting zero. She shut her eyes as the watch
counted down. She wanted to go home.
Thanatophobia
One jumpy
and erratic thought was in her mind as the clock counted down. 00:00:04.
Every 127 hours. 00:00:03. Why was the number 127 important, anyways?
00:00:02. It couldn’t be how many people had been killed that day when it
had all really started. 00:00:01. Maybe it was how long...? 00:00:00. She
shut her eyes and tried to brace herself, instead shaking in misery and
letting little gasping sounds escape from her mouth. Skittering noises
like claws scraping against wood pervaded her hearing. And then things
began to brush by her, wispy things that had the feathery feel of shadow
if shadow ever had a texture. It felt cold. And then there was the
giggling, that frightful giggling that was so out-of-place here. The
laughter of children that echoed in her head because she had heard it so
many times before. And that wasn’t even what she was afraid of the most.
It was what coming next. So she waited and waited and heard nothing more.
Her eyes opened. There wasn’t a single person within the building other
than the man that had just died. Not a sound to be heard though that
changed soon enough. There was a clicking of shoes against the floor. The
pace was light and even and steady and it was slowly walking her way from
the hallway outside. Through the door walked a little girl who was no more
than seven and glowing brilliantly like a big candle flame. Her face was
blank and surrounded by long brown hair. Every 127 hours, the only
recurring one. Her mouth began to move, the voice ensuing awash with
coldness and echoing with hundreds of pained and miserable voices of those
who had died. “Time to go, Matilda.” No. No no no, she didn’t want to go.
She never wanted to go. She already knew where she’d be going. Her eyes
shut tight and her head began to swing back and forth, pitifully begging,
pleading “...no, no, please....” A small hand clasped around hers, began
to tug at her, the voice emerging from coldness and into a kinder tone
with only a hint of urgency. “It’s time to go.” She already knew what she
was trying to get her to do, already knew what was waiting for her. Only
with reluctance did she haltingly get to her feet. “Come on.” The child
led her to a chair standing in the center of the room where there hadn’t
been there before. “Get up.” She didn’t say anything, just giving a
whimper in response. “Get up.” So she did, slowly putting one foot on the
chair and then following with the other as the child held her hand. Her
eyes were closed again. There was something lightly brushing against her
face and she already knew what it was. “Stop being so scared.” The girl
was talking right into her ear. Her eyes fluttered open for just a second,
long enough to see a vibrant little pair of hands reach for the noose
dangling in front of her face. The noose. The girl put it over her head,
looped it around her neck and under her chin. No. “You can do it,
Matilda.” They sounded like they should be spoken with a mocking tone but
they weren’t. It was just honesty, the pure loving honesty of a once-pure
child that used to do nothing but pick daises and be loved by her parents.
Daises were her favorite. “I believe in you.” How badly she missed her
parents. She was simply standing there now, without even wanting to move.
“Don’t worry. It’ll only take a few seconds, and it’ll hurt a little, but
then the pain’ll be all gone.” She wanted to curl up into a ball again and
forget the world existed but she couldn’t because if she tried the noose
would snap tight and dangle her feet right above the floor. Her eyes shut
tight because she didn’t want to cry. Her mouth shut tight because she
didn’t want to scream. Slowly and stiffly she shook her head. No. Never.
Won’t jump. Too afraid to jump. She knew the child was smiling. “You can
do nearly anything if you set your mind to it.” But she still refused,
still shaking her head in between the sobs that forced their way out of
her throat. The child sighed in disappointment, just like every other
time. “Fine.” She only heard light footstep slowly and evenly walking
away. Not until the footsteps faded did she open her eyes. She had
forgotten to breathe. And that her hands weren’t bound. Her fingers
shakily made their way to the noose and took it off. The corpse of the
drunkard wasn’t looking at her, was lying on its stomach and its face was
staring at the wall. Good. She never wanted anybody to see her like this.
Her stopwatch had stopped beeping. It was set to automatically reset every
127 hours. She stood there, sniveling and sniffling and feeling the way
she felt every time she came but worse. She’d only been away from her
apartment building a few times when she came before. Her clothes were
soiled. And her panties were still around her ankles. She pulled them up
before getting off the chair. She glanced at the body for a moment before
taking a mildewed blanket from underneath the rotting bedframe and
covering his body. Without a cry or whimper or scream, she slowly shuffled
away from the bed, into the hallway, and eventually going back outside. It
was dark, probably past curfew. No one else should be outside. She’d be
alone again. Her car was still in the Documentation Division parking lot.
She ran all the way just to be safe.
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