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 Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 4:50 pm
It was a Friday night, and Jada was coming home later than she'd planned from the library downtown. They were overhauling more sections, and she had volunteered to stay late with the other workers. Most of them had taken taxicabs; Jada had let them go first. It wasn't until her particular taxicab came, and she was digging in her pockets to pull out her wallet that she realized she didn't have any cash.
Taxis didn't take debit cards.
Taxi cab drivers also didn't take hopeful smiles as payment. He dropped her off at the subway, three blocks away, kicking her out and taking another passenger in her place and zooming away, leaving her alone downtown near the subway.
There were homeless people everywhere! Not that it really bothered her, if anyone tried to mess with her she'd just... scream like a baby, and hope she could remember her kickboxing lessons. Not that kickboxing was any good when one was wearing Jimmy Choo high heels and a skirt.
It was almost 10:00, and this was the last train of the night. She carefully acquired a ticket, paranoid violet eyes looking at every shadow as though a hobo was going to leap forth and jump her. None did, though she saw a few sizing her up. She just tilted her chin, trying to look confident.
There were sticky spots on the concrete floor of the subway terminal; she stepped around those she could, trying not to curse as the black spike of one of her heels went squarely into a pink wad of... something. It was easy enough to wrench herself free, and she made it onto the subway with little further mishap, sliding onto the cushioned bench, avoiding the torn and wet spots. This late at night, there were only a few others taking the subway. Everyone knew the stories; it was why cabs were so busy. No one in their right mind wanted to be alone after dark.
People died that way.
... was that a booger on the seat?
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Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 5:14 pm
Across from her sat a boy lounging on two subway seats, his legs kicked open wide like seat boundaries didn't apply to him. To be fair, it was 10:00. No one was going to sit next to him anyway. He wasn't asleep; he had his headphones in to some kind of MP3 player and he was inspecting what looked like a handicam, cradled in his hands and hanging from a broad black strap around his neck.
He looked like a high schooler. A pretty good-looking high schooler, all things considered -- lanky, blonde, dressed in a black hoodie, a beat-up Sex Pistols T-shirt, black corduroy skinnys. And he was far too engrossed in looking at his handicam to harass her, which was the #1 consideration when it came to strangers on the subway, really; all good. The boy snapped the preview screen on his handicam shut, apparently satisfied, shoved his hands in his hoodie pockets and closed his eyes.
The subway slammed to an abrupt halt. The boy's eyes snapped open. Other people in the car had cried out in alarm and confusion, but he merely blinked and sat up as all the lights in the subway came on again, in silence -- then, as they started to snap off again, one by one, starting from a faraway car and traveling towards them, he pulled his earbuds out.
"The state of public transportation in America," he remarked, "really leaves something to be desired, don't you think?"
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Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 6:11 pm
The subway slammed to an abrupt halt. Jada's body tilted towards the mysterious yellow-and-green slightly slimy lump and she clutched at the back of her seat desperately trying to remain balanced. When she finally spoke she wasn't being very polite, her tone a mix between befuddled and annoyed. "I've never had to sink to transportation like this before." she said frankly.
She stood, brushing something white off of her black skirt and cautiously gripping onto one of the standing hooks. "It's disgusting." How could people handle this, day in and day out? She looked him over, curious; he seemed a little younger than her, even though she was no judge of age.
How far was she from her stop? She glanced out the window, purple eyes narrowed thoughtfully. She'd seen horror movies, where cars stopped in the subways, and people screaming and running in the darkness. Jack the Ripper, or werewolves or something crazy like that. "What's up with the lights?" they were doing funny things, making her lip curl. "And does the subway do this often?"
She gingerly brushed a curl out of her face, hesitant to get her hands near her face after they'd been touching the germs on that seat, even for the briefest moment. What if something made her break out?
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Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 6:59 pm
"No," said the boy. As the lights continued to shut off, creeping towards them, he wound his iPod headphones around his fingers to make a neat loop before pocketing them, as if this would prevent them from becoming tangled. The lights started to shut off in the car next to them. The boy took off his hoodie, wrapped the handicam in it and stowed it gingerly in his backpack: a lime green Jansport.
Their car began to darken. "In my experience this tends to happen when everyone is about to die," said the boy, now sitting in his seat looking up at the ceiling with a thoughtful air. He sounded like he was talking about the weather. "Excuse me one moment."
The last light snapped out and they were plunged into darkness. A moment later a bright, painful spot of light appeared: the boy's iPod. He was using it as a flashlight -- he clambered over his seat and started feeling around the windows, with no explanation to Jada as to the purpose of this, until he found a red lever with the light and pulled it. One of the windows snapped open.
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Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 8:57 pm
"Aren't you Sally Sunshine?" she asked, tone dry. Watched the lights, eyes narrowing. They were starting to go out in the car in front of them now, and she tugged out her cellular phone just as the boy did.
He knew what he was looking for, and she subconsciously drifted in his general direction rather than stay on the far side of the train car. She watched him, not asking any questions, her back to the windows. "Shouldn't we just stay in the car until they get the train back going again?" she asked the blonde. "I personally don't have the foggiest on where these lines run."
The darkness was getting to her though. Especially with the events of the last... week? She stepped away from the blonde stranger, watching the lights go out in the cars behind them. And then it was all darkness, only a few lights in the darkness from other cars with the good idea to also use their cell phone.
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Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 9:31 am
In response the boy climbed off the seat and onto the one opposite, finding a similar emergency lever and pulling it. The window opposite sprung open too. "I am staying in the car," he answered. As if to prove it he sat down on the neighboring seat and leaned back again, idly clicking at his iPod to keep the light on. It was the brightest and only illumination in the subway car, and mostly it illuminated his face: fair-skinned, elfin, and blinking owlishly into the darkness. He didn't move any further. Whatever his mission had been, opening two windows directly opposite one another had accomplished it.
He looked down at his iPod and started clicking through album covers. Coldplay's Viva La Vida came up; so did U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind. "You see a lot of horror movies?" he asked conversationally.
Outside the subway tunnel was very faintly lit and dead silent. The conversation topic did not seem especially relevant.
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Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 1:28 pm
She sat down next to him, with an "Oh. Good," not wanting to be along on the other side of the darkened subway. There was nothing to hear, not even from the other passenger in their car, and with the warm, heated air that flowed into the car through the windows, there came a smell of something else.
Death. Or some kind of disease. Sick and stale, almost more suffocating to her than the air that had been in the car. Was this what subways smelled like? It was a tunnel, she supposed, pretty well closed off from fresh breezes excepting the cars that ran through it. The tracks the subway ran on probably heated up and sparked every so often; she could see that being a cause for the alien smell.
A song was an average of three minutes. Jada managed to sit through the two songs before she was standing, tapping her toes on the metal and trying very hard to remember her manners. "Horror movies? Not a lot. Just enough that I know in a zombie apocalypse to double tap and be glad I have a good cardio programme in my every day life; If I start seeing zombie dogs I know Umbrella has gone too far, and I know that it is never a good thing to hear nothing but clicking coming from the darkness." Did Zombieland qualify as a horror movie? "And men in ski masks are give a wide berth." it was added as an afterthought.
The conversation topic was horribly relevant considering that this was a perfect setting for a horror movie. At least it wasn't a Predator situation.
"What about you?" she let her body fall into the seat that she'd been in earlier, using her phone light to avoid that thing. "Watch a lot of horror?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 2:32 pm
"A bit," said the boy. He clicked to "Lovers in Japan" and turned up the volume, though apparently not enough to prevent him from talking to her, as he turned to look at her a moment later, smiling faintly in recollection. "I suppose that's an understatement. I watch a lot of horror films," he said. "Bad horror films. Good horror films. David Cronenberg horror films." Apparently this was a separate category. "Not just for fun -- well, that's inaccurate, it is just for fun, but I'm planning to go to film school also for fun," he gestured with one of his free hands, which was spidery and thin, "so I can make them for a living. For fun."
The conversation topic seemed to have cheered him up a little, so he settled back into his seat with a contented smile. "In any case, there should be auxiliary power for a subway line," he said, "and moreover, there should be announcements. That's unsettling enough." He didn't sound unsettled. "But really, the real disconcerting bit," or disconcerted, for that matter, "is how there we should be able to hear other trains right now, now that the windows are open. Listen."
They listened. There were none: just the faint, breathy creaking of the breeze, and some far-off, clanging echoes. And some kind of vibration in the train, but that was normal -- wasn't it?
"Disconcerting," said the boy in wonder. He'd pulled out his earbuds again. "I'm Dylan Rasmussen. If I asked you to stay in your seat for now, would you oblige me?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 3:18 pm
"Sounds like a plan for the future." she agreed. "I've never thought too much about making movies." She didn't have the creativity required to envision a whole new world.
He settled back in his seat, she turned around to stare out the window, listening to him with half an ear. There was an odd silence. Something Eerie about all of this. "I'm Jada Chamberlyn." she turned back to him, plopping down in her seat obediently. Would she stay in her seat? Certainly, unless something happened. The air was getting heavier to her, the dim light that lit the tracks and allowed her a glimpse of things moving in the other cars pressing like a weight on her mind.
She pulled her purse closer to her, hand firm on a lump she could feel inside. Now that he had pointed out the oddities to her of all of this, she wasn't liking it. And if something did happen here, in this small little train car, the only place for her to go would be out the window, into that darkness.
That would be fine, another part of her mind decided. Safety in darkness.
"For now, I'd oblige you."
Who knew how long 'For now' would be? Hopefully the train would get started soon.
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Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 5:20 pm
There was a curious wind blowing outside. Dylan ignored it for the moment, head resting against the window as his lavender eyes wandered the ceiling in thought. "For now?" he echoed, sounding a little amused. He had a voice best described as pale, if a voice could have a color: it was quiet, a little hollow, with a bit of a rasp to it. Like he had smoker's lung or some other condition. "And what were you planning to do in the other instance, might I ask?"
He lost interest in his question almost as soon as he asked it, as soon he was holding one hand out the window to feel the wind; his expression darkened noticeably, but he said nothing about that. More noticeably, his hand was shaking -- very slightly, but it was shaking. It was strange, as his voice hadn't been, and he didn't look nervous -- rather, he looked poised on the tip of something, and like wheels were turning in his head at a speed that rendered them invisible to the rest of the world.
He must have noticed her looking. "Sorry about the tremors," he said. "I don't do a lot of uppers, but the pros are, you think like Barry Allen. Or Quicksilver. Marvel or DC, take your pick. The cons are, well, tremors. Gets the hall monitors on you like white on rice. Do you have any idea that I'm talking about illegal drugs or is that pure incomprehension I see in your pretty Tyrian purple eyes?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 5:53 pm
His voice seemed to be changing, just a little bit. Getting thinner, making Jada draw her eyebrows together. This air couldn't be good for him. Any minute she expected him to start coughing. It didn't look like he had an inhaler of any sort on him and if he started choking, she didn't know any CPR or the Heimlich maneuver.
"Where is the breeze coming from?" she asked, avoiding his first question. She had caught the faintest hint of the wind moving, entering the subway car. There was movement from the subway car in front of them. She pulled her eyes away from his shaking hand, outside the subway car, trying to see what they were doing.
She'd promised to stay in her seat.
The blunt, abrupt question from Dylan made her look more than mildly uncomfortable. "I wouldn't have had a clue that you were a druggie if you hadn't told me." her voice was tight. It was embarrassing that he'd read her naivete so clearly. She'd never encountered (that she knew of) someone who used illegal substances. And she'd certainly never had anyone admit it to her. "You don't have anything to apologize for."
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Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 6:04 pm
That last statement seemed to bring him up short: at you don't have anything to apologize for he looked up and at her, square in the eyes, for a moment or two as he said nothing. When this long instance of eye contact had become almost too uncomfortable to bear he tilted his head to one side, as if in assessment, and looked at her again. "It's all right," he said in that translucent voice of his. "I'm not contagious. I don't bite."
This might have been a sharp set-down from another person, but a slight smile came to Dylan Rasmussen's pale features. "You remind me, a bit, of someone I know," he said. "Jada Chamberlyn, is it? Do you mind if I call you Jada?" He raised his eyebrows. "Normally I wouldn't have the occasion to call you anything, but I'm afraid we'll be stuck here in a while. In fact, I'm afraid in the best case we'll be stuck here in a while. If our stuckness is brought to an abrupt halt then we can be sure that something very bad has happened to us. At least that's as far as I can reckon. Meth, you know, you work things out quickly," he gestured, "but sometimes you're wrong."
Dylan motioned to the window. "Stick your hand out and feel it. But keep your head in. If I'm not hallucinating it should be hot air, the wind."
In the silence it took her to do so, he closed his eyes again as he settled back in his seat. "Do you believe in the Destiny City monsters, Jada?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 6:21 pm
"I'd be very upset if you did try to bite me." she assured him with a faint smile. In fact, mental images of the elfin boy in front of her turning into a zombie made her frown faintly; but it wasn't him she was thinking about needing to beat up as she glanced around idly for something that looked as if it could serve for a defensive item.
He pulled her attention back to himself when he spoke her name. "I don't have a problem with you calling me by my name. Especially given the situation, it would be a pain if we flung around 'Miss Chamberlyn' and 'Mr. Rasmussen' the whole time, wouldn't it?" Her lipstick-red lips turned down in a frown. "And if our 'stuckness' is brought to an abrupt halt, couldn't it just as easily be Destiny City Officials actually doing their job?"
Her own hand slipped out the window. "It feels like breath." she said softly. "Not like a wind at all. I know it is supposed to be hot in the subway, but it's strange." Not like she'd expected at all. "Is it coming from the main engine of the subway?"
In her mind the front of a a subway train was similar to an old-fashioned choo choo train, complete with the stack and puffer of air. She knew it wasn't, but she didn't know anything about the technical specifications of the subway any more than she knew about the technical specifications of a space station.
She pulled herself back inside, looking at him very seriously as he settled back in the seat. "There are a lot of things that go bump in the night, Dylan. It's just a question of what gets to you first. Monsters?" she shrugged. "I believe in hateful people. I believe in people who are so warped by emotion for good or for ill that they could become monsters." What else was she supposed to say? She couldn't just tell some stranger on the subway, 'I'm not afraid of the things that go bump in the night, Dylan. I'm one of them.'
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Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 7:03 pm
Dylan fixed her with another look of assessment, this one decidedly less lackadaisical. Behind them both, in one of the cars further along the train, it sounded like someone was yelling -- then, abruptly, screaming from the next car over. The other people in their car, few as they were, were bolt upright in the darkness, some banging on the windows and yelling; one woman was frantically and fruitlessly trying to get reception on her cell phone; a man in a business suit kept futilely pulling the yellow emergency cord. No one was paying attention to Dylan and Jada, save a pair of girls who had stayed quiet and wide-eyed and backed against the car wall.
Next to her, Dylan hopped up to crouch on the seat and glanced between her and the window he had open with shutter-fast flicks of his eyes. "If I told you never to tell anyone what you saw me do right now," he said, "would you listen to me?"
He didn't wait for her to answer. He looked decidedly grim for a moment, with gritted teeth -- a very strange look on his face, which otherwise had seemed built only for placidity -- and then he took a deep breath, put his hands together, and then he was covered by a rain of black rose petals, petals that had the distinct, unsettling ring of transformation to them: from nowhere, it seemed, or from everywhere, and they stuck to him and carpeted him head to toe. Then they scattered again.
The boy, or young man, was now a senshi: or not quite. A Cavalier, with a bow in his hands. There was a loud bellow from outside and another blast of hot air. He paid it no heed. He was still staring at Jada.
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Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 7:29 pm
The noise was unexpected, a shriek, and then panic. The fear-sounds rang in Jada's ears, bouncing off the walls and sinking in from the windows. Her fists clenched, face going pinched and tight. Her eyes fixed themselves on Dylan as next to her, he oh-so-quickly wasn't Dylan anymore. In her mind, alarm bells were going wild.
A weapon meant one of two things to her. The Negaverse, and the memory of Kunzite, rapier at his/her side. But this was not a rapier.
He was watching her. She watched him back, meeting his eyes.
Her lips curved faintly. "I would have made sure no one was around." was all she said, softly. Her fists clenched reflexively around her purse, feeling the pen inside. He didn't know her; it was eerie that he was trusting her with the knowledge of what he was. She hadn't trusted even Virgo with that information, personally.
People were still screaming.
She couldn't change in here, no matter how much screaming there was. Scylla demanded the darkness, the heavy comforting pressure. "Are we going?" she asked finally, and gestured at the window.
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