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 Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2017 12:46 pm
Quote: You hear a weird scuttling on your rooftop in the middle of the night but it doesn’t sound like any rodent or noise you can easily identify. Whatever it is sounds like it’s doing a lot of movement—and is sizeable enough to give you decent concern. Is it an animal? A robber? If you listen closely you can hear strange chattering and an odd whisper; it feels like eyes are watching you, but you can’t see anything. The noise doesn’t last for long; whatever is on your roof is moving—but, if you are brave enough to check outside you might be sorely disappointed to find that you can’t see anything but shadows. Either way, there’s something out there…and it’s not safe to stay out for long.
Most of the time, it was a festering cesspool of the worst in humanity, and even Katie could concede that, but despite it's flaws she couldn't help but be enamored with the medium, with the raw power that came from accessibility to information. Armed with a smartphone, Katie had the world at her fingertips, a collective consciousness of every creator who'd ever thought to make a forum post, and in the past she'd been known to woo the infinite by scrolling through articles for hours at a time, absorbing trivia about the occult and the paranormal that did nothing but make her more difficult to socialize with other people. With school and volleyball to consider, she had less time to court her curiosity, but it was nevertheless something she regarded with a nostalgic fondness, curling up in her room with nothing save the light of her laptop and her phone keeping her up in the wee hours of the morning.
(It was a cheaper hobby than drinking, too, but luckily Katie hadn't had much time to indulge in either since her incident at the University Store.)
Her favorite thing about the internet was how it sometimes reached out and touched back on the small contributions she'd made, videos of strange happenings in her hometown and then in Destiny City once she'd moved out of her father's house. Most of the responses she got were apathetically negative, a chorus of variations on 'fake' or 'dumb'. But occasionally, she found herself a diamond in the rough, and she'd received that in the form of an email from one elexyorke@gmail.com.
New Comment on: the video that cost me my phone :C RIP had been the title of the message, and Katie opened it in the middle of class, tucking her phone under a notebook in the shitty-but-expected pretense of discretion. She remembered less of the video itself and more the frantic scramble to try and get to the shattered pieces of that device for the sim card, as well as the verbal lashing she'd gotten from her Aunt Carol when she came home with a mangled rectangle of metal and glass for a phone. But the writer had meaningful questions, insightful ones that gave her enough pause to rewatch the video a few times (sans audio) to try and remember precisely what was happening.
At some point a TA coughed pointedly, and Katie felt sheepish enough to put her phone away, but the moment she was out of class she was at her screen typing, her response detailed and energetic. It sounded like elexyorke@gmail.com might have been a local, so she sent off the response with a number, and a couple of ideas where she could meet up and talk about it in greater detail, and after a few back and forth responses they'd settled on a common meeting ground, getting coffee late in the evening at some place with just enough ambient noise to be drowned out.
Katie waited in one of the booths by a window, rocking her best festive gear in a t-shirt she'd cut by hand into a tank. She was already a two thirds of the way through her coffee, rattling the last bit around in the cup as she skimmed over her notes in an attempt to look the part of a professional that knew what they were doing. She wasn't really sure what to look for in this blind meeting, but like most everything else, she tried to keep her mind open. Elexyorke@gmail.com could have been anyone, even someone who was already there.
Something rattled above her, a quick shuffle of too many feet on the roof that made Katie jump in her seat. That...probably wasn't elexyorke@gmail.com. She tried to pay it no mind.
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Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 12:00 pm
Elex Yorke would've scoffed at himself a year ago.
As one who seldom put stock in Youtube videos and Twitter comments, Elex preferred to skip the sites altogether. While his peers scrolled through new loathsome videos about fidget spinners or popular pranks, Elex kept his interests confined. But now that the Negaverse had a hand in shaping his future, hoaxes and hauntings and harrowing videos garnered his attention quickly. Since meeting Rowan and discovering the man's vehemence against anything supernatural, Elex was led to wonder — how much of youma slipped into the popular consciousness? With cell phone cameras and speed photography and photoshop, who found belief in these creatures? And how did the public look at them for their stories of the supernatural?
The video still weighed on his mind. Any trained eye could confirm a youma, even through the digitally-fragmented images. Much of the comments confirmed sound manipulation, digital editing, acting, CG, hoax, hoax, hoax, fake, fake, fake. But Elex suspected truth — the owner of the phone encountered a youma, even if no such title was given. But did she know what it was? If so, how deep did that knowledge run? Was she simply a lucky civilian who escaped youma attention, or was she a sailor-suited warrior set to destroy the Negaverse?
Elex kept such careful questions off the internet; her offer for coffee in a public house was enough to blend their appearances into a wall of empty faces. They could vanish here, nurse their anonymity, and discuss topics better left unsaid.
When he entered, dressed in a double-breasted coat and pinstripe scarf, he felt nearly out of place. But the staff dressed more formally, and a few business meets scattered themselves to the outskirts of the cafe, and Elex assumed his attire was easily dismissed. he spoke with one of the staff quickly, and the bearded gentleman pointed him toward a window booth near the corner. He approached purposefully, scanning the faces of each patron until he found a girl sitting lone and keeping her coffee close to hand. He paused as he reached the table. "You must be Katie." He extended a hand, all thin bones and trimmed nails. "Elex Yorke."
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Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 10:15 am
Was Katie a little underdressed for the establishment? Probably, but it didn't seem to perturb Katie, nor did it change the fact that she was getting work done, as referenced by the clutter of papers around her on both the table and the booth next to her. Her gaze sprung up when a well-dressed gentleman made a beeline for her table, and shuffled her notes together into a more presentable stack so she could stand.
"That's me! So you're Ee-lex, right?" she replied, chipper as she clapped her hand into his, warm and well-calloused. "Am I saying that right? It looks like Alex with an E, but I'm trash at pronouncing names, so tell me if I'm saying it wrong." After a brief but emphatic handshake, she pulled her fingers away so she could slide back into the booth, motioning for him to sit opposite her with a caffeinated gleam in her eyes.
"Did you want to order anything here? The espresso is really good, it's not bitter at all, but they have sodas too I think if that's not your style." The whole time she talked, she reorganized the reference materials she'd brought with her, but every so often she would glance up, quick assessments of the young man and his dark suit. He looked so official, what if he was part of some covert agency, like the FBI? It was nothing more than her imagination running wild, but it was fun to think about all the same.
"I just have to say, it's really cool of you to reach out as a DC local, I feel like there's not enough of a community for all this stuff, and there's so much stuff," she continued, finally settling on a print of a few choice screenshots from the video he'd selected as their talking point. "So fire away with any questions you might have, I'll do the best I can to clarify what was going on."
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Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 12:12 pm
I just said my name. Were you listening? He waited patiently through the butchering of his name. The handshake did not linger long, however, and he was glad for that. "It's the same as pronouncing the letters L and X. Elex." He shirked his coat and hung it on the booth-mounted rack before seating himself. His scarf remained as a focal point against a ribbed turtleneck. Lacing his hands together, he blew into them to ward away the chill.
His legs crossed beneath the table, and his raised foot began its incessant, restless bobbing. Booths seldom communicated the motion disturbance, however. "I usually drink tea," he replied almost absently, as his curious gaze wandered over the fettered papers. "They had a darjeeling white that looked good." Even if she lacked an air of professionalism, she played the serious part well. Seldom did anyone go through the effort of an elaborate scheme unless a conman of sorts, and he had his reservations about Katie as a conwoman. Perhaps she played her part too well. Regardless, he only had money worth conning. And even during his disappearance, his parents were reticent to pay a ransom; what worth was he as a mark? "I'll order when the waiter comes around."
Elex tucked his arms into himself, and resisted the pull to rest elbows on the table. It's improper, his mother's words rang out. Seconds passed. His elbows met the table. "I'm not much of a local — I've only lived here a couple years. It's still easy to find instances like what you taped. Things eating out of trash cans. But most people wander around with their eyes shut and their ears open to the media; it's easier to shout 'coma' and 'mugging' over the alternatives." Elex struggled to swallow his light rasp. "If something disturbs you, why look at it?" He glanced to her shirt, its drab screenprinting confidently displayed over a loud orange.
"I want to know what you think you saw. Was it a dog, a rabid coyote? Something else?" There are a lot of taboo words in this city. 'Monster' is one of them. 'Youma' is another. What's your choice of nomenclature, Katie? Does it abide the FCC rules?
The print she chose, data-ravaged and dark as it was, caught his eye. He looked to it with lips pursed and lashes low in thought. How hard does Infiltration work to smother videos like these? And does that censorship reinforce belief? What do you think, Katie? What goes on after dark in this city?
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Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2017 10:01 pm
Katie might have been listening to Elex the first time, or maybe she'd been taking in the stiffness of his posture, the pleasing silhouette of his dark coat against the backdrop of the mundane, the way everything about him felt so tightly folded and neatly pressed. She might have been fighting the urge to ruffle his hair, to see if it would muss or if it had been painted in place as immaculate and immutable. She might have been curious about the scarf, or the way he said darjeeling, or his hesitance to put his elbows on the table. Where Elex had kept to his sliver of the booth, Katie had likewise spread herself out across the entirety of her given space, shoulders relaxed even while her toes tapped restlessly on the floorboards below.
She couldn't help it. This was exciting stuff.
"I looked at it because I'd never seen anything like it before, and I needed a video," she insisted, spreading her hands across the edges of her photo, like she was framing it. "It was bigger than a dog. Way bigger. You can see the comparison of its body to the trash can it was eating in the background--and I s**t you not, it was eating the trash can with the trash--so I mean, you're looking at something horse-bodied, but with, like, stubby crocodile legs. I've never seen anything like it in any local wildlife guide." Which was to say that she'd checked wikipedia and called it a bust because it was so obviously not a normal animal.
"It tried to eat my phone, and then it tried to eat me, along with this other guy, and it basically became this 100 meter dash for our lives," she recounted, tapping at her chin. and then she was digging through her papers again, this time producing a series of forum posts, certain responses circled in bright red ink. "There are literally dozens of reports like the one I had posted on the DC area Reddit, but they always get taken down super fast. Drives down the real estate market or whatever? But people deserve to know about these things--some people call them monsters, or chimeras, or whatever, but a number of the comments that sound really in-the-know refer to them as youma." She pronounced the word phonetically, like you-mah, and slid her finger towards one of the bottom descriptions, outlining some kind of monstrous attack at a music festival some time ago.
"It's hard to say where they come from," Katie shrugged, pulling her hands away so that the boy could peruse her files at his own leisure. "But it's a total infestation. I only have video of the one, but since I've lived here, I've seen a bunch of things that definitely weren't mundane. One was this...ooze thing, and I was in the park once when a tree just uprooted itself and started chucking pine cones at runners, it was nuts."
She felt the eyes of another table on her and so she slowly retreated into her half of the booth, only to jump at the sound of that scratching sound again. "Did you hear that?" she blurted out to Elex, eyes wide and the edges of her mouth curling. How lucky would they be, to witness an event here in this very coffee shop? It'd be terrible for the property, sure, but it would be rad.
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Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 4:13 pm
Katie, he learned, was a slouch. His mother would call her uncultured. Perhaps she was, for the way she spoke so informally to someone she never knew. To someone shemet in a faux interview. Was this her strategy for coaxing others into opening up? Appearing friendly and relatable? Perhaps that worked with people who lacked the volume of secrets he kept. He wondered about her and all her lightly aggravating habits. What purpose was there in all of this antic she expressed? In all of her?
In time, her guerrilla filming might lead her to the truth — to the Negaverse itself. At that point, would she make a better starseed or a better officer?
As she regaled him with the story, Elex narrowed eyes at her still frame. He looked through the memorabilia distributed to him through her tale, each receiving split-attention scrutiny while he nodded his understanding. Many of the forum posts expounded on similar topics — people attacked by indescribable monsters, anecdotal recounts of people lapsing into comas after such attacks, conspiracy theoriests seeking to tie the lot of it together. He lingered most on the still, however, for how its digital noise barely veiled what was obviously a youma. Then she said the word, pronouncing it like one uninformed yet so clearly enamored by the nomenclature alone. His brows raised. He looked to her, then to the post. Another pause for scrutiny. You and someone else chased down by a youma. And you're not terrified of them now? Interesting. That must be a journalist's tenacity.
You hike a dangerous trail, Katie.
"I heard the term before. It —" Only too eager to cut himself off, Elex looked skyward at her behest. The scratching sounded audible, heavy. Like its origins carried a heft larger than the average human. Elex looked back at her half-expecting fear, yet meeting a lurid excitement. He felt its infectiousness spread across his lips. "Interested in another YouTube video?" He doubted she needed the prompting; Katie veritably hummed with the energy to leap out of her seat and bolt through the door.
"Let's find it," he offered, and slipped from the booth. He reclaimed his jacket nearly as an afterthought, then started for the door. She would have her cell phone at the ready, surely.
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Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2017 9:14 am
To the uninformed eye, Elex looked like the sort of person who was too fussy for adventure. His jacket spoke of casual money, as did the straightness of his posture, the upward bent of his nose when he appraised the evidence Katie had chosen to present to this little lordling. He was a calculated aloofness, professional distance, the sort to be discerning and selectively curate and wear gloves when touching the antiques. His was an interest that was built to last, metered and measured, and though Katie had never felt quite so disciplined, she had to respect and pity someone who commanded such restraint with so little work. How relieving and terrible it must have been, not to want things with all-consuming fervor?
But she also saw the hungry look in his eyes, the slow mirror of his grin, and she felt the sudden thrill of being let in on a secret. The imagined fussy Elex Yorke wouldn't have bothered meeting with some conspiracy theorist in a coffee shop, even a bougie one like this, unless he felt the pull of the unknown as well. Under all that veneer and polish must have existed someone who wanted just as badly to understand, to pull back the curtains on the truth.
"Don't threaten me with a good time," she laughed, but she was already moving, a couple of bills slapped on the table and her papers swept in hand. By the time she was on his heels, her phone was out and recording, and when she tumbled into the chill of the air she swiveled on her heels, one arm pinning her work to her chest and the other raised and recording, trying to get a good look at the roof. In the darkness, everything looked like brambles and thorns and wicked claws in the shadows, and it was impossible to distinguish movement.
"Did you see anything?" she murmured, her voice low for the first time and buzzing with excitement. "It couldn't have gotten far, I bet if we can find a way onto the roof--" She hummed, starting to wander to the side of the building in search of a convenient ladder. They existed in movies, didn't they? Why couldn't serendipity be so present in real life?
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Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2017 10:10 am
Elex's breath caught in his throat when he made it to the outside — autumn bluster swept down his throat with such raw exposure that he wondered if the world ever grew this cold. He caught his surprise and drew it back up inside himself, sealed it away like an old wreckage, and turned toward the roof at once. Lingering flecks of mood lighting and circumstance danced as unwanted memories in his vision. He saw dimming lamp light, reflective slashes on menus, and circular watch crystalz glaze his vision before they faded into dull splotches.
And when he could see, really truly see, see in the way that youma did when they spent all night in the Rift, he saw nothing. The roof sat empty, devoid of even snow. Bereft of pigeons or youma or dashing senshi looking to justify their evening. Katie's phone screen spilled its dull glow into the night air. "No," he returned after a moment. "There's nothing there."
Would you have pursued it with a journalist's fervor? What would you do when it tried to kill you?
But Katie spoke again, proving her dedication. He sucked in a breath and turned toward her as the wind whipped its bitter claws about their faces. "You'd break onto the roof?" He asked incredulously. A half-smile threatened to make itself known. All the types of people I could never meet as myself —
"There's always a fire escape attached to multistory apartment buildings, right?" Elex paced to the edge of the building where a thin alley offered no answers. On the other side, older residences rose up like imperfect teeth to tear down the sky. The alleyway was just wide enough to admit them in single file, and the short trek through detritus promised sour sludge to stick to their feet. But Katie's enthusiasm infected him now, resurrected a part of him long thought lost to conditioning. "Let's look around." His legs ached to run with her fervor. Stll he waited, only long enough for her to take the lead.
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Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2018 9:29 pm
"Yeah, why not?" Katie shrugged, holding her phone with her teeth while she untied the arms of a jacket at her waist and sloughed it on. It seemed a simple enough logical progression--they wanted to find the thing, and it was on the roof, so it followed that they would also have to get on the roof to get to it. Was Elex afraid? She glanced over at the boy to try and gauge his temperament by body language alone, but he was already pressing forward, thinking about fire escapes and entrances and nodding down an alleyway that looked too narrow for comfort. Katie had to shuffle her earlier assessment of him around--he might have looked bougie, but he definitely had a sense of adventure. A hunger for the truth, she might say. She was impressed.
"I think so, yeah," she called behind her, shuffling into the alleyway one shoulder at a time. She didn't seem particularly bothered by the tack of the muck at her feet, how it squelched when she stepped or tried to hold her to the broken asphalt of the alleyway ground. She certainly didn't want to fall in it, though--with her arms outstretched, she half-jogged her way across the puddle, whirling around to watch Elex when she reached the other side.
"Do you see anything?" Katie asked, pointing her phone back up towards the roof. They should have been able to hear something that big from outside if they'd heard it inside. Where did it go?Strickenized hello yes I am a trash lord
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Posted: Sat Jan 27, 2018 11:29 am
Katie pushed forward with the fervor he hoped to see. Never puillanimous, not like the ever-hated Chrysocolla with her grovelling servitude, and ever fitting of a lead in this topic. She chased truth like it mattered. How long had it been since he found someone like that?
Cabhan was the last one he could remember.
Elex's first and only hesitation came when he reached the alleyway opening and saw the muck that threw its sticky fingers at Katie's shoes. He liked his footwear rather well, having a robust collection of it, and the mystery amalgamation on the floor promised certain doom for anything less than Doc Martens. A resigned sigh came as he set foot into the muck, felt the squelch as it fitted to his foot. He pushed off, chasing after Katie in her moment's passions.
He caught up to her in short time, owing more to his training than his youth. Inertia carried him a few extra steps before he stopped. He looked to her, her eyes alight with a wild interest, ever combing their surroundings for the mystery sound. Elex looked to the roof at her mention but found nothing more than creeping darkness. No stars shone in the sky, not ever a city this polluted with light and petty courtesy. "No," he answered with finality. "I don't see anything. Or hear it.
"It's gone now, whatever it was." How do you wear disappointment?
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