Quote:
The holidays are close to ending and it’s time to start packing away your decorations. In a stroke of bad luck, you drop an ornament (or other small bauble) and it shatters. Inside was a strange, glistening dust that you accidentally inhale. You are immediately met with a strong hallucination of a previous holiday memory. It only lasts for a few moments, but it feels like you are back in the memory, reliving it. It seems so real but when it ends, you are back in the present with no trace of the dust left in sight. Which holiday memory did you relive, and how do you react to being torn from it?
(You can only relive a memory from a holiday in December and it must be from this lifetime. Characters who have lost civilian memories, such as in a side swap, will have a much vaguer memory. Locations and faces will be blurred and unrecognizable, and the memory will not reveal anything about their previous life. These characters may be left feeling a little hollow after the memory.
(You can only relive a memory from a holiday in December and it must be from this lifetime. Characters who have lost civilian memories, such as in a side swap, will have a much vaguer memory. Locations and faces will be blurred and unrecognizable, and the memory will not reveal anything about their previous life. These characters may be left feeling a little hollow after the memory.
It was cold outside, with the wind howling in the trees and branches scratching against the side of the house. Roddy was asleep upstairs - taking a nap after having to go into the shop so early in the morning on a Saturday of all days. Someone had a terrible emergency, he said, and it wasn't like Roddy to turn down someone in need. The poor man was gone at 7AM to fix an almost-ruined tattoo before the person had to catch a plane later that day. Julian didn't mind, and wanted to help around the house while his roommate slept, just to make things easier.
Roddy had brought home some new ornaments - lovely, very thin glass orbs with metallic coating. They glistened in many colors, but Julian's favorites were the golds and the reds - partly because they reminded him of Kastra and Sabine and Phact and Imperiatrix... and Manu, too! All of them had bits of color in their uniforms like these baubles, and that made Julian so very happy. Opening the plastic packaging, he found twelve of the ornaments snug in their cardboard container. He would hang them all around the tree in addition to the other ornaments it already possessed, several of which were specifically made by Roddy's niece and nephew. One was a clay flower painted in primary colors and tossed with glitter. The other was shaped and painted like a soccer ball, each ornament having the children's names carved in the back.
Julian smiled, reaching up to hang one of the new ornaments on an open bough that looked almost naked with no ornaments, but the bauble slipped right off the branch, landing at his feet. With a start, Julian found the bauble had cracked slightly. It must have been terribly brittle! This should be cleaned up immediately so nobody would get glass in their feet--
Leaning down, the poofy-haired young man found a strange, silvery powder seeping from the crack in the orb. He felt the urge to sneeze then, and with a great inhalation, managed to aspirate some of the powder. From then on, it felt like he'd been swept away in a dream...
Dead inside was what he felt, and terribly, bitterly cold. His limbs were stiff but he both cared-and-didn't. It was a mild annoyance. After all, it wasn't as though he could die from hypothermia. With a buzz on his back -- oh god, it was the wings, wasn't it?! -- clawed hands started to climb down the face of a bank building. There was a hunger inside him, a predatory hunger, insatiable for all but the finest of souls. Twinkling lights danced around each building, making hiding in shadows incredibly difficult. It was annoying, the singing, and gaiety. It wasn't as though any of it mattered anyway.
More people being out and about meant more food, and that's all that truly mattered.
Closer to the pavement he crept, dodging strings of those damned lights that could be caught up in his wings and break them. People started screaming, dropping brightly-wrapped packages, grabbing their children and running away. Blurred faces - their identities were worthless - sprawling parking lot, flickering lights, screaming, one man laying on his back, begging for mercy, he had children, he said...
Julian fell backwards, eyes blurred with fear and tears and he tumbled to the ground. In the oncoming wave of a panic attack, he curled up into a ball at the base of the tree and wept. He wept for those whose lives he destroyed and wept for those whose Christmas was ruined.
WC: 594
