Event Prompt
Event Prompt 2 of ??? Every person who happens to have received one of the unaddressed pumpkin baubles begins to feel oddly strange. You find yourself growing more irritable and restless. You’re finding it difficult to sleep and when you do manage to sleep, your dreams are plagued with nightmares. The weird symptoms don’t fade when you power up - you’re just as irritable, if not even more, when you roam the streets as your alter ego. What's gotten into you all of a sudden?
Owen didn't usually consider himself an angry or grumpy person. Sure, he might get a little irritated now and then, if he got a bad grade or if someone said something stupid or insensitive, but overall he liked to think that anger wasn't something he was prone to resorting to. Except, for the last few days, he'd been... well, there was really no other way to describe it than grumpy and irritable.
Maybe it was because of the nightmares that had started bothering him? They were definitely making it hard to get any real sleep, and he remembered reading somewhere that a lack of good sleep could make you more irritable. It would make sense and was probably what was going on, except for one thing: he couldn't figure out why he was having so many nightmares in the first place! It would have been one thing if something particularly scary had happened, but apart from one or two incidents that had been pretty mild all things considered (nothing like the spider fiasco that still tends to give him bad dreams!) there wasn't anything he could think of that might be causing them.
Could it just be the time of year itself? He'd heard of something called seasonal depression before, something about less sunlight affecting your mood, but... he didn't think nightmares was a part of that, and he was just grumpy, not sad or tired (well, okay, not more tired than someone who's having a lot of nightmares normally would be, but still). So that seemed like the wrong explanation, but that didn't give him any better an idea of what it could be, just what it wasn't!
Ugh, even trying to think about what was making him angry was starting to make him angry! With a huff, Owen tossed the book he had been trying to read (really just turning the pages with more and more irritation and less paying attention to what was printed on them) onto his bed and stormed out of his room, slamming the door behind him. Grabbing his coat and shoving it on with rather more force than needed, he tucked his apartment key into his pocket and slammed that door too, on the way out.
Maybe a walk would help him cool his head a little?
At least, that had been the idea, but even walking up and down the blocks near his house didn't help. Heading to the nearby park didn't help. Standing in line to buy a hot chocolate at the local coffee shop didn't help, either - it just made him angrier at how long it was taking, and finally, after having wandered around for over two hours trying to settle his temper down, he shuffled back into his apartment and locked the door behind him, marching straight to his room and falling facefirst onto his bed with an angry, frustrated sigh.
Ugh. Ugh, why wasn't this getting better? Nothing fixed it, everything made it worse, and he just wanted to hit something! Grabbing his pillow, Owen rolled over and shoved it over his face, screaming into it until he couldn't scream any more. Even that didn't help, but it did wear him out a little more. Maybe he should just... try to take a nap, instead, and hope he could get some real sleep.If he was really lucky, maybe it wouldn't bring another nightmare with it! That should make this stupid bad mood go away, shouldn't it?
(He did manage to fall asleep, but... he wasn't so lucky when it came to the nightmares.)
Word Count: 606
