Prompt 1 (Mysterious Carolers): Caroling has been a tradition for years, so it’s not really unusual when you hear a soft chorus from outside. What is unusual is that it’s three in the morning, and the moment they start singing you feel a chill in the air. Maybe it’s a holiday song, maybe it’s not, but whatever it is it’s a song you know before--from this life? From another?--and something about this version makes you go cold. If you move to the window, you will find no carolers, but the song is loud enough that you know you should be able to see them. They sing one song, and then there is silence. An eerie chill lingers, and your dreams are haunted by strange voices. You’ll probably never be able to hear that song again without feeling a chill.
With the release of Security Breach, Laike had broken new ground in the streaming market. he felt like a sellout for playing it — he never cared for the micromanagement style in the previous FNaF games, and thus never streamed them before on his Twitch account — but Security Breach was more like Metal Gear Solid but with animatronics. And Laike enjoyed the stealth mechanics of MGS, and especially liked the nonsensical storylines that sometimes made fun of itself, and he gently hoped Security Breach would do the same (it sort of did, but in an American way that was often too subtle for Laike to get much into it).
He ended up enjoying what he played of Security Breach, however, and spent a good deal of time experimenting with and mapping out the means by which the animatronics would detect him or teleport to a new area. His favorite mechanic had to be that the animatronics, when confronting Gregory, would orbit around him whenever Laike adjusted the field of view. Fun, he thought, and fitting.
Because he was having fun (and because some of his audience was making him laugh, and he was embarrassed about his smile, so they would make him laugh more and he'd try to cover up his face while playing the game), Laike kept pushing out his streaming time. And because he kept getting bits and subs for it, that was more motivation to stay up later. But finally, Laike ran out of viewers and will to stay awake near simultaneously, so he thanked the remaining participants, shut down the stream, and sent his computer into sleep mode. He'd gotten up, stretched, tripped over a handful of Red Bull cans that accumulated on the floor by his desk, and nearly fell into bed to avoid the rest of his debris field.
It was 2:40, and by 2:50, he'd made it to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and stared at himself in the mirror. He looked like s**t, but that was normal, so he turned the lights out. Briefly he thought about that kid at the orientation, and how he was on fire. Would that kid even need a bathroom light?
Then he thought about Niter, and how Jet told him that he'd heal faster in his powered-up state as Niter than he would as Laike. And Laike wondered — did that extend toward other things? If he moved faster and punched harder and healed faster, could he also sleep faster? Because it would be great to only need, like, 4 hours of sleep instead of 8, and then still feel refreshed after. He hoped that was a thing. He would ask Jet later, and if he said yes, then Niter was definitely gonna sleep in Negaspace from now on. Somehow. Wait, maybe not until he could teleport, too, because that was too much human interaction…
Sufficiently tired, Laike crossed the ocean of trash that gently roiled and lapped around his socked feet as he padded toward his bed in the dark. After a few paces, he felt around for the high-pile rug that laid directly before his bed, and once he kicked it with his toes, he knew he could just plank onto his covers. So he did, and smacked onto the squishy mattress, and in nothing but a hoodie, boxers, and socks, Laike curled up into a ball near the head of his bed.
He laid there for a few minutes, reminding himself how to breathe. His heart still raced terribly from all those hours streaming, but his mind was tired, his body was tired, and his incessant anxiety was the main thing keeping him awake. His sister bought him some fast-acting melatonin, and his grandmother gave him a bunch of herbs he couldn't pronounce (which was a lie — he knew there was suanzaoren, and fuling, and gancao, but he couldn't read the symbols). He reached for the melatonin, popped one into his mouth, and sucked on the berry-flavored tablet while he waited.
He wasn't sure how long he laid in bed, staring at the patches of sky between his potted plants on the window. He was aware that, by the time he fell asleep, the sky was still dark. And when he was woken up again, the sky was the same shade that he remembered it. He thought that, as he blearily looked at his phone, no more than fifteen minutes passed since he fell asleep. It was 4AM.
What he didn't know was who in his building was playing music at this time of night. Or why they were playing Christmas carols. Or why it was all a cappella. He dealt with it by mashing a pillow over his ears, but he still heard the music worm its way into his brain.
Then he started to feel quite cold. He found the extra blankets still piled at the edge of the bed where he left them last, and he gathered up a pair to wrap them about himself. Once properly burritoed, Laike tucked his cold feet up as best he could to warm them up properly. But heat never came, and he still shivered in bed, so he painstakingly unraveled himself from the blanket burrito to get a third blanket that had a cord connected to the wall.
He wrapped himself in that new blanket foremost, then fumbled around for the dial attached to the cord. Once he found it, he turned the thing on with a click, and dialed it up to five. Then the other two blankets went over top of him, and he again curled into a ball.
Paradoxically, he still felt cold. Laike wondered if he was coming down with something.
And the assholes outside were still singing. He considered yelling at them from his bedroom, but nixed the idea just as quickly — he wasn't in the mood to talk to anyone, and they sounded kinda creepy anyway, so one of them probably had a shotgun for teenagers who got mouthy with them — and for some reason that gave him a fright, so now he was wide awake. Awake, shivering, and miserable.
And if he was going to be any of those things, especially all three of those things, he would rather be them while playing Bloodborne. Reluctantly, Laike crawled out of bed, and stumbled through cans and wrappers and empty boxes to resume his seat at the computer with his nest of blankets still tucked around him.
WC: 1087
