WIP Meme [finally]
Stole this from poppyfields13
When you see this, post an excerpt from as many random works-in-progress as you can find lying around. Who knows? Maybe inspiration will burst forth and do something, um, inspiration-y.
Ah! Old stuff, bad writing, and proof that, eventually, I will cross everything over with Silent Hill.
Sweat streamed down Mercedes’ body as she writhed in time to the music, to the masses pressed in around her. She was wasted; a crazy blue and pink pill from Lexus, a Mai Tai, four shots of Tequila, six beers. The club was wild. High, metal archways, rickety, steep onyx stairs leading up to catwalks suspended from the ceiling, low, pulsing lights everywhere. Under 21’s weren’t supposed to be allowed in, but Mercedes got in anywhere she wanted.
Her head spun and for a moment she was terrified beyond reason, and giddy and sick at the same time. She let out a violent laugh and wrapped her arms around a stranger’s neck to stop the floor from moving. As soon as she was stable again, she let out a breathless “Thanks, sweetie,” and gave the surprised man a wet kiss.
Before he could say anything, she was dancing away to one of those rickety staircases, bending and twisting to the beat as she went. As she hit the cool metal, she started crawling up. Her skin pressed down into the rows of embossed holes on each step. Her mind was foggy, but she was sure of what she was doing. Sort of. Soon enough she was standing on the catwalk, gripping the railings. She whipped her head back and forth and started grinding to the music.
She gave a small joyful scream that she couldn’t explain. The world was collapsing around her. Exhaustion was creeping in from her fingers into her arms, from her toes into her legs, from her head into everywhere. Everything moved slowly. Questions penetrated her heavy mind. Why was her head moving without her consent? Were her fingers losing their grip on the grounding metal? Was everyone watching her as she went down, down, down?
She collapsed onto the catwalk and stared up into blackness and let the music move over her in waves. This was the only thing that was real, this was all there was.
This was all that could touch her damaged heart.
The blackness eventually stopped moving in on her and she pulled herself to her feet. The clubbers danced below, oblivious to her. She turned, and jammed fearlessly down the dangerous steps. A quick twist, a step, a touch, and she weaved her way through the crowd as easily as if they were water and she were Moses. Then the bouncer was handing her a coat (her coat? She hoped so…) and she was out the door into the freezing cold streets.
Her breath moved in clouds as the five o’clock morning sun rose over the buildings and she knew she was alive again.
“Nash, journalist for the New York Times, was in town visiting her mother when the bomb was set off. She is missing and presumed dead, but other wise the only victim in this weekends terrifying explosion.”
“Thank you, Tom. In today’s sports news-”
Paige’s mouth was hanging wide open.
No way.
oXxXo
Alex sucked on the end of the ballpoint pen as she stared blankly at the computer screen.
This whole being a writer thing? It sucked.
When she had first started to write stories, it had been an escape for the constant screaming of her mother and the man of the house, whoever he was at the time. She hadn’t even realized she was any good at it until Ms. Kwan got a hold of a sample and started raving at her about “being a natural.”
Her first published novel had come along easy enough. A story based on her own life about a girl living in a nightmare and finding light in the most unexpected of places.
But now she was apparently expected to write more. The idea of it gave her a headache, mostly because she didn’t have a clue where to start. She wished that she could say Paige was her muse, or something equally cheesy, but that just wasn’t the case. If anything, Paige was a huge distraction.
George Lass flopped down into the empty booth at Der Waffle House and sighed.
She sighed a lot these days. They weren’t all I wish my life had ended when it ended sighs, as they had been that first year she’d become a reaper. She was coming into her own in this field, growing to accept that everything died eventually and she was only helping them on to something new. It still kept her awake at night, but those nights she watched old black and white movies with Mason and Daisy to keep her mind off it. When Daisy was too tired or irritable to join them, George and Mason would watch late night chick flicks and eat all too buttery popcorn. She made running, sarcastic commentary, and he cried like the big girl he was.
George’s sighs nowadays were usually tired sighs, because of the insomnia, or frustrated sighs, of the my coworkers just live to annoy me, or pained sighs, as hers could be one hell of a tough job. This particular sigh was a mixture of all three, being that of course no one would be there yet to agree to pick up the bill when she’d been awake for twenty hours and the last meal she’d had was one of Daisy’s ‘flash-pop’ suckers from the seventies that had made her tongue itch after she’d eaten it.
She debated fervently whether or not to order as Kiffany came closer and closer to her table, all the while silently cursing Mason for convincing her it was a good idea to spend all her money on Pay-Per-View, when the bell at the door jingled and Rube stepped in. She shot him a pleading look. He caught her meaning and made a long-suffering expression, before nodding slightly. She knew she’d have to pay him back later, one way or another.
She was finishing reciting her order to Kiffany as Rube joined her (“two eggs over easy, two pieces of toast, hash browns, and a side of bacon”). He politely declined when the waitress asked his order.
“Alright,” Kiffany said in her mix of cheerful exasperation. She loved these particular regulars, but they could be a bit on the strange side sometimes. “I’ll be back with your food in a few minutes, honey.”
They watched the waitress retreat to the kitchen and then turned back to one another. Rube was already pulling out his yellow post-its.
“Already?” George inquired. “No one else is here yet.”
“Might as well get yours early, Peanut,” Rube said with a slightly apologetic smile. “You’re going out of town.”
“Mexico?” She asked hopefully.
“Sorry, kid.”
He handed her the post-it. She examined it curiously for a moment, surprised. She’d never gotten a post-it like this before.
All it said was Silent Hill.
The Impala weaved its way through the roads that skirted the outsides of the woods near Brahm. The long stretch of cement was deserted. Dean peered through his window at the gathering darkness of the trees. It made him nervous, wondering where things could hide. In branches, roots, bushes, behind the trunks, in the water. He leaned back into the leather of his seat and concentrated on the road. The Doors played softly from the radio, the only other sound in the car the rattling of an aspirin bottle; the aftermath of not one but three successive visions Sam had endured only an hour before. He was still shaking, pale from the experience. Dean was shaken, too, though less visibly.
“How we holdin’ up, Sammy?” He asked, keeping his voice low. Sam only nodded, concentrating his trembling fingers on prying the childproof cap from the bottle.
Up ahead, a damaged green sign painted with an arrow pointed into the trees. Dean slowed. “That the one?”
Sam looked up briefly from his task. “Yeah, that looks like it.” His voice was thin and wispy, making Dean’s stomach tighten briefly. He forced his body to relax as he directed the car down a partially hidden dirt road. He turned on the high beams to dispel the gloom of the forest.
He glanced at his brother. Something dark and telling lingered behind his unfocused eyes. Sam nodded to the road. “There.”
The dirt road had merged with a wider paved road. A sign gleamed wetly in the headlights.
Welcome to Silent Hill.
Sixteen year old Squall Leonhart watched with horrified eyes as the streets below his window swarmed, moving like a tide of black. The flocks of the yellow eyed demons washed against buildings, pulling unlucky victims into its swirling black mass. He watched as Hollow Bastion was being swallowed by evil.
Squall had always been bored by his home town. He wanted to go out into the world, away from the father he couldn’t relate to, away from his mother’s grave, away from the friends who were so different from him. He had made plans when he was ten and had saved enough that he was almost ready to leave. He would buy a ticket, or ask Cid to borrow something on wheels, and then he would be gone from this town and all its memories.
Suddenly, clinging to the windowsill and watching the swirling evil devour the buildings and people, he didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay and daydream in his room and sit with rambunctious Zell and flirtatious Irvine and ignore the doe eyed looks Rinoa shot him from across the square. He wanted to be lectured by Quistis and spend those uncomfortable moments with Kiros and Ward waiting for Laguna.
He wanted them, and now he couldn’t have them.
He turned away from the window with every intention of running to the back of the house where his father was in his study, but something caught his eye. He turned back to the massacre. A flash of pink against the black of the surroundings. He leaned as far out the window as he dared and saw something that made his heart plummet.
A girl stood on a crate, just out of reach of the clawing creatures, tears streaming down her face as she wobbled and clung, trying to keep from falling. He knew who she was, though they had never spoken; Aerith Gainsborough, the girl who stood on the street selling flowers a penny each. She was just a year younger than him, and went to the same school. Now that he knew what to listen for, he could hear her calling out in a fearful voice.
“Cloud!” She screamed. “Cloud! Help!”
He didn’t stop to think. He grabbed the gunblade off the wall display- the old Revolver wasn’t meant for use, just show, but he had nothing else going for him now. Pulling himself into the window, he took a deep breath and than plunged the two stories to the street below.
For a moment it was a horrible, dark pain. Sight was whisked away from him as he struggled against claws and teeth. Fighting for air, he swung the Revolver up in a slashing arc, decimating a line of his enemies and revealing the sunlight again. Shooting up, he ran as quickly as he could, slashing here and firing there to make a path for himself. It took him five minutes to make a journey of what would have been, under normal circumstances, five seconds. When he finally managed to arrive at the teetering crate, he was bleeding and out of breath. Aerith, crouched low, had her hands pressed against the wall and stared at him with big green eyes, silent.
Now that he was there, he realized that a little planning before hand would not have been remiss. As he heaved himself up onto the crate, the only thing he had changed about the situation was that there was now a boy with a display weapon in the same situation as the flower girl.
“Are you alright?” He managed to gasp at her.
She looked baffled by the question. “Are you?” She replied, looking with alarm at a deep gash in his shoulder.
He nodded feebly and hefted his weapon up, striking down a shadowy creature who had managed to get on the crate. He almost jumped out of his skin when he felt two small hands land on his shoulder. There was a sudden cooling sensation and he looked down to find his wound healed.
“Thanks,” he rasped, beginning to fire repeatedly at the monsters surrounding the bottom of the crate.
He thought he heard her say, in a gentle voice, “No, thank you.”
There was a sudden crumbling sound across the street. Squall’s head snapped up and watched in terror as his house fell slowly into the monsters, bricks and glass melding into a dark puddle that was rapidly disappearing.
Dad… He thought, trying to make his voice work.
Hur. I’m going to go hide under my bed now, kthnx.
When you see this, post an excerpt from as many random works-in-progress as you can find lying around. Who knows? Maybe inspiration will burst forth and do something, um, inspiration-y.
Ah! Old stuff, bad writing, and proof that, eventually, I will cross everything over with Silent Hill.
Sweat streamed down Mercedes’ body as she writhed in time to the music, to the masses pressed in around her. She was wasted; a crazy blue and pink pill from Lexus, a Mai Tai, four shots of Tequila, six beers. The club was wild. High, metal archways, rickety, steep onyx stairs leading up to catwalks suspended from the ceiling, low, pulsing lights everywhere. Under 21’s weren’t supposed to be allowed in, but Mercedes got in anywhere she wanted.
Her head spun and for a moment she was terrified beyond reason, and giddy and sick at the same time. She let out a violent laugh and wrapped her arms around a stranger’s neck to stop the floor from moving. As soon as she was stable again, she let out a breathless “Thanks, sweetie,” and gave the surprised man a wet kiss.
Before he could say anything, she was dancing away to one of those rickety staircases, bending and twisting to the beat as she went. As she hit the cool metal, she started crawling up. Her skin pressed down into the rows of embossed holes on each step. Her mind was foggy, but she was sure of what she was doing. Sort of. Soon enough she was standing on the catwalk, gripping the railings. She whipped her head back and forth and started grinding to the music.
She gave a small joyful scream that she couldn’t explain. The world was collapsing around her. Exhaustion was creeping in from her fingers into her arms, from her toes into her legs, from her head into everywhere. Everything moved slowly. Questions penetrated her heavy mind. Why was her head moving without her consent? Were her fingers losing their grip on the grounding metal? Was everyone watching her as she went down, down, down?
She collapsed onto the catwalk and stared up into blackness and let the music move over her in waves. This was the only thing that was real, this was all there was.
This was all that could touch her damaged heart.
The blackness eventually stopped moving in on her and she pulled herself to her feet. The clubbers danced below, oblivious to her. She turned, and jammed fearlessly down the dangerous steps. A quick twist, a step, a touch, and she weaved her way through the crowd as easily as if they were water and she were Moses. Then the bouncer was handing her a coat (her coat? She hoped so…) and she was out the door into the freezing cold streets.
Her breath moved in clouds as the five o’clock morning sun rose over the buildings and she knew she was alive again.
“Nash, journalist for the New York Times, was in town visiting her mother when the bomb was set off. She is missing and presumed dead, but other wise the only victim in this weekends terrifying explosion.”
“Thank you, Tom. In today’s sports news-”
Paige’s mouth was hanging wide open.
No way.
oXxXo
Alex sucked on the end of the ballpoint pen as she stared blankly at the computer screen.
This whole being a writer thing? It sucked.
When she had first started to write stories, it had been an escape for the constant screaming of her mother and the man of the house, whoever he was at the time. She hadn’t even realized she was any good at it until Ms. Kwan got a hold of a sample and started raving at her about “being a natural.”
Her first published novel had come along easy enough. A story based on her own life about a girl living in a nightmare and finding light in the most unexpected of places.
But now she was apparently expected to write more. The idea of it gave her a headache, mostly because she didn’t have a clue where to start. She wished that she could say Paige was her muse, or something equally cheesy, but that just wasn’t the case. If anything, Paige was a huge distraction.
George Lass flopped down into the empty booth at Der Waffle House and sighed.
She sighed a lot these days. They weren’t all I wish my life had ended when it ended sighs, as they had been that first year she’d become a reaper. She was coming into her own in this field, growing to accept that everything died eventually and she was only helping them on to something new. It still kept her awake at night, but those nights she watched old black and white movies with Mason and Daisy to keep her mind off it. When Daisy was too tired or irritable to join them, George and Mason would watch late night chick flicks and eat all too buttery popcorn. She made running, sarcastic commentary, and he cried like the big girl he was.
George’s sighs nowadays were usually tired sighs, because of the insomnia, or frustrated sighs, of the my coworkers just live to annoy me, or pained sighs, as hers could be one hell of a tough job. This particular sigh was a mixture of all three, being that of course no one would be there yet to agree to pick up the bill when she’d been awake for twenty hours and the last meal she’d had was one of Daisy’s ‘flash-pop’ suckers from the seventies that had made her tongue itch after she’d eaten it.
She debated fervently whether or not to order as Kiffany came closer and closer to her table, all the while silently cursing Mason for convincing her it was a good idea to spend all her money on Pay-Per-View, when the bell at the door jingled and Rube stepped in. She shot him a pleading look. He caught her meaning and made a long-suffering expression, before nodding slightly. She knew she’d have to pay him back later, one way or another.
She was finishing reciting her order to Kiffany as Rube joined her (“two eggs over easy, two pieces of toast, hash browns, and a side of bacon”). He politely declined when the waitress asked his order.
“Alright,” Kiffany said in her mix of cheerful exasperation. She loved these particular regulars, but they could be a bit on the strange side sometimes. “I’ll be back with your food in a few minutes, honey.”
They watched the waitress retreat to the kitchen and then turned back to one another. Rube was already pulling out his yellow post-its.
“Already?” George inquired. “No one else is here yet.”
“Might as well get yours early, Peanut,” Rube said with a slightly apologetic smile. “You’re going out of town.”
“Mexico?” She asked hopefully.
“Sorry, kid.”
He handed her the post-it. She examined it curiously for a moment, surprised. She’d never gotten a post-it like this before.
All it said was Silent Hill.
The Impala weaved its way through the roads that skirted the outsides of the woods near Brahm. The long stretch of cement was deserted. Dean peered through his window at the gathering darkness of the trees. It made him nervous, wondering where things could hide. In branches, roots, bushes, behind the trunks, in the water. He leaned back into the leather of his seat and concentrated on the road. The Doors played softly from the radio, the only other sound in the car the rattling of an aspirin bottle; the aftermath of not one but three successive visions Sam had endured only an hour before. He was still shaking, pale from the experience. Dean was shaken, too, though less visibly.
“How we holdin’ up, Sammy?” He asked, keeping his voice low. Sam only nodded, concentrating his trembling fingers on prying the childproof cap from the bottle.
Up ahead, a damaged green sign painted with an arrow pointed into the trees. Dean slowed. “That the one?”
Sam looked up briefly from his task. “Yeah, that looks like it.” His voice was thin and wispy, making Dean’s stomach tighten briefly. He forced his body to relax as he directed the car down a partially hidden dirt road. He turned on the high beams to dispel the gloom of the forest.
He glanced at his brother. Something dark and telling lingered behind his unfocused eyes. Sam nodded to the road. “There.”
The dirt road had merged with a wider paved road. A sign gleamed wetly in the headlights.
Welcome to Silent Hill.
Sixteen year old Squall Leonhart watched with horrified eyes as the streets below his window swarmed, moving like a tide of black. The flocks of the yellow eyed demons washed against buildings, pulling unlucky victims into its swirling black mass. He watched as Hollow Bastion was being swallowed by evil.
Squall had always been bored by his home town. He wanted to go out into the world, away from the father he couldn’t relate to, away from his mother’s grave, away from the friends who were so different from him. He had made plans when he was ten and had saved enough that he was almost ready to leave. He would buy a ticket, or ask Cid to borrow something on wheels, and then he would be gone from this town and all its memories.
Suddenly, clinging to the windowsill and watching the swirling evil devour the buildings and people, he didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay and daydream in his room and sit with rambunctious Zell and flirtatious Irvine and ignore the doe eyed looks Rinoa shot him from across the square. He wanted to be lectured by Quistis and spend those uncomfortable moments with Kiros and Ward waiting for Laguna.
He wanted them, and now he couldn’t have them.
He turned away from the window with every intention of running to the back of the house where his father was in his study, but something caught his eye. He turned back to the massacre. A flash of pink against the black of the surroundings. He leaned as far out the window as he dared and saw something that made his heart plummet.
A girl stood on a crate, just out of reach of the clawing creatures, tears streaming down her face as she wobbled and clung, trying to keep from falling. He knew who she was, though they had never spoken; Aerith Gainsborough, the girl who stood on the street selling flowers a penny each. She was just a year younger than him, and went to the same school. Now that he knew what to listen for, he could hear her calling out in a fearful voice.
“Cloud!” She screamed. “Cloud! Help!”
He didn’t stop to think. He grabbed the gunblade off the wall display- the old Revolver wasn’t meant for use, just show, but he had nothing else going for him now. Pulling himself into the window, he took a deep breath and than plunged the two stories to the street below.
For a moment it was a horrible, dark pain. Sight was whisked away from him as he struggled against claws and teeth. Fighting for air, he swung the Revolver up in a slashing arc, decimating a line of his enemies and revealing the sunlight again. Shooting up, he ran as quickly as he could, slashing here and firing there to make a path for himself. It took him five minutes to make a journey of what would have been, under normal circumstances, five seconds. When he finally managed to arrive at the teetering crate, he was bleeding and out of breath. Aerith, crouched low, had her hands pressed against the wall and stared at him with big green eyes, silent.
Now that he was there, he realized that a little planning before hand would not have been remiss. As he heaved himself up onto the crate, the only thing he had changed about the situation was that there was now a boy with a display weapon in the same situation as the flower girl.
“Are you alright?” He managed to gasp at her.
She looked baffled by the question. “Are you?” She replied, looking with alarm at a deep gash in his shoulder.
He nodded feebly and hefted his weapon up, striking down a shadowy creature who had managed to get on the crate. He almost jumped out of his skin when he felt two small hands land on his shoulder. There was a sudden cooling sensation and he looked down to find his wound healed.
“Thanks,” he rasped, beginning to fire repeatedly at the monsters surrounding the bottom of the crate.
He thought he heard her say, in a gentle voice, “No, thank you.”
There was a sudden crumbling sound across the street. Squall’s head snapped up and watched in terror as his house fell slowly into the monsters, bricks and glass melding into a dark puddle that was rapidly disappearing.
Dad… He thought, trying to make his voice work.
Hur. I’m going to go hide under my bed now, kthnx.