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[mikata_lian]

Player Information

Name: Alex/Replica
Age: 26
AIM SN:namedalex
email: namedalex@aol.com
Have you played in an LJ based game before? yes
Currently Played Characters: None.
Conditional: Activity Check Link: Not Applicable
Conditional: Official Reserve Link: Here

Character Information

General
Canon Source: Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories
Canon Format: Video Game (Both the GBA and the PS2 remake)
Character's Name: Marluxia
Character's Age: 24
Conditional: If your character is 13 years of age or under, please clarify how they will be played.

What form will your character's NV take? Since this Marluxia is coming from Jigoku Apartments, his communication device, the “Jigoberry” will just carry over from the game. While it was never expressly described in-game, I pictured it to look like a tablet phone, only with a slide-out keyboard to make it easier to type. Marluxia’s is magenta, with a brushed-steel finish, with a cell-phone charm hole. He doesn’t actually have a charm. Instead, he has an empty key-ring, so he can clip the device to something and not lose it.

Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities:
Summarized from Marluxia’s entry on the Wiki, as the list of his abilities is huge:

• Marluxia can draw forth his scythe to his hand, and dismiss it when he needs to, which allows him to keep his hands free as necessary, and to recall the scythe after he has hurled it at something.
• He can create a storm of petals. When he activates this power, he can choose to (and often does, in canon) to summon up a few to highlight his presence, or summon up many in order to create a combination distraction/vicious attack. The petals are rich magenta in color, which all but glow, and when directed to be so, can cut like little razor blades, making the technique very good for suppression attacks. They also smell strongly of roses and darkness, which can distract and make people who are sensitive to strong smells queasy.
• He can levitate above the ground, like many others of his kind.
• As fast as he is regularly, Marluxia has mastered the ability to open a door to the Darkness temporarily, letting him hop from one spot to another very close by, making it seem like he can teleport.
• Marluxia can also open up a more sustained portal through the darkness, allowing him to travel greater distances almost instantly.
• In the presence of lesser Nobodies, Marluxia can bend their wills and bodies in order to both command them as minions, and use their bodies to create protective armor for himself.
• Like Xemnas, Marluxia can summon laser beams to slice at his opponents from a distance, using a small number of flower petals as a focus.
• Marluxia can cast a spell similar to Doom in the Final Fantasy series, starting a countdown to the inevitable end of the victim’s life. The only way to get their precious seconds back is for his opponent to literally steal them back from Marluxia, typically by cornering him somehow and beating him senseless. This ability has an extremely limited range, and Marluxia is forced to whisper secret words into the victim’s ear, and then must stay nearby (within 30 feet), or the spell will be broken.
• Marluxia has the ability to call upon a powerful final attack when he is on his last bit of strength. It extends the reach of his scythe, clearing out enemies crowding around him, and allows him to channel a beam of pink light at one particular target in order to mow them down.

In the Apartments, using too much of your spiritual power was very dangerous. It typically either attracted ghosts, failed to work, or backfired randomly. As a result, Marluxia now rarely calls upon powers aside from being able to draw his scythe in defense. As he begins to realize that using magical powers in Siren’s Port won’t automatically flag him as a tasty morsel for every spirit in the area, he will begin to use them more, focusing on the sneakier, more vicious uses of his power. Fitting with the changes of Marluxia’s personality, he is far less likely to use powers that are showy but relatively ineffective compared to physically fighting. For example, he would be more likely to attempt to incapacitate a foe by blinding him in a storm of rose petals, then slipping in and using the scythe to try to cut his legs out from under him than to use his petals to summon forth his lasers.

Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them?

Weapons:
Marluxia’s weapon is commonly the scythe, but after his experiences in the Apartments, is willing to pick up literally anything and use it as a weapon.

History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: Wiki Link
History Entry from Jigoku Apartments Application Part 1
History Part 2 (and personality)


ADDITION 9/13/11

I completely cut out the pre-canon history. Instead, I wrote up his canon history again in my own words, since the links to the original app didn't seem to work

Marluxia is a Nobody, a creature that is created when a person with a powerful heart is felled by a Heartless. Nobodies come in all shapes and sizes, but humanoid Nobodies like Marluxia are the rarest type. Sometime after he was "born", he was discovered by Xigbar, another Nobody. Xigbar took Marluxia under his wing and brought him into the Organization XIII, a collection of Nobodies that were in the pursuit of their Hearts. He was given his name and his title, "The Graceful Assassin", either by Xigbar, or by Xemnas, their leader. He quickly proved himself to be a competent member of the Organization, and by the time Roxas, their thirteenth member had joined, Marluxia was one of the ones responsible for instructing him. However, by the time Roxas arrived in the Organization, Marluxia was dissatisfied with his position at the bottom of the Organization. He had been offered the opportunity to head up the research team being sent to Castle Oblivion, and he took it readily, seeing this as an opportunity to take on the Organization higher-ups. What he did not realize was that his ambitions had become transparent to to other members, and the entire excursion was designed specifically to purge the traitorous elements of the Organization out.
When Sora approached the Castle, having defeated Xehanort's Heartless, Marluxia called him forth, goading the Keyblade master and his cohorts into the Castle, then trapping them inside, with the promise that someone important was waiting for them inside. While Sora assumed it was his childhood friend Riku, and Goofy and Donald's King, Mickey, Marluxia was actually holding hostage a Nobody named Namine. Namine had once been Kairi, Sora's other childhood friend. Like the other Nobodies, Namine had a unique ability. Namine was able to re-write people's memories using crayon drawings. Her special power was combined with the unique nature of Castle Oblivion, where "to find [was] to lose, and to lose [was] to find." As heart-bearers ascended the Castle stairs, memories would fade, and by the time one reached for the top of the Castle, only the most important memories would remain. Namine would, by the time Sora reached the top, have re-written Sora's memories, and have inserted herself into them instead of Kairi. At the top, Sora's heart would have been totally enslaved to her, and Marluxia had assumed that Namine was so fully under his thumb that he would be able to use her to control Sora to take on the surviving Organization members.
His plan might have worked, even in spite of Xemnas' knowledge, if Larxene, a co-conspirator, hadn't carelessly told Axel, a double-agent planted by the higher-ups, about the plan early on. While Marluxia himself remained suspicious of Axel's involvement, he was eventually won over in the end.
Meanwhile, Vexen, another member of the Organization, had been observing the plot, and returning to the basement levels to report to Lexaeus and Zexion, his compatriots. Zexion commanded him to continue to watch the situation. Riku, Sora's friend, found himself in the basement levels of the Castle, after he had escaped from Kingdom Hearts. Vexen encountered him, battled him, and took the information to the lab to create a Replica of Riku, in order to use him to protect the basement members from Marluxia's plot. The Replica was captured by Larxene and Marluxia, and it was forced into their schemes, with Namine forcing false memories into the Replica to encourage him to compete with Sora. Marluxia would ultimately declare the Replica a failure to Vexen, and threatened to inform Xemnas of his failure. Using that as blackmail, Marluxia told Vexen that on no uncertain terms that he was to go confront Sora himself and take control of the situation, even if it meant killing Sora. Vexen, terrified of being turned in to Xemnas, went to confront Sora in a suicide mission. Sora defeated him, but did not kill him, and Vexen decided to destroy Marluxia's plan by telling Sora the truth about Marluxia, of the Organization, and of the existence of Roxas, who was his Nobody, but he was killed by Axel before he could reveal the truth.
Axel had been there on Marluxia's command, who had told him to literally purge the traitors of the Organization. With Vexen's death, Marluxia was won over, and believed Axel to be fully complicit in his plot. As a result, Marluxia sent Larxene to delay Sora while he prepared for the final confrontation with the boy, and left Axel to supervise Namine's drawings. Axel used this opportunity to convince Namine to rebel against Marluxia, who flees, thereby preventing further tampering with Sora's memories. Larxene is killed off by Sora shortly afterwards, leaving Sora with a clear path to the top.
Marluxia confronts Axel's double-cross, and the two fight. Marluxia takes Namine up as a human shield, thinking that she needed to be rescued from the Castle, but Axel had no orders to rescue anyone, and he was willing to destroy Namine if it would kill Marluxia too. Fortunately for Marluxia, Sora showed up at the end of the fight, and Marluxia took advantage of the situation, saying that Axel was trying to hurt Namine, then fleeing, leaving Axel to fight Sora. Axel faked his death after a battle, leaving Sora to defeat Marluxia on his own.
With the time that he had bought by sacrificing Axel, Marluxia threatened Namine, demanding that she destroy Sora's memories completely, so he could be rebuilt. Namine, emboldened by Axel's words, and by the fact that Sora was willing to fight to protect her, even though by now he knew that she was deliberately tampering with his memories, refused. Before Marluxia could punish her, Sora came to rescue her, and Marluxia was beaten back into his chambers, cornered into fighting until Sora destroyed him utterly.

Point in Canon:Post-death

Conditional: Brief summary of previous RP history:
Marluxia awoke moments after his death, trapped inside of a shabby apartment building with a veritable rogues gallery of other people, all in different rooms. The apartment building, he would come to learn, was part of a town that was once a normal, happy place, but some horrible power, some unknown force, cursed every individual that lived there, and one by one, all of the townspeople had died horrible, violent deaths. They continued to live on as ghosts, confused and angry at the intrusion of the living, even as they drained the life and energy from them. Marluxia in particular found himself alienated by the sudden change of his situation. All of the books in the apartment were written in a language he didn’t understand, and the appliances; the radio, the television, the land-line phones all emitted static and strange voices babbling. Instead of clean, well-lit and pristine hallways, he found only grunge and darkness.
Going out of his apartment, he discovered that among the strange survivors, Namine had also made the jump into this world. He quickly manipulated her into joining him in his apartment, treating her a little more kindly in order to regain her trust in him. Namine, being separated from Sora and his friends as well as being trapped in a scary, dangerous environment that she was defenseless against, reluctantly let Marluxia into her life again.
His first real encounter with the ugliness of the apartment world came early in his stay. One night, he left his apartment and climbed up on the roof. He got too close to the water tank, and discovered that there was the ghost of someone who was murdered and thrown inside lurking. In an attempt to escape the ghost, he accidentally teleported himself into a worse situation: He found himself trapped inside of a well with a vengeful drowning victim inside. When he attempted to teleport out of the well, he found that ability, and all of his others, beyond him. His acquaintances watched helplessly through their Jigoberries as Marluxia struggled to climb out of the hole. When he managed to do so, it came at a great cost: Unknowingly, Sadako, the monster in the well, had laid a curse upon him, one that would lay dormant for some time.
As time progressed, Marluxia found himself becoming more reliant upon the others in the Apartments. It was one thing, when he was in the Organization, and their collected might alone kept lesser creatures at bay. He was safe, if anesthetized. The world was empty and cold, and filled with nothing but others who tried to lord their might over one another, which he could not abide. In the Apartments, nothing was sacred. In order to survive, he had to become more “empathetic” to the needs of others. As people who were close to Namine seemed to vanish without a trace, Marluxia used “kindness” to trap her closer to him, so that when the day came, he could rely upon her strengths, and have her believe that she was doing so under an act of free will.
He would discover that his softer “emotions” came with a cost. People he had developed ties with would slip in and out of the Apartments, in and out of his life, leaving him with the memory of grief, which was amplified by the general atmosphere of gloom and despair that hung over the entire town. When Namine disappeared, the void would be filled by (Yami) Bakura, a person who would become the single most important person that he had ever met, before or after he lost his heart. Bakura, a spirit trapped inside the Millennium Ring, an artifact of enormous power, responded to one of Marluxia’s posts one day, and the two began talking coyly to one another ever since.
Somehow, the pair, despite being utterly selfish and depraved monsters in their own respective worlds, became fast friends. They bonded over their desire to control the forces that held the town in sway, talking to one another over their Jigoberries about philosophy, mythology and plotting deeds that would grant them unimaginable power.
Then Marluxia died.
It was after a flood in the apartments. Marluxia was convinced that the girl in the well was the culprit, and was determined to punish her for it. With Bakura’s encouragement and help, they brought bags of cement over to the well to dump in and trap the ghost forever. However, Sadako used her ghostly power to break off a piece of the well psychically, while Marluxia was leaning over it to dump in the cement powder, causing him to fall in. She grabbed him in the murk, and dragged him down, far beyond the reach of Bakura or any of the others who had come to rescue him. Marluxia drowned in the mud. Sadako, now with a new body at her disposal, stole Marluxia’s Jigoberry and uploaded her cursed video directly onto it, determined to kill everyone. After the seven days had passed, she sent Marluxia’s body out, along with her own, to kill those who had not been able to pass on the curse. Marluxia would go on to attack Rubi Malone, one of the newest residents, who had managed to avoid the curse, but had drawn his attention anyway. Despite him ruining the apartment she was living in, she would grudgingly forgive him, and the two became close friends and friendly rivals, giving them something to do to lighten the dark days in the Apartments.
Bakura, on the other hand, felt uncharacteristically guilty for Marluxia’s death. It was because after so long, the spirit had found a kindred soul. After a shared dream where all of the inhabitants were forced to relive their worst memories of the past, where Bakura and Marluxia could see that their lives had shared many of the same tragic milestones, they became a little closer.
Some time after the dreams came the rise of Silent Hill. It was as simple as waking up in the apartments, only the apartments were different than before, and the entire town was different. Instead of a small town, this world became a sprawling nightmare where the spirits were bound in flesh. Upon hearing a rumor that there was a god to be birthed in a church hidden within the bowels of an abandoned amusement park, the pair, proving that they were slow to learn from past experiences, spared no time in marching in to go kill her. While they did not manage to reach the inner sanctum of God before having to turn back, Bakura and Marluxia kissed outside of the haunted house. They managed to contain themselves for an entire hour before consummating their relationship, against the altar of the cult, no less. It became more than just sex between the two, and somehow, their narcissistic, psychotic behavior dovetailed with one another perfectly. Bakura would eventually decide to share his heart with Marluxia, by turning Marluxia’s body into a vessel for his spirit. It was also a precaution, if something were ever to happen to either of their bodies again, to protect their souls from being harmed by the ghosts. Inside of Bakura’s soul, Marluxia could feel and understand peace that he had eluded him for a great portion of his life. Even though he was experiencing Bakura’s feelings, the heady flow of the warm feeling Bakura described as “love” made Marluxia feel comfortable. For the first time since he was a very small boy, he could say that he felt happy. He was able to carry this “happiness” to an extent when their souls were not joined, experiencing the memory of it in much the same way as another Nobody might. Instead of an abstract concept that was unfathomable to him, he could remember every time he looked at Bakura’s face.
Their supernatural bond did not go beyond the notice of the ghosts in the apartments. The apartment Marluxia and Bakura shared was home to a particularly sadistic ghost named Hikaru. During one union between Marluxia’s and Bakura’s souls, Hikaru slipped into Bakura’s empty body, hiding inside of it and waiting for the appropriate moment to possess it. Jealous and hateful of all the people in the apartment, and of Marluxia and Bakura in particular, he planned on using Bakura’s human body and his reputation with the other inhabitants in order to break into their homes to kill them, to clean the scum out of his home. He almost successfully rid himself of Marluxia by luring him into the Love Hotel on the outskirts of town and leaving him there to have his soul devoured by angry, lustful spirits. His plan was foiled when Bakura managed to wrest control from the ghost long enough to send Rubi and some others to release him.
At the point where their story (and the game) ends, Hikaru was attempting to rally some of the other ghosts in the apartments, ones who had also had their homes stolen by the living, by making the apartments unlivable with power outages, fires, and floods. Marluxia, by merit of being the longest standing inhabitant of the apartments, had begun to rally the disparate interests together in order to actively fight off the ghosts. On his last day before being pulled into Siren’s Port, he woke up beside Bakura, early in the morning as he usually did, and made him coffee. After lounging about for a few moments, he got up to assess the flood that had started in the basement, and now had completely engulfed the first floor, despite the doors and windows to the outside having been deliberately left open. Too afraid of getting into the water himself, he started attempting to contact his neighbors, only to find that the apartments were strangely quiet, with only one neighbor, a newcomer named Shino. When he returned to the apartment, Bakura seemed to be gone, as if he had stepped out for a moment, though there would have been nowhere to go. With dread, Marluxia packed up some things in a messenger bag and prepared for the worst, though in reality, the truth was much worse than what he had imagined. With the world around him beginning to fade away, he could feel the pull, and before long, he too, had gone away from the Apartments, leaving the town to rot silently, forever.

Sample Logs
Unfortunately, a lot of the logs Marluxia was involved in with Bakura, with whom he had a lot of development with, are f-locked because the two couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. Here are a few logs/comment threads that are not locked. Nothing with Namine is unlocked, because it is on journals that are f-locked or purged.
Marluxia trying to organize the apartment-dwellers
A thread showing Marluxia and Bakura working together.
Marluxia and Bakura investigating a suspicious death

Character Personality:
Personality from Jigoku Apartments Entry


REVISIONS: UPDATED 9/13/11
Marluxia is a perfect storm of brains, brawn, looks, and ambition. Nobodies in general are arrogant creatures, fully assured of their superiority, but Marluxia in particular is known for this, believing himself to be the better of all other Nobodies. His naked ambition with absence of anything resembling empathy drives him to strive to be the best of whatever he is doing, regardless of who it hurts. This drove him to be considered worthy of a position in Castle Oblivion, and it is what drove him towards his destruction. While he is indeed smart and clever, there is also a measure of impatience in his actions. His inability to empathize with other creatures, human and Nobody alike, along with his ego, sometimes drive him to act without fully thinking out the consequences. For example, when he should have suspected that Axel would betray him, he let his guard down to the point where he completely miscalculated what Axel would do, and as a result, he basically handed Namine over to him, which ultimately destroyed the last threads of his plot. Marluxia's ambition and lack of empathy also prevents him from developing real attachments to other creatures. He may get on well with others, but he doesn't really care about anyone. He is the sort of dangerous sociopath that knows how to be charming, and knows how to use his body and brains to get what he wants, but doesn't understand or care about the emotional impacts of his actions. Not only is he not capable of it, he doesn't even pretend to try. Marluxia is utterly without morality, pity, or empathy.
While he is arrogant and ambitious, he's not an utter fool. Marluxia knows when to put his head down, and if he has to, can grit his teeth and bear mistreatment or belittling from others. His moniker, "The Graceful Assassin" was not given to him because "Dancer" was already taken. He knows how to be quiet, how to blend in intimately with his surroundings. When in the Castle, while he made his presence known, he was more than willing to let others take up positions in the forefront, like when Axel when he asked to test Sora on the first level. Marluxia is a leader who does not mind taking a more hidden role, provided that it suitably feeds his massive black hole of an ego.
He doesn't always show off, but when he does, he is quite flashy. He speaks in prose and honeyed words, moves in grand gestures, and punctuates his points with a spray of magenta petals. Despite how he doesn't care about others, it's clear that he cares how others think about him. Everything he does is purposeful and considered, even if he's "hiding" his true nature under his hood. No matter what he does, no matter where he is or who he's dealing with, he has to be in utter control of his image, and how others view and remember him.
Ultimately, to sum up how Marluxia views himself, He is perfect as he is, and deserves the power and station in accordance of such.

Conditional: Personality development in previous game:
By the end of the games, Marluxia gets along a little better with others. A little. This is only because of survivalistic, band-together-or-die nature of the apartments. He is still the manipulative con-artist he was when he arrived. His methods of dealing with people have refined themselves since he was in the Castle, letting him blend in among heart-bearers a little more easily. However, if he wants something, he does everything in his power to get it, through force, through trickery, through theft; there is little beneath him in what he will do for his goals. If anything, the humiliations that he suffered in the apartments have made him more willing to dispense with his pride in order to achieve his desires. His only soft spot is in regards to Bakura, that specific Bakura. If a different Bakura arrived in Siren’s Port, he would have no hesitation or compunction in taking advantage of him. If that specific Bakura were to re-enter his life he would possessively hunt him down in order to be with him again (provided that Bakura’s mun would be agreeable to playing Jigoku-Bakura.)
The other Nobodies, the ones who know him well, might notice more changes in him. He seems paler now, as if some of the life had been sucked from his flesh, and his features are somewhat harder. They would be able to tell that he’s been knocked back a peg or two since he left the Organization. As a result, he is not quite as much of an obnoxious windbag as he used to be. He is quieter, more intense, but certainly by no means without his pride. His is the self-assurance of a man who has forgotten more agony than most will ever remember, and survived it. It isn’t that he doesn’t care that his actions have consequences, he just knows that he can withstand incredible amounts of agony that come with failed decisons.
Marluxia was always rather cunning in his canon, and this cleverness only grew as he was forced to rely on his wits and his mundane skills in order to get by. He is now especially fond of attacking opponents in the same way a shark would, by delivering one initial, brutal strike before retreating to a safe distance, then repeating until his foe is either incapacitated, has escaped, or is forcing Marluxia into a prolonged fight.
His time in the apartment left him with some unique aversions and quirks. In order to be accepted in the Apartments, the characters all had to have a fear, which will be carried over. Marluxia’s fear was claustrophobia, particularly now if that tiny space is also a wet one (Like a well). Marluxia experienced a great deal of low-level dread while he lived in the apartments, and while he will appear to shake that off for the most part, he will have nightmares about his experiences, and substitute people he knew in the apartments with people he meets at Siren’s Port. In order to demonstrate this fear, Marluxia will write his nightmares in a protected (but not entirely unhackable) entry on his Jigoberry. (I feel that doing this keeps the feel of the Apartments in his character, while not making his characterization overly emotional and weak. It was a very tenuous balance to bring an emotionless character into a fear-based setting and keep his characterization relatively truthful while actually making the events affect him in some fashion.)
Character Plans:
Marluxia’s major goal in his post-Organization life is to understand the greater powers that seem to hold sway over lesser beings, and capture the power as his own. In this world, it would mean investigating the Pull, SERO and Afterglow, inc. on his own, or perhaps with someone he respected as an equal or near-equal. He would resist joining a great group of people to investigate, though if there was a crisis, or some issue that was too big to deal with himself, he would work with others, if only temporarily. Issues of survival and protection are one thing, but for the bigger, metaphysical things in life, it is better to experience these things oneself.
Marluxia still despises people who try to force him to submit, and “hates” Xemnas for having forced him to submit to his authority. When he discovers the power and scope of the Organization in Siren’s Port, he will likely try to keep a low profile and avoid directly incurring their wrath. He still entertains ideas of destroying the Superior in some way or another, and while he is not afraid to lay his body on the line, he is not so utterly foolish as to take on Xemnas (and the rest of the Organization, and likely whatever groups that have allied with it) that he would attack Xemnas openly, or without some sort of plan. He ultimately wants nothing to do with the Organization at large, and assumes that any members that are less than totally on board with Xemnas’ grand plan have either seen the dismal failure of Marluxia’s efforts and are not willing to betray him, or will not be swayed by anything Marluxia can say or do. This will not stop his planning, however, and if a suitable opportunity arises, Marluxia is not afraid to seize it.
Another priority is finding a “heart”. It does not have to be his actual heart, or a “heart” at all. While he once eschewed all emotion, favoring the numbness of the lack of a heart, his exposure to a living, feeling heart in the Apartments makes him remember that not all of those pesky emotions were terrible and painful.

Appearance/PB: 81 pictures so far I tend to update the icons as I discover that I need new ones to explain his actions. (Which is why like, half of them are of him in varying degrees of smugness.)

Writing Samples

First Person Sample
[Marluxia looks rather displeased with the situation, his face washed out by the gray sky.]

Really now. As if memorizing the topography of two ghostly cities was not enough, but we now have to add a third?

[He rubs at his temples with his free hand, his face scrunching in discomfort and perhaps a bit of nausea from the effects of the Pull. After a moment, his eyes move, as if he’s taking in everything around the baseball diamond.]

This... is different, somehow. Not like Silent Hill at all...

[He’s walking now, having kind of forgotten about the NV in his hand. He seems to notice the security by the dugouts, and moves away from it, distrust written across his face. With a disgusted huff, he sees he’s still recording and shoves the NV into his pocket. Viewers are treated to the inside view of his pants pocket, blackness and rustling of fabric supercede most everything else. It can be intimated that he’s walking towards the parking lot.]

Third Person Sample
Marluxia sat on the edge of his new bed, trying to assess his newfound situation. Another apartment. Another set of tacit rules to follow. Same pit of dread coiling in his stomach. He didn’t have to be told about the dangers of this world; he could practically feel them. He still had his Jigoberry, even though the red tape and the flashlight he usually carried along were gone. His own words were clearly laid out inside, but the replies, the words of the others that had lived in the Apartments with him were jumbled, and the harder he tried to read them, the more scrambled the words became. He tried to muster up a feeling of anxiety that perhaps he was losing his mind, but he couldn’t manage it. Someone, his lover with the white hair, had left a lot of comments in one of the more recent entries, but he couldn’t remember what they had talked about. What was his name?
He rubbed at the scars his lover had left on his chest, but nothing more came to mind. It didn’t seem to bother him like it should have, and he just let it go. What was the point? He probably wasn’t here, because if he was, he probably would have said something by now. Neither of them were particularly quiet people, especially when they were waxing philosophical about their situation.
He closed out of the backlog of his Jigoberry and looked at what was being posted on the new network, which thankfully the device seemed to be able to connect to. He would have been annoyed to have to learn another electronic piece of equipment, especially if that one turned out to not be as durable as his Jigoberry had proved to be. Many different voices in this city, so many more than he had heard in quite some time. He could mope, he supposed, and muse on this love of his that was slipping out of his fingers, but really, remembering him wasn’t the same as having him, and if he couldn’t have him, perhaps it was best if he didn’t remember him at all.
He got off of the bed and crossed over to look out the window, carefully scrutinizing the city that he could see. It was growing dark, and he had been warned against going out in the darkness. On the other hand, there was nothing to be learned about the world if he cooped himself up in this apartment. He closed the curtains again, since he so hated to have his sleep interrupted by the morning light (though he suspected that it wouldn’t often be a problem in this place).
He was halfway down the stairs when he heard the sirens go off. Instinctively, his hands tightened around the railing of the stairs, adrenaline coursing through his veins. When the world failed to turn to rust and rot, he continued down the stairs, out to the lobby. He pushed past the people there who tried to stop him, ignoring their warnings. This was something he had to see for himself.
And it wasn’t as if he had never experienced real Hell before.
He didn’t go far outside of the Apartment building, of course. Heaven forbid if he did get wounded and had to limp back home. Better that his limp wouldn’t have to carry him far. With the glow of the apartment door behind him, he stood in the parking lot, arms outstretched into the dying daylight, and waited.