psychoshenanigans | UVS // Writing Practice

UVS // Writing Practice

Wow, it's Zoe. Here she is. Unremarkable height, unremarkable build, wavy blonde hair, chapped lips, light freckles, spindly fingers, and clipped-short fingernails. Her eyes are either a boring green or a very exciting, nearly-glowing green, depending on whether or not you can see magic. On this fine day (or night), she's easy to encounter because she is either...

A) Party

...at a party she doesn't want to be attending, because it's late and she's tired and she doesn't really know anybody here except for maybe one person, and that person is off socializing without her. Her focus is largely on trying to get another drink and keep up the appearance that she's having a cool and casual time here. This is probably why her spatial awareness fails her so horribly as she abruptly knocks into someone the moment she goes to move away.

B) Body

...dragging an unconscious body down a hallway. Laboriously. Yanking the guy along by his armpits maybe a foot at a time. She's not that strong. He's a big guy. The scene is alarming, yes, but also very funny. Her attempts at speed and stealth are being dampened by what's becoming comical panting and grunting as she tries to lever this motherfucker up into a stairwell in a hurry.

C) Trapped

...tied up! In a chair. In a basement. Just waking up. And she's not alone. This can't be good.

D) Space?

...in space. In space? Shit, she's in space?? Just, you know, anxiously trying to navigate this busted-looking spaceship. This is so bad and out-of-left-field that she's mostly assuming this is one of her awful nightmares because this can't actually be happening. Right?

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The incongruous amount of rusty skulls involved in the decor of a spaceship means that this must be a dream. And it fits with a nightmare that the nagging feeling of being watched or followed would be creeping around in the back of her mind. Is every sound here a normal part of this frigid wreck, or are some of the soft rattles and creaks being produced by a hidden threat sneaking up behind her?

Unfortunately, it also fits with a nightmare that her fears would suddenly blossom before her eyes as if the act of worrying alone had summoned them into existence.

Near the end of the corridor, where the shadows are deeper underneath the weak flickering of a bulb dying somewhere in the ceiling, a towering figure suddenly materializes to whirl around the corner and cut off her path. Shapeless underneath some kind of cloak, a quick glimpse of armor and the cold glint of a visor, they loom with obvious agrression.

The futuristic rifle they're carrying has her locked in its sights before they even finish their dramatic pivot around the corner.

Some part of her thinks ah, finally, as an intimidating shape materializes at the end of the hall. This thing is probably here to chase her down the nebulous hallways of her nightmare for the next thirty minutes.

And while in hindsight she would have loved to have used that confidence to say something cool, she lets out a startled yelp instead. She halfway throws up her hands (To... Surrender? To protect herself? As if she'd had a thought as coherent as either of those..) and instinctually ducks for cover. Tries to wedge herself behind a structural beam jutting out of the wall.

And it's not like she's superhuman-fast about it, or anything. Just normal, scared-human-fast. Honestly, she'll be lucky if this doesn't somehow get her shot.

It's true that according to dream logic, now would be when the running starts. The mortal dread incarnate would lunge and then chase, and the hallways would be confounding and endless. Probably some poignant illustration of her internal mortal dread and insecurities.

Instead, she gets the looming doom treatment.

The figure steps quietly, but their solid weight makes the floor panels creak enough to describe a slow and menacing approach.

If she looks, she'll see the gunman stalking forward to peer at her around her feeble hiding place, rifle half-lowered but still extremely ready to kill her at the slightest provocation.

This monster is way too tall. It has to be a dream.

Oh, fuck. Not the looming doom treatment! That's way worse than the chase scene.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Okay. She's flooded with enough adrenaline to finally believe this might be a real situation. And if that's true, that's a vampire. With a rifle. And armor? Ready for a fight. She's not. Running is bad. Hiding won't work. All her blood is too loud. She starts scrunching down into a smaller shape in self-defense, though she can't have explained exactly why. She's not really thinking. She doesn't have the guts to get a second look, either. The footsteps are a lot as it is.

She grasps at her only conceivable shred of hope, which is that the looming aberration approaching her might fit into the only other context she has for this kind of thing. Words leave her mouth, short and surprisingly flat given how scared she is.

"If you're after the girl, I don't have her."

According to the boots and tattered edges of cloak that she can see from her scrunched-up shape, the gunman paces slowly and evenly forward along the corridor wall that she is not scrunched against. It's important to leave a potential-rifle-shot's worth of space between the two of them while the target is being scrutinized.

Seconds of tension-loaded silence pass by--of course feeling far longer than they really are--before the gunman finally responds.

Luckily, the response is not to just shoot her.

"...Girl?"

The rumbly voice filtering through the futuristic facemask sounds perplexed. Maybe even hesitant. As baffling as everything in the world is right now, it is at least clear that he has no idea what she's talking about. The next question is colder, a little sharper, but still just as confused.

"Who are you?"

Out of everything, it's the weird filtered quality of his voice that gets Zoe to look up at her potential assailant. And maybe the delayed realization that there'll be more seconds between alive and dead for her than she'd previously assumed.

"Uh..." Goddamn. She instinctually searches for a face somewhere in that visor, wanting any read on an expression and finding absolutely nothing to latch on to. "...No one. I'm not anybody."

She means she's not anybody important. She's trying to keep from somehow getting into more trouble. Starting to play chess without a single idea what the board looks like. She doesn't realize how cagey it sounds.

Cagey indeed.

His sympathies are limited. He has been around plenty of harmless-seeming girls who are secretly magic-slinging monsters. He has seen enough of them act as deceptive lures and distractions. He is taking no chances.

The rifle swings up to lock her in its sights once more, and with her crumpled on the ground like that, it doesn't need to move far. It's barely a shrug for him to aim death at her again.

"Name."

Sharp and cold. The matter clearly is not up for discussion. The request is not open to interpretation. And, perhaps because he realizes that her answer won't likely give him information that will actually be useful to him, he shortly follows it up with additional demands.

"Origin. Purpose. Everything."

Start talking.

Oh, okay. Nevermind. The big scary space marine is very convincing. She flinches and squeezes her eyes shut and tries to answer.

"Zoe. Hawkins. Civilian. Going home."

Those are probably answers to some of the questions he asked. She didn't retain his exact words very well, probably because they didn't make a whole lot of sense. She's gotten into a lot of trouble for things that she barely understands over the last few days. She had really been hoping that was over.

The last of her already-tenuous defensiveness quickly crumbles as she tries to figure out if this guy is a cop or something. And what that could mean. And what the fuck he's expecting to get by saying "everything".

"I don't know," she admits after a stilted pause, the overwhelm finally creeping into her voice, "I don't know where I am right now. I don't know how I got here. I have no idea what's going on. I'm just trying to leave."

'Everything' meant whatever words she chose to willingly let fall out of her face. He wanted whatever pieces of information she thought might prevent her from getting shot. The relevant and important things tend to come up first when staring down the barrel of a weapon, so he doesn't need to elaborate.

Hopefully the pause that follows is a good one, as he considers her piecemeal answer... and also tries to listen to the sounds of the ship around the girl's stressed breathing. If there are raiders hiding here, the perfect time to strike would be while he's busy with this convenient distraction, so he would like to catch the sounds of their approach before that happens.

After a few measured moments of thought, and no trap springs in the meantime, he coldly delivers one more follow-up question.

"Where is 'home?'"

Is she trying to get back to another one of the wrecked ships in fleet, some nearby colony of scavengers... or, most improbably--and distressing for him to even consider--somewhere completely unrelated to this place.

"Bothell." Then, after another short pause, she adds, "Seattle."

She doesn't know where here is and she certainly doesn't have... Wait, she does know. Something helpfully provides the intrusive knowledge that she's in space. It's the same way how in dreams, sometimes you just know stuff about the scenario you're in despite it being completely nonsensical.

That's why, when she doesn't get an immediate verbal response, she cracks one eye open and adds, "Washington? Not the... Not D.C., the state. On Earth?"

She'd... Love to see any recognition, there. She would also love to put her shoulders down, but she's afraid that might be too much movement for her sudden interrogator.

Yeah, that ominous pause does not bode well for the possibility of dawning recognition. The gunman remains still and silent, looming there with latent threat while she jitters her way through an answer, and then continues to loom like a dire storm cloud for several seconds after.

And of course, when he does reanimate and respond, he offers no sign of what he thinks about any of it.

It's impossible to tell if her answer has anything to do with his decision to suddenly reach down and make contact with her.

He grabs her upper arm. He lifts. He's very strong.

"Up." Another sharp command that implies a very bad outcome if she does not comply. "Walk."

She is being moved bodily down the hallway, and she has no way of knowing that the fact that he uses not only one word, but two, is actually very kind of him.

He's being nice.

Being hoisted up by the arm is both good and bad.

Just kidding, it's actually fully terrible aside from a very thin silver lining; being forced to move kicks some of her panic back up, which means she does something other than cowering uselessly. She can struggle uselessly instead.

She whines when her arm is grabbed and tries to twist out of it. She tries to stay in a little crunched-up shape too, until her feet leave the ground for the couple milliseconds she needs to realize she really is totally and completely powerless here.

She's so fucking sick of being dragged around by people a billion times stronger than her. It's so unfair. She's likely dragged unwillingly for couple of feet before she makes another noise like she's actively repressing some kind of tantrum. Incredibly, once she gets her feet under her, she starts walking under her own volition. Her arm and shoulder stay fully tensed.

"Where. Why." Short, clipped. She's obviously still scared but her face and voice don't have room for that kind of emoting anymore. "Who are you."

Whether she's choosing to struggle or comply, she can detect no difference in is methodical forward-momentum. On one hand, this means that he doesn't need to so much as jostle her to make her easier to handle, but on the other, he is free to completely ignore her once he has her in-hand. Which is exactly what he does.

To him, she's just a little flag twisting in the wind, and he spares her no extra attention as he moves the both of them down the rest of the corridor. Her questions might as well not exist, as it quickly becomes clear that the rest of the ship is the only thing that has his attention now.

Girl in one hand and big space-rifle held up and at the ready in the other, the gunman pauses at the mouth of the corridor when he reaches it. Stopping to listen--regardless of whether she's still making noise or not--before stepping forward to peer into the next room, silent and slow.

It's clear he's either hunting or watching out for some other threat that is not girls cowering in hallways.

"...Any friends?"

If there's someone else here that she doesn't want shot on sight, this is her one cue to speak up about it.

Spaaaaaace

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