it all begins with a lie.

for @hypermotion // the cult life; circa 2013

there are wolves in the city dressed up in human skin, disappearing in the brisk pace of pseudo-rush. the city reeks of decaying prey and fresh slaughter. but mina doesn’t mind in her riding hood red.

her paper dolls have found a disturbance, a strange anomaly rippling the surface of well-placed wards. someone had triggered them (human, inhuman. something in between? it was hard to tell). she grins all the same. it didn’t matter who they were–what was important was whether they understood the rules that dictated the underground, the supernatural, if they understood what it meant to cross lines and mess with the status quo.

mina loved challenges and this one seemed destined to prove worthy.

she stands at an intersection, an invitation held between her fingers. the night is eerily quiet, muffled by the wards weaving in and out of her body. there’s a chill that creeps along her skin and up her spine, settling into her bones. it is foreboding and a touch exhilarating.

a shadow slips along the walls of buildings, dashing through empty alleyways. soon, it finds itself standing quietly beside her, waiting. mina doesn’t dawdle; time is a necessity. the in-game players already teetering at the news of a new player so late in the game. but no matter, she didn’t make the rules–They did.

“deliver this.”

the shadow vanishes, journeying to the east of the city. come dawn, sergeant lee seungho will receive an opportunity of a lifetime.

Welcome to Der Märchenclub.

los angeles is a cesspool; its underground a home to the disenfranchised & the naysayers, the rebellious & the dangerous, the corrupt elite & the crude bottom feeders. 

can’t take a step outside the dump the real estate agent had marketed as a house without stepping on a ley line and triggering ten different silent alarms. can’t even look marginally in anyone’s general direction or you’d get the stank eye from a beast wearing the skin of a teenaged boy’s wet dream. can’t fucking do anything in this goddamned city without somebody knowing -- like those so-called linchpins, those make-believe gods.

never in a million years would he have imagined being washed up in a city incapable of living up to its namesake. never would have imagined being marooned on what felt like an island ruled by a pale imitation of meritocracy but was, in secret, pandering to oligarchy -- the weak & the powerless having to resort to sucking dick & kissing elite ass for a shred of leftover sympathy and a poorer-than-a-beggar’s portion of the underground’s mounds of blood money (the worst kind of dirty money, really).

it made seungho sick to his stomach to think that his mistakes are what landed him right smack in the middle of a playing field with no exit in sight and a whole lot of anger (and nerve, mostly reckless nerve).

so when he receives a seemingly nondescript invitation in the mail, sealed and signed in gold with a welcome note to what is quite possibly the stupidest thing he’s ever heard of, seungho laughs for a long time.

then he burns the invitation, rsvp and consequences be damned.

come and get me, i dare you.

for @hypermotion

3AM and you startle awake with your hand wrapped around the gun you keep beneath your pillow, finger already on the trigger.

they call you trigger-happy, sneering like the idiots they are. (they’ll never know that when the lights go out, you’re the monster lurking in their closets, watching them while they sleep; eeny-meeny-miney-moe'ing your way through enemies wearing the faces of your neighbors.)

your friends whisper behind your back, pointing fingers at you. there’s the psycho, they say before sunday mass, watching you like vultures spotting weak prey. poor boy, they coo, full of pity. 

you stare, a thousand yards beyond their shoulders, seeing everything and nothing all at once. 

ptsd, they laugh in high-pitched tones, sounding like the aftershocks of a flashbang going off in your ears. ringing, ringing, ringing—

(you mistaken their voices for cries of mercy. mistaken them for your comrades pleading for you to save them. 

you close your eyes. 

survivor’s guilt is a mythsurvivor’s guilt is a mythsurvivor —)

3AM and you pull the trigger with the muzzle in your mouth. and cry when nothing but click click click meets your ears.

foolish boy, home is just another battlefield.

(tell me: who will remember the child who played at war, only to return with a mouth full of blood and a head full of ghosts?

tell me: who will remember the innocent church boy who thought himself holy and brave, only to come crawling back a sinner and half crazed?)

soldier boy, you damned fool.