#*armageddon

==> A few times last night, the room still dark and Dave still fast asleep, you'd woken up in a fit of coughing and left the room so as not to wake him. You mulled around the apartment trying to decide whether to huddle on the couch or lock yourself in the ablution block so you'd be even less likely to disturb him. You'd been groggy, tired, desperate just to stop coughing and get back to sleep so you could get over all of this. One of those times, you'd flicked on your handheld and stared at it in the dark. Thoughts crowded your mind and you pondered the man sleeping in the next room. That must have been when you'd typed those words, not remembering whether you'd sent them or not. You'd fallen asleep on the couch for half an hour, eventually waking up and trundling back to bed.

==> When you finally stirred, Dave was gone and the apartment was quiet. It only took a glance at his blog to see a note about where he'd gone. It also showed the familiar notification for a message. Your stomach dropped as your half-conscious mind recalled what you'd written last night. Looks like you had sent it after all.

==> You just lay there, looking at the little envelope icon with your thumb hovering above the touch screen. You were anxious about opening it. About what it'd say.

==> Fear didn't hold you forever. You read the words on the screen in a resoundingly quiet-- and empty-- apartment.

==> When a mind came down from the neon-coloured, candy-coated Trickster Mode, it took a while for it to stabilize. It overcompensated; it went through hangover-like symptoms; then the gears slowly started ticking again, and it remembered.

==> You'd crawled off the floor into Dave's ablution trap at some point. The trap was a similar shape to your 'coon and vaguely reassuring, but without much needed sopor, terrors from the void poisoned your dreams. Memories trickled back in in the form of macabre horrors. Your limbs twitched violently as you ran from unseen monsters and relived being one yourself.

==> With a heart-stopping lurch, you flung yourself up-- you gasped for air and sucked it in hungrily. The pitch black of the ablution trap left you confused and out-of-sorts for a few seconds more. Only after a while did the light under the door register, and you remembered where you were.

==> Right. Dave's place.

==> Because you--

==> You slowly remembered your nightmares, how vivid and clear they'd been, how a trickster theme had played through them all. How unlikely they were to be dreams. How they showed where the pink and green blood had come from. Your shoulders shook lightly as you wrapped your arms around yourself, letting your head sink down to your knees. Whoops. You'd forgotten the large hole Dave had blown in your stomach. Now you were doubled over for an entirely different reason.

==> Stop

Stop right now.

==> Stop

...Young lady, are you listening to me?

==>

...ARADIA.

This time you manage to push yourself back away from the computer, breaking its spell upon you, and you immediately wish you hadn't. You sit a few feet away from the desk and just stare at the screen. From this distance you can still see the cursor blinking over the text box.

What were you doing?

You couldn't provide an answer.

Your head fell so you could stare at your hands where they lay in your lap. You felt it coming on but couldn't do much about it; they looked distant, unfamiliar. Lifelines and luck lines crossing to and fro. They didn't have the callouses of an adventurer or strifer or much of a proper troll at all. You knew they had to be your hands, but maybe it would've been nice to blame them for the last few days. Perigrees even.

You'd gone too far with this whole charade. The online social life and sneaking out. It was wrong, and you knew it. And now.. now you were even entertaining thoughts like..

You needed something to get your mind off of it, and immediately. You knew the most logical answer. The chair screeched as you got up suddenly and shoved it back under the desk, turning on your heel to go find the nearest carapacian. A short conversation and the little white pawn scampered off, leaving you to clean yourself up and go sit in the waiting room. She didn't leave you waiting long. She returned with two of the Midnight Crew's mooks, who completely dwarfed her and you both. You simply smiled genteelly in greeting-- like they weren't the mob members who were assigned to keep you from escaping-- and only pausing a moment to tap a message into your handheld before rising to follow them. One of them only bothered to speak once you'd reached the car:

"Where to?"

The corner of your mouth lifted in a lopsided look. You knew the name and reputation of your renter this time.

"Orphaner Dualscar's residence."

You recognized those looks the mooks gave you. They didn't ask any more questions on the ride through Midnight City, nor when they dropped you off in front of his hive. 

There are probably other Aradia's better suited for the job, being robots and all.

==> Aradia: Try to figure out if they're lying to you

You can't really do that.

That's the thing about the internet. The people on the other end could be anywhere in the world, and apparently anywhere in multiple worlds in multiple universes and multiple timelines. Face-to-face you might be able to determine whether they were lying, but as all these accusations of sounding emotionless prove, expression doesn't send well over the web.

What you do know is that the voices haven't been vehemently denying all of this either. Usually if someone lies to you outright about the world and how it works, there's at least one ghost who's fervently against it and it leaves you feeling greatly unsettled. Right now as you stare at the screen and rest your chin in your palms, it's the same background static as ever. But maybe they simply don't know. Maybe they don't want to tell you.

==> Aradia: Then find someone to tell you.

Well, at that very moment she was sitting in the common room yet again. It was the most likely place to find her in the last few days, her spartan cell holding nothing of interest beyond her recuperacoon. She held herself with too much poise for the basic plastic chair and stared in front of her. The computer was still in sleep mode; she hadn't touched it. The voices had caught her before she could log on again.

Why was she sitting there, hogging the computer terminal and oblivious to whether someone else might be irritably waiting for her to either do something with it or get out of the way?

She didn't have an answer to that.

What was the point of starting a blog for a slave girl, besides passing time till the auction?

She stared at her hands in her lap like she was trying to memorize foreign objects. Her thoughts wandered to the highblood she'd been conversing with last night. He'd said very strange things and she'd accepted it, and instead of doubting his sincerity she'd started coaxing out his problems and pointing out possibilities for him. It was pretty obvious what she was doing. Painfully obvious, to her.

She was doing her job. It was the same kind of help she tried to give those who purchased her, simply lacking the physicality in lieu of text on a screen. Was that it then? Was that the appeal of the site? The free form of relief or escape that she'd provide, trading off quality and intimacy in exchange for being available to everyone? 

...

Aradia lifted her head and looked at the blank computer screen. How long had she been sitting there?

It would've been too much to hope for, being purchased by the Midnight Mansion and arriving in time to be auctioned.