bullet with butterfly wings

[tagartist]

WHO: Chloe Price and YOOOOOOOU.
WHAT: Catch all! One hyperactive, definitely ill teenage brat with way too much time on her hands is trying to do research and explore shit. Please stop her before someone gets hurt.
WHEN: From ~17/18 and onwards (I'll update prompts for Phase II when it comes about)
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: I got nothing, I'll update if somethin' crops up

[ A ] One Through Three

Despite all her anger at arriving here, Chloe's starting to kind of sort of feel a little bit more at ease with the place. Maybe it's the sleep she got from the sleep aid that cut through the restlessness she was feeling from the withdrawal of cigarettes and drugs. She doesn't feel as shaky as she did before - the headaches still there, the restlessness definitely, but she doesn't feel bad, so it only makes sense she's on the mend.

Maybe she's a little more hyper than usual, but maybe she's just finally figuring out how to be happy drug free. Maybe she's been doing the opposite of what she thought was all this time - not numbing pain, but numbing joy, and now she can feel it again and there's something nice about it, something great, something addicting, because she hasn't remembered what it's like to feel happy and excited in ages.

It gets her ready to help out, to find some tasks, to research some shit, to figure this place out from the ground up. She can be found in various areas, trying to get to know the ways of Kirkwall, sticking out like a sore thumb most likely, and definitely getting horribly lost every which way, but hey! If you need some help carrying bags, or if you need someone to fix a wheel on your cart that's come loose, or if there's something you can teach her, she's more than happy to rush over, smile on her face, give you a hand because helping each other is what people are supposed to do, right?

And if she's not helping out with those, she's found herself in a library, or anywhere with books, anywhere she can sit down and start to read the history of this place - all of it she can get her hands on - about the science and the magic and every bit of knowledge she can find. It's the first time in years she's wanted to know things, wanted to learn, and it almost makes her feel like her old self, which is something that should have struck her as odd, but doesn't.

[ B ] Four Through Six

At some point, the energy starts to feel out of hand though. Way out of hand. Maybe this is withdrawal after all, she doesn't know. She's jittery and she can't sleep without help in the slightest and the fucking energy she was feeling is obnoxious now, but she just can't stop moving. She tries to tie herself down to the library, to focus on those studies, but the words blur and her mind can't focus, so she's up and running before she can even get through a single page. She's getting frustrated that the technology here isn't what she's used to because she'd fucking kill to play some video games or fucking sit down and marathon her favorite movies, but instead she's got to figure out how to make her own entertainment or bust. She wants to fix a car, she wants to feel oil on her hands, and she's got nothing for herself.

So she does the next best thing she can think of; she's drinking (probably stolen) booze in an attempt to knock herself out if she just gets enough, but it's doing nothing and now she's just hyper AND drunk and maybe stumbling about trying to find something to do, but not having too much luck on the latter. The stumbling's going real well, though. Better than expected, even, and she actually ends up steadying herself with the arm of a passing person, stranger or not, because it's the only way to keep herself upright for a second.

This might have been a bad idea.

[ C ] Seven Through Ten

"So if I begged you, would you kill me, because I'm pretty sure I'm already dying."

That's the best thing to say to whoever's listening, right? Totally normal. She's got a fever and she can tell, she's pretty sure her hands won't stop shaking anymore and the sleep aids are so much less effective than they were before; she always wakes up feeling ten times worse and she's just stopped using them because of it.

She was supposed to be dead anyway. Just bring it full circle. She doesn't want to deal with this anymore. She's still convinced it's just withdrawal, but fuck, was it supposed to last this long? Or was this the Zoloft and not the cigarettes? When did that stop? She doesn't know, and she can't exactly Google it.

So she's been settling on keeping up the drinking (because it was such a smart plan) and now it's at least gotten her to be sluggish enough to sort of curl up somewhere not entirely comfy and clearly way too public if she's talking to other people, but that doesn't matter to her anymore. "I don't want to feel this way anymore."

Comments

[tagartist]

She rubbed at her eyes at the explanation, a soft snort of either amusement or disbelief escaping. Her vision felt blurry and her head was pounding like it was trying to split open on the spot. She didn't know how eating a feather would actually cure anything, but she didn't think that shrines would do much either. She was too much a skeptic, even in a world filled with magic.

That being said, she also knew a good idea when she heard one, and she couldn't say she was wrong about her wanting one if she even thought it had a chance to work.

"You're probably on to something with that. I never thought I'd say I'd eat a feather, but right now, I'd try anything if it meant this would end."

[earthbones]

There had been a moment once when her target had bitten her and something had sat under her skin, burning, burning, burning until she'd dragged herself to a temple, trembling before the shrine (Akatosh? No, it was Arkay, maybe. It's slipping sideways out of her mind) but her gods are--

Her hand slips, the arrowhead no longer uninterrupted white bone where it cuts cleanly along the line of her thumb to startle her back into uneasy uncomfortable wakefulness.

"Sometimes a thing doesn't end," if her mind was a little more her own then she might think this through more carefully but it isn't, it's taken up with flitting from one thing to the next, survival isn't what matters now. "It becomes the next thing then the next. It has to-- transform itself. Reshape. The world ends so that the new one is born; the egg cracks down the center and from it out come wings, unfurling, and it becomes new again. Maybe it has to happen. This sky has a tear, a tear is a crack is a tear."

[tagartist]

On a better day, Chloe might have followed some of that. Maybe. Slightly. With her mind as all over the place it feels, focusing in on her words is hard enough, let alone figuring out what they mean when strung together. She had gotten distracted with picking the remaining blue nail polish off of her fingers, the chips that hadn't disappeared since she'd come through the rift, and hearing maybe every other word at most in the process.

A tear is a crack is a tear. "A tear has to be caused by pulling." Why did that matter? Who cared? Definitions never mattered to her before. She rubs her forehead, going to pull herself up slightly so she can see what she was doing in the first place. "You sound high."

Oh. Wait. Is she cut? "Are you alright?" That's a dumb question.

[earthbones]

Well honestly this is the sort of thing that either rattles around inside a Bosmer's head or that she'd take to very certain people that now sit impossibly far beyond her reach though-- well time is a relative concept, she unfurled a scroll, saw a dragon cast through time. Maybe that happened.

Did someone see that? Has that been written somewhere too? In the margins of a page?

"How else did we show up? Pulled. Pulled out of space, out of time, out of place. You know--" A miscalculation from where she's perched sees her rolling over too sharply to sprawl untidly, too distracted to save herself and oh, her thumb is bleeding, she sucks it into her mouth with a shrug.

Spends a few minutes worrying it until the thread in her mind tries to remember where it knotted itself. "I was in a camp inside a thing that was living until it-- did this turn your nails blue and is it coming off?" This is important because nails coming off hurts.

[tagartist]

"Falling?" She thought maybe she'd been falling. She couldn't remember. "Tornados connected to worm holes." Everyone else had been in the middle of a storm, right? Sure. That's about all she's got in memories before the weird dreams. Why had she fallen asleep in the middle of danger anyway? She still wondered if she'd been hit by debris, or if she'd blocked out Max making her choice. Going back through time, ending up... here.

... is it coming off? The question startles her, looking at her nails like she's wondering if she peeled one off without noticing or something. That would be some next level horror movie bullshit if that was the case. She looked then to the nail polish chips on her jeans and -- "Oh. Shit."

She should say no.

"Yeah, I guess they did. Wonder if my hair is gonna fall out next.".

[earthbones]

"I-- I went through a place to another before. Through a-- portal, that's what it got called, it took me straight to somewhere I should never have been able to go and after-- I think about it now. Here. All of this twisting on itself." And she'd been asleep in the wild, or as close to sleeping as she gets alone, fitful that close to the Forsworn camp she'd been meant to take on until but inside the ribs of a dead thing, another animal's skin stretched tight to shut out the cold.

Not a mage (too Altmer for her, too human as well) but it shouldn't work how this has. Being here. Or her being here. If she had more things. More books. Pieces to lay out and point to instead of resignation that stokes to anger when the wind changes it'd be easier.

(But she is to Ysmir as Talos was, and Talos is Lorkhan so isn't she him too? Speaking as one who loves Sithis twists it all to the pounding of the Doom Drum.)

"Didn't want to say, but I've known some bald people." A beat. "They were lizard people."

Look it counts they're still bald.

[tagartist]

"A portal is kind of like a wormhole." She's not sure. She's actually never been through a portal OR a wormhole that she can remember, but both sound like they could be the same. Like they could be a better explanation than anything else she's come up with for how she got here. Nothing about it makes sense, she knows that, but if she could get it to, maybe she could get home.

If she wants to get home? She hasn't figured it out quite yet.

Her hand lifts, playing with a strand of hair that peaks out from under the beanie, wondering what it would be like to just cut it all off anyway. Maybe people would stop looking at her so funny. She doubted it, but maybe. "I'd be okay being bald if I were a lizard person," she says with a shrug. "But I'll look pretty terrible bald as a human."