i've lived long enough to see some good friends die [ OPEN ]

[postictal]

Who: Tim Wright and YOU
Where: Mostly the woods, but also the mansion
When: April 28th - May 2nd
Rating: PG-13, though it'll easily dip into R for violence, mind control, and general unpleasantness. also arson.
Summary: Tim's preexisting mental health conditions serve as the strangest manner of advantage.
The Story:

woods ; there's simply no place safer than the bank the day after the robbery

He ditches the phone immediately. Drops it in the pool on his way out of the mansion, away from the Reaper, and into the fucking woods. A quick check, a frantic once-over of his personal belongings, assures him that he has nothing else to worry about - no technology that's liable to needle its way into his brain.

Slow, even breaths. He stops at some of the closets to stock up, and then he's out, backpack slung over one shoulder. Gas can clank up against one another beneath the cheap nylon, bumping up against whatever shitty food items he could think to toss in there. If it ends up spilling and soaking his supplies, well - that's what he gets for packing so poorly. It's the least he deserves. These events usually last a couple days, no more than a week at most. He can get by until then, probably.

The water bottles and pills, at least, will be okay. That's the most important thing. He has enough to last him a week, if he portions it all carefully.

He takes to the landscape that's familiar. It might be hostile, might bring back a swill of associations he doesn't necessarily want rattling around in his skull, but it'll suffice. He knows the land, and he knows it'll make it a pain for any tech to spread to this point. It's safer. It's safer, even if it's selfish, because there are too many people he should be checking on - too many people he should be diving after to save. Most of them are smart enough not to go poking at unfamiliar technology - most. The ones that aren't are probably already fucked. The ones that are might still have gotten supremely unlucky.

The thought isn't a comfort. It sits heavily in his gut like a lump of lead.

So he moves quickly. Doesn't stay in any one place for long. Doesn't leave a trail if he can help it. Anyone else who's taken to the trees might catch him slinking in the undergrowth, keeping low, or catch the snap of a twig precluding the glint of a hefty combat knife, held out warily in case the other party turns out to be a threat he can't ignore.

He's switched his flip-knife for something a little more up to speed.

mansion ; you don't so much mind the aging, you just mind the getting wise

[The snap of a white lid popped off with the tip of a thumbnail, the rattle of capsules being shaken out into an open palm with the dull slog of routine, and the orange bottle nearly dips back into his pocket. Nearly. He holds it up, regarding its contents with narrowed eyes.]

[Electromagnetic. That's how people keep saying it spreads, right? Electric signals in the brain. The kind of abnormal signals that an anticonvulsant is meant to prevent.]

[He'd always assumed that no one would get it. That no one would be - that not even Shepard would particularly understand the way something like It could spread, crawling, spiderwebbing into everyone's collective subconsciousness and urging them to spew Its poison into other people's heads without even realizing it. There are ways to block It out.]

[Maybe it can block this out as well.]

[He won't know unless he tries.]

[He dry-swallows one more, just to make sure - just to be safe - and starts back for the mansion's familiar silhouette squatting on the horizon. There's no one out here looking for him, he's pretty sure, and everyone that might need his help is still unaccounted for, which means there's a lot of damn places they could be. He glances at the sky, mentally plotting the position of the sun. Without a clock or a watch or any means of telling the time, he'll have to resort to ballparking it, and in the process suppresses a sigh.]

[This should go well.]

[Tim's progress through the halls isn't utterly silent, but it's close. He loots the closets, keeps a wide berth from populated areas, pauses here and again to swallow down another capsule.]

[He's looking for someone. Several someones, really, but you won't hear him calling out for them. He's not that stupid.]

lighting a spark ; how old will i be when i try to freeze time, and my age degrades into a well-worn lie

He's stupid enough to try something else, instead.

The wet spatter of gasoline along the edges of the mansion's doorways, down the halls, outside of rooms, along any of the grassy hills that might be overtaken with tech - it's as unmistakable as the sharp, distinctive tang of its reek. The lines of Tim's face are set in grim resolve. He freezes at the slightest sound, the most minute indication that someone might have caught sight of him, someone he can no longer afford to think of as a potential ally. He glances over his shoulders, scanning the halls and tea rooms, not for an elongated, spidery shadow sprawled along the corners of his vision for once, but for the sight of anyone, anyone at all.

There's no telling who might've been taken, and who he can trust. Paranoia is an old, easy, familiar skin to don. It's like it never left in the first place.

He can't stop the Reaper. Realistically, he knows he can't. But he chokes down another capsule, throat working past the burn in his lungs and in his chest, and he strikes a match from the book he's slipped into his pocket, plundered from one of the closets.

The stilling flame is spared a brief look, something distant and pained in equal measure, before Tim tosses it onto the wet patches on the floor, on the rug, on the grass. Wherever he is, wherever he's just been, his intentions are readily apparent to anyone who might witness it.

He intends to burn all of it down.

He can't stop the Reaper.

But he can set it back as much as he possibly can. He can scorch its technology in a house fire, burn its Indoctrinated acolytes to the ground, if he can. The mansion will wipe away the damage before it can get to be too much, he knows, or one of the Reaper's many newly inducted underlings will stamp it out, but that doesn't mean he can't raise a little hell. The possibility of actual fatality is minute, he tells himself (he is a liar), and it's liable to be far less painful than whatever fate the Reaper has in store for its freshly acquired pawns (he is a liar), and even if it isn't the case, even if it isn't -

It's the least he can do. He's been allowed a rare, singular advantage. He'd have to be pretty goddamn heartless not to use it.

It's just bitterly, sickeningly ironic that it really should be him burning alive in the midst of all this. Look at this, at how far he's come: from elementary arsonist to coward who won't even stand still for what he deserves, for what he knows he deserves.

For what Alex Kralie knew he deserved.

Maybe they were always doomed from the start.

wildcard ; some people fade like evening, some just never go away

[Got an idea for a closed starter? Want something special cooked up? Hit me up over here or over at arrpee or zero#8942 on Discord! I will match prose or brackets!]