I'm in your RPGs, doing your narratives. WHO: Lea Quesada (THE AUDREY RAMIERZ) WHAT: Hello, Miss Quesada, welcome to Nightmareland, USA. WHEN: Extreme early morning of Wednesday, 3 September. WHERE: The Quesada bedroom at Unprecedented Failhouse. RATING: R for language at times, along with some gross things. (Way to make Disney not appropriate, Allison.)
It started out innocuously enough, of course, all flapping United States of Americas in the breeze and strange fruits of the sea squirming in new and strange ways. They just seemed to be pastel and exotic, these recent dreams of hers, chasing her as soon as the eyelids would drop and her head would nestle in between the pages of Gross Domestic Product theories and Navier-Stokes equations. The vivid nature meant that she was exhausted when she sat up in the morning, bags getting darker and darker despite the relatively easygoing mood of the nocturnal action therein. So she coped, as one is wont to do: from Fanta to coffee in the mornings, lots of kicking shins in the middle of labs, taking little snippets of naps and allowing Santo to take the wheel. Dozing was enough to dodge the specter of the REM cycle, but never enough to really replenish her energy, and that was just when she was attempting to avoid mild, goofy adventurous tales at night.
The first evening Lea Quesada started having the terrors, she’d only eaten oatmeal all day. Even then, oatmeal was not a dish crafted by culinary choice; she’d managed to make it blander than most of Zeke’s culinary masterpieces, and that was a feat in of itself. But if one was to take stock in the old wives’ tale of what you ate affecting how you slept (and, at that point, Lea was taking stock in any and everything regarding Slumberland), bland was not only soothing for the mind, but also an excellent sedative. To be honest, almost anything was a sedative these days, and so she’d fallen akimbo in her piles of homework with her mouth open in the manner of a drowning fish by the gentle hour of 8PM. Her body eased in, allowed itself to fall into the shitty mattress springs, and there she was! Off she went, sailing into the abyss, unwittingly pushing herself into that subconscious tempest with little fanfare other than the dribbling stream of saliva petering out of the corner of her mouth.
The sailing metaphor was fitting, for tonight found Lea in the basin of a submarine. She’d been there once before, laughing with an over-tall Italian in a bowl cut about the lamest lecture on the ocean she’d ever heard in her life, but now it was flashing and screaming at her in excruciating pain, as if the Goddamn machine was alive. Bolts were flying everywhere as water started to rush in around her feet, and it vaguely occurred to her that her over-large dungarees (she always wore fucking over-large dungarees) were making the sudden exit out of the room vexingly difficult. Sailors twice, three times her size pushed around her as she tried to shimmy up the ladder, and it was all she could do to finally reach the mouthpiece and scream something about boilers. There was water! They were going to blow! How fast? Pretty damn fast, fucker, but this wasn’t the verbatim words out of her mouth. It was “We got a big hit, and we’re taking in water fast!” and “I don’t wanna be around when it hits the boilers,” and although it was foreign in her mouth, it never really occurred to Lea to say it in any other way. She looked as if Tia Angelica had taken her in with the rest of her yarn and dyed her as red as blood when she stood there in those flashing lights as if it was nothing that she was about to sink into the bottom of the ocean. Panic was best reserved for other things, the back of her head reminded her, like midterms.
She really didn’t get fucked up much until she was in the pod with that noodle-armed dweeb that could not only fail to make even an adventure like this sound very exciting, but was also bound and determined to piss and shit his pants in sync as the rest of them sped towards an uncertain future. She was hell-bent to seem as if it wasn’t that bad, as if she wasn’t about to puke her brains out too as they sped through this impossible cavern at speeds that shouldn’t have been attainable given how rickety the damn thing looked. Even she wanted to put her head between her legs to assuage the impending nausea, but there was none of that as they popped up on the surface – just scattered bits of limbs and debris from the giant monster’s ferocious wake.
It was from that image that Lea rocked up from her poorly crafted nest and grabbed for her trash can, all shaking and night sweats and green tinges at her gills. Her stomach wanted to offer up that very oatmeal but only managed a few dry heaves and a dribbling spot of spittle into the plastic bottom. There was little to tell by way of whether she was feverish or whether she was just frustrated, and all she could do was press her forehead to the surface and try to catch her breath in those shaking breaths. She’d had worse dreams, of course, and gorier, but nothing shook her as much as this, and there was that sense that it would only build from this as it had been building in the past weeks.
She would’ve cried, would’ve found one of her friends, but Lea Quesada had to be the tough one, really, even though she’d been shit at hiding that the no sleep was bothering her. She was just tired, right? She wasn’t fucking scared, and that was the thought that was able to push her into grabbing at her knees and counting the cracks by her Buzzcocks poster. There were twenty-nine.