Characters: Jen and Quen Setting: Their new home, backdated Arrival Date Summary: Jen and Quen figure some shit out about themselves Rating:pretty low, just language
She had three suitcases, all of them had been inspected as she entered the island but nothing had been flagged as it was mainly clothes, makeup and her stuffed unicorn. Oh, and her Switch, which was almost ‘confiscated’ but she was oddly understanding that the guard seemed to be thrown off and let her keep it. Jen was given an ID, keys and directions to her new home. As she arrived she fumbled with the keys a moment, having to set down her luggage. Once she got the door open she entered and glanced around. The place was quaint and she was already getting ideas of how to make the place brighter and cheerier.
Pulling her luggage into the place she was a bit surprised to see two rooms and one room already inhabited. “Oh, sorry.” She said, seeing the back of someone's head. “I must have the wrong…” wait her key had worked in the door. “Do you have the right place?” They hadn't told her she'd be rooming with someone- especially a boy. What would her father say?
The boy in question had gotten there first and had noticed two bedrooms and had just assumed it meant he got to alternate which bed he slept in on any given night. Which was thoughtful. Sometimes he enjoyed a change of scenery while unconscious.
But the boy in question also had his back to Jen, and was rummaging through his bag and didn’t hear the front door or Jen speak. He wasn’t doing too great with hearing. But he felt a prickle on the back of his neck and lifted his head and saw Jen standing there. Stupidly, he said, “huh?” As if he just needed her to speak up.
“Who ar-” She started a tad annoyed, until he turned and she saw his face. “Wait.” Jen’s brow furrowed slightly she recognized him… but from where. “I know you.” Her brain tried to focus but any focusing has been hard since color had infected her life. The island itself had a greenish yellow fog almost everywhere and the boy himself seemed to radiate at orange color with black swirls.
It came on slowly, the world started to silence, like entering a bubble. Jen let her luggage go and put her hands to her ears and it stopped, everything was back to normal. She shook it off- maybe the island was higher than the mainland and her ears were just adjusting. “Are you supposed to be in this number?”
Quentin’s eyes narrowed on her and he was about to say can’t hear you, dude but then his hearing cleared just enough for him to catch her last sentence. Was he supposed to be in this number. His eyes widened because what the fuck but then the world drifted back into silence and his eyes narrowed again on her. It was all very expressive and all very silent. He was told that excessive sound had ruptured his ear drums, that they would heal, but it would take time. His hearing should return to normal. He’d been living in a bubble of silence for a minute now. Sometimes the silence shifted. Being in the cold sounded a lot like hearing the ocean, but only if you put your ear real close to the waves, just a constant whooshing inside of his ears. The bubble of silence hadn’t burst since that night he lost his hearing, though.
“Yeah dude,” he said anyway. “205 fidelity ave - which is a fucked up name but I dig it.” He rummaged in his pocket and produced his ID and showed it to her. The ID did have this very address on it. It also had his name. And this bullshit danger level. What the fuck was a three supposed to mean. He was way more dangerous than a three. He could mildly inconvenience people by temporarily deafening them. That deserved more than a three, even if the only person held ever deafened was himself. A danger to himself was still dangerous.
“Your face,” he said bluntly. “Doesn’t look unfamiliar. You an actor?”
“How are you more dangerous than a three?” She asked, momentarily ignoring the other question. Pausing Jen tilted her head- wait he hadn't said that… did he? “And no, I'm a waitress.”
“I temporarily deafen people and it’s inconvenient,” Quentin said automatically. Wait. He hadn’t heard that. But he’d known it was the question. He watched her closely, suspiciously. Seeing some sort of materializing color swirling around her briefly was - surprisingly - not making her less suspicious. “Who the fuck are you?” He said, sounding just as suspicious as he felt.
“My name is Jen.” She said, trying to shake an uneasy feeling. “I just got here.” Her wings fluttered slightly as something clicked when he said deafen people. “Wait. I do know you but… You were the boy in the building.”
“You were that chick in the room,” Quentin said, talking over Jen, his words mirroring hers, at the exact same time. “That ice pack chick is the last words I heard.” Which was probably why he remembered it so well - aside from how fucked up that half minute of his life had been. “I don’t understand what the fuck’s going on. Are you a government plant?” His voice had abruptly turned suspicious. “Dom warned me bout this. They got in my head. Are we in a simulation?” He demanded.
“That was my mom.” Jen said really confused now. ‘It'll be ok sweetie.’ The words echoed in her mind.
Caught off guard by his accusations she crossed her arms across her chest. “I'm just as confused as you are. I was sent here because of my wings and the colors and they said people here could help. You were standing in my living room.” And she was standing… somewhere she had no idea where. Jen huffed and turned away from him, grabbing her stuff to take it to the second room. She wasn't going to stand there and be accused. She'd just put her stuff away and go find someone to find her a new home or maybe move him instead.
“Yeah well, you were standing in my illicit warehouse,” Quentin shot back, which had nothing to do with anything. He didn’t even have a point there. And he was hearing pretty well for someone that was temporarily deaf, he considered. “And the hell they are. I’m not moving. This is my house. I already became one with this room and Christened the toilet and put a solid forty minutes of my life into this house,” he continued. “I’m already acclimated.”
“I didn’t say anything.” She snapped, feeling quite a bit more agitated than normal. “And what are you doing in my room?” Jen looked at him, eyes narrowed. And how did he beat her into his room? Wait, no she was still in his room? Glancing around Jen was somehow both in his room and her room with him at the same time. “Oh. I’m seriously freaked out now.” Her rising stress level really didn’t help with the intensity of the colors surrounding her. They almost seemed to multiply, reds and blues and bright yellows seeming to come in through the window. Moving over to draw the blinds didn’t seem to help much. “Ah!” She let out a frustrated scream as she turned to look at him and he was gone and she was only in her room. Ok, what the fuck was happening?
“I haven’t -“ he was going to say moved because he hadn’t. But then he noticed the window - which had not been there in his room. And the bed was on a different wall. “What the fuck,” was what he said instead. There was a loud shatter from Quentin’s room and suddenly he was back in it, instead of torn between two different rooms and the light was blown, literally. He hadn’t heard it but he flinched anyway.
Quentin shoved his bag away from himself and stalked from his room to the second bedroom. “You’re not changing rooms either,” he announced. “Because this is fucked up and I don’t understand what the hell is going on, but I’m gonna investigate it and I can’t do that if you’re across the island. I mean I can, but it’d be more inconvenient.”
There was a bright flash of blue that accompanied the shattering sound. “And how do you expect to ‘investigate’?” She asked incredulously as she rubbed her temple. Her headache was coming back, it didn't help that his colors were very Halloween and did made her feel a little sick to her stomach. She turned around and he was standing there, for real this time. “I’m really confused and I don’t even know who you are.”
“I don’t know yet, I’m working on it,” Quentin said dismissively, like he as already formulating a plan. He wasn’t. He had no idea how to even investigate shit that was only happening in their heads. They needed a narrator guy or like a video game tutorial. Somebody to give them context, a place to start. But he was working on it.
“I’m Quentin, we got assigned to the same house, I can see in your head - like we seriously just went over this - if this was a movie - it would be like a defining eureka moment that ends all the boring introductory shit and starts the real action,” he explained. “So now we gotta do some shit and then do the montage of discovering our capabilities and then kill a bad guy or some shit. I dunno the genre yet.” He shrugged. “But if this was a movie, not moving out would be pretty fucking detrimental to the plot so you gotta follow the plot.”
“It’s not a movie and it’s not a video game.” She said, with a sigh. “I mean everything’s, like really messed up.” Really fucked up, but Jen didn’t really curse… out loud. She sat down on the bed with a small huff. “I mean like this, and the fact that I’m here and away from my family and I mean look I have wings, what’s up with that?” She loved her wings, they were pretty and stuff and probably would have totally worn a fake pair for halloween one year, but they weren’t fake.
“It’s nice to meet you Quentin, I suppose.” Honestly she would normally have been really happy to meet someone new, but between the confusion and the headache… Jen reached over to her luggage on the bed and opened the shoulder bag and pulled out a bottle of water and bottle of prescription strength painkillers her doctor had prescribed. “I’m Jen-” She realized she’d already said that earlier. Of course her name wasn’t really ‘Jen’, but so many people fucked up Jin and she’d just started to go by ‘Jen’ so long ago she’d gotten used to it. Now only her parents and brother called her Jin… And she had no idea when she’d see them.
“You think that’s fucked up, Jin, I’m literally temporarily totally fucking deaf and I’ve been talking to you this entire time, and I only realized it like half a minute ago. I collapsed a whole damn building I was fucking inside of. Who the fuck does that?” Quentin said. It was remarkably rare for him to show any form of regret or self awareness but that comment got pretty close to it. He probably wished he hadn’t quite done that, in hindsight, as if he’d had any kind of control over it.
“And your wings look awesome,” he concluded even though that had nothing to do with his current predicament. “They look impractical as fuck, like you can’t fly in that shit but we got a lot of impractical fashion trends going on right now so it’s not like impracticality is wrong, so they look cool. Felt painful as shit for that hot minute though,” he noted. “Also - what the fuck is up with all these colors? That’s you, right?”
She nodded, a mildly offended by the impractical comment about her wings… she could hover. Not that it mattered. “Was painful more than a minute- for me…” Jen brushed her fingers through her hair. “You’re the reason the sound went out then…” Somehow it had stopped and wasn’t really happening a lot- at least not for her. “And the colors are me. I can’t stop them.” She looked down at her ID, “Apparently it’s ‘Energy Perception’. Whatever that means.” Jen frowned slightly, an expression sort of alien to her face. “You were really scared.” It was if the realization from the moment had just hit her. “When you collapsed the building. And you really can’t hear anything? I mean… outside of whatever this is?”
Quentin balked. Murdock’s didn’t get scared. He had definitely been terrified that he was going to die at the dumb age of eighteen. Nope. “Scared is a strong, unnecessary - offensive, even - word. I was not.” He cleared his throat. “But what is this shit?” He continued, waving his hand to indicate them, this room, everything. “So I see colors and shit. And you… like… don’t get any of the cool shit from me? Like I have the ears of like a rabbit with good hearing and you got none of it?” Quentin snorted and waved his hand. “I mean like - not right fucking now, obviously - oh. Yeah. That makes sense. So what. We can like talk because you can hear and shit? Is that what you’re saying? Are we sharing some shit right now?”
“You think I know? I’m just as new to this as you. At least you know what your hearing stuff can do. The colors give me migraines.” Jen looked around a bit, trying to think. “They said I’m supposed to start training after the new year… maybe they’ll know what this is… I mean,” She waved her hand between them and in an ‘everything’ motion. “All of it. Some of it makes sense though, right? Like you hearing right now. But why you?” She didn’t mean it to be offensive, but the question was sound. Out of everyone, why Quentin? A guy who was angry and vulgar and just not a happy person.
Quentin made a face. “Hey, fuck you.” And then he made a completely different face. “Ah fucking telepathy. No. Jin. This is what we’re going to do. You do your color wheel training shit. Hone your own powers. But we’re not telling them about this. Like. Okay. This is some twin telepathy bullshit but on the DL because we ain’t twins. Why the fuck would we tell them that we can do shit like share powers and make eachother hear and like magic bullshit. No. We keep that a secret. Do our training montage off screen.”
“Why wouldn’t we get help? I mean I don’t know how to figure this out, do you you?” She cringed slightly at all the cursing and muttered something in Korean her grandmother always used to say to her father when he cursed in front of the kids that roughly translated to ‘Those with a simple mind use simple insults’. “And it’s not really telepathy right? I mean maybe. It’s not everything, but some things I can like… it sounds like you’re actually saying them. Like you’re standing right next to me saying them.”Jen wasn’t sure that description was quite right.
“Of course not.” Wasn’t that obvious? Quentin had no idea how to do any of this. Yet. “But I’ll figure it out. They’re rounding us up, sticking us on an island, I seen this story before. Just a matter of time ‘fore they start gassing us en masse or feeding us rat poison or using us as indentured servants. And the way they get to do that is by having everybody be nice and obedient and honest sheeps, just waiting to get gassed. So wouldn’t it be better if we kept this one in our pocket? They already know our other powers. But nobody’s gonna guess this. So we’re gonna have to put in extra work to figure this out ourselves. But I’ll figure it out and fuck you, stop talking about me being simple minded - just so you know - according to the internet, vulgar assholes got a bigger vocab than nonvulgar assholes.” The more he said fuck you to Jen, the less bite it had, until it sounded casual. “I got complex shit going on in here, alright?”
Have a bigger vocab. Yea it was a petty thought but his language was rubbing her the wrong way and she didn't normally get rubbed the- it was him wasn't it? He was so angry and defensive and… Jen sighed. “You're just being paranoid but fine. Until it's not anymore.” If things started to get out of contr- more out of control, she couldn't promise it she could keep it secret anymore. “And wait. You speak Korean?”
Jen rubbed her temple, the painkillers were slowly kicking in, thank god. “And can you sit down? Your making me antsy.”
Quentin sat, surprisingly without complaint. “No, you speak Korean, dummy,” Quentin muttered. Quentin rubbed his head, briefly mirroring her action before he noticed it and dropped his hand. “Dude. I’ll figure it out. You just gotta trust me and the montage. Adapting to weird shit is in my DNA.”
“This is confusing and I'm hungry and tired.” Jen questioned now if it was actually her, or was it him? Or both of them? “Look, so long as it's safe I won't tell anyone now. I need to figure out how to make the colors go away first.” Jen glanced at her suitcases, she should unpack, then eat, then just go to sleep and hope this whole thing was a dream.