InsaneJournal

It was kind of a shitty day in Las Vegas. And by shitty, I mean, hella hot, and by hella hot, I mean hell of hot. Like hell. And also hot. And for the first time in forever (no, Anna; though, Elsa, you are welcome)—Lin didn't feel like sitting inside, killing the environment with chlorodifluoromethane refrigerant A/C on full-blast and his face in front of a vent, wearing, like, idk, shorts that would stick to his thighs as he tried to find a way to cool his ass simultaneously. His mood wasn't good—he could tell he was slipping, sliding down into that bottomless pit of depression where one a) dies of starvation (TGS reference), b) less hilariously, kills oneself. He didn't want to get up most days and he was hard-pressed to make himself, bc wtf for? Daniel was gone, and everyone else had their lives, whirlwind! drama! not enough elderly women making jokes! So, he stuck with Golden Girls and TV, slow-ass internet and dumb-ass hobbies, unless he like, had to come out of his proverbial cave. To scream at Neil's selfish girlfriend, for example, and tease Louis. Both obviously emergency situations.

He probably hadn't left the apartment in… like… a week? Two? It was too easy to order takeout in a tourist city for him to really need to.

But, today he woke up, nightsweat glistening on dark skin, alone in his bed, in a room kept black with aluminum foil over the windows in a totally not hoarder way, the annoyingly chipper sun outside doing its best to welcome itself into Lin's life, cresting high, might, and bright in coarse, crystal Egyptian blue. And today, he decided, fuck it. He was going to do something—like, something that didn't have shit to do with any of his books or movies or various, obscure hobbies and excess origami cranes (don't ask).—And after he made that decision, he decided that something would be finding a door to go to in the hotel, only he wasn't dumb and he had sketches with various conditional probability equations and only about one billion statistical breakdowns of known doors and how they moved—and, okay, that wasn't foolproof, he knew that. Far the fuck from it. But, he'd also put his head in, and if something tried to kill him, he wouldn't go there.

That was foolproof, statistically speaking. (50% fool, 50% proof!)

It was thus, like, two hours later, after he managed to slog himself out from the comfortable, cotton clutch of his comforter and shower and, yk, hygienate, in an admittedly abstracted leopard print top, black high-waisted shorts, and Rainbow Brite flannel cinched around hips, he traipsed the rack and ruin of the hotel with some bounce to his step. He brought along some small shit, collector's shit, like coins, pens (yes, there was, in fact, a market for hella old fountain pens, which Lin just had to like, steal from Alice's London. EZ $$), &c., so he could get money (EZ $$), if he got stuck, but otherwise, didn't bother to pack anything. Up staircases, down, in black Docs, his long, sleek hair shining over one shoulder and fluttering in black-brown fingers against sparkle-and-gloss lips, where it stuck. It took a while, finding somewhere suitable, a series of wrong turns, some bad door choices, some ~unexpected~ movement on the part of the hotel, which seemed to shuffle the doors like cards in a 200-card deck (totally probably a real thing somewhere), and this was exactly why statistics was nothing more than complicated guesswork and exactly why said complicated guesswork could go fuck itself on regression analysis.

Heh. Anal-ysis.

Anyway, hilarious jokes aside, the point is, eventually, he opened a door onto a city, and it looked, like, legit and shit. Lin's mind was a sieve and he knew where he was with unsurprising immediacy—Lapa—thank you, Arcos da Lapa—, and there were people doing their shit without looking like they were being hunted/cannibalized/possessed/zombified/overtaken by bees and/or ponies/Avada Kedavra'd/vampire'd/&c., &c. In fact, it looked like, ...normal.

He just had to find an internet café somewhere, figure out the date, maybe find out if there were, idk aliens and shit running around, and then he could explore. He could try and learn Portuguese, find some samba bars, and otherwise totally ignore the spidery, black episode of chemically-tanked mood that rubbed static on the inside of his skull like steel wool on brainmatter. And maybe later he could go swimming.