WHO: Lindsay Colt [491] WHERE: Her apartment! WHEN: Sunday, August 16. WHAT: A nightmare. WARNINGS: Creepiness, violence, things you would expect from this game.
She comes to awareness running. At first she can’t seem to place why, and then it comes to her, the riot, the chaos, her injuries. Did they lose control of the facility? Is that what happened? Is that why she’s running as fast as she can though every step is laced with pain? Lindsay doesn’t question it. The fear is real enough to keep her going, but in the dark she seems to trip on something, or at least in a moment she abruptly goes from sprinting across the street to on her hands and knees.
Gasping on the floor, she closes her eyes to find relief. Her arms crumple and her knees slide until her elbows are the only things keeping her from pressing her whole body, cheek to toes, on the concrete grime. It’s quiet except for her rapid breaths and the flow of runoff down the nearest storm drain and the hiss coming from behind her—
Lindsay screams and reaches forward, clambering, scraping her hands on the ground as she tries to pull herself away, anywhere, but there’s nowhere to go, and even if there was her broken, battered body would not get her far. Something touches her side, a soft but insistent pressure that dampens her shirt, and her heart stops. Already? Surely they were farther than that— the world moves suddenly, turns upside down. It takes her a moment to realize she’s on her back, and a moment longer to realize, horrifyingly, that the pressure she felt is the tip of a large, forked tongue, connected to a young man standing ten feet away. Lindsay doesn’t know what any of her three brothers look like, hasn’t seen even so much as a picture of any of them in the twenty years since her parents gave them away, but she recognizes easily enough the messy blond hair and the dark eyes, the pert nose and small lips that would be drawn into a frown were it not for the thick tongue protruding from the cavern of his mouth, the same tongue that wiggles under and around her until she’s stuck in its hold.
The worst part is that he isn’t doing it to hurt her, no, the creeping, invasive spread of his reptilian tongue around and around her waist isn’t even tight enough to cause her discomfort. He drags her down the street with his tongue almost gently, just because he can, because he can, because he can...
Lindsay wakes up.
She’s kicked the sheet off at some point in her sleep, and her shirt is damp with sweat. After a moment, heart still pounding, she touches the fabric with trembling fingers, and then suddenly pulls it off, although it strains her aching arms and tugs at the gauze wrapped around them. The shirt drops to the floor as she turns over in bed, presses her face into her pillow, and tries to regulate her breathing.
In, out. In, out. It takes all her physical control to keep her shoulders from shaking, so Lindsay remains perfectly still as she sobs. Finally her heart stops pounding in her ears and she sits up. The windowless bedroom doesn’t tell her the time of day, but she knows it must be late afternoon, since she didn’t get back until after the sun had risen that morning.
Lindsay makes her way to the bathroom, where the harsh light isn’t kind on her reddened eyes. She looks at herself in the mirror: topless, bruised, gauze wrapped all down both arms from when she’d instinctively raised them to protect her face from an incoming fireball. They ache; she hadn’t let the healers touch her for any longer than necessary to ensure she could be back at work by Monday.
Already the details of the dream fall away, like her blood down the drain of her shower not so many hours before. She is not sorry to see them go.