Marco (thatdarnoctopus) wrote in zenithrp, @ 2016-08-09 18:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | #day 044, aspen, juno, marco, oliver, pam |
Who: Marco, Pam, Oliver, Aspen, & Juno
When: Late afternoon, after this
Where: Third Floor Hallway
After finishing up the movie he was watching, the first Iron Man movie, Marco decided that he probably didn't want to spend his whole day in the movie theater, even though he'd had a productive morning and had no reason not to. He just wanted to go back to his room for a bit, and chill out. Maybe he just hadn't been feeling the explosions as much as he thought he had. He just needed some quiet.
He went back to his room, less than half an hour after Felix had secretly been in there. Marco had no way of knowing who had been in his room, but as soon as he opened the door, he knew that someone had. Black splotches had bled into his carpet, from his window to his bathroom. He sucked on his cheek as he moved closer, and closed the window. Why the hell was his window even open? It was too damn cold for that. He glanced outside, unsure of what to expect, then turned back to the wet black line. Leaning down to touch it didn't tell him much of anything, either. It just put a black mark on his fingertip.
"The fuck?" he wondered as he followed where it led. At least there were towels in the bathroom for him to clean it all up with, but he wondered if maybe he should send a message to Jim about cleaning again. He really needed better reasons to talk to that guy. Jim was too nice for Marco to only talk to him when things needed cleaning. But for now, towels would work fine, and lots of water--
He froze as he got to the bathroom doorway, eyes wide on the toilet. The thing about octopuses that maybe Felix didn't know is that they're smart, and even though he'd shut the lid on Hathaway, the octopus had just pushed it open again, then closed it, then opened it, and continued to play with it. It could have escaped, but it stayed in the toilet, apparently getting some enjoyment out of changing it's lighting. It didn't matter what it was doing, really, since as soon as Marco saw the tentacles coming out of his toilet, he let out an involuntarily yelp and jumped out of the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind him. "No no no, you've got to be fucking kidding me!"
Without knowing if the damn thing was real or not, Marco crawled over his bed do grab the longer of the two lamps, and dragged it over to the bathroom door, nearly bouncing back when the plug stayed in the outlet and he was forced to give it an extra tug. He flipped the thing over so the heavy base was held away from him. This was it. This was going to be the end of Liam. This was it. He threw the bathroom door open, and with a short and pathetic battle cry, he brought the base of the lamp down on the writhing tentacles coming out of his toilet. Water and ink splashed across his bathroom floor, and with another cry he hit the octopus again, and again, until his battle cries gave way to manic laughter and the water and ink were accompanied by blue blood from the creature.
Things were really still for a minute after that. Marco only breathed heavily, his hands trembling with the lamp base still heavy on top of the now unmoving octopus. He'd chipped his toilet, and his bathroom and some of his body was soaked, but he was pretty sure he felt good about crushing the octopus, for however long that would last. He slowly pulled the lamp off the corpse, and set it aside. "Okay," he muttered as he took a step closer. He could hear his pulse in his head. Was that normal? "Okay, okay, okay." He moved to flush the thing, but as he got close enough to the toilet, he noticed something on the floor that he had missed initially. A little note, that must have been on the toilet seat before the octopus started playing with it. An ugly little note in black ink. Fownd Yoo.
He could only stare at the stupid note for a moment. That was new. Liam couldn't write. Liam was still just an octopus, even in his hallucinations. He picked the note up and flipped it over a few times. It was soaked, but it was real. The note was real. The octopus in his toilet was also real. "Oh, shit." He took a step away from the toilet. "Shit. Shit, please don't be Hathaway. Please be some other octopus."
Right, sure. There was no chance this place could just be crawling with octopuses. Why couldn't this have just been some other octopus? What was the chance that They had just put an octopus in his toilet as a punishment?
But They wouldn't have left the stupid note from the octopus, and the little ink trail, which he now realized was supposed to have been from the octopus. All he could think about was the drawing that Chase had left for him a few weeks ago, and though he couldn't figure out what would bring this out of Chase now, it was the only solution he had. After the things Lila had said, there was no doubt that there was still a lot of anger between them, no matter how civil they had been the day before.
He grabbed a towel, wrapped it around his hand, then pulled Hathaway out of his toilet by one of the tentacles, and breathed a small sigh of relief when the tentacle didn't grab him back. He probably should have checked to see how much ink and octopus bloke he had on him, but he didn't. He could have looked worse. He probably had. With the octopus hanging at his side, he stormed out of his room, ready to throw Hathaway down at Chase's door.
Instead, he ran almost immediately into Pam. He had forgotten that she'd ended up across the hall from him once the rooms had been moved.
Pam had finished her laundry and had carried it up to her room, and had also been surprised to find her window open, and the blinds hanging halfway out of them. It was strange, and not like her to forget to close the window. It for sure wasn't like her to leave a gross black spot on her carpet, either. She'd been more freaked out over that, and had dropped her laundry basket at the door. It took a moment of whining before she peered into her bathroom, only to find her shower mysteriously empty, with a note taped to the glass. She loved the idea of talking animals, but that wasn't how the world worked, and no animals were writing notes, even with their spelling as rough as Gon Vizziting.
"Seriously?!" she yelled to her empty bathroom. She looked in her bathtub anyway, as if maybe she'd missed him, then followed the ink trail to the window and peered out, pulling the curtains back in as she did. Okay, so the washcloths would have been really cute under other circumstances. She quickly wrote out a message on the network, then ran back out her door, ready to start knocking on doors to find her pet, and wondering if he was crawling around in the plumbing.
She walked out of her room just in time to see Marco, wet and gross-looking, walking down the hall. And there was Hathaway, limp in his hand, tentacles trailing behind on the floor as he dragged the animal along. "What is that?" she demanded, in disbelief. Her voice went high and shrill as she ran out of her room, putting herself between Marco and the stairs. "What is that?! What did you do? Marco! What did you do?!"
Marco stood frozen, unsure what to do about Pam shrieking in his face. He had just wanted to leave the thing at Chase's door. He had no idea what he was supposed to do for Pam. With his eyes wide, he slowly shook his head. "Pam, I can explain! I didn't know it was him, I just found him in my room--"
But Pam didn't feel like listening to him, she just kept screaming over him. Hot tears were starting to run down her face, and she snatched Hathaway away from Marco and cradled the thing in her arms. "This was my pet, Marco! Hathaway was my pet and I loved him and you killed him!"
Continuing the trend of yelling over each other, Marco attempted to make his apology, loudly. "He was in my bathroom, Pam! I didn't know it was Hathaway, I just needed there to not be an octopus in my toilet!"
"You're such a psycho!" she shouted back. She wasn't even trying to hide that she was sobbing, and most of her attention still fell on poor dead Hathaway rather than Marco as she yelled. "What the hell is wrong with you?! People don't go around killing animals, you psychopath! That's why there are laws against that! There's something wrong with you! Why would you even do this?!"
Marco gritted his teeth, trying not to get too irritated over being called a psychopath, but he was already irritated over the octopus in the first place. "Pam, most people don't even think of octopuses as pets, that's just you! And he was my punishment first, remember? I should have killed the fucking thing a long time ago!"
Hearing that her poor dead pet should have been murdered sooner was clearly not the response Pam had wanted, and as soon as Marco had finished his sentence, Pam pulled an arm out from beneath Hathaway and struck Marco hard across the face. Shocked, and already shaken from the whole encounter in his bathroom, Marco didn't think, only reacted, and reached out to grab Pam by the shoulders, ready to shake her and shove her away from him.