writing_shadows

Sherrard Road, East Ham, London, UK, nWoD, Four Years Ago

“Nah, blud. Fuck her. Fuck her and all the fuckin’ fuckin’ she is doin’. ‘Cause she’s a fucking slag, you feel me? Just a Yank after some proper lovin’ on the D-train. But she ain't an Express, it's a stopping service. Just...whatevs.”

The words were stained with alcohol and depression, slurred sentiments dribbling down his acne-plagued chin. The youth’s eyes fluttered in and out of focus, cans of lager strewn around the unholy maze of detritus he called a bedroom. His headset hung lopsided over his fitted cap, connecting him to his cabal and the epic pwnage he was about to unleash upon them. His hoodie was stained with beer, blood, and the sickly damp of tears. He was on his bed, but his trainers clawed into his mattress as he pulled, flicked and bashed the controller.

“I’m well serious! I go’s up to his fancy-ass party right, fuckin’ beer and some kind of bird-in-a-bird-in-a-pig pie or some shit. Bookknob Squarepants presidin’, all the gnomes of her weirdo family. And she’s puttin’ out, and I’m like “Sweet!”… right, cause you would, wouldn’t you? She’s well fit. But then she…”

He looked over at the corner by the light. He’d lost how many hours he’d spent on it. The canvas was larger than life, but he’d painted every curve, every tiny tug of her smile, every beautiful imperfection and blemish. Captured them perfectly. It was beyond photorealism. It was just truth, soaring and wonderful and smiling at him. She was perfection, an angel walking the Earth. Her and the little weird monkey that thought he was Monkey. And she’d torn his heart out and pooped on it. Seriously… the necrophiliac? The necrophiliac

Fuck Hero. Bitch. Bitch bitch bitch. Just a callous girl trying to…

He ripped off the headset, threw it across the room, quit the game. In the darkness, he just rolled around, writhing, aching, hurting. Men don’t cry, Dash… men don’t cry. He wanted to get high. But then what was the point of getting high. He was a fucking wizard. He could get even…

There was a call from downstairs. “ANTHONY?”

He rolled his inebriated eyes. “WOT?”

”ANTHONY CALLAHAN!”

”Fuck… WHAT DO YOU WANT, MUM?”

“THERE’S A GIRL AT THE DOOR.”

He groaned, slouched, shoved his head under his pillow, muffling his voice. “I DON’T CARE.”

Downstairs, patiently, his mother opened the door, and smiled at the odd girl in the tattered dress. “Anthony is in his room,” she said softly.

TED Talks, Long Beach, CA, USA, nWoD, Two Years Ago

“The Rat King is a dubious fellow indeed. Oh, you may scoff. You may laugh. You may call him as mysterious as Nessie or Big Foot or Yoda. But let me ask you this: if it weren’t for the Rat King – The Rattus Rattus Rex, or, ha!, the RRR as I like to refer to the blighter, where would technology be today?

“Sometimes we need to hunt for the impossible, to don our Wellingtons – or, if you’re German, your Bluchers – and go trudging into the mire of mysterious environs. The unknown! The undiscovered! That which we call the paranormal. For our quest, our driving purpose as human beings, is to further our knowledge. And once we reach the perimeters of the world, were all we can do is stand at the railing and say ‘I reckon I know what’s happening over there, but it’s just open space in front of me,’, we have to begin to look for that invisible path, and its invisible guardians.

“Without the RRR, we would not have needed the correct frequency oscillation to incapacitate a rodenty-form – these are technical terms – lifebeing and incapacitate so as to humanely investigate and, if required, eradicated the verminous gribbly. Oh no. Such ossilation wears rubber – believe me, you don’t want your elastic to snap and let down your closely guarded interior defence circuitry, so as to give rodent hostiles a clear golden path to your jingle-jangles. Therefore we came up with advanced rubber polymers. And, as any student of the surrealist documentary Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles knows, Advanced Rodent Sentients live in sewers. Now, I consider myself an Advanced Rodent Sentient Expert, and thus am prepared to wage through the flotsam, jetsam, coagulated fat and faecal matter of Johnny poopy-pants. Oh, it’s fine – everybody poos. And it’s not like there’s cholera down there anymore. So, off I trundle. But to access the Advanced Rodent Sentient lair, of course I require something to create drainage, unclog the sewer pipes. Simply put, the shoddy kit I had wasn’t working. So I endeavoured to do a bit better.

“And, by Jimminy-Cricket’s Eyeballs, I did. Thus, the Batman Breach-Block Plunger was invented, improving plunger efficiency by 6 per cent. This may sound trivial to you. But you’d be surprised how many major industries require a plunger. The oil industry. Plumbing. The Iranian Electricity Board even asked for my assistance in some research, but they didn’t have a viable enough source of plutonium and I’m not going to waste my time teaching them what any GSCE science student knows on converting their sample. Plumbing is universally useful. And the Breach-Block Plunger just wouldn’t be around, if it weren’t for our friend, The illusive Rat King…”

There was an awkward silence as Michael Batman finished his rehearsal.

"Well, Emma, what do you think? Need any work?"