maskormenacelogs | i found myself in crowded rooms, feeling so alone

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i found myself in crowded rooms, feeling so alone

WHO: Teen!Rumor + You
WHERE: Nonah (or wherever, we can handwave how)
WHEN: May 4th
WHAT: Allison is hit with Wild Fey Magic, and reverts back to being 13
WARNINGS: One super temper and a mass case of flippant, ruthless uses of powers

Number Three had no clue where she was when she woke up.

The bedroom was bare and unfamiliar, and someone had put her in some weird set of pajamas. While their father might be the end all be all a totalitarian dictator, he had prepared them, if not for every situation, then with skills that could be used wherever they might find themselves. If panic touched the edges of her thoughts, she brushed it away with all the dismissal of ants. She skivvied out of the strange bed, stole a tunic shirt, and belted it at the waist, making sure her every step was silent.

She'd been kidnapped and tortured before. That wasn't anything new. But she wasn't about to stick around and wait to see what the latest flavor whatever villain who got the drop on her had in mind. Weirdly. She couldn't remember how she'd been kidnapped at all, where her uniform was. But that could wait. They could have drugged her. She could focus on that once she was home.

Number Three crept out of the bedroom into ... a house? A house full of boxes? And one where the front door only had a knob lock and deadbolt? This was too weird. But she wasn't looking a gift-horse in the mouth. She slipped out from the house, closing the door carefully, slowly, and waiting for about fifteen more feet of silent steps from the door before she started sprinting down the street, still holding her breath.

It only gets weirder and weirder. She doesn't recognize any of the street signs, and she asks someone on a sidewalk where she is, and how far from home it is. But she doesn't know the name of this place. Or anywhere else they mentioned. Weirder still when she finally found someone with a phone (or whatever this was, that was the size of her hand???), and The Academy phone number didn't work.

It's a mistake the first time she mentions The Umbrella Academy because a crowd forms out of nowhere, screaming questions (about whether she's some love child from the future? And asking any number of things that seem crazily worse. She's pretty sure someone just asked if they went in for underwear or no underwear with costumes wherever she came from).

Eventually, with or without some help, Number Three does manage to wrench herself free of the teeming crowds, that are like the crowds from home and nothing like that at all. After getting a few blocks away, she dropped on a bench. She was racking her head. This wasn't her job. This was what Luther did. Or Five, if he was allowed to.

One barefoot, forlorn, if headstrong and temperamental,
child-hero for sale to any buyers who would like to find her.

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He takes a step back when she snaps at him, but he still prefers it to the sheer unnerving enthusiasm of the other humans in this place.

"I didn't mean here here, I meant..." He waves his hands around to gesture at everything around them. "In this weird place. I woke up in a room, but I keep running into people that ask me weird questions, but I figured you didn't look like you'd be a part of whatever this thing is."

Mostly because she's another kid, but also because she seems as freaked out as he does. He's assuming, of course, the adults asking him invasive questions are a part of whatever's going on.

There is a small stab of vicious pride when the boy takes a quick step back from nearing her -- even sitting well below his height still on the bench -- but he doesn't run away. And the more words that come out of his mouth, the more it sounds exactly like what she's been facing since she woke up, and the harder it's becoming to discredit him.

(Or the easier it is?

Is it way too suspicious that some other kid just happens to have suddenly gone through what she did, and is looking at her like he wants her to agree with him? Side with him? Is it possible he's part of all this?)

Still on edge, though her voice is more a tense line that a sword this time. "Why is that?"

"Because you're not old enough to be part of a big kidnapping conspiracy." Obviously. Or was it? Did inter-planar cabals employ children? "I think."

He is, of course, assuming this is all a fake city, and that everyone he sees must have something to do with whatever reason they were kidnapped. Although he's not sure where that city could be, because there's nowhere on Golarion with carriages that race by on their own without horses to pull them. Maybe it's a fay realm? Or Hell?

"You don't know that."

She's old enough to do a lot of things. She's old enough she doesn't know how many people she's killed or taken part in killing. She's old enough that her first thought isn't either of those -- it's that he doesn't know enough to think about the best part of it all. The part where she could, even now, do anything she wanted to him.

With a few of the right words,
she could make him pull off his own foot and eat it.

"I've done a lot of things, back home, kids my age don't do."

"So I was right, you aren't from around here." And then the implication of what she said registers. "What kind of stuff?"

His imagination runs wild, but even so, what he's picturing is far tamer than the reality, and mostly involves stealing and possibly some black magic, complete with chicken sacrifices. Then he decides to play his own history up, so she doesn't think he's a young naive kid compared to her.

"I mean, I've done stuff, too. I'm literal devil spawn, and I've...shoplifted."

He tries to lean against a nearby tree in a way that he thinks will make him look cool, while his tail swishes casually from side to side.

Allison's not sure if it was more baffling to consider the questions the crowd had thrown at her, or this boy's sudden reference of not knowing who she was. Everyone knew who she was. Even if people mixed up sometimes who the boys were, she was the only girl, and no one forgot her.

There's definitely no level of impressiveness early from the girl on her seat when her expression wrinkles. When Allison is suddenly trying to gauge if this boy just admitted to being like Klaus. That would be disastrously against the grain of this person being helpful to her means.

Still, the other part of that statement had started off far stranger.

"You're what?"

"I'm a Tiefling, which means there was a devil or demon somewhere in my line. I thought that was kind of obvious. You know, with the...everything." He gestures. The horns. The silver eyes. The skin. The tail.

That's another word Number Three doesn't know. She wonders if Number One, with all his books, would recognize it quickly. She wishes she did, but not enough to actually start picking through his books, of the undoubtedly ample recommendation list that she'd get if she did.

But it's never been her thing.

Not for more than passing through required studies.

Her eyes narrowed, more speculative of his sanity than of the words. Her head tilts in a way that's not entirely normal gesture as she considers his body. "Some kind of full-body tattoo, and maybe surgical-grafting could do it? It's a big favorite with the villains in Asia like you wouldn't believe."

Beat.

"Though none of them are usually your age."

They were addle-brained adults who fell off the edge.

"I don't know what grafting is, but can it attach a fully functioning tail?" He waves his tail in demonstration.

He could see someone painting their body, gluing on horns or whatever, though he's not sure how someone could get their eyes to turn silver. Illusion magic, he supposes, could handle both that and the tail. But is it truly so strange for someone to be a Tiefling? It seems stranger to him to think that someone might want to pretend to be one. Still, there's one other thing he wants to clarify.

"I'm not a villain, though."

Sure, he was just trying to seem tough and cool and like he did 'stuff', but going by the villain label just seems like it's going too far.

"Are Tieflings really that rare where you're from?"

"I don't know what that is. Never heard of it."

Where anyone else might sound curious or apologetic, Number Three says this with all the detached aplomb of someone stating, unremorsefully, if they don't know it, it doesn't exist and isn't that important. It is not required knowledge for saving the world. Which is the most critical job, and only six of them in the world have it.

"And. No. You don't seem like the villain type at all."

Look like it, maybe. Seem like it, no.

"Well, it's what I am," In a matter of fact way that implied she should just accept it. "And I'm glad you think that. A lot of people where I'm from don't trust me because of what I am. Here...it's different, but I think that has to do with whatever reason they kidnapped us."

What that reason is, he can't imagine.

"What do you think this place is? I think it's some kind of fairy realm or some pocket of Hell that we got sucked into."

She takes note of certain things in that, without any regard for his tone or the implications therein. She might hate her Father most of the time, but he did training them in deciphering what was important to a fine, honed point.

Everything else was chaff.

(Everything.)

"Wouldn't hell or some kid's storybook world have something more exciting than boring old traffic and people walking in and out of coffee shops?"

"But it does. It has carriages moving quickly with nothing to pull them, lights that are constantly steady without flickering, strange people who ask stranger questions, signs that glow. It'll probably get even crazier from here!"

Allison is just s t a r i n g now.

Because he might not be a villain,
but he might just be insane.

Edited 2020-05-09 17:59 (UTC)

"...what? Don't tell me you didn't notice all that?"

He stares right back at her.

"Is all that normal where you're from?"

Number Three is still looking at sidelong and only pauses to look at everything around them, with the complete nonplussed obliviousness of someone who really does recognize pretty much everything in front of her. "Yeah?"

"Oh." After an awkward few second pause, Anton adds. "We don't have that where I'm from."

"And where exactly is that?"

Allison twenty years from now could manage to make that sound authentically curious, especially at year into being here and so much exposure to the knowledge of other worlds, but at thirteen, Number Three's words sound like a straight blade of sound asking what very far away, decrepit dark hole he could have crawled out to not knowing everything that was normal in the world was, well, normal. Everyday. Already taken for granted.

None of the things he listed had been invented since her birth even.

And here he was talking about it like it was magic.

He looks a bit sheepish, even though he honestly has no reason to since it's hardly his fault that his world is less technologically advanced than this one, and he answers, "Golarion."

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i found myself in crowded rooms, feeling so alone

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