Sarin's Story

It's really quite a sinister sound. It's the sound of faceless men prepared for poison and of dark lords with breathing problems. This was the sound that constantly filled apartment 14D of Sarah's building, as the only other option, while much quieter, would also fill the entire building with silence before the eventual sirens came. With that said, this sound, this breathing, didn't really fit the image inside the apartment: a young woman in her underwear and a white t-shirt lying on her bed and flipping through a stack of papers. Names and numbers filled these sheets, with the occasional elaborative picture attached with a paperclip to liven up the informative text.

It was a rather archaic way to go about things, as well as somewhat ironic considering the people Sarah sent into the fray. Paper and ink seems wasteful when the same text and the same images can be found on a tablet mere feet away, along with the infinitely greater resources to be found on such a thing. That said, computers were a bit too open to the world for Sarah to put her rather large pile of damning materials onto one. She certainly kept some digital information, but she made sure to keep as much of it analog as she could; digital was used only for storage and amounted to a single harddrive hidden in one of her desk drawers.

And, most importantly, it was much easier and far more satisfying to physically mark the sheets up, especially when you're using such an authoritative instrument as a red pen and a clipboard. X's through the names of people who'd already died–whether through her actions or just from living in a fucked up Las Flores–scribbles through things that didn't matter, and circles for targets. So far she'd decided upon four managers, two clinics, and a vice president for her little band of tree huggers to work on over the next week or so. After settling on her decision, she turned one of the pages over and scattered the red names of her targets over it; top right for Vice President Sherman, middle-left for the West End Clinic, and so on until they were all set. Then, she engaged in her most sacred of rituals: she closed her eyes waved her right index finger around in the air for a few seconds while humming to herself, and then gave it the order to pounce on the first to go.

Sadly, it didn't hit any of the names directly–such a thing happens a disappointingly small amount of times–so she simply went with whichever was closest to her finger's location in the lower-mid-right: Steven Hoatle, a manager in human resources. The unfortunate man lived in the East End and didn't have any noted spouse or children living with him in his upscale apartment, meaning that when Mr. Hoatle came home tomorrow, he'd have someone to greet him for the first time in awhile. The rest of the targets were assigned the days following it, all with their appropriate times already determined through analyzing the set of papers that was once a stack but now crinkled under the weight of the person cruelly defacing them.

"Hey, Nick."

A few seconds went by without a response or even the muffled sound of movement from outside her apartment door.

"Nick!"

Another few seconds went by before a muffled and exasperated sigh filtered through Sarah's gas mask as she rocked herself upright onto the bed and shuffled her way to the side. The carpet scratched her feet as she extended her legs to the floor and gave her soles the weight they were made to bare. She gave her own personal doorman one last chance to answer before both she would have to show her neighbors the rather strange sight of a half naked woman in a gas mask and he would have to be brought inside to be yelled at for not paying attention.

"Nick!"

Nothing. And so she purposefully stomped her feet over to the door and swung it open as quickly as possible, like a parent trying to catch their child doing something forbidden. Initially, she was in absolute shock at what she saw on the little bench found outside her apartment, but, within moments, she realized who it was she had willfully associated herself with and felt deeply ashamed of herself. Nick, the man who was supposed to make sure people didn't suddenly break into his boss' room, was gone. He was off on the obviously important mission to buy some complicated mixture of caffeine and cream before complaining about how the shop doesn't recycle properly no doubt. She considered picking someone else to do the job, but Sarah had little respect for any of them, so she settled on sending Nick to squat in some slum for punishment and giving the next person a game to at least keep them there.

Regardless, Sarah still had to do what she wanted Nick to do, call someone to actually put what she'd just planned out into motion. So she closed her door, glad no one had actually seen her simply staring at an empty bench for so long, and meandered over to the desk where her cheap, throwaway phone lied. She took it into the bathroom and slid the glass door to the shower open, shutting herself in the only airtight place she had access to. Reaching her hands up to her head, she started to unfasten the straps that affixed her mask to her face so tightly and, when the complex affair was done, her neck, shoulders, and face all felt immediate relief from the stripped burden. Now that she was sure she could actually be heard over the phone and not have to deal with having to repeat herself too many times, she looked to her phone and selected one of the names listed. She brought the piece of plastic up to her ear and heard three rings go by before someone answered.

"Hello?" A harsh tenor answered the rings and was immediately curious as to why this particular number was calling. Normally, Nick's phone would be making this call.

Uncaring about his curiosity, she briskly informed him why she called. "Yeah, I've decided on the next set. I want you, the Sams, and Joe to meet me at the usual place so we can go over it."

"Okay, I'll call 'em after this. What time d'you want us to be there?"

"I'll probably be there by six."

"Okay, I'll let 'em know... Bye."

"Yeah, thanks. Bye."

Sarah stood still for a moment after the call had ended. She looked down at her mask as she rocked back and forth a bit on her feet, enjoying the light feeling that everyone else gets to have all the time. Eventually, the light feeling turned bitter and she quickly went about strapping her mask back on before going back into her room to get dressed.

Everytime she and hers took to the roads to get from place to place, Sarah remembered why she never bothered updating her driver's license before her corporate imprisonment. Twenty minutes she had been stuck in this inconspicuously cheap-looking and uncomfortable car behind this same red truck with that same bumper sticker about honor students. There were only so many things to look at as the car crawled along the busy street, and she had already looked at each of them several times. Now she was occupying her time bouncing her leg up and down, pounding her heel into the dirtied carpeting and tapping her finger vigorously against her metallic mask just so that dull ping could drown out the jumble of bad music, beeping, and people talking too loudly on their cell phones. Her driver for the day who had earned no favors abandoning her apartment with an excuse she didn't even care to listen to, duly noted his passanger's irritation, but had no way to dissipate it. She had already switched off the radio and ended most of his attempts at conversation well before they had entered their current, hobbled mobility. Fortunately, something else would distract her better than anything he could have tried.

In an instant, everything stopped. The engines slept. The radios hushed. And the cell phones died. Most importantly, though, the blue LED lights in Sarah's mask flickered off, stunning her with the suddenless. Then her eyes went wide in fear and a layer of sweat started to form over her body. They were in the middle of the damn city, with no real openness between here and any possible destination she could go to. She was deciding on how the keep the bodycount to an unnoticed minimum when enough time passed for the absense of the alarmist red light that is meant to appear with a leak to become curious. While Nick was trying to understand what had happened to everything else, Sarah worked her hands around her mask trying to see if anything was wrong. Eventually she came to stop fearing that she had sprung a leak, mostly because Nick hadn't started convulsing.

When this emergency had been resolved, there still laid before her the issue that her car wasn't moving, and neither was anyone else'. Aware of what an EMP does due to the frequent use of such a thing in media, she decided it was either that or some superhuman who thought it was funny to stop an entire city's traffic. Either way, she still had a meeting to get to, and, with her current means crippled, she opened her door and stepped out amongst all the others who had done the same. She bent over and peered in after Nick's "Where are you going?" to answer. "You stay with the car to make sure no one searches it. It'll be faster for me to walk."

Not one to argue with the face of his boss, Nick nodded and glanced around to get a better feel for the people he would now be surrounded by for an unknowable amount of time. Sarah, pulling the hood on her dark blue sweatshirt down as far as she could and keeping her head slouched, closed the door and began to slither her way out of the mess of cars and people. She walked her way down the sidewalk, bypassing person after person more concerned with what had happened than inspecting everyone who went by, which eventually resulted in her raising her head more and more. It wasn't long before she had left the affected area, though, and had to return her chin to her chest, just before she had entered Glades Park. It was here that she got distracted. Walking had opened up a good amount of freetime for her, and the sound of strings was more than enough reason to stop for a few minutes.

Sarah peered around for the source and quickly found it near one of the fountains. It looked like it had stepped—maybe rolled would be better, if potentially offensive—out of an ad for a charity; crippled, impoverished, and sickly-looking. On her approach to hear better and stand out less while next to the wheelchair-bound musician, she noticed the open case for the instrument and sighed. She reached into her pocket as she got closer and pulled out whatever loose assortment of currency she had at the time: a few coins and several crumpled bills. When she arrived, she leaned over the case and dropped the assortment into the case before taking a step back to listen for a bit. There wasn't much of a reason to worry about some sick kid she'd just given money to.

---

The business card had been placed up one of September’s long sleeves, his primarily because that person, the odd apparition, had never left, and now stood more or less beside the one she had made for herself, the latter of which was looking rather put-out by the whole thing. She was tempted not to try getting rid of the new one for that reason alone. Maybe if she slept at some point soon, they would both go away, but she was not in the business of quite so much optimism as that. In the end, there wasn’t really much she could do about it at this point, and with the consummate practicality that can belong only to someone who is entirely out of impractical dreams, September shifted slightly in her position on the rim of the fountain and went back to playing.

At one point, she could have sworn she heard something, like a clamor, but from further away. There were no sirens, however, though when she pulled her hacked-together cellular device from her pocket, it seemed to be missing a signal, suggesting that the tower nearest here had bee knocked out somehow. Well, given the amount of catastrophe that seemed to pass for normal in this city, that wasn’t exactly unusual. There were always metahumans and who knew what else getting into it over things that September couldn’t bother to get worked up about. She was a little busy trying not to die, most days.

Shoving the phone back in her pocket, she went back to playing for a while. A few people wandered by here and there—there was an older couple who she was pretty sure walked the same route through the park every day. They were just about as dirt poor as she was, though, so excepting the occasional food item from the bakery down the street, she neither expected nor received anything from them. They seemed to think she was in greater need of food than money, and she really couldn’t say they were wrong, all things considered. Alas, food was not really the answer to her obvious afflictions, but then, money couldn’t fix them either. Perhaps if it had been capable, she wouldn’t be here now, trying to make enough of it to scrape by on.

The card seemed like a sudden lead weight in her sleeve, but she ignored the way it burned against her paper-thin skin, because that too was only in her head. No less real, to someone like her, but something she could put aside, for the moment.

Her attention was eventually drawn by someone new, and the clatter of coins into the violin case. Drawing out the last note of the tune, September looked up, blinking slowly at the dark-colored gas mask the woman was wearing. That was admittedly not something she saw every day. Still, be it simple paranoia or something more complicated, she assumed there was some kind of reason for it, and she was hardly the kind of person who got to assume that someone else was crazy. The two invisible men to her left were proof enough of that. Lowering the instrument from her chin, she cocked an eyebrow. “Any requests?”

Not particularly familiar with most music, let alone the classical kind, Sarah wasn't sure whether the song being played coincidentally ended with the dropping of her coins or if had ended prematurely for her. Either way, the question wasn't really one she was prepared to answer, and she shuffled her weight a bit while thinking of what to say. Thankfully, whether out of courtesy for a patron or just a desensitization towards the weird things in this city, nothing of the usual sort involving her mask came up. A raspy "Umm" filtered into the air as she scratched her head and peered into the air. When she gave up pretending to actually think of a song she didn't know, her eyes leveled out with the musician and she halfheartedly shrugged her shoulders. "Not really. Anything's fine."

Anything was a bit broad for someone like September, who had memorized literally hundreds of pieces, and she thus faced something of an incommensurability problem, having really very little preference for any of them at the moment. “Fair enough. So pick a color, or a mood or something.” She did consider just reaching into the woman’s head and picking out some detail to go from, but given what had happened the last time, she wasn’t really in the frame of mind to risk it. It had never been a risk, before; she had thought herself undetectable. Just one more oddity to mull over. Considering that, a gas mask and a hood were hardly much of note, really.

Apparently musicians had songs for every color, mood, and thing to be picky about, fascinating little freaks that they are. Sarah never had much of an ear for music and, short of the actual lyrics, rarely had any grasp on any musical nuance more subtle than the most upbeat or somber tones that a child could understand. As such, trying to figure out what, say, a "green" or "sad" song would ctually sound like racked the mind and she crossed her arms and hung her head back to stare up at the sky for a moment to consider it. Blue seemed fine. The sky was blue. The little musician's eyes were blue. Blue it was. "Blue... And happy." To punctuate what she considered a tricky addition to her answer, she swung her head back into place to look straight at the musician and pointed towards September as if she had already caught her. She might be the least musically inclined person in the park, but Sarah knew the nuances of color, and she felt little (immediate) shame for wearing a smirk under her mask and feeling superior about it.

The girl on the fountain snorted slightly, tipping her own head back to take in the sky. “I don’t usually do happy.” Both as a point of fact about her own life and because nobody ever seemed to ask for it. Maybe there was something to that—could a geographic location be so miserable that people forgot what happiness even was? Still—there was perhaps a way to incorporate both elements of a seemingly paradoxical request, and she was the slightest bit amused by the challenge. “You’ll have to let me know how it goes.” No point of reference, really, but that was neither here nor there.

The piece was one that took a lot of turns, but then, she hadn’t been told it had to be happy and blue simultaneously, only that both elements had to appear. So perhaps that was a bit of creative interpretation of the mandate, but, well, that was simply the way of it. “It’s Vivialdi—Summer.” She gestured with a truncated sweep of her violin bow up at he sky. “Blue sky, blue ocean if you can afford it. But happy for some, I suppose.”

Considering the music she'd listened to in the past, Sarah wasn't wholly surprised by the lack of happy in classical music; happiness seemed to be something you gave up before creating something like that. She simply shrugged at the responsibility of critique and stood idle as the bow found itself against the strings and played. She could see the blue in it, low and slow, and guessed the other parts were meant to be the happy. Seemed more excited than happy, but the two were close enough. It wasn't until the musician bothered to explain it that it became more overt. "Clever." She reached a hand into her pocket and withdrew her worn leather wallet. "How much does clever go for nowadays?" Opening up the single fold, she began picking at the edges of the bills and eyed the musician.

September considered it for a moment, then shook her head. “You tell me. I’ve been clever all my life, and yet here I am, playing for the whimsy and benevolence of strangers.” Honestly, they didn’t often have a lot of either. She’d learned not to expect it—she wasn’t exactly whimsical or benevolent herself. There wasn’t much logical reason to have such traits, anymore. Whimsy was a waste of time, and benevolence was a good way to get oneself walked all over. If she played for the money itself, she would have been sorely disappointed by her yield, and likely would have stopped quite some time ago.

"You just have to be the right kind of clever at the right time." Three bills slid from their leather binding and casually floated down into the violin shaped depository below. 300 dollars to spend on whatever clever thing they wanted, though Sarah did have a suggestion. "And right now, someone who's the right kind of clever would take the money they have and not go near the slums tonight." She tapped a nail against her mask. "Clever people can tell when something bad's going to happen and know to stay away." She looked towards a distant clock to see her extra time had almost been expended on the performance and turned to leave, taking a few steps towards her meeting.

“You don’t say,” September murmured, watching the bills float down into the case, then flicking her eyes to the woman in the gas mask and inclining her head slightly. She lived in the slums, as it happened, but she could stay away for a night. In fact, there was probably someone she could impose upon for the required shelter, or she could simply spend it wandering around. She didn’t fear much, in truth, at least not anymore. Whatever the case, the woman left, and September figured she might as well follow suit, looking around to make sure nobody could see before she lifted the violin case with her mind and set it down beside her on the fountain. Pocketing the coins, she left the bills where they were and set the instrument down.

Well. She supposed she had to find something to do with herself for the night, then.